When Friday afternoon had rolled around, Rachel had indulged herself is a way that she hadn't done in some time: with an after-school nap. Then, once she'd actually felt rested, Rachel had stretched and hauled herself out of bed. It was something she didn't get to enjoy nearly as much as she had in the old days; weekends and late afternoons, after all, were the prime time for Animorph missions.

Now, though, she was starting to feel a bit hungry again, and so, toeing on a pair of fluffy, well-worn slippers, Rachel made her way down to the kitchen.

The kitchen that still hadn't been entirely fixed yet from her little morphing escapade with the crocodile; the kitchen that had been remodeled from its old look into something like what she'd sometimes seen on TV shows. Making her way past the island, which their old kitchen didn't have but which her mother had always wanted, Rachel shook her head. She still felt kinda guilty about the builder being blamed for the collapse, and for his feeling so guilty and scared about what he'd done that he was willing to do all the work for free.

Still, it wasn't as if she could actually tell anyone that the reason the house had collapsed in on itself was because she'd had an allergic reaction to the crocodile DNA she'd acquired, one that had caused her to morph out of control until she'd ended up going into a full-blown African Elephant in her bedroom. At least not without compromising the Animorphs' security and risking exposing the entire war effort to the Yeerks.

Putting those thoughts out of her mind as she continued to dig through the refrigerator, in search of the small, white container of Chinese food from the last time that they had ordered home-delivery of the stuff, Rachel began to frown. She wasn't finding it. Most of the other boxes of leftovers were there, some of them obviously missing more than a few bites, but the one she'd been looking for was gone entirely.

There was really only one explanation for this.

"Jordan! JORDAN!" she shouted, not particularly caring who she woke up at this point. "Jordan, you little thief!"

"What?"

Turning away from the refrigerator, momentarily forgetting about anything else in her eagerness to see this particular thief punished for what she had done, Rachel slammed right into the new kitchen island. Angrier now, and with nothing but a bruise on her hip to show for it, Rachel growled under her breath and stuck her right pointer finger at her younger sister's face.

"You! You ate my Szechuan shrimp! I was saving it for later. I want it. I want it right now!"

"Rachel, I took your stupid shrimp yesterday," Jordan said, not intimidated in the slightest by something that would have cowed her on the spot not so long ago. "And I threw it out."

"What?!" she demanded, seething. "You threw out my Szechuan shrimp? You're always doing something with my leftovers, and I'm getting sick of it!"

"It was already a week old, duh," Jordan said, with the slow, pitying shake of her head that Rachel herself could remember using on people who were being particularly stupid. "It was too old, duh. It would have made you barf up your kidneys, duh. Shrimp doesn't exactly stay good forever, duh. And oh, by the way, did I mention, duh?"

"You should have asked me first!" Rachel snapped back, in no particular mood to be reasonable about things.

"Okay, Rachel," Jordan said, in what Rachel could swear was some kind of an imitation of her own talking-to-morons tone. "Should I have thrown out your rancid, bacteria-crawling, moldy leftovers, like Mom asked me to, or should I have left them for you to eat so you'd end up having to get your stomach pumped?"

Seething, and all the while knowing that there was no real, logical argument that she could make in the face of that, a fact which made her almost as annoyed as not being able to come up with a particularly crushing comeback, Rachel settled for a scathing glare. "I'll let it go, this time."

"Thank you," Jordan said, rolling her eyes. "Thank you, Queen Rachel. I'm so glad you'll let me live."

Before she could begin to think up a crushing retort to that, Rachel saw her and Jordan's – and Sara's, but the younger girl wasn't home at the moment – mother coming into the kitchen with a pair of briefcases held at her sides. One of them was normal-sized, while the other one was about half-again as big. Even as Rachel wondered in a vague sort of way what case her mother was working on, the older woman hefted both briefcases up and set them down on the counter in front of her.

Rachel noticed then that her mother looked pretty tired; not an uncommon occurrence given her line of work, but still something Rachel took notice of all the same. Mom was the kind of person who would probably have been working constantly even if her lower position in the law firm where she worked hadn't made that kind of thing necessary. Or, at least that was the impression that Rachel got whenever her mother was home.

