Motion
part 1 of 2
2.29.20
Canon-typical mentions of violence, mentions of CPS and child neglect, intergalactic war, criminally old bags of chips.
.
Jake had tanked in Debate Club and wasn't that great with motivational speeches, which left him only a handful of options when it came to confronting Marco. Once he'd checked off the prevailingly stupid ones, he took over some potato chips and a few cans of Sprite still in their plastic rings and rang the doorbell like an asshole until a middle finger popped out from the rusted mail slot by his knees. "Let me in," Jake said. "I brought food."
"I've got a couple of fun words you can eat instead." Marco's voice was competing with something in the background. Probably the TV. "You do realize normal people sleep in on the weekends, right?"
"What time is it?" Jake had kind of been wondering about it. He'd accidentally dropped his watch in the toilet a couple of weeks ago and hadn't really been keeping track of time that morning, so he had no way of gauging how bad he should feel about this visit.
"Sleeping-in-o'clock. Run along home and experience the magic of the hour before your glass balls turn back into pumpkin seeds."
"It's like two," Jake said, exasperated, catching the clock mounted on the wall by the greasy window. "Let me in."
"Door's right down here." Marco made a come-hither gesture with the same finger. "I'll let you figure it out. Wipe on the mat when you're done pasting yourself in, I just washed the floor."
"You do realize I can actually get in that way if I wanted to now, right?"
For a while all Jake could hear was the faint sound of canned laughter from further back in the house.
Marco's hand disappeared with a rusty screech of hinges. When the front door opened it was only a few inches, just barely enough for Jake to see Marco's narrow, exasperated eyes. For his part Jake tried really hard to look like this visit was about potato chips and Sprite and not the dozen other things that had brought him out this way, like an intergalactic war and maybe child neglect. "You're kind of an enormous dipshit for slinging that around where anyone could hear you," Marco said. "Look, whatever it is you're selling, I'm not in the mood for it today. Also, those chips are a hate crime."
"They're guacamole flavored."
"They're we've-been-in-your-snack-cupboard-for-three-months flavored."
Jake took a brief glance into the bag. "They're not that old."
"Those things were around during the Ming dynasty," Marco said. "I think some of those were used as arrowheads to impale Mongolian invaders. You can find some of them lining the walls of the imperial tombs. They invented sand clocks and gunpowder during a late night binge from that same bag."
"At least take the Sprite," Jake said, instead of leaping headfirst into the empty swimming pool out back and making a police crew clean up the -biohazard. "The rings are cutting off my circulation."
Marco's hand was braced on the doorframe as though to keep Jake from seeing past him, but the fact was Marco was really short and Jake wasn't. When he took a second glance over Marco's shoulder, he could make out the telltale flicker of a television set and a silhouette that might've been Marco's dad or a coat slung over a chair. Both moved about the same amount. "You know, I was kinda busy being grateful about not being dead, man," Marco said abruptly. "Not really helping things over here. Just saying."
Jake thumbed an itch on the back of his neck as he processed that. Marco's open hostility had died down into that tired, resigned venom that was hard to handle even on a good day. "This isn't about that."
"Oh yeah? Funny," Marco said. "Because see, me, I get this feeling that you've come over to twist my arm. Which, by the way, would've been a lot more successful if you'd brought over some pepperoni pizza with olives and mushrooms. Live and learn, commander."
"At least come to the meetings. Just to stay in the know."
"I don't want to know. My choice, not yours."
The silhouette on the couch in front of the TV hadn't moved but was more than likely Marco's dad. Based on the number of times Marco had brought Skittles-and-Doritos sandwiches to school in the past two weeks, the couch probably had more experience parenting at this point. He lowered his voice anyway. "You don't have to be a part of it, but if you don't at least know the places to avoid, you're going to be putting yourself in the line of fire anyway. That puts all of us in danger, not just you."
"Sorry," Marco said. "I'm busy painting my toenails. Check back in afterwards and I'll let you in on whether or not I used Brocean Cruise or Paradise Punk."
Jake stuck his toes in the path of the door to keep it from slamming shut. The next minute was spent in a nostalgic frenzy of Jake flailing in pain on the ground after a failed stunt while Marco paced around him yelling blistering bilingual commentary. "I swear it you try to blame it on me, I'm telling your mom I shut the door on you because you wouldn't stop hitting on me," Marco threatened.
"You don't have her number."
"She gave me her pager number when we were like, ten. Okay, did I really, did I break it? Seriously?"
"No." He was probably bleeding, but chiseling a scrap of human emotion out of Marco after days of him crawling around his dark house like a reptile was a win Jake was willing to sacrifice some blood for. He blindly flailed a hand upwards, blinking back tears. "Help me up."
Marco caught it and levied him back up onto his good foot. "Look, man, I get it," Marco said. "I do. I get it, okay? Just not now. Maybe not ever. But not right now."
"You just squashed my foot. You owe me at least one meeting now."
"I totally do not owe you that," Marco said. "Also, you realize if I do tell your mom you've been hitting on me, the next week of your life is going to be nothing but butt jokes and sex-ed pamphlets full of baseball terminology."
"At the barn," Jake said. "To work on homework. Wednesday. Midterms, you know? A study group."
"Have fun. Say hi to that skunk with the pancake leg for me."
"You can do it yourself. I hear she puts out."
"Weirdly," Marco said, "bestiality has gotten a lot less funny this past week. It used to be such an ice-breaker."
"One time." Jake caught Marco's eye and made a show of shrugging. "Don't like it, don't come again. But you owe it to yourself to try. If it's not your thing, I won't bug you again. I promise."
"I'll think about it." Marco was already climbing the stoop again. "I'm going back to bed. Next time bring food that contains actual food and maybe I won't guillotine your foot."
This time Jake's toes weren't in the way when Marco slammed the door.
Jake left the Sprite on the porch, dumped the chips into an overflowing garbage receptacle, and went around the back to steal Marco's bike.
.
He'd expected weird dreams from the start, so it surprised him when it took nearly a full week for them to kick in. That night started out with a typical forgot-pants-at-school dream that gradually slid into the forgot-both-homework-and-pants dream, which resulted in the threat of having to repeat elementary school to be allowed back into high school.
The obvious thing to do wasn't at all to call his parents, because parents were scarier than intergalactic war. Much better to go up onto the roof through the custodial access closet and risk the entire human race by morphing in broad daylight under several security cameras. He figured he could get home as a bird, grab his homework and some lunch as a bonus, and bike back in time for fifth period to start.
He was on the roof unbuttoning his shirt when the usual annoying dream stuff started kicking in: shirt rebuttoning when he reached the bottom, shoes refusing to unlace, four belts that bit like into him bike chains. By the time he finally got himself down to morphing gear, the roof felt spongy under his feet and he had to crawl up onto a painfully thin ledge to peer over the side of the building. The top of his head hit the sky with a force hard enough to jar his neck.
He was trying to puzzle out how the hell airplanes were supposed fly under such a cramped sky when his father's voice broke through his concentration. "Jake?"
