The Littlest Bigfoot

by Jennifer Weiner

  “We have one TV set here, in the lodge,” said Alice. “They mostly show us educational movies, about Egypt and things like that. But I bet I could get permission to watch something else.” She paused and made a face that Millie couldn’t read. “They owe me.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Why are they owing you?”

  “Something happened,” said Alice. Her tone warned Millie not to push. Millie could have told Alice that the show’s season was over, that there wouldn’t be new shows until the spring, but then she wouldn’t have an excuse to come back, and she already knew that she wanted to come back, to spend more time in this girl’s company and learn more about the world that had fascinated her for so long.

  “Will you still be camping next week?” Alice asked.

  “Yes!” Millie said. “My parents have taken me out of school for a . . . sem-ester.” She pronounced the word with care and hoped it was the right one.

  “They can leave their farm for that long?” Alice asked.

  “Oh, well, the farm is near the camping. We are in a community with others. Phoebe and Monica and Joey and Chandler,” said Millie. “They can help with the chores while we are away. If I could sneak away . . . I could meet you. . . .”

  “We could watch together. I could make popcorn. . . .” Alice suddenly got quiet. “I mean, if you want me to watch with you.”

  “Of course I do!” said Millie, who still couldn’t believe her good fortune. She paused. “Will there be other No . . .” She snapped her mouth shut before she could say “Furs.” “Other kids there?”

  Through the bushes, Millie could see that Alice had a strange, unhappy expression on her face.

  “It is only that other kids sometimes think I am strange,” Millie explained.

  Alice brightened. “Me too,” she said. “They think I’m strange too.”

  This made no sense. If Alice lived in Millie’s Tribe, she’d be the best-loved girl, more popular, even, than Tulip. No-Furs must be strange not to appreciate her, Millie thought. She certainly wouldn’t make the same mistake. This No-Fur named Alice had saved her life. She also had access to a television set and she’d given Millie brownies and . . .

  Millie looked up at the sky, which was just starting to shift from black to gray. She imagined her mother waking up and finding pillows, instead of Millie, in her bed.

  “I should go,” she said.

  “Do you have a phone?” Alice asked. “So I can text you?”

  “No,” said Millie, “but I’m on-the-line. I have an email address.” This was a secret that not even Old Aunt Yetta knew. The year before, Millie had set up an account so that she could vote for her favorites on The Next Stage. She paused, then shyly recited, “FurryMillie@standishonline.com.”

  “I think I can remember that,” said Alice. “I’ll write to you.”

  “I’ll write back!” Millie trotted down the path, hoping that in the dark her new friend wouldn’t notice her fur, and feeling happier than she had in a long time. “So long! Farewell!” she called.

  When she turned to look back, Alice was standing there, waving and watching her go.

  CHAPTER 13

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK MILLIE and Alice Met twice, at midnight, on the shores of Lake Standish. As soon as she was sure her roommates were asleep, Alice would slip out of bed. She would take a snack and a glass bottle of milk from the dining-hall kitchen and would wait on the shore for Millie to arrive.

  Her new friend was odd, Alice thought, watching Millie paddle to the shore in her canoe. She would only come over on moonless nights, explaining that her village adhered to the lunar calendar, and that it was bad luck to travel on nights when the moon was out. She wore oversize sweatpants that drooped past her ankles, a big plaid shirt with sleeves that came practically to her fingertips, and a baseball cap pulled down low on her forehead. The second time she’d come, she’d hopped out of her canoe and dashed behind the bushes—to pee, Alice thought—except then she’d stayed there. Alice had been trying to figure out a polite way to ask why she was hiding when, from her spot behind the foliage, Millie had explained that she had a glandular condition that caused her to have hair on her face and hands, “And I am shy of being seen.”

  “Can’t you get laser treatments?”

  Millie paused. “My parents don’t believe in them,” she said. That made sense, because, Alice had learned, Millie belonged to a very strict religious order. Its practitioners, who called themselves the Yare, had rules that prohibited movies, music, and any television show except for Friends and The Next Stage, which Alice thought was weird, but maybe no weirder than religions that let their followers drink everything but coffee or required them to wear little hats or didn’t celebrate birthdays.

