Chapter One

My name is Marco. I can't tell you my last name. Sorry, but I've got so many fangirls out there that if I put my full name in public, I'd be plagued by date requests for the rest of my life.

Not really. But I still can't tell you my last name. The Yeerks are out there, and I have to keep my last name private, or else they'd find me.

"Gee, Marco," I can hear you saying. "If you want to keep yourself private, why are you writing books about yourself? And while we're on the subject, what the heck is a Yeerk?"

Excellent questions. The Yeerks are aliens. Parasitic aliens, to be specific. Evil slugs that crawl into your brain and take over your body. They have come to take over the world. To control every single human and turn them into human controllers—Yeerk slaves.

Aren't you glad you asked a Yeerk is now?

Anyway, as any of the girls at our school can tell you, I am not only incredibly cute and unbelievably hilarious, but I am also incredibly smart.

But sometimes, on really rare occasions, I have been known to do things that are slightly stupid.

Such as lose my cell phone underneath the row of lockers.

"Crap," I said to no one in particular.

I tried lying on the floor and grabbing at my phone. No dice. It was too far back for me to reach.

Seeing as I couldn't get my cell phone, I did the next best thing. I went to the nearby bathroom and found myself an empty stall.

See, my friends and I have a very special power: the power to morph animals. That's why we call ourselves the Animorphs. We can become animals whenever we want to. Normally, we only use this power to fight the Yeerks, but this was an emergency. If I didn't come home with my cell phone, Dad would probably ground me for a month.

I began my hamster morph. A few months ago, I would have used my rat morph, but I don't do that morph anymore. See, I might have used my rat morph to spy on girls in the locker room once. Or twice.

Or every day. I forget.

Anyway, Rachel, who's another one of the Animorphs, found out about it and threatened to kill me if I ever spied on girls in my rat morph again.

So, I did the only natural thing a normal teenage boy could have done: I switched to a hamster morph and resumed my daily surveillance of the girls' locker room. In my defense, I had to do it. One of those girls could turn out to be a Controller.

I began the hamster morph. See, a hamster is small enough to fit underneath the lockers. I'd do a quick morph to hamster, grab my cell phone, then morph back, no problem. So I thought.

My cheeks bulged out suddenly, and hung downwards. Let me tell you, if you've never had foot-long sacks of skin hanging from your face, it is a very weird feeling. Did I mention gross? Yeah, it's pretty gross, too.

Then I started to shrink, and my face starting changing into the hamster's face. My nose pointed out, my heads traveled upwards, and whiskers sprouted. Soon, the morph was complete.

I sniffed the air and looked around. No humans anywhere. Good. I ran out from underneath the stall and made my way to the door.

Normally when you morph an animal, you have to deal with its instincts. Hamsters can be very skittish creatures, and the hamster brain often yells at you to RUN RUN RUN in case there's danger. Very distracting. Fortunately, due to all my experience morphing the hamster, I had little trouble controlling it.

I headed through the hallway and made it to my locker. A few people saw me, but none of them did anything, because teenagers don't really care too much about hamsters. The only person who acknowledged my presence was this one girl, who looked at me and said, "Aw..." lovingly.

See? Even as a hamster, I'm cute.

I slipped under the locker easily and stuffed my cell phone into my cheeks. See, the thing about hamster cheeks is that they're like huge pouches built into your face. Very handy for storing extra food. Or cell phones, as the case may be.

My mission half-completed, I turned around and headed back to the bathroom.

That was my fatal mistake. See, teenagers may not care about hamsters, but they care about cell phones. A lot.

"CRAIG, LOOK! THAT HAMSTER'S GOT A PHONE!" someone yelled. Or maybe they didn't yell. Either way, it sounded incredibly loud to my tiny hamster ears.

"DUDE! FREE PHONE! GET IT!"

Suddenly, movement! Boom! Boom! Boom! Heavy footsteps heading my way!

The hamster brain automatically kicked in. RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN!!!

I ran. Unfortunately, compared to humans, hamsters don't run very fast at all. The two guys were on my tail in seconds.

"I GOT IT!" one of the guys yelled, prematurely.

RUN! HIDE! I dove underneath the lockers where the guys couldn't reach me.

((Heh heh, I'm safe now,)) I said to myself.

But two guys are not going to give up on a chance to get a free cell phone that easily. One of them put their face to the ground and stared at me. He reached out his hand, but I dodged out of his reach.

"It's too far back! I can't touch it!" he said.

"I've got a ruler," the other guy said. "Try using it."

Oh. A ruler. That's what I should have used to get my cell phone, instead of a hamster morph. Duh. How stupid of me not to think of that.

No time to worry about how stupid I was, though. I had to find a way to get out of there! I looked around, but there was no escape! If I ran out from under the lockers, no matter which way I went, the guys would see me!

"What the heck are you doing?" a voice asked. A girl's voice.

"We're trying to get a hamster!" one of the guys said.

I looked towards where I heard the girl's voice come from. There! About six lockers over. I could see her sneakers. They were next to...a backpack! Yes!

I made a mad dash towards the girl and dove into her backpack. The guy saw me.

"It's in your backpack! Get it!"

I spit out the cell phone and tried to shove it behind a book. Hamster paws aren't good for shoving, but there was some free space, so I managed to do it.

"In my backpack? What's in my backpack?" the girl asked.

"The hamster we're chasing."

"A hamster? In my backpack?"

Suddenly, all the light disappeared. I looked up. A huge face! The girl! Her head was blocking out the light from the ceiling.

"Ah! There is a hamster in here!"

Then she reached her hand towards me. "Come here, little guy," she said kindly.

I climbed onto her palm. She lifted me up and held me close to her face. I did my best "I'm a poor, scared helpless animal" look.

It worked.

"Oh...it looks so frightened!" the girl said. "You guys scared it half to death!"

She stroked me gently a couple of times, then turned on the boys. "You guys ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Chasing a poor, innocent animal!"

"But, it...it had a cell phone!"

The girl laughed. "You expect me to believe that? A hamster with a cell phone?"

"Dude! It had a phone! It must have dropped it in your backpack!"

"You jerks! You scare a poor animal half to death for no reason at all, then you try to make up lies about it! I'm going to tell my father about you!"

One of the guys said something unprintable, and the two of them walked away. I turned to the girl and gave her my best happy hamster face.

"Sorry about that," the girl said. "Boys can be real jerks sometimes."

She petted me a couple of times, then set me back down on the ground.

"You're really cute," she said. "I'd love to take you home with me, but I can't. Fluffer McKitty would probably eat you for lunch."

That's when I realized who the girl was. Melissa Chapman.