This was a new one. Even in his worst nightmares his dad had never shown up on the school roof when Jake was about to play semi-nude hooky. Figuring he'd go for broke, Jake spread his arms and gambled on dream-physics to allow him time to morph before getting grounded. He let his fingertips meld into wingtips as he leaned forward to embrace the wrenching sensation of a dive.
His head smashed against the sky so hard he saw stars. The school roof vanished, and the next instant Jake was sprawled on the floor of his bedroom on top of his dad, who was swearing in a way Jake hadn't heard since he'd broken the sideview mirror off the car backing out of the garage. "Jake, Jake, son, Jake." His dad scrambled up, taking Jake's face between his hands. "Shit. Jake. Talk to me."
He could hear the cicadas' full-throated croaks in the backyard. Cold with dread, Jake ran a frantic check to see how far he'd morphed, but when he pictured himself as a human nothing happened. He must have reversed the transformation as he'd come out of the dream. "Jean!" his dad yelled.
"I'm okay," Jake blurted, shaking, but there were already footsteps pounding down the hall. His mother appeared in his doorway seconds later, catching herself on the frame as she took in the scene with a rapid sweep. "I'm okay. I just got confused, I thought it was a door."
"You were sleepwalking?" His dad cranked him around. "Really?"
"I don't—"
"It wasn't on purpose?"
What? Still stupid with disorientation, Jake stared back at him uncomprehendingly. "He's all right, Jean," his dad said. "He almost went out the goddamn window. You were right."
"We heard it open." His mother addressed Jake with more composure, but Jake saw her knuckles whitening on the door frame. "We thought someone might have broken in when we heard the banging."
So his dad had charged in here unarmed to take on the intruder. Jake kind of wondered if he should address this but was ultimately too busy. "Sorry I woke you up."
"Sorry you—" his dad followed up with a string of something Jake probably wasn't supposed to hear. He grabbed Jake's shoulders with an intensity that made Jake flinch. "So that's all this was? Sleepwalking?"
Genuinely confused by the urgency, Jake had to blink at him a while to parse the question. "Jake." His dad gave him a shake. "Is that all this was?"
It took another several beats of them both eyeballing him for it to finally translate. "Oh, crap, no," he blurted, horrified. "I wasn't – Dad, I'm not suicidal!"
"You promise you weren't trying to jump?"
"No!"
"I know you've been upset about not making the team this year. You know you can talk to us, right? You know there will be other chances?"
"Dad, I didn't—" Jake could see Tom craning his neck to see over their mother's shoulder. His grin in the shadows was shit-eating. "Mom, do something," Jake said, a little desperate at the general escalation. "Stop letting him freak out!"
"He hasn't sleepwalked since he was ten," Mom said. She'd ignored Jake to focus on his dad. "This could just be a temporary relapse from stress."
"I knew we should've put a screen in that window." His dad released him and sank back onto his heels. His hands were shaking as he pushed them through his hair. "He'd have broken both his legs. I'm putting in a screen. We have one in the garage. I should've put it in months ago."
"Look on the bright side, twerp," Tom said to Jake. "It's not like you could play any worse even if you did have two broken legs."
"You're not helping." Mom gave him a firm shove towards his room. "Steam in there until you're done."
"I'm getting the screen." His dad was already out the door. He came back in. "Are you sure you're all right?"
"I'm fine! Why is everyone freaking out?"
"Stay there." His dad was back out. "Don't go to sleep. Get some milk or something. Jean, watch him."
It turned out that the spare screen in the garage had a warped corner, so his parents settled for temporarily nailing the window shut. By the time Jake got home from school the next day, the window was properly outfitted and his dad had calmed down enough to put on the pediatric doctor persona in place, which ended up being worse because his dad was really, really good at chiseling information out of terrified kids.
Jake spent an hour fielding bone-chillingly accurate questions about his school life and his friends and possible sources of stress, trying to muster up something that would validate their concerns without resulting in actual long-term counseling. He managed to handcraft a story about homework and stress and even threw in something about bullies hassling him between classes, figuring that was bland enough to get them off his back.
He thought he might've overplayed his hand when his mother suggested calling their parents, but surprisingly enough his dad was the one to put the kibosh on it. "We can't fight your battles for you, Jake," he said. "Even if we could, I know you'd rather fight them yourself. But if it gets to be too much and you need us to tag in, you have to let us know. We're not going to stand on the sidelines and make you fight every war alone."
A year ago Jake would've brushed the entire episode off. Now he sat at his desk and wavered between mortal humiliation and immortal, crippling terror, because when it came down to it, he wanted nothing more than for his parents to tag in. He wanted it to be as simple as a teacher telling him he couldn't use the bathroom until after the test was over, or a carnival operator telling him he was too short to ride the coaster. Sorry. Too young. Maybe next year.
In the meantime Tom spent the better part of the week heckling him about it, and once again Jake found himself at a crossroad of two extremes. There were times it was easy to forget the fact that there was an alien force in his brother's head that looked and sounded exactly like his brother, because Tom acted and sounded normal when it suited him. Other times, Jake had to hold onto his chair to keep himself from lunging across the dinner table and throttling Tom until his face turned purple and the blood vessels burst in his eyeballs and the yeerk dribbled out of his head like mustard.
He settled instead for taking the screen off the window when no one was looking. The nights had been getting cooler and the cicadas were starting to drop off, but the wooden sill was still swollen with humidity as he eased his legs over the side of it.
He dangled his feet over the gloom of the backyard and swung them for nearly an hour, letting himself marinate in the cosmic stalemate until the urge to kill his brother tapered off. When the ridges of the sill began to hurt his ass, he slid back off into his room and got to work on his English homework.
.
Rachel was crazy. It wasn't the kind of thing that generally came out during family barbecues and shared Christmases, so it'd taken Jake a couple of times discussing galactic war with her to pick up the scent. Now that the secret was out in the open and they were in a crime-fighting team that could turn into their pets, Jake found himself unwillingly thrust into the role of guidance counselor as he tried to keep the people he loved alive.
He knew enough from his days playing basketball and secretly watching Disney channel movies that team dynamics were everything. Someone had to be leader. Someone had to be the brain. Someone had to be nice. Someone had to be mysterious. Someone had to be the muscle.
Jake had experience with crazy, but it'd been the garden-variety teenage rebellion. He'd skipped school on a dare one time to go to the DimeDrop arcade, which had been really stupid in hindsight because the manager knew his dad, but it'd turned out fine. He'd snuck the car out of the driveway with Tom in the middle of the night a few times to joyride around the block, but they'd both been too paranoid about getting caught for it to have much appeal. Mostly Jake just climbed things that were really stupid to climb, like ladders left against buildings or giant trees or construction scaffolding, usually while Marco stood below and listed all the things he expected Jake to bequeath to him when he died.
