January 6, 2000 7:12 PM
I'm so glad the holidays are over. Ug. Christmas, I spent in the Hork-Bajir valley. We created a nice melding of human and hork-bajir traditions. We decorated a Douglas Fir and then on Christmas, which was also Toby's birthday, we ate it.
Tobias, Aximili, and I also partook in our hork-bajir morphs. As a hork-bajir, it didn't taste half-bad. Kind of syrupy and bitter, but that's to be expected of Terra Firman trees, apparently.
That evening, I did something I hadn't done in a long time. I went to church.
St. Rose's 7:30 evening Christmas mass. Rose is my mother's name, so it was a strange choice. I never thought about my mother. I thought about my father all the time, but never my mother. How odd.
In Terry Stevens morph I attended the mass. I hadn't forgotten anything.
Then I froze. I spotted my parents.
They didn't recognize me, of course. I was in morph. After the mass, I sidled up around them while they were talking to the priest.
"It is our first Christmas without our son. It's very hard." I heard my father say.
Covar. I heard Covar say.
"We've tried to stay in the area for as long as possible, just in case our son came back," said my mother. Zillnay
"But I've just gotten word that I must transfer to Washington. The agency I work for won't allow it any longer."
My parents were moving. No longer will they be in New Jersey. I felt oddly indifferent about that.
New Year's Eve was nicer. One of Melissa's friends was having a party, so she brought me along as her date. All the gyms were closed, but I was lucky enough to shower at Cassie's, while she and her parents were away.
At midnight, we kissed. I liked kissing Melissa. My relationship with Melissa has been one of the most god-awfully tumultuous relationships I've ever been in, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. And all our arguments were whispers in the past whenever we kissed. It was nice.
But then she dropped a bomb on me. "I want you to meet my parents."
"Excuse me?"
Small argument, blah blah blah, I have issues with her parents, blah blah blah, it's important to her.
So anyway, here I was on a Thursday night, taping-but-still-missing Friends, eating dinner at a really fancy restaurant with the Chapmans.
Two controllers, an Animorph, and a very sweet, but clueless girl.
"Terry, it is so nice to meet you finally." said Mrs. Chapman.
"Yes, although I wish I could say that Melissa has told us much about you." Mr. Chapman said.
"Maybe she has and you just weren't paying attention." I said.
I felt someone kick me.
"Well, there's no 'Terry Stevens' in the School System's records. Tell me, where do you go to school, Terry?"
"Daddy!" Melissa said.
"It's okay, Melissa. It's only natural that a father show some concern toward a man courting his daughter." It was a chess game. The typical Father vs. Suitor chess game.
But the yeerks should have no interest in this type of game. He must suspect something.
Or maybe the real Chapman doesn't trust me and he's hounding his captor to give me the third degree. That thought kind of made me proud.
"I am an advanced student. I graduated early from a private school in El Paso called Rio Dulce Academy. I'm taking a year off before I attend Princeton." Such a sweet lie.
Melissa stared at me throughout all of this. She knew I was lying. She looked disappointed. What? She wanted me to tell her folks that I was a homeless vagabond?
"Where do you live?"
"Far away enough such that you don't have to be worried."
That was a curt answer. An answer that should make everyone uncomfortable. Especially Melissa, but her parents looked more bored than worried.
Melissa seemed to notice this and looked disappointed again.
But it seems Chapman wasn't giving up. "Still, if you live in the area, maybe you should join our local chapter of the Sharing."
"Daddy, you don't need to pimp your program to everyone you meet." Melissa said exasperated.
"I don't particular care for your choice of words, honey." Chapman said very father-like. "The Sharing is great program for all types of children, and you'd be an inspiration to our . . ."
"Geek population?" I supplied.
"Let's just say our academically advanced children."
"Daddy, Terry doesn't quite like . . ." Melissa said attempting to spare her father the conversation I had with her about the Sharing. However, I had a much different answer prepared for her him.
