CHAPTER TEN: RACHEL

That night and the next morning, I barely got any homework done. In math class that day I got the first C I'd gotten in a long time. My grades were starting to fall because I was busy trying to save the world. Or at least to save my old friend.

I knew now what had happened. Why Melissa and I weren't friends anymore, at least not close friends. Something had gone terribly wrong in her life. Her parents no longer loved her. They pretended to, they sounded like they did, but Melissa knew it was all wrong.

Every time I thought about it, I felt like my insides were burning up from the anger. I guess I knew a little bit about what she was feeling. When my parents got divorced, I worried that maybe that meant they didn't love me anymore.

I was wrong. They still did. I don't see my dad as much as I would like to, but he does love me. My mom loves me. Even my sisters love me. Love is pretty important. It's like wearing a suit of armor. It makes you strong.

Unfortunately there wasn't a lot of love going around our middle school that day. What there mostly was, was gossip. Ordinarily I didn't mind gossip, even enjoyed it most of the time—I wasn't an addict, like people like Elizabeth or Darlene or Allison, but some of the stories were fun—but today all I could think about was how stupid it all was. Did people really not have anything more important to talk about than who I'd chosen to talk to about their cat?

Apparently not, if the idiots surrounding me were any indication. The fact that at least half the idiots in question were my friends did not make the constant whispering, tittering, giggling, gasping, and prying any less annoying; if anything that made it worse, because while I could shut-down everyone else with a sharp comeback or a pointed eyeroll, tricks like that wouldn't work on the people who actually knew me.

"Yeah, Brittany," I said for at least the sixth time that day, "I have definitely heard that his mom believes in aliens. That is a thing that I know because I am, like, not a feral child who just crawled out of the cave where she was raised by a family of bears."

"Um, isn't it usually raised by wolves?" Brittany asked, because apparently she was some kind of idiom-pedant all of a sudden.

I rolled my eyes for at least the twenty-sixth time that day. "Yeah, usually," I said, "but wolves are social animals, while bears aren't so much. Plus they hibernate which is, like, the ultimate form of tuning-out on the world." God, Cassie was rubbing off on me. "So I figure that being raised by bears would mean someone would be even more out of touch than if they'd been raised by wolves. And you would have to be that out-of-touch to not know about Loren Mullins and her aliens."

"Who?" said Brittany.

This time I didn't roll my eyes; I closed them. I couldn't stand looking at Brittany's face any longer. "Loren Mullins. Tobias's mom," I said through gritted teeth.

I could practically hear Brittany's nose wrinkling in confusion. "Uh, I thought Tobias's name was Williams or something?"

"Whitman," I said. I was going to crack a tooth at this rate. "His name is Tobias Whitman."

"Okay but then like, why does his mom have a different name?"

"Because we live in a patriarchal society," I shot back automatically. I grimaced at myself as soon as the words were out of my mouth; I hadn't meant to quote my mom, but I've heard her rail about the sexism of surnames so many times that I guess it popped out before I could help myself.

Mom's bitter over the fact that she'd established her career using my dad's last name, which meant that she couldn't change back to her maiden name after the divorce without losing some of her clout and recognition in the courtroom. For a while I'd been glad that she'd kept dad's name just because I didn't like the idea of more things in my life changing , but now I was kind of ticked-off about it on my mom's behalf. Like, why is it automatically assumed that the woman is going to change her name when she gets married? It seems kind of stupid to me for anyone to change their name, because isn't it confusing for everybody to suddenly start going by a different name midway through your life? But add to that the fact that everyone just assumes that girls will do it automatically, well…maybe I've spent too much time listening to my mom, but that kind of pisses me off when I think about it. I like my last name. Why should I have to give it up just so I can make it easier for people to figure out what man I've "given" myself to—given, like I'm a Cuisinart or a Cadillac? No thanks.

"Huh?" said Brittany.

I shook my head and stormed away. "Forget it," I snapped.

Storming away didn't actually help me much; it just got me to Social Studies faster. Ms. Paloma was out sick so we had a sub, which meant a short video from Schoolhouse Rock and a cooperative worksheet. Ordinarily that would have meant a pretty chill class, but today?

