This was inspired by "A Peculiar Reading" by janember. I had read Chapter 1 back in December and it got me really interested, but it hasn't been updated yet, so I'm making my own!

So basically, it's just the kids, after Abe, before Jacob, and before Victor died, reading the books

I hope you all enjoy it.

Disclaimer: Since you're reading this by Blue-Haired-Wonder , I'm assuming you are anyway, because if you aren't then someone copied me, then I most likely don't own it.

Millard was searching through the books in the library, trying to find something to read. He had read a lot of the books already, and was trying to find something that he found interesting.

He sighed as he went through one stack of books. Nothing. He put them all pack and went to another pile. Top one, read the back, nothing interesting. This same thing happened with the next two in this pile before he was faced with a book that caught his interest. As he looked more closely, he realized that the person on the cover was Olive! He looked at the title and it read,

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Millard frowned. 'Whoever wrote this couldn't possibly mean us, could they?' he thought. He flipped the book over and started to read the back,

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of peculiar photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its decaying bedrooms and hallways, it becomes for clear that Miss Peregrine's children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow -impossible though it seems-they may still be alive.

Millard looked at the book in shock. 'This sounds like us!' he thought. Millard wanted to read the book so badly, but thought it was best to ask Miss Peregrine first. Maybe the other kids would want to read it too.

Millard left the library and started searching the house and yard for Miss Peregrine. He went outside and saw Enoch and Victor sitting under a tree, Claire, Olive, and Bronwyn playing together, and Fiona growing plants.

He walked up to Fiona and asked her, "Have you seen Miss Peregrine?"

Fiona shook her head and went back to growing plants. Millard shrugged and went to ask the girls. They said they hadn't seen her. Millard went up to Enoch and Victor.

"Have either of you seen Miss Peregrine?" He asked. Enoch jumped and scowled. He stared to speak, but Victor elbowed him and glared. He looked up to where he thought Millard was standing and said,

"No, sorry Millard. We haven't seen her."

Millard nodded. "Thanks anyway." And walked back inside.

After searching the house and asking all the others inside if they had seen her, he finally found her in the living room (I don't know what a living room was called in the 40s, so...).

"Miss Peregrine, can I read this?" he asked.

Miss Peregrine looked at him oddly. "Why should you not, Millard?"

"Read the summary."

Miss Peregrine did and when she was finished she looked at the book in shock.

"So...can I?" Millard asked, snapping her out of her thoughts.

She thought. Did she want Millard to read this? It could reveal things about the future she didn't want any of her children to know.

After a few minutes she decided she would read this to all of her children. "Sit down Millard while I go get the others." Millard nodded and sat down on the couch.

Minutes later and everyone was in the room. Victor and Enoch sitting on the floor, Hugh, Fiona, and Emma seated on one couch, Millard and Horace on another couch, Olive, Claire, and Bronwyn on the final couch, and finally Miss Peregrine seated in her chair.

"While Millard was looking through the library, he found this book about us and I decided I would read it to you," Miss Peregrine stated.

"Why would anyone want to read a book about us?" Victor whispered to Enoch. "Life in this loop is so boring." Enoch had a brief smile on his face before it washed away as he looked back up to Miss Peregrine.

"This is the Prologue. Does anyone have any questions before I start?" Everyone shook their heads. "Alright."

I had just come to accept my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

"Is this person Peculiar?" Hugh asked Miss Peregrine.

"Most likely," she replied.

The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes your life forever, split my life into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my grandfather, Abraham Portman.

Everyone went into shock at Abe's name. Emma felt tears threaten to fall. She missed him dearly. Then a thought came to her.

'This boy is Abe's grandson?' she thought. 'He moved on?'

Growing up, Grandpa Portman was the most fascinating person I knew.

"Of course he was," Enoch sarcastically whispered to Victor. Victor snorted quietly.

He had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans by steamship and deserts by horseback, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three different languages that weren't English.

"Wow," Millard whispered. "That's so much knowledge."

"And adventure," Victor continued.

It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a kid who'd never left Florida, and I begged him to regale me with stories whenever I saw him. He always obliged, telling them like secrets that could be entrusted only to me. When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman's was to become an explorer.

"Of course he did," Emma stated as a matter-of-fact. "Any relative of Abe's was born for adventure."

He encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expedition's with trails of red pushpins and telling me about fantastic places I would discover one day.

"Like a loop?" Millard asked.

At home I made my ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, "Land ho!" and "Prepare a landing party!" until my parents shooed me outside.

All the kids laughed or chuckled at this, imagining a tiny Abe doing this.

I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I'd never recover-that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions...

"Being an explorer is a perfectly fine ambition, thank you very much!" Victor huffed.

so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered.

"I highly doubt that," Millard stated.

I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

"Welcome to how we feel, mini Portman," Enoch snorted. Miss Peregrine and Emma glared at him.

I felt even more cheated when I realized that most of Grandpa Portman's best stories couldn't possibly be true.

"And why couldn't they possibly be true?" Hugh questioned.

