Little Bigfoot, Big City

by Jennifer Weiner

  “The Wi-Fi is very slow,” said Millie, which was also something she’d learned from the No-Furs, who were forever complaining about how long things took to appear on their various devices. Finally, the website loaded, and the space for Millie to type in her password appeared. Alice had shown her how to use the computer and how to sign in to the Experimental Center’s Wi-Fi, which was accessible even across the lake and miles into the forest, where the Yare village was hidden. That made things go faster, but faster was still not fast enough for Millie. Any minute her mother might go walking through the woods to try to find her, or Tulip or Florrie, the other Yare littlies, might come running through the snow and see Millie doing a forbidden thing and get her in all kinds of trouble.

  Frederee peered over her shoulder, frowning and chewing on his fingernails and looking, the way all Yare did these days, a little unsettled to be in Millie’s presence. He’d known Millie for her entire life, just as the rest of the Yare in the village had, but ever since she’d gone swimming across the lake and been rescued by Alice, ever since she had almost exposed the hidden Tribe to human eyes, and then been part of the plan that had saved them, everyone—from Old Aunt Yetta to Ricardan and his wife, Melissandra, to Tulip and even Millie’s parents—had started treating Millie with a kind of fearful reverence, as if she might burst into flames if they said something wrong. Or, she thought, make them burst into flames. They thought that she knew things she didn’t know; that she’d seen things she hadn’t seen; that, just by having a No-Fur friend and spending time out in the No-Fur world, she’d become someone different.

  The littlies asked her for stories from the No-Fur encampment. They wanted to know about cars and airplanes and elections. Was it true that they only ate three times a day? And did they mind being naked all the time, without any fur beneath their clothes?

  Millie explained that they were untroubled by their furlessness, and that airplanes were safe and that No-Furs did, indeed, vote on their leaders. She let them admire the friendship bracelet that Alice had given her, and she taught them how to make fortune-tellers out of folded paper and how to sing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” The other young Yare all acted as if she were a hero, crediting her for saving the Tribe, and they all seemed to have forgotten that if it hadn’t been for her curiosity, the Tribe would never have been in danger in the first place.

  The truth was that it had been Alice’s plan that had saved them, once they’d learned that a bad No-Fur boy named Jeremy Bigelow had seen Millie and had announced a plan to gather hundreds of No-Furs on the shores of Lake Standish to lead a search into the woods. On the night of the search, Alice had put on a fur vest and let her thick, curly hair out of its braids. Alice had run right into the crowd, looking, even Millie had to admit, enough like a Yare that the No-Furs all started to chase her. Instead of leading them to the Yare village, though, Alice led them to her school, where all the learners and learning guides and even the school’s founders had been lined up outside the gates. They’d shamed the No-Furs for chasing after a girl just because she looked different, and when Millie stepped forward to claim that she was just a No-Fur with a skin condition, not a Bigfoot at all, the other No-Furs hadn’t looked suspicious or like they wanted to throw her in a cage. They’d looked ashamed of themselves and had gone slinking off into the darkness, abandoning their search, leaving the village still safe and hidden, and Millie a hero.

  Mostly, Millie didn’t mind the special treatment, the way that Aelia would slip her extra hand-pies on her way to school, bowing her head, too shy to even meet Millie’s eyes, or how Teacher Greenleaf no longer got angry if Millie hadn’t finished her readings or if she wanted to spend extra time in the Lookout Tree, from whose top branches she could see the Center. She especially enjoyed the way Tulip, the largest of the Yare littlies—and, for years, Millie’s sworn enemy—would flinch and cringe if Millie even looked her way, as if Millie might have learned some secret new fighting tricks during her time across the lake. But it made her sad when Frederee, her old friend, did the same thing.

  Millie had always felt different from the other Yare. Most of her Tribe mates would have been more than content to live a safe and quiet life, to know that when they were grown they would live the same lives as their parents. They were happy in their village, content in their snug and hidden homes dug into the sides of the hills, pleased to spend their days sewing and mending and cooking, chopping wood and gathering healing herbs, tending to the goats, preserving foods for winter, or making crafts or clothing or all-natural soaps and scrubs to sell on Etsy.

