The Littlest Bigfoot (5 page)

“Bigfoots helped build the railroads.” Another slide, this one showing a crowd of men—one of whom towered head and shoulders above the others—posing proudly in front of a track.

“Evidence suggests that sometimes Bigfoots and humans would marry and have children.”

“Eww!” squealed Lucy Jones.

Jeremy clicked to a sepia-toned family photograph, another discovery from the depths of the Bradon collection. The husband was an enormous, hulking man, tall and wide and heavily whiskered. His wife was clearly human, with a hint of amusement in the tilted corners of her mouth. The husband's free hand rested on the shoulder of a big, thick-necked boy who was staring at the ground so that most of his face was invisible to the camera. The wife was holding on to a freckle-faced girl with two long braided pigtails and the same smile as her mother.

“But as the march of progress continued, humans began to realize that their Bigfoot neighbors were different . . . and the Bigfoots began exploring means of controlling their fur and extreme size.”

Jeremy clicked, then wiped his hands again and stole
a glance at the classroom. Hayden Morganthal was fast asleep. Sophie was now working on Olivia's hair. Aisling had a textbook open in her lap and was reading ahead in science.

Jeremy sighed.
Just wait,
he thought.
Wait until I find them. Wait until I show you they're real.

The next slide showed a canvas-covered wagon with a poster on the side advertising “Snake Oil Scalp Tonic.” Other posters offered love potions, slimming belts, various liniments, and lotions including—Jeremy zoomed in until the class could see it—Dr. McLaughlin's All-Natural Wildroot Hair Removing Crème. “Troubled by unwanted hair?” the text read. “Twice-a-day application of Dr. McLaughlin's All-Natural Wildroot Hair Removing Crème will eliminate unsightly whiskers from any portion of the anatomy, small or large, and permanently prevent their return!”

“Wasn't that just for, like, ladies' mustaches?” asked Austin the Armpit Farter. Austin had red hair and freckles and a smirky grin that allowed teachers to identify him as a troublemaker before he'd actually made any trouble.

“That's what they want you to believe,” said Jeremy.

“Who's ‘they'?” Austin inquired.

Jeremy clicked to the next slide, ignoring his classmate's questions. “Sadly, humans turned on their former friends and neighbors, labeling them freaks and abominations,
forcing Bigfoots into hiding. The unfortunate Bigfoots who had the misfortune to be captured by hostile humans were displayed in circuses and traveling sideshows.”

The worst slide, the one that always made him feel sick, came next. “BEHOLD LUCILLE, the FAMED and ORIGINAL BEARDED LADY!” blared a poster nailed to the wall above a cringing, fur-covered human-size creature in a cage. “IS SHE HUMAN? IS SHE BEAST? BORN with a FULL HEAD OF HAIR, her BEARD was APPARENT AT BIRTH and now she is COVERED WITH A PELT OF THICK FUR FROM HEAD TO TOE. Experts consider her ONE of the WONDERS OF THE MODERN AGE.”

“My Nanna's got a mustache,” volunteered Lucy Jones. “Maybe she's a Bigfoot!”

Jeremy, who thought Lucy had a bit of a mustache herself, hurried through the slides, eager to get away from the image of the furred but unmistakably female Bigfoot cowering behind the bars of her cage. If he found a Bigfoot, he'd make sure it was treated better than that—not locked up, not shown off for money. He'd be kind; he'd figure out its language (or teach it English) and make sure it had a comfortable place to live, with lots of space. He'd never keep a Bigfoot locked up . . . at least, he'd only lock one up until he figured out how to make it
understand that he was its friend, not its enemy.

Jeremy showed his classmates pictures of footprints with rulers set beside them, proof that they hadn't been made by bears. He clicked through newspaper reports of campers who'd been awakened by strange noises and seen gigantic, hairy creatures running away—upright, on two legs—with their coolers and supplies. He lingered on a newspaper clipping with a picture of Milford Carruthers, a Standish resident, identified in the caption as “Famed Bigfoot Hunter,” and his quote, which Jeremy knew by heart: “Given the preponderance of evidence, of sightings and reports down through the years, we must come to the obvious conclusion that Bigfoots are real, and that they live among us.”

