The Bigfoot Files Read online

  She’s a travel photographer.

  She’s a corporate lawyer with bicoastal clients.

  She’s an artist with a case of wanderlust that parenthood never cured.

  But the truth was written somewhere in her file; Ms. Palmer would find out if she lied. And then there would be more questions.

  Ms. Palmer waited. Why did guidance counselors have to look so kind, so dependable? Everything about her seemed soft to Miranda — a pillow to hug, a hammock to fall into. Someone to spill all her secrets to.

  Even the secrets she kept locked away from herself.

  “Do you know what cryptozoology is?”

  Ms. Palmer frowned. “Like the Loch Ness Monster? Things like that?”

  “Yes.” Humiliation flowed through Miranda’s body in a polluted river. “My mom does that. She looks for creatures — last week we were in Ohio.”

  “What’s in Ohio?”

  “The Frogman.” Burrow into the ground, Miranda instructed herself, and don’t stop until you’re on the other side of the earth. “Half man, half —”

  “Frog.” Ms. Palmer laughed once, a gust of air. “That sounds like a fun job. Does she work for a zoo?”

  “No,” Miranda said. That would be respectable. “She runs a blog — The Bigfoot Files. She charts sightings, organizes searches, that sort of thing.” She pursed her lips. Those were all the details she was willing to offer — she already wished she could erase the name of the website from this conversation. The last thing she wanted was for Ms. Palmer to look it up.

  “Anyway,” Miranda concluded, “she has to travel a lot.”

  “And you don’t have a sitter you can stay with? Or family?” Ms. Palmer didn’t ask about Miranda’s father. That, too, would be in her file.

  No, Miranda had nothing like that. Babysitters cost money, and family, well . . . family members were supposed to be the ones who stuck around when the good times had run out and only the muck was left.

  Miranda and her mother had no such people.

  “Can you talk to your mom?” Ms. Palmer said. “See if she’d be willing to cut back on her travel, at least during the school year? It’s important that you’re here for classes —”

  “I know.” Miranda hated when she snapped, when she knew she was acting like a stereotype of her age. But she hated it more when adults explained things as if they were simple, when in fact they were impossibly messy. They handed her a skein of tangled yarn, then wondered why she wasn’t wearing it as a sweater.

  Ms. Palmer studied her. “Are you afraid to talk to your mom?”

  Miranda was so surprised by the question, she nearly laughed. “No,” she said, and it was the truth. Not scared of her mother. Not at all. That was akin to being afraid of a muffin. A crayon. A toadstool.

  Ms. Palmer leaned back in her chair. Miranda made herself small as a beetle as the counselor studied her — hands folded calmly in her lap, lungs bringing in air and returning it with a steady rhythm. No detail at all that would give her away. Nothing that would let Ms. Palmer know how much Miranda wanted to reach for a hair.

  “You only have two absences left before you face losing credit for this term,” Ms. Palmer said, and Miranda’s heart crash-landed in her stomach. No credit meant her grades would be suspended. Liquefied. Her end-of-term report card would bear those two dreaded letters — NC — instead of those bright, clean As sweeping down the margin, unbroken, like a mountain chain.

  “And you know what that would mean: even if you did get into the camp”— if, Ms. Palmer said if —“you’d have to turn it down to make up your absences at summer school.”

  When Miranda was dismissed, she stood on gelatin legs and muttered something resembling a good-bye. She headed back into the still-empty hallway, closing the counselor’s door behind her.

  If. She’d said if.

  The hours before school started had always felt like Miranda’s secret. A magic time.

  Now the building seemed eerie without the kids talking, running, pulsing through like blood cells. The halls were just empty veins, and they felt thinner now, too. Less room to breathe. Miranda’s thoughts rattled around in her brain, echoing, colliding into each other, entire universes.

  A shoo-in for the leadership camp, Ms. Palmer called her — and the counselor was not generous with compliments.

  But she had also said if.

  There could be no if. Miranda had to go to that camp. She had to.

