The Littlest Bigfoot

by Jennifer Weiner

Alice nodded. Her mother didn’t work, but her volunteering was practically a full-time job. Diabetes on Mondays, Crohn’s disease on Tuesdays, cancer on Wednesdays, and heart disease on Fridays, with Thursdays reserved for the hair salon, mani-pedis, and Pilates lessons.

  Felicia got to her feet, put her slender arms around Alice’s shoulders, and pressed her cool, powdery cheek to the top of Alice’s head, all the while keeping her body angled away from her daughter’s. As if I’m catching, Alice thought, wondering, for the thousandth time, how she could have ever emerged from this slim and perfect woman, and wondering why it was so hard for her to leave.

  No one here wanted her. She was an impediment, an embarrassment, an unwanted gift that had arrived without receipt and couldn’t be returned. Her parents would shove her under a bunk bed if they thought that no one would notice she was gone. Maybe it was just that at home she knew exactly what kind of awful to expect, whereas each school was a revelation, a new adventure in misery and isolation.

  Alice knew her mother’s dream: that one year she’d come home from school transformed into the kind of slender, smiling, appropriate girl they could have loved. So far it hadn’t happened. As much as Alice wanted to please her parents—to see her father look happy, to make Felicia’s painted lips curve into a smile—she also wanted to run in the sunshine, to play in the dirt or the mud puddles or the snow, to eat the warm chocolate chip cookies that her Granny baked during her visit every summer, and to ruin her shoes by letting the waves wash over her feet. As hard as she tried, Alice could never stop being herself. She could never make herself be the kind of girl they’d love.

  Standing on the corner, sweating in the late-summer heat, still feeling the cool imprint of Felicia’s cheek on her head, Alice kicked at the corner of the monogrammed trunk and shut her eyes, listening for the sound of her parents’ car. A battered white van cruised slowly down the street, then backed into an illegal parking spot and sat there with its flashers on.

  Alice rummaged in her bag for another butterscotch and wondered why her parents kept hiring Miss Merriweather, who’d been wrong about seven different schools in a row. She wondered too whether her new school, the Experimental Center, was as weird as it sounded in the letter the school had sent to parents, which began:

  We humbly acknowledge the profound act of surrender it will be to entrust to us your INCREDIBLE YOUNG HUMANS, the most unspeakably precious beings in the world. It’s an honor we take with the utmost gravity, that we are part of the village that will raise them. We will strive to teach the values of honesty, integrity, and respect for themselves and the world to your daughters, your sons, and your non-gender-conforming offspring. We promise an atmosphere of inclusivity and respect, where hierarchies are nonexistent, where age and grades don’t matter as much as the understanding that we all have things to learn from one another.

  Alice shook her head, thinking that getting rid of her every September was not an act of profound surrender for her parents, but one of great relief. And what could anyone learn from me? she wondered. How to break combs with your hair? How to outgrow your entire wardrobe every three months? How to make your mother cry by spilling grape juice on her new suede boots, and then shrink her favorite white cashmere dress in the dryer until it was too small for even a Barbie doll because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell her that you’d gotten juice on that, too?

  Alice closed her eyes, testing herself. She could hear the wheeze of a city bus as it heaved itself around the corner, a taxicab that needed a new muffler, one of those electric cars that barely made a sound. No Lee, though. She smiled, remembering how Lee hadn’t believed her when she told him that she could always hear his car, specifically; how he’d made her stand on the sidewalk, blindfolded (with his wife watching) while he circled the block. Five times he’d driven past Alice, surrounded by taxis and buses and motorcycles and even other Town Cars like his, and every time Alice was able to pick out his car as it went by.

  That morning, Alice waited patiently, eyes closed, until she heard the car whispering up to the curb.

  “Ready to go, Allie-cat?” Lee asked. The trunk’s lid popped open, and he started hoisting her luggage off the sidewalk.

  Alice tried to help. Lee waved her away, saying, the way he always did, “You know I need my exercise,” and then, as always, shrugging as she lifted her suitcase, then her duffel bag, saying, in a gruff Russian accent, “Alice is strong like a bull!”