Today it just meant more opportunities for people to pester me.

"Psssst…Rachel!"

I ignored the whisper as well as the smothered giggles that followed it.

"Rachel! Hey, hey Rachel! Hey!"

I glowered at my worksheet until the point of my pencil snapped off and went skittering across the floor. Grumbling uncomplimentary words under my breath, I headed to the front of the room and the big metal pencil sharpener bolted to the wall over the trash can. The sub looked up from his book, eyeing me curiously, but when he figured out where I was headed he dropped his gaze again. He'd said so little before starting the video and passing out our worksheets that I couldn't even remember the dude's name, but what did it matter? Ms. Paloma would be back tomorrow, and this substitute certainly wouldn't remember any of us even if he ended up in our classroom again. Unless they were filling-in for long term issues like pregnancy or cancer, subs never did.

I glanced at him on the way back to my desk and did a double-take. For a second, I thought the title on his book had read The Sharing—but no. It was The Shining. Everything was fine.

My heart was pounding in my throat anyway. In my head, I could hear the screams of the Yeerk Pool again. When I sat down to a renewed course of "Hey, Rachel! Pssst, Rachel! Hey!" it was too much to swallow.

I spun around in my chair and glowered. "What?" I snapped. The three girls and two boys in the desks behind me giggled into their hands and sleeves, and I glared harder. I'd kept my voice low out of habit, but part of me wanted the substitute to yell at us all for talking too much. At least it would shut them up for a little while, even if it would be embarrassing to be called-out like that.

"We were just wondering," Hans said, "if Tobias asks you out on a date, would he pick you up in a flying saucer do you think?"

"Better than your mom's crappy minivan, Romeo," I sneered. "At least a flying saucer would be able to get above twenty miles per hour without a downhill slope."

Hans blinked at me, his mouth dropping open in shock and hurt, while the others "Ooohed!" at him and laughed.

I flashed them all a tight, strained smirk and turned back around.

I tapped my pencil on the edge of my worksheet but I wasn't seeing it; I was seeing the pool and the Hork-Bajir and the humans in the cages. I was seeing the voluntary Controller area, set up like a cute little food court in Hell. I was seeing Tobias blushing in that half-finished warehouse, more concerned over the possibility that people might think he was trying to compete with Jake by morphing a cougar than he was with the idea of risking his life for people he didn't even know. It was different for me and Jake, of course: Tom was family, even if I wasn't anywhere near as close to him as Jake was. And Marco had been Jake's best friend since they were in diapers, so Tom might as well have been a big brother to him, too. Cassie was my best friend and she had a massive crush on Jake, so—basically, we all had reasons for going into that pit to save Tom. Tobias hadn't, but he'd still gone without a word of complaint. And now these morons were laughing about him, were laughing at the very idea that somebody like me might find somebody like him worth talking to.

It made my blood boil.

I could hear them whispering again and I did my best to tune it out. I still kept catching words like "space case" and "nutjob" and "weirdo," though. It wasn't until the pencil snapped in my hand that I realized how tightly I'd been gripping it.

Growling quietly, I returned to the front of the room to sharpen the half-a-pencil I had left into a point. The substitute watched me suspiciously. I probably should have smiled at him; I can usually get most adults to melt with a big, bright, toothy grin without having to try too hard, but I didn't feel like it just then. Let him write me up; what could he say? That I'd had to sharpen my pencil more than once? Ms. Paloma wouldn't even bother to roll her eyes over that one. Compared to some of the kids in this class I was practically a saint. I could sharpen a whole box of pencils and she wouldn't care.

I stomped back to my seat and threw myself into the chair hard enough to rattle the attached desk. I picked up my worksheet and glared at it, trying to will the jumble of nonsense words and dates to make some kind of sense. Behind me, the whispering continued.

