Leatherbound Lives

Chapter Six

Predictably, I was exhausted the following morning. (I don't know when I had gotten back the night before; all I knew was that when I had settled into the library to talk to Miss Peregrine, it was after midnight.) When my mother knocked on my door, I gave her the groan I preserved for schooldays. I think she assumed the awfully thin mattresses that were on all of our beds were to blame for my lack of sleep last night. God, if only she knew. I heard her and my dad leave the pub, and I drifted off to sleep again.

When I woke up several hours later, there was a note on the table in the common room.

Lynn,

Dad and I are at the beach. Probably be back around 1:00. Hope you feel better.

- Mom

I checked the time. It was just after ten o'clock. There was nothing to do in the pub, so I didn't know how I was going to spend the next three hours. I didn't know of any good places to go on the island. Except, of course, the house. But I'd stubbornly decided sometime last night that I wouldn't go there. Truthfully, I was afraid to visit the loop and meet the rest of the children, lest I grow attached to any of them, and not want to leave. And that could never happen. I had a family and a life in this time.

It seemed, however, that each time I came up with a reason not to stay in the loop, I would immediately think of something else to counter it:

I'd be trapped; reliving the same day in the same place, without any freedom.

But if you go back home, you would have to keep sneaking around. That's not freedom.

You'd have to give everything up - your parents, your school, growing up, college, getting married.

Who says I'm going to grow up if I stay in the present? I could be in the belly of a monster by next month. It's safer in the loop.

Safer!? It's in war-torn Europe!

It's not like I'd be Hitler's neighbor - it's a tiny island in Wales, and it's just one day.

But that one day is 1940. No cell phones, YouTube, video games-

Oh, shut up. Stop being a typical teenager.

I was fighting a war in my head. I realized I was looking for reasons to stay in the home - or at least visit. I looked at the clock again. Almost three hours. And it's not like I had anything better to do...

"That's it - I'm going," I said aloud, pulling a fresh jacket out of my suitcase. And I'm talking to myself, I thought. A sign of insanity. Brilliant.

And then I stopped myself, because what if last night had only been a dream? What if my subconscious had been so hungry for an explanation as to how I got my abilities, that it conjured up it's own fantastic concept? Could I really have conjured up something that complicated on my own?

The more I considered this idea, the more it made sense. I scraped a chair out from underneath the common room table and sank into it. I didn't expect myself to be so disappointed. I went into my bedroom and located my leather-bound journal, christened with Worm's map, and brought it back out to the common room. I wrote down everything I could remember about the dream: every quirk and detail I noticed - trying to quote things Miss Peregrine and Hugh said to me as best I could. The more I focused, it seemed, the faster the details slipped away from my grasp. I scribbled madly, trying to keep up the with information as it came and went from my memory. I wrote it all down because, odd as it sounded, I didn't want to let go of this dream - it felt so real, so fantastic, and God, conflicted as I felt about it, I wished it were real.