Rachel's crazy was a variety Jake had first chalked up to pretty-girl frustration and now chalked up to vengeance. He'd seen the way she'd looked at Tobias before Tobias had gotten trapped in morph. He didn't have his father's experience, but figured he maybe didn't need to be a counselor to figure out why Rachel wanted the yeerks dead so badly. In a way her reasons were better. Jake still had half a chance to save Tom if he played his cards right, but Tobias was trapped in his hawk morph whether they won the war or not. Rachel had already lost, so collateral damage meant less to her. She could afford more crazy.
Unfortunately fatalism didn't translate well in team pep talks, which left Jake with the awkward after-hours task of trying to determine whether or not his cousin was too crazy to fight. This was less of a potato chips and Sprite problem and more of a 'how to stop a freight train with a sheet of math homework' problem. He went to Rachel's house on Saturday under the pretense of needing tutoring and flailed around like a drunk spider on her bungee chair while Rachel laughed so hard she had to excuse herself to pee. "My mom's face," she gasped, collapsed in her desk's swivel chair. "My mom's face though."
"I don't get why she kept asking me who died."
"Because you totally never come over on your own. Not for homework. Not unless it was for the like, the cookouts and stuff, or Christmas, or whenever your family made you come over here. What are you doing?"
"My foot's stuck." So was his knee, but the foot was at a weird angle that was cutting off his blood supply. "How do people sit in these things?"
"Like not a total goofasaurus. Here." Rachel helped pry his foot out of the chair's webbing, nearly dumping him on his face when the frame tipped. This time Jake was able to more or less sit down on his butt instead of his shoulder. "If it makes you feel better, Sara got her neck caught in hers last year. We ended up having to cut it off her and throw the chair away."
"Is it really so weird to ask you for math help?" Maybe he'd messed up, but he'd figured it was more normal to do homework with a girl cousin than ride bikes or watch TV. He didn't even know what kind of shows girls watched. Cassie didn't have time because she busy after school wrangling animals that were trying to bite her. Jake had found fewer reasons to watch television once he figured out how beautiful Cassie looked wrangling animals trying to bite her. "We live pretty close to each other. Wouldn't it make sense to ask you for help once in a while?"
"Yeah, but I mean, you usually just get help from Tom or Marco."
"Marco's tanking your class."
"Marco's tanking because he doesn't turn in his homework, not because he's stupid, and I will kill you if you tell him I said that," Rachel said. "But whatever. It's not like it matters now. Let's just own it. It's only weird if we don't. Did you tell your parents?"
"Yeah, I set it up. They actually said it was good timing, because they said they'd been meaning to remind you guys that they had to switch the cook-out to next Sunday instead of the one after. I guess Grandma Bette has some sort of thing going on and she couldn't make it that weekend."
Rachel had slipped her scrunchie onto her wrist and had been gathering up her hair for a ponytail. She paused at this, looking at him with blank eyes. "The cookout," Jake said. "You know, the one we do every year?"
"Oh. Ohhh. Oh, god, okay, crap. That's already here? Why are we always the last to know about that?"
"We left you a message on the answering machine."
"Yeah, I'm sure you did." Rachel shook her head to herself as she expertly finished tying her hair up. "Jordan probably erased it without writing it down like she always does. Okay. I'll tell Mom."
"It should be pretty fun this year." The bungee cords were digging into his ass. Jake wondered if there was any alternate dimension in the cosmos where bungee chairs were comfortable to anyone at any time. "My dad got his tools out a while ago and he's been in the backyard every night building games to play. Cornhole and stuff. I know it sounds lame but he's really amped about it."
"A couple of weeks ago that would've been lame, but now…" Rachel managed a half-shrug, half headshake as she swiveled around in her desk chair. She had homework laid out on her desk that she'd clearly been working on for a while, which kind of surprised him. Rachel was notorious for all-day Saturday mall crawls. "I could use a little lame, I guess."
"The food should be pretty good too. We already ordered like fifty brats from Bell's. I think Uncle Dave is bringing burgers."
"I'm sure we'll think up something to bring too. I'll have Mom call your dad to see if you guys need anything." Rachel fetched a pencil from the pencil cup at the corner of her desk, then froze suddenly. She wheeled around and jabbed the pencil towards him. "Tell me Marco isn't going."
"Of course he is," Jake said, taken aback. "He comes every year."
"Not this year."
"My mom already invited him."
"Uninvite him."
"What? No."
"Jake, every single year he somehow manages to trick Great Gram that we're dating," Rachel said. "And every single year, Great Gram pulls me over to the porch swing to talk about safe sex. You want to know how fun it is to talk about genital warts with your ninety year-old great grandma at every single family cookout? I have legit PTSD. Just the smell of potato salad gives me night terrors."
"Look, I'll talk to him," Jake said, giving up, mostly because at least 110% of him never wanted to hear his cousin say 'genital warts' ever again. "But I can't just uninvite him. Mom uses the cookouts as an excuse to send food home with him. She already labeled the tupperware."
"Then have him pick it up at your window like any other take-out joint."
Jake scratched his neck. To her credit Rachel seemed to read into his silence, because when she spoke again it was with a grudging sort of resignation. "It's still bad?"
"Yeah," Jake said. "I mean, it's been bad since his mom disappeared, but these past couple months Mom's been talking about calling social services."
"You think she'll actually do it?"
"I don't know." Their moms had been friends ever since they'd met at the park twelve years ago, turning up with the same mystery novel as their toddlers played in the sandbox. Jake knew his mother would prefer to have Marco live with them until his dad had sorted out his issues, but Marco's pride prevented him from taking handouts unless they were cleverly disguised. It was a more reliable strategy to whip up casually-elaborate snacks when Marco came over to play video games, then entice him into staying for dinner and sending the leftovers home with him.
It was one of those real-world adult situations that had used to make Jake feel uncomfortable, like he was sitting in on a movie he knew he wasn't old enough to be watching yet. Now, faced with leading the resistance against the would-be conquerors of the human race, Jake mostly just felt tired and annoyed. It was one thing to be shaken up over losing a wife and another thing to let your kid go hungry because you couldn't pull your own pants up to run errands. Had the whole yeerk thing not happened, Jake might've backed a call to CPS, but throwing a wrench into Marco's living situation at this point could mean setting him up for bigger, brain-eating trouble. As bad as his dad was, at least he wasn't infested. Also the lack of supervision made it easier for Marco to sneak out, which made it easier for Jake to potentially put his life at risk in other ways, because that was just great. That was a great thought Jake just had. "Listen, I'll try to keep him away," he said, trying to take his mind off it. "I'll distract him somehow. I dunno. I'll think of something."
"Forget it." Rachel shook her head and retrieved her pencil. "I keep forgetting that I can legit squish him now. I'll have my own conversation with him. With lots of exclamation points. With giant elephant feet. You know what? While we're on this, maybe you should think about bringing Cassie this time too, you know? Now that you're going out with her? As long as we're setting up stuff here with the two of us, it'd be good to make the whole Cassie thing not weird with your parents too."
"Woah, wait, woah," Jake said, alert all of a sudden. "There's no weird 'Cassie thing'."