  In the meantime, she sank back down among familiar shadows — the shadow of a tower of assignments whose height was incompatible with the amount of time she had left to finish them. The shadow of the teachers with whom she would have to bargain, again, for extensions. The shadow of her cringing and squirming and loathing herself for needing the extra days.

  Looming over them all was the biggest shadow, the one she could never outrun, the one with a mouth and a spine and a thrumming heartbeat — the shadow of the knowledge that she would never get it all done, she would never get caught up. No matter how fast she worked, no matter how hard she hustled — next week would be Alkali Lake. The week after that — Hope, Idaho. The absences, piling up like beach trash.

  Until something changed, every day would be a hustle.

  Miranda pulled out hair after hair while she raced through her homework, and on every strand she made a furious promise: No more missed classes. No more extensions. No more meetings with Ms. Palmer where the counselor cross-examined her about her life and about her mother, getting dangerously close to the truth.

  Between yanks and sentence diagrams, her mind galloped over happy terrain: daydreams of the leadership camp. Two months of catered meals and clean, matching bedsheets. Two months of grown-ups acting like grown-ups. Two months with two thousand miles and at least that many imaginary creatures between her and her mother.

  Perfect, Ms. Palmer had said. And Miranda would be.

  School always ended too quickly.

  The hours flapped past like hurried birds in a cold sky. All too soon, Miranda sat outside, beneath the old bur oak tree, her backpack full enough with books and papers and expectations that it could sink her to the bottom of a river. She should have unzipped it at once and finished her vocabulary sheets, but instead she leaned her head against the trunk, the scars of previous generations’ initials carved into its bark, and allowed herself the briefest, smallest moment to simply breathe.

  Breathe and watch the tree.

  Boughs, blackened green against the blue of sky. Leaf after leaf, layer after layer, until the canopy was thick enough to bury the clouds.

  Anything could be hiding behind these leaves.

  She stiffened. That wasn’t one of her own thoughts, born of her own mind. That thought belonged to someone else.

  Even something as simple as the leaves of a tree had been ruined for her.

  She looked around — at real life unfolding before her. At the last of the buses driving away. At the faculty parking lot slowly emptying, teachers and staff going home to cook dinner, to tend to household chores, to zone out in front of the television until bedtime — things normal people did. Stray boys used the near-empty parking lot to cruise on longboards, despite the signs posted everywhere forbidding it.

  Miranda squinted — she’d known all of these boys once, back when they were all little and their families had rotated carpools to get them to kindergarten. Back when Miranda’s mother worked a nine-to-five, and different moms would sometimes watch her after school for an hour or two.

  Back before everyone in her mother’s life dropped them like old sandwiches.

  Now the boys stretched tall and lurpy, like their bones had grown faster than their skin. She had grown, too, she knew, but somehow when she was around these boys, she felt like she hadn’t changed at all. Like she was still freckled and pigtailed, still three feet tall, still starry-eyed. Still telling her outlandish stories — and still believing every word.

  She hadn’t been that girl in a long time.

 
; One of them saw her and, after a moment, waved. A dash of his hand; he could have been swatting away a bug.

  Miranda pretended not to see.

  To-do list, Miranda typed on her phone.

  Proofread flyer for Science Club sign-ups

  Finish bibliography for English

  After a moment, she added:

  Talk to Mom

  It was late summer — or early fall, depending on which side you were rooting for. Pockets of color were visible on the mountains, brushstrokes of faintest yellow and ochre and pink among the dark conifers. Chilly evenings stung when the sun went down, but a faux-July still made for sweltering days.

  A small season of its own, this season of change, of transition. Miranda always felt a burst of momentum at this time of year, a gentle push from the gods of new school terms and sharpened pencils and fresh starts.

  Not even the click and shift of September could make Miranda excited for this last item on her to-do list. She wasn’t afraid to talk to her mom. But that didn’t mean she wanted to. Indeed, she would rather — well, that was a list that could have gone on for miles, the number of things she’d rather do than talk to her mom.