  Millie had been homeschooled and had lived her whole life in a Yare village that was somewhere upstate, she’d said, gesturing vaguely across the water. “Not too far from here.” The Yare were mostly farmers, although some of the women did knitting and crochet and needlework that they sold “on-the-line,” which was how Millie referred to the Internet. Millie had hardly ever been out of her village, had never met a kid who wasn’t Yare, and had about eighteen million questions every time she saw Alice. That night, after they’d shared the homemade granola bars and apple pie that Alice had made with Kate that afternoon and filched from the kitchen, they were discussing what they’d started to call “the Friends exception.”

  “I mean, it sounds like a funny show, but I don’t understand why the . . . Elders?” Alice looked at Millie, who nodded—or at least it looked like she was nodding through the bushes. “Why the Elders would think it was any better than, like, Gilmore Girls or Modern Family.”

  “I cannot speak for them,” said Millie, and then gave a little giggle. “Oh, they’d laugh if they heard me saying that. I am always speaking. About everything. Old Aunt Yetta calls me a box of chatter.” She took a deep breath. Alice braced herself for the onslaught of questions that she knew was coming.

  “Have you ever been to a restaurant?” Millie asked.

  “Ever?” asked Alice.

  “I mean to say, which restaurant is your favorite one?” Millie said quickly.

  Alice told her about the candy store in Cape Cod that served cheddar-cheese-and-chive scones and dark-chocolate-covered apricots.

  “Apricots,” Millie said dreamily. “I’ll have to ask my papa to order me some. What is your favorite place that you’ve ever been?”

  Alice smiled. “The beach with my granny,” she said. “In the mornings, when there’s no one there, I go running on the sand. Sometimes at low tide there are sandbars—little islands,” she explained, and told Millie how she’d wade through the shallows to reach them, and then pretend that she’d been shipwrecked and would have to survive, all alone.

  “You like to be alone?” Millie asked.

  Alice didn’t want to answer that. She didn’t want to tell Millie the truth about how lonely she was and how she longed for company, only nobody ever seemed to want to be around her. “My turn,” she said instead. After their first meeting, they’d agreed that for every ten questions Millie asked, Alice could ask two. “What’s the name of your town? Is it far from here?”

  “Not so far,” said Millie. “But you must not try and find it!”

  “Why not?” Alice asked.

  “The Elders—my parents especially—they don’t like us talking with the N— I mean, with the outsiders,” Millie said. “They wouldn’t like it if they knew I had made up a friend.”

  “Made a friend,” Alice said. She liked the funny way Millie said things. “If you say ‘made up,’ it sounds like I’m imaginary.”

  “Ah,” said Millie. “Also, we don’t like people to look at us.”

  “Because of the . . .” Instead of saying the word “hair,” Alice merely gestured toward her face. Millie had explained that lots of the Yare shared her affliction and didn’t like going out in public.

  “Exactly,” said Millie. “So are you having a b
est friend? At home, in New York?”

  Alice looked down at her feet. She felt sick and ashamed as she heard Millie scoot closer.

  “Did I ask something wrong?” Millie asked in a small voice.

  Alice shook her head. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I don’t really . . .” She took a deep breath. “People don’t like me,” she finally said.

  “I like you,” said Millie.

  Alice gave an unhappy laugh. “You don’t know many other girls.”

  “Even if I knew one hundred girls, you would be my bestie,” Millie said.

  Alice found that she was on the verge of tears. “Well, you don’t go to school here,” she said. “None of the girls here are my friends.”

  “What do they do?”

  Alice paused . . . and then, without knowing she was going to say anything, she blurted, “They took my picture.”

  “What?” Millie asked. “Who took your picture?”

  “Some of the kids here. They tricked me into skinny-dipping.” Alice gave an unhappy bark of laughter. “Or fat-dipping, I guess you’d call it, in my case.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” said Millie.

