Authors: K. A. Applegate
It’s hard not to stare when you think of what is squeezed inside that skull.
“When we were stuck back at the red light it looked like some guy was bothering you,” Melissa said. “Then he ran off. Was he bothering you?”
“Um … no,” I lied. “He was … he was just picking up something he dropped by the side of the road.”
Pathetic! I was such a lame liar.
I saw Chapman’s eyes watching me in the
rearview mirror. He looked like normal old Chapman. That’s the problem with Controllers. There is no outward clue. They look so normal.
“He went running off like the hounds of Hades were after him,” Chapman said.
“Did he?” I said in a squeaky voice. “I wasn’t looking. I guess it was the rain. That’s probably why he was running. There. You can turn left there.”
“I know where you live,” Chapman said.
I almost swallowed my tongue. Was that a threat? Did he suspect? Did he guess? Was he looking at me strangely?
Or was I just being paranoid?
He pulled up in front of my house. My heart was hammering, but I was determined to act casual. “Thanks for the ride, Mr. Chapman,” I said. “Hey, Melissa, I was totally serious about us getting together, okay?”
She nodded. “Sure, Rachel. Absolutely.”
I closed the car door behind me. I had escaped. I was alive. I’d probably just been imagining things.
Then I heard Melissa call out to me. “Hey. What happened to your shoes?”
I looked down. My shoes were in tatters, the result of my feet growing from a size six to a size three hundred in about five seconds flat.
“See?” I said, as lightly as I could. “I told you I needed to go shopping.”
Melissa just looked puzzled. Her father stared at me with an expression I could not read.
I was shaking like a leaf when I walked into my house. I headed upstairs to my room and stuffed my ripped shoes into the trash. Only then did I go back downstairs and say hi to my mom. She was at the kitchen table, half hidden by a pile of buff-colored books. My mother’s a lawyer, and she brings work home a lot so she can be around me and my two little sisters. She and my dad are divorced. I only get to see my dad a few days a month, so Mom feels guilty when she isn’t there for us.
“Hi, honey,” she said. Then she got her “suspicious mother” look. “How did you get home? You didn’t walk, did you? You were supposed to call me.”
“Melissa and her dad gave me a ride,” I said. Well, it was the truth. Sort of.
She relaxed and made a point of closing her book. “Sorry. You know I worry about you.”
“Where are Jordan and Sara?”
“They’re in the family room watching another one of those scary shows. Of course, tonight Jordan will be sleeping with her night-light on and Sara will end up in my bed, no doubt. I don’t know why they like things that frighten them. You were never that way.”
It almost made me laugh. I felt like saying, well, Mom, I don’t have to watch things that are scary; I am scary. Should have seen me a little while ago with tusks sticking out of my mouth and a three-foot-long nose.
What I really said was, “So, what’s for dinner?”
My mother winced. “Pizza? Chinese? Anything else you can order over the phone? I’m sorry, but I have this brief and I have court in the morning.”
“Mom,” I told her for maybe the thousandth time, “I don’t mind pizza. Sorry, but your cooking isn’t all that great, so it’s no big deal ordering pizza.”
“Well, at least get some veggies on it,” she said.
After dinner I called Jake.
“Do you want to come over?” I said. “I got that new album, if you want to listen to it.”
There was no album, of course. It’s just that we always have to be careful. Like I said, Jake’s brother, Tom, is a Controller. He could be listening on the extension. Then I called Cassie and Marco and told them the same cover story.
When they arrived I told them about Melissa, and then I told them about my little run-in with the creep. I did not tell them about Chapman driving me home. I don’t know why. But when I saw the way Marco exploded, I was glad I hadn’t told them the whole story.
“Oh, that was dumb! Dumb! DUMB!” Marco said. “What if that guy is a Controller?”
“He wasn’t a Controller,” I said scornfully. “Why would the Yeerks want to make a Controller out of a punk? They want people in positions of power.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Jake said. “Tom isn’t in a position of power.”
