As far back as I can remember, I've had an unshakeable conviction that I was born in the wrong body. I KNOW I'm a boy. But my body is female. And so everyone else thinks that I'm a girl. Look, it's not that I don't like girls. In fact, I'm generally attracted to them. I just hate being one, and I've hated it more and more the older I get. When I was 8, I didn't like wearing dresses or playing with dolls. Now that I'm in high school, I hate having to deal with period cramps every month. And I've got this sort of itching sensation, like my skin isn't attached properly. Then I gained the power to morph, and, well, demorphing sucks. Going back into my 'real' body almost feels like putting on a shirt that's been smeared with peanut butter. it fits, but it's really uncomfortable and feels kind of gross. Basically, when my brain reconnects to my body, it knows something is wrong and is sending me an error message. Usually, I can keep the nausea under control, but sometimes the demorphing process will be just a little too jarring.
But I haven't exactly gone out of my way to tell anyone. Every time I ever considered it, I was too embarrassed to go through with it. I was always afraid that my friends would be too freaked out to ever want anything to do with me. And the one time I finally worked up the courage to talk to my parents about it, they didn't take me seriously at all. They just thought I was 'going through a phase'. Then they got mad at me when I wouldn't drop the subject, and now we just don't talk to each other at all if we can help it. That might have something to do with why I wasn't infested by the Yeerks along with them.
So far, only one other person knows my big secret: the boy who I had just morphed to help cover up his disappearance. I'd guessed - hoped - that he'd be open-minded enough to take me seriously. And he did. Maybe the fact that our sense of reality had already been shattered had something to do with it, but he accepted me for who I was right then and there. Later, he'd also offered to let me acquire his DNA and morph him so I could see what it felt like to be in a boy's body. And I had just started that morph when a little voice in my head told me to stop. I was doing it for the wrong reasons, and it wouldn't give me what I wanted. What I wanted was to be in a male version of my own body, not in a copy of somebody else's. Especially not if it was somebody I knew. That was just too personal. The only reason I'd morphed him this time was for the sake of the mission.
Apart from dysphoria as a result of demorphing to a body I didn't feel comfortable in, there was another reason I felt sick. And it had everything to do with the battle inside the Yeerk Pool. Thing is, I'd killed a bunch of Yeerks down there. Well, we all did. Every one of us had absolutely cut loose and shredded our way through all those Hork-Bajir and Taxxons. Only, I'd gone just a bit further than the others. Cassie had been captured a little while before the mission, and we didn't even know until we went in. I saw her, about to be infested by a Yeerk slug. I pounced, 150 pounds of raw muscle and sinew and razor-sharp claws and fangs slamming into the Controller holding her head down. A human Controller, not one of the aliens. By the time I finished with him, there wasn't much left.
I'd bitten right through the guy's neck. Hopefully, he died fast. Sure, the Yeerk inside his head deserved it. But the man himself was just a helpless puppet, unable to resist anything the Yeerk made him do. A prisoner in his own head. Innocent. And I'd ripped his throat out to get to my real enemy. To save my friend. I had blood on my hands now. Granted, at the time, they'd been leopard's paws instead of hands, but demorphing couldn't change what I had done. I didn't even need to kill him - I could've just knocked him over. But it was the first time I'd ever morphed a leopard, and I hadn't had enough time to get control over the animal instincts. I'd tried to take a shortcut - I told the leopard brain that the guy holding Cassie was prey. Five seconds later, he was dead.
After I left Tobias's house, I went straight back home and hid the backpack in my closet. I was supposed to have checked in with Jake after the mission was over, but I really didn't feel like it. Tobias was going to talk to him anyway, so he could fill Jake in on how it went. Then at school the next day, I did my best to avoid the other Animorphs. I guess I still needed time to process what had happened at the Pool. I probably would've just kept avoiding them indefinitely, but they had other ideas.