Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

I felt ashamed for having been jealous of his life, considering the price he’d paid for it, and I tried to feel lucky for the safe and unextraordinary one that I had done nothing to deserve.

I didn’t know what to call it, what was happening between us, but I liked it. It felt silly and fragile and good.

Climbing down into the yard, I circled the house looking for another way in, taking the measure of the place, but it seemed almost without measure, as though with every corner I turned the house sprouted new balconies and turrets and chimneys. Then I came around back and saw my opportunity: a doorless doorway, bearded with vines, gaping and black; an open mouth just waiting to swallow me. Just looking at it made my skin crawl, but I hadn’t come halfway around the world just to run away screaming at the sight of a scary house

Each room was a disaster more incredible than the last. Newspapers gathered in drifts. Scattered toys, evidence of children long gone, lay skinned in dust. Creeping mold had turned window-adjacent walls black and furry. Fireplaces were throttled with vines that had descended from the roof and begun to spread across the floors like alien tentacles. The kitchen was a science experiment gone terribly wrong—entire shelves of jarred food had exploded from sixty seasons of freezing and thawing, splattering the wall with evil-looking stains—and fallen plaster lay so thickly over the dining room floor that for a moment I thought it had snowed indoors. At the end of a light-starved corridor I tested my weight on a rickety staircase, my boots leaving fresh tracks in layers of dust. The steps groaned as if woken from a long sleep. If anyone was upstairs, they’d been there a very long time

I let it hang between us for a moment.

Stars, too, were time travelers.

made a grab for me, but slow and drunk is no match for fast and scared shitless.

regarded me doubtfully, as if deciding whether to help or to wash his hands of the whole thing.

she would say, beaming

my mother said, narrowing her eyes at him as if readying herself to hear the unvarnished truth.