  Alice hated it when other kids teased her about her size, her strength, her weird wide face and untamable hair, but Lee could say anything he wanted, because Lee was safe, and nice, and would never hurt her. Every Christmas, Lee gave her a bag of Hershey’s Kisses, wrapped in red and green foil. On her birthday he always sent a card, and at Swifton he’d mail care packages with Kit Kat bars and postcards of the Statue of Liberty or Central Park.

  Alice climbed into the backseat—in spite of her pleading and pointing out that she was more than big enough, Lee never let her sit up front—and buckled her seat belt as Lee pulled away from the curb, heading downtown.

  “Allie-cat,” he began. Alice smiled, the way she always did at the nickname that only Lee used. “I understand that this place sounds a bit . . .”

  “Ridiculous?” asked Alice. “Bizarre? Possibly illegal?”

  “Precious,” Lee said, easing to a stop at a red light. “But you need to keep an open mind.”

  In the backseat, Alice leaned her forehead against the cool pane of glass. Her eyes slipped shut, which was good, because then she didn’t have to see herself—the parts that were too thick, too soft, too big, too round. As the car sped along the highway she slipped into her favorite daydream: of how somewhere, there were two people, a man as big and strong as the tallest basketball player and a lady whose body was as soft and warm and welcoming as her granny’s when she’d let Alice sit on her lap. They were her real parents, who had been separated from her somehow, and in Alice’s daydream they would run to her, crying, and they would scoop her up into their arms and hold her tight and tell her that now that they had found her, they would love her forever and never let her go.

  CHAPTER 2

  ON A WARM SEPTEMBER NIGHT, a girl named Millie Maximus, wearing her favorite blue dress, climbed to the sturdiest branch of the Lookout Tree and hid herself in the shadows. It was late; the rest of the littlies were tucked up in bed, but Millie was too excited to fall asleep even if she’d wanted to.

  Millie held her breath as the Elders crept out of their underground houses and came to stand around the flames. They linked their hands and bent their heads, and Millie’s father began the chant. Maximus’s voice was low and quiet and rumbly, like water tumbling over stones.

  “I am Maximus of the Yare. Would you listen?” her father began.

  “We will listen,” came the response.

  “We are the Yare. We are the hidden ones.”

  We are the Yare, repeated the men, their voices deep and soft. We are the hidden ones.

  “We live in the shadows. We protect the silence. We guard the secret spaces of the world.” Millie’s mother, Septima, spoke those words, in a voice as high and piping as birdsong.

  We live in the shadows. We protect the silence. We guard the secret spaces of the world, echoed the other women in their own twittery voices.

  “We are the forgotten. We are the unseen. We are the guides,” said Maximus. Then, as one, the Tribe chanted, “We are the Yare, and we survive.” With their heads bowed, holding each other’s hands, the Tribe stood for a moment in reverent silence, before they closed with a final, solemn “Nyebbeh,” a word that could mean anything from “hello” to “love” or “peace” or “not right now,” when said to a friend or a loved one. Millie held perfectly still, gazing down at the two dozen Elders she’d known her entire life.

  Maximus stretched out his arm, poking the tip of a long branch into the fire. Once it had caught, the meeting would begin, and whoever held the stick could speak.

  Ma
ximus was the Leader of the Yare, a tribe of what humans called Bigfoots. When he Passed—“may the day be long-and-long,” Millie whispered—as her parents’ only child, she’d be the one in charge, bound by the traditions that had ruled her life and her parents’ lives and their parents’ lives and the lives of every member of every Tribe that had come before her. She would live her whole life in the forest, hidden away from the No-Furs, which was what the Yare called humans; and the most she could ever dream of doing was introducing a new strain of pumpkin or coming up with a new recipe for bread; and the closest she would ever come to the human world was watching Old Aunt Yetta’s TV tapes or listening to the sound of singing when it carried across the water.

