Millie is still my friend, Alice thought, but her body told a different truth. Her eyes were stinging, full of unshed tears, and the hands that she kept crammed in her pockets out of habit and embarrassment had curled themselves into fists. She realized, as she trudged through the cold, that Millie hadn’t told her the secret she’d hinted at in her email . . . and now, of course, it was too late to ask.
With her head down, her hat pulled low over her ears, and her shoulders hunched, Alice didn’t notice that someone had followed them into the woods. She didn’t hear the faint crunch of boots on the snow. She didn’t see the shadow that fell across her own or hear a sighed exhalation or feel the fingertips that brushed the back of her winter jacket, as soft as a mother’s kiss.
JEREMY HAD READ A LOT of books about spies and detectives, so he knew how to prepare for a stakeout. He dressed in his warmest clothes, his thickest wool socks, and the insulated ski gloves he’d inherited from his brother Ben. He packed a thermos full of hot chocolate, four energy bars, and, after some consideration, an empty plastic bottle in case he had to pee, even though he figured that if he got desperate he could just run into in the woods.
He and Jo had tried for days to figure out what Mrs. Landsman’s words “the biggest heart” could possibly mean. They’d each thought of the kindest, most generous people they knew: Mrs. Koenig, who’d led three decades’ worth of Brownie troops on camping trips; Ms. Miller, who’d won Teacher of the Year ten times at the high school and was known for buying prom dresses for girls who couldn’t afford them, and even taking in kids who had difficult home situations and letting them live in her guest bedroom. Sadly, neither of those estimable ladies recognized Priscilla Landsman’s name. Neither did their parents or the town’s priests, rabbis, or Sunday-school teachers. Jeremy had an idea—“wild but plausible,” said Jo—that Warren, Mrs. Landsman’s companion, might have been the possessor of the biggest heart, but when they called him to ask, he said he didn’t know what they were talking about, and when they asked to meet with Mrs. Landsman again, Warren said that she’d “taken a turn for the worse.”
“Please give her our best wishes,” Jo had said, sounding unusually formal. She ended the call, sighed, and stared at her map of Standish.
“I could go look in the woods,” Jeremy said. “Maybe there’s a cave with an opening shaped like a heart.”
“Or a tree,” said Jo, and gave another sigh. That was when Jeremy decided that, in addition to investigating the forest, he would try to make contact with Alice at the Center, to see if she’d learned anything about herself or her so-called cousin that she might be willing to share. His plan was to hang around the Experimental Center, probably behind the big falling-down pile of a building at the top of the hill that held the dining hall and offices and classroom space. When he saw Alice, he’d figure out a way to approach her. He would ask if she remembered what he’d told her about not being human. He’d figure out whether she believed it, and he would ask if she wanted to learn the truth about herself. He’d even practiced saying that phrase in the mirror, in a deep and mysterious voice, just to increase the chance that she would say yes, instead of calling for help or running away.
He was not expecting to leave Standish Middle School at the end of the day and find Alice waiting for him, just outside the chain-link fence that separated the athletic fields from the street.
She was dressed in a puffy dark-blue winter jacket, boots, and snow pants. Her hair was mostly tucked up under a gray hat, but he could see reddish-blond pieces of it blowing around her face. He jogged toward her, and she raised a hand in greeting.
“I need you to help me,” she said.
“Um, okay. With what?” Jeremy asked. He was aware that some of the other kids—Hayden and Austin and Sophie—were staring at him, noticing him talking to a girl, a strange girl. He took Alice’s elbow, steering her onto the sidewalk, and started to walk.
“Where’s your cousin?” he asked. “The one with the skin condition?” He’d almost said “the furry one” but, luckily, had thought better of it.
Alice shut her eyes. She looked so sad that Jeremy felt like he should do something, except, of course, he had no idea, ever, about what to do with girls.
“She’s busy,” Alice said.
“Busy with what?” Jeremy asked, even though it was obvious, even to a boy, that Alice didn’t want to talk about it.
