Memories
Chapter Six
I reached the safety of the temporary wall in seconds. I cowered there with my antenna swinging madly back and forth, looking for danger.
(Julie, what are you doing?)- Jake screamed.
It was dark in the wall, which calmed the roach considerably. But all my thoughts were still focused on the vibrations outside. The person outside walked into the room, stopped for a few moments, then turned and left, turning out the lights again on the way out.
Slowly, as the danger faded, I gained control of the morph again. The roach was safe once again and no longer cared about anything. I, however, was mortified. I stayed under the wall, wondering what the others would have to say to me once everything was over.
(Ax, are you done morphing?)- Jake asked again.
(Yes.)-
(Good, then let's get out of here.)-
I ran ahead of the others, using the walls and my memory to guide me out the door and across the parking lot to the Quickstop. I hugged close to the wall and started to demorph before the others had caught up with me, but I was still the last one done. Yet another example of my lack of practice.
"What happened back there?" Jake nearly screamed as soon as he had a normal mouth.
Mine was still too disfigured to produce more than gibberish so I had no choice but to wait and attempt to look repentant.
"You lost control of your morph and ran away! Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? What if that guy had seen you? Or stepped on you? And Ax was still half-morphed. What if something happened and we needed you while you were hiding under a wall?"
"Nothing happened," I countered in a quiet voice. He was right and I knew it, but I still argued back, although without much conviction. "And I was a roach; he probably wouldn't have thought anything of it."
"We can't take those kinds of chances," he continued. "The Yeerks know we're fighting them, even if they think we're Andalites. They'll be suspicious of anything, even bugs."
I shrank away from him, staring at the cigarette buts that littered the ground. "Nothing happened," I muttered again, still clinging stubbornly to my one defense.
"That's not the point. The point is you told us you'd be okay for this and you weren't. You ran. We need to know we can trust you, Julie."
"I'm trying!" I yelled suddenly. "I'm doing the best I can here, but no one told me stuff like that was going to happen! How was I supposed to know something like that would happen just because someone turned on the lights?"
"That's why we try to practice morphs before we have to use them. Why-"
Jake broke off when Cassie touched his arm lightly. He turned away and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
"Don't let it happen again."
"I won't," I muttered, head hanging in shame.
"Look, there's nothing more we can do tonight and it's getting late. Let's go home."
I watched the others as they prepared to leave, hanging in the back and staying out of the way. Ax morphed quickly and he and Tobias flew away while the others dressed in silence, occasionally giving me glances that were sympathetic and disgusted by turn.
Only Marco kept his gaze firmly turned away. He wouldn't even glance my way, his anger and disappointment evident in every action. After he was done he started walking away, then called to Jake when he noticed he was alone.
Jake looked from me to Marco, unable to decide between what he thought was his responsibility, and getting away from me. "Will you be okay?" he asked.
"Yeah. I'm fine. Go home, I'll be fine."
Jake left and I dressed slower than necessary and took the long way home. When I reached my room sometime after midnight I went strait to bed. I tried not to think. A difficult thing to do in a silence that offered no distractions.
The next morning, the first thing I saw when I reached to turn off the alarm was my English textbook sitting out on my desk. I'd left it out as a reminder to myself to finish reading Beowulf. The test was second period.
"Oh shit," I muttered to no one in particular. I looked at the clock and tried to figure out how much time I had to cram before I remembered why I hadn't finished the reading. I fell back on my pillow, covered my head with my blanket, and groaned. Thoughts of my failure and cowardice ran through my head and I considered faking an illness. Mom was so understanding with my frequent 'stomach bugs' and occasionally thought I was truly sick.
Right. Because skipping school will really earn Marco's approval.
My eyes snapped open and I uncovered my head and stared at the ceiling. Why should Marco's approval mean anything to me? If anyone's approval mattered it was Jake's, or the whole group's, but certainly not Marco's.
Marco, Jake, or all of them, it didn't matter. The fact remained that skipping school would solve nothing but my study problem and probably just make the others even more angry with me. Invading aliens were bad enough without added drama.
