Little Bigfoot, Big City

by Jennifer Weiner

  Jeremy, who’d read some of these stories and who’d heard about this from Skip Carruthers, nodded along.

  “So the search went on for years. Decades with nothing to show but footprints and bent branches, and weird footprints on Snickers wrappers.” He smiled. “It seems like they really like Snickers bars. Eventually the people who wrote the Department’s checks got tired of waiting. Instead of anthropologists and ethnobiologists, they hired ex-military people. Trackers. Hunters.” He paused, his eyes back on the ceiling. “Soldiers.”

  Alice shivered. Jeremy drummed his fingers on the knees of his jeans.

  “How’d they get from wanting to find a Bigfoot to wanting to hunt one down?” Jo asked. “Why was it such a big deal?”

  Marcus pointed at her with one of those enormous, deft fingers. “Officially—as far as there was an official record—they thought that these creatures might be a threat, and they were investigating to keep America safe. Less officially . . .” He looked up at the ceiling again. “There was some talk that their physical attributes—their strength, their longevity—might somehow translate to humans, and if we studied their biology, if we could get a sample of their blood, it might give us some insight into our own diseases. But if you were running a government, what would you do with a creature that was intelligent, with incredible size and speed and strength? Creatures that could heal themselves quickly, lived so long that they were close to immortal, and were almost impossible to kill?”

  As the veteran of half a hundred movies about aliens and mutants and superheroes, Jeremy had a guess, but it was Alice who answered, in a small, bleak voice.

  “You’d want them for the army,” she said. “You would want them to fight our wars.”

  “Give the lady a prize,” said Marcus.

  For a minute there was silence so complete that Jeremy imagined he could hear the dust settle on the old exhibits. Alice rocked forward, still with her hands wrapped around her knees. “But I don’t have any powers,” she said. “Unless breaking everything you touch is a power. Or getting kicked out of seven different schools. Or not having any friends.”

  The chair gave its loudest squeal yet as Marcus shifted, then reached over to his desk to pick up a notebook and a pen.

  “Ever broken a bone?” Marcus asked her.

  Alice shook her head.

  “Needed stitches?” he asked.

  Another head shake.

  “Concussion?” he asked. “Any childhood illnesses? Measles, mumps, chicken pox?”

  “I’m totally normal,” she said, her voice small and bleak. “I’m not . . . I can’t do anything special.”

  Alice thumped her heels against the floor, again and again, beating out a furious tattoo.

  “You know what? I bet I’m a dud. Or a squib, or whatever you call a Bigfoot who isn’t really a Bigfoot.”

  “Hey,” said Jo, and Dr. Johansson moved to pat her shoulder. Jeremy remembered Alice running through the forest, ducking under branches, leaping over streams, lifting and tossing logs out of her way like they were nothing. “You’re a good runner,” he said.

  Alice gave him a small, sad smile. “I’m a giant klutz,” she said, and Jeremy felt like someone had tied a thread around the center of his heart and cinched it tight.

  Alice pulled at her hair again and then, with a deliberate gesture, she pushed it away from her face, tucking it behind her ears so that they could see her eyes and mouth again, and sat up straight, with her feet on the floor. “Whatever Bigfoots can do, whatever powers they have, I don’t have them. I’m just a regular kid.” She looked at the doctor, hands out, palms up. “Or else they’d have taken me away, right? This Department? If they know where I am, and they know what I am, they could just take me any time they wanted.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Marcus said. “Did you move around a lot?”

  Alice shook her head. “I’ve gone to eight different schools, but I’ve lived in the same place my whole life.”

  “Never changed your name?” Marcus asked. Alice shook her head. “How about a makeover? Did your parents ever, I don’t know, give you a haircut for no good reason?”

  Alice touched her unruly pile of hair and gave a snort of not-laughter. She was sitting up straight, and her expression was resolute. She looked, Jeremy thought, like the figure on the bow of a ship, bravely facing the elements, with her hair flying out behind her.

  “Could be you’ve got powers you don’t even know about,” Marcus said. “I’ve got some people who could do a full work-up, but they’re in New York City.”

  “Tell me where to go,” Alice said. “Ask them how soon they can see me. I want to know where I came from,” she said, in a voice that was ringing and clear. “I want to know the truth.”

  WHEN THE NO-FUR NAMED JESSICA Jarvis had proposed her plan, Millie had agreed only because she couldn’t think of another way of getting a video submitted before her time ran out. She’d wanted Alice to help her, but Alice hadn’t wanted to do it. Even if she had, Millie imagined that it would be frustrating, having, every day, to convince Alice that she looked a-okay, that Millie could film her and no one would think she looked weird.

  Jessica had no such doubts about herself, which was good. Still, Millie hadn’t actually been convinced that it could work. Maybe Jessica wouldn’t be able to sync-lip convincingly. Maybe Millie wouldn’t figure out a way to stay hidden while singing loudly enough for people to believe that her voice was coming from Jessica’s mouth. Or maybe—the most likely possibility—the judges at The Next Stage were used to people trying to fool them in precisely this way and would immediately recognize that the girl who was moving her lips was not the girl who was actually singing.

