The Littlest Bigfoot

by Jennifer Weiner

  By their third time through, Millie had the words and the melody, and she joined in, perfectly in tune, when they began the song again. “Picked up a hammer in his little right hand / said,  ‘Hammer gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord / Hammer gonna be the death of me.’ ” Only why would baby’s own hammer be the death of him? Was there some hammer-related mishap in an upcoming verse?

  Tulip was glaring at her. “If you don’t stop with that racket, Teacher Greenleaf will be the death of you.”

  Millie ignored her. I wish, she thought as she stared across the lake, as if wishing could magically transport her over the miles, over the water, to the place where she wanted to be.

  I wish there weren’t Yare around all the time. The Elders loved her, she knew, but their love could feel like suffocation, like being crammed into an itchy sweater that had been too small for years.

  I wish there weren’t so many rules: “Millie, keep your voice down!” “Millie, try to keep up with your packmates!” “Millie, pay the attention!” “Millie, sit up with a straightness!”

  I wish I was having the choice, she thought.

  I wish I could leave here.

  I wish I could sing.

  CHAPTER 6

  GOOD MORNINGS, LEARNERS,” SANG PHIL, four weeks after Alice’s arrival, as he stood outside of Bunk Ladybug’s window. (The seventh-grade girls’ bunk had been called Bunk Seven until the week before, when Phil and Lori decided that numbers were hierarchical and that hierarchies were, by their very nature, unfair, and had renamed all the bunks after insects and birds.) “The earth says hello!”

  Alice peeked out the window to see that Phil had covered his narrow, rectangular face in face paint—lately he’d been favoring blue—and braided his beard. It hung like a second tongue, dangling at the center of his chest.

  In the bed beside hers, Alice heard Taley sniffle, then reach for her inhaler, then her embroidery hoop, and the sound of Riya’s steps as she danced through a fencing warm-up, slashing and stabbing at an imaginary opponent.

  Alice had already been awake for an hour. She’d gone for her morning run through the woods and then walked back along the lakeshore to her cabin, with wet leaves slipping underneath her feet and a cool breeze ruffling her hair.

  She got out of bed, cinched the elastic band around the Mane, made sure her socks weren’t muddy, and pulled a fleece sweatshirt over her plain blue T-shirt, feeling grateful, the way she felt every time she changed her clothes, that the Center had no uniforms. Alice, and the rest of the student body, had been encouraged to treat fashion as “a vehicle for self-expression,” which meant that you could wear anything, as long as it wasn’t see-through or low-cut and it didn’t have a logo or brand name (“Our bodies are not billboards for corporate America,” Lori liked to say).

  As the summer weather cooled and the air got crisp, with a wintry bite to the wind, Alice wore mostly yoga pants and fleece, elastic-waisted and oversize, clothes she hoped she wouldn’t grow out of before the semester ended. Taley layered tights and leggings and long-sleeved thermal shirts beneath her hand-sewn jumpers, which she’d made with extra pockets for handkerchiefs and medication. Riya wore athletic gear, leggings made of sweat-wicking fabric, and a zippered nylon jacket that proclaimed her a member of the Junior National Fencing Team.

  As Phil started up with his cowbell, the girls gathered their books and laptops and headed out of the cabin. Alice began her day with Intentional Weeding, while Taley did Morning Meditation. (“Butd really,” she said, “I mostly justb sitb there andb sleeb.”) Riya had gotten special permission to fence.

  The next activity was Daily Conversation. With the learners assembled in a semicircle beneath Mother Tree, Phil and Lori would talk about the day, whether there was anything special planned (there usually wasn’t), and whether there were any changes to the rules (there always were). Then the learners and guides would march to the Lodge for breakfast, the object of which, Alice sometimes thought, was for Kate, the Center’s cook, to get as many grains as possible into otherwise normal food. There’d be seven-grain porridge and twelve-grain toast, and apples, which the Center got by the bushel from a neighboring orchard.