With a heavy sigh I hauled myself out of bed and got ready for school. I carried my Lit book with me, trying to study as I got ready, but it didn't matter. The Animorphs had made me put off more of the required reading that I'd thought; there was too much to finish in one morning. I counted on the fact that I'd read a majority of the epic poem to get me through the test.
What I didn't count on was my lack of sleep and other worries. Throughout the test if I wasn't yawning, I was wondering what would have happened to Ax if the man in office had seen him. I left many of my answers blank and half-assed the rest of them.
No one approached me the entire day about the previous night. Even Cassie left me alone in study hall. I spent the entire day thinking of things to say to them, of ways to argue and defend myself, but the opportunity to use them never presented itself. Perhaps that's why, when I saw Marco walking home after school, I ran to catch up with him.
"Hey. Mind if I walk with you?"
He glanced at me for a moment, then looked ahead again. "Go ahead."
We walked in silence for a while. After the crowd of kids going home thinned out a bit, I waited for him to say something. To berate me, or yell at me, or lecture me, or something. But he just kept walking.
"I really screwed up last night, didn't I?"
He paused before answering with a simple, "Yeah."
It was a situation I hadn't anticipated. I expected the other Animorphs to fight with me, especially Marco with his tendency to be brutally honest. I tried to get my thoughts in order, to say something that might clear the air.
"I'm not like David," I blurted out. "I'm just trying to adjust here."
I snapped my mouth shut and groaned inwardly, telling myself that talking about David was not a good way to 'clear the air.'
"I know you're not," he replied. "David wouldn't have felt sorry about something like last night."
I had nothing to say to that. Marco wasn't giving me anything to work with and his quiet demeanor gave no hint of what he was thinking. Although, the very fact that he was being quiet told me something was wrong. Normally he'd be talking up a storm and making jokes.
We'd almost reached the point where our paths split before I spoke again. "Look, I'm really sorry about last night. It's just that this is a lot to deal with all at once and I'm still really new at the whole superhero-by-night thing. And I want to do this well, I really do, and I won't let you guys down again."
He stopped walking and looked at me. Really looked at me. The same way he did in the mall bookstore. "Do you hear yourself? You're still talking about this whole thing like its some group project we've got going on. Like you think the worst that can happen is a bad grade or something. This isn't something you 'do well.' Either you do it, or you end up dead. There is no third option."
I couldn't think of a single thing to say in response, so I just stared at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something I could use.
"Why did you think you had to come talk to me, anyway? You don't need my approval to be an Animorph."
"Yes I do."
As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them. Even then I didn't fully understand why I needed to be in his good graces; it certainly wasn't something I could explain to him.
"Why?"
I shrugged. "Well, not just you. Everyone. I'm struggling here; I need support."
Marco broke eye contact and stared at the ground, running a hand over the longer hair on top of his head. He needed a haircut.
"Yeah, well, that's what we keep Cassie and Jake around for."
He turned to leave and I spoke again when I should have just let him go. "I meant what I said about doing better from now on."
He stopped, but didn't face me. "I'll believe that promise when I see it."
I slammed the front door closed behind me, stormed into the living room, and threw my bag on the couch.
'I'll believe that promise when I see it.'
Marco didn't trust me. Not that I could really blame him. I'd done nothing but screw up since joining the group. But it wasn't just that he didn't trust me. He was waiting for me to make a mistake. Like he thought he knew what was going to happen and was just waiting for me to prove him right.
That ugly, arrogant, self-righteous SOB.
I kicked the couch for good measure and Mom poked her head through the door to the kitchen. "Are you alright, honey?"
"Just fine," I grumbled, falling onto the couch and picking up the remote. Mom abandoned whatever it was she had been doing and joined me on the couch.
"What's wrong?" she asked, putting an arm around my shoulder. I looked at her and I could see what she was really feeling. She was worried about me, but she was more worried about finding out what was bothering me. Scared that whatever it was would be something she couldn't deal with.