In the back row, Anthony Palmore, one of the smart kids who always turned in his homework on time, raised his hand. Anthony's button-down blue shirt was neatly ironed, his blue jeans had creases, and his sneakers were pristine. Anthony's mother, Jeremy thought, would never forget to take Anthony for his haircuts. Jeremy curled his toes inside his shoes. “Yes?”

“If they're real,” said Anthony, “then why hasn't anyone found one? That picture you showed us was taken in the nineteen sixties, right?”

“Nineteen sixty-seven,” said Jeremy, and jerked his neck to flip his long hair out of his eyes.

“And that's the most recent one?”

“They've gotten better at hiding,” Jeremy said. “They've probably figured out how to grow their own food and tap into the power system without anyone knowing.” He thought of the news reports of bears raiding a campsite in California two years ago. The campers had said they'd seen bears, but the footprints hadn't looked like bear prints, the police had said, but feet.
Big
feet. Jeremy was sure those weren't bears the campers had seen, but the investigators had never confirmed anything, and Jeremy knew his classmates would be brutal if he brought it up.

“While we're looking for them, I bet they're paying attention to us. They're probably online,” he said instead.

“Try www.bigfoot.com,” said Lucy Jones with a smirk.

“If they've gotten better at hiding, shouldn't we have gotten better at seeking?” asked Anthony. “Don't we have infrared sensors?”

“Bigfoots wouldn't show up on sensors any differently than humans,” Jeremy said.

“What about drones or something?”

The back of Jeremy's neck prickled underneath his collar. He flicked his hair off his face again. “If you were a
Bigfoot,” he said, keeping his voice level, “don't you think you'd be smart enough to figure out how to not be spotted by a drone?”

“The one in the picture doesn't look too smart,” said Austin, hunching over, imitating the Bigfoot's pose and expression. Everyone laughed.

With his face burning, Jeremy dropped the remote on Miss March's desk—although “threw” might have been a more accurate word. “I'm done,” he said, and stalked back to his seat. He knew how his afternoon would proceed: the call to the principal's office; the recess spent with the school counselor, Mrs. Dannicker, who had a sloping shelf of a bosom and whose sweaters were usually dotted with dabs of egg or tuna salad from her lunch. Mrs. Dannicker would ask him to discuss his interest in Bigfoots, and the difference between a “hobby” and an “obsession,” and how was he getting along with his classmates, which would eventually lead to the question she always asked him, the one Jeremy thought was the only one she actually cared about: “How are things at home?”

At his desk Jeremy stared down at his textbooks and imagined how it must have been for the Bigfoots. One day they were living in villages and towns, friends and neighbors to the humans. Then the talk started.

They don't go to church,
the ministers would say from their pulpits.

They don't come to school,
the teachers would note.

They never wear shoes,
the women would whisper.
Maybe, when they're alone, not even clothes!

Why are they so big? Why are they so hairy?

They're not like us
. Just like Jeremy wasn't like his exceptional brothers. He was lucky, he thought, that his parents still fed him and clothed him and let him live in their house, instead of displaying him in a cage and making people pay for a look.

Step right up to see the perfectly average boy,
he thought, and scrubbed the heels of his hands against his stinging eyes as the bell rang. He heard his classmates gathering their books, chattering and laughing, and Lucy Jones saying, “I can't believe he did the exact same report again!”

When he looked up, the classroom lights had been turned back on, the room had emptied, and Miss March was sitting at the desk next to his. If she'd been angry (because he had, basically, repeated his project from the previous spring), if she'd been bored, if she'd threatened to flunk him, that all would have been fine. But Miss March looked concerned, the way his mother looked, on the rare occasions when she noticed him . . . like at Ben, when
he'd gotten a concussion during the state semifinals, or at Noah, when
Nature
had asked him to rewrite his paper on stellar parallax before they'd publish it. Miss March's eyes were soft, and her voice was very gentle when she spoke.

