The Littlest Bigfoot Read Free Page A

impediment, an embarrassment, an unwanted gift that had arrived without receipt and couldn’t be returned. Her parents would shove her under a bunk bed if they thought that no one would notice she was gone. Maybe it was just that at home she knew exactly what kind of awful to expect, whereas each school was a revelation, a new adventure in misery and isolation.
    Alice knew her mother’s dream: that one year she’d come home from school transformed into the kind of slender, smiling, appropriate girl they could have loved. So far it hadn’t happened. As much as Alice wanted to please her parents—to see her father look happy, to make Felicia’s painted lips curve into a smile—she also wanted to run in the sunshine, to play in the dirt or the mud puddles or the snow, to eat the warm chocolate chip cookies that her Granny baked during her visit every summer, and to ruin her shoes by letting the waves wash over her feet. As hard as she tried, Alice could never stop being herself. She couldnever make herself be the kind of girl they’d love.
    Standing on the corner, sweating in the late-summer heat, still feeling the cool imprint of Felicia’s cheek on her head, Alice kicked at the corner of the monogrammed trunk and shut her eyes, listening for the sound of her parents’ car. A battered white van cruised slowly down the street, then backed into an illegal parking spot and sat there with its flashers on.
    Alice rummaged in her bag for another butterscotch and wondered why her parents kept hiring Miss Merriweather, who’d been wrong about seven different schools in a row. She wondered too whether her new school, the Experimental Center, was as weird as it sounded in the letter the school had sent to parents, which began:
    We humbly acknowledge the profound act of surrender it will be to entrust to us your INCREDIBLE YOUNG HUMANS, the most unspeakably precious beings in the world. It’s an honor we take with the utmost gravity, that we are part of the village that will raise them. We will strive to teach the values of honesty, integrity, and respect for themselves and the world to your daughters, your sons, and your non-gender-conforming offspring. We promisean atmosphere of inclusivity and respect, where hierarchies are nonexistent, where age and grades don’t matter as much as the understanding that we all have things to learn from one another.
    Alice shook her head, thinking that getting rid of her every September was not an act of profound surrender for her parents, but one of great relief. And what could anyone learn from me? she wondered. How to break combs with your hair? How to outgrow your entire wardrobe every three months? How to make your mother cry by spilling grape juice on her new suede boots, and then shrink her favorite white cashmere dress in the dryer until it was too small for even a Barbie doll because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell her that you’d gotten juice on that, too?
    Alice closed her eyes, testing herself. She could hear the wheeze of a city bus as it heaved itself around the corner, a taxicab that needed a new muffler, one of those electric cars that barely made a sound. No Lee, though. She smiled, remembering how Lee hadn’t believed her when she told him that she could always hear his car, specifically; how he’d made her stand on the sidewalk, blindfolded (with his wife watching) while he circled the block. Five times he’d driven past Alice, surrounded by taxis and buses andmotorcycles and even other Town Cars like his, and every time Alice was able to pick out his car as it went by.
    That morning, Alice waited patiently, eyes closed, until she heard the car whispering up to the curb.
    â€œReady to go, Allie-cat?” Lee asked. The trunk’s lid popped open, and he started hoisting her luggage off the sidewalk.
    Alice tried to help. Lee waved her away, saying, the way he always did, “You know I need my