  “It’s when you swim naked,” said Alice. “So, when I was in the water, they stole all my clothes, and when I came out, they took my picture, and they put it up, all over campus.” She sniffled and swiped at her cheeks. “For all I know, they even put it online for everyone to laugh at it.”

  “Oh, Alice,” Millie said. “Oh no!”

  “And it’s not the other girls,” said Alice. She was glad for the darkness, glad that she was probably just a girl-shaped lump on the shore. Tears were slipping down her face, soaking the collar of her sweatshirt as she voiced her deepest fear. “It’s me.”

  “What do you mean? What about you?” asked Millie.

  “Everywhere I go, every single school, the same thing happens. Nobody likes me. Nobody ever likes me! My roommates here are only nice because they have to be. My own parents . . .” Alice’s voice caught. “My own parents don’t even like me. They keep sending me away.”

  “I like you,” said Millie. Her voice was firm. She got to her feet, emerged from the bushes, and wrapped her arms around Alice’s shoulders, hugging her from behind. “Who did that?” Millie asked. “Who stole your clothes and took your picture? Who did that to you?”

  Alice’s voice hitched and wobbled. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It doesn’t matter which one, because if it wasn’t that girl, it would have been someone else. It’s me,” she said, and now there was no way that Millie wouldn’t hear her crying. “There’s something wrong with me.”

  “There is nothing wrong with you,” Millie said, and rested her chin on the top of Alice’s head. “Probably they are jealous of your beauty.”

  Alice gave a bitter little snort and wondered if Millie, too, was teasing her. Millie pressed on.

  “I’d give anything to look like you. If I was bigger, I could be keeping up, and the other Yare wouldn’t ditch me,” she said. “If I was stronger and faster, they wouldn’t treat me like I’m a little scrap of nothing. If my fu—if my hair wasn’t so strange . . .”

  “My hair is strange,” said Alice.

  “Your hair is perfect.” Millie released Alice and plopped down beside her, straightening the baseball cap that covered her head and shadowed her face. “If you lived in my village, you would be the most favorite of all, I promise. Even Tulip couldn’t compete.”

  Alice laughed . . . only now she felt lighter inside, now that she’d shared the story of what had happened. When Millie leaned against her, Alice didn’t pull away. The two girls sat, shoulder to shoulder, talking and laughing until the sky lightened from black to gray and it was time for Millie to paddle back home.

  CHAPTER 14

  SOME BOYS RODE THEIR BIKES home from school or walked to soccer or football practice or went into Standish’s two-block-long downtown to buy cheeseburgers and ice-cream cones and hang out at the library. Jeremy had a different routine.

  As soon as the last bell rang, he gathered up his books and hurried home, keeping his eyes open on the path through the woods, looking for bent twigs and broken branches and any sign of a Bigfoot nearby. Sometimes, while he walked, he imagined himself in front of a cheering crowd, explaining how he’d found and captured a Bigfoot. Sometimes he envisioned a TV interview, the suit and tie he’d be wearing when Donnetta Dale, lead anchor from Channel 6 Eyewitness News, leaned intently toward him, asking, “How were you able to remain so committed to your quest, even in the face of relentless scorn and disbelief?”

  On that fateful Thursday, he hooked his finger into the handle of a quart of milk, dumped a box of cereal into a mixing bowl, and poured the milk on top. While he ate, he made the rounds of his favorite websites: Paranormal Activity, Area 51, Weird Roswell, and AliensAmongUs. The last website was his favorite—it was where Bigfoot hunters posted rumors and, occasionally, pictures that claimed to show actual Bigfoots.

  There hadn’t been anything new on the site in weeks, though. Jeremy didn’t feel optimistic as he clicked over and saw . . . nothing but a blank screen. He refreshed his browser and stared at the message that showed a frowny-face emoji and the words We have crashed under heavy traffic. Please keep trying! He hit refresh over and over, spooning cereal into his mouth with his eyes on the screen, telling himself not to get his hopes up, even as one of his feet started tapping in a jittery rhythm on the floor.