The woman grinned at them all, clearly inviting her and Jordan to share in some kind of triumph or private joke; maybe even both. "Hey! Congratulate me, I'm a celebrity. Did you girls eat? How was school? Where's Sara? And don't tell me she's at Tisha's house. Every time she comes home from there, I end up buying her another Barbie."

"School was fine," Rachel said, leaving it at that. "We haven't had dinner," she said, changing the subject before her stomach could change it for her. "You want me to make something?"

"Or we could order out," Jordan said, her entire demeanor smug. "Rachel would like some puss-oozing, rotten shrimp."

"Mom! Mom!" Sara shouted, charging into the room through the back door like a speeding car; or a rampaging elephant. "Tisha says they have a lawyer Barbie! A lawyer Barbie. Just like you!"

"So, what's this about being a celebrity?" she asked, as she saw her mother struggling not to roll her eyes at Sara's antics.

"Oh, well I was mostly kidding about that," Mom said, a look of amusement on her face. "You know that guy who was in the papers a few days ago? The one who was rescued by Arnold Schwarzman? He was on CNN and the local news."

"Schwarzenegger?" she asked, curious.

"No, the man he rescued," Mom corrected. "Anyway, guess what? I'm his lawyer. His family is saying he's incompetent. They want to-"

"Incompetent?" Jordan interrupted. "Is that where you have to wear those adult diapers?"

"No, honey," Mom said gently. "Not incontinent. They're alleging he's incompetent. Not able to look after his own affairs. That's what they allege."

"Nuts," Rachel translated for the benefit of her two younger sisters. "Wacko. Allegedly wacko."

"Don't say wacko," her mom said, looking as if the word itself was painful to hear. "Mentally unbalanced will do fine. Anyway, his family wants to have him institutionalized permanently."

"So, what are you supposed to do?" she asked, not really seeing a way that her mother could help this guy. "Prove he's not crazy? I mean, he is, right? He jumped off a building. That's not something sane people do."

For a moment Rachel reflected on what Shara had said to her, but then she put it out of her mind; the two situations weren't even remotely similar, and besides that she wasn't going to let Shara keep thinking that way, anyway.

"Lawyer Barbie could save him," Sara said, folding her arms confidently.

"Actually, it's a bit worse than just that," her mom said, a worried, pitying expression on her face as she gathered Sara up into her arms. "Apparently, this poor man thinks he has an alien living in his head." Rachel's heart pounded; three loud beats that she was almost surprised that no one else heard, before all but stopping entirely. "He calls them Yerks, or Yorks; something like that."

Holding onto her composure with both hands, not wanting to give anything away that might endanger her, the other Animorphs, or anyone else in her family, Rachel shrugged.

"Well, that's kind of weird," she said, deliberately casual. "No wonder his family thinks he's wacko; I mean, aliens that live in your head? Come on."

"I know," Mom said, shaking her head as if she pitied the man; Rachel couldn't tell if it was real or an act. "What I don't know is just how I'm going to be able to represent him if he keeps insisting on telling that absurd story. No one in their right mind would ever believe it, but from all the material I've read on the case, it seems like that's his story and he's sticking to it. I just don't know what I'm going to do about him yet."

"I'm sure you'll figure something out, Mom," Jordan said, smiling. "You always do."

"And Lawyer Barbie could help you!" Sara said cheerfully.

"Thanks, girls," Mom said, with a wry smile at Sara. Then, clapping her hands together briskly, she swept them all with her gaze. "Well, let's not think about that anymore; I'm sure we're all hungry. Rachel, did you really want Chinese food tonight?"

"Actually," she said, rolling her eyes at Jordan; her younger sister stuck out her tongue. "I think I'm more in the mood for pizza, now."

"Ooh, pizza!" Sara cheered, swinging her arms happily. "Sounds great."

"All right," Mom said, nodding sharply. "We've got two votes for pizza; Jordan, you're the tie-breaker."

"I think pizza would be cool," Jordan said, then Rachel saw her younger sister smirking. "Just so long as it isn't all rotten and covered in mold."

"I don't think they actually deliver it that way," she said, rolling her eyes at Jordan.

"All right, you two," Mom said, giving them both a fish-eyed look. "No bickering before dinner."

"Yes, Mom," she and Jordan both answered in unison.