There would be a fire burning in the kitchen, and bowls of thick porridge with cream and butter and brown sugar and raisins, or warm slices of fresh-baked bread. Millie would sit at the table with a steaming cup of what Old Aunt Yetta called “growing tea” in front of her, a tea made with special ingredients to keep her healthy and strong and, hopefully, to help her grow to a normal Yare size. Her mother would urge her to eat, and her father would look at her with affection, sometimes squeezing her shoulders with both of his big hands. When she’d finished clearing the table and helping Septima wash and dry the dishes, one of her parents would walk her to school and hand her a small snackle, along with her lunch sack, before she walked through the door.
Ever since her audition video had been accepted, her days began differently. At five in the morning, when the sky was still dark, the alarm on Alice’s laptop would chime. Millie would turn it off before her parents could hear, and then sit up in bed, with the room lit by the eerie blue glow of the screen.
First, she would go to The Next Stage’s home page to check the comments on their audition video and type in her own comments underneath the most popular positive remarks. This would boost those comments to the top of the string and encourage more people to write. She’d check on the number of votes that had come in during the night, and feel happy if she and Jessica were still in the lead, and feel a leaden misery, like she’d swallowed a bellyful of stones, if they weren’t.
Next, she would go to the InstaChat page that Jessica had set up, the place where they’d been posting new content. Again, she would check the number of thumbs-ups, the number of “likes” and “loves” and “favorites,” and she would like and love and favorite the favorable comments, and write the same things underneath them: “So glad you enjoyed!” and “Thanks for the love,” along with “Please please PLEEEEEEEEEASE don’t forget to MAKE US NUMBER ONE on The Next Stage,” along with a link directing people to the correct page. It made Millie feel uncomfortable, asking so baldly for strangers to do her a kindness, like they owed her anything more than just their time, but Jessica had said that this was the way things worked, on-the-line, and had even shown her the Facebook pages of famous singers and bestselling authors, all pleading for people to purchase their books or their albums, to watch their videos and play their songs, to make them Number One.
By the time she heard her mother’s light footsteps in the hall, Millie would have been awake for close to two hours. Her back would feel achy, and her eyes would burn, and she’d feel sick and stuffed and a little dizzy, like she’d eaten something too cold or too sweet much too quickly. Her mind would be crammed with words, good and bad:
Beautiful singing
I’ve heard better
Such a pretty little girl
She’s maybe a six, needs to lose 10 lbs
She must be related to one of the judges if she’s actually in the finals
“Just ignore it,” Jessica had told her, when Millie would fret over the mean stuff. “People are angry. They’re just looking for a dog to kick.” Millie couldn’t understand why the No-Furs were so mad and why saying something unkind to a stranger on a screen would make them feel better, but she just added it to her list of No-Fur behaviors that made no sense. In a single motion, she would slip the laptop underneath her mattress, pull the covers up to her chin, then lie back with her eyes shut as her mother bustled around the room, opening the curtains, giving Millie a kiss, singing her good-morning song.
That day was a Friday, the day she and Jessica—and Alice, she reminded herself—would be leaving for the city. Millie had packed her best dress and her not-best dress, the snow boots that she wore outside, and the moccasins for indoors. She’d packed her toothbrush and a bar of the sweet soap that her mother made and slipped Old Aunt Yetta’s potion into her pocket, and she’d rolled and folded everything until it fit into a plaid flannel pillowcase that she’d knotted and tied to a stick. (She had an old canvas knapsack with leather straps that had once been her father’s, but it smelled slightly like mildew, and Millie thought the idea of a bundle on a stick much more charming than simply cramming her things into a backpack.) The stick was propped in the snow beside the Lookout Tree, and the bundle was waiting on the platform in the tree’s top branches.