“Busy trying to be famous,” Alice said. “All she cares about is . . .” She shut her mouth, pressing her lips together hard. Her cheeks were pink, and she was walking so quickly that Jeremy had to almost jog to keep up. “She’s just busy. Too busy to help me. And I need help. I need to figure some things out.”
“I can help,” he offered. “I’ve got a lot of free time.” Alice looked at him sideways. “My friend and I . . . my friend Jo,” he said. The tips of his ears felt hot, and he couldn’t seem to make himself stop talking. “Jo with no e. She’s a girl. A girl Jo. You saw her . . .” He was going to say “the night we chased you” but went with “the one in the wheelchair” instead.
“You’re not supposed to say that,” said Alice. “You’re supposed to say that someone uses a wheelchair, not that they’re in it.”
“Why?”
“Because if you say that they’re in a wheelchair, you make the wheelchair their defining characteristic, but if you say that they use a wheelchair, then they’re still a person first,” Alice said. Her tone hinted that she was reciting something she’d been made to memorize.
Jeremy thought about this, while Alice speeded up. He trotted to catch up with her again. “What do you need help with?” Jeremy asked.
Alice didn’t slow her pace, but the pink in her cheeks faded, making her look slightly less like she’d been slapped. “I have to find out who I am. Where I belong. I thought Millie would help me, but Millie’s obsessed with The Next Stage. You know, that TV show where people do stuff to try and win money.”
“Don’t they sing?”
“Some of them. Some of them tell jokes or do magic tricks or dance or make human pyramids.” Alice’s voice was trembling. “Millie wants to audition for it. That’s the only thing she cares about anymore.” Alice walked on in silence with her hands deep in her pockets and her eyes on the ground. “I thought she was my friend,” she said, so quietly that Jeremy wasn’t sure he was meant to hear. “But she was just using me. To get my laptop, and so I could tell her things about the world, so she could win,” said Alice. The last word came out almost like a sob, bristling with pain and scorn. Jeremy snuck a glance to his left and, sure enough, Alice was swiping at her face with one mittened hand.
“I’m sorry,” said Jeremy, because that seemed like the only thing you were supposed to say when a girl started crying in front of you.
Alice sniffled and shrugged. Then she said, “I want to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead,” Jeremy said.
“When you told me I’m not human, what did you mean?”
Jeremy thought of his dad, sitting him down in the dining room to tell him that the coach had called and that Jeremy hadn’t made the travel soccer team. He remembered his mother when the letter had come from Juilliard to say that he hadn’t been accepted into their Pre-College Division young musicians program. There was the teacher who’d told him that he hadn’t been picked to participate in the Science Olympiad and the director of the sixth-grade play telling him that he had not been cast as Captain Hook or Mr. Smee or even as one of the pirates. “We need trees!” the lady had said. “You could be a tree! I bet you’d have just as much fun as anyone else!”
Grown-ups always tried to be nice, they tried to remind you about all of your good qualities and tell you how special you were and wish you “better luck next time,” but it never really mattered. In the end, no matter how nicely you said it, bad news was bad news.
“I think that you’re a Bigfoot,” he said. “You and your cousin. Or maybe you’re just part. Like a half or a quarter.”
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“I know,” said Alice, “what ‘part’ means. But why do you think that? Why don’t you think I’m, like, a hobbit or a vampire? Something like that?”
Jeremy told her. He explained that the DNA analysis of her hair had come back as inconclusive. He told her about the histories of Bigfoots in the forests of Standish and how for years the government had been trying to find them.
“But I’m not from here,” Alice pointed out.
“Where are you from?”
“New York City.” Her face looked thoughtful, and her words were coming slowly, like she was thinking them over before she spoke. “I was born in Vermont.”
“Well, there you go. Forests.” Jeremy was trying to sneak a peek at her feet, which, in their snow boots, looked big but not necessarily abnormally large. He wondered if there was a polite way to ask her if she had hair anyplace that girls weren’t normally hairy, then quickly decided against it. “I don’t know . . . do you feel like a vampire?”
This earned him a short laugh.
“Or a hobbit?”