They were all snickering now, and shooting looks across the room toward the desk in the back corner where Tobias was sitting, his blonde head bent low over his own paper. I think that was the worst part of it, really: they were teasing me, sure, but they were doing it at his expense. Because I wasn't the weirdo; I was the nice, normal girl who had made the mistake of treating the school freak like a person for twenty minutes.

Right, I thought darkly, the nice, normal girl who can turn into an elephant and use you for a field goal.

Picturing that made me feel a little better, but it didn't do anything to get my worksheet finished. Oh well. My grades in Social Studies were great; I could survive a botched worksheet or two, and everyone knew that the classroom assignments given out on substitute teacher days were make-work to keep us out of their hair anyway. I hoped, anyway; I didn't need to get two Cs in one day.

I yanked my backpack onto my shoulders, handed in my three-questions-completed-out-of-thirteen worksheet, and breezed out the door as though I'd never even met Hans before, let alone spent the last fifteen minutes imagining using him as a pachydermal football.

My fake-careless attitude shattered two minutes later when I crossed paths with Melissa on my way into Language Arts. She took one look at me and turned around, heading back the other direction as though I was some kind of plague carrier, but not before I could see how red-rimmed her eyes were.

She'd been crying, and recently.

My heart sank. I knew she wasn't a Controller now—if she'd been a Controller, she would have known why her parents had stopped acting like they loved her, and she also wouldn't have cared—which meant that she was a prisoner in her own home and didn't even know it. She was caught up in a war that refused to name itself, her parents helpless victims who weren't even allowed to send messages to the people they loved.

And I, somehow, had made it worse.

My stomach turned over and I decide to skip Language Arts in favor of making a run to the restroom. It would mean trouble if I got caught, I guess, but I wasn't the sort of kid who faked-sick to get out of tests or due dates. If I went to the Nurse's Office complaining that I didn't feel well, she'd probably let me lay down on the weird brown plastic couch in there for a class period without much objection. I could always get the notes from Cassie. She didn't take great notes, but her handwriting was clearer than mine—even if she did have a habit of doodling flower petals sometimes when she dotted her i's.

I dropped my backpack on the floor of the farthest stall, sat on the toilet with my jeans still up, and rested my head on the cool metal wall next to me. I closed my eyes and waited for my stomach to stop cramping.

I hadn't meant to hurt Melissa. That was the worst part: that I'd upset her again, without noticing again. How had I missed realizing we were drifting apart? How could asking Tobias to tell me stories about his stupid cat have turned into Melissa and I shouting at each other in the lunchroom doorway? We'd been friends almost all our lives. How was it that our friendship could have fallen apart without me noticing?

Was I a bad friend?

My eyes shot open again as I contemplated this new possibility. I'd always thought I was a pretty good friend, when I'd thought about it at all. I teased people, sure, and I guess I picked on people's clothes a little if I thought they were wearing something dumb or ugly but I did that to help them, not to hurt them. I didn't blow people off or talk about them behind their backs—well, not much, not any more than anyone did—and I didn't play stupid games to score laughs at other people's expense. I didn't go out of my way to hurt people in order to make myself look cool.

But did I ignore other people's feelings when they weren't convenient to me? I hadn't thought I did, but I hadn't noticed Melissa's pain until now…and that seemed like a lot of pain to ignore.

I closed my eyes and pushed the heels of my hands into them, as though I could shut out the memory of the hurt on her tired, sad face. It didn't work, so I dropped my hands and sighed.

"Why do I keep hurting the people I like?" I asked the restroom at large.

Fortunately, nobody answered me. Bathrooms gaining the ability to speak would have been one level too weird for me to process, I think.

. . . .

That afternoon after school we met up again—the other Animorphs and I, I mean—which made for a great excuse to ditch my other friends, who were still teasing me about talking to Tobias. Not that I could tell them that's what I was doing, of course. "Sorry guys, can't hang out today, I need to turn into a bird so I can go plot how to stop an alien invasion with my other friends," just doesn't roll off the tongue, I guess. Plus there was always the chance that one or more of the girls giggling about how weird Tobias was might be a Controller.