After breakfast, Millie would leave for lessons, but after going into the dugout where Teacher Greenleaf and the rest of the littlies were waiting, she would ask to be excused. She would climb the Lookout Tree and sneak the bundle down the tree’s trunk. She’d attach it to the stick. And then, while the class studied fractions and reviewed the Ten Common Techniques for Evading the No-Furs or did their run-and-hide drills, she would trot away from the Yare encampment, around the lake, to the Experimental Center, where, Jessica had told her, a van would be waiting to take them to New York City.
The thought of it made her stomach do a flip and made her fur feel bristly. Break it down, was what Old Aunt Yetta told her to do when something scared her. Think of each piece on its own and how you will get through it. Millie had been on a school bus, trick-or-treating with the rest of the Yare littlies, then Alice, and so a van would be mostly the same. At least, that was what she tried to tell herself, even though she knew that the van would go on the highways, not just little town roads, and even through a tunnel, under a river, where Millie was sure she’d be able to feel the weight of all the water pressing down. Alice’s partment, she told herself, would be much like the learners’ cabin, only fancier, and in a tall building, with its rooms perched high in the sky—which, Millie thought, would be like the Lookout Tree. She wasn’t even letting herself think about the audition itself, or about actually being in the city. Whenever she did, her heart started beating so fast that the world got wobbly, and she’d have to sit with her head between her legs, taking big deep breaths until her pulse settled.
Millie told herself that this—a stage, an audience, the possibility of fame—was her dream, the only thing she’d ever wanted, but as she’d gotten closer to the audition date, she found herself missing the way things had been. She missed waking up slowly in the warmth of her blankets. She missed singing just for pleasure, not always thinking about whether Jessica would be able to mouth the words convincingly as Millie sang them, or whether favorite songs would turn out to be the kind of thing voters liked. She missed her time with Alice, their nights by the lake, in the darkness, with Millie hidden in the bushes and Alice sitting on the ground next to her while they traded secrets and stories and talked about what they wanted from the world.
But now Alice was angry and sad. Whenever Millie tried to talk to her—about the vote getting or about how Millie was becoming increasingly convinced that someone was following her through the forest—Alice would answer in single words and find an excuse to be somewhere else. That was her fault, Millie knew. She’d never meant to abandon her friend. It was almost as if it had happened without her even noticing, like they’d slipped apart so quickly and completely that she wouldn’t have been able to stop it, even if she’d tried.
She must have sighed, because Septima was looking at her sharply. “Millie, what is troubling you?”
“Not a thing,” said Millie, helping herself to a dried-apple pancake. She was thinking how much better it would have been if she’d been born a No-Fur and Alice had been a Yare. Then Millie would have been able to sing with no one stopping her, and Alice would never have to wonder where she belonged, and would have been happy in the woods.
She folded up three more pancakes in a cloth napkin and took a last swallow of goat’s milk. “Happy day,” she told her parents, and both of them kissed her good-bye. Millie tried not to think of how they would fret when it was three-of-the-clock, then four, then five, and she hadn’t come home. She had left them a note underneath her pillow, telling them not to worry, that she was safe and with friends and would be home Sunday night, but telling her mother not to worry was like telling the sun not to rise in the morning, like telling the birds not to sing.
> Outside, in the winter morning, it was still more dark than light. Millie’s breath formed frosty white clouds in front of her. The moon hung low in the sky, reflected in the lake. She could hear her feet crunching through the ice-crusted snow and feel the sharp, cold air stinging her cheeks as she walked. It was a beautiful morning, lovely and still, but Millie didn’t notice. She was thinking about the audition and whether an upbeat, happy song would get more votes than a sad kind of love song and which would be easier for Jessica to pretend to sing. Millie was so deep in thought that at first she didn’t hear the steps—slow and cautious, then quicker and louder—of someone coming up behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw a tall, hooded figure, all in black, coming toward her fast, on feet that seemed to skim the snow.
