The Littlest Bigfoot (18 page)

“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 office. 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.

“I've been in the Google cache for hours. The image was first uploaded to Blabber. It's one of those apps where kids in high school and college can post things about their professors or other kids. It's all ‘supposed to be' anonymous,” Jo said, her tone turning sarcastic, her fingers curving into the air quotes she'd put around “supposed to be.” Jo could be sharp-tongued, and she saved most of her scorn for people who didn't understand the Internet the way she did—a group that included the vast majority of humanity, as well as Jeremy himself.

“It's also supposed to automatically delete after sixty seconds, but you know how that goes.”

Jeremy nodded, and he and Jo recited together, “On the Internet, everything lives forever.”

“So anyhow,” Jo continued, “all we have to do now is find the Blabber account that posted it.”

“How are we going to do that?”

Jo just smiled. Jeremy wondered, maybe for the hundredth time, whether Jo knew people in the government, or whether her father, who he'd heard moving around in the house but had never seen, was some kind of spy.

“Leave that part to me. Meanwhile, your job is to monitor the Net. Especially anything coming from this region.”

“The picture was uploaded from somewhere in upstate,” Jeremy said, thinking out loud. “That could be here or Albany or up near Vermont . . .”

Jo was unperturbed. “We have to start somewhere, so why not close to home? We know there are Bigfoots in Standish. We know that Standish is in upstate New York. Thus, it's not impossible, and maybe even likely, that the picture was shot somewhere nearby.” She smiled her sarcastic half smile. “And sometimes you get lucky. Or so I've heard.”

Jeremy wondered what that meant. When Jo turned back to her screen, he started mentally listing the chat rooms he'd hang out in, the Twitter accounts he'd check, the blogs he'd be visiting. “Maybe I'll walk around the forest a little,” he said. “If there's a tribe somewhere nearby, like we think, they must be freaking out if they know one of them's been photographed.”

“Excellent.” Jo's voice was crisp, and Jeremy felt his face flush with pleasure. “As soon as I hear from Gary about what we're looking at, I'll let you know.”

Together, they spent the next hour in the Batcave, with Jo scrolling through phone numbers, cross-referencing them with Blabber accounts, and Jeremy googling for other re-postings of, and comments beneath, the flyer. When Jo's father called her to dinner, Jeremy told her good-bye and walked toward his bike, thinking he'd go the long way home through the forest, when his cell phone rang.
Blocked number,
read the screen. Curious, he lifted the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Jeremy.” The voice was an old man's, cracked and whispery but somehow still powerful, like it belonged to someone who was used to having people listen and do what he said. “Keep looking.”

“Keep looking for what?” His heart was beating hard,
and the cereal was sloshing uncomfortably in his belly. “Keep looking where?”

“The forest,” said the voice. “The lake. Pay attention to the school. You're very close, boy. Closer than you know.”

“Who is this?” He realized—later than he should have—that he and Jo weren't the only people who'd seen the flyer, not if it was floating around online. “And if this is about . . . you know, Bigfoots . . . you should talk to Jo, too.”

The man made a rude, dismissive noise. “Never mind the girl,” he said. “She'll just slow you down. Keep looking.” His voice sounded scary and greedy when he whispered, “We're almost there.”

“What do you mean?” Jeremy blurted. “Why do you care?”

“Because they're everything,” the old man whispered. “The key to everything.” The line went dead. Jeremy stared at the phone, then picked up his bike and gave a shocked yell when it fell to pieces in his hands, as if every bolt had been unscrewed precisely to the point of it coming undone. The wheels went rolling off in opposite directions, the seat and seat post and frame fell to the ground, and Jeremy was left standing there holding the handlebars, hearing that ancient, scratchy, greedy voice in his head, saying,
Because they're everything.

M
ILLIE?” SEPTIMA STOOD IN THE
doorway of Millie's bedroom, her hands entwined, fingers tugging at her wrist-fur. “You barely had two bites at the feast.”

“I'm not hungry.” Millie was lying on her bed, fully clothed, face toward the wall. It was Halloween, Halloween night, except Halloweening had been canceled after Old Aunt Yetta came across a new picture that had been posted on-the-line, a shot “that proves, conclusively, once and for all, that Bigfoots are real!”

Millie hadn't seen the picture. Hidden in the Lookout Tree, watching the Elders' meeting, she was too far away to get a good look at what it showed. From what she
could hear, though, it sounded like the Yare, or at least Old Aunt Yetta, didn't believe that it was real.