"Sure there's not," Rachel said. "It's actually good timing, my mom is one hundred percent convinced you're dating Marco. I'm almost sad to disappoint her. She thinks it's really cute."
Jake's elbow slipped and he nearly died again in the ropes of the chair. "She what."
"So bringing around Cassie might be kind of fun just to see her face. But either way, if we're going to do this, we might as well do it all the way." Rachel glanced at the clock on her wall. "So how long are you staying, anyway? Did you actually bring math?"
He felt a little dizzy. "Your mom thinks I'm dating Marco?"
"If it makes you feel better, she was convinced I was dating Cassie until I pinky-promised her that I wasn't. I think she's just bored and likes to make up soap opera subplots. Seriously, did you bring math or didn't you? I have stuff to get done too, so we should probably get going on it. I want to hit the mall today before it closes."
He'd have to disassemble the trauma and deal with it later. Jake fumbled for his math book at his feet and nearly died for the third time that day when the chair tipped. "Oh my god, I can't watch this anymore." Rachel surged up and strode over to her closet, yanking it open. Impeccably stacked canvas shelving units full of folded shirts lined the walls, a rainbow collection of hanging clothes on the other side. Rachel yanked a beanbag chair off the floor and tossed it at his face. "Sit in that and never even look at a bungee chair again," she said. "Do you need actual help on the math, or are you good?"
"I'm good." Jake untangled his foot from the bungee just in time for Rachel to yank it up on its side and roll it towards the closet, then spent another moment flailing around on the beanbag chair when he sank into an unexpectedly deep divot. He wondered what it was with girls and their fascination with cutesy chairs that didn't do chair things. "I'm not bothering you, am I?"
"Nope." Rachel shut the closet door and plopped back down in her swivel chair, once again rescuing her pencil, and with the suddenness of a light switching off, he was out of her radar entirely.
Jake shifted his weight around for a while, then resigned himself to the most uncomfortable study session of this lunar cycle. He managed to puzzle through problem nine and ten and got halfway through a quadratic function in problem eleven before his stamina gave out, and then he was tipping his pencil between his second and third finger and trying not to eyeball her room too obviously. He didn't have a lot of experience, but it looked a lot like what he'd expect a girl's room to look like. A lot of pastels, a lot of floofy odds and ends, a stack of magazines half-hidden under the bed. There were some stuffed animals on her pillows and some gymnastics clippings taped to the wall by her window, as well as a bulletin board sporting post-it reminders and a bird calendar with various dates circled.
He was busy enough procrastinating that he didn't notice Rachel had stopped in tandem. By the time he picked up on her distraction, she'd progressed to leaning back in her chair, drumming her eraser against her book, staring at the wall over her desk.
Thinking she was probably chewing on a difficult problem, Jake tried to give a damn about math things. He finished up problem eleven and was debating whether or not to cheat and have Marco do problem twelve for him before school when Rachel said abruptly, "How is he?"
Distracted, he glanced up. Rachel's back was still to him, the swivel chair rocking back and forth with every flex of her foot. "Marco?" he said blankly.
"God, no, what is it with you and – Tobias. I'm talking about Tobias."
Tobias? Still somewhere out in left field, Jake said reflexively, "He's okay."
"Is he still with you?"
"Yeah."
Rachel was silent. Her foot continued to jog.
The house was a lot warmer than his dad kept theirs. Just as he was thinking about asking for something to drink, Rachel said, just as abruptly, back still to him, "I kind of just spend all day wanting to tear something apart, Jake."
"That's okay," Jake said, keenly aware of the quiet hallway outside her room. "I'm pretty sure that's normal. I mean… what's normal for us, anyway. New normal."
"Yeah, except it isn't normal, and it isn't okay," Rachel said. "I mean, you've got the whole Tom thing, and that really sucks, Jake, but… I mean, that's the goal, right? To free everybody. Once we win this, everybody's going to be freed, and you'll get him back. But Tobias… he's not coming back. Win or lose, dead or alive, he's stuck that way."
Jake's eyes flickered again to the door. Rachel's breath rocked out of her impatiently. She stood and retrieved the fan from the corner of her room, set it up by the door, and cranked the dial up to high. She flounced back into her swivel chair and let it spin twice before digging in her toe, facing him squarely. "Look, I know it's not anyone's idea of a good time, but we have to get used to taking some hits," Jake said. "We're still new at this. It's going to take some getting used to – learning all the rules, figuring out all the players. They may have gotten the first point, but we have a home court advantage. We won't be playing defense forever."
"Great," Rachel said, rolling her eyes, but he caught a quiver of laughter in her voice. "Basketball metaphors. Inspiring. I knew we elected you for a reason."
"You can be the leader."
Rachel waved it off, but he thought he saw a flicker in her eyes. Something unpleasant and cool. "We still don't know everything about this power," Jake said. "El— he didn't have a chance to tell us everything. There might be ways to reverse it even he didn't know about. This is all alien tech, you know? I mean, do you know everything there is to know about DNA? Because I don't. I didn't take that class."
"He told us it was permanent."
"Yeah, but so is like, permanent marker. Remember when you wrote 'stupid' on my forehead with a Sharpie during that family campout? It was gone in like a week."
"Oh my god, I totally forgot about that." Rachel sputtered with sudden laughter. "Were we fighting about something? I don't even remember what pissed me off. Weren't we like, five?"
"I think so."
"I remember your mom acted so mad, but then I heard her laughing with my mom about it at a truck stop on the way home. You know the best part is, my mom grounded me for that when I got home, right? But she was more mad about the fact that I 'left the evidence' in my backpack and that I spelled 'stupid' wrong. She made me rewrite the word three hundred times in my notebook as part of my punishment."
"That does sound like your mom," Jake admitted, surrendering a grin."
"Right?" Rachel laughed again, but it was wistful and it trailed off quickly. She rocked a little more in her chair, eyes on the floor, and Jake waited her out. "You know, Jake, for me, it's like that first battle never ended," she said. "Just random things will sneak up on me, you know? I see a dad pushing his kid on the swing, or even like… a trailer for a movie that's coming out next year, right? And I keep thinking, 'I wonder if the world will be taken over by the time that kid's a dad' or 'I wonder what's the last movie that'll come out before everyone's infested'. Just these stupid things that have nothing to do with each other. But it's all, we're on a timetable now, right? Usually 'forever' is just, you just sort of grow up taking that for granted, but forever got a lot shorter. By the time that kid grows up, there may not be any more new movies, or new books being written, or sports or concerts or schools or any of that stuff. When's the point where life as we know it ends?"
"It's not going to end," Jake said. "We're going to use this power and fight to get it all back."
"Yeah, but that's not enough anymore." Rachel's gaze finally lifted, and Jake almost recoiled at the rawness in it. "You don't get it, Jake. I don't want to be that hero. What I want – what I really want? I want to crush the things that put those thoughts in my head. Because they're never, ever getting out. Those assholes stole 'normal' from me. Knowing that I'm going to feel this way forever? It makes me so…"
Jake was frozen waiting for her to finish. "I want to crush them," Rachel said. "I want to make them suffer. I want to feel bone and, and, and… squishy alien goo under my boot. I want to make them bleed. And if we win the war, great. But if we don't, and I still get to go on fighting them until I die… that's kind of okay too."
