I sucked in air and pushed myself back from the computer.
And that's when I noticed my hand.
My right hand was green. A dark, mottled, reptile green.
?What the. . ."
I held up my left hand. It was green, too. Getting greener as I watched.
Getting rougher. Changing. Morphing!
There were scales forming on my skin. Crawling up my arms.
I bolted from the chair and raced for my full-length mirror.
My face was just beginning to bulge out. A huge, long, black-green snout.
This is something you never want to actually see.
"Yahhhh!" I yelped.
The swelling bulge split open to reveal a row of long, yellowed teeth.
"Crckkk!" I started to say, but my mouth was no longer human enough to make human sounds.
My legs shriveled as I watched helplessly. I fell forward onto the floor. The huge tail was surging behind me. I felt my spine stretching.
No! No! I hadn't decided to morph!
And yet I was morphing. At warp speed! I was on the floor of my bedroom, turning into a murderous, twenty-foot-long crocodile.
Morph out! I ordered myself. Morph out!
But the transformation continued. I was too big for the room! My snout was pushed into one corner, while my tail stretched out under the bed and curled in the far corner.
What was happening to me?
If Jordan or Sara or my mother walked into the room, my secret would be out. Worse yet, I wasn't sure I could control the crocodile.
It was hungry.
Focus, Rachel! Focus! Morph out! Go human!
But I wasn't morphing out. At least, not back to human.
Instead I began to notice a completely different kind of change. My body was narrowing in two places. I was cinching up. Forming three different body sections: head, abdomen, and thorax.
I was becoming an insect!
And that's when I became afraid. See, it's impossible to morph straight from one animal to another. Or at least it's supposed to be impossible. But I was definitely morphing. And I was not morphing to human.
I was still a huge crocodile, but my massive crocodile head was connected to my body by a tiny, narrow neck. And the area connecting my squat crocodile body to my fat crocodile tail had narrowed so much it was the size of a human wrist.
"This can't be happening!" I cried to no one. "This has to be a dream." But I'd had dozens, maybe hundreds of awful morphing dreams. And they'd never been like this.
I could hear my bones squishing as they turned to water and disappeared.
I could see the black-green crocodile scales turn dark brown, almost black, as an insect's exoskeleton grew over me like armor.
Huge spiky hairs shot like daggers from my back. My big teeth melted together, solidified, blackened, and reformed to become a long, vile-looking tube. Two new legs spurted from my sides. Two spiky, multi-jointed legs.
I knew all these changes. This was a morph I had done before. But never like this!
I was on my way to becoming a fly. But be-
cause morphing is never logical, I was a gigantic fly. I was becoming a fly before I'd had a chance to shrink.
Then the shrinkage kicked in and I was spiraling wildly downward. I was going from twenty-five feet in length to less than a quarter of an inch!
I wanted to scream for help. But who could help me? No one. No one!
Suddenly my reptile eyes bulged and popped out like balloons. The world around me was shattered into a thousand tiny pictures. I had the compound eyes of a fly!
My mind was reeling. It had to be a nightmare. This wasn't possible. It had to be some awful dream!
I was shrinking so fast that the corners of the room seemed to be racing away from me. The wood grain grew large and dark and clear. The cracks between boards were growing as wide as ditches.
And then, with a sickening lurch, I realized I had stopped shrinking. I was growing again.
The wood grain grew smaller. The cracks shrank. And I grew. And grew.
And grew!
My extra legs were gone. I had just four now. Four legs growing thicker and taller and thicker and taller!
"0h, please! Someone help me!"
Sproing! Sproing! The springs in my mattress popped as my bulk crushed them. I was too big for the room. Bigger even than the crocodile. My bookshelves fell over. My desk slammed against the wall.
Sparks shot from my computer and the screen went blank.
Too big for the room! I was big enough to be weighed in tons, not pounds. I was morphing a full-grown African elephant. In my small bedroom.
C-r-r-r-r-r-e-e-e-e-k!
"0h, no," I whispered. I could feel the floor literally sinking under my impossible weight. My head was shoved up against the ceiling.
C-r-r-r-UNCH!
With a scream of twisting wood, the floor gave way.
A sickening drop! And . . .
C-r-r-a-BOOOOM!
I was, very suddenly, in the kitchen.
CRASH!
CRUNCH!
I staggered and fell against the rubble of my room and the even bigger mess of the kitchen. It was chaos! Nothing made any sense.
The stove sat at a ridiculous angle with a two-by-four piece of lumber spearing through its glass door. The refrigerator was open, with all its contents spilled out. A gallon of milk glub-glubbed all over the place.
Sara! Jordan! Had they been in the kitchen?
Had my mom?
Oh, God! No one could have survived being crushed under this mess!
"Rachel! Rachel!"
It was Jordan's voice. She sounded scared but okay. And my elephant ears told me she was not in the room with me. She was out in the hallway. She couldn't see me through the rubble.