“And how about people driving by in their cars, or looking out of the windows of their homes?” Marco asked. “And what if he runs and tells someone about this girl who suddenly sprouted a trunk and tusks?”
“No one is going to believe a lowlife like that,” I said.
“His friends won’t believe him,” Marco said poisonously, “but a Controller
would
believe him. A Controller would know what it meant.”
Yes. A Controller would know what it meant. A Controller like Chapman. Or even Melissa, if she were one of them.
I felt sick. It was like my whole life was nothing but lies. Lies to Melissa. Lies to my mother. Now I was lying by not telling the others the whole truth.
“Okay, I screwed up,” I muttered.
“You sure did!” Marco crowed. “You screwed up so—”
“Marco, let it drop,” Jake said. “Rachel knows she made a mistake. We all make mistakes.”
Marco rolled his eyes.
Cassie gave me an encouraging smile. “It
was
dumb putting yourself in that position, Rachel. You need to be more careful. But still, I’d have paid my next ten allowances to see the look on that guy’s face.”
“The important thing is that it doesn’t sound like Rachel can use Melissa to get close to Chapman,” Jake said. “Not if she’s a Controller herself. And not if she’s going to continue being weird to Rachel.”
“I guess we’ll have to find another way,” I said quickly. “I mean, we know where Chapman’s office is. We know where his house is. Maybe we could just morph into some small animals and hide out.”
“Small animals like what?” Marco asked. “When Jake turned into a lizard he got stepped on. He lost his tail. Besides, what are you going to morph into? A cockroach?”
We all shuddered at the thought. The smallest, strangest thing anyone had morphed so far was when Jake had done the lizard. It creeped him out big-time. A roach would be even worse.
“The problem with being a cockroach,” I said, “aside from the fact that it is too gross to believe, is that roach senses might not even be useful to us. Can a roach ‘hear’ in a way that would make it possible for us to understand
what
we’re hearing?”
We all looked at Cassie. She’s sort of our expert on animals.
Cassie held up her hands. “Oh, come on. Like I know how a cockroach sees and hears? We don’t take care of roaches at the rehab clinic.”
We all sat there feeling glum for a few minutes. But I wasn’t going to let it drop. This was about more than just striking a blow at the Yeerks. I had to find out if Chapman suspected me. If he did, we were all in terrible danger.
I happened to glance over at my desk. There was my math homework, still not done. That didn’t make me feel any better. But then I looked at the photos I had mounted in one of those big frames with six different holes. One was of me with my mom and dad on a white-water rafting trip we took. One was of me visiting my dad at his job—he’s a weatherman on TV. We were grinning in front of a map of storms. Another picture was of Cassie and me riding horses side by side, with Cassie, as usual, looking like she’d spent her entire life in the saddle, and me looking like a total clown.
But the picture that got my attention was one taken a couple of years ago of Melissa and me.
I got up and went over to take the frame down. I stared hard at the picture.
“What?” Jake asked. “What is it?”
“It’s me and Melissa,” I said. “It was, like, her twelfth birthday, or some birthday, anyway, and we were out on her lawn playing with the present her dad gave her.”
“So what?” Marco asked.
“So …” I passed him the photograph. It showed me and Melissa in shorts. And between us, a small black-and-white kitten. “So her present was a cat.”
L
ook! A kitty door!” Jake pointed.
“Where?” Marco asked.
“See the lines of light? At the bottom of the regular door?”
“Oh, yeah,” Marco said. “I wish the moon were out. I can’t see a thing.”
The four of us were cowering behind a hedge that bordered the Chapmans’ lawn. They lived in a pretty normal-looking suburban home. You know: two stories, a garage, a lawn. Nothing to make you think that the person who lived there was part of a huge alien conspiracy to take over the world.
“Let me just ask you this,” Marco whispered. “Why did it have to be Chapman? I was afraid of Chapman even before we found out he was a Controller.”
“You’re not still upset over that detention he gave you?” I asked. “Look, if you’re going to listen to music in math class with an earphone hidden under your hair, you have to remember not to start singing along.”
