CHAPTER TWO: MARCO

I followed Tobias back to his crappy apartment. Fortunately we weren't too far away, because my eye was already starting to swell. By the time we mounted the squeaky metal steps up to his front door, I could barely see out of that side of my face. I don't know what I'd been thinking, tangling with those two jerks. Obviously spending so much time with Jake was a bad idea. He was rubbing off on me, making me do stupid things. Making me get involved in other people's problems. Yeah, I know everybody has problems. But that's the crux of it: they're their problems, not mine.

Unless, like some kind of idiot, I decide to make them mine.

Well, that was enough of that. Tobias Whitman was not my problem. If Jake wanted to take on that charity case, bully for him. I had better things to do with my life than try and solve the world's issues. I had plenty of issues of my own, I didn't need to go looking for more.

All I needed right now was an ice pack, a few minutes to take the swelling down, and a new carton of milk. Man, I can't believe I wasted the groceries like that. What was I thinking?

I flopped onto Tobias's couch as he went into the kitchen to root around in his freezer. The apartment he shares with his mom is pretty small, smaller than the one my dad and I live in and we aren't exactly living in a palace, either. It's also really old and shabby, it having once been part of an old townhouse that had been portioned-out into rentals as the neighborhood it was in slowly decayed and fell into neglect and disrepair. The carpet was almost worn through, there were water stains on the ceiling, and a fuzzy layer of cat hair covered everything.

It was also, in a strange and run-down way, kind of beautiful.

See, Tobias's mom had kind of gone all-out decorating the place with colored glass mobiles and bits of sculpture and dozens of paintings. She's an artist. Not a famous artist or anything, but she paints on the regular and even does a few commissions for people who want portraits of family or loved ones but don't want to pay a professional's prices. I guess she probably works other jobs, crappy part-time stuff or temp jobs like my dad, but I don't know. I've never really talked to Tobias before. I mean, everybody at school knows who he is, but he and I aren't friends. I'm not sure the boy has ever had friends, actually.

That's because everybody knows him as the boy whose mom believes in aliens.

Yeah. A total nutjob. One of those tinfoil-hat, conspiracy theory whack-a-doodles. Little green men from outer space, flying saucers, crop circles, all the jazz. Somebody call the men in white coats to take the lady away, she's certifiable!

Or at least, that's what we all used to think. But that was before the alien spaceship crashed in the construction site while my friends and I were walking home from the mall. That was before we met this dying Andalite named Elfangor and discovered that Earth is being invaded by these totally gross alien slugs called Yeerks. They slither inside your head and take control of everything—and I mean everything. Blinking, breathing, eating, sleeping—all of it. Every word you say, every move you make, all of it is at the Yeerk's command. Every memory, every thought, all of that is theirs to use against you and everyone around you.

Anyone can be a Yeerk. Cops, reporters, gas station attendants, vice principals, brothers, parents. Anybody. So we can't tell anyone what we saw, can't tell anyone what we can do. I mean, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned; we don't want to end up lumped into the same category of crazy as Tobias's mom. I'm not sure all of the others agree with me, though. Rachel, for one—the girl is gorgeous, but something about her makes me edgy. She seems a little bit too excited by the whole thing, you know? And then there's Cassie, who just wants to use our powers to save the whales and bond with the beavers. Boring!

Admittedly, our little trip around town on our borrowed wings this morning was pretty cool—but cool enough to risk dying for? No way. We were better off just forgetting any of it had ever happened. The hard part was convincing the others, especially Jake, but I figured that if I went along with things for a little while eventually I'd be able to bring them around to see sense…

My musing was cut short when Tobias shoved an ice pack at me. "Here," he said gruffly. He was looking away from me, hiding behind his hair again the way he does when he's feeling nervous or sad or uncomfortable or...basically, feeling anything at all. It kind of gets on my nerves. The world isn't going to go away or get better just because you don't look at it. Might as well face it head-on and find something to smile about, that's what I say. It's either laugh or cry, and I really don't like crying.

"Hey," I said to Tobias. "You ever think about, you know, fighting back?"

He shrugged, not meeting my eyes. "Doesn't really help," he mumbled.

I shrugged too. What did I care? It wasn't my problem. "Okay then," I said.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, me on the couch with an ice pack over my eye, Tobias perched on one of the kitchen stools with another ice pack held to his bloody lip. After a while he started to chuckle.

"What's so funny?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said quickly, and chuckled again. "Just—it's just, the sight of that milk exploding all over Andy? The look on his face, when he found himself with an eyeful of milk?"

I started to chuckle too. "That was pretty good," I agreed. I put on my best Announcer Voice and boomed, "Milk! It does a body good!"