There was an overriding instinct in Jake that told him, very specifically and in no uncertain terms, that this was extremely not okay. It was actually even less okay than Tobias being trapped as a bird. Looking at the cold, flat rage on his cousin's face, Jake caught himself wondering if this was maybe how his dad felt trying to wrangle his bipolar teenage patients. This was probably something that needed to be medicated, but none of them had access to a pharmacy. They didn't even have access to doctors anymore.
He must have looked as terrified as he felt, because just as suddenly Rachel laughed, flapping her hand as if brushing the dark clouds off her. "I'm sorry, wow, that came out of total nowhere. I didn't mean to freak you out. You're not freaked out, are you?"
"I'm okay," Jake said, the opposite of that. "How much homework do you have left? I should probably get out of here soon."
"I'm almost done. Did you need help? Come here, bring your book over. Let me prove I'm stable and everything."
They ended up spending the next minute puzzling through problem twelve, then going back and fixing the mistakes Jake made on problem nine and ten. The smell of dinner was starting to waft up through the vents by the time they'd finished up, so Jake gathered up his things and let Rachel escort him downstairs. Sara and Jordan had been watching TV upside down, Sara upside down with her socked feet waving in the air. She uprighted herself hurriedly as Jake and Rachel thumped down the stairs. "Hey," Jake said, kind of hoping they didn't ambush him with water pistols like they did the last time he'd come in.
"Hey," Jordan said vaguely, not taking her eyes from the screen, but Sara immediately ran over to the nearest wall and called, "Look what I can do!"
"Cool," Jake said as she swung her feet up into a wall-handstand. He could hear hissing in the kitchen as Rachel's mom wrangled something in a pan. "Did Rachel teach you that?"
"I learned it all by myself. Do you want to try?"
"Maybe next time."
"Awww come on."
"Don't," Rachel said. "She broke one of Mom's old lamps earlier today and she's looking for someone to blame it on. The only reason I haven't told Mom yet is because I'm blackmailing her into doing my chores."
"That's kind of messed up," Jake said. "Isn't she like eight?"
"Eight's old enough to be blackmailed," Rachel said. "I checked. Plus I'm going to make up a story at the end about how it got broken while she was cleaning, so we'll come out even in the end."
"Did Marco come with you?" Jordan asked Jake, tearing her eyes from the television screen to glance up the stairs behind Jake hopefully. "He's coming to the cookout, right?"
"Oh my god, what is it with my family and their obsession with Marco." Rachel yanked Jake's elbow and dragged him towards the door. "I swear to god I could win a Nobel Peace Prize and all my family would ask me is but is Marco coming to the ceremony. Just escape, Jake. Seriously. Don't make eye contact. Just run."
"Not so fast," Aunt Naomi called from the kitchen, sticking her head out amidst a cloud of steam. "Jake, I told your mother you'd call her before you left. Use the phone in here."
"Mom, he's fine, he rode his bike," Rachel said. "It'll take him like ten minutes to get home, just let him go."
"I'm not his mother, and mothers' laws reign supreme over all other laws. Jake, phone, now."
"Okay." He figured he still owed his mom some slack considering the stunt he'd pulled with the window. He jogged over, slipping in his socks on the polished hardwood, and dialed up his house phone.
Once he'd hung up, Naomi was stirring the fried vegetables in the pan with one hand and holding a fruit roll-up out to him, which was pretty boss. "Thanks," he said, taking it. "And thanks for having me over. Sorry about the whole barbecue thing."
Naomi glanced at him as she got the sesame seed oil down from the cupboard. "Barbecue thing."
"Someone erased the message." Rachel had angled her shoulder against the doorframe to the kitchen and was scratching up and down shamelessly. "Barbecue was moved to this Sunday."
"Oh, god, really?" Naomi sighed and shook her head even as she upended the bottle, sending up another smothering wave of steam as it hit the vegetables. "They do realize I'm a single career mom over here and schedule changes have consequences, right?"
"Sorry," Jake said. "We tried to call you."
"Oh, honey, it's not your fault. Rachel, you know, that wasn't very long up there. Are you sure he understood his math? You didn't rush through it?"
"Mom." Rachel rolled her eyes, every inch the quintessential bratty teenager. A half an hour ago she'd crafted a dissertation about how much she yearned to crush sentient life forms under her feet like eggshells, so even whiny normalcy was nice. "He's not stupid."
"I'm not suggesting he's stupid, I'm suggesting you're impatient and rush things," Naomi said. "Highlighting your personal flaws, not his. Jake, honey, did you get it? Honestly? I can always go over the lesson if there's something you still don't understand."
"She's actually a pretty great tutor," Jake said. "She only hit me twice."
"In my defense, his big head is a super tempting target," Rachel said. "Bye mom. Let him go."
"All right, all right." Naomi stifled a curse as steam burst into her face, blindly reaching around the cloud to lower the heat. "Jake, tell your mom to call me. I'll try to work something out for Sunday."
"Okay."
"Bye, Jake!" Sara hollered from the living room as he followed Rachel to the door. "Bring Marco next time! He'll do handstands with me."
"Do you think he'll tutor me?" Jordan asked, then ducked her head behind the couch cushions when Rachel turned a glower her way. "Ask him!" she yelled from behind the bastion.
"Jake, say goodbye, because this is the last time you'll see them alive," Rachel said. "I'll call you later."
"Bye. Bye," he added louder for Sara's benefit, who was already running into the kitchen to seek sanctuary with their mother. "Thanks again," he told Rachel.
"No problem." Rachel slammed the door behind him. He heard a shriek from behind it, followed by running feet, and Naomi hollering over the ensuing chaos.
What he'd suspected to be a rumbling stomach ended up being an approaching storm over the Pacific. Despite his hustle, the rain beat him home by five minutes, succeeding in soaking him through and ruining the papers in his backpack before he poured himself into the kitchen. His mother took one look at him as he came in and arrested him on the welcome mat. Jake endured the humiliation of stripping down to his boxers in front of his mom before being sent up to the shower.
That night Tom was out, so Jake made his excuses to eat upstairs, claiming to need more time with his homework. As soon as his parents were distracted with the television in the family room, he sneaked up to the attic while the hamburger was still warm.
Sending a last glance down the corridor to make sure he wasn't being followed, Jake balanced the plate of food and the dish of bathroom tap water in his left arm while he rapped a pattern on the door with his right. ‹I'm here. › Tobias's voice floated into his head.
The attic was its usual slapdash mess of dust motes and collectibles, boxes stacked to the sides and a chest of unused costumes waiting by the door. Jake closed the door behind him with his foot, set down the trays, and pushed the trunk in front of the door to prevent any surprise intruders. Tobias was perched on the windowsill opposite the door, beak buried under the crook of his wing, digging into the feathers with enthusiasm.
