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Belief
Acknowledgments
Bean! Come see!”
Miranda had heard her mother call her like this before; she’d heard it at least a dozen times that weekend alone. But even though it was a familiar summoning, even though Miranda was concentrating on a civics essay that was due three days earlier, even though the wind blew through the yellowing trees with a certain seriousness and the congregating clouds outside of the jury-rigged awning threatened rain, she stood up. She stuffed her papers beneath a rock near the barren fire pit and ran.
But first she grabbed the camera.
There were half a dozen others with them in Big Cottonwood Canyon, some of them driving across entire states to get here. They had all seen the same report, an obscure story written for levity, plucked from a credible news site and then trickling through their online community, their forums, their blogs: A pair of young hikers witnessed strange rustlings in the nettle. They had seen an abnormal stillness in the surrounding wildlife, as if the warblers and the foxes and the cutthroat trout were holding their breath as another beast, a king, passed through. They had noticed an unusual darkness in the evenings that concentrated around a figure — something tall, something that was neither human nor animal, but definitely something alive.
Most of all, the hikers said, they saw shadows. Shadows without moorings. Shadows in impossible shapes. Shadows that formed and disappeared in the space of a single blink.
And then the hunt began.
They all wanted to see one. They all wanted proof.
But sometimes, Miranda thought, the others seemed like they wanted the game to keep going more than they wanted to know. They liked the hide-and-seek of it, the gathering of intellects and theories, the division of perimeters, the smoky campfire evenings, and the fancy infrared equipment that must be unloaded and carted and mastered.
Even if a creature was bagged, tagged, and hauled around the world on exhibition, many of them would no doubt still scour the media for reports, would still get together for the search. The search was what they lived for.
Not Miranda. She wanted proof.
She and her mother had been hunting for years. She was ready to know.
And the time was ripe. In the whispering petals of wildflowers, in the babbling of clear rivers, in the freeway currents across their pockmarked windshield on their drives home after fruitless trips, she could hear it sometimes: Soon. So very soon.
That afternoon her mother had left camp to investigate a tree-mounted motion sensor camera that had been activated, then mysteriously lost power — no doubt pushed off the branch by the wind, as often happened. But her mother was giddy at the prospect. “Or maybe — maybe, Bean — Bigfoot knocked it over when he saw the blinking light!”
“What is he, camera shy?” Miranda joked.
Those jokes were easier to make lately. They grew on Miranda’s tongue like thorns; all she had to do was spit them out.
Up past the reservoir Miranda went, a thin wind crying through the firs like a vindictive ghost. When the first of a cold rain dotted her cheek, she resisted the urge to run back under the awning with her homework. Instead she focused her mind —
What if this is it?
What if I turn this corner, around this pine, down this gulley, and I see him?
What if we found Bigfoot?
Even from behind the parched autumn grass and the quaking, coin-size leaves of white aspens, Miranda could spot her mother wearing the mad-eyed grin of a person obsessed — it beamed, it was like a new sun.
A knot in Miranda’s stomach untied itself.
It’s happening, she thought, and I’m ready.
“Where?” Miranda flew through the swishing grass and into the clearing, camera poised. “Where is he?”
“Look at it, Bean!” Her mother stepped backward, angling Miranda to see the dampening loam behind a fallen log.
Miranda’s insides tangled.
A footprint.
Only a footprint.
Smudged into the dirt, a heel and five toes, clearly human — or, at least humanoid, she corrected herself with some bitterness — and fading as the rain hit the ground.
A large footprint, yes. But when Miranda checked herself for veneration, for the stuff that her mother currently oozed like she was able to convert oxygen into awe . . . it wasn’t there.
There was nothing there.
Miranda waited while her mother and the others took photographs, while they found the missing motion sensor camera (which had indeed fallen from the tree and turned itself off ), while they analyzed the footprint’s length and width and tread, while they spoke about the find as if it was the first of its kind and not, as Miranda would have pointed out had she not been too empty to speak, the tenth footprint they’d found that year alone.
Miranda acted polite. Miranda acted smiley. Miranda acted the perfect assistant as they huddled around the footprint like it was a relic. She held jackets and helped frame their “Aha! Discovery!” pictures and nodded when they said, over and over, “Can you believe it?”
Another footprint.
She really, really could believe it.
“We’re so close, Bean.” Her mother put an arm around her, and a sudden, foreign instinct came over Miranda — to jerk away, to push back, to run.
When her mother was twelve weeks pregnant, she’d seen baby Miranda on an ultrasound — just a grainy white dot dancing across the screen “like a jumping bean,” her mother always said, and the nickname stuck.
Miranda couldn’t remember the last time her mother had used her real name. Why had that never bothered her before?