“I like breakfast,” Alice said. Jeremy realized that she was making a joke, and he smiled and didn’t mention that there was a government agency searching for Bigfoots, that one of its agents was currently cruising the streets of Standish, piloting a deceptively crummy-looking van around, looking for her and her friend.
“So if I’m not human,” said Alice, “if I’m a Bigfoot, then how did I end up”—she gestured back toward the school—“you know, in the human world?”
Jeremy decided that honesty was his best bet. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a lot I don’t know. What are your parents like?”
“My dad works in finance,” Alice said. “My mom . . .” She looked unhappy as she began tucking strands of hair back up underneath her hat. “My mom is thin. That’s her job. She does other volunteer stuff, but mostly she exercises, and she doesn’t eat.” Alice made an unhappy sound that only slightly resembled laughter. “I don’t really look much like either one of them.”
“Were you adopted?”
Alice shook her head. “I checked. Or I tried to check. They both say I wasn’t, though, and there’s pictures of me in the hospital with my mom, right after I was born.”
“People can fake pictures,” Jeremy suggested.
Alice shrugged. “I guess they could. But why?” Her gaze was still on the road. More hair had escaped from her hat again, obscuring her face. “Why would they adopt me and then pretend that I was theirs? Especially when . . .” She turned her face away, so that she was looking toward the woods, and Jeremy had to strain to hear what she was saying. “Especially when they don’t even really like me.”
Jeremy didn’t know what to say to that. “I guess there’s lots of reasons people would lie.”
“What kinds of reasons?” asked Alice.
“Well, money,” Jeremy said. “Maybe they got paid to take care of you and pretend that you were”—he almost said “human” but chose, instead, to say—“theirs.”
“Okay,” said Alice. “So pretend I’m half-Bigfoot, half-human. Why would someone give me to my parents and pay them to pretend that I’m their kid? What’s the point?”
The answer was right there, swelling in his mouth like a toad that wanted to hop out. He wanted to tell her what Mr. Carruthers had told him. Because your blood can cure things. Because Bigfoots are practically immortal. Because maybe they were growing you, like a plant in a greenhouse, until your blood was ready. But what would Alice do if she found that out? Jeremy wasn’t sure. He wasn’t even sure what he’d do if he learned that his blood had magical healing powers. Run, probably. Assume that there were people hunting him and that he had to hide.
“I don’t know,” he told her. “Maybe they just . . . I don’t know . . . wanted to see how you’d grow up. Maybe they’re waiting to see.”
“See if I turn into a Bigfoot?” Alice looked at him, right in the face, for the first time. Her eyes were wide and clear, her hair a tangle around her cheeks, and her expression was frightened. “You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “You have to promise.”
“I won’t,” said Jeremy. He liked Alice. She was honest and straightforward, not trying to hide that she was scared. Of course, Jeremy acknowledged, she was also talking to him. Most girls didn’t.
“Promise?” Alice asked.
“Promise,” Jeremy said, even though the word felt slimy in his mouth. He was already thinking about the next time he’d see Mr. Carruthers, who might be in his van, somewhere nearby, watching them right now. He decided that he wouldn’t tell Mr. Carruthers he’d made contact with Alice. Even though Carruthers had apologized—very convincingly—for the bad stuff he’d done, even though he’d repaired Jeremy’s bike and paid for his school lunches and fixed his grades somehow, even though he’d told Jeremy how smart he was, Jeremy didn’t trust him. His good deeds didn’t erase the bad ones. He worked for the government—for that creepy agency, with its weird eye logo.
Most of all, though, Mr. Carruthers was a grown-up, and Jeremy knew that you could never really trust that tribe. They’d lie to you and tell you it was for your own good; they’d say “you’re going to feel a little pinch” before they gave you a shot that would make your arm burn for the rest of the day; they’d say “this hurts me more than it hurts you” when they grounded you or told you that you couldn’t watch the scary movie you’d been waiting to see for months or took your phone away. They’d even say “You’ll have a great time being a tree in the school play,” when it wasn’t true at all. The pirates and the Lost Boys got all the big laughs, plus a standing ovation. The trees got nothing.
