The Littlest Bigfoot (25 page)

J
EREMY'S TWEETS AND BLOG POSTS,
the banner headline on Believeinbigfoot.com, and the press releases he and Jo had delivered instructed people to gather at the old Lake Standish campground, which had a large parking lot and was an easy walk to the Center. His plan was to present his evidence—the picture he'd found online, then the picture he'd taken of the two girls and the fur that he'd collected, the fur that wasn't human hair. Then he would lead a contingent to the Experimental Center, while Jo, in the kayak they'd rented that afternoon, would lead the charge across the lake, in case the Bigfoot had fled the Center and was hiding out in the forest.

By six o'clock the parking lot was full, and a noisy, raucous crowd was gathered on the shore. Jeremy figured that maybe half the people were actually serious, either about spotting a Bigfoot or about protecting themselves. The rest were treating the night like a tailgate party or a football game. These were the ones who'd come with coolers instead of flashlights and with beers instead of the water bottles the press release had recommended. One group had even brought s'mores fixings and were building a bonfire. Jeremy paced along the edge of the parking lot with Jo, who was gliding along beside him in her sleek, low-slung red metal wheelchair.

“Do you see what I see?” she asked.

Jeremy turned toward where she was pointing and saw a News 6 van pulling down the dirt road, with the satellite dish on its roof practically brushing against the power lines. He swallowed hard as Donnetta Dale, wearing a dark-brown suit, a brown-and-gold scarf, gold earrings, and high-heeled shoes, stepped out of the passenger's side.

“Mr. Bigelow?” she called, peering into the twilight.

Jeremy gulped and dashed over, clutching a stack of press releases. “Right here,” he said. If Donnetta Dale wasn't used to dealing with twelve-year-olds, the only evidence
was a brief widening of her expertly shadowed eyes as she shook his hand.

“Do you have a copy of the images that we can use?” Donnetta asked. Jeremy did. Meanwhile, headlights were flooding the street; the Channel 10 News at Night truck was pulling in behind Channel 6. Trailing it were three cars and a dirty white van with a Phish sticker clinging to its rusty bumper . . . a van, Jeremy thought, that could have been easily disguised to look like a plumbing van or one that installed security systems.

He stared at the van until Donnetta Dale, who was even prettier in person than she was on TV, and also smelled good, put her hand on his shoulder.

“So you're a Bigfoot hunter?” she asked.

Jeremy, too nervous to speak, merely nodded.

“Thanks for doing such a thorough job on the background,” said Donnetta. “I remember hearing stories about Bigfoots in the woods around Standish when I was a little girl. . . .” She gave a wry smile. “You know, back in the Mesozoic era. My gran used to tell me about how her father actually knew someone who was rumored to be half-Bigfoot. He had pictures and everything.” She wrinkled her nose charmingly. “The guy could've just been tall and hairy, but I always wondered.”

“Actually, there have been multiple reports, going back hundreds of years, about sightings in this region,” Jeremy said.

Donnetta held up her hand like a crossing guard. “I'm going to stop you right there. I'd love to shoot some B-roll if that's okay. Hey, Bryan?” she called, and a cameraman came hustling over.

Jeremy smiled. There were people here, there were reporters here, his friend was here. People who believed him or who, at least, didn't
not
believe him were here. All he needed now was—

“Hey, man!” brayed a loud, slightly slurred teenage male voice. “Where are the Yetis?”

“Not Yetis, Bigfoots!” Jeremy heard Jo say. The guy and his friends—all of them, Jeremy saw with his heart sinking, had beers in their hands—ignored her.

“Bring on the Teen Wolf!” the young man yelled as his friends started to cackle, then to chant.

“Teen Wolf! Teen Wolf! TEEN WOLF!”

“Be quiet!” Jo was shouting. “Just listen, and we'll tell you what we found!”

“Shut up, kid!” said one of the guys, and then with a laugh he gave her chair a shove. Jo grabbed the wheels to stop herself but still came close to flipping face-first into
the dirt. Jeremy felt sick. He turned toward Donnetta Dale, the nearest grown-up, thinking that the adults would stop this, but Donnetta had gone over to her cameraman and was gesturing toward the yelling drunk people. As Jeremy watched, the cameraman turned on his lights and then, instead of telling the guys to cut it out and leave Jo alone, he started to film them.

Jeremy saw an empty pickup truck and jumped up onto its bed, banging his shin in the process. Tears came to his eyes. He wiped them away, looking for Jo, who'd gotten shoved to the back of the crowd.

He stood up. “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey, everyone! My name is Jeremy Bigelow, and if you'd all just give me your attention for a moment . . .”

The crowd's reaction was about the same as his classmates' had been when he'd launched into his annual report on Bigfoots Are Real.

“Siddown, kid!” called one of the teenage boys.

“We came here to see the monsters!” said a sunburned woman with curly blond hair and a tight pink top. “Where're the monsters?”

“They're not monsters!” Jeremy yelled. He heard his voice crack. “They're just different!” He wondered—too late, he knew—how many of these people had guns, how
many of them had come not to find a Bigfoot but to hunt one.
They're the monsters,
he thought, staring down at the chanting, seething crowd. Jo's head was bent so that all he could see was the top of her baseball cap.
They're the monsters, and Jo and I are the freaks.

“Look!” a woman shrieked. Jeremy peered into the twilight as the camera operators swung their lights in the direction the woman had pointed, flooding the forest in a brilliant glow . . . and then he saw it, a familiar hunched figure running out of the forest, about two hundred yards away from the beach, with big hands and big feet and a thick, curly, chestnut-brown pelt.

