She was shaking all over by the time she arrived, filthy and soaking and trying not to cry or wake up her roommates. But, of course, Riya was awake, saber flashing as she fenced with an imaginary opponent, and Taley woke up as soon as Alice came in the door.
“Oh my goodness,” Taley said as Alice hurried past her. “What happened?”
“Alice, are you all right?” Riya asked.
“Leave me alone!” Alice said, turning on the shower and yanking the curtain shut, too ashamed to look at them and see pity on their faces, or hear them say I told you so.
CHAPTER 10
THE FINAL EPISODE OF SEASON nine of The Next Stage, scheduled to air on a Wednesday night, was the culmination of twelve weeks of competition, during which forty-eight competitors had been whittled down to just two acts. During the finale, the two remaining contenders would perform in a “head-to-head battle of epic proportions”—at least, according to the show’s head judge, Benjamin Burton.
One finalist was a singer, a woman named Darcy Baker who looked like a plump and somewhat frumpy grandmother, with oversize eyeglasses and fine white hair in a bun . . . until she opened her mouth, and it sounded like she’d swallowed a choir of angels. Darcy, who was Millie’s favorite, was up against Los Kicks, a troop of precision pop-and-lock dancers who’d do things like turn their bodies into human rocking chairs for one another to sit on, and form and reform elaborate and precarious pyramids and patterns to the tune of Top 40 music.
For years Old Aunt Yetta had taped each Wednesday-night show, and then, on Thursdays and Fridays, provided she did well with her lessons, Millie would be permitted to watch an hour of the show at a time. But the grand finale was three hours long, featuring every previous grand-prize winner in the show’s entire history, plus a performance by Danna de la Cruz, Millie’s absolute favorite singer in the world. Millie knew that there was no way she’d be able to wait until Thursday to see the first hour and all the way until Saturday or Sunday or even the following week to find out who’d won.
For days leading up to the finale she’d been thinking nonstop, her mind churning up solutions, all of them ultimately impossible or flawed. She’d considered putting a potion of slippery willow bark into Old Aunt Yetta’s tea and watching the show while her friend slept. But sleeping aids were risky, and Aunt Yetta’s heart wasn’t strong. She’d thought about inventing some emergency to call Old Aunt Yetta away, but for that to work she would need a partner, and she knew that none of the other littlies would help, or could fake illness convincingly. There were no other television sets in the Yare village . . . but, of course, Millie knew who had television sets. The No-Furs did. They had sets in every room of their houses; they had phones that showed programs and movies on their tiny screens; they’d even, she’d heard, invented eyeglasses with built-in displays so you could watch anything you wanted just by blinking a request.
The No-Fur school across the lake had at least one set. Millie had seen its bluish glow coming through the windows of the big building on top of the hill. Those kids would be watching the finale; she was sure of it. She just needed to figure out how to get there and how to disguise herself, so that if anyone spotted her, tucked into the shadows underneath the window, she’d look like just another No-Fur girl.
The night before the finale, she was still trying to figure it out. After her lessons, she joined Old Aunt Yetta in the garden, wearing a wide-brimmed hat that Septima insisted on, so the sun wouldn’t make her silver-gray fur any lighter than it already was. Millie pulled weeds without being asked, and when she was sure Old Aunt Yetta was listening, Millie ran her hand through the fur on her head and sighed.
Old Aunt Yetta raised an eyebrow.
Millie pulled a few more weeds, then asked, “If a Yare was wanting to get more fur, is there a way to do that?”
Old Aunt Yetta’s face was sympathetic as she patted Millie’s back. “There are things we can try. Rosemary, pine pitch, and dried dandelion greens . . .” Tapping her finger on her lip, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, Old Aunt Yetta, Millie knew, was lost to the world, imagining potions and powders, different ingredients and what each would do.
“What if I was wanting my fur to change color? Could I kill it?” Millie asked.
“Dye it,” Old Aunt Yetta corrected. “And no one’s ever having success with that. Yare have tried everything when they start to go gray. Boiled walnut shells, crushed quartz, soapstone . . .”
