CHAPTER EIGHT: TOBIAS

When the last bell of the day finally rang, I got out of there as fast as I could move. It wasn't fast enough to avoid all the things people had been shouting at me since lunch, and it wasn't fast enough to avoid Jake, who caught up with me on the way to my bus.

"What was that about at lunch?" he hissed at me.

I shook my head and looked at my feet.

"We can't attract that kind of attention," Jake continued. "It isn't safe."

"It wasn't my idea," I mumbled. I could feel my eyes stinging, and I blinked rapidly.

I didn't like the idea of Jake being disappointed with me. Even before we'd all become Animorphs, he had stood up for me when nobody else would. He'd let me hang around him without calling me out for being a pathetic hanger-on, had even invited me around to his house once or twice without letting on that he was doing it only out of pity. All that made him probably the closest thing I'd ever had to a friend, and even though I knew I wasn't anywhere near his level, even though I knew there was no way that I could help but come up short in any comparison, I still wasn't happy about disappointing him.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

Jake sighed and ran his hand through his hair. "Don't be sorry," he said eventually. "I know whose fault it was, and it wasn't yours. I ought to be chiding Rachel, not you." He clapped me companionably on the shoulder. "Sorry, man. Anyway, I'll give you a call when we're ready to try that thing again, okay?"

I nodded. "Sure," I said. "No problem."

I stood there and watched Jake walk away, thinking that if the Berenson cousins kept this up people were going to start wondering if I had some kind of dirt on their family. What other explanation was there for two incredible kids like that to suddenly start paying attention to a loser like me? That is, if you didn't believe in aliens of course.

I shook my head and forced myself to stop staring wistfully after Jake and trudged to my bus. I did my best to ignore the less-than-witty comments people were shouting at me about Rachel and my cat and Melissa Chapman, but two feet from the door of the bus it became too much. I swerved away and let four sixth graders climb on ahead of me. I stared up at the fluffy clouds overhead for several minutes before I realized what I was thinking: how much nicer it would be to fly home instead.

As soon as that thought coalesced in my brain it became almost overpowering. The temptation to ditch my backpack, my books, my body, my clothes and shoes and just fly, fly away was so strong I actually bent down and started unlacing my sneakers before I thought better of it.

Someone pushed past me in a hurry to get to their bus and I wobbled, steadied myself with a hand on the pavement, and realized suddenly what I was doing. It was like being doused with a bucket of ice water.

I stood up, cheeks flaming, and looked around. Nobody seemed to be looking at me funny—or funnier than normal, anyway—so I guess they all assumed I'd been tying my shoes, rather than on the brink of kicking them off in order to turn into a hawk in the middle of the sidewalk. Of course only a nutter would think that something like that was a possibility — a nutter, or another Animorph.

I caught sight of Marco through one of the grimy windows toward the back of the bus. He didn't meet my eye, but I had the feeling he'd been watching me. I ducked my head quickly, as though afraid that he'd be able to read my intentions on my face, and reluctantly boarded the bus.

I took a seat near the front of the bus, where the little kids and the losers sat. I didn't look around for Marco; we rode the same bus route, but we didn't hang out. Even when Jake had been letting me tag along I had understood that Marco was tolerating my presence out of affection for Jake more than from pity for me. The incident with the milk carton was the first time the two of us had had any direct one-on-one interaction outside the other Animorphs, and I had the feeling that it was going to be the last, too.

Marco wasn't a Berenson. He wasn't going to stick his neck out for me, just because we had both been in the same construction site when the secrets of the world had cracked open in front of us—and why should he? I wasn't his problem. I hadn't asked to be Jake or Rachel's problem, either. I could take care of myself…even if the others clearly didn't think so.

I sighed, leaned my head back against the insufficient padding of the stiff green seat, and closed my eyes. I realized that I was going to have to prove myself to the rest of the Animorphs, to prove that I wasn't the weak link of the group.

All I had to do was figure out how.

. . . .

I was lucky on my way home: nobody was waiting to pound me. I was a little surprised by that, after the scene in the lunch room, but I wasn't going to complain. Maybe the bullies were all in detention, or maybe they had just found better things to do today. Maybe the story of Andy and the milk carton had gone around, and no one wanted to risk getting dairied.

That didn't seem likely. First because I couldn't see either Andy or Tap-Tap spreading a story that made them look bad, and I knew (hoped) Marco was too clever to self-sabotage like that, and second because if all it took was a little milk to scare bullies off, they'd have stopped bothering me years ago.

I walked fast anyway, because I didn't want to tempt fate and because I felt too antsy to walk slow. I was hoping that I'd be able to find some time to fly, to ditch this clumsy human body for an hour and a half and soar free, leaving my problems behind for a while.

I was trying hard to think about flying, instead of all the problems I had down here on the ground. In my distraction, I didn't realize mom was there until after I'd dumped my backpack unceremoniously on the floor and slouched into the kitchen for a glass of water. When she said, "Hi sweetie!" I jumped and half the glass went up my nose.