  The Yare did not sing. They did not yell or hum or raise their voices. They kept quiet, they moved quickly, they blended into the forest, they faded into the background, because these were the behaviors that had kept the Yare safe from human discovery for the past five hundred years. Even their animals were quiet: Millie’s little gray kitten Georgina’s purrs were barely audible, and Old Aunt Yetta’s goat, Esmerelda, hardly ever bleated, not even when Millie was late to milk her. That was the way it had always been, the way it would always be, and Millie was powerless to change it. It made her furious just thinking about it. “Fyeh,” she muttered in disgust . . . but she muttered it very quietly.

  “We all know what’s happened,” Maximus said in his quiet rumble, as the Speaking Stick flared above his head. “The No-Furs have built twelve new buildings . . . and this morning there was a ‘Welcome, New Learners’ banner hanging from two trees.”

  “A school,” whispered Aelia. “A school means children. Children are curious. They will be having canoes or those yak-boats.”

  Kayaks, thought Millie, and rolled her eyes.

  “They’ll dare each other to come across the lake, or they’ll hear us or see us, and they’ll find us.” Aelia began twisting her hands in her apron, and Septima was anxiously nibbling at the fur on her fingers.

  Millie, meanwhile, was so giddy with delight it was all she could do to keep from dancing on her branch. A school! Maybe there would be No-Fur girls her age, and she’d be able to hear them—their conversations, maybe even their music. Maybe, maybe someday, she could find some sort of disguise or even a potion to make her fur disappear. She’d long suspected that there was such a thing, to be used in cases when the Yare absolutely had to venture into the No-Fur world. She’d figure it out and she’d make her way across the lake in a canoe or in a kayak. She’d pretend to be a lost camper who’d wandered away from her parents, and she’d meet a girl, and make up a friend, and the girl would hear Millie sing and say, “You are totally amazelling”—“amazelling” was the highest praise a Yare could get—and take Millie to the principal, who would know a ProDucer (as opposed to an amateur one), and then Millie would be where she’d always wanted to be—standing on a stage, in a shimmery silvery dress, holding a microphone, singing, while people listened to her, entranced.

  Of all the Yare she knew, Millie was the only one who had such dreams, the only one who wasn’t terrified of humans, the only one who’d never entirely believed the stories that the Yare littlies were told.

  There was, for example, the tale of the terrible old No-Fur who had a white beard and wore a red suit that was trimmed with the fur of tiny baby Yare. Each winter he would slip down the chimneys of unsuspecting Yare families (he was so small and slender that he could, of course, easily fit). Once he’d gained entry, he would creep around the house piling food and toys and goodies into an enchanted sack that could hold an entire household’s worth of belongings. He would magic himself back up the chimney, then fly away and give everything he’d stolen from the Yare to greedy little No-Fur children, who would eat up the candy and break all the toys. “So be good,” the Yare would say each winter, “or the Bad Red-Suit No-Fur will come down the chimney and be having your toys in his sack!”

  Another story—even more terrible—claimed there was a No-Fur as small as a speck of sand with wings and a little white dress, so tiny that she was almost invisible and could fit through mesh window screens. This horrible creature would fly into the bedrooms of young Yare and scoop up any coins or shells or pebbles or small toys they might have left lying around their bedrooms. Then she’d slip inside of their mouths and yank out one of their teeth as punishment for not putting their things away. “So be good,” the Yare would whisper, “or the Bad Fairytooth No-Fur will come through your window and be having your toys and your teeth!”

  Every spring, said the Yare, the Neaster Bunny No-Fur would come hopping through the fields, pretending, for reasons that were never clear, to be a large rabbit, leaving exploding painted egg-shaped bombs hidden in the grass and stealing all the candy in the village. (Almost every Yare had a sweet tooth, so this story was especially scary to the littlies.)

  And every summer on the Fourth of July, the No-Furs would celebrate a holiday they called the Banishment of the Bigfoots, with terrifying and noisy displays of fireworks that would shatter the peace of the summer evening as the No-Furs roared their approval and drank beer, and honked their car horns at one another.

  Down below, the meeting continued.

  “Could be it’s not a school,” a Yare named Marten was saying. “Could be it’s another camping-ground.”

  “The sign said ‘Learners,’ ” Aelia hissed.

  “So a learning campground,” said Marten. “Where they send the littlies to learn about camping.”