  The oak leaves turned over, a soft breeze finding them above Miranda’s head. And beside her, something rustled the well-manicured hedges trimmed along the junior high building. Her pulse spiked and her breathing slowed, her back straightening against the trunk. All involuntary reactions, her body triggered by the sound of twigs snapping and the smell of fresh air.

  It’s nothing, she told herself. A squirrel or a bird.

  Her mind knew there was no such thing as monsters, but her body was slower to convince. When a pigeon hopped out between the bushes, she still exhaled harder than was necessary.

  It was always nothing.

  A trio of girls came out of the science room, one of them carrying a mushy, post-eruption papier-mâché volcano. Two of them were the Martinez twins, Alex and Carmen.

  The other girl was Emma.

  Miranda had a brief window in which to dodge them — to run back into the school, to hide in the baseball dugout, to climb up into the tree and make a nest, where she would live forever — but her dignity made her hesitate, and then it was too late.

  “Hi!” Carmen called.

  I didn’t hear her, Miranda told herself. I’m busy, I’m writing in my student planner, I’m working . . .

  And then she heard it:

  “Hey, Miranda.”

  Emma.

  She could never forget the timbre of Emma’s voice — rippling soft in the air, pretty as birdsong. Even after a whole summer without hearing it, Miranda knew it like she knew her own heartbeat.

  The girls walked toward the oak, and Miranda’s chances of avoiding them evaporated.

  What if Emma told them what happened?

  What if she’s coming over to confront me about it?

  What if they laugh at me?

  She put on her official student body president face: engaged mouth, listening eyes. “Oh, hi!”

  “Are you waiting for your mom?” Was that a barb in Emma’s words?

  Miranda skimmed her fingers along the straps of her backpack, letting them dance into the ends of her hair. “No, I was about to start walking.” Their rides will be here any minute, she reasoned, and then I’ll be free of them.

  Free of conversation. Free of questions.

  Free of trying to fill the space between Emma and herself with anything but this discomfort, gathering like dust.

  Her vocabulary sheet waited, unfinished in her backpack. Was there a word for this? A word for people who used to be friends, and then stopped?

  “You’re walking? All the way home?” Emma lived near Miranda, on the opposite side of town — in fact Miranda could still see Emma’s bedroom window from her own bedroom window.

  Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, Miranda would push aside her curtains and wait until Emma’s window went dark and her night-light snapped on — the rose-shaped one Emma kept by her bed, the one that made her whole room glow pink as sunset, each plastic petal the intense shade of the floribunda buds in Emma’s front yard. Then Miranda would snap off her own light and fall horizontal onto her covers and close her eyes.

  Somehow, on difficult nights, it was easier to find sleep if she pretended both of them were looking for it at the same time.

  Miranda pushed the subject elsewhere. “Was this your project?”

  Emma surveyed her volcano with a wrinkled brow. “Yep. All those hours painting these dumb little palm trees by hand, and Howard only gave me a B.”

  “Everyone knows Howard is a beast,” Alex said. “She never gives As. I made a lightbulb potato and she still docked me points for skipping a step in the scientific method.”

  “Which step?” Miranda asked.

  “Hypothesis,” she said. “Our brother did the same experiment when he was in her class, so it wouldn’t be fair to guess what would happen, right? I already knew.”

  The girls laughed. Miranda laughed. Emma glanced at her, happy blue eyes lit up like a carnival sky.

  Those eyes.

  You can do this, Miranda told herself. She didn’t know why Emma was speaking to her now, after all these months, why Emma was so smiley, so warm.

  Don’t mess this up. Don’t do or say anything weird. Nothing like what Mom would say.

  “What did you get?” Emma nudged Miranda and sent her heart into a tap dance.

  “Um, a ninety-nine.”

  “Wow,” the twins chorused.