“There!” Jeremy yelled. “RIGHT THERE!” It wasn't the little gray-furred thing he'd seen—it was much bigger—but it was something. Maybe a friend or a relative, and it definitely wasn't human. Without looking to see whether anyone else was following, he leaped off the truck and started to run.

A
LICE, WITH HER HAIR UNBOUND
and her feet bare, dressed in the furry brown vest that Taley had whipped up on her sewing machine, ran through the forest. She felt cold dirt and moss, dead leaves, and pine needles under her feet, and her breath burned her throat and lungs. Her legs ached. Her heart felt like it would burst. She made herself go faster, arms pumping, feet flying, spurred on by the sounds of people chasing her, and the lights from the TV cameras bobbing through the forest.

I can do this,
she told herself, remembering how every morning she'd run through the woods alone and remem
bering that her friend—her friends—were waiting. Millie was counting on her. She would do this, or she would die trying.

They won't hurt me,
she thought as she caught one ankle on a fallen tree branch and went sprawling on her face. The air went whooshing out of her. For a moment she couldn't breathe, couldn't move. Her furry vest had split along one seam, and her palms were bleeding. Then, as she heard her pursuers draw closer, leaves crunching and branches cracking under their feet, she forced herself to get up, then limp, then walk, then jog, then run.
All they've got are cameras,
she told herself as she ran in the direction of the Experimental Center for Love and Learning.
And I've already had my picture taken and posted all over school. It was even in the paper. I survived that, and I can survive this, too, if I have to do it to keep Millie safe.

Her sides throbbed. Her lungs burned. She tasted hot copper in her throat as she made herself keep going, faster than she'd ever gone before. She scraped her shoulder on a protruding branch, snagged her sleeve in a pricker bush, slipped, and fell in a stream. With the stones bruising her knees and the cold water soaking her clothes and hair, she thought,
They're all going to stare at me.
The thought came wrapped in shame
and horror—even in the cold, she felt her face start to burn—but she made herself get up, push forward, keep running.
For Millie,
she thought as she turned toward the Center.
For Millie.

Once they'd come up with the plan, Alice had volunteered to be the lure. “What if they don't chase you?” Millie had said. “What if they just think you're—you know—a regular girl?”

“They'll chase me,” said Alice with more confidence than she felt. “People see what they want to see. If they want to see a Bigfoot, then that's what they'll think I am.”

“Do dbyou wantb a disguisbe? Sombde fur or something?” Taley asked. Her hazel eyes, behind her glasses, looked excited. Alice remembered how Taley had come up with Alice's Invisible Man costume, how she'd made the wigs and costumes for every one of the Center's plays and skits.

Alice thought, then said, “How fast can you make something?”

Taley was already reaching for the sewing basket that she kept in the corner, telling Riya to go to the drama closet and see if they still had the vests from the
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
play the Center had done the year before, where the moral, Alice remembered overhearing,
was that all the chairs and beds and bowls of porridge were “just right.” Meanwhile, Alice pulled her hair out of its braid, letting it spring into a curly thicket that covered most of her back.

“I bet that'll do it,” she said. While Taley glue-gunned extra fur to a pair of mittens, Alice was breathing mindfully, the way Kara, who taught yoga, had shown them, pulling air in slowly through her nose, letting out through her mouth, trying to calm her racing heart. “Okay,” Taley said. “All donedb.”

Alice nodded. It was getting dark by then, and cold, with a thin crescent of moon visible in the indigo sky and the stars stabbing the darkness with pinpricks of silvery light. Alice thought of the rest of the Yare, huddled Underground, in their tunnel, waiting for word as to whether they could stay or if their feet would be set on the road.

She thought of what it felt like to be chased, laughed at, mocked, misunderstood, turned into a punch line, the butt of other peoples' jokes, all because you looked different.

She thought of Felicia, pressing her cool cheek against the top of Alice's head every time Alice left for a new school but not giving her an actual kiss, and the way her father wouldn't even look up from his phone when Alice
came into the room, and her granny, saying, “You need to find your people.” Her heart was a jumble of impulses: a desire to be brave and to keep Millie safe tangling with an impulse to run away from the danger, to go back to where the Yare were hiding, throw herself on their mercy, tell them,
Take me with you.

“Alice?” Millie's voice was soft. “It's almost time.” They'd decided to wait until after six for Alice to make her appearance. “Givdbe the crowdb time to getb excitedb,” Taley had advised.

Alice nodded. She put on the vest and the furry mittens, and bent each arm, pulling them back behind her head, before lifting each ankle to stretch out her quads. She pushed past Jessica, jogged through the Center's gates, and moved toward the campground at an easy lope, until she heard the cars and the voices and saw the television camera lights.

Her plan was to shout until they saw her, but she didn't even need to open her mouth. First a woman screamed and pointed. Then the camera's lights picked her out of the gathering shadows. Finally Jeremy Bigelow—she knew it had to be him, even though she'd never seen him before—looked at her from where he was standing on top of a truck. For a moment their eyes met.

“THERE!” he shouted.

Alice turned and started to run the other way, leading the crowd away from the lake and the forest and the Yare . . . or, at least, all of them except one.

Millie,
she thought as she led them toward the Center,
we better have been right. This better work.

She dug down deep for the last scraps of her strength, for one final, desperate burst of speed. Her body gave it to her. The round, muscled thighs she'd always despaired of, the broad shoulders and big feet she hated, all of them worked together like a perfect machine, keeping Alice safely ahead of her pursuers. She sprinted through the Center's gates . . . and there, thank God, were Lori and Phil, with their arms crossed against their chests and identical stony expressions on their faces.

“Stop right there,” said Phil as Jeremy pulled up, panting, and a crowd of first a dozen, then a few dozen, then maybe fifty strangers lined up behind him.