Sputtering and wiping my face on the tail of my t-shirt, I moved out into the living room to join her. "Hi mom," I said, clearing my throat a few times to get all the water out. She was perched on the stool by her easel, paint on her face and a brush in her hand. She had another two brushes tucked behind her ears, where she had probably forgotten about them, and Aragorn had claimed the corner of her stained dropcloth for a bed. He didn't look like he had any wet paint on him right now though, so I ignored the cat.

To tell the truth, I probably would have ignored him even if he'd been covered in ultramarine and fuschia; I was too busy staring at the half-complete painting in from of my mom.

It was, as usual, of an alien - but not one of her aliens. This was Elfangor - Elfangor standing tall and unhurt, his green eyes gleaming and that impossible little smile on his face. Mom hadn't painted enough of the tail for me to tell what she was going to do with the blade yet, but that didn't make much difference to the overall subject of the piece, and that subject was unmistakable.

I swallowed. "Um...mom?" I asked.

She grinned at me. "Do you like it?" she said. "I pulled out your sketches without asking, I'm sorry. I just couldn't get the image out of my head. Are you mad?"

"No," I said, "no of course I'm not mad." I was still staring at the painting. "I just...uhh…"

I wanted to know why she had painted Elfangor, not one of her Andalites - and it was unmistakably Elfangor. I didn't have a very large sample of Andalite appearance to base things on to be fair, but there were distinct differences between Elfangor and the only other Andalite I had ever seen, the one Visser Three was using as a host - and not just the sense of dark menace that wafted from the Yeerk commander like a cloud. They were visually distinct...so why had mom painted an Andalite that looked exactly like the one the other Animorphs and I had met in the construction site that night?

I could have told myself that it was because she was using my sketches as a reference - and now that I was looking at more than the canvas, I saw several of them taped to the walls around her, and others stacked on the floor, the sketches that she and I had both done when we'd finally talked about her aliens, and mine, for the first time - but I would have been kidding myself. I know I wasn't that good of an artist, not yet anyway; mom claimed that I was really talented for thirteen, and I guess I believed her because other people said the same thing, but I was still nothing compared to her...and more importantly, I could see the results of what I drew. And what I had drawn wasn't nearly accurate enough for mom to turn those sketches into an unerring painting of Elfangor.

There was another, even bigger question I had to ask first, though.

"Why did you paint him standing in front of our house?" I blurted.

Mom turned back to blink at the painting in front of her. "I don't know," she said. "It just felt like the right place to put him." She shrugged and flashed me a grin before swirling her brush through the globs of blue on her palette and adding a few more quick, graceful strokes to the lively canvass.

I couldn't stop staring. I didn't remember much about the house we had lived in when I was little, before mom and dad had split-up, but I knew what it looked like both from my memories and from mom's photographs. The yellow siding, the green shutters, the gray roof...the garden . That was the part that was really unmistakable. The little yellow house could have been any of the dozens of cookie-cutter suburb neighborhoods all over California. The garden, though - I remembered the garden. It had been weird in retrospect, since neither mom nor dad had been big gardeners, but we'd had all sorts of strange trees and flowers and ferns. It had always been a little overgrown, a little underkept; I guess it must have been left behind by whoever had owned the house before us. The point was that no one else I'd ever seen had a garden like that, which meant that mom hadn't just painted the Andalite in front of a house; she had painted him in front of our house.

Why?

I perched on the edge of the couch and sipped the rest of my water, watching mom work. It was soothing, familiar - but in some ways, completely different from the norm. This wasn't her usual half-glimpsed, half-remembered fragment; this was a full-bodied, unmistakable Andalite...and a chill crashed over me as I suddenly realized how dangerous that was.

"Mom, don't show that one to anyone!" I said. She turned to look at me, a curious frown underneath the smear of green that crossed her pale forehead. I swallowed. "Please," I added, a little less frantically. "I don't...I don't think you should show that one to anyone else. Anyone but us."

Mom tilted her head, her hair slipping from the accidental pin of her forgotten paintbrush. "Why not, Tobias?" she asked me. "Now that I know what my aliens look like better, maybe I can find someone else who recognizes-"

"NO!" I shouted, coming up off the couch in a rush. I didn't notice the half-empty water glass spilling from my hand across the rug; barely noticed Aragorn streaking past me out of the room, his tail puffed out like a feather duster. "You can't - mom, it isn't safe."

She stared at me. "What are you talking about?"

I hesitated...but I had to tell her something. "It's Mr. Chapman," I blurted. "He's been asking questions again. About your...your mental fitness." I winced and avoided her eye, feeling a clammy flush of guilt slide across my skin as her paint-smeared cheeks went pale. For almost as long as I could remember, people had been threatening to take me away from my mom on the basis of her being too mentally unstable to take care of a kid. Throwing that at her now that I knew she wasn't crazy made me feel sick, but it was still a real threat: just because I knew mom wasn't imagining her aliens didn't mean the rest of the world suddenly knew the truth - and those who did know were the most dangerous of all.

"Mr. Chapman," mom snarled, and the vitriol in her voice made me blink. I'd never heard mom sound that venomous about...well, anyone. Her knack for seeing the good in people no matter what annoyed me sometimes (like when she stopped me saying mean things about the social workers who were "just doing their jobs" when they looked for excuses to take me away from my mom) but I was also used to it. Mom was nice to people even when they didn't deserve it...so what had Mr. Chapman done to get on her bad side?