  The deadline for submitting audition videos was five p.m. on Friday, and it was after three by the time Jessica had decided on an outfit (a short gray skirt, a gray-and-pink striped sweater, pale gray tights, and soft suede boots). Luckily, Jessica knew the words to “Defying Gravity” from Wicked. “My parents take me to see all the shows,” she’d said, and Millie had almost swooned with jealousy, imagining what it would be like to sit in a Broadway theater and watch actors perform the shows.

  They ran through the song twice. Then Jessica stood in the corner of the seventh-grade learners’ cabin, Millie crouched down beneath her, with her fur smoothed down and her arms held tight against her sides. Alice held her phone, filming Jessica mouthing the words as Millie sang them. They did it three times, then uploaded the first attempt, which they all agreed was the best one. Millie noticed that Alice sounded less than enthusiastic as she said, “Yeah, it’s great!” Millie promised herself that, as soon as the video had been accepted, she’d ask Alice what was wrong and reassure her that they were still friends, that it was the two of them who were a team, and that Jessica was just a convenience, a means to an end. She would tell Alice about everything she’d seen and heard—that she’d heard her mother crying, saying that they hadn’t done enough about something or someone, and together they would figure out what. Millie dreamed that she could even spend the night in the cabin, tucked up tight in one of the bags-of-sleep, and they could whisper together all night long, even though she knew her mother would never ever allow it.

  Except, somehow, as soon as The Next Stage emailed to say “Congratulations! Your audition has been ACCEPTED!” Millie had been so busy dancing around the room with Jessica, the two of them shouting with delight, that she hadn’t even noticed that Alice had slipped away. Then Millie had had to hurry back home before anyone noticed she was gone, so she didn’t get to say good-bye.

  And then, the very next morning, she snuck Alice’s laptop into her bed to check her email, and there was an actual message from an actual producer at the show, writing to say that she had made the first cut and that her audition tape would go live on the website at noon eastern standard time and would be up on the show’s website for the next forty-eight hours. “If YOUR SONG is one of our TOP SIX VOTE GETTERS, you’ll be MOVING ON to the NEXT ROUND .
. . and, just maybe, to THE NEXT STAGE!” the email read.

  So of course there was nothing else to do but make an excuse to her parents about feeling too unwell to go to her lessons, and then lie in bed in a frenzy of impatience as her mother dosed her with goldenrod tea, waiting until she could finally sneak out of her bedroom window and go racing through the woods as fast as she could. She then waited underneath the windowsill of the Lodge until the learners filed in for lunch, so that she could report this unbelievably exciting new development to Alice and Jessica. Jessica’s delight touched off another round of shrieking and dancing around. When Jessica left, to make the rounds of the dining hall and ask the other learners to vote for her (“Yes,” Millie heard her saying, in a voice full of false modesty, “I do have a lovely voice!”), Alice just gave her a quiet “Congratulations.”

  “Alice,” Millie said. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” said Alice, without meeting Millie’s eyes. “I’m just busy.”

  “Are you wanting your laptop back?”

  “Keep it,” said Alice. “My parents get me a new one every Christmas.”

  Millie reached into her knapsack, meaning to give her friend the dried plum hand-pies she’d packed, but Jessica grabbed her arm and pulled her into a book-lined room with a fireplace—a liberry, Millie thought.

  “We have to start strategizing,” Jessica announced. “Alice, we need you!” she singsonged through the open door, and Alice came slouching in, with her eyes on the floor, like she was carrying something heavy on her back.

  “What do you mean about stratergizing?” Millie inquired.

  “Look,” said Jessica, as she loaded The Next Stage’s home page on her iPad. At noon, just as the email had promised, twelve new videos had appeared beneath a banner that read “Hot New Talent!”

  Jessica clicked, and Benjamin Burton’s deep and terrifying voice filled the room. “Welcome to The Next Stage. Take a look at today’s twelve competitors. Once you’ve seen their audition tapes, we invite you to step into our virtual voting booth and cast your ballot for your favorite. The top six will advance to the next round.”

  Jessica clicked the link to their audition, and Millie heard her own voice, high and sweet, fill the room. Her singing sounded fine as ever, but when it was paired with the image of a beautiful girl moving her mouth along with the words, somehow it sounded even better. It didn’t make any sense, but it was true.

  Then she looked underneath Jessica’s image, at the vote totals. She—they—had thirty-seven votes. The competitor next to them, a hula dancer named Leilani, already had over a thousand votes. The accordion player next to her had twice as many as that, and the six-year-old magician right above him had somehow amassed more than five thousand.

  “How has this happened?” Millie asked as she felt her heart plummet and her hands go cold with disappointment and fury. “How can people be voting with such a quickness! They haven’t even had time to watch all of the auditions!”

  “People get their friends to vote for them,” Jessica explained.

  Millie peered at the totals, then shook her head. “I am not believing that this person has”—she looked at the number underneath the singer in the top left-hand corner—“seven hundred and eighty-two friends.”

  “Not friend friends,” said Jessica. “Social media friends.”

  “What,” Millie asked, “is social media?”