Millie quickened her pace. The figure followed along, faster and faster. Millie began to trot, then run. Whoever was behind her was gaining, getting closer with every step. Millie could hear the rasp of her pursuer’s breath in her ears. She was too afraid to turn around, too scared to scream. All she could do was squeeze her eyes shut as a big hand grabbed the collar of her coat and hoisted her into the air.
Millie screeched, her legs flailing and her feet paddling helplessly above the snow-covered ground, wondering who had gotten her. One of the No-Furs, she thought, as she wriggled and screeched, and now it would be just like she’d always been told. She’d be put in a cage, displayed in a zoo, treated like a freak, something more like an animal than a person. She would never see her parents or friends. Or her Tribe. She would never sing again. That thought made her howl more loudly than ever, until she heard a woman’s voice in her ear.
“Millie,” it said.
Millie instantly went still. She felt her mouth drop open as she tumbled to the snowy ground.
“Millie,” Septima repeated, and held out her hands, pulling her daughter to her feet. “I know where you are going.”
Millie’s heart lurched. She felt her neck-fur and face-fur quiver with fear, even as she made herself look up, trying to make her expression innocent and a little pathetic. “I’m just going to my lessons.”
“I know,” Septima sighed. “I know.” For a minute she was quiet, looking out at Lake Standish. Across the miles of water, the kids and the teachers at the Experimental Center were probably all still sleeping, snug in their beds . . . and, all over the world, people with computers might be looking at Millie’s audition or at the Amazing Marvin’s magic tricks or at Trisha Doyle, who was the grown-up singer who’d had the most votes the last time Millie had checked.
Millie felt like she was going to burst with anxiety and disappointment. To come so close to her dream—to have it right there in her hand, right there for the taking—and then, on the day before her audition, to be foiled by her own mother.
“It’s not f—” she started to say, when her mother interrupted.
“Go on,” Septima said.
Millie blinked. “What?”
“Go,” Septima repeated, and handed Millie a basket. “Go on and see your friend.”
Millie just stared. She couldn’t think of a single word to say. Her mother—who’d kept Millie so close, who’d carried her everywhere until Millie was three, who’d been known to lurk around the schoolhouse and even hide herself in bushes so that she could watch Millie during lesson time—giving her permission to go out among the No-Furs?
“You have a friend,” her mother was saying. Millie nodded uncertainly, still not believing that her mother intended to let her go. “I understand that a friend is an important thing. I know you have been lonely.”
Millie nodded again, feeling a timid flicker of hope that maybe this wasn’t a trick or a trap. Then a thought seized her. “Have you been following me?” she whispered. “All this time?”
Her mother looked at her with fond exasperation, an expression Millie had seen on her familiar face at least a thousand times.
“I had to keep you safe,” she said. “That is what mothers do.”
Millie remembered hearing her mother cry to Old Aunt Yetta, remembered her saying that she should have tried harder. Taking a guess—a wild one—she said, “Did you ever go out there? Out with the No-Furs?”
Septima gave her daughter a faint smile. “Do you have time to listen?”
Millie nodded, thinking of the last time she’d been in the learners’ cabin, how Jessica had piles of clothes and shoes heaped up on her bed and how she was meticulously constructing outfits for the audition. She had a few hours before Jessica would be ready, and she knew they wouldn’t leave without her.
“Then come,” said her mother, and Millie followed her to the school yard, then up the thick trunk of the Lookout Tree. Millie’s little treehouse was warm enough, with piles of blankets and even a battery-operated heater that her father had purchased on-the-line. Millie snuggled in one corner. Septima stood on her tiptoes, reaching and pulling something out of a crack between the roof and the wall. As Millie watched, her mother carefully unwrapped the layers of tape and plastic.
“Was this your place?” Millie asked.
“Long-and-long ago,” said her mother, using her sharp nails to rip through the tape. Finally, she finished her unwrapping. The plastic had concealed two things: a wooden box with the words “My Keepsakes” on the top and a big book with the word “Scrapbook” on the cover. She smoothed her hands over the box’s surface, sat down on her own nest of blankets, and looked at her daughter. “This is my faulting,” she said. Her voice sounded miserable, and her eyes were on the floor. “All my faulting. The why of it. How you are the way you are. All my faulting.”