Mom had me when she was sixteen. By some miracle, Dad agreed to marry her and they made that marriage work. But it forced her to grow up too fast, to skip steps in the natural process. My mom was the most immature adult I knew, fully capable of dealing with high-school drama but not much else when it came to her children. I was as old as she was when she had me. I was at the age that she knew nothing about. And it scared her.
But my life was a lot scarier than whatever she was imagining.
"It's nothing Mom. I just had a bad day at school. That's all."
Keep it safe, I thought. Keep it to things she can deal with.
"Want to tell me about it?"
I shook my head. "It's nothing. Really. Someone just said something that pissed me off. No big deal."
She just nodded and kissed my forehead. "Well, don't worry about it, then. By tomorrow no one will remember what was said."
"Yeah."
I just sat there on the couch and scowled at my shoes until she took the hint and left. For the first time in my life, I resented my mother's past. I couldn't ask her how to deal with people who didn't trust me. She couldn't tell me what to do about my situation, hypotheticals or no. She didn't know anything about how to deal with a mistake or act mature in the face of failure. She just went bumbling through life with that stupid smile, not caring what people thought of it.
The remote was still in my hand. I turned on the TV and started flipping through channels, hoping the mindless act would help block thoughts of the previous night. But it didn't work. No matter how many channels I flipped through, all I could think about was Ax and the man in the theatre.
After watching Jerry Springer for five minutes before realizing it, I decided that the TV wasn't helping assuage my guilt. In the back of my mind I knew what would make me feel better, or less guilty at least, but the idea still made me squirm.
I had to practice morphing. The last thing I wanted to do on a quiet afternoon. But it was either run around the kitchen as a roach or sit on the couch feeling sorry for myself.
Jerry made the decision for me. Someone from the audience ran on stage and started a fight. I turned off the television in disgust and headed up to my room. Once there I reached for the lights, then decided to leave them on and changed into my morphing outfit.
The change from human to roach was getting progressively easier to deal with. As my arms stretched and my fingers melted into claws and my skin turned to hard brown armor I felt nauseous, but the morphing process didn't stop. I even kept my eyes open throughout the entire process.
I waited, fully cockroach, in the middle of my well-lit room, for the instincts I knew were coming.
LIGHT! RUN! RUN! HIDE! DANGER! LIGHT!
My roach body ran for the bed, which was the nearest shadow. I tried to stop myself but couldn't. Just like in the theatre, it was like my body wasn't under my own control. Once I reached the safety of the dark, the roach calmed down and I was able to think again. In a human body, I would have scowled at something or hit my head on the desk. Simply morphing was getting me nowhere fast.
Preparing myself for the rush of insect fear, I tried to make myself run into the middle of the room again and got a few feet before the instincts had me looking for a hiding place.
LIGHT! LIGHT! RUN!
No! Don't hide! Stop it!
RUN! HIDE!
I was only barely aware of myself in the grip of the fear, but that fear was becoming familiar. Familiar enough that I could remember who I was and what I was doing.
I thought of Ax to distract myself. Ax, helpless in mid-morph and killed by a controller. It was a sick image but it worked. Fear is a very powerful tool. And my human fear of causing someone's death far outweighed the roach's fear of he light.
The thought of Ax dead was enough to distract me from the roach instincts. I inched toward the centre of the room, just to prove I could. And even though I could still feel the roach's instincts telling me to run and hide, I didn't let them rule me. Slowly, as I walked around the well-lit room, I learned to control the morph. I walked around the room and crawled up the side of my desk and explored the keyboard. The instinctive need to run and hide was still there, but I was learning how to control it.
I heard voices in the hallway. Incoherent vibrations to my roach sense. I hid under the keyboard, not from any instinct, but because I knew that if one of the twins came in looking for me and found a roach on the desk, they'd keep it in a jar and perform 'experiments.' Dad was forever rescuing hapless insects from them.