"I've heard so much about your organization. I travel a lot and every where I go, it's like there's a chapter of the Sharing. And you're all connected. It's like you guys are from outer space, yet you have that certain . . . underground quality too. It's fascinating."
Mr. and Mrs. Chapman got noticeably twitchy with that.
"And your inner circle. You guys are dedicated. Not once a month. Not once a week, but every three days! That's dedication right there!"
"We have a lot to prepare for." Mrs. Chapman said, covering. "Our Annual celebration of Lore David Altman's birthday is approaching."
"Who's he?" I asked.
"Mr. Altman started the Sharing years ago. He died in a tragic accident shortly after." Melissa answered before her father could shut her up.
"So you see how important it is to celebrate Mr. Altman and carry out his visions." Mr. Chapman said.
"Of course, humans will tear down a living leader, but revere a dead one." I said.
"Humans?" Chapman repeated suspiciously.
"Meaning us, of course." I said. "I mean, we're all humans here."
I chuckled and the Chapmans chuckled weakly with me. Melissa started to get the impression that she was watching a game with rules she didn't understand.
"Besides," I continued, "I bet you have a leader you'd like to tear down."
"What?" Mr. Chapman asked.
"A leader you'd like to get rid of. I'd like to get rid of him too." I said.
"Excuse me?"
"Superintendent Victor Trent. Maybe it's none of my business, but I think he's just mucking it up for everyone."
"Oh, right. My superintendent." Mr. Chapman said, relieved. "Yes, even we principals have our higher-ups."
"Nothing I hate worse than an Ass-Visser."
"Excuse me?" Mr. and Mrs. Chapman said at the same time.
Melissa, assuming I said 'ass-kisser' kicked me (hard!) under the table.
"My apologies. That was inappropriate. Um . . . . 'Brown-noser'. I think that's more appropriate."
The Chapmans started to breathe again. "It's all politics." was all that Mr. Chapman said.
"Yeah." I said back. "Politics."
The Chapmans squirmed in their seats some more.
"Escargot, anyone?" offered the waiter. "Already shelled."
"No, thank you." said Mr. Chapman, barely masking a look of disgust. Mrs. Chapman also passed on the French delicacy.
Escargot is snails. Cooked snails. Ick. They looked like yeerks.
Hmmmmm.
"I'll have one." I said. I speared the cooked annelid with my fork and began to eat it in small bites, starting from the back. It was a little too salty for my taste, but I didn't let that ruin my act.
"Mmmmmmm." I said as I took the first bite, looking at the Chapmans the whole time. They looked very, very uncomfortable. I took another bite and Mmmmmm-ed louder.
When all that was left was the head, I looked straight at Hedrick Chapman, making eye contact. I bit down on the head with an audible *squish*. "Mmmmmmmm" I said as I chewed. I swallowed, all without averting my gaze at Chapman. "Tastes good."
Chapman looked away. I looked to Melissa who was giving me a strange look. "I never realized these buggers tasted so good cooked before." I said.
A mortified Melissa hid her face in her hands.
I excused myself to the bathroom to demorph, and when I came back out I spotted an old face.
He was sitting with two guys who were closer to my age than his, probably eighteen, nineteen. My old friend was twenty-five years old and lived on 1101 Eden Prairie Avenue.
"Ryan Gryphon, I presume?" I said.
"Do I know you?" he asked. He didn't recognize me. He wouldn't. I was in my real body when I assaulted him. I think I still had his license in the wallet I carried around in when I was human.
I pulled out his licence and said "You've never met me, but isn't this you?"
Ryan than looked edgy, then looked at me confused. "Mr. Hunting?"
That I did NOT expect. I didn't know he got a good look at me, let alone ID'd me. And just because I had his licence, why did he assume that Terry Stevens and David Hunting were the same? We look nothing alike.
"Dude, is this him??" said one the younger guys with him.
I must have looked semi-paniced because the other guy said. "Relax, brother, you're among friends."
"Am I?" I asked.