Jake spotted a splatter of raindrops on the hardwood underneath the window. "You mind if I close that?"
‹No problem. Here, I'll get out of your way.› Tobias gave his wing a last good dig before hopping down with a flutter.
Jake tried to keep his steps light walking across the room and crashed like a rhinoceros anyway. ‹It's really coming down out there,› Tobias said. ‹I've been watching people run home on the sidewalks. It's actually really funny with a bird's-eye view.›
"Yeah, I was one of those." The floor was pretty wet, but it was dry enough up here that Jake figured it'd probably evaporate without rotting. He made a mental note to grab a towel his mother wouldn't miss to sop up the excess. "I brought you dinner if you're up for it. Sorry, my mom put some weird spice in the burger. I tried to scrape it off."
‹It's okay. I can't really taste it.›
"I also got some uh…" He was stupidly tired. He cradled his neck in his palm a moment and rolled his head, trying to think of the word. "That stuff you get at the Italian markets."
‹Salami?›
"No, the other stuff. It starts with an L."
‹Liverwurst? ›
"Yeah, that stuff. I didn't know if you wanted to try it."
‹Sure. Thanks.›
Jake picked up the trays and relocated them atop a box. The displacement of air from Tobias's wings sent the dust motes swirling. Tobias did the idiosyncratic bird shuffle as he settled himself in front of the trays, flapping his tail to balance himself out before digging in.
Jake contemplated finding a seat and instead found himself caught by the sight as usual. Tobias's humanity wasn't hypothetical, but there wasn't a lot of evidence when he ate like this – huge, heaping gulps, cranking his neck back and guzzling the chunks down his throat like they had whiskers and tails. Jake had a weird hang-up with animals. Even walking his grandma's dog as a kid, it'd felt rude to him to stare at it while it did its thing. You didn't stare at humans while they ate or pooped, so doing the same with animals felt like an invasion of privacy.
Jake spent about as many sleepless nights chewing on the Tobias situation as he did chewing on the Tom situation. It wasn't guilt exactly. He'd done a crappy job reining in Tobias's use of the hawk morph early on, which had more than likely led to the situation at the yeerk pool, but there was more to it. He'd watched the same videos in Health class as everyone else. It was hard to accept the fact that a bunch of enormous bleeding zoo animals had clawed their way successfully out of the yeerk pool, but one small hawk hadn't been able to swoop out amidst all the confusion. He'd seen hawks hunt before in his backyard, and while occasionally did catch a blur as they swept through and snatched something off the ground, that was pretty much all he saw of them. They were smart and they could move. For Tobias to not have gotten out when that window had been big enough for an elephant to shove out of it…
Jake didn't pretend to be an expert on the adolescence psyche, but something was off. Tobias was off. He was also dependent on Jake's welfare now, so bringing up things like self-harm and suicide seemed pointless after the fact. Tobias was obviously self-motivated enough to keep himself alive on salty second-hand liverwurst, so that probably something Jake could work with. If it wasn't… Jake knew his days of keeping a hawk in the attic were probably numbered anyway. Even if his mom didn't find Tobias and chase him out with a broom and her shoe, his dad would make Jake turn him over to a wildlife clinic, and they'd be back where they started. They were already on borrowed time. ‹You don't have to stay up here, you know,› Tobias said suddenly, derailing Jake's train of thought. ‹I know you have homework to do.›
"I did most of it over at Rachel's. It's okay, I'm fine hanging out. I didn't eat at the table tonight, so no one's waiting for me or anything."
‹You didn't eat?› Tobias paused to regard him. ‹Was this your food?›
"I'll just grab more later. It's easier than doing it the other way around anyway."
Tobias watched him.
Jake sat cross-legged on the floor and tried to think up conversation topics that didn't suck. The sound of the rain on the window was a drum roll in the silence. He rubbed his eyes but they continued to buzz, echoing the unpleasant shiver in his gut. ‹Jake, you look trashed,› Tobias said. ‹You should've eaten first. I could've waited.›
"Huh?" Occupied, Jake peeked out behind his palm. "What?"
‹I said you look trashed. Did you sleep last night? ›
"Yeah, I'm fine. Just cold."
Tobias didn't look mollified. Tobias was hawk-shaped, though, which angled Jake's confidence in his ability to translate him down a notch. ‹Are you sure there'll be enough left?›
"It's fine. Seriously. Mom always makes way too much. I'll get some later, I promise."
Tobias said nothing. "Where do you fly, anyway?" Jake asked, just to get the focus off him. "I haven't had a chance lately. I've been trying to keep low-key for a while until I figure out Tom's new schedule."
‹I didn't want to travel out too far yet until I get to know whose territory is whose, but I got over by the mall and swung out by the ocean,› Tobias said. He hadn't started eating again. ‹There are some punk ospreys out there though, so I've had to be careful.›
"Are you going to, you know. Fight for territory?"
‹Maybe. Eventually, I guess.›
"You need me to tag in?" Jake held up his fists and half-heartedly rocked them around. "I can ride in on your back. We could tag-team like the Wonder Twins."
Tobias's sudden laughter shivered through their mental link. ‹Did you seriously just reference the Wonder Twins?›
"Yeah, but you have no proof, so good luck with the blackmail. Also, you knew who they were too, so you've kind of got no place to run with that."
‹Yeah, but I'm a certifiable nerd,› Tobias said. ‹You actually have cool points to lose at school.›
Jake was relieved when Tobias finally went returned to his meal. He watched him snarf the burger, running his bare heel along a rough floorboard to get his focus off his stomach. The problem here wasn't really Tobias. It wasn't even that Tobias was hawk-shaped. When it came to dialogue, Jake was really just used to being the talkee. Cassie called it 'being a good listener', but what it boiled down to was that Jake wasn't good at finding topics other people found interesting. He tended to chew on things longer, think harder, and by the time he'd gotten his brain sorted on how he felt about them, the conversation had already moved on. Marco was great that way in that he tended to run off his mouth without expecting Jake to pick up on it all, so Jake over the years had gotten complacent with the ability to tune in and out to the chatter while he traveled alongside it at his own pace.
Having to direct the conversation with someone even worse at talking than he was gave him that weird, panicky feeling of not having studied enough for a unit exam. Just to break the silence, he gave into his curiosity and ventured, "You ever miss it? School, I mean?"
Tobias stopped eating.
Jake realized the dickish insensitivity an instant too late. He tried to backpedal, feeling his face heat. "I just meant the whole being around other people thing. I mean, I know we're people, I just meant – shit. I mean crap. I just meant having a routine, like school or—"
‹Jake. Jake.› There was no change in the hawk's demeanor, but Jake was surprised to hear alarm Tobias's voice. ‹Geez, Jake, take it easy.›
"I'm sorry—"
‹It's okay. Easy. It's okay.›
It wasn't. From Marco to Rachel to Tobias, none of it was okay. Cassie was the only one managing and that was just because she hid her trauma better. Jake was winded. He hiked up his knees and hid himself against them for a while. ‹Not to keep harping on this, but you're really not looking good,› Tobias said. ‹Why don't you call it quits for the day? You can't have that much homework left.›
"It's fine."