“Yeah, that was only slightly stupid, Marco,” Jake agreed.
“I still say Chapman never would have given me a whole week’s detention if he were totally human.”
“I have a question,” Cassie said. “How do we get Melissa’s cat to come outside?”
We all looked at her.
“Good question,” I admitted.
“I mean, we could hide here in the bushes for a long time. But sooner or later the neighbors are going to notice.”
Tobias was sitting perched on a nearby tree branch. He was close enough to hear us.
I tried to remember. “It’s name is Fluffer, I remember that much. Fluffer McKitty.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Marco, of course.
I tried to remember back to when I used to hang
out with Melissa. “It’s black-and-white. You know, in patches.”
Tobias spread his wings, swooped silently down over our heads, and flapped away into the night.
“You know what we need?” I said. “We need another kitty. We should have thought of that. Then we could have the second cat call out to Fluffer.”
Marco turned to stare at me. “Meowfluffer, comeoutmeow, meow come and play meow?”
“Tobias morphed a cat very early on, didn’t he?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “His first morph. The first morph any of us did.”
“Rachel, you need to remember if you go in there tonight that you have to stay in cat character,” Cassie said. “Most people would just think it was weird if a cat acted strangely. But Chapman may be able to guess what’s going on if Fluffer suddenly starts acting un-catlike.”
“So, you’re saying I shouldn’t try eating with a fork or changing the channels on the TV?”
Everyone laughed—quietly and nervously, but it was laughter just the same.
Suddenly Tobias dropped out of the sky, then drifted over us in a lazy circle and called down,
He settled back on the branch. He was really an amazing animal, when you just looked at him as a bird and didn’t think about him being a boy trapped in there. I mean, the gaze of a hawk when it is looking right at you is incredibly intimidating. Gentle Tobias now had an expression that looked totally ferocious.
“You’re kidding. You found Fluffer?” I asked.
“Rats?” That got Marco’s attention. “Rats? Here? This is suburbia. I mean, it’s a lot better than where I live. They have rats?”
“Get a grip, Tobias,” Marco said. “Don’t start eating rats, all right? I don’t know if I can have someone who eats rats for a friend.”
Sometimes Marco is funny. Sometimes he goes too far. This was one of those times. “Shut up, Marco,” I growled.
“I ate a live spider,” Jake pointed out. “Does that mean you and I can’t be friends?” From his tone of voice I could tell he was angry, too.
None of us knew what Tobias was going through. None of us had ever been in morph for more than two hours. Tobias had been a hawk for more than a week.
Marco realized he’d been a jerk. “Well, yeah, I guess you’re right,” he muttered. “Besides, I’ve been known to eat eggplant. So I guess I can’t criticize.”
That was an apology, or as close as Marco could get to an actual apology.
He flew off, but kept low. We took off after him. Even flying at minimum speed, Tobias was too fast for us to keep up with, so he had to circle back again and again. We had a hard time keeping him in sight.
“This doesn’t look
too
strange,” Cassie joked. “The four of us running down the street looking up in the sky.”
“Yeah. Just to our left?”
“Okay, we can’t all go traipsing over some stranger’s yard,” I pointed out. “I’ll go with Cassie.”
Marco held up the kitty carrier we had brought along. “Don’t you need this?”
“Not yet. I’ll grab Fluffer and bring him back over here. You two guys just stand here, looking casual.”
Cassie and I stepped onto the lawn. The house was dark. Maybe no one was home. That would be good.
“Go left,” I suggested to Cassie. We circled the tree.
“Hey, Fluffer,” I said in a high, talking-to-animals voice. “Here, kitty kitty. Remember me?”
“There he is.”
“I see him.” I squatted down and held my hand out toward the cat. “Hey, Fluffer Fluffer. It’s me, Rachel.”
Fluffer flattened his ears back along his skull. He looked from me to Cassie and back again.
“Come on, Fluffer, it’s me. Come on, boy.”