That was a really fun new addition to my life: wondering which of my friends could be enslaved by an alien slug who would kill me if they found out who I was. Suddenly "Truth Or Dare" had spiked to life or death levels, how awesome.

It was hard to sulk while riding the thermals, though. By the time I reached the meeting point I was feeling a little better. I saw one of the others—Tobias, I guessed, from the flash of red feathers in his tail—angling in to the old bell tower. The bell was long gone, but there were big open windows that birds of prey could soar into easily, and the tower was far enough off the ground that no one was going to be casually peeking inside to see us morphing.

Ten minutes later we were all there, all back in our human bodies, and listening to Marco whine about our unfashionable attire. I couldn't deny that Cassie's decision to pair a purple stretch top with patterned green leggings had been an even bigger mistake than Jake's terrible bike shorts, but when Marco started to pick on Tobias for still wearing his mom's baggy blue leggings I lost my temper.

"Marco," I said, "I think you've been reading too much Vogue lately. The perfume samples seem to be dissolving what few brain cells you've got left."

Cassie giggled and even Jake's mouth twitched. Tobias was sitting hunched on a windowsill, his hair hanging forward to hide his face, but the bone-white strain of his clenched knuckles eased. I felt a little better. Maybe I couldn't do much to stop the idiots at school from teasing him, but at least I could make Marco shut-up when he went too far.

"I guess that explains what happened to your brains," Marco shot back at me, and I actually grinned. It was so nice to actually banter with someone, compared to what I'd spent the day dealing with at school, that I didn't even bother with a comeback.

Jake cleared his throat. "Speaking of brains…" he said.

We all turned to look at him. "You're finally going to write to that mail order company I told you about and get yourself one?" Marco guessed.

I snorted. Jake was so used to Marco that he hardly even bothered to roll his eyes. "No," he said. "They sold their last model to you already, remember? No," he continued, his voice going flat and serious. "What I want is for us to start using ours more—all of us."

He said "all of us," but he was looking at me.

I looked back. "What do you want?" I said. "I already apologized for morphing to scare off that creep, and I'm not going to apologize for spending a little extra time at the Chapmans' house."

A muscle twitched in Jake's jaw, like he was fighting to resist the urge to point out that it had been more than a little extra time—but what he said was, "I want everyone to remember that we need to be careful when we're in public." His eyes flashed to Marco for a moment before coming back to rest on me again. "Like at school," he added grimly.

I could feel my face heating up. I didn't dare look at Tobias.

"We just talked," I said. I knew I sounded like I was whining, but I couldn't stop myself. "About how cats act, like you told us to. It wasn't a big deal. I don't know why everybody decided to make it a big deal."

"Bull," said Marco bluntly. "Look, I'm not saying that I think it's a good thing that there are so many weird social divisions in school, but there are. You know there are. You have to; you're at the top of the heap."

"I don't see what that has to do with anything," I said.

"Well then I'll spell it out for you, perfume-brain," Marco said, his eyes narrow. "You—" he pointed at me like his finger was the barrel of a gun "—are a queen bee, a goddess among mortals, a shopping mall princess. One of the pretty, popular people. And Tobias here—" the pointing finger shot sideways "—he is at the bottom of the social pecking order. A guppy, a minnow, a tadpole. When someone like you —" the finger swung back around "—makes a big scene out of having lunch with someone like him —" he pointed at Tobias again "—people will notice. People will care . People will talk." He shrugged. "I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's cool. I'm just saying it's a fact." Marco's voice softened as he added, "No offense, Tobias. But we all know it's true."

I glanced sideways in time to see Tobias's head jerk in a tiny nod, his face hidden all the way down to his chin. His hands had gone tense again, so tense that I could practically see the bones of his knuckles protruding through the skin. My stomach felt like it was tying itself in knots and I wanted to throw up.

Instead I said, "It isn't right. And I'm not going to let some…some stupid idea about who's 'cool' and who isn't dictate who I talk to."

Marco's laugh was bitter. "If you don't want to cause a scene you will," he told me. "And we can't afford to cause scenes these days, can we?"