‹I heard what happened the other night, with the window. I'm sorry I didn't get there sooner. I mean, I heard you get up, but I didn't think anything of it until your dad came barreling in and started shouting.›
"Not on you."
‹I know.› Tobias gave the hawk equivalent of a shrug, ruffling his pinfeathers. ‹I can still be sorry.›
"I used to sleepwalk a lot as a kid, so it's probably not all that weird it's all coming back up now."
Tobias mercifully let that sit. He went back to his meal with utilitarian speed, finishing it up in two small gulps and then a last big one, and then Tobias was back to fluffing out his wings and buckling down to his post-dinner clean-up.
Jake was considering excusing himself to die when Tobias said, ‹You went to see Rachel today, right?›
He'd figured this was coming. This time he was ready. "Yeah."
‹How is she doing?›
"She's okay."
‹Still pissed, isn't she,› Tobias said.
"Yeah, but not at you," Jake admitted. "Pissed is better than being scared, I guess. She wants us all to get going, but not everybody's there yet."
‹Yeah, but she's got a point. I'm getting pretty wired too. I was kind of hoping you'd call a meeting soon.›
"I'm getting to it." It wasn't technically a lie. Planning was the first step towards doing stuff. Procrastination had 'pro' in it. "Just thought we should take it slow for a while. Get used to things."
‹You don't have to worry about me, if that's what you're held up on, › Tobias said. ‹I've been ready since the beginning. You know that. I knew what it was we were getting into.›
"I know. Not everybody's there yet."
‹Things are happening all around us. We gotta start doing something.›
I know. Did fourteen year-olds get tension headaches? Jake looked at the ceiling for a minute and massaged his neck and yes, apparently they did. "Just give it a few days. We'll get there. Some of us just need some more time."
Tobias again was perceptive enough not to push. He finished grooming, sorted himself out with a final ruffle of feathers, then let his head swivel to face the window. Jake followed his gaze to the slivers of rain lit up by the garage light, hazing their peripherals into smears. ‹You're a really nice guy, Jake,› Tobias said abruptly, apropos of nothing, still looking out the window. ‹After everything that's happened… after all I went through, back when things were really rough… I'm glad it all held up in the end. I'm glad I wasn't wrong about you.›
It felt weird to say thanks to that and insensitive to argue against it, so Jake did neither. Cross-legged and cold and tired on the floor of his attic, he wondered if he could get away with hiding there for the rest of the month while Tobias fed them with burgers stolen off his dad's grill. ‹Sorry, do you mind opening the window?› Tobias asked. ‹I think I want to soak for a while. Whatever's on me isn't coming off.›
"Sure." Jake stood and crossed the room to the window. It jammed. He changed his angle, put his back into it, and after a few more seconds of coercion it sprang open with a screech. "Just give me a shout when you come back so I can let you in."
‹Thanks.› Tobias hopped up onto the sill, spread his wings, and let himself drop into open air.
Jake took another shower, longer and hotter this time. By the time he got out his nose was fully plugged and there was a ringing in his ears that sounded like a door squealing shut on its hinges. By the time he figured out what was wrong, he'd suffered through half a box of kleenex and a too-late quart of orange juice and that was his price for trying to do his homework, apparently.
.
He was sick for the most terrifying three days of his life. His mother pelted him with well-meaning threats to take him to the doctor and only relented when he gobbled down his cough medicine without fuss, which apparently constituted the Konami code of maturity for parents. "I still think one of us should stay home with you," she murmured, thumbing the heat on his forehead as she squinted at the thermometer readout in her other hand. "I can take the day. I'd just need to reschedule my interviews."
"I'm just gonna sleep," he said, which actually sounded like I'm jubt gudda and also was code for I have alien DNA floating around in my body that might narc on me during a blood test. He hoped she extrapolated 'sleep' from it. "Homer can watch me."
"Homer is not licensed in CPR in the event you choke on a pop-tart," Mom said. "I want you to answer the phone when I call at noon today. Dad is hooking up the landline in the hall. Set an alarm if you don't think you'll be able to hear my call over the humidifier."
"Okay," Jake said.
She proved her momliness by kissing him on the forehead, which Jake thought was actually pretty gross. He hoped it wasn't a parental imperative he'd be expected to follow as an adult. "I left reheatables in the fridge for you," she said. "Stay off your feet. Hold onto the banister when you go down the stairs. Flush the toilet."
"I'll be okay."
"I know," she sighed. There was something in her eyes he wasn't sure what to do with. She hesitated, then seemed to change her mind and kissed his forehead again, this time between the eyes. "Call if you need anything. Either Dad or me. Tom will be home right after school today to look after you."
Half-asleep and under the influence, this didn't register as problematic until he woke back up around nine o'clock, needing a bathroom and maybe waffles, and his slow syrupy death-march back up the stairs brought up some relevant questions. He swayed on the edge of his bed and parceled out implications around the cold coil of fear in his stomach. The yeerk in Tom's head hadn't been overtly aggressive in infesting Jake or his parents, but Jake knew it was only a matter of time. Fully healthy, Jake could out-muscle him if it came to it. Loopy on cough syrup, it'd be a lot simpler to drug his soup or his orange juice and infest him right in the convenience of their own home.
Jake floated in a queasy sea of existential crisis throughout the rest of the day, zoning out under medication only to jerk himself awake when he caught himself. He had a vague impression of light shifting, of his humidifier clicking off; at noon he stumbled out of bed to answer the phone and use the bathroom, after which time the drugs finally won out and he fell asleep with a hand on his baseball bat. The next time he awoke, there was a TV on the floor of his room with a stolen Super Nintendo IV'd into it, and Marco's back was leaning against the edge of Jake's mattress as he played F-Zero and crunched on a piece of toast. "What the fuck," Jake said.
"I'm telling," Marco said, mouth full.
"What time is it?"
"Two-thirtyish. I ditched last period."
His baseball bat was gone. Confused and about as coordinated as a wet towel, Jake blindly pawed for it and instead found his childhood stuffed elephant from his closet. "I cleaned your closet," Marco said. "I found six of my magazines in there and like two pairs of my shorts. People are gonna get ideas, man."
"What are you doing here?"
"Kicking the crap out of your top scores. Take your meds."
There was a tray table and medicine next to a glass of water. Jake's head was full of syrup and wool. He blinked at his elephant point-blank for a while, trying to parse up from down. "Been thinking," Marco said. "I'm wondering if morphing wouldn't fix this. Your ick, I mean. Cassie wondered it too."
"I don't know."
"You even try?"
"Can't concentrate."
"Yeah, well." The last sliver of toast was hanging like a cigar from Marco's mouth. He gnawed on it idly as he swerved the pink car through the third lap of Big Blue. "Good a reason as any."