Then we were both laughing in earnest, guffawing really, Tobias clutching at his side like it hurt but still laughing away, like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. We were still laughing when the front door opened and Tobias's mom walked in.

I shut-up fast. I feel a little weird around other people's moms sometimes, and Tobias's mom is a whole bushel of weird all on her own. For one thing, she doesn't dress like a grown-up. She dresses like a college kid who really likes thrift stores and she's always got paint splotches on her clothes and face, sometimes even in her hair. For another, there's the fact that she likes people, even kids like me, to call her by her first name, like she's a regular person instead of a parent. Then there's the way her eyes shift between being these soft, dreamy blue orbs that look like they're focused on something a million miles away that nobody else can see, and being as sharp and immediate as the blade of a knife. And of course, there's her stories about aliens, which are enough to weird anybody out.

Then there's the fact that she's, well, a mom.

I shifted on the couch, wondering if my eye was recovered enough that I could ditch the ice pack and get out of there. Before I could make a move, Tobias's mom—Loren, as she preferred to be called—looked curiously at me and said, "Oh, hello…?"

"Marco," Tobias supplied. He was suddenly no longer laughing either. "His name's Marco. You met him before," he added tiredly.

"Oh," Loren said again. She gave me a strained little smile, like she was struggling to place my face, then gave up and shrugged. "Well, hello again Marco."

She moved into the kitchen and started unpacking the bag of groceries she was carrying. I was a little curious myself, and I sat up on the couch to see better. It wasn't the bags of rice or the boxes of instant potatoes I was staring at, though. I was watching Loren, wondering when she would say something about the ice packs we were both holding, and the fact that Tobias was all over filthy from lying on the pavement. I mean, we had obviously just been in a fight. It was so obvious a toddler could have figured it out. And yet, Loren said nothing.

I transferred my gaze to Tobias. He looked uncomfortable now, but not the kind of uncomfortable that comes with waiting for the other shoe to drop; just like a kid who wasn't comfortable having someone else his age see his mom. I knew a lot of kids like that, kids who were embarrassed by their parents (and oh boy, there were times I could sympathize), and Tobias had more reason to feel that way than most—but while he looked uncomfortable, he didn't look like he was trying to make up a story to explain why his lip had bled all over his shirt, or why he had some other kid sitting on his couch with an ice pack over his eye. They both just took it in stride.

Like I said, weird.

After a few minutes Loren gently took Tobias's ice pack away and replaced it with another one she pulled from the freezer. "Is your ice pack thawing, Marco?" she called to me. "Do you want a fresh one?"

"Uh, no," I said. "No thanks. I'm good."

"Okay," said Loren. "Help yourself whenever."

"Uh...thanks," I said. I didn't say anything else as she finished putting her groceries away. It reminded me a lot of the kind of stuff my dad and I ate, except that there were fewer frozen pizzas and more Asian sauces. I squinted at Tobias, wondering if that was something Loren had picked up from Tobias's dad. I'd always thought he looked like a bit of a mix ethnically, despite his floppy blonde hair, but I wasn't sure what his heritage was exactly. I'd never seen his dad—as far as I knew, he had been gone for years by the time we started going to school together—so I wasn't sure what kind of ancestry he had. Me, I'm Hispanic on my mom's side but my dad's white, so I'm pretty basic; there are lots of kids like me in our town. Not enough to keep me from getting flack about it sometimes, but enough that I've never felt like I was "in a minority" or whatever. Tobias on the other hand—well, I had a feeling that it wouldn't matter what his ancestry was; he'd have been an outcast even if he'd been as white-bread as his mom.

After all, she was the one that was the real weirdo. Tobias just got to inherit the fall-out from her crazy.

That's when it clicked: Tobias's mom wasn't asking about him being in a fight because she was used to him coming home looking like he'd had the crap kicked out of him. They'd probably had the conversation so many times that they didn't bother repeating it anymore—or maybe she was just tired of hearing that her kid had gotten beat-up because of how people felt about her.

I winced. That had to be it. How much must it hurt to be a mom and to know that the reason your son was the school punching bag was because he was your kid? Talk about unpleasant.

"Did you ever think about just, like, not telling people about it?" I blurted out before I could stop myself.

Loren wandered out of the kitchen, a box of off-brand macaroni and cheese in her hand, and tilted her head at me. "Not telling people about what?" she asked.

Tobias was glaring at me. I struggled to think of something else to say. "Um—uh—you know, um—" I looked wildly around the room. "Artist's Statements!" I cried. "Like, aren't people always asking you, um, what your art 'means' and stuff like that? Our art teacher at school always makes us write these stupid Artist Statements to go along with everything we draw and like, it's so totally bogus, right? Sometimes a dinosaur is just a dinosaur." I gave a frantic little laugh. "Do you, like artists like you, do you ever think about just not doing those?" The grin on my face felt stretched and horrific, but Loren just smiled at me.