“I apologize for your classmates,” she said. “They should have listened to you with more respect.”

Jeremy shrugged and started to gather his books. He didn't want sympathy, especially not from a teacher. Miss March put her hand on his arm. “I don't know if I've ever mentioned this in class, but I had a twin sister.”

Jeremy swallowed a sigh and readied himself for Well-Meaning Grown-Up Speech #37: You're Special Too.

“She was different than I was,” Miss March continued.

Of course she was,
Jeremy thought.
Smarter. Faster. Stronger. Better.

“She had multiple sclerosis—do you know what that is?”

Startled, Jeremy shook his head. This speech wasn't going where he'd imagined.

“It's a disease. People who have it sometimes can't walk or talk. They look different. My sister used a wheelchair, and she could communicate, but her speech wasn't clear. Most people didn't understand her.” Miss March looked
away, toward the window. “Most people didn't try.”

In the light from the windows, Jeremy saw that his teacher's white hair was fine, that her pink lipstick had worked its way into the tiny lines around her top lip.

“I know what it's like to feel like you're the child your parents forgot about. Between my sister's medical issues—the doctors and the therapy and all of it—it felt sometimes like I wasn't even there. Like I could be turning somersaults, or standing on my head in the middle of the kitchen, and my mom would say, ‘Did Stephanie eat her lunch?' and my dad would say, ‘I was on the phone with the insurance company about reimbursements.' ” Miss March managed a smile. “But I worked hard to carve out my own niche—do you know what that means?—and I made some good friends.” She patted Jeremy's arm. “It took time, but I found my way.”

Jeremy wondered if Miss March had noticed that he had no friends among his classmates, that all the kids, even the troublemakers like Austin and the lazy lumps like Hayden Morganthal, thought he was a weirdo and a freak . . . and these were kids who'd known him his whole life. How would time help?

“You'll be fine,” she said, and Jeremy nodded and zipped up his backpack and put it over his shoulders before he
thought to ask, “What happened to your sister?”

Miss March had been straightening her stacks of paper. At Jeremy's question, she went very still. “She died,” she said after a moment. “When we were—when she was sixteen.”

Jeremy didn't know what to say to that. He'd hardly thought of teachers as having once been children, let alone children to whom terrible things happened. “Have a good weekend,” he managed, and she gave him a sad smile, and then he was out the door, walking fast, with his head down and his thumbs hooked under his backpack straps.

The kids at school would never understand him, and it would probably take his parents a few weeks to notice if he ran away from home (“Honey, does it seem like there's more food left over from dinner?” he could hear his mother asking. “Should we call someone?” His dad would think for a minute, then shrug).

He would keep looking. He had one friend, one friend who believed him, and that was enough. He would continue his research and his explorations. He'd find a Bigfoot, and when he did, his parents, his classmates, his teachers, and the whole world would know his name.

A
LICE STEPPED OUT OF LEE'S
car and into the drowsy late-summer heat, thinking that her new school strongly resembled a dilapidated summer camp. The big, dark log-cabin lodge sat slumped on top of the hill. Lush vegetable gardens edged up against soccer fields with raggedy nets in the goals. Down a short slope was a lake with a half dozen banged-up canoes and battered kayaks pulled up onto the sandy shore, and a stack of sun-bleached, stained, and fraying life jackets were piled beside them. Alice remembered something from the school's welcoming letter, about how their “picturesque new lakeside campus” would “let our learners and
guides live in harmony with nature, with the elements of earth and air and water, and the cycles of the moon.” The school's founders emphasized that they tried to recycle or “freecycle” everything they needed, “sourcing” material from donations and barter. She wondered if any of the parents had gotten here, taken one look at how shabby everything was, and immediately asked for their money back.