Once the voices were gone, I crawled back to the centre of the room and demorphed, remembering something else from the night before. Jake was right when he pointed out that morphing didn't get rid of certain risks, it just added a truckload of new ones.
But I was too elated with success to really take much notice. I'd done it. I'd figured out how to control my morph, albeit a bit late. I shoved that thought to the back of my mind and went in search of the twins, convinced that they had been the voices I'd heard.
Andi met me in the hallway and gave me a flyer. It was an ad for The Gardens, with a coupon attached, that had been handed out en mass at their school.
"Want to go this weekend?" she asked.
"Hm? Uh, sure. Sounds like fun."
She told me she'd brought home a handful of the flyers, enough to get the whole family in at a discount, and that Mom was excited at the prospect of a 'family outing.'
I nodded and smiled, but didn't pay much attention to what she was saying. My thoughts were focused on the flyer in my hands. Specifically on a small section promoting new animals gained for a short period of time thanks to a zoo transfer.
For the next two weeks, my favorite animal would be living a few miles away. And this thing could fight.
I'd show those self-righteous Animorphs I could do things right.
That night I gave up sleep in favor of a trip to the Gardens. Breaking in was absurdly easy. I simply morphed to owl and flew over the gates and the guards. I was worried about getting lost, as I always did when I visited the Gardens on the ground, but I could see everything from the air and to my owl eye the entire scene was bright as day. I found the reptile house with no problem. Beside it, the Gardens employees had converted a large open area to a temporary habitat. Home away from home for the Komodo Dragon. The King of Reptiles.
Unfortunately, I was so excited to be doing something progressive that I ignored my common sense and forgot that the Komodos are territorial. Extremely territorial. The giant monitor asleep in his cave didn't notice or care about an owl landing nearby. But once I started demorphing, the sounds my joints made as they twisted and popped back into place woke him. An owl might not be threatening, but apparently I was.
The monitor came charging out of the cave before I was fully human again and I screamed. My vocal cords were still changing, so the noise came out somewhere between a scream and a screech and I prayed that the guards hadn't heard. Stumbling on legs that were still growing, I scrambled for the skinny tree at my back and reached for the lowest limb just as my arms grew fingers strong enough to grip it. I pulled my body up behind me, grateful that being half-morphed meant I was smaller and significantly lighter than normal. I climbed up a few more branches before they threatened to break under me and stopped. I looked down at the monitor with eyes that were fully human in a face that still had feathers. He was pacing below my tree, agitated but unable to follow me.
I breathed a sigh of relief and closed my eyes, trying to calm down enough to finish demorphing. Once I was done I hugged the tree trunk, aware that the limb I was sitting on was groaning under my full weight. The monitor was still pacing below me; I'd have to think of something soon or risk falling on top of him.
I looked down at the reptile I was planning to acquire. He was about eight feet long, the standard size for a Komodo Dragon, with a powerful tail that dragged the ground behind him as he paced. In the dark, I couldn't see much else, but I knew he had claws and teeth that could easily kill a full grown deer. Or a small human girl.
I climbed down to a lower, thicker branch to think. The Komodo seemed to be loosing interest in me, since I was no longer an active threat. I worried that he would return to his cave. If I tried to approach him there, I wouldn't have the safety of the tree to return to. I stayed put in the tree and tried to think of a way out while still looking menacing enough to keep the monitor near me. I thought back to the cockroach and the way he seemed to go into a trance when I acquired him and slowly a plan started to take shape.
Too slowly. The Komodo decided a girl stuck in a tree wasn't a threat to his territory and headed back to his cave. In a panic, I scrambled to the lowest branch and jumped to the ground, running to catch the monitor's tail before he could turn around.
He glared at me. The Komodo's tail is as long as the rest of his body, so he had plenty of room to turn and face his attacker, though I'm sure he could have thrown me off just by twitching his tail. I pushed that thought aside, took a firmer grip on his tail, and concentrated. The Komodo stopped moving and his eyelids half closed, as if he were about to fall asleep. I kept contact with the rough skin of his tail even as I stood and prepared to run back to the tree.
