Little Bigfoot, Big City

by Jennifer Weiner

  Friends, thought Alice, remembering how Taley and Riya and even mean Jessica Jarvis had all hugged her good-bye before break. She did have friends—or at least one real friend. Maybe Miss Merriweather was telling her to let that be enough.

  “And now,” Miss Merriweather said, “I really do need to go.”

  Five minutes later, bundled into her winter clothes and clutching her backpack, Alice was back outside and on her way to the subway. She walked slowly, thinking that she’d buy a hot chocolate and drink it before she got on the train, which would give her time to make notes while the conversation was still fresh in her mind. She hadn’t planned on spying on Miss Merriweather. Millie probably would have thought to do it, and that boy, Jeremy the so-called Bigfoot hunter, would have too, but not Alice. It wasn’t until she saw the educational consultant hurry past the coffee-shop window that she decided to follow her.

  Quickly pulling her coat back on, Alice ran outside and trailed Miss Merriweather down into the subway and onto the platform for the uptown trains. She was careful to keep her distance and make sure there were people between them. When the train pulled into the station, she let Miss Merriweather get on first, and then Alice found a spot in the car behind hers and watched through the windows to see when Miss Merriweather got out.

  That turned out to be the Columbus Circle stop, which made it easy for Alice to hide herself in a group of chattering, field-tripping Girl Scouts as they made their way up the stairs and into the light. Miss Merriweather was walking briskly, with her oversize purse, the one Alice knew she used to carry school information and a laptop, tucked tightly against her side.

  Alice trailed her as she walked into an office building, said something to the security guard, signed a ledger, and got onto an elevator. Waiting until the elevator’s doors slid shut, Alice approached the desk with her most pathetic look on her face.

  “I’m supposed to meet my grandmother at her dentist, and I think just missed her. She just got onto the elevator, but I can’t remember which floor she said.”

  “Sorry, miss,” said one of the guards, and the other said, “Do you have a phone? Don’t all kids have phones?” By then Alice had peeked at the register and seen “Cecelia Merriweather, 18th floor.”

  “Oh, never mind, I remembered!” she said, and gave the guards a twinkling smile and slipped onto the elevator just as the doors slid shut.

  Inside, Alice was surrounded by a typical crowd of adults in the middle of a workday: men in suits, women in skirts and high heels, some carrying briefcases, others carrying Styrofoam containers that smelled of curry, almost all of them peering at their iPads or their phones. When the elevator reached the eighteenth floor, Alice tried to exit, but a man’s hand came down on her shoulder, pushing her back inside.

  “This floor is restricted,” he said.

  “I have to meet my grandmother,” said Alice. She’d only caught a glimpse, but the eighteenth floor appeared to house a typical office: glass doors, sofas, and a coffee table in a waiting area, a woman with a headset sitting behind a desk.

  The man was looking down at her. He wore a blue suit, and Alice saw that he had a laminated badge clipped to his lapel. She felt her skin go icy as she saw the initials DOI and, underneath it, a holograph of an eye. Creepy, she thought as she snuck another glimpse and saw the same eye etched into the glass on the office doors. It made her think of something, but she couldn’t figure out what. Had she seen that eye before?

  “I—I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I don’t think I’m in the right place.”

  The man’s grip didn’t loosen, and Alice thought frantically of the lie she’d told downstairs. “I’m supposed to meet her at the dentist’s office,” she finally blurted, praying that the building actually had a dentist’s office somewhere inside of it.

  For a few seconds that stretched out like taffy, nothing happened. Finally the man’s grip loosened. “Try down on the fifth floor,” he said gruffly, stepping out into the hallway. Alice watched him as the elevator doors slid shut. Miss Merriweather was in there, behind those glass doors with their etching of that eerie, all-seeing eye.

  Alice found a vending machine on the third floor and sat at a table in the corner of what must have been an office’s break room, eating a bag of potato chips. When an hour had passed—long enough, she guessed, for a dentist appointment—she took the elevator back down to the lobby and stopped at the desk with the guards.

  “Find your grandma?” one of the guards asked.

  Alice nodded. “But I almost got off at the wrong floor. There were glass doors with an eye on them?”