"Oh, yes," she said. "Actually those aren't really mandatory, outside of school and a few of the stuffier galleries." She laughed cheerfully. "I mean, people ask me what my paintings 'mean' sometimes, but nobody makes me write a paragraph about it."

"Oh man," I babbled, "I knew it was a total rip-off. Wait until I see Mrs. Dobbins on Monday. I am so going to give her a piece of my mind. Ha ha ha!"

"Ha ha ha," Loren laughed back at me, and floated back into the kitchen. Tobias was still glaring at me. I wiped sweat off my brow, fumbled my ice pack, and had to lunge halfway off the couch to catch it.

I missed. "Oh, man," I grumbled. When I picked it up again, the ice pack was coated—absolutely coated—in orange cat hair. I stared at it and sighed.

"Would you like to stay for dinner, Marco?"

"Um, what?" I asked, distracted. Loren repeated the question. "Oh, uh, no—no thanks," I said quickly. "I have to get home soon. My dad will—my dad will be waiting for me," I lied. In truth I rarely had to worry about what time I got home, because my dad didn't pay enough attention to the clock to care, but I didn't like telling people that. I didn't like telling them that he only made it to work on time when I got him out the door, or that I was the one who did most of the grocery shopping—hence that carton of milk that I'd busted open all over Andy's ugly face—or that if I didn't remind him to eat, my dad mostly just sat in his chair and stared at nothing. The good days were when he sat in his chair and stared at The Simpsons on the TV because at least he was looking at something, but that was as good as it got.

My mom had died two years ago, see, and my dad...my dad had kind of fallen apart.

I don't like thinking about that, though, and I definitely don't like talking about it, so all I said was, "I need to pick up some milk on the way home, too."

I glanced at Tobias to see if he was grinning at the memory of me milk-bombing Andy, but he was hiding behind his hair again.

Okay, I was seriously getting tired of that trick.

"Hey Tobias," I said challengingly, "do you think if I told your mom I'd met some aliens, she'd buy me a ticket out of town? I'd really rather not have to take that math test on Monday…"

"Oh, you've met aliens?" Loren asked before Tobias could respond. "Were you with Tobias last week, or was this a different time?"

I jerked forward to glare at Tobias. I dropped the ice pack again, but this time I didn't bother trying to catch it. It thumped dully on the thin carpet. "You told your mom about that?" I yelped. "You told her about—about Visser Three and Elfangor getting eaten and the blue box and everything?"

Tobias sighed. "No," he said patiently, "I didn't. I just told her I'd met some aliens, like the ones in her paintings. And I told her that Alice had met some other aliens who weren't so nice, and she'd needed help getting away from them." He pointed at me. "So no, Marco, I didn't tell her about Elfangor…you did."

"Oh," I said. I winced.

"Elfangor…"

We both turned to look into the little kitchen, where Loren was standing in front of the stove. She had the open box of macaroni in her hand and the pot of water was boiling, but she was staring blankly at the wall in front of her. "Elfangor," she said again, softly, like she was turning the word over in her mind, trying to sound-out the meaning. "Elfangor…"

"Mom?" Tobias asked. He sounded a little worried. "Mom, are you okay?"

Loren didn't say anything, didn't move. I was starting to feel a little bit freaked-out.

"Mrs. Whitman? Loren? Can you hear us?"

"Elfangor…" Loren frowned, suddenly, shook her head, and rolled her shoulders like she was stretching out a bad cramp. She looked up and saw us both staring at her. "Sorry, boys," she said, with a little laugh. "I guess I must have drifted off for a minute there!" She poured the macaroni into the pot and stirred it a few times.

I kept staring at her. So did Tobias. After a while he sat back on his stool and said, "Okay, then…"

"Uhhh, right," I said as well. "Look, I—I think I'm gonna go…"

Loren gave me a bright, cheerful smile. "If you're sure you won't stay for dinner?" she said.

"No," I said quickly, "no, I—I should get home. Check on my dad…"

"Okay," she said. "It was nice to meet you, Marco. To meet you again, I mean. Come over any time. We can talk about those aliens you met."

"Sure," I lied, "sounds fun. Thanks for the ice pack." I set it on the counter, gave Tobias a stern look, and left as quickly as I could. For some reason, the way his mom had gone out-of-focus like that had given me the willies. I couldn't explain exactly why; she was a crazy lady, even if she'd been right about aliens being real (that didn't make her sane, because only a crazy lady would tell people they'd met aliens), and so I expected her to act a little bit nuts.

So why had her reaction to Elfangor's name freaked me out so much?