Jake sat up. Marco didn't look up at him, but nudged his elbow back a bit to jostle the tray table. "I checked the schedule your mom taped up on the fridge. You're overdue. Brought up some pretzels too in case you feel like you're going to yack them up."
Jake blew his nose ineffectually on two kleenexes, missed the trashcan with them, and took the medicine with the same hands that'd won those high scores in Big Blue and would now have to undergo deep intense ninja training to reclaim their title. "You know," Marco said abruptly, still not looking him, "I don't hate you, man. Like, directly the opposite of that. It shouldn't have taken Tobias coming over for me to know you were laid up like this."
"It didn't have anything to do with you."
"Yeah, sure, we can play that game," Marco said. "Or, or – just a thought – we could do the thing where we acknowledge that there is sort of an enemy agent under your roof, and you're leading something kind of important, and maybe your team should know when you're compromised so we can cover your tail and protect the human race from extinction."
Considering how their last conversation had ended, Jake figured he'd earned a little butthurt. "I can take care of myself."
"That why you were sleeping with a baseball bat? 'Cause I've got news for you, I've been tooling around in here for like, an hour. Whatever home run you were hoping to hit left infield a long time ago."
"Look, either you want information about all this or you don't," Jake said. "I don't have time to play games with you. I don't know what you want."
"I want you to either stop bitching and co-op with me or lay down and sleep," Marco said. "Either way shutting up would be great. I called your mom and told her I'm spending the night for a while, by the way, so you can stop trying to get rid of me. She likes me way better than you. You're stuck with me until the barbecue on Sunday."
Jake lowered himself back down with limbs that ached. His eyes were stinging. He pushed his sore nose against the clean scent of his elephant and tried not to do the thing where he vividly, viscerally remembered Rachel-as-elephant pancaking enemies down in the yeerk pool. Bones splintering like matchsticks. Screams that cut off.
Marco hit pause. He drew himself up onto the bed and sorted Jake out until he was more under the covers than on top of them. "I was afraid of Tom," Jake mumbled into his pillow. He kept blinking rapidly, using the elephant as a very manly shield between them to hide his tears from Marco. "I've never been afraid of him before."
"You're not afraid of him. You're afraid of the sentient dick in his head. Very sensible fear."
"I used to like when I got to stay home. He'd always come right home and play games with me until Mom or Dad got back."
Marco didn't reply. He'd cranked his hair back into a short tail to get it off his neck, which made sense considering how high Jake's mom had turned up the heat before she'd left. "I should've saved him down in that pool," Jake said. "That was on me. I left him there. He watched me leave him there."
"He watched a bunch of zoo animals pick a fight with a monster from a Mos Eisley cantina," Marco said. "Trust me, Jake. He's glad he didn't see you there. He's fighting tooth and nail in his own head to keep you out of there."
"We have to go back in. We have to stop them."
"Yeah." Surprisingly, perhaps out of some faint shred of mercy, Marco didn't argue. He did make Jake drink some more water, which in its own way surprised Jake just as much. Marco tended to buck a lot of teenage male trends, but guy-to-guy mollycoddling hadn't historically been one of them. Jake couldn't tell if he was mortified for the both of them or so grateful it hurt. "First things first. When you're not trying to take off to Cloud City on a snot rocket, we can maybe talk strategy or at least some more waffles."
"That's the second Star Wars reference in like thirty seconds," Jake said. "Are you trying to tell me something?"
"That Obi-Wan was MVP of that whole series and everyone else was a sister-kissing hack? Yeah," Marco said. "Like, for years. Where have you been?"
Jake said, "Thanks."
Marco scratched his ear with his thumb. He began to say something, then closed his mouth and fell silent for a while.
Jake rolled over to face the wall. There was some kind of construction going on down the street; every once in a while the sounds of a jackhammer and some yelling would crowd out the quiet in the room. The house continued to settle with the shifting sunlight, emitting periodic creaks as the temperature took a downturn towards evening.
Marco said, "Look, I know I haven't been all that involved or anything, but it's not like I don't care. I just got a dose of reality down there, all right? We're not superheroes. We're not even old enough to drive. All those meetings you keep having, all the BS we've been doing on the side – surveillance, tailing, this cops and robbers stuff with the Sharing – it's all play. We don't know what the hell we're doing. All I know is that if something happens to me, my dad goes too. He's already told me."
Jake didn't turn over. He figured Marco could use the privacy as much as he could. "But when it comes to backing you up on stuff like this, you can't be an asshole," Marco said. "You have to let me know. Maybe I don't want as big a role in this as you do, but it still involves me. If you get caught, we all get caught, and that affects everybody. And that is on me. At least that much, anyway."
Jake's voice rasped. "So you're just over here on guard duty?"
"I'm clearly over here to steal your food and play your Nintendo. Pay attention," Marco said. "Guard dog is like fourth down on my list of job titles. And for your information, I'm not the only one babysitting. The others are taking turns tonight to flyover. Tobias is on call upstairs too. One way or another, you're not showing your throat to anybody. 'Cept me. Because I've got seniority."
"I have to go back down," Jake said. His throat was almost too tight to get words out around it. He could feel himself drifting off and hated it. "I can't leave him there."
"He's not there. I couldn't even find the door."
"We can't give up."
"Didn't say we should." Marco shoved his head from behind, briefly smothering him into the pillow. "Just that you should shut up for a while. That's all. We've got you. Or something. Something encouraging. Take this all as top-tier dialogue and stop poking holes in it. My script writers are on break."
Jake slept like roadkill all the way up until dinner. He endured a well-meaning bowl of chicken broth as his mother fussed over Marco with enchiladas and strawberry-rhubarb pie. When it was time to turn in, Marco moved his borrowed sleeping bag in front of the door and morphed just enough to be able to communicate mind-to-mind with the surveillance outside before backing out of it with a shudder. "Cassie sends kissy noises," he yawned, piling down into the additional sheets Jake's mom had scared up from their linen closet. "A/S/L, heart stickers, the works. AIM her up when you're not slobbering all over everything."
Jake could hear Tom knocking about in the adjacent room. He gripped the trunk of the stuffed elephant and tried not to feel like there was an actual elephant sitting on his chest. "Switch off, man," Marco said. "Take the night off. Toggle player 2."
Okay. Jake itemized his own to-do list in his head through a cloud of dissociation. There was a scuttle that might have been Tobias coming into the attic and might have been a branch scraping the side of the house. With Tom-who-was-not-Tom in the next room, fact and hallucination had the same weight. Even Cassie making hypothetical kissing noises above his house felt like an interesting but unrelated footnote.
It wasn't until he was dropping off past the point of no return that he realized three very relevant, very factual things: the morph Marco had half-slid into to communicate hadn't been a gorilla, he'd checked on the door to the yeerk pool under the school that week without telling any of them, and Jake had been called in absent for tomorrow while his mom would be out for another round of interviews.
Clogged ears aside, it sounded a lot like an invitation.