The Littlest Bigfoot (19 page)

“By yourself?” Septima asked. She kept her voice gentle, but her hands were working, plucking at her apron or the fur on her fingers.

“I want to be alone,” said Millie, taking care to sound extra pouty. “But I would like a small snackle.” Her mother filled her packsack with treats from the feasting, and Millie walked down to the lake, glad it was a cloudy night. The canoe was right where she'd left it the last time. It was the work of just a few minutes to slide the boat into the water and start paddling toward the opposite shore.

Alice was waiting for her, dressed in a long coat with a belt, a banded hat, and a pair of dark sunglasses that were pushed up on her forehead so she could see. “Millie! You're here!” she said, and smiled and gave Millie a hug before looking her over, seeing Millie as she really was, in all her furred glory, for the first time. “Wow.” Millie had fashioned a kind of hood with a collar out of a piece of brown velvet from Septima's scrap bag. She wore Florrie's work boots and carried one of Old Aunt Yetta's walking sticks.

“Are you an Ewok?” Alice asked.

“An Ewok,” Millie confirmed. The No-Furs usually guessed “Bigfoot” when they saw the larger littlies trick-or-treating. When they saw Millie, they typically said
“Ewok,” which, Millie had learned on-the-line, were the small, teddy bear–ish creatures that lived on a made-up moon called Endor and whose presence had ruined a movie called
Return of the Jedi
. Millie smoothed her fur as Alice circled her.

“Wow,” she said. “That is some costume.”

“The Yare are excellent seamstresses,” Millie said. This was true—at least, according to the customers who'd posted reviews on Etsy.

“Come on,” Alice said. “We're going to trick-or-treat on campus first, and then they're taking us into town.”

Millie marched up the hill, following her friend, who adjusted her pace so that Millie didn't have to struggle to keep up. The air was crisp, and smelled like autumn, like fallen leaves and fireplaces, and Millie couldn't stop looking at the No-Fur kids in their costumes. Some were dressed as superheroes, with boots and capes and papier-mâché shields. There was a boy whose hair looked like it had been electrified, with his face painted white and his lips painted black, and a girl in an enormous white hoopskirted gown and a matching white hat with a green satin brim. From the way Alice avoided her, Millie guessed that this was the infamous Jessica, who'd tricked Alice into thinny-dipping and taken her picture.

“I should warn you,” Alice said. “The stuff the learning guides hand out is probably going to be, like, no-bake kale cookies or something.”

Millie nodded. She didn't care about the candy and had her small snackle and a thermos of tea in case she got hungry. She looked at her friend. “And what are you being?”

Alice sighed, pulling her hat down tightly over her forehead. “I'm the Invisible Man.”

Millie, assuming this was another reference to a book she hadn't read or a TV show she'd never seen, simply nodded. After hearing what had happened to Alice, she understood why her friend would want to be invisible.

“Hi, Alice!” said a girl dressed all in white, with a white helmet and face mask, who was carrying a slim, silver sword.

“Who's your friendb?” snuffled a girl in a fancy, flounced green dress, with a green wig and green face paint.

“This is Millie. What are you dressed as?” Alice asked.

The green girl sniffled. “I'mdb mucus,” she said, looking glum. She turned to Millie. “Are you fromdb Standish?”

“I'm camping with my family, on the other side of the lake,” Millie said. She couldn't believe she was actually
talking to not just one but three No-Fur girls, and that, so far, they seemed to be accepting her as one of their own. Except the one all in white, who was studying her curiously.

“That's an amazing costume,” she said, walking in a slow circle around Millie, who felt her fur begin to bristle. The girl reached out to stroke her, and Millie forced herself not to flinch or tell the other girl—Riya, she thought—how rude it was to touch someone's fur without permission. “Where's the zipper?” Riya asked.

“Sewn into the seam,” Millie squeaked.

“She's an Ewok,” Alice said curtly. Millie sensed something, some mixture of fear and sympathy in the other girls' attitude toward Alice, the way they seemed to choose their words carefully when they talked to her, the way they held their bodies.

Alice isn't like them,
Millie thought, and for some reason the idea gave her a thrill. She liked the idea that Alice didn't belong entirely to the No-Fur world, that she belonged, instead, to Millie.

The four girls approached the first of the learning guides' cottages. “Trickb-or-treatdb!” called Taley, knocking on the door. It was opened by a soft-voiced, mild-looking person named Clem, who praised their
costumes and offered them carob-coconut bars, before frowning at Riya. “I thought Phil and Lori said no weapons?”

“I have permission,” Riya said crisply . . . but when he'd shut his door she'd smiled and said, “Actually, I don't.”

Millie held open her sack, accepted her treat, and with Alice by her side, and with Riya and Taley arguing aloud whether Riya's everyday fencing gear constituted a costume, trotted off in a swelling crowd of No-Fur kids dressed as clowns and peacocks and ballet dancers and mummies and things Millie couldn't begin to identify. The boys were whooping as they ran from cabin to cabin; the girls were chattering, complimenting each other on their hair and their clothes. As a girl strutted by in high heels, followed by a pair of giggling bedsheet ghosts, Millie, feeling nervous, grabbed Alice's hand.

“Are you okay?” asked Alice, who looked puzzled but friendly and nice.
She won't hurt me,
Millie told herself.
She's not like they say.

“I am okay,” said Millie, and made herself let go and follow Alice up the three steps and onto a seat on the school bus, which roared to life and went lurching down the road. The boys were singing, “Ninety-nine bottles of root beer on the wall,” and the girls were pulling mirrors
out of purses and pockets to inspect themselves. Millie shut her eyes and leaned her head back against the pebbled plastic of the bus seat, trying to make her knees stop quivering, thinking that working her way into No-Fur society was the first necessary step toward her eventual stardom.