  Jessica rolled her eyes and muttered something about homeschooled losers. “Okay. Social media is, like, where people go online to talk about things.”

  “Like a vbirtual waterdb coolerdb,” snuffled Taley, who was curled up in an armchair in front of the fireplace.

  Millie didn’t know what a water cooler was and wasn’t entirely sure what “virtual” meant in this context. So she sat, listening closely, as Jessica explained.

  “This is Facebook,” Jessica began, showing Millie a website that appeared to be videos of cooking and pictures of weddings or vacations at the beach or No-Furs doing skiing. “It’s mostly for old people. Your mom’s probably on Facebook.”

  My mom definitely is not, thought Millie. She looked over at Alice, hoping to exchange a knowing glance with the one No-Fur who knew the truth about who she was, but Alice was staring at the fire, and Millie couldn’t tell if she was listening.

  “Twitter,” said Jessica, drawing Millie’s attention back to the screen, which was now full of mostly words, with far fewer pictures and videos. “Also for old people, but at least some of them are old people who watch TV.” She showed Millie The Next Stage’s accounts on the websites, pointing out how many thousands of friends or fans or followers the show had amassed.

  Finally, Jessica opened up InstaChat, which she claimed was by far the most popular social-media website, especially with kids and teenagers and, most important, with The Next Stage viewers. “See, look at the Amazing Marvin,” she said. She hit a few buttons, and there was the magician, a little boy in a black silk top hat, the same one he wore on The Next Stage page. “He’s already got seventeen thousand fans.”

  “But how?” Millie asked. This did not strike her as fair at all, if the people she was competing against could simply call on the reserves of admirers they’d already collected.

  “He joined the site two years ago, and he’s been posting a new video every week,” said Jessica.

  Millie moaned out loud. “We’ll never catch up,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” said Jessica. “But we have to try.”

  They spent the next few hours online, building an InstaChat page, posting their audition video, and then recording another song.

  “Now,” Jessica said, “we have to start liking people.”

  Millie was starting to feel faintish from hunger. It had been almost three hours since she’d eaten the last of the jelly rollies and hand-pies she’d put in her knapsack. As she watched, Jessica went back to the Amazing Marvin’s page and clicked “like.”

  “Why are we liking him if we want people to vote for us?” Millie asked.

  “Watch,” said Jessica. Sure enough, within a minute, the Amazing Marvin had “liked” them back, and then a slow trickle of his friends and fans and followers made their way first to Millie’s InstaChat page, and then over to The Next Stage’s virtual voting booth.

  “Now we just have to like everyone we can find who’s auditioning or who’s a fan of the show with more than five thousand—”

  “I am sorry,” said Millie, whose head was whirling, “but I am now requiring some foods.” When Jessica stared, Millie touched her face-fur and said, “It is one of the symptoms of the medical condition I have. I need to eat.”

  “I’ll go find something,” said Alice, and left the liberry without a look back. She is angry, Millie thought . . . but then she somehow accidentally deleted a link that she’d posted on another competitor’s Facebook page, and got so involved in trying to fix it that she forgot to ask Alice what was wrong and barely remembered to thank her for the lentil salad and bread and cheese that she brought back from the dining hall. By the time the sun was setting, she and Jessica had 9,311 votes, the fifth-highest tally on the page.

  It wasn’t enough.

  “We need to post new videos and photos every day,” Jessica said, without looking up from the screen. “At least once a day. That’s important. And we have to friend and fan as many people as we can.”

  Millie nodded, knowing that if her parents discovered that she had Alice’s computer and learned that, in spite of their warnings, she had been consorting with the No-Furs, that she was visiting the school every day, that she’d let herself be recorded and put on-the-line—even if it was only her voice, and no one could see her—and that she had sent the audition in to a national No-Fur contest and was ardently, actively trying to get people to vote for it, it would be enough for them to set her feet on the road, to excommunicate her from the Yare Tribe and make sure she had no place in the world.

  “Start packing,” Jessica said. “A
nd start figuring out some kind of story to tell these people when we get picked.”

  “If we get picked,” Millie corrected. She was surprised to realize that a part of her did not want to get picked at all, did not want to have to figure out a story to explain her fur and her claws, did not want to have to venture into the No-Furs’ biggest city. Already, everything seemed so much harder than she’d imagined, when she’d thought that all you needed was a pretty singing voice. Now it was clear that a good voice was only the first part of it. You needed a pretty face to go with the pretty voice. You needed lots of clothes and lots of songs and lots of friends you’d never met to vote for you. And what if, at the end, she stood alone on the stage, with confetti raining down and Benjamin Burton himself presenting her with a check for a million dollars, only there was no one to celebrate with her? What if winning the competition meant losing her friend, her Tribe, her family?

  This is what I wanted, Millie thought as she trudged back around the lake, feeling the cold seep through the soles of her boots and the wind bite through her face-fur. This was my dream, she thought as the howling wind disguised the sound of the footsteps padding along after her, and the deepening shadows hid the tall, cloaked figure that had followed Millie all the way around the lake and stayed behind her almost until she slipped through her front door.