“How about making fur go away?” Millie’s eyes were on the pumpkin vines, her voice blamelessly casual. She knew there was a way . . . she just had to get her friend to tell her how.
Old Aunt Yetta’s head swiveled, and her golden eyes narrowed.
“Millie Maximus,” she asked, “what are you playing at?”
“Nothing!” said Millie. “Nothing! I was just having some curiosity. My fur is so strange. I thought maybe if I got rid of it and started over, it would grow back regular. Regular brown.” She made her face sad and her eyes despondent and gave her lower lip a quiver. It was an expression that would have torn at the heart of any observer less familiar with Millie’s tricks and poses.
Unfortunately, Old Aunt Yetta was very familiar with Millie’s tricks and poses. Bending down, she put her hands on Millie’s shoulders and looked her sternly in the eye. “You are planning for something,” she said as Millie squirmed and began to stammer out denials. “I don’t know what it is, but I know you’re having a plan . . . and I won’t help you. It would break your mother’s heart.”
Millie squirmed out of Old Aunt Yetta’s grasp. “But when,” she demanded, “do I get to mind my own happiness? When do I get to be me?” Then Millie remembered her mission and made her expression mournful once again. “I mean,” she said, with a catch in her voice, “if I was only looking like the other littlies, I’d feel more like I belonged here.”
Old Aunt Yetta studied her carefully. Millie held her breath. Finally, Old Aunt Yetta sighed and said, “If darker fur is really what you want, then maybe there’s a way.”
Millie tried to keep her face grave and her feet from skipping as she followed Old Aunt Yetta into her kitchen. A row of ancient, hand-bound books lined the shelf above the old iron stove, their heavy parchment pages covered from top to bottom and left to right with different handwriting in different colors of faded ink. Antidotes and salves and teas and decoctions, handed down from Healers over generations, all of them in the books.
Clicking her tongue, Old Aunt Yetta took a book off the shelf, pulled on her spectacles, and began to read. After a minute Millie helped herself to a volume. She flipped through it until she saw an illustration of a Yare giving birth, and put it back, wincing. The next book was all about first aid: bee stings and snake bites and how to set broken bones. Finally, in a third book, she found pages of scribbles, lists of ingredients, crossed-out additions and footnotes, taped scraps of paper, and—she felt her heart skip—drawings of fur, thick fur, patchy fur, gray fur, brown fur, and even a full-grown Yare with no fur at all.
Millie ran her fingers over the hand-drawn picture, feeling her heart beat faster. It was an adult male Yare, dressed in human clothing, his face completely smooth. He wore a hat on his head, leather gloves on his hands, and high boots covering his feet . . . but other than those additions, he looked just like a No-Fur man—a very big and tall one. Millie studied the list of ingredients written alongside the picture, her heart sinking with each thing she’d never heard of or had no idea how to obtain: dandelion leaves, lavender oil, essence of mint, a jigger of brandy, crushed snail shell (one medium or two small), three spider legs . . .
“Beetroot,” Old Aunt Yetta murmured, frowning over her own book. “You wait here.” Old Aunt Yetta took her cane and hobbled out of her house, past the garden, and into the forest, leaving Millie alone with the books.
Millie waited, watching out the window until Old Aunt Yetta was out of sight. Then she climbed onto the counter and balanced on her knees, hoping to raid Ol
d Aunt Yetta’s store of ingredients and find brandy and lavender oil and maybe even a snail shell.
There were three shelves full of glass bottles and pouches of various sizes, some with dried leaves or seeds or pods or bark. Then, above the books, above the bottles, on a shelf so high she hadn’t been able to see it from the ground, was a row of tiny stoppered glass bottles, each one the size of her thumb, each one labeled in Old Aunt Yetta’s wobbly cursive. Millie plucked a bottle at random and squinted at the label. “For Maximus” it said.