  Learning sessions—which, in Alice’s previous schools, had been called “classes”—were held outside during good weather. Abigail would take a group of kids down to the shores of the lake, and the learners would take turns reading aloud from and then discussing Of Mice and Men, or Terry would teach algebra underneath Mother Tree. There was another break before lunchtime. Alice would usually wander in the forest or take out a canoe with Taley. Riya would sometimes join them, resting on her belly in the middle of the boat with a book propped up in front of her.

  Taley and Riya weren’t her friends—they hardly even tried to talk to her, on the water or at Nutrition, when they all sat together at one of the two long tables that ran the length of the Lodge—but at least they weren’t mean. Riya would press her lips together into a tight line and sigh when Alice knocked over the swords Riya had left by the door, or interrupted her practice, and Taley had snapped, “Didn’tb I tell you notb to touch itb?” after Alice had somehow elbowed Taley’s neti pot to the floor, but they didn’t go out of their way to torment her, which made them a nice change from her previous classmates.

  Lunch, “Midmorning Nutrition,” was at one o’clock. The food was, as Alice had feared, mostly vegetarian, with the occasional fish on Fridays (whatever enjoyment the learners might have found from the pan-fried flounder or grilled brook trout was severely diminished by Lori’s lengthy predinner blessing, during which she’d urge everyone to “honor the soul and the spirit of this animal, that its flesh might enrich and strengthen us”). In the afternoons there were Specials—sports or music lessons, drama or choir. Alice worked in the garden alongside Clem, who had a cheerful round face and had spent six years following a band called Phish around before settling down at the Center. Then there was more free time, for homework or “quiet contemplation,” which for the younger kids meant naps, and then dinner. Even though she missed cheeseburgers and steak, Alice was learning to like the food at the Center: lentil soups and black-bean burritos, vegetarian lasagna made with soy cheese, five-bean salad and curried tofu mash. Everything was made with fresh herbs and unusual spices; everything tasted interesting, which was an improvement over the meals at Swifton or Miss Pratt’s.

  Kate had noticed Alice on the third night, when Alice had asked for a second helping of lentil soup. “It’s delicious,” she said, and Kate, who wore black dresses and enormous white aprons and seemed to frown all the time, had given Alice a hard look.

  “Cumin,” she finally said.

  A few nights later, when Alice complimented her on the whole-grain biscuits, Kate said, “Thank you.” If this keeps going, Alice thought, she’ll say an entire sentence by Christmas . . . but it ended up not taking that long. One night, after Alice had devoured the tofu tikka masala, Kate said, “I do cooking class Wednesday nights. If you’re interested.”

  Alice was absolutely interested. When she arrived at the Lodge on Wednesday, Kate was waiting, with her hair covered in a kerchief, her body covered by a crisp white apron that hung past her knees. Alice looked around, but she didn’t see any other learners. This was fine with her.

  “Brioche,” Kate announced, pulling out a basket of eggs, a crock of butter, and—after a quick glance over her shoulder—white sugar and white flour, which she removed from a locked cupboard at the back of the kitchen. “Cooking is a science,” Kate began. She had a low, gruff voice, and she spoke so quietly that Alice had to lean close to listen. “Mostly, if you follow the recipe, you get what you wanted. Not like life,” she said, and sighed. Before Alice could figure out how to ask Kate what that meant, Kate was sliding a thick cookbook across the table. How to Cook Everything was written on the cover. The book bristled with Post-it notes and scraps of paper. The pages were wavy, as if the book had gotten wet at some point. Some pages were spotted with gravy or grease or
red wine, and almost every recipe had notes—ingredients crossed out, new ones added, asterisks indicating the dates they’d been cooked and if the kids had liked whatever it was.

  By the end of her first month at the Center, Alice had cooked brioche and angel food cake and pound cake and was moving on to breads and soups. “Not bad,” Kate would say, tasting a spoonful or a bite of whatever Alice had prepared, adjusting the seasoning, sometimes giving Alice one of her rare smiles. When the lesson was over, she’d let Alice wrap up a few cookies or slices of cake to take back to the bunk or to tuck into her backpack and eat after her run in the morning.