That's when the air shimmered. The second friend of Ryan's disappeared and a Chee took his place. Obviously, he extended his hologram around himself and me so that Ryan, his friend, and everyone else in the restaurant saw his human guise and me not looking so slack-jawed.
The air shimmered back and the chee looked human again. "Take a seat." said the Chee.
I sat down. Ryan was friends with a Chee. And he didn't know it.
"Is that really you?" Ryan asked.
"Did you get plastic surgery? Do you get plastic surgery every three years like Tyler Durdin?" said Ryan's over-active (and assumably human) friend.
"Actually, it's just a disguise."
"Pretty good disguise." said the Chee.
"Mr. Hunting, this is Mitch Collins," Ryan introduced his over-active friend, "and his brother Thomas."
"Brothers?" I asked.
"I'm adopted." said Thomas the Chee.
"Ah."
"It's been more than six weeks." Ryan said.
"I've been busy."
"Well, don't worry. Ryan's launched www.newschakra.com and we are actually being quoted in magazines!" said Mitch excitedly.
"Mitch and Thomas help out a lot. We have about twenty employees now."
"Excellent." I said, genuinely impressed.
"I didn't have time to learn all the business things I was supposed to, but Thomas seems to know a lot about the business of journalism." Ryan explained.
"It's like I was William Randolph Hurst's secretary in another life." Thomas said semi-sarcastically.
"Ryan told me what you did and I think that was cool as shit. You've finally got him off of his ass." Mitch said.
"I still think you're a fucked-up a kid whose seen Fight Club once too many times." Ryan commented to me.
"That's okay. So do I." I retorted.
"Dude, you were so Dante Hicks. You even worked at a Quik Stop!" Mitch insisted.
"Faststop! There's a difference!" Ryan answered back.
"How did you find out my real name?" I asked.
"I didn't go looking for it." Ryan insisted. "But we found this at the post-office."
Thomas handed me a piece of paper. "I don't know if you are aware of this, Mr. Hunting, but you are a wanted man."
"Really?" I asked as I looked at the paper. It was a picture of me, no doubt given to them by my 'parents', a police artist drawing and a list of charges. Among them were assault and attempted murder.
Whatever.
"The paper lists your birthdate as 1979, but you can't be any older than Mitch." Ryan reasoned.
I didn't want to tell them it was 1984, so I fudged. "1982"
"Seventeen. Still a minor." Ryan calculated.
"They must want you bad, man." Mitch said.
"Who could authorize this?" I asked.
"Chief June Perkins, herself, of the county police." Thomas answered. "She's 41, a Scorpio, and in her free time, she gardens and is an Inner Circle member of the Sharing."
A controller. Perkins. That name sounded so familiar.
"If you're in trouble, man, you can always swing on by News Chakra.com's HQ." Mitch offered. "We're waiting for your return, Mr. Hunting."
"We're waiting for your return, Mr. Durdin."
"Terry? What are you doing?"
Steph? No, it was Melissa. I really need to stop doing that.
"Excuse me, gentlemen." I said and went back to Melissa.
"Why did they call you 'Mr. Hunting'?" she asked me.
"Silly kids." I weakly answered.
"Well, Mommy and Daddy are ready to go and . . . .What's this?" she said as she took the paper from my hand.
"Oh that's . . . !" I said as I tried to grab it back. Oh shit.
Melissa read the sheet and went slack-jawed. "This is the boy. The blond boy I met at the beach. The boy I told you about. His name is David Hunting. They called you 'David Hunting'!"
"They called me 'Mr. Hunting'. There's a difference!"
"What's going on?" Melissa asked strongly.
"It's nothing, Melissa. You need to trust me." I said, snatching the paper back.
"Is there a problem?" Mr. Chapman said, walking up to me and Melissa. I stuffed the wanted paper in my pocket.
"Daddy, were you listening to us?" Melissa asked annoyed.
Mr. Chapman held up his hands in protest. "I just walked up. I swear. We need to leave. Terry, do you need a ride?"
"That's all right, Mr. Chapman, I have a ride home."