  Not Millie. Millie wanted more. Millie wanted to taste every treat that the No-Fur world had to offer. She wanted to shop in a No-Fur store, not just wear the dresses her mother sewed and the shoes her father bought her on-the-line. (She had tenderfoot, a condition in which her feet never developed the fur and thick calluses that allowed the rest of the Yare to spend even the coldest, snowiest winters without shoes.) She wanted to go to concerts and see a movie in a big soft seat in the darkness of a theater, with other No-Furs laughing at the funny parts and crying when the story got sad, instead of watching them on Old Aunt Yetta’s television set all by herself because no one else was interested. She wanted to ride a train and a boat and a subway; to visit a beach and a desert and a mountaintop; to live in a big city and sleep in a partment like the one Alice came from, high above the busy streets.

  More than any of that, though, Millie wanted to sing. She wanted to perform, on a stage, in front of an audience. She wanted to be on television, like the people in her favorite show, Friends. Her fondest wish was to win the TV talent competition The Next Stage, to stand in the spotlight next to Benjamin Burton while gold and silver confetti rained down and the crowd shouted her name.

  The other Yare had always known these things about her. Before she’d crossed the lake they had treated her like she was strange but amusing; eccentric little Millie with her skimpy fur and tiny little feet, who would someday grow up and be their Leader. Now that she’d actually gone out into that other world and come back with a human friend, they treated her with something closer to awe . . . as if all of her strange dreams might actually come true.

  Frederee tapped her shoulder, then pointed at the laptop. “What do we do now?”

  Millie looked at the screen. Before she’d met Alice and gone across the lake, Frederee had never been shy about telling her no or when he thought something was a bad idea. Now he would agree to help even before Millie had promised him all of her sweets for a month, but he didn’t look happy about it. He kept turning around, peering over his shoulder, even though they were down by the lake, on the first day of the First Month, standing underneath a pine tree’s snow-laden branches. Old Aunt Yetta was off attending to Ricardan, who had fallen through the ice while ice fishing and broken his arm. Millie’s and Frederee’s fathers were both deep in the forest, cutting down trees and dragging them back to the village for firewood, and Millie’s mother, Septima, was hosting the other ladies of the Tribe to finish a wedding quilt for Aelia, who would fasten hands with Laurentius come the spring thaw.

  “ ‘Submit Information Here,’ ” Millie read. She’d already filled in the entire form, putting in whatever she could that was true, making up the rest. She had already convinced Alice to let her use her address at the Center so she’d have the required mailing address, and Alice had agreed to collect any mail that might arrive. All the other pieces were in place. Millie had an email address. She had faked her parents’ signatures in the electronic signature boxes and had promised that, indeed, she’d be available for an in-person audition in New York. All she needed—she smoothed her best blue dress, the one she’d been glad her mother hadn’t noticed her wearing—was to submit an audition video by five o’clock on January 15. Which was why she’d convinced Alice to let her borrow her laptop and had talked Frederee into coming with her into the forest.

  “What do I do?” asked Frederee as Millie located the app for t
he camera and clicked it into life. The laptop looked like a toy in his big hands, and he held it as if it were a bomb that might explode if he loosened his grip.

  “Hold the top-lap.”

  Frederee fumbled with the computer.

  “No, you need to turn the screen so it’s facing me,” Millie said, and tried not to sound impatient. If she could have asked Alice to help or, really, any of the No-Fur kids just across the lake, they’d have known what to do without being told. All of them had computers and tablets and phones; some of them even read their books on slim electronic screens. Millie just had Frederee, a laptop that she didn’t entirely understand, and two weeks to complete her audition and submit it. She squirmed with impatience as Frederee fumbled with the keyboard, then the screen.

  “Look!” Frederee sounded delighted as he peered down. “Millie! I am seeing me!” He grinned at the screen, then reached up to fluff the fur on top of his head, and dropped the laptop into the snow. Millie shrieked. Frederee apologized. Thankfully, the laptop wasn’t broken, and Millie was able to figure out which button to click so that the camera was shooting out instead of in.