  Alice was almost afraid to admit it, even to herself, but she liked the Experimental Center. Taley and Riya left her alone after she’d declined their invitations to learn how to fence or to sew, invitations they’d probably only offered to be polite. After Alice had turned them each down twice, it seemed like they’d made some secret agreement to keep their distance, which was fine with Alice. The three of them were unfailingly polite to one another. Riya and Taley would deal with whatever new havoc Alice had caused with a minimum of sighs and eye rolls.

  Riya had a best friend, an older girl and fellow fencer named Alana, and everyone liked Taley, who could mend rips and tears and replace lost buttons.

  Most of the guides were nice. Clem showed her how to make a salt scrub using coconut oil and the lavender the previous year’s learners had grown and dried, and Terry, who taught math, turned out to be very patient, even when Alice needed things explained more than once.

  Alice had her books of Greek mythology and her sketch pads, on which she drew pictures of flowers and the lake with the mountains rising behind it. She had the solitude of her morning runs and the pleasure of the little treats she’d tuck away. She was too busy to ever feel really lonely, or to feel bad when other kids got care packages or letters from home. The only mail she ever got were New York City–themed postcards from Lee and a note from Miss Merriweather that came on monogrammed stationery and said, I hope you’re doing well!

  Alice was feeling good that morning as she walked toward Daily Conversation, munching on a slice of banana-walnut bread, her body warm and relaxed after her run. She was so lost in her thoughts about the day ahead—English, then a walk in the woods, a nap after lunch, and then a cooking lesson—that she almost didn’t notice the black Town Car cruising down the dirt path in a cloud of dust.

  “Hey, watch outb!” Taley cried. Riya looked up from her book as the car jerked to a stop six inches from her hip.

  A blank-faced chauffeur in a suit and black cap got out of the car, walked to the rear door, and pulled it open, and a girl who was about their age but who looked nothing like any of them, or like any other girl at the Center, emerged.

  Her scent was what Alice noticed first, a sweet mixture of honeysuckle, raspberry, and coconut shampoo that gave her the smell of a fruit salad left out of the refrigerator for too long. The girl at the center of this aromatic cloud had shiny brown hair that hung in waves to the small of her back and a heart-shaped face with glossed, pouting lips. She wore a short black skirt, cinched tight at the waist, pointy-toed black patent-leather shoes, and a white silk blouse. Earrings twinkled from her lobes, and a gold bangle encircled her wrist. Her eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, but her frown wasn’t hidden at all.

  “What a dump,” she said, and tilted her nose a few degrees higher into the air. “This is even worse than that farm we were at last year.”

  “Hey, your drivber almost hitb us,” Taley said.

  The girl tossed her hair. “You were standing in the middle of the road.” She toed the dirt disdainfully. “Such as it is.” Pulling off her dark glasses, she turned toward Alice. “And you are . . . ?”

  Alice cleared her throat. “Alice Mayfair.”

  “She’s frombd dNew York,” said Taley.

  “Congratulations.” The girl didn’t even try to sound sincere.

  “You should be more careful,” said Alice, feeling suddenly protective toward her cabin mates. Riya, who read fencing books while she walked between sessions, would probably wander right into traffic if there’d been any traffic at the Center for her to wander into, and Taley was so congested all the time that she probably couldn’t hear cars approaching.

  “Oh, really?” sneered the girl. Then she whirled, her skirt flaring, at the sound of Phil and Lori approaching, and put on the fakest smile Alice had ever seen. “Hello, guides!” she caroled. “I’m sorry I’m so late, but I’m finally here!”

  CHAPTER 7

  FOR YEARS JEREMY’S PARENTS, MARTIN and Suzanne, clung to the idea that their youngest son was a musical prodigy. It had started when, in kindergarten, the music teacher had scribbled “shows promise!” beneath Jeremy’s “Satisfactory” grade in chorus. Martin and Suzanne had seized on those two words with panicked desperation.

  “Music,” said Martin.

  “Of course!” said Suzanne, and sighed deeply in relief.

  They’d ushered little Jeremy into the dining room, a room they hardly ever used unless there were important matters to discuss or big decisions to be made. This was the room where Noah eventually decided between MIT and Caltech, the room where Ben would sit and meet with the college coaches who’d come calling.