  The guards exchanged an uneasy look. “Government offices,” one of them said.

  “What part of the government?” Alice asked. She cast her mind back to all the field trips she’d taken when she’d gone to school in New York City. “My friend’s mother is a district attorney. We got to go to her offices once. And I went to the International Spy Museum in Washington.”

  “Not that kind of government,” the other guard said. He was shorter, younger, with thick black hair under his cap.

  “Is it the CIA?” Alice lowered her voice.

  “Government,” said the second guard. “That’s all we know. The people who work up there all have key cards to get in.”

  Alice thanked them and went outside. Her mouth felt dry and her knees felt wobbly. She knew what this meant. Miss Merriweather was not a good fairy like she’d imagined, watching over Alice, keeping her safe. She worked for, or with, the government. She was one of the bad guys. She might have been responsible for snatching Alice away from the Yare, away from her real parents, for dumping her with Mark and Felicia, for moving her from one terrible school to another, for ensuring that she’d never be happy.

  Miss Merriweather worked for the government. And now she would tell them about Alice’s suspicions that she wasn’t human and that her parents weren’t her real parents. The men with the eye on their badges would be watching. Alice would have to be very careful—oh so careful, she thought, as Millie would say—as she tried to figure out the truth.

  Alice pulled out her phone, noticing that Millie still hadn’t written, before opening a new email. “PLEASE WRITE AS SOON AS YOU CAN,” she typed, in all capital letters. “I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.” Then, hoping that Millie would get her message and find a way to write, she zipped up her coat and walked down to the subway.

  ANOTHER CUP OF TEA?” MILLIE asked sweetly.

  Old Aunt Yetta was looking at her from behind her gold-rimmed reading glasses. They had spent the morning, at Millie’s request, tromping through the snow, walking deep into the drifts in the forest for the roots and barks they’d need to replenish the Tribe’s stocks. They’d filled their baskets with licorice root, sassafras, and aspen bark, and Old Aunt Yetta had quizzed Millie about tinctures for healing broken bones and teas for treating earaches. Millie, who had absolutely no desire to take on Old Aunt Yetta’s role as Healer or her father’s post as Leader of the Yare, tried her best to answer correctly, and just said “slippery elm bark,” which seemed to be useful for everything, when she couldn’t think of a different answer.

  “You are a frustration,” Old Aunt Yetta said with a sigh after Millie had guessed “slippery elm bark” for the third time in a row.

  You’re a frustration, Millie thought about saying. You and the rest of the Elders, who don’t understand that all I want to do is leave.

  Instead, she tried to look sorry, with her eyes downcast and her face-fur drooping, and she promised to do better. Back at Old Aunt Yetta’s house, Millie settled her friend on the couch in front of the fire and offered to make Old Aunt Yetta her tea.

  The cozy little kitchen had low ceilings and brightly colored hand-braided rugs on the floor. Millie put the kettle on the flame, and then pulled pinches from the bundles of dried herbs that hung in rows on the pegboard on the wall. Orange peel and cloves, elm bark for Old Aunt Yetta’s bone-fret (what the No-Furs called ArthurItis), hawthorn for her
heart, and a spoonful of the lavender honey that Millie and Frederee had collected that fall.

  And then . . .

  Millie’s quick fingers touched the bottles of tincture of valerian and one of magnolia bark. Those went into nighttime teas, the ones that brought on restful sleep. That was what Millie needed, just an hour of her friend dozing on the couch while Millie did what she had to do. She nibbled at her face-fur, and then it felt like she had fallen into a No-Fur television show and she was watching her small hands moving deftly, crumbling the sleeping-stuff into the boiling water, straining the tea into Old Aunt Yetta’s favorite cup, and stirring in extra honey to disguise the taste.

  “Thank you, dear,” Old Aunt Yetta said, and Millie felt her muscles tense as her friend took her first sip, then swallowed.

  “Interesting,” she finally said. Millie tucked a blanket around her friend’s legs. Then she pulled on her winter coat, a thick many-layered parka special-ordered on-the-line. Most Yare did not need a coat—their dense, wiry fur was quite enough to keep them warm—but Millie’s fine, silky fur was more like a decoration than a pelt, and she’d spend the entire winter with the shivers if it wasn’t for her store-bought coat, her on-the-line fur.