“Not Yare. It's the old picture of Cassoundra, and then just a No-Fur littlie with some pine needles and some mud,” Old Aunt Yetta pronounced. Millie felt her fur prickle and bristle with alarm. Could that be the picture Alice had told her about, the flyers the mean girls had posted showing her alongside an assortment of monsters?

Nugget,
she thought.
I should say something
. Instead, she just listened.

Ricardan glared fiercely at Old Aunt Yetta. “Real or not doesn't matter! If the No-Furs believe it, they'll come looking, and it won't be long before they find us.”

“We should go,” whispered Aelia, who'd been tugging so hard at the fur on her cheeks that she'd given herself a few bald patches. “We should pack up the village . . . we should go somewhere far . . . where there aren't any cities . . . maybe up north, where it's cold . . .”

“We can't leave,” said Junie, one of the younger female Yare. “I just planted my perennials.”

“And why would the No-Furs look here?” Old Aunt Yetta asked. “None of them are knowing where the picture was taken. There's nothing that would draw them to our forest.”

“Measures must be taken,” Ricardan said as his wife nodded her enthusiastic agreement. “Always safe. Never sorry. We must have new rules about noise. Perhaps guards at the perimeter. And we should cancel Halloweening.”

At this a chorus of gasps came from some of the younger Yare.

“No Halloweening?” whispered Frederee, whose fur seemed to droop.

“Silence! You don't have the Speaking Stick,” Ricardan said, lip curled disdainfully to show his large front teeth. “Halloweening was always foolishness. Far too risky. We can be having our own feasting, and that will be that.”

Millie gave a soft growl, feeling like she'd cry. She knew what a Yare celebration would include: rabbit casserole and sweet stewed pumpkin, sweet and savory hand-pies, baked apples and poached pears and sugar-roasted walnuts. Games of checkers and chess and Scrabble played quietly around the fire. No dashing down strange streets, right along with the No-Fur kids, no walking up to No-Fur doorsteps bold as could be, ringing their doorbells, holding your bag open, waiting for them to drop delicious chocolate candy inside. No shouts and no laughter. No pretending, the way Millie always did, that she was a No-Fur girl in a Bigfoot costume, that,
at the end of the night, she'd pull off fur-covered boots, unpeel her sleeves and cuffs and wig, and unzip her skin, stepping out of it and leaving it puddled on the floor, to emerge a smooth-skinned little girl, no different from the fairies and princesses and witches and superheroes with whom she'd spent the night.

“They don't know where to look,” Old Aunt Yetta snapped.

“They'll find us.” Aelia's voice was almost a moan. “They'll be coming . . . with their hellercopters . . . and their bright lights . . . and their littlies on the ATM machines . . .”

“ATVs,” whispered Millie, and rolled her eyes.

“Silence,” she heard her father rumble. “Ricardan is right.” Ricardan preened, his fur bristling, making him look bushier and bigger. “It's too risky. There will be no Halloweening this year.”

Millie had almost jumped out of the tree in frustration and fury. Instead she decided, that minute, that she would have her Halloweening, that she'd go trick-or-treating no matter what her father decreed.

By then she'd crossed the lake three times already to visit with Alice. Each time she'd borrowed Frederee's clothing, although she supposed it wasn't technically borrowing because she hadn't technically asked for permission to wear
his clothes or to take the Tribe's single canoe. She had eaten brownies and cookies and granola, and had listened as Alice had wept about how much being called a monster and a freak had hurt her, and offered what comfort she could.

Now that Millie had met an actual No-Fur, she could see that maybe No-Fur life wasn't as grand as she'd imagined and that being Yare was maybe not so bad at all. Yare mothers and fathers did not abandon their littlies, putting their lives in the hands of educational consultants, sending them away to sleepaway camps and boarding schools, seeing them only a handful of days every year. If Alice had been Yare, she would have been treasured.

While the grown-up Yare were still chanting their final blessings, Millie had slipped out of the tree, raced to Old Aunt Yetta's house, and pulled the top-lap out from its box underneath Old Aunt Yetta's bed. She logged on to the email account she'd created and sent a message to Alice that read, “Can I go trick-or-treating with you?”

Then she sat, fidgeting and looking over her shoulder, until finally she had her answer: “Yes!!!”

The night of Halloween, Millie, who'd been in what her mother called “a mood” since the decision was made, had left the feasting early and spent the night in bed. At seven
o'clock she announced that she was going for a walk.