  “I saw targets.” Aelia sounded like she was about to cry. “Targets for learning to shoot at us. That’s what they’re learning.”

  Millie shook her head, thinking it was much more likely that the targets were for archery and not Yare-hunting.

  No-Furs are dangerous, was what little Yare learned . . . but Millie had never believed it. She didn’t believe a grown No-Fur could fit down a chimney or fly through a window or go hopping around a meadow dressed in white fur without anyone noticing. Besides, what would No-Fur children want with Yare toys, which were all handmade, carved from wood or sewn from scraps of cloth? She had seen TV shows on Old Aunt Yetta’s laptop—or “top-lap,” as it was known to the Yare—and sometimes they included commercials. She knew that No-Fur children had electronic games and flying scooters and keyboards and microphones and parents who’d listen when they said they wanted to be singers, not just stay stuck in the woods for the rest of their lives.

  Millie kicked at the tree trunk, feeling familiar frustration rising. Septima glanced up, her brown eyes narrowed, and Millie shrank back, hiding herself in the shadows. “Sorry,” she whispered, and patted the Lookout Tree by way of apology.

  “Could be it’s temporary,” said Darrius, whose youngest son, Frederee, had just had his barnitzvah ceremony, officially becoming an Elder. “Maybe they’ll only be there for the fall—like a campout, you see—and then they’ll be going back to where they were.”

  Yare voices rose in a babble of squeaks and whispers. Maximus reclaimed the Speaking Stick. “One at a time,” he murmured, lifting and lowering his free hand in a gesture Millie knew all too well, a motion that meant “be quiet.”

  Melissandra yanked the stick out of his hand. “Why are we waiting?” she demanded, without bothering to lower her voice. “They’re too close. It’s too risky. We should be packing already. We should be far-and-far away by now!”

  “I cannot leave my garden,” said Old Aunt Yetta. “My mother, and her mother before her, spent their lives on that garden. Even if I took cuttings, it would be long-and-long before I could be growing what we need.”

  Just as every clan had a Leader, each clan had a Healer, who managed the supply of herbs and barks and leaves, and each clan had a Watcher, a Yare tasked with keeping track of news of the No-Fur world. In Millie’s Tribe, Old Aunt Yetta was both Healer and Watcher. She kept the Tribe’s single top-lap computer, and an ancient television set, on which she watched the nightly news shows. Millie knew, from careful
questioning, that the Yare got on-the-line with the help of something called Why-fie Modem. They got electricity by hooking into the outlets of an old campground. A single extension cord buried in the ground powered the whole village—and something called a “shell corporation” paid the bills.

  All of that was known to the rest of the clan, but what the other Yare didn’t know was that Old Aunt Yetta sometimes enjoyed watching more entertaining options than just news . . . and sometimes Millie watched with her. They were both partial to a program called Friends, about attractive young No-Furs in New York City. But Millie’s absolute favorite show was called The Next Stage, where regular, not famous No-Furs sang or danced or did gymnastic tricks and tried to win a million dollars.

  “And our buildings!” said Laurentius, a young Yare whose voice still wobbled and cracked when he spoke. “The new lodge . . . the pens for the goats . . . we’d be needing to start all over.”

  The Yare village was mostly underground, a series of burrows and warrens and tunnels dug into the hillside. Everything aboveground was carefully camouflaged with panels of leaves and branches attached to pulleys that would come down and disguise doors and pens and windows with a single tug.

  “So we stay here and wait for them to find us?” This time Melissandra didn’t even bother trying for the stick. “Those children will be trying to come over here. And our littlies will be wanting to go over there.” She glared at Maximus and Septima. “Or, at least, one of them will.”

  Millie hung her head as her mother huddled into Maximus’s side, hands working at her apron. Maximus’s voice was calm when he said, “Our Little Bit will do as she’s told.”

  “Do as she’s told?” hissed Melissandra. “Nyebbeh! How many times has she run to away? How many times has she almost been discovered? How many times will you let her be putting all of our lives at risk before you do something?” Melissandra’s eyes were wild, her fur bristling on top of her head and hands and shoulders.