  A ninety-nine, she wanted to repeat. As in missing one point. Not a solid one hundred, Miranda’s favorite number, the double zeroes like fat balloons full of air, the roundest, most perfect number in the grading system.

  “What was your project?” Alex asked.

  Miranda studied the way the blades of grass bent beneath Alex’s sandal, the spiky shadows it made on the sidewalk. “Oh. Um, I tracked the spread of an invasive species of borer beetles through a neighborhood’s trees.”

  The twins’ jaws dropped. “No wonder!” Carmen said.

  “Miranda’s brilliant,” Emma said.

  Miranda glowed with the memory of what it was like to hear someone say these things in this possessive way. To feel proud of your best friend’s accomplishments, responsible for her triumphs, to be equal partners in every high and low of her life, like you have a growth. Like you have a twin.

  “So you’re like a real scientist,” Carmen said. “Are you going to invent something?”

  “Build a robot?” Alex said. “Discover a new dinosaur?”

  “Maybe someday.” There was no limit for a girl who cared so much about her ranking in the district-wide science fair that she charted the reproductive habits and egg sac locations of the beetles for six months. Yes, she started plotting her project last spring, while still in sixth grade. A preemptive strike for her application to the leadership camp, and, for anyone who happened to be looking, a chance to do the scientific method right. To show that she could do science the right way.

  If you were going for perfect, you couldn’t afford any practice shots. Perfect didn’t believe in them.

  Carmen said, “You should come over! We’re making cookies.”

  “We live three blocks from here,” Alex said. “Emma’s coming, too.”

  Emma shifted the volcano in her arms and gave Miranda a ghost of a smile — but her eyes, Miranda noticed, were watching, hyperaware. Waiting.

  Remembering.

  “I can’t.” Sweat condensed in Miranda’s armpits. “My — my mom’s coming —”

  “You said you were walking,” Emma said gently, and Miranda’s insides flailed.

  For a politician, she sure was terrible at lying.

  Carmen linked her arm through Miranda’s. “Just call your mom when you get to our house.”

  The elbow crooked in hers made Miranda reel. Had it been this easy before, to make a friend?

  “What do you say, Prez?” Emma was looki
ng at her, right at her. Hope scratched against her rib cage.

  It had been easy to lose a friend, too. Her brain regurgitated the image at her like a sip of foul vinegar:

  Emma’s face, the last time Miranda talked to her.

  Emma’s cheeks, bright as fire when she made her escape from Miranda’s house.

  Emma’s steps down the porch reverberating in Miranda’s ears long after Emma was gone.

  Reality struck Miranda like a meteorite:

  What are you doing? You can’t go to their house. You can’t go to anyone’s house.

  And no one can come to yours.

  She made a big show of slapping her forehead. “I left something in my locker!”

  “What?” Emma asked.

  Miranda thought quickly. Lying to grown-ups was easy. They were so eager for you to say what they wanted to hear, they’d rearrange your words themselves if they had to.

  But kids saw through you. The three pairs of eyes on Miranda made her feel as sheer as the wind.

  “Student council stuff,” she blurted. There. Nice and ambiguous. And true, if they wanted proof. “You — you guys go on ahead.” Why were the words so hard to say? Why did they come with an aching in her throat, an unfairness in her chest? She wished, desperately, that she could be one of them. A normal girl, giggling with friends, gobbling up chocolate chip cookies, inviting people over on a whim. She wished she could be the kind of girl who says yes, who could go enjoy the normal bustle of someone else’s house.

  But she would never be such a girl.

  “Should we wait for you?” Alex said.

  Emma was silent, but the expression on her face — the one that said this is sad, but not surprising — said everything for her.

  “Uh, actually,” Miranda said, “I might have a family thing.”

  And before the girls could spot the punctures in her lies — the way she wrenched her hands, like she was trying to remove them from her wrists — she turned and practically ran back into the school, where she hid in the foyer and watched through the tinted windows as the girls walked away without looking back.

  What if that was my chance?

  What if she had been reaching out? Testing things? Opening a door?