The storm finally convinced them to leave the clearing; they peeled away reluctantly one by one until it was just Miranda and her mother — and the footprint, until the mud claimed it.
“This, right here.” Her mother gestured at the ground, at the aspens, as pale as if someone had drained them, at the forest all around them. “Isn’t this amazing, Bean? We’re so close!”
Miranda couldn’t hold back. “But we’ve seen so many footprints. If he’s really out there, why haven’t we seen him yet? Why haven’t we found real proof?”
“Oh, Bean.” Her mother again wrapped herself around Miranda, constricting her. “Be patient. We don’t find Bigfoot — Bigfoot finds us.”
It was only after her mother walked ahead, the sound of her happy whistle piercing through the din of the storm, that Miranda realized what she’d said:
If.
She’d said if.
The word came out so naturally, as if it had been perched there on her lips for a long, long time — and her mother hadn’t even noticed.
Miranda had barely noticed.
Miranda dragged herself back through the rain to camp, where she found the notes for her civics essay, soaked and torn cleanly in half by the wind. She searched, but the missing sections were hiding somewhere in these woods, these damn trees that refused to reveal anything that was given to them to conceal.
The next day they drove home, where they would unpack and stay only until the next bumpkin farmer announced that he saw an ape-like creature crossing the stream in his fields. Until the next shadow
.
Miranda tuned out her mother’s circular talking. Something new was happening within her, and she honed in on it. Where there was once wonder, there was now itching, a grain of sand in your eye.
Where there was once fireworks and golden frenzies and the sensation that she was reaching out to touch magic and magic was reaching back — there was instead this tiny, odd anger burrowing beneath her ribs.
“We’re going to find one, Bean,” her mother said, again and again. “We’re so close. Believe me.”
Miranda curled up on her seat, feigning sleep. With the hand farthest from her mother, she reached up and pulled out a hair. A single hair. The bite of pain chewed through the hot fog in her brain. It gave her something to hold on to.
And so she did it again.
Another hair, another bite.
Eventually her mom stopped talking and there was, at last, quiet.
Miranda pressed her ear against the cold glass of the window, straining to hear the air currents above the rumbles and grunts of their car — but outside the window, there was nothing.
Outside the window, it was a dead zone.
Soon, soon, soon — that was what she wanted to hear. A reassurance. But the wind on the dark, rain-soaked highway, the air brushing the windshield and the metal of the car door, the sky around the bold twilight stars — all were silent.
Except this one word, echoing in her head again and again — if, if, if.
Miranda was good at naming shadows.
She could sense them before they incorporated into solid darkness, before they had decided on a shape — and then she could tell exactly what they belonged to.
You are only a spare desk, hulking outside the principal’s office.
You are only a banner, flapping in the gale of the air-conditioning vent.
You are only a hawthorn bush, a streetlight, a bird, the clouds rolling across the moon — you are only me, my shape reflected on the ground behind me.
A peculiar skill for a twelve-year-old to take pride in — the days of checking under beds and in closets for hungry monsters were long over for most of her peers.
But there was still someone at Miranda’s house who made a monster out of every unexplained silhouette or indecipherable sound.
And so she had to be vigilant.
And she had to come here, to the school, before anyone else arrived, so she could work.
A house full of monsters was not a place where she could think, no matter how much she tried to hide in the shadows.
She sat in front of the lockers, a spread of homework and books around her. It was a balancing act she attempted most mornings — trying to jostle the various assignments that were all due that day, none of which was even close to being completed.
Pockets of magic existed in the world, Miranda knew, but they came exclusively in the form of moments like these — the hours before the school opened, when the building was an empty shell and the freshly born sunrise made the harsh fluorescent lights in the hallway almost obscene in comparison. Moments when the only sound was her own wheels spinning.
These cereal hours, these foggy mornings . . . Miranda had always been busy enough to need every waking hour of her days, but lately she’d been squeezing out extra time where she could.
She had to.
She had to make sure everything was perfect. Even if other elements of her life threatened to ruin everything.
She glanced at the clock. Quarter to seven: That gave her only fifteen minutes to devote to each assignment. And even if she did manage to get them finished, that didn’t leave time for anything else — any of the other things she had to do to catch up. It wasn’t enough time. It was never enough.
Panic jolted through her like cold coffee.
What if I don’t get these finished?
What if I have to ask for more time?
What if they won’t give me more time?
Too many things swirling, hovering — they gathered in a mist, thick as a curtain. Mind spinning like a second hand on a clock, she took out her phone and opened her to-do list.
To-do list:
Finish study guide for history
Put tutoring schedule online
She twirled her inky hair around her finger. There was something else she was missing, something that was clouding a large amount of her mental storage —
Fall Fling! How could she have forgotten? Her delinquent homework was eating every other task in her brain. The Fall Fling was next week, a dance that would raise money for new projectors in every classroom and simultaneously provide her classmates with three hours of teacher-free socialization. It was her most ambitious project as student body president so far, and she had to get every detail just right.