  “I will be going now,” she said, and Old Aunt Yetta looked at her closely.

  “You are missing your friend,” she guessed. Millie felt a spasm of guilt, even as she nodded. Alice had written to her every day, sometimes more than once, but Millie had been so preoccupied with trying to submit her video that she hadn’t found the time to write back. Every day that she could manage it, she’d have Frederee tape her—from up close, from far away, even from behind. Every day, the system would reject her application, displaying the same cheery message about how it was sorry that something had gone wrong. I have gone wrong, Millie thought. She’d even tried to shave her face with the sharp edge of a kitchen knife, but as soon as the fur was gone, it started growing back.

  “A good friend is the most valuable thing you will ever have,” Old Aunt Yetta was saying, which only made Millie feel worse. “And Alice is as good as gold. Brave, and with a loyal heart.”

  “Yes,” said Millie, and she wondered about her own heart. Alice was so lonely—more lonely, even, than Millie was—without a single Yare to understand her. That night that Alice had grabbed Millie in the water, it felt like Alice, not Millie, had been the drowning one. Millie loved Alice, and she loved hearing about the No-Fur world. She recognized too that she envied her friend so much: her freedom, her gadgets, her subway pass card, her life in the city, all the places she’d been and the things she knew, and, most of all, the way she could move through the world as she wanted, because her parents didn’t seem to care. (If Millie’s parents decided to care any more, they’d just start carrying Millie around on their backs all the time, the way they had when she’d been a baby.)

  Millie loved Alice . . . but sometimes she felt like Alice wanted to have Millie all to herself, that she didn’t like it when Millie tried to talk to the other girl No-Furs at the Center, or when Millie described dreams that didn’t perfectly line up with Alice’s own ideas. Millie wanted to be famous, while Alice seemed to think that the No-Fur world was a terrible place and that the best thing you could do was hide from it, tuck yourself deep into the woods, in a Yare-style dugout carved into a hill, disguise your door with twigs and leaves, and hope that no one ever found you. She knew that if she made too much of a fuss about The Next Stage, Alice would ask her questions she didn’t want to answer; questions about why she was in such a rush to leave her parents and her Tribe and a world where everyone loved her; questions about why she, Alice, wouldn’t be allowed into the Yare village and why she should help Millie chase her dreams when Millie wouldn’t help her find a place to call home.

  Millie tugged the red knitted cozy over the teapot and pulled Old Aunt Yetta’s afghan up to her chin. She built the fire up to a blaze and carried in a dozen more logs to keep it going through the afternoon.

  “You’re a good girl,” Old Aunt Yetta said, sighing as she turned her body toward the fire.

  As guilt pulsed through her, Millie shut the door and started walking the path toward her home. Only, instead of going left, she doubled back around to Old Aunt Yetta’s house and ducked under the window, listening, until she heard the soft buzzing of Old Aunt Yetta’s snores.

  She made herself count to one hundred, taking a breath after each number, before she eased the back door open, snuck inside, and tiptoed into the kitchen, where she scrambled onto the counter, kneeling and peering onto the top shelf. The bottles, half a dozen of them, labeled “For Maximus” in Old Aunt Yetta’s spidery handwriting, were all still there. The first time Millie had met Alice, she’d stolen one of the bottles, certain that it contained the potion to remove a Yare’s fur. It was a special tincture that Old Aunt Yetta had made for the times when Millie’s father, in his capacity as the Tribe’s leader, had to venture to the posting office to do the Mailing, sending Yare goods to Etsy, which was a person, or maybe a person who ran a shop and who sold their scrubs and organic soaps. Millie had put the bottle in her pocket, intending to swim across the lake and swallow it when she arrived, but the lake was much larger than it appeared, and the bottle had been lost in the process of Millie’s near drowning.

  For weeks she’d been on edge, waiting for someone to notice that the bottle was missing. But, of course, in the weeks after she’d met Alice, the Tribe had been threatened by discovery, and it was only Alice’s cunning that had kept them safe. Probably with all of that going on, Old Aunt Yetta hadn’t had time to re-count her stores of potions. Which meant that Millie could take another one and hope, again, that no one would find her out.