I glared at Marco through narrowed eyes, wondering what everybody would do if I just stepped forward and punched him in the jaw. Before I could decide if I wanted to or not, Jake spoke, snapping everyone's attention back to him.

"Neither can you, Marco," he said. "What were you thinking, taking the fall for Melissa swearing?"

Marco looked a little flustered but his voice, when he spoke, was smooth. "I was thinking that me getting in trouble for saying a bad word would attract less attention than Chapman's daughter getting in trouble for saying a bad word. I was thinking that having Chapman wonder why his daughter had gotten into such a nasty fight with one of her closest friends that she was swearing in the school hallways might inspire him to start looking at Rachel." His gaze slid sideways from Jake's face to catch my eyes, and stayed there. "I was thinking," he finished darkly, his eyes glittering, "that giving Chapman an excuse to make sure that Melissa's friends weren't causing any problems is the last thing we need."

I felt cold all over, even though the breeze off the beach was still warm from the afternoon sun. I didn't think Marco had been thinking any such thing when he'd lied to Mr. Halloram about Melissa swearing, but he'd obviously thought about it since and even if he'd just come up with all of that in order to cover his butt when Jake inevitably called him out, that didn't mean he was wrong.

I broke our staring contest, looking down at my feet. For a while nobody said anything, not even Jake.

Eventually he cleared his throat again. "Okay," he said. "Well, that's…that's something to consider, definitely. So let's all just try and be more careful in the future, okay?"

"Okay," I mumbled. The others chorused a ragged agreement, no one sounding very enthusiastic.

"Right," Jake said. "Right. Well…I guess we should decide what we're doing next. Yeah?"

Marco shook his head. "I want to decide what we're not doing next. I should be spending more time with my dad. You know, he's still messed up over my mom…."

Marco's voice always cracked whenever he mentioned his mom. He'd start out sounding tough and all, but his voice would end up with that little break, that little wobble. It had been two years since his mother disappeared. They said she'd drowned, although they never found her body. His father had fallen apart. I knew it was the main reason Marco was so reluctant to be an Animorph. He was worried that if anything ever happened to him, his dad would just give up totally.

Suddenly, I couldn't feel impatient with his refusal to face our new reality. Jake looked away, and I did the same. I didn't know what to say.

Fortunately we had Cassie with us. She put a hand on Marco's arm. "Don't ever let any of this get in the way of spending time with your dad," she said earnestly. "He needs you. We need you, too, Marco, but your dad comes first." She looked at Jake, then at Tobias, then at me. "There isn't much point in doing any of this if we forget why we're doing it."

I thought about Melissa. And I thought about my mom and dad and how great it was to have them, even when they got on my nerves.

"Cassie's right. When you get home, tell your dad you love him, Marco." I blurted it out without thinking about it. It wasn't the kind of thing I normally say.

"Thank you, Doctor Rachel," Marco said.

He said it snidely, but I could see he knew what I was talking about. Then he was suddenly all business. He rubbed his hands together. "Okay, let's get serious here. How are we going to go about getting ourselves killed next? Turn into flies at a frog convention? Morph into turkeys at Thanksgiving?"

"I want to go back in," I said. "Back into Chapman's."

"Why?" Jake asked. "We learned a lot already. We—"

"We didn't learn the location of the Kandrona," I pointed out. "That's what we need to do, sooner or later. The Andalite made it pretty clear to Tobias that the Kandrona is the weak point for the Yeerks. The Kandrona sends out the rays that are concentrated in the Yeerk pools. If we destroy the Kandrona, we hurt them bad."

"That's true," Tobias said. His voice was soft, little more than a mumble, but I took it as a good sign that he was participating in the conversation again—that he was backing me up. Maybe he would eventually forgive me for putting him through all that crap at school with my stupid idea of eating lunch together.

Marco raised a skeptical eyebrow at the both of us. "Excuse me, love birds, but what is a Kandrona? I mean, we know what it does , but what does it look like? How big is it? For all we know, the Kandrona could be the size of a lighter and be in Visser Three's pocket."

"That's not the impression I got from the Andalite," Tobias said. "Besides, Visser Three doesn't wear clothes. He doesn't have pockets."