Confirm student council meeting with administration
Call DJ about extension cords
Order pumpkin spice doughnuts from bakery
Her election as student body president had been a rare historical feat — only a seventh-grader, and yet they had still chosen her. A seventh-grader, to rule even the older grades.
And so the Fall Fling had to be perfect.
That word again, perfect.
Her favorite word.
Proofread flyers
Write script for school announcements next week
Her to-do lists never seemed to get any shorter, no matter how hard she hustled; her mind was a video game landscape, every item on her list a bad guy. You kill every one within sight, and it’s quiet until you turn a corner and you’re ambushed.
A dozen papers around her, two textbooks straddling a folder of exam notes, and eight tabs open on her phone — and the ticking of the clock, which was as loud as her own pulse —
Something inside her unspooled.
What if there are questions on the history test that weren’t on the study guide?
What if the DJ cancels?
What if —
She inhaled, concentrating on surrendering the tension in her shoulders, loosening the imaginary cords that bound her, but they only cinched tighter.
What if the bakery loses our order?
What if no one shows up to the dance?
What if I don’t get it done in time? Any of it? And then the camp, the leadership camp —
What if, what if, what if?
Alone in the hall, she reached up and yanked out a single strand of hair. A prickle, then relief.
One strand of hair, and she could think again.
Another strand, and she could breathe again.
A door opened down the hall. A shadow emerged.
The custodians, she predicted, beginning their slow tour of the school’s floors with their mops.
But it was her guidance counselor, Ms. Palmer.
“Miss Miranda Cho.” Ms. Palmer eyed her, jingling her keys in the door of the counseling office. “It’s early, even for you.”
“Just getting some extra credit work done.” A baby fib. “You know how it is — if I’m not ahead, I’m behind.”
And she was so far behind.
She gritted her teeth and hoped the counselor would leave her alone.
“Actually, Miranda, I’m glad to run into you.” Ms. Palmer paused. “Can we talk?”
The counselor disappeared through the door without waiting for a response; Miranda gathered her things from the tiles, and as she lifted up the pages, she gathered herself, too. The counselor wouldn’t interrupt the student body president unless it was important.
Like the camp?
What if Ms. Palmer has news?
She folded up her annoyance and put it into her pocket.
Inside her office, Ms. Palmer’s fingers clacked on her keyboard, her computer sluggish as it woke up for the day. She’d finally organized (or had someone else organize) the mishmash of files that were, until today, threatening to overtake her desk. She’d gotten a haircut, too — though apparently a fairly cheap one, as her curls were slightly higher and tauter on the left side of her head. And there was
a faint, barely there stain on her collar — coffee or black tea, splashed into the shape of a continent.
Small details. Anyone else would gloss over them, let the details remain camouflaged against the rest of the mundane.
But to Miranda, small details were dessert.
“Have you heard anything?” Ms. Palmer asked, and Miranda’s heart thumped crookedly.
“Nothing yet.”
Nothing in the mailbox, nothing in her e-mail — nothing at all.
“You’re a shoo-in, Miranda.” The black wave composed itself — Ms. Palmer was not the type to soothe. “Your application was perfect — you had a perfect term last spring. Perfect grades, perfect extracurriculars, and now, with you serving as student body president . . .”
Miranda hid a sigh. She could live forever in that word, perfect.
Three weeks ago she’d applied to a leadership camp for next summer, one of the most prestigious youth programs in the nation. Students who were selected flew to Washington, D.C., for communications workshops, service projects, White House tours, and meetings with important people. The kind of people Miranda wanted to be when she grew up.
Any day now she would find out if she got in. Any day.
“Miranda, I wanted to talk to you about your absences.”
Somehow Miranda managed to keep her smile from slipping. She even widened it, a cat’s smile.
“I’ve been reviewing your attendance record. You’ve missed ten days of school — we’re still in the first term.” Her eyes bored holes into Miranda. “You’re not skipping school, are you?”
“No,” Miranda said — but she’d hesitated. “At least, not on purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
Here we go, Miranda thought, and swallowed. “Sometimes I have to go with my mom on her work trips. But I always bring my homework and I’ve never missed a deadline.” She didn’t mention that sometimes she had to get extensions for those deadlines.
But the counselor wasn’t impressed by Miranda’s semi-honest disclosure. “What does your mom do for work?” she asked, and the questions formed before Miranda could even blink:
What if she laughs?
What if she doesn’t believe me?
What if I tell her and it doesn’t make me feel any less alone?
“She’s —” A thousand lies leaped to Miranda’s aid:
The Bigfoot Files Page 1
