The Littlest Bigfoot (9 page)

“What a dump,” she said, and tilted her nose a few degrees higher into the air. “This is even worse than that farm we were at last year.”

“Hey, your drivber almost hitb us,” Taley said.

The girl tossed her hair. “You were standing in the middle of the road.” She toed the dirt disdainfully. “Such as it is.” Pulling off her dark glasses, she turned toward Alice. “And you are . . . ?”

Alice cleared her throat. “Alice Mayfair.”

“She's frombd dNew York,” said Taley.

“Congratulations.” The girl didn't even try to sound sincere.

“You should be more careful,” said Alice, feeling suddenly protective toward her cabin mates. Riya, who read fencing books while she walked between sessions, would probably wander right into traffic if there'd been any traffic at the Center for her to wander into, and Taley was so congested all the time that she probably couldn't hear cars approaching.

“Oh, really?” sneered the girl. Then she whirled, her skirt flaring, at the sound of Phil and Lori approaching, and put on the fakest smile Alice had ever seen. “Hello, guides!” she caroled. “I'm sorry I'm so late, but I'm finally here!”

F
OR YEARS JEREMY'S PARENTS, MARTIN
and Suzanne, clung to the idea that their youngest son was a musical prodigy. It had started when, in kindergarten, the music teacher had scribbled “shows promise!” beneath Jeremy's “Satisfactory” grade in chorus. Martin and Suzanne had seized on those two words with panicked desperation.

“Music,” said Martin.

“Of course!” said Suzanne, and sighed deeply in relief.

They'd ushered little Jeremy into the dining room, a room they hardly ever used unless there were important matters to discuss or big decisions to be made. This was
the room where Noah eventually decided between MIT and Caltech, the room where Ben would sit and meet with the college coaches who'd come calling.

“You are a musical prodigy!” his mother announced. “A genius,” she added, after Jeremy just stared.

Jeremy might have just been a little kid, but he knew two things. The first was that, to keep his parents happy, he needed to be a standout in something. The second was that he was pretty sure he wasn't a musical prodigy; he was just okay at music, not great. But his parents were gazing at him with such love and such hope—the way he was used to seeing them look at his brothers—that Jeremy wanted to be that star they'd hoped for, a boy that they could love.

The oboe had been his father's suggestion. Jeremy had requested guitar lessons, but his parents told him that the oboe was more unusual and that Jeremy's mastery of a difficult instrument would give him more opportunities at youth orchestras and local symphonies and, eventually, at colleges.

“If there are six violinists and only one oboist, you're a shoo-in,” his father explained.

“But what if I'm the best violinist?” Jeremy asked. He didn't want to play the violin—he wanted to play the guitar—but even a violin had to be better than an oboe.

Martin had frowned. “Oboist? Oboe player? Hon, do you know what it is?”

His parents went off to consult a dictionary. Jeremy noticed that his father hadn't even considered the possibility that Jeremy might be the best at something. Maybe they believed he was a prodigy, but it also seemed like they were, as his papa Frank liked to say, “hedging their bets” (“That's like when you pray for rain but dig a well while you're praying,” Papa Frank had explained).

It was months before Jeremy learned to blow into the oboe's reed and produce a tone that sounded like music and not like a small animal moaning out its death throes. He'd practiced for an hour a day, grimly mastering scales and simple tunes, Purcell's “Air” and “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” He tried not to be hurt when Shayna, the family's sheltie, crawled underneath his bed when he practiced, and he ignored his brothers when they covered their ears and offered him money and comic books in exchange for quiet.

“Very good,” his teacher would tell him. Mr. McCrae, who played seven instruments, including the bagpipes, would praise Jeremy's diligence and hard work. “Nice effort,” he'd say. “Keep it up!” Jeremy knew that wasn't the same as saying he'd played well, or that what he was playing was beautiful.

For a few years Jeremy's efforts with the oboe seemed to be enough to keep his parents happy. “And Jeremy's our musician,” his mother would say after she got through describing Ben's latest feats on the football field or how Noah was planning on spending the summer working on some arcane proof with a mathematics professor from Princeton.

Jeremy played with the local youth orchestra and spent his summers in music camps. Finally, when he turned ten, his parents made some calls and got Jeremy a chance to apply for the Pre-College Division program at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City. Jeremy was instructed to prepare two pieces of music for the panel, and so, in between rounds of Mario Kart and reading Steven Universe comics, he'd practiced “Hedwig's Theme” from the Harry Potter movies and “Sweet Child o' Mine” by Guns N' Roses, which he'd arranged himself.

His parents were practically glowing as they loaded up the car for the two-hour trip to the city. While Jeremy's father parked the car, Suzanne whisked Jeremy to a door where someone had Scotch-taped a sign that read “Auditions.” Past the door was an auditorium, with rows of empty seats in front of a brilliantly lit stage. Up front, in the very first row, were an older man in a tweedy suit, a
younger woman in a floor-sweeping dress with a colorful embroidered top, and another woman, middle-aged, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, hunched over a yellow legal pad.

“Jeremy,” called the tweedy man in a rich, rolling voice. “If you would.”

With sweat-slicked hands, Jeremy unfolded his sheet music and forced his wooden legs to deliver him to the stage. Even before he set his lips on the reed, even before he'd blown the first note, he knew there was no way that Juilliard would take him. He couldn't do anything new or special . . . and he could tell, in just ten minutes of being at Juilliard, that it was a place for rare and special people. His parents, his brothers, they belonged in places like this. Jeremy should be here only to deliver someone's lunch or take out their trash.

He finished “Sweet Child o' Mine” with a little swagger, knowing he had nothing left to lose. The tweedy man gave him a curt nod, and the woman in jeans looked over his head, toward the door.

