Chapter 7
I don't know how it happened, but I managed to make my way home. I don't have any memory of getting to my neighborhood, finding my house, or going in the front door, but somehow it happened. My parents were both already asleep. They assumed I'd get home just fine. I briefly considered waking them up and telling them about what had happened. But I didn't. After all, they could be Controllers.
I called my friends, one by one. They had all escaped just fine, shaken up, but otherwise okay. Alive, at the very least. Silver seemed to not want to accept it was real, demanding that I tell him he was dreaming. I didn't. I wasn't sure myself. Yellow was the most shaken. The entire phone call, I half expected her to resume her broken repetition of 'Oh God,' but she held herself together enough to avoid that.
Once I was sure they were all safe, I crashed into my bed, closing my eyes and wanting nothing more than to forget. My sleep was dreamless. Nothing I could dream about would compare to the living nightmare of that night.
By morning, I was almost convinced it had all been just a nightmare. Something so crazy couldn't have been real, could it?
"Red!" My mom knocked on my door, finally jarring me awake. I'd slept through my alarms. "Are you even alive in there?"
"Yeah," I replied, my voice ragged.
"One of your friends is here," she said. "Green."
I paused, my still-drowsy brain processing. "Green?" Why would Green be here? He'd never come over before, and I'd never been to his place either. We were acquaintances at best, but not friends, not by a long shot.
"Hi Red," Green's voice came through the door. "Can I come in?"
I blinked a few times, rubbing my eyes. "Uh... yeah, I guess."
He came through the door and said thanks to my mom before shutting it behind him. There was a wide grin on his face, the kind he didn't normally have. He was practically bouncing with unaccustomed energy.
"Red," he said, his voice hushed, but alive with excitement. "I did it."
I stared at him and then rubbed my eyes again. "Did it? Did what?"
I yawned, and his answer caught me with my mouth open. "I became Dude."
My jaw slammed shut so hard that my teeth hurt. Dude was Green's pet Meowth. "What?"
Green's eyes flitted to the door and the window like he was checking for witnesses, and he lowered his voice even more. "Just like Elfangor said. I became Dude. I morphed him!"
I couldn't find an appropriate response. Reality had just set in. Green remembered what had happened too, apparently just as vividly as I did. Elfangor wasn't just some name my dreaming mind had fashioned out of thin air. It was real. He was real.
"It was so weird," Green continued, oblivious to my shock. "I was just petting him this morning, and I remembered what Elfangor said, and so I decided I'd give it a shot." He started pacing and tapping his fingers to his thumbs like he had too much energy to let his hands sit still, both things I'd never seen him do before. "So I thought about Dude and I... what was it?... acquired, that's it. I acquired him. And then I kept on concentrating on him, and I looked at my hand, and... what do you think I saw?" He grinned hugely. "Go on, guess!"
I shrugged. "Uh... I don't know."
"Fur! I had fur, and my fingernails were claws! Dude started to freak out, so I had to stick him outside, but after that, I kept on morphing."
That was when I hit the point of disbelief. I just couldn't fathom that this was real–what he was saying, the Andalite, the Yeerks, none of it. "Green, I'm pretty sure you were just dreaming."
Without meaning to, I'd hit a nerve. All of a sudden, the grin was gone from his face, and he was almost scowling. "No, I wasn't. Don't you get it? It's real. All of it. Real. Stop trying to lie to yourself about it. It doesn't work."
I realized then that he'd already been through the same process I had, and just happened to be a few steps ahead. He'd woken up earlier and gotten a head start. He'd done the same thing I had, sitting in bed, trying to reconcile nightmare with reality. He'd thought about it, probably for hours, and then, once he concluded that he wasn't sure, he'd tested it. He'd used the power we'd gotten in that construction site, the power Elfangor had given us to fight the Yeerks. And that had been the final straw. He'd had to admit it. The nightmare was real.
I hadn't come to any such conclusion yet. "Show me," I ordered. "If it's so real, then prove it."
Green grinned again. "Okay. Watch this."
I watched, waiting patiently, as he closed his eyes and screwed up his face in concentration. I waited for a few seconds before a smirk made its way across my face. "Green, I don't think you trying to hold your breath for as long as you can is going to make me any more convinced."
"What was that?" he asked, and opened his eyes. I nearly recoiled. His pupils had changed. Instead of his usual green eyes, they'd become the tall, narrow, feline glare of a Meowth.
"Y-Your eyes," I began, but already more of his body was changing. Just like he'd said, his skin began to erupt with patches of short tan fur, making its way up his arms and neck and coating his face. I saw his fingernails shift and thin and grow a protective sheath until they were retractable claws, positioned at the end of his still very human fingers. His canine teeth grew and sharpened until his grin showed off thin fangs. His ears slid up his head, and as they did, his natural hair retreated into his skull. Then, the most incredible thing of all: he began to shrink, losing height and width until his clothes became baggy, and then he disappeared completely inside of them.
Throughout the entire process, I'd sat there, mouth hanging open in shock, too surprised even to scream. I wanted to get up out of my bed and bust down my door and call the police and shout that Green was transforming into some sort of monster. But something kept me frozen to where I sat, my eyes glued to the spectacle before me.
Something stirred inside Green's clothes, which had pooled on the floor as he'd shrunk. I slid out of bed and knelt beside the pile of fabric. I watched as a lump shifted around, squirming back and forth to try to find a way out. Finally, from the gap between Green's shirt and his pants, out slipped a small feline form.
Green had been replaced by a Meowth.