"Okay, Andalite nudity aside," Marco said impatiently, "the point is: How do we destroy something when we don't even know what it is?"

"That's why we have to follow the one lead we have," I said. "Chapman. Chapman communicates with Visser Three. The two of them know where the Kandrona is. If I can spy on them, maybe I can figure it out."

They were all staring at me. Marco looked at me like I was crazy. Jake looked thoughtful. Cassie looked worried, like she wasn't sure about what I was saying.

Tobias had raised his head up through the curtain of his hair, and he was staring at me unhappily. "That sounds really…risky, Rachel," he said softly. I had a feeling he wasn't just talking about getting caught by Chapman, but I decided to ignore his subtext.

"No riskier than it was the first time," I bluffed.

"Untrue," said Marco. "Every time you repeat an action, the odds of discovery increase."

"Like you're some kind of statistics genius," I started, but Jake interrupted me.

"I don't think you should go back in there," he said. "And definitely not alone."

"Just because we can all morph Fluffer doesn't mean we can have multiple versions of Melissa's cat show up in the house at one time," I said. I even managed to laugh. "If anything is going to make Chapman suspicious of his daughter's cat, it would be that."

See…I hadn't told anyone about Visser Three telling Chapman to kill me. I knew it was wrong to keep secrets like that from the group. But if I'd told them, they would have never let me go back in.

"No, Rachel, of course we can't all go charging in as an army of Fluffers," Jake said. He sounded annoyed, like I was being stupid on purpose. I bristled. "But that doesn't mean you have to be the one to go back in."

I started to feel panicky. I couldn't have any of the others going in there in my place. Not with my friend being the one who was trapped in that house, and definitely not with Visser Three already suspicious of the cat. But what could I say?

"Did you forget the part where I'm the only one who knows the layout of the house?" I pointed out.

"I think I've got a general gist of it," said Tobias. I spun around to glare at him but he was looking at Jake and avoiding my eye. "I mean, I peeked in the windows a little bit when I was trying to get you to come out. And it sounds like the room where Chapman talks to Visser Three is the only place that really matters. I think I can manage to find the basement if I try real hard."

He had a little grin on his face, like there nothing to worry about. My heart skipped a beat in my chest and I had to swallow hard to fight back the urge to just blurt out the whole story. I bit my lip instead and forced myself to speak calmly, saying, "But I'm the one who's been there already. It makes more sense for me to be the one to go back in."

Jake shook his head. "No," he said, "I think sending someone different is a good idea. A second pair of eyes gives us more of a chance to notice something different—something that you might not notice, Rachel, precisely because you are familiar with the house."

"I've morphed a cat before," Cassie said. "Maybe I should be the one to go."

My heart didn't skip a beat this time; it started sinking, dropping slowly from my chest toward my shoes.

"But didn't you say you'd almost gotten in trouble because of how confident the cat was?" Marco said. "Probably not a good idea for you to risk repeating that, not in Chapman's house."

I could see Cassie blush. Her complexion is dark enough that most people—like Jake, I presume—don't usually notice when she blushes, unless it gets really bad, but Cassie has been my best friend since I was a baby. I noticed the red flush of mortification blazing on her cheeks, the way she ducked her chin toward her chest and her shoulders twitched in the faintest hint of a shrug.

I breathed a private sigh of relief. If Cassie was embarrassed, she wasn't likely to press the point.

"I'll do it," Tobias offered again. He glanced at me. "As we've established, I'm the only one who's really familiar with feline behavior." Was I imagining the little smirk on his face? Was he really joking about the scene in the cafeteria?

I was so pleased at the thought that he might not hate me for putting him through all that that I forgot to keep arguing about who would morph Fluffer, and smiled at Tobias instead.

"Great," said Jake, jolting me back to reality. "It's settled then. Tobias will go in, and the rest of us will play backup—just like before. Now I don't know about the rest of you," he pushed off from the salt-faded windowsill he'd been using as a seat, "but I have a pile of homework waiting for me. If we're going to go back to the Chapman's tonight, I need to go get started on that asap. We'll meet outside Chapman's house same as last night—does that work for everybody?"