“How'd it go?” asked Jeremy's father, who was waiting outside, keeping an eye on the car, which he'd had to park illegally.

“Fine!” said Suzanne in a voice that was too high
and too bright. Jeremy felt the air shift as his parents exchanged a glance. They'd never say anything out loud, and they'd try to treat him the same, but he knew that something had changed, permanently and profoundly. He had disappointed them . . . and he didn't know how to fix it, unless it turned out that there was something he was great at, and he was almost positive that there wasn't.

Back home, he'd put his oboe, in its hard plastic case, on a high shelf in his closet. Then he'd gone for a walk in the woods. Head down, hands in his pockets, ten-year-old Jeremy wondered if his parents could love him if he was just ordinary, if he never turned into a superstar or a genius the way his brothers had.

He'd walked for miles and had been deep in the woods, sauntering along, trying to guess what his parents would make him try next, and which sport would be the least humiliating, when he heard a rustling sound.
Bird,
he thought. Maybe a squirrel or fox. From the corner of his eye he saw a flash of brown, something much bigger than a squirrel or a fox, something bigger, even, than a man. It was almost bear-size, standing upright on two legs, moving lightly and very fast. What on earth . . . ?

Jeremy started running, sounding like an army on the move as he trampled over sticks and leaped over logs.
The thing up ahead of him was man-shaped, but much larger, with a hat on its head and boots on its feet and some kind of pack on its back, but Jeremy knew that it wasn't a human when it turned sideways and he saw the fur on its face and hands.

The problem was, when Jeremy saw the creature, the creature also saw Jeremy. Its eyes widened in fear, and it started to run. Jeremy gave chase.

“Hey!” he yelled, his breath burning in his chest, as the creature pulled farther and farther ahead. “Hey, wait! Wait! I'm not gonna hurt you!”

Either the creature didn't hear or didn't understand or believe him, because it kept running. Jeremy poured on one last desperate burst of speed, fumbled his phone out of his pocket, poked his passcode onto the touch screen, and began to film the thing that ran on ahead of him.

“Wait!” he yelled. “Wait, please!” The creature never slowed. Jeremy was left with nine seconds of blurry, bouncing footage that showed a large shadowy something slipping through the trees.

“Probably a camper,” said Martin when Jeremy, breathless with excitement, finally got his father to look up from his magazine back at home.

“But why would a camper run away from me like that?”

Martin shrugged. “Maybe he was a hunter. Going after deer without a permit.”

Jeremy showed his mom the footage. “That's nice, dear,” said Suzanne, pouring herself more wine, without looking at all.

Ben, in the middle of a set of jump squats, merely grunted. Noah was the one who talked to him about it . . . but he was far from encouraging.

“Look, J, Bigfoots are a legend,” he said.

“I know what I saw,” Jeremy repeated. He must have said those words a hundred times since he'd gotten home with his phone footage.

Noah reached over and pulled him into a rare one-armed side hug. “I know it's hard,” he began.

Jeremy squirmed away. He hadn't told either of his brothers about the audition disaster. His parents must have filled them in.

“It was real,” Jeremy said.

Noah looked dismayed. “Real,” Jeremy repeated. “And I'm going to prove it. And you'll be sorry you didn't believe me.”

He'd jumped off his brother's bed, grabbed his phone, run to his bedroom, and started googling “Bigfoot” and “sightings” and “Bigfoot is real.”

For weeks after his sighting, he'd immersed himself in the online world of Bigfoot hunters, paranormal activities, and UFO sightings. On his travels through the Internet's more obscure byways, he'd found people who believed all kinds of things—that an alien spaceship had crash-landed in New Mexico (and that the aliens from the spaceship were currently running all of the banks and newspapers in America); that the Loch Ness Monster had relocated to the Erie Canal; that NBA TV sent secret, coded messages during its
NBA GameTime
highlights program that ran every morning.

He'd gone to the Standish Public Library to try to find out if anyone had ever seen strange creatures in the local woods, and after the librarian, Ms. Putnam, decided he wasn't a troublemaker, she'd told him about the Standish Historical Society in Mrs. Bradon's garage. Mrs. Bradon had a hundred years' worth of back issues of the
Standish Times
on microfiche, along with a reader that she'd bought when the town library was renovated. Jeremy's goal was to get through ten years of newspapers every day. He was on 1912 when a front-page headline froze him in place, his hand still on the reader's dial, his Bigfoot notebook spread open on his lap.

“Milford Garrison Carruthers and the captive ‘Lucille,' ”
read the caption underneath the black-and-white drawing of a man standing next to a cringing figure in a cage. Milford Garrison Carruthers had an enormous waxed mustache that turned up at the tips and a watch chain that strained against his belly. He wore a black suit, a striped vest, and a pleased expression as he posed in front of the cowering thing. “The captive ‘Lucille' ” wore a long dress with a high neck and a bonnet that covered most of her face. Most, but not all of it. The illustration showed that her face was covered in short, dark fur. One furry hand held the handle of a parasol. The other rested lightly on the bars.

Sitting in a corner of Mrs. Bradon's garage, smelling old paper and mildewed lawn furniture and car wax, Jeremy felt his eyes burn as he read the story. “Carruthers, who has downed lions and rhinos in darkest Africa, captured the fearsome creature in the woods surrounding his Standish estate. He claims that the creature—or ‘Lucille,' as he has named her—is capable of intelligible speech, and announced plans to sell her to the Sanderson Traveling Circus, where she will be displayed as part of a roster of freaks, including albinos, midgets, giants, Siamese twins, and exotic animals.”

Jeremy turned the page to a handbill featuring a drawing of Lucille and inviting people to “come marvel
at one of Nature's true Oddities, one of God's Errors, a Freakish Hybrid of Human and Ape.”