"Well, okay. I guess we'll see you around. Melissa, honey, let's go."
"I'll talk to you later, Melissa." I said.
"Yeah, right." she said as she left with her parents in a huff. I hate it when she does that.
Could tonight have gone any worse?
I flew home thinking about all of my problems with Melissa. And God, where there problems. It all stems from the fact that she doesn't really know who I am. She thinks I'm Terry Stevens, homeless kid.
But I'm not Terry Stevens. I'm David Hunting, Animorph. If we are ever to have a real relationship, . . . . she has to know.
But that would mean telling her everything.
I came home in time for an Animorph meeting at the Fortress of Attitude. Apparently, Jake's great-grandfather died. They would be attending a funeral in upstate New York. They would be gone for four days.
The problem was that Tom, a controller and Visser Three's Temrash (whatever that was), would have to be gone those four days. Four days without access to Kandrona rays.
So Temrash needs to neutralize the problem, Jake's dad. Which leaves Big Jake Berenson feeling very fluttered.
Twenty-four hour surveillance. That was his order. Since Tobias, Aximili, and I have theoretically no lives, we did most of the work.
Well, Jake did too. He skipped school to follow his dad to work. We followed him there.
Thanks to Brilliant Leader Berenson, we attacked an angry bald man for no reason. Also, while I was taking a break, Brilliant Leader Berenson almost gets himself shot by my girlfriend's father.
I found that funny.
Well, except the almost dying part.
Sans Rachel and Aximili, we were all there while Feathers, without blame or bias, related what had happened.
"Stupid!" Marco denounced.
"I can't believe you took a chance like that, Jake!!" Cassie said angrily. And Cassie never gets angry.
All for her precious Jake.
Stop doing that, David.
I withdrew myself from the conversation and started to think about my own father. I didn't like him. I plain didn't like him. He was this rigid, military trained jerk. Unlike most people I know whose fathers were in their twenties when they were born, my father was forty-six. Meaning he was sixty-one now. Christ, Jake's grandfather is just a few years older than my father. His earliest memories were of his father complaining about the war. Meaning World War II. Then the Korean War. He joined the NSA when he could but left when the Vietnam war heated up because he was tired of sitting on his ass. He joined the army and over time, became a General. He went back to NSA of course (I'm not all that sure he actually left in the first place). He started a family and began trying to raise his only son with the same principles that he was raised in. Everything around him was war. I had no war.
At least, I didn't. I do now.
Didn't change how I felt about him. He never gave me the time of day and I was never good enough for him. He hated my martial arts. He thought they were wussy. To prove this, he challenged me to do my 'killer kick' against him when I was seven. I tried to tell him that martial arts were defensive, not offense, but he just said that made them wussier. Despite being in his early fifties at the time, my father was in excellent shape and was very formidable. Still is.
I karate kicked him in his chest. He caught my foot and put my squirming body in a sleeper hold he learned in the army. I think his intent was to show the superiority of army training as opposed to marital arts. It didn't turn out that way; I was able to get an arm free and I karate chopped him with all the intensity I use to break boards. I hit him right where the brow meets the nose. The bone shattered and entered his sinus cavity and gave him a concussion. He came to as the paramedics were hauling him off. He was able to shout "You are fucking grounded." before the bay doors closed and the ambulance drove off. My dad was always a sore loser.
Still though. My Dad was a soldier. Jake's dad was a doctor. My dad was trained to kill and destroy. Jake's dad healed, nurtured, and cared. Total opposite. Night and day.
"You need to back off on this." Marco said, pulling out of my haze. "You can't make this call. Not about your dad and your brother."
"You made it when it was your mom." Jake said.
"Yeah, well, that's me." Marco shrugged. "If it's any comfort to you, I'd like myself more if I was like you. But the question here is, how far do we go to protect your father? And who is going to make that decision?"
"I'm leader of this group."
"Oh, now, you own up to it." I said.
"Fuck you, David!"
"We need a vote." Marco said.