The tallest tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped of to a children's home in Wales.

"That's so sad!" Claire exclaimed sadly.

When I would ask why he had to leave his parents, his answer was always the same: because the monsters were after him. Poland was simply rotten with them, he said.

"Poland did have a lot of Hollowghasts at the time," Miss Peregrine mused to herself.

"What kind of monsters?" I'd ask, wide-eyed. It became a sort of routine. "Awful hunched-over ones with rotting skin and black eyes," he'd say. "And they walked like this!" And he'd shamble after me like an old-time movie monster until i ran away laughing.

'Trust Abe to teach a kid about Hollows this way,' Emma thought fondly to herself.

Enoch and Victor just looked at each other before saying in unison, "And that's how you teach a little kid about Hollows everybody!"

Every time he described them he'd toss in some lurid new detail: they stank like putrefying trash...

"I most certainly did not need to hear that," Horace put in.

they were invisible except for their shadows, a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside their mouths and could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws.

All the kids shivered and shuddered. None of them ever wanted to face one.

It wasn't long before I had trouble falling asleep,

Horace winced in sympathy. 'I can understand having troubles sleeping,' he thought. 'Even if they are different reasons.'

my hyperactive imagination transforming the hiss of tires on wet pavement into labored breathing just outside my window or shadows under the door into twisting gray-black tentacles.

"Poor kid," Bronwyn murmured sympathetically.

I was scared of the monsters but thrilled to imagine my grandfather battling them and surviving to tell the tale.

"Of course, who wouldn't be thrilled to hear this?" Enoch said, his love for all things war and battle showing.

More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children's home.

"Of course stories about us would be fantastic," Horace said, his snotty side showing.

"But we aren't stories," Olive whined.

"Please be quiet, you two," Miss Peregrine cut in sharply.

It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where nobody ever got sick or died. Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird-or so the story went. As I got older though, I began to have doubts.

"Any 'normal' kid would," Millard said.

"What kind of bird?" I asked him one afternoon at the age of seven, eyeing him skeptically across the card table where he was letting me win at Monopoly.

"What's Monopoly?" Millard asked, curiously. All the kids shrugged and Miss Peregrine answered,

"A type of game in the future." (A/N: I don't know what Monopoly is...)

"A big hawk who smoked a pipe," he said.

"You must think I'm pretty dumb, Grandpa."

"Why would he think you're dumb?" Claire asked, innocently.

He thumbed through his dwindling stack of orange and blue money. "I would never think that about you Yakob." I knew I'd offended him because the Polish accent,

"I always loved Abe's accent," Emma said.

he could never quite shake had come out of hiding, so would became vood and think became sink. Feeling guilty,

"You should feel guilty," Victor said in a patronizing tone. Enoch snorted.

I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"But why did the monsters want to hurt you?" I asked.

"Because we weren't like other people. We were peculiar."

"And proud to be!" Enoch said proudly, puffing his chest. Victor rolled his eyes.

"Peculiar how?"

"Oh, all sorts of ways," he said. "There was a girl who could fly,

"That's me!" Olive said, excited that she had been mentioned.

a boy who had bees living inside him,

"Finally get a mention," Hugh grinned.

a brother and a sister who could lift boulders over their heads."

"That's us, Victor!" Bronwyn cried. Victor sighed, before smiling and saying,

"Sure is, Bronwyn."

It was hard to tell if he was being serious.

"Why is it hard?" Horace questioned. "Abe hardly ever joked."

Then again, my grandfather was not known as a teller of jokes

"I told you so," Horace said proudly, even though no one had doubted him.

He frowned, reading the doubt on my face.

"Fine, you don't have to take my word for it," he said. "I got pictures!"

"He had pictures of us?" Bronwyn asked, tilting her head.

He pushed back his lawn chair and went into the house, leaving me alone in the screened-in lanai. A minute later he came back holding an old cigar box. I leaned out to look as he drew out four wrinkled and yellowing snapshots. The first was of what looked like a suit of clothes with no person in them.

"It's me!" Millard said happily.

Either that or the person didn't have a head.

"Hey!" Millard cried, happy mood gone. "Of course I have a head. How would I be able to talk if I didn't?"

"Calm down, Millard," Miss Peregrine said. "I'm sure Abe will correct him."

"Sure he's got a head!" my grandfather said, grinning. "Only you can't see it."

"See Millard," Miss Peregrine said.

"Why not? Is he invisible?"

"Hey, look at the brain on this one!" He raised his eyebrows as if I'd surprised him with my powers of deduction. "Millard, his name was. Funny kid. Sometimes he'd say, 'Hey Abe, I know what you did today,' and he'd tell you where you'd been, what you had to eat, if you picked your nose when you thought no one was looking. Sometimes, he'd follow you around, quiet as a mouse, with no clothes on so you couldn't see him-just watching!" He shook his head. "Of all the things, eh?"

"And that sums up you, Millard," Hugh joked.

He slipped me another photograph. Once I'd had a moment to look at it, he said, "So? What do you see?"

"A little girl?"

"And?"

