A Peculiar Girl (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children fanfiction)

Prologue

"I have a surprise for you, dear" Marion Strange told her daughter, who was sitting in the couch doing homework.

"Don't tell me, we're moving again" Eleonora said sarcastically, rolling her eyes and focusing again in her homework, which she had again left for the last minute.

"No, not this time. Quite the opposite, actually" Marion told Eleonora who sat there with her eyes open like plates and a smile drawn in her Latin American features, "if things go all right, we'll be staying here for quite a while"

Eleonora stood up and hugged her mother. She was tired of moving so much. In the course of five years she had gone to eleven different schools in six different countries. She really wanted to be able to finish her high school with friends and not complete strangers.

Eleonora was born in Mexico City and moved for the first time when she was four to Monterrey, in Nuevo León. Then she moved again when she was five to Canada and a year later to Argentina. Not even a year after Argentina, they moved again to Mexico. When she was nine, her mother moved them to Spain. A year after, she went to Portugal, then Italy, after that she went to Australia, and six months later she moved to Ireland, then she lived in France and now she was again in the U.K., trying not to mix languages while talking.

Marion told Eleonora to go wash herself before dinner, which was always at 5:30 pm, it seemed to Eleonora that her mother sometimes forgot she was not eight anymore. However, she still followed her mother's orders and went upstairs to her room to take a shower. She took her navy blue hair out of the ponytail she had tied it in the morning. Eleonora quickly took a shower and groaned as she saw herself in the mirror. She had again forgotten that she had put mascara in the morning and the skin below her hazel eyes had smudged mascara, making her look like a raccoon. She whipped off the smudges with some moisturiser and cotton and reapplied mascara. After that, she quickly brushed her hair and put on her pyjamas.

Not long after, Eleonora went downstairs to find the lower part of the house made a mess. Broken china and pieces of wood from the door laying all around. The crystal table had been turned to dust and it smelled like smoke.

"Mum?" Nora called. She carefully tiptoed to the kitchen, where she found her mother sitting in the floor, passed out, looking exhausted.

The smoke was coming from the oven, which she opened and took whatever was inside and threw it in the sink after the pain in her hands. Eleonora looked at them, seeing third degree burns in both her hands. The only thing she thought doing was opening the water faucet and letting the cool liquid sooth the pain. The water not only soothed the pain, when the sixteen year old girl looked at her hands again, they were good as new, no trace of the injury. Eleonora decided to ignore it, she had to help her mother first and find out what happened.

"Mum, are you alright?" The girl asked the older woman.

"Pack your things, Eleonora. We are going to move again" Marion said, standing up with difficulty.

"No, mum, we have to call the police. If they tried to steal anything-" Eleonora started but her mother interrupted her.

"No, you listen to me, Nora, go upstairs and pack your things in your trunk. We're going tonight" Marion told her daughter sternly and Eleonora knew better than to argue with her.

Eleonora quickly went upstairs and took her trunk from her closet, throwing a bunch of clothes to her bed in the process. Years of moving from country to country made her a pro in packing her things, all of them, in two trunks. That, and the fact that she didn't have many things because extra weight in the bags was always a problem at airports. All of her leggings and jeans were at the bottom, followed by hoodies and shirts, next off were the few skirts she owned and lastly, underwear tucked in the corners with her shoes on top of everything. In her other trunk she put everything that were not clothes, like her photos, neatly put in a wooden box. Eleonora opened the drawer of her nightstand, taking her comb and hair ties, as well as her drawing kit and jewellery. In the back of the almost empty drawer rested a packet of cigarettes, which her friends had gifted her for her sixteenth birthday as a joke and for some reason she kept them. After some though, Eleonora took the cigarettes and lighter and put them in a separate compartment of her trunk. On top of everything of the second trunk she put the four stuffed animals she owned, she used to have more back in Mexico but had to leave them behind.

Eleonora's room was now empty, apart from the lilac bed sheets and white comforter, but she wouldn't take them, they never dragged bed sheets or towels with them, they left them and bought new ones in the next city or country.

Nora exited her room and dragged her luggage downstairs, where her mother was waiting for her with two trunks of her own. The walls were now barren, all the family photos were in a backpack next to Marion, who gave Eleonora the bag. They walked out of the house without saying a word to each other, without looking back at the house they thought would be theirs for a long time. Oh how wrong they were.