The Littlest Bigfoot by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œI 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?
    â€œYou’ll be fine,” she said, and Jeremy nodded and zipped up his backpack and put it over his shoulders before hethought 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.

CHAPTER 4

    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 andguides 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.
    The sound of drums echoed through the humid air. Across the soccer field, a tall, stick-skinny man was banging on a set of bongo drums, and a short, plump woman whose face was painted orange was doing a kind of twirling, skipping dance beside him.
    â€œWelcome to Eden! The Land