2011م - 1444هـ
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children



I stared at the last photo as Grandpa Portman explained. “He had two mouths, see?

One in the front and one in the back. That’s why he got so big and fat!”

“But it’s fake,” I said. “The face is just painted on.”

“Sure, the paint’s fake. It was for a circus show. But I’m telling you, he had two

mouths. You don’t believe me?”

I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then at my grandfather, his face so

earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie?

“I believe you,” I said.

And I really did believe him—for a few years, at least—though mostly because I

wanted to, like other kids my age wanted to believe in Santa Claus. We cling to our

fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high, which for me was the day

in second grade when Robbie Jensen pantsed me at lunch in front of a table of girls and

announced that I believed in fairies. It was just deserts, I suppose, for repeating my

grandfather’s stories at school but in those humiliating seconds I foresaw the moniker

“fairy boy” trailing me for years and, rightly or not, I resented him for it.

Grandpa Portman picked me up from school that afternoon, as he often did when both

my parents were working. I climbed into the passenger seat of his old Pontiac and

declared that I didn’t believe in his fairy stories anymore.

“What fairy stories?” he said, peering at me over his glasses.

“You know. The stories. About the kids and the monsters.”