“What do you mean?” Millie asked. She was looking at her mother and thinking, the way she normally did, that the two of them could not be less alike—Septima, with her soft voice and downcast eyes, her neat, simple dress, and her dark, dense fur that looked like everyone else’s, and Millie, who was loud and bold, whose fur was silvery, who was not like any of the other Yare at all.
“Because, long-and-long ago, I wanted to go out into the world. I wanted . . .” She made a choked noise, then gestured toward the high, narrow slit of the window, a movement that took in the snowy, silent world beyond. “And now you are just like me. And I can’t keep you safe, no more than my parents could keep me from running away.”
“You ran away?” Millie stared as Septima gave a shamefaced nod. “Did you want to be famous?” Millie asked.
Septima’s mouth lifted in an unhappy kind of smirk. “Something like that. But not the same as you. I wanted to be a track star.” She looked at her daughter. “Are you knowing what that is?”
“I think so,” said Millie. “Running? On a track?”
“Not running,” said Septima. “Not for me. Throwing.” Her hand curved, like she was cradling a giant egg. “You know I am from . . .” She lifted her hand toward the sky, bringing her fingers toward her palm, then spreading them out again, a Yare gesture that meant “far away.”
Millie nodded.
“And you know I was runtish.”
Millie nodded again. She’d heard stories of how Septima was small and sickly, so tiny that her village had despaired of her survival. Her Healer had dosed her with tonics, rare meat, and fresh air, and her folks had tried to feed her up, the same way Septima now did with Millie, but Millie knew her mother had always been small and weak as a littlie until she’d grown to be a normal size, the way Millie hoped that she herself would grow.
“We lived in the forest, a’course, but there was a town, and the town had a school, and the school had a track team. One day I was gathering berries, and I’d wandered far-and-far, and I saw them. No-Fur boys and girls, racing around in a circle or jumping or throwing.” A ghost of a smile lifted Septima’s lips. “One of the girls got angry at the coach, and instead of putting the shot where she was supposed to, she threw it into the woods, as a joke. It landed almost at my feet. I thought it was a sign. So I picked it up”—Septima’s hand curved again—“and I
threw it back . . .” She lifted her hand behind her shoulder, then made a throwing motion, then smiled in earnest. “I have never heard No-Furs be screaming so loud or be running so fast. All of them ran but the coach. He stood at the very edge of the woods and shouted, ‘Whoever did that, come to practice tomorrow, and let’s see if you can do it again.’ ”
Millie listened, still not quite believing what she heard as her mother described doing exactly what Millie had long dreamed of: finding a way to make her fur disappear, then venturing into the world.
“Do not ask me the how of it,” Septima said, her voice so stern and her face so fearsome that Millie nodded immediately, secretly thinking that it had to be the potion, the same one she’d stolen from Old Aunt Yetta. Then her mother told a story that was like Millie’s own singing story, a story of wanting not only to go out into the No-Fur world but to find the thing that you were best at, a story of wanting to shine.
“That first day, the coach watched me throw and said I had much of the talent. He showed me the right way to do it, and I practiced and practiced, at home, with rocks. And I was good.” Her face took on a wistful expression. “I was very good. I could throw it farther than any of the No-Fur girls could, and farther, even, than most of the boys. That should have been enough, just to know that I was the best of them.”
“But it wasn’t,” Millie said.
Septima shook her head. “The coach said he was needing a note from my parents and a copy of my birth certificate so I could be in the tournaments.” Septima pronounced “birth certificate” with great care, the way Yare typically did with unfamiliar No-Fur terms. “I could write a note, but I had no certificate. I told him that it was lost. He said for my parents to go to City Hall and ask for another. He gave me a unifrom.”
Little Bigfoot, Big City Page 15