  “You are a musical prodigy!” his mother announced. “A genius,” she added, after Jeremy just stared.

  Jeremy might have just been a little kid, but he knew two things. The first was that, to keep his parents happy, he needed to be a standout in something. The second was that he was pretty sure he wasn’t a musical prodigy; he was just okay at music, not great. But his parents were gazing at him with such love and such hope—the way he was used to seeing them look at his brothers—that Jeremy wanted to be that star they’d hoped for, a boy that they could love.

  The oboe had been his father’s suggestion. Jeremy had requested guitar lessons, but his parents told him that the oboe was more unusual and that Jeremy’s mastery of a difficult instrument would give him more opportunities at youth orchestras and local symphonies and, eventually, at colleges.

  “If there are six violinists and only one oboist, you’re a shoo-in,” his father explained.

  “But what if I’m the best violinist?” Jeremy asked. He didn’t want to play the violin—he wanted to play the guitar—but even a violin had to be better than an oboe.

  Martin had frowned. “Oboist? Oboe player? Hon, do you know what it is?”

  His parents went off to consult a dictionary. Jeremy noticed that his father hadn’t even considered the possibility that Jeremy might be the best at something. Maybe they believed he was a prodigy, but it also seemed like they were, as his papa Frank liked to say, “hedging their bets” (“That’s like when you pray for rain but dig a well while you’re praying,” Papa Frank had explained).

  It was months before Jeremy learned to blow into the oboe’s reed and produce a tone that sounded like music and not like a small animal moaning out its death throes. He’d practiced for an hour a day, grimly mastering scales and simple tunes, Purcell’s “Air” and “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” He tried not to be hurt when Shayna, the family’s sheltie, crawled underneath his bed when he practiced, and he ignored his brothers when they covered their ears and offered him money and comic books in exchange for quiet.

  “Very good,” his teacher would tell him. Mr. McCrae, who played seven instruments, including the bagpipes, would praise Jeremy’s diligence and hard work. “Nice effort,” he’d say. “Keep it up!” Jeremy knew that wasn’t the same as saying he’d played well, or that what he was playing was beautiful.

  For a few years Jeremy’s efforts with the oboe seemed to be enough to keep his parents happy. “And Jeremy’s our musician,” his mother would say after she got through describing Ben’s latest feats on the football field or how Noah was planning on spending the summer working on some arcane proof with a mathematics professor from Princeton.

  Jeremy played with the local youth orc
hestra and spent his summers in music camps. Finally, when he turned ten, his parents made some calls and got Jeremy a chance to apply for the Pre-College Division program at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City. Jeremy was instructed to prepare two pieces of music for the panel, and so, in between rounds of Mario Kart and reading Steven Universe comics, he’d practiced “Hedwig’s Theme” from the Harry Potter movies and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses, which he’d arranged himself.

  His parents were practically glowing as they loaded up the car for the two-hour trip to the city. While Jeremy’s father parked the car, Suzanne whisked Jeremy to a door where someone had Scotch-taped a sign that read “Auditions.” Past the door was an auditorium, with rows of empty seats in front of a brilliantly lit stage. Up front, in the very first row, were an older man in a tweedy suit, a younger woman in a floor-sweeping dress with a colorful embroidered top, and another woman, middle-aged, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, hunched over a yellow legal pad.

  “Jeremy,” called the tweedy man in a rich, rolling voice. “If you would.”

  With sweat-slicked hands, Jeremy unfolded his sheet music and forced his wooden legs to deliver him to the stage. Even before he set his lips on the reed, even before he’d blown the first note, he knew there was no way that Juilliard would take him. He couldn’t do anything new or special . . . and he could tell, in just ten minutes of being at Juilliard, that it was a place for rare and special people. His parents, his brothers, they belonged in places like this. Jeremy should be here only to deliver someone’s lunch or take out their trash.

  He finished “Sweet Child o’ Mine” with a little swagger, knowing he had nothing left to lose. The tweedy man gave him a curt nod, and the woman in jeans looked over his head, toward the door.