In that instant, crouched on the countertop, among the collected wisdom of generations of Yare, everything came together like a clap of thunder. When Maximus left to do the Mailing, he wore a hat, boots, and gloves—No-Fur clothes, human clothes, the same disguise he wore for Halloweening—but even that was not enough. He’d need to be able to pass as one of them, to go into the posting office to drop off the packages for Etsy and collect whatever the Yare had ordered. He’d need to look like a human. He’d need to lose his fur.
Millie pulled out the cork stopper and sniffed. The liquid had a bracing smell, like peppermint and cloves, that made her eyes water. She wondered how she would look without her fur, what color her skin would be, whether her silvery-gray eyes would look strange to the No-Furs, or whether they’d just think that she was a regular . . .
“Millie?”
Millie froze, clutching the little glass bottle, as she heard the thump of Old Aunt Yetta’s cane. “Millie, what are you doing up there?”
Millie tucked the vial into her pocket, knowing that Old Aunt Yetta’s eyes were bad.
“Just putting the book away!” she said, and was relieved to hear that her voice sounded normal. She kept her fingers curled around the vial as Old Aunt Yetta puttered around the kitchen, talking to herself, boiling up beetroot and yarrow and cattails from the marsh into a foul-smelling potion that Millie was to swallow every night before bed.
“Don’t be forgetting your program tomorrow!” Old Aunt Yetta said as Millie was gathering her things, preparing to leave. “I’ll be taping it tonight!”
“Thank you,” Millie said, and ran to her friend, throwing her arms around Old Aunt Yetta’s waist and hugging her tight.
That night Millie waited until she heard the sounds of her father’s deep breaths and her mother’s little wheezes. She crept out of her bed, leaving a Millie-shaped pile of pillows beneath the covers. The first two hours of The Next Stage were over, but if she swam fast, she’d reach the shore in time for the finale, in time to hear Danna de la Cruz and to see the winner crowned.
At the edge of the water, she pulled the vial out of her pocket, looked at it for a long moment, then tucked it away. She wasn’t sure how long the potion would last, so she’d decided not to swallow it until she reached the other side. She stared at the water, gathering her courage. Then she waded out until she couldn’t stand, did a shallow dive, and began swimming toward the opposite shore.
She paddled and kicked for what felt like hours . . . but whenever she looked, thinking that she had to be getting there, it didn’t seem like she’d gotten any closer to the shore. Her arms got heavy, and her legs got so tired that she could barely move them. She floated on her back, then flipped over, peering for the No-Fur school, but she couldn’t see or hear anything, not a single light or a single voice.
Come on, she told herself, and started swimming again . . . but her sodden dress felt like there were stones in its seams, and she was so tired, and her arms were so heavy, and the lake seemed endless. Millie kicked hard, splashing, gasping for air.
She thought of her mother crying after the last time she’d run away, how Septima had sobbed and wrung her hands and said she didn’t know what she’d do if anything happened to her Millie, her Little Silver, her Little Bit.
She thought of her father, his grave face as he instructed her not to sing or skip or shout, because the No-Furs would hear, and how sad he’d looked when he’d told her about Demetrius, the brother who’d disappeared.
I don’t want to die, Millie thought. She tried to kick harder, but she was so exhausted that her legs barely moved, and she could hardly lift her arms at all before they splashed helplessly down into the lake.
“Help!” she squeaked, thrashing at the water, knowing that no one would hear her. “Help!”
And then, like an answered prayer, there were hands around her shoulders, flipping her onto her back, and a voice saying, “I’ve got you.” Millie let herself float, feeling her body being towed through the water, as strong arms—strong human arms—held her and strong human legs kicked through the water, pulling her to the shore.
CHAPTER 11
MOST OF HER TIME AT the Center, Alice had tried to be quiet, to be invisible, to slip, unnoticed, among her classmates. The night after the Jessica Jarvis incident she decided not to care.
Late that night, she stomped up the path to the dining hall, cracking branches, kicking dead leaves, doing everything but banging Phil’s bongos to announce her arrival. The dining-hall doors were locked, but instead of looking for the key that she knew Kate kept underneath the mat, Alice slammed the door as hard as she could with her shoulder, giving a humorless smile when it popped open on her first attempt. If they thought she was a monster, well, then, she’d behave like a monster.