  “Good. Now you have to move it so you can’t see my face.”

  Frederee frowned.

  “Just lower it down, until you’re looking . . .” Millie gestured toward her midsection, which was covered by her dress and looked like it could belong to a normal No-Fur girl. In other words, it did not display any fur.

  Frederee frowned at the screen as he rocked back and forth on the snowy ground. “It says on the form, ‘Contestant’s entire face must be visible.’ ”

  Millie felt her temper rise. “We will tell them that it slipped.”

  Frederee shrugged and held the screen still. Millie breathed in the icy air, straightening her shoulders and curling her toes, in their fur-lined boots, more deeply into the snow. She’d thought for hours about which song to choose, one that would show off her voice and her personality, and had finally settled on “Defying Gravity,” from Wicked. Every word of the song, and the story of a green-faced girl who wanted to make friends and fit in and change the world, could have been her story, if you substituted “fur” for “green” and “get famous” for “change the world.” She pulled in another breath of the sharp wintry air, and began: “Something has changed within me / Something is not the same.”

  “Um, Millie?” Frederee was holding up one hand, gesturing for her to stop. “Sorry,” he said, sounding sheepish. “I jiggled.”

  “Try not to jiggle. We do not have much time!”

  Frederee nodded and adjusted the top-lap. Millie started again, and this time she got through the entire song, then trotted up to Frederee to review the video. There was her midriff, centered in the snowy outdoors, and there was her voice, clear and pure and sweet, and it was perfect.

  Only, instead of hitting “upload,” Frederee’s thick finger accidentally pressed the key for “delete.”

  Millie trotted back, took another deep breath, and sang it again, maybe even better than she had the first time, and Frederee managed to upload it correctly. Millie was about to declare the day a triumph when a notice appeared on the screen. “ ‘We are SORRY,’ ” Millie and Frederee read together as a frowny-face emoji appeared beneath the words. “ ‘It appears as though something in your video has gone wrong! Please try again.’ ”

  So they did, with Frederee aiming the camera at a point just below the fur of Millie’s chin. That way, Millie reasoned, whoever was looking at these videos would assume it was an honest mistake, and then of course once they’d heard her voice they would send her through to the next round. Except, almost as soon as they’d uploaded that attempt, the same message reappeared.

  “I think,” Frederee said carefully, “that it knows it is not seeing your face.”

  Millie made a frustrated snort. They tried posing with her face in shadow. They shot her singing with the camera aimed at the back of her head. Both times, the system told them no. And, then, even though her voice was getting hoarse, and Frederee was making noises about being so hungry he could drop, Millie asked for one more try.

  Frederee shook his head, his gaze moving anxiously toward the sky. “It is getting on sundown,” he said, as if Millie hadn’t noticed the sliver of moon that had appeared over the black mirror of the lake.

  Millie’s shoulders sank, and she slumped against a nearby tree. “I will never figure this out,” she said.

  “There’s always next year,” said Frederee. He handed Millie the computer and went hurrying away through the snow, back to his parents, his dinner, a few games of checkers or Scrabble, and then his cozy bed, back to the only life he’d ever wanted, a life where he’d never known a minute of discontent.

  And where could Millie go? She would never be happy here, in the Yare village. She could never be content with a life spent in hiding, a life lived in whispers, a life where the simple act of singing could put all their lives in danger.

  Alice could help her, but Alice was gone, to New York City, and then to Hawaii with her parents. The night before, Alice had written, saying that she had big news—“the biggest!”—but that it was a secret that she could only tell in person. Millie had written back, a long letter detailing all the trouble she’d had getting the laptop up and running and how she kept getting bounced off the Wi-Fi and how she’d struggled to make her handwriting look different for Maximus’s and Septima’s signatures.