"She's wearing a crown?"

"That's me again!" Olive yelled.

"Please calm down, Olive," Miss Peregrine said.

He tapped the bottom of the picture. "What about her feet?"

I held the snapshot closer. The girl's feet weren't touching the ground. But she wasn't jumping-she seemed to be floating in the air. My jaw fell open.

"She's flying!"

"Close," my grandfather said. "She's levitating. Only she couldn't control herself too well, so sometimes we had to tie a rope around her to keep her from floating away!"

Some people laughed at memories of Olive almost floating away.

My eyes were glued to her haunting, doll-like face.

"My face isn't haunting!" Olive yelled

"Is it real?"

"Of course it is," he said gruffly, taking the picture a replacing it with another, this one of a scrawny boy lifting a boulder.

"I'm not scrawny!" Victor exclaimed. Enoch gave him a look. "Much."

Victor and his sister weren't so smart," he said, "but boy were they strong!"

"He doesn't look strong," I said, studying the boy's skinny arms.

"Excuse me?" Victor questioned, raising a threatening eyebrow at the book.

"Trust me, he was. I tried to arm-wrestle him once and he just about tore my hand off!"

Victor smirked fondly at the memory.

But the strangest photo was the last one. It was the back of somebody's head, with a face painted on it.

"Who's that, Miss Peregrine?" Emma asked. She didn't get an answer.

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 how 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 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.

"Who wouldn't believe Portman?" Enoch whispered to Victor. He got a head shake in return.

And I really did believe him-for a few years, at least-though mostly because I wanted to, like other kids my age wanted believe in Santa Clause.

"Ah, my memories of Santa Clause are wonderful," Enoch said, mockingly smiling. "Until my parents shattered my world by telling me he wasn't real."

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 on a table of girls and announced that I believed in fairies.

"Abe never said anything about fairies," Horace said, raising an eyebrow.

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.

"As you should," Millard nodded.

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.

"Abe isn't going to like that," Bronwyn mused.

"What fairy stories?" he asked . peering at me over his glasses.

"You know. The stories. About the kids and the monsters."

He seemed confused. "Who said anything about fairies?'

"That what I said!" Horace exclaimed.

I told him that a a made-up story and a fairy tale were the same thing, and that fairy tales were for pants-wetting babies, and that I knew his photo's ad stories were fakes. I expected him to get mad or put up a fight, but instead he just said, "Okay," and threw the Pontiac into drive.

"Really Abe?" Emma said, disbelievingly. "You didn't even try to convince him?"

With a stab of his foot on the accelerator we lurched away from the curb. And that was the end of it.

"The End," Victor stated. Enoch burst out laughing.

I guess he'd seen it coming-I had to grow out of them eventually-but he dropped the whole thing so quickly it left me feeling like I'd been lied to.

"But you weren't being lied to," Enoch stated as if it was obvious.

I couldn't understand why he'd made up all that stuff, tricked me into believing extraordinary things were possible when they weren't.

"But he didn't make it up or trick you," Enoch stated in mock exasperation. "How many times do I have to say it for you to get it through your thick head?

It wasn't until a few years later that my dad explained it to me: Grandpa told him the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren't lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth-because the story of Grandpa Portman's childhood wasn't a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.

"Oh... Story time my fellow peculiars," Victor said, with a mysterious look on his face.

My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelve years old when his parents sent him into the arms of strangers, putting their youngest son on a train to Britain with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes on his back. It was a one-way ticket. He never saw his mother or father again, or his older brothers, his cousins, his aunts, and uncles. Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped.

"That's...so sad," Horace said quietly.

But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around-they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.

"That's a very good way to put it," Millard said, grinning.

Like the monsters, the enchanted-island story was also a ruth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland England, the children's home that had taken in my grandfather must've seemed like paradise,

"This place kind of is paradise," Hugh said grinning.

'Paradise alright,' Victor thought sarcastically.

and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn't really fly or turn invisible or life boulders, of peculiarity for which they'd been hunted was simply their Jewishness.

"Not all of us are Jewish," Millard said.

"Some of us are Christian," Hugh said.

"Some of us are Catholic," Horace said.

"Some of us are Atheists," Enoch said.

"And many more!" Victor finished, smiling.

They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood.

"Okay... Well that has some truth to it, I guess," Victor said.

What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough. I stopped asking my grandfather to tell me stories, and I think secretly he was relieved.

"Why would he be relieved?" Claire asked.

An air of mystery closed around the details of his early life. I didn't pry. He had been through hell and had a right to his secrets. I felt ashamed for having been jealous of his life,

"As you should be," Hugh said sarcastically.

considering the price he'd pay for it, and I tried to feel lucky for the safe and unextraordinary one that I had done nothing to deserve. Then, a few years later, when I was fifteen, and extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.

"I wonder what happened," Enoch whispered loud enough for everyone to hear.

"That is the end of the Prologue. Any questions?" Head shakes.

Chapter 1...

There we go, this only took me two days to write and I'm proud of myself.

Sorry if there are any mistakes.

Please review!