  She closed the cupboard, hopped to the ground, slipped back out of the cabin, and went through to Old Aunt Yetta’s garden, where carrots and peppers and potatoes and squash would grow in the summer, and where her goat, Esmerelda, was penned. Millie wanted to be close, so that if something went wrong she’d be able to cry out and, she hoped, wake up her friend. But she also wanted to be hidden, so that none of the other Yare could see her if it worked.

  Millie slipped behind the little lean-to where Esmerelda slept. The goat blinked at her, then bleated, then went back to snuffling through the snow. Millie uncapped the bottle and smelled its biting peppermint scent, so sharp that it made her eyes water.

  In for a penny, in for a pounding, she thought, and tipped the flask to her mouth. The liquid burned as soon as it touched her tongue, and it traced a line of fire down her insides. Millie managed only the tiniest sip before she started shaking, and she crammed her hand against her mouth to stop herself from howling. Oh, it hurt, it hurt so much; it was pain she’d never imagined; it felt like her skin was being bitten by a thousand fire ants, like she was trying to turn herself inside out.

  She opened her mouth, thinking that she would scream, that she couldn’t not scream, when she felt herself shuddering. There was one final, terrible blaze of heat and pain, like her cells were trying to fold themselves in half. And then . . . Millie looked down. Her arm was bare. Her fur was gone!

  She put the bottle in her pocket and used her hands to confirm. No fur on her face, none on her neck or her ears; no fur on her shoulders or her chest or her belly. No fur anywhere. She jumped in the air, joy surging through her, thinking about the mirror she’d hidden in the rafters in the loft in the Lookout Tree.

  But then Millie heard a knock, followed by Old Aunt Yetta’s snort. She heard the floorboards creak as Old Aunt Yetta walked to her front door. Frozen in place, unsure whether she should try to hide or whether leaving would make noise and attract attention, Millie heard her mother’s voice.

  “I can’t stand it anymore,” Septima said. She sounded miserable, her voice completely unlike the sunny, singsongy, slightly screechy tone she typically used when addressing Millie (unless she was scared about something that Millie had done, some risk that Millie had taken, and then her voice would drop to a reedy w
hisper).

  “Have a seat, dear,” Old Aunt Yetta said. “We will talk.”

  Millie heard her mother sniffle, heard the squeak of the couch springs as she sat and the sounds of Old Aunt Yetta fussing in the kitchen, filling the kettle, adjusting the flame.

  “Ever since that night, I keep thinking about it,” Septima said, and now her voice was almost a moan. “Thinking about all of it. What I should have said, what I should have done.”

  “It’s over,” said Old Aunt Yetta. “Over and done with.”

  “It is not,” said Septima in a sharper tone than Millie had ever heard her mother use. “It is not over. It will never be over. Not when I can’t stop remembering and wishing I’d done different. Every day I see Millie grow up, and I know that I can never keep her safe, and I think . . .” Her mother was crying now, and Old Aunt Yetta was making cooing, comforting noises.

  Millie couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe. What was her mother talking about? What—or who—could she not stop thinking about? What did she wish was different?

  “We did our best,” Old Aunt Yetta was saying. “Our best is all that any of us can do.”

  “It wasn’t enough,” Septima said, her voice rising to what was almost a shout. (Septima, who never shouted!) “It wasn’t enough, but it isn’t too late. We should do something,” Millie’s mother said. “Tell her, at least. Maybe if she knew—”

  Millie heard Old Aunt Yetta set the kettle down with a bang. “Never think it!” she said, and her voice was a low, angry growl. “Never for a minute. That would bring danger down on us, and danger down on her. And then what?” Her voice gentled. Millie heard footsteps, the sound of Old Aunt Yetta settling down on the couch. “There is a thing that the No-Furs say. ‘Burn the village in order to save it.’ ”

  But that makes none of the sense, thought Millie, just as her mother said the exact same thing.

  “Of course it doesn’t.” Old Aunt Yetta’s voice was low and soothing. “If you think, ‘I will do this thing, this big thing, and maybe it will cause disruption and sorrow and pain, but at least it will be the right thing to do, and at least I’ll feel better having done it,’ what do you get?”