One by one we all agreed, although I could barely force the words out. What had I done? I couldn't let Tobias go in there in my place, I couldn't—but if I told the others why not, they'd never let any of us go back in there. And I couldn't abandon Melissa, not again.

My head was spinning as we all geared up to leave. We had to go back to the school to get out things, our clothes and our book bags and our shoes; not even my bald eagle morph was big enough to carry a backpack, especially not one that had been stuffed full of textbooks for homework that I already knew I wasn't going to be able to make myself focus on.

I could barely manage to get into morph. I was glad that we all had different bird morphs—well, except for Marco and Cassie; they had both morphed the same osprey. But it meant that we didn't all fly at the same speed, and we couldn't exactly hang-out in midair. Even birds of prey of the same species don't spend a lot of time just flapping around together; they aren't social animals. We spread out wide and all took the journey back at our own pace, which gave me a chance to think without being distracted by a bunch of thought-speak chatter.

Unfortunately the flight didn't do much to help me figure out what to do. By the time I landed, I was just as panicky and just as lost as when I'd started.

I walked around back behind the bleachers where I'd stashed my things and pulled my clothes on over my morphing suit. I trudged toward the front of the school, where another block's walk would take me to a regular bus stop where I could get a ride home. The bright afternoon sun was fading toward the rich glow of evening, but I didn't think it was dimming sunlight that had goose bumps running up and down my arms. If anything happened to Tobias, it would be my fault…

A flash of motion caught my eye, and I realized it was Tobias, walking off in the other direction with his head down, heading for the apartment he shared with his mom.

"Tobias—wait up!" I blurted. He turned around, spotted me, and paused beside the "Tobacco Free Zone" sign. The sunlight caught his hair like a crown, making it hard for me to see his face, but I thought he might be smiling. I jogged over to him. "I have to—there's something I need to talk to you about," I stammered. My heart was pounding, but not from the short run.

He smiled at me. "It's okay, Rachel," he said. His voice was gentle. "It isn't a big deal, seriously. It was kind of nice to eat lunch with—with somebody else. Besides, everyone will forget in a few—"

"It's about Chapman's house," I interrupted. "You can't go in there. It's too dangerous."

His smile soured, drawing into a frown. "I can handle it," he said shortly. "I don't need to be protected like a—"

"Visser Three noticed me last time," I said. I knew if I didn't get the words out fast I wouldn't be able to, and Tobias had to know. "He told Chapman to kill me. In case I was an Andalite in morph. Chapman talked him out of it, but—" I fell silent, swallowing hard.

Tobias stared at me. His face was slack, his blue eyes wide. The silence felt like it stretched forever. When he spoke again, his voice was tight. "You should have told us about that," he said.

I hung my head, hunching my shoulders. "I know," I said miserably. "I know I should have. I'm sorry. I just—I knew there was no way that Jake would have agreed to my going back in if he'd known that. But don't you see?" I looked up again, meeting his eyes, searching them for—what was I looking for? Forgiveness? Understanding? Fear? Whatever it was, I didn't find it. "That's why I have to be the one to go back in, not you. I can't ask you to take that kind of risk."

"Then I guess it's a good thing you don't have to ask," Tobias said simply. He turned and started walking again, leaving me to gape after him.

By the time I could get my feet to start moving again, he was halfway down the block. I raced after him, shouting, "Tobias—!"

He shook his head at me without turning around. "I'm doing it," he said. His voice shook a little but his shoulders were squared against the weight of his ratty backpack and he walked without hesitation. "Please don't try and stop me."

For a long moment I paced behind him, hesitating, one hand fluttering uselessly in the air between us as I struggled between grabbing his arm and letting him go. Finally I managed to say, my voice little more than a whisper, "Okay." I swallowed. "Just be careful, okay?"

Tobias paused and looked back to face me. "Like it's my middle name," he promised. He gave me a weak grin, then turned and started walking again.

This time, I let him go.