“What are you thinking?” Alice asked.
Jeremy shook his head. “My friend Jo and I are trying to find out more about Bigfoots in Standish. We found someone who knew one—”
“Who?”
Jeremy told her about their visit to Priscilla Carruthers. “She told us to look in the biggest heart, and we don’t know what it means.”
Alice looked at him sharply. “What’d she say?”
“Look inside the biggest heart,” Jeremy repeated. “We’ve already talked to, like, the Teacher of the Year and this lady who was in the paper for being a Brownie troop leader, and I’ve gone through all the topographical maps to see if there’s, like, a cave or a rock formation somewhere up in the hills.”
Alice was smiling. “The biggest heart,” she said.
“What, is that someone at your school?” Jeremy asked. He should have thought along those lines before. A place called the Experimental Center for Love and Learning might have named its dining hall the Biggest Heart, or given a Biggest Heart award to a guidance counselor or something like that. But Alice, still smiling, was shaking her head.
“I know where it is,” she said. “And I’ll bet you do too.”
Jeremy stared at her. There was something teasing at the edge of his memory, something he could almost, but not quite, call to the front of his mind.
“Did you ever go to the Standish Children’s Museum?” Alice asked, and, just like that, it clicked into place. “They took us there on a field trip last fall, and I remember that there’s a—”
“Giant model of the human heart,” Jeremy finished. “Oh my God.” He grabbed her by the hands and whirled her into a brief dance that was as enthusiastic as it was clumsy. “You’re a genius!”
Alice gave a modest shrug. “We don’t even know if I’m right yet. But if there was someone who knew something about Bigfoots in Standish—some kind of expert—doesn’t it make sense that whoever it was would work near the forest?”
“The museum makes sense,” said Jeremy, who’d been sent there on field trips at least once a year since kindergarten. “There’s that whole History of Standish Valley display . . .”
“And the exhibit about native wildlife . . .”
“And if you were trying to find things out . . . ,” said Alice.
“You could say, ‘I’m from the chi
ldren’s museum,’ ” said Jeremy. “And everyone would want to help you, because who’d tell a children’s museum no?” He grabbed Alice’s mittened hand with his gloved one. “Let’s go. Right now. Can you go? Do you have to go back to school?”
Alice stopped. Her shoulders slumped. Even the pom-pom on top of her hat looked droopy.
“What?” Jeremy asked.
“Nothing,” said Alice. “Only . . . what if it turns out that I am a Bigfoot? Then what? I always thought I was different and that if I found out what I was, then I’d know where to go. I’d have people. But now . . .” She closed her mouth.
“There’s other ones out there,” he promised. “I saw one once.” He showed Alice his film, which she watched with apparent interest, but when it was over, she sighed, and still looked droopy. Jeremy wondered if she was thinking about her cousin, the one who’d suddenly gotten so interested in The Next Stage.
“Knowledge is power,” he said, which was something his science teacher liked to say.
“I guess,” Alice said. Even though she didn’t look convinced, she followed him to Jo’s house.
“Of course,” said Jo, when they told her about their museum theory. “The heart. That has to be it.”
Ten minutes later, with Jo and Jeremy on the tandem bike, Jo’s walker strapped to the carrier, and Alice on Jeremy’s bike, the three of them set out for the Standish Children’s Museum, where, luckily, admission was free to anyone with a student ID on school days.
“We close in half an hour,” said the lady behind the front desk. Jo assured them that they just needed a quick minute. They got their hands stamped and walked through the quiet, echoing halls, which smelled like dust and school lunches and were filled with glass display cases full of Standish’s native flora and fauna.
It was a small museum, nothing like the ones Jeremy had visited in Boston and Philadelphia. Instead of interactive displays with sound and lights and video and things that kids could do, there were dusty glass cases containing taxidermied birds and squirrels and dioramas about Standish’s first settlers. The dioramas, Jeremy noted, hadn’t even been updated to show that there had been people living in the so-called New World long before Columbus and, later, the pilgrims showed up.
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