Alice yanked open the refrigerator. At the end of that awful, endless day, she’d refused to go to dinner, had stayed in bed, flat on her belly with a pillow over her head.
“Kate made you something special,” Lori said after paying a special visit to Bunk Ladybug, but Alice had refused to answer or even move.
Lori hadn’t lied. There was a plate in the walk-in refrigerator, covered in wax paper, with “For Alice” written on it in Kate’s dashed-off scribble. Last week they’d been experimenting with brownie recipes, adding swirls of dark chocolate, marshmallow drizzle, bits of toffee, and peppermint. It had been fun.
Alice snatched the plate and turned to go. She’d walk to the lake, she’d eat her treat, and then she’d figure out if she even wanted to stay at this place or whether she should just call her parents, admit defeat, and beg them to bring her back home.
On her way out, she stopped and looked at the stack of clean plates on the shelf, the rows of bowls for the morning’s porridge, the heavy mugs for tea. Before she’d even planned it, she stretched out her arm and swept a stack of pottery onto the floor. The crash was deafening as the plates and bowls shattered into nasty-looking shards and pottery dust. Alice leaped over the mess, still holding her brownies, and started to walk down to the lake.
The day had been just as horrible as she’d feared. She’d lain awake all night, too ashamed and furious to sleep, and when it was time for Daily Conversation, her eyes felt gritty, like they were full of sand, and her arms and neck were knotted with cramps.
“Oh,” she heard Riya say as the girls stepped out of the cabin in the morning. Riya stopped moving like she’d been frozen. Taley gasped.
Alice pushed past them. It looked like the campus had been hit by some strange snowstorm that had left the tree trunks blanketed in white.
Then Alice saw what was going on. Jessica and her crew had had a busy night. It wasn’t snow on the trees; it was pieces of paper. Each one of them had her picture. Her picture, with another one beside it. On some posters she was lined up next to a Bigfoot, and sometimes the Thing or the Incredible Hulk or King Kong.
Alice stomped over to a tree and tore down the flyers. She marched to the next tree and saw, out of the corner of her eye, that Riya and Taley were trotting from tree to tree, pulling down more pictures. She’d just finished ripping down a flyer depicting her next to Godzilla when Jessica Jarvis drifted by.
“It really is an uncanny resemblance,” Jessica said. She looked lovely as always, her hair in shining waves, the pleats of her miniskirt perfectly ironed, her lip gloss beautifully applied, her white blouse spotless.
Alice’s eyes were hot and her throat felt tight and burning as she pulle
d another poster off a tree. She wanted to ask why . . . but she knew there wasn’t an answer that would satisfy her or take away the sting. They’d done this to her because it was what people like Jessica did. It was how they kept themselves on top of the social pyramid . . . every once in a while, they’d step down from their pedestal and squash the people underneath them, just to remind the world that they could.
That morning, classes were canceled. Phil and Lori called everyone to Mother Tree and then stood there in silence, their heads bowed. Lori finally looked up, and Alice was mortified to see that Lori’s eyes were full of tears.
“I have never—never—been so disappointed,” she said. Her voice was croaky as she slowly looked over the assembled learners. “When you enrolled, each one of you signed a pledge. You promised to respect the individuality and dignity and unique spirit of the other members of this village. This morning, we learned that some of you didn’t take that pledge seriously. You have betrayed not only your fellow learners but your own integrity and the spirit in which we founded the Center.”
Phil rested his hands on her shoulders as Lori continued. “I urge the person or people who did this—and I hesitate to even dignify you with the title of ‘person’—to come forward now, and apologize, not only to Alice, but to this entire community and, maybe most of all, to yourselves.”
Lori stepped back. A heavy silence descended over the group. Alice sat, miserable, feeling as if every inch of her skin was burning, as if she could experience her classmates’ scorn and pity like a physical thing, a fever or a rash.
After five minutes of silence, Phil said, “My good friend Jack David agreed to come this morning and lead a seminar about bullying. I urge you all to give him your full attention.”
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