I mean, I didn't have a lot of nice things to say about my assistant principal, but what kid does? Maybe honor roll students or star athletes I guess, but I've never seen "the good side" of Vice Principal Chapman and now that he has a murderous Yeerk in his head, I doubt I ever will. Mom, on the other hand...what did she have against him?

"Uhhh," I said dumbly, "yeah. You know, the assistant principal?"

"Oh I know who he is," mom said, still in that tight, unfamiliar angry voice. "We've had several conversations."

I knew that. No parent whose kid gets in as many fights as I do-or whose kid gets beat-up by so many bullies, at least; I didn't think I could fairly say they'd been fights when I never did much fighting back - doesn't end up having more than a few talks with their vice principal. But I'd always assumed that's all their talks had been about, and that mom had been in a bad mood afterwards because she didn't like the idea of me being bullied, and maybe because Mr. Chapman probably treated her as dismissively as most other adults did.

Now I had to wonder if it was more than that.

I remembered, suddenly, the way she had told me to stay away from The Sharing. At the time I'd been focused on the fact that mom disliking the idea of me hanging-out at the Yeerks' big recruitment organization meant that she wasn't a Controller, but now that I was thinking more clearly I realized that it had been Mr. Chapman's association with them that she had objected to.

That was interesting.

"He's a jerk, huh?" I asked, trying to coax her into telling me more details.

Mom shook her head, still frowning. "He's just...not a nice man, Tobias." Mild words, but there was nothing mild about her tone. "Selfish, untrustworthy, dangerous…"

Dangerous? I raised my eyebrows. Could mom know more about the Yeerks than even she knew she knew, maybe?

"Yeah," I agreed a little too fervently for someone just talking about a mean-tempered assistant principal, "yeah exactly. So you should keep that painting out of sight." I hesitated again, then said slowly, "In fact, it's probably not a good idea to talk about Andalites specifically at all, you know?"

Mom's frown shifted, lightened from fury and frustration to a look of confusion. "Why not? It's a little late to try and pretend that I'm not looking for aliens, Tobias."

"I know," I said, "but...uhh...you remember hearing about those fireworks in the construction site? And the kids the cops were looking for?" She stared at me blankly. "You remember Alice?"

That triggered more of a reaction; her cloudy blue eyes cleared and filled with sad sympathy. "Poor Alice," she said. "I hope she's okay."

"Me too," I agreed, "but that's my point, mom. The Yeerks are going to be looking for her. That's why she had to run away, remember? And that means they're going to be looking for anybody who helped her."

Mom's frown deepened. "You think they'd come after us?"

"Oh yeah," I nodded grimly. "In a heartbeat."

"We'll have to be careful then," mom said. Her voice was firm. She didn't sound scared.

Come to think of it, I couldn't remember many cases of my mom actually sounding scared. Worried, sure, frantic even sometimes when she thought some social worker was going to find an excuse to steal me away; hurt and confused when her memory failed her or when I was being a jerk for not believing her...but scared? Genuinely, truly scared? Not so much.

"Right," I agreed, shaking my head to try and clear it. "That's exactly what I'm talking about. We have to be careful, and that means not letting-on that we know too much about Andalites and Yeerks and Taxxons and Hork-Bajir and everything."

Mom's gaze on my face was thoughtful and tight, studying me like she was cataloging details for her next painting. What she said was, "I've been chasing after my aliens all my life, Tobias. If I stop now, that'll look even more suspicious."

My stomach gave a lurch because I knew she was right. "Well..okay," I admitted, "but just be careful about it. Don't use any new information - like Elfangor's name." I pointed. "Or that painting. Stick to the same questions, the same clues, you had before I...before I met them, too." Before I knew you weren't crazy, I didn't say.

"That's going to put a crimp in actually finding them," mom pointed out.

I grimaced. That's the point , I didn't tell her. That's the point, because if you find them, they'll kill you - or make you a Controller. "Maybe now isn't a good time to actually find them," I said instead. "Wait until they've given up on finding Alice, on finding those kids."

"What kids?"

"The five kids who were at that construction site that night. The ones they said were playing with fireworks." I sighed. "You know...the ones who actually saw the aliens. Me and my friends. The Animorphs."

"Animorphs?" mom repeated and I winced. I hadn't meant to use that word in front of her, but it had slipped-out. It was easy to not talk about all of this secret alien invasion stuff with anybody else-firstly because I didn't really have anyone else to talk about it with , but also because just not saying anything wasn't a hard thing to remember. It was more difficult with mom, trying to walk the tightrope of what she knew and what she didn't.

"That's, uh...our nickname. For the five of us. Just a dumb thing we call ourselves, you know…kid stuff." I shrugged like it was no big deal.

Mom's face brightened and she smiled. "Animorphs," she said. "I like that."

I knew what she meant was, I like that you have friends.

I didn't say that, though; just smiled back at her.

I wasn't sure how much any of them were really my friends yet...but I kind of liked it too.