I dropped the tail and ran for my life. The monitor came out of his trance after about a second and chased after me. I reached the safety of my tree just as he caught up with me, pulling my foot up onto the branch just inches ahead of his snapping jaw. He was surprisingly fast for an animal that had been raised in captivity.
I climbed up a few more branches and looked down again, suppressing the urge to laugh like a maniac. I'd faced a deadly animal and come away alive and without a scratch. I wouldn't have to put up with Jake's scolding or Marco's mistrust. I'd prove that I could hold my own as an Animorph.
As the monitor lost interest again and ambled away, I morphed owl from my tree branch and flew home.
"You did what?"
We were on our way to Cassie's barn after school the next day, Jake pushing his bike and me coming from the bus stop. He didn't even wait to hear my full story before starting a lecture.
"What on Earth possessed you to go the Gardens by yourself? You could have been killed! Or injured, or caught be security!"
I scowled at the ground and kicked a rock. "Well I wasn't."
"That's not the point!"
I turned so that I was in front of him and stopped walking. "Why? Why can't that be the point? Here I am, perfectly safe and with a brand new battle morph. Doesn't that count for anything?"
Jake thought for a moment, opening and closing his mouth a few times. "Tell someone else before you pull a crazy stunt like that again. Don't go off on your own. You could get hurt."
He walked around me and I followed him to the barn, still scowling. Inside, Marco and Cassie were waiting. I took up a spot on a bale of hay across from Marco and Jake went to help Cassie feed a pill to an injured wolf. No one said anything until Rachel and Tobias showed up a few moments later.
"Alright," Jake said as he wiped his hands on his pants. "Here's the deal. We have to figure out what to do about this theatre before they have a chance to open it."
"We're going to have to attack it," Rachel announced, giving Marco a look that dared him to argue with her. "There's no other way to get them to stop. Look, we've done it before, like with that hospital thing last year. If the Yeerks know that we know about the theatre, they'll shut it down in a heartbeat."
(She makes a good point,)- Tobias offered from his perch on the crossbeams. -(They won't risk giving us the chance to attack them publicly and draw attention.)-
Marco leaned against a bale of hay and crossed his arms. "I can't believe we're even considering this."
"Do you have a better plan?" Rachel asked.
"No, but that doesn't mean I like this one." He sighed and ran a hand through the hair that still needed a haircut. "Much as I hate to agree with Xena here, I can't find another way out of this mess. The Yeerks won't let us expose them to the public." I could hear the doubt in Marco's voice. He wasn't sure that the threat was enough to make the Yeerks run and hide and I didn't blame him. Why should they be afraid of us? Or even the guerilla Andalites they thought we were?
But still, it was a possibility. And doing anything was better than sitting around a barn watching Cassie change the bandage on a half-drugged wolf.
The others seemed to think so too.
"Should we put it too a vote?" Jake asked.
Rachel was the first to raise her voice. "I'm in."
"No surprise there," Marco said good-naturedly. She stuck her tongue out at him and after a few moments of thought, he threw up his hands. "Alright, let's give it a try."
"Cassie?" Jake turned to her, asking for her vote.
She sighed as she finished her work with the wolf and put him back in his cage. "We've got to do something," she said. "I'm in, too."
(Me, too.)-
"Julie?"
Everyone turned to me. The vote was unanimous so far and I was loathed to change that. To be the outsider again. Besides, they were right. We had to do something, and if there was even a chance that an attack would work, we had to try it.
I tried to keep my voice steady as I answered. "I'm in."
"Alright. That makes it unanimous." He didn't exactly look pleased by that fact. In fact, he looked like he'd just eaten something moldy and was trying not to throw it up. "We'll do it this Friday."
I pulled my knees to my chest and hugged them closely, trying to convince myself that everything would be alright and not quite succeeding. The others seemed to be struggling with the same problem and after a few moments of silence we left, one by one.