  After realizing that she’d written two pages’ worth of complaints, she’d deleted it and hadn’t written back at all. I will write when I am less grumpity, she promised herself. Meanwhile, she needed to figure out how to make her fur disappear, at least temporarily. There was, she thought, smoothing down her arm-fur with her fingertips, such a lot of it, and while it wasn’t thick, like most Yare fur, it was abundant, a silvery white that covered her body and fell in tangles around her face and lay like soft, almost invisible down along her cheeks and her chin.

  Old Aunt Yetta had a potion that could do the trick. Millie had found it on a shelf in her friend’s kitchen. She had sniffed it, blinking back tears at its bracing, peppery scent, and she’d slipped a vial of it in her pocket the night she’d run away and tried to swim across the lake. The night she’d almost drowned. The night she’d met Alice. Her plan had been to gulp down the potion once she was on the other side of the lake—the No-Fur side—before any of the No-Furs could see her, but the vial had slipped out of her pocket during her swim and was probably lying on the bottom of Lake Standish, and Millie would never have a chance to find out of it worked. Probably some fish had sucked it up by now. Millie wondered if the sharp, minty-smelling stuff had made its scales fall off.

  With the laptop tucked under her dress, Millie crunched through the snow, making a list in her head:

  Try to get more of the potion

  Ask Alice for ideas

  Practice song

  Plan for in-person audition

  Figure out a solution, because time is running out.

  She walked on, lost in thought, sometimes murmuring to herself, sometimes singing snatches of her audition song. She never noticed the sound of footsteps behind her; never felt the eyes that were staring at her back; never had any idea that someone had been watching her in the forest and that the same someone was following her, almost all the way home.

  JEREMY BIGELOW WRAPPED HIS SCARF around his neck and the bottom half of his face and pulled his wool hat down tight over his ears before working his bicycle helmet down on top of it. The streets of Standish were still icy in places, the lawns still covered in dingy gray snow, but not even a blizzard could have kept Jeremy inside.

  When he’d woken up and gone downstairs he’d found his mother hunched over the kitchen counter, still in her bathrobe, with a pile of bills spread out in front of her and the telephone tucked beneath her shoulder. Dirty dishes stood in stacks beside the sink; the table where they ate breakfast was covered in crumbs and piled high with folders.

&nb
sp; “No, please don’t put me on hold again,” Jeremy heard her say as he helped himself to a banana, a jar of peanut butter, and a spoon. “I have been the victim of identity theft. Someone in Arizona is trying to take out a mortgage in my name, and I need to speak to an actual human being.”

  Jeremy gathered up his breakfast and hurried away, down the hall, until a wash of red and blue lights against the wall froze him in place. Two cop cars pulled up to the curb. His father’s car was between them.

  Swallowing hard against the lump in his throat, Jeremy listened as a voice from the first car blared, “COME OUT OF THERE WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”

  Jeremy’s father looked sheepish as he exited his station wagon. Worse, he looked scared. “Is there a problem, officer?” he asked, and then attempted a chuckle. “I guess there must be, if I got a police escort home.”

  The police officer wore sunglasses and a hat whose brim kept his face in shadow. “License and registration, sir.”

  Jeremy watched as his father fumbled the documents out of the glove compartment. A radio crackled as the officer from the other car called in his father’s license plate. His father had a cringing kind of smile on his face and new lines around his eyes. Jeremy knew—because his father liked to make a big deal about it, especially to Jeremy’s oldest brother, who’d be taking his driver’s test soon—that he’d never been in an accident, never gotten a speeding ticket. “Not even a warning,” he’d say, and glare meaningfully at his boys until all of them promised that they too would be cautious drivers.

  “What now?” asked Ben, who emerged, yawning, from his bedroom, rubbing at his head with one muscle-bulging arm. Jeremy nodded toward the window. Ben blinked.

  “I don’t get it,” Ben muttered, before helping himself to Jeremy’s jar of peanut butter and going back into the bedroom that looked more like a home gym than a place to sleep.

  Unfortunately, Jeremy did get it. His parents, who were completely law-abiding—such straight arrows that they would never even use the express line at the grocery store if they had thirteen items instead of twelve—had been the target of some kind of governmental action for weeks. And Jeremy was the reason why.