I didn't take Jake's comment personal. I pretty much deserved it.
"Mr. Berenson is an innocent. Moreover, he's a doctor. Unlike soldiers, his job is to heal. Create life as opposed to destroy it. That's too great an asset to hand over to the yeerks."
Everyone seemed surprised by my answer.
That's when Tobias stepped in and pretty much convinced everyone that it was important to save Mr. Berenson and to do so offensively. Jake said he had a plan.
"Kidnap Chapman." He said.
"What?!" I said. "Hold on."
But without giving good reasons, my protest fell short. Jake and Marco assumed I was being difficult, but Tobias and Cassie knew better. They wondered why I "protested too much." We agreed to get Melissa out of there, she was an innocent. I told them I'd do it, and that's when I came to a decision.
With Aximili as bait, we lured Melissa Chapman out of the house.
"Hello, is Melissa here? Hee-yer? I am a friend of Melissa? I have come here to speak to her regarding a class assignment. Class-uh." Aximili said brightly in his human morph, slightly modified of course.
"Wait here. I'll get her." Chapman said as he looked strangely at Aximili.
"Good." Aximili said. "She is my close friend and also classmate and thus this is a perfectly normal thing for me to do."
Stop talking, Aximili. I said. Stop talking now.
We waited. Ax gave a rundown of hazards we were likely to encounter, but if all goes well for me, I'll have nothing to do with it.
The front door opened. Melissa stepped out. My Melissa. So pretty. She looked strangely at Aximili.
I grabbed her with my baboon arms, clamped her mouth shut, and carried her away.
David, where are you taking her? Rachel demanded.
Far away from you assholes. I shouted back.
He did his job. Go! Go! Go! Jake shouted.
I carried Melissa to an empty lot a few blocks away from her house. Neither yeerk nor Animorph will find us.
I placed Melissa into the empty room. She inched away timidly.
"Nice baboon. No rape the human."
Never without your permission, dear. I said.
Melissa stopped inching away. "I'm going crazy. I'm hearing voices in my head. I'm going crazy."
No, you're not. I said as I demorphed.
Melissa gasped. "The Blond boy. Are you the one I . . . ."
"Seven months ago, I met you on the beach when a sperm whale beached itself. Ever since then I thought you were beautiful."
"Oh." she said softly. "I have a boyfriend."
I morphed into Terry Stevens.
"No way."
"You know it's true."
"No No No No No No No No NO NO NO!" Melissa shouted. She got up and did the classic hysteric hammering-of-the-pecs-of-the-boyfriend-you-still-love-yet-needs-to-be-hit. The only thing the guy can do at this point is hug her and hope she doesn't turn away instantly. I hugged and she didn't struggle against it. "The whole time? The whole time?! The whole time!"
"Melissa . . ." I started.
"Terry," she said exasperated as she pulled away, "this is too weird! You're changing into apes and whatnot. I mean, God, Terry . . . . . Is that even your real name?"
"My name is David Hunting."
"Oh my God! I knew it. I fucking knew it! I can't believe you, Terry! David! Whatever! The Beach. The Club. The whole thing with Brett. The Halloween Dance. Everything . . . . . . . My God. Just . . . .who are you? What are you? Who are you really? I want to see your real form. What are you really? Do you have a real form?"
I demorphed. I was David Hunting. The real David Hunting.
"The Blond boy at the beach." she said softly.
"This is the real me, Melissa. I swear. I swear to God. I swear to you. I swear to everything. This is the real, as born, me."
"That's a lot of swearing."
"You know I swear like a sailor."
"Stop trying to be funny!" She said as she turned away from me. I came up behind her and placed my hand on her shoulder. "You're human?"
I gave an amused sigh. "Yes."
"Humans don't turn into baboons, David." she said as she turned around and looked into my eyes. "How can you do that?"
"We should sit." I said as we both lowered ourselves to the floor.
I looked into her eyes and held her hands softly in mine. "What I'm about to tell you will be very difficult."