  It wasn’t nothing. When the site finally let him in, he saw a picture of a flyer with two photographs side by side. Jeremy’s heart jumped into his throat as he recognized the shot on the left, a picture with which he was intimately familiar, a female Bigfoot in profile, caught in midstride, the still from the Patterson-Gimlin film that he’d used in his report.

  The picture on the right was what made his mouth go dry and his skin prickle. It was a photograph of a smaller person in the same sideways pose, hunched over, one arm slung across her chest, her body bristling with . . . Jeremy squinted, holding his breath, staring at the low-resolution image, trying to believe what he was seeing.

  Fur. Pine needles and mud too—maybe just pine needles and mud, Jeremy cautioned himself. He couldn’t see the figure’s feet clearly, but it was big, big and broad-shouldered, with large hands and wild, bushy hair. More than its size and posture, though, was the attitude of shame and fear communicated in the slump of its shoulders, the curve of its neck, the way it tried to hide its face and body.

  “Oh my God,” Jeremy whispered. His face was flushed; his heart was hammering so hard he was surprised his mother, in her office down the hall, hadn’t heard it.

  Separated at birth? read the words underneath the pictures . . . and that was all it said. There were no names, of course, no location, no clue as to where the shot had been taken (and, his brain whispered, it could have been a fake, was probably a fake, Photoshopped and whomped up on someone’s computer as a joke).

  Except his heart told him otherwise. In his two years of seeking, of research, he’d seen, he reckoned, every fake Bigfoot picture that existed online, and he’d never seen this one. He’d never seen anything that looked like this, that communicated the same kind of painful, aching fear.

  “Real,” he whispered, then read the site’s caption out loud. “We have no information where this image, posted anonymously online, came from,” read the text. “All we know for sure is that the computer’s IP address is associated with a server in upstate New York.”

  “Real,” he said again.

  “Talking to yourself?” asked Noah, who’d come up from his basement hideaway. Jeremy ignored him. He slammed his laptop shut, shoved it in his backpack, and speed-dialed the first contact on his phone with one hand as he carried his empty mixing bowl to the kitchen.

  “Did you see it?” Jo’s familiar voice asked.

  “Saw it,” Jeremy answered. “I’m on my way.” He’d almost made it to the door when his mother drifted out of her offic
e. A pencil anchored her bun to her head, and her eyes looked dreamy.

  “Jeremy?” she said. “Where are you going?”

  “Cub Scouts,” he answered.

  Suzanne frowned. “Are you still a Cub Scout?”

  Jeremy had actually never been a Cub Scout. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll be back late!” He ran out the door, jumped on his bike, and pedaled down the street toward Jo’s house as fast as he could. Her street, normally empty, was unusually crowded. A van that read “Standish Plumbers—DUMP IT ON US” was parked at the curb, next to a gray sedan and a motorcycle. Jeremy dropped his bike on her lawn and went inside without knocking, knowing that the door would be unlocked and that Jo would be in her chair on the sunporch. She’d already pulled up the flyer on the biggest of her four computer screens and was doing a point-by-point comparison between the two images.

  “Do we know where it’s from?” Jeremy said as he tried to look over Jo’s shoulder while catching his breath. “All the site said was upstate New York.”

  “The picture was uploaded on an iPhone with a New York City area code,” Jo said without turning away from the screen.

  “How do you know that?” Sometimes, the things that Jo did, or found out, did not strike him as entirely legal.

  She tweaked her ponytail, leaning closer to the screen. “I have my ways. I already forwarded it to Gary.”

  Gary Hardison was an online friend of Jo’s, a PhD student in California just as obsessed with Bigfoots as they were.

  “He should be able to compare the anatomy. He’ll tell us if this is the real deal or just a kid in a costume. Our job,” she said, spinning her chair so that she faced Jeremy, “is to figure out who posted this picture, and from where.”

  “So how do we do that? Do we call every single cell phone with a New York City area code and say, ‘Did you happen to photograph a Bigfoot in upstate New York recently?’ ”

  Jeremy figured that Jo had a better plan . . . and he wasn’t wrong.