I made it. I'm here,
she thought.
I'm really here.

F
OR ALICE IT WAS THE
best Halloween that she could remember: running through the streets, shouting and laughing, with the crisp air reddening her cheeks and her bag sagging with candy, with her friend at her side.

In the crush of kids in costume, none of the learning guides noticed that Millie was a stranger or asked where she'd come from or if she had permission to be there. Alice enjoyed a pleasant daydream that she could keep her costume on and it would make her actually invisible; that she could slip through the world unseen and unnoticed until she found a place where she felt welcome.

At eleven o'clock the learning guides herded the kids back onto the bus. Alice and Millie sat down on a seat together behind Riya and Taley. Alice had always thought there was something a little strange about Millie, about the way she spoke, and how shy she was about letting Alice see her, and that night it was even more noticeable: the way she kept looking around, staring at Riya and Taley like she was trying to memorize everything about them, the way she'd lean toward them or toward Jessica Jarvis and her crew, like she didn't want to miss a single word they were saying. It was almost as if she'd never seen people before. But, of course, she hadn't seen many people, Alice thought. She'd been homeschooled in a small town with kids in the same religion. Of course this was all weird and strange.

Alice looked out the window and sighed, and she and Millie said, “I wish,” at the exact same moment.

Alice looked at her friend. “You wish what?”

“I am wishing I could be in a place like this, with people.” Millie's eyes—Alice saw that even her eyelids were furry—were half-shut, her mouth curved in a sweet smile. “I am wishing my mother and father would let me . . . you know.” She gestured at the kids on the bus. “I am wishing they'd let me do things like this, with other
kids. Different kids, not just Yare ones. I am wishing they'd let me go.”

“Tell me more about your town,” she said to Millie, hoping to change the subject. She realized, as she said it, that there was a lot she didn't know about her new friend, including her last name or the exact location of where she lived when she wasn't camping.

“Oh, it's just a regular kind of place,” said Millie, waving one furry hand toward the window. Alice wondered how she'd gotten fur to stick on her hands. Spirit gum?

Millie, meanwhile, was unzipping her backpack. “I am so hungry,” she announced. “Are you hungry?” She handed Alice a sandwich made with bread that looked homemade and took one for herself.

Alice took a bite, then closed her eyes. The jam tasted like essence of blackberries, sweetened with real sugar, not honey or maple syrup, which was what the Center usually used. Except for Kate's secret stash, there was no white sugar anywhere in the kitchen, and the learners usually had fruit or granola for dessert. “This is so good.”

“It's blackberry jam,” said Millie, who was talking with her mouth full. She swallowed, wiped her lips, and said, “My mother and I pick berries every summer and we put up jam ourselves.”

Alice bit into the fresh bread and the sweet jam, humming with pleasure. Millie smiled, and Alice smiled back, and Millie started her chatter, describing some episode of
Friends
where Chandler's name was misspelled on the label of his
TV Guide
. Alice could feel herself relaxing, her shoulders descending from their usual spot up around her ears, her belly unclenching, her fingers resting loosely in her lap instead of forming fists. She never felt like Millie was making judgments about her broad shoulders and big feet and wild hair . . . or that, if she was judging, she was deciding in Alice's favor. She'd complimented Alice's size and strength and speed so many times, had been so open in her admiration about Alice's body, that Alice could almost believe Millie was telling the truth and that the way Alice looked and acted were okay.

Besides, Millie was constantly saying that Alice had saved her life. “You couldn't have done that if you were some weak little puny wisp,” she'd say. That gave Alice a warm, happy glow, a feeling that, maybe, for the first time in her life, she had found a friend, someone who liked her because she was who she was. Not Lee, whose job it was to drive her; not Riya and Taley, who had to be polite because they lived so close together; and not her granny, who was obligated to love her because they were related, but a real friend.

“Try these,” Millie said, passing Alice more neatly wrapped packages, which turned out to be buttermilk doughnuts and dried plum hand-pies with wedges of goat cheese.

“Oh my God,” sighed Alice. “This is the best food I've had in forever.”

Millie, who always had a hundred questions, inquired, “What are your favorite snackles?”

“Well, now they're hand-pies,” Alice said. “At home, all Felicia lets me have are baby carrots and grapes. At school we usually just get hummus.” She frowned, thinking first about the garlicky beige glop that had tasted okay the first five or six times they'd served it and now felt like mortar in her mouth; then about the way her mother would watch her, perching casually on one of the chairs at the breakfast bar and trying to pretend she wasn't taking note of every single thing Alice ate.

“But that's terrible!” said Millie.

Alice, laughing, asked, “Do you want to hear the menu at the Center?” When Millie nodded, she said, “For breakfast every day we get whole-grain cereal with raisins.”

“I hate raisins,” said Millie with a shudder. “They are, like, grapes that something terrible has happened to, and
instead of being grateful that they survived, they're just shriveled up and mad.”

“I don't like them either,” Alice said. “But at least they're a little sweet. Lori and Phil don't believe in refined sugar.”

“They don't believe in eating it or don't believe it exists?” asked Millie.

“Oh, they believes it exists,” said Alice, who'd heard from Kate that Lori kept a secret stash of chocolate-covered orange peel in a locked desk drawer in her office, “but they don't believe it's good for us, so we're not allowed to have any sweets.”

“That,” said Millie solemnly, “is a tragedy.”

“I know,” said Alice.

“Tell herdb aboutdb lunch,” said Taley, who, along with Riya, had turned around to join the conversation.