"Look at your hand."
I looked at my hand. It was covered with orange fur.
I jumped about a foot, straight up in the air. "Ohh! Ohh!" I stared at my hand. The fur had stopped growing.
"Don't be scared," Tobias advised, "Go with it. Now you've stopped the morph. You have to concentrate."
"My hand!" I said. "Fur!"
"Yeah, and your ears… " Tobias said.
I ran to the mirror over my dresser. My ears had moved. They had slid up the side of my head, and were definitely larger than they should be.
"Go on, it's so cool!" Tobias said.
"Cool? It's… it's… creepy. It's weird. It's… I mean, look at my hands! I have fur!"
"You have to do this," Tobias said.
"I don't have to do anything," I said sullenly.
Tobias nodded. "Okay, you're right. You don't have to do this. You can just forget what we saw last night. And forget what we know. And as the Yeerks take over more and more people, you can just ignore it. We can all just go along and grow up in a world where human beings are nothing but bodies to be used by murdering aliens."
Okay, when he put it that way it didn't sound like a great option.
"Come on," Tobias urged.
I swallowed hard. I closed my eyes. I thought of Homer. Of being Homer.
I felt the itch mess again, and when I opened my eyes, there was fur growing on my arms. And fur growing out of my face. And fur curling up from under my collar. My legs itched and I realized they were growing fur, too. My bones… well, they didn't exactly hurt, but they did feel very strange. You know when you go to the dentist and he gives you Novocaine so the drill doesn't really hurt, but you know it should hurt? I guess that's what it's like.
My bones shortened. I could feel my backbone stretching as it extended out into a tail. There was a scraping sound as my knees suddenly reversed direction. I toppled forward, no longer able to walk upright.
When my hands hit the floor they weren't exactly hands anymore. The fingers were gone. All that was left were short, stubby nails.
My face bulged out. My eyes drew closer together.
Tobias got up and tilted the mirror down so I could see myself.
I watched the final transformation as the last patches of my pink human flesh disappeared. And the tail — my tail — sprouted to its full length.
I was a dog. It was insane. But just the same. I was a dog.
I knew I should be scared by all this, only I wasn't. I was ecstatic. I was giddy. I was thrilled. Happiness just washed over me, Happiness filled me up.
I breathed in through my ridiculously long nose and wow! Wow! The smells. Oh, man, you have no idea! I breathed in and right away I knew my mom was toasting a waffle in the kitchen. And I knew Tobias had walked through the territory of a big male dog. And I knew things I couldn't even explain in human words. It was like being blind all your life and then suddenly you can see.
I ran over to Tobias and sniffed his shoe. I wanted a better idea of who that big male dog was. From the scent of his urine picked up by Tobias's shoe I got a sort of picture of him. See, Homer knew him. His owners called him Streak. He was neutered, like me. He spent most of his time in his yard, but he broke out sometimes by digging under his fence. He got a mix of canned and dry food, Purina. No table scraps, unlike me.
All this information made me happy all over again, and I had to wag my tail. I looked up at Tobias. He looked tall and strange and not very colorful, I wasn't all that interested in looking at stuff. Smelling things was way better.
INTRUDER!
There was a noise in the yard. A dog! An unknown dog in MY yard. An INTRUDER! I ran to the window and perched against it and cut loose.
"Rrrawf! Rrawf rrawf! rrawfrrawfrrawfrrawf!"
I barked as loud as I could. No WAY some unknown dog was just going to walk through MY yard.
"Jake, get a grip," Tobias said. "That's Homer out there." Homer? What? But I was…
I tucked my tail between my legs. What was going on?
"Jake, listen to me," Tobias said. "It's just what happened to me when I morphed into a cat. The dog brain is part of your brain now. You have to deal with it."
<But… there's a dog in MY yard.>
"That's Homer, Jake. You are Jake. You're just in a body copied from Homer's DNA. That's the real Homer out there. You put him out there. Focus. You are Jake. Jake."
I took several deep breaths. The smells! Oh, boy, there was this one smell I couldn't quite —
Focus, Jake! I ordered myself. Focus!
Slowly I calmed the dog part of my mind.
Let go of the smells. Let go of the sound of a dog out in your yard.
It wasn't easy, that first time. Being a dog is so completely amazing. For one thing, there's nothing halfway about it. You're never sort of happy. You're HAPPY! You're never sort of bummed. You're totally, completely bummed. And boy, when you get hungry in dog form, you are nuts on the subject of food.
There was a knock on my bedroom door. Yes, my bedroom door. I knew who I was again. I was Jake. Jake with four legs, a tail and a snout, but Jake.
The knocking seemed incredibly loud to my dog ears.
"Jake, you got Homer in there with you?" My brother Tom's voice. "Mom's on the phone, stop him yapping — "
He opened the door and stepped in. He looked around, confused.
"Who are you?" he demanded of Tobias.
"I'm Tobias. I'm a friend of Jake's."
"Well, where is he?"
"Oh… he's around," Tobias said.
Tom looked down at me. There was a strange smell about him. My dog brain couldn't quite identify it. It was an unsettling, dangerous smell. And somehow, in my own mind, I heard the echo of a laugh. A very human laugh I had heard the night before as Visser Three swallowed the Andalite whole.
"Bad dog," Tom said to me. "You keep quiet. Bad dog." And then he left.
I was devastated. I wasn't a bad dog. Not really. I was just barking because some other dog was in MY yard. Bad dog? I was a bad dog? No, I wanted to be a good dog. I crept into the corner, utterly miserable.
Tobias knelt down and patted my head.
When he scratched me behind the ears, I felt a little better.
CHAPTER 10
I called all the others on the phone after I got done morphing back into my normal body. Tobias took off on his own, saying he'd hook up with us later at Cassie's farm. I was on the kitchen phone with Cassie when Tom came in.
"Oh, there you are," he said.
I covered the mouthpiece. "Yeah. Tobias said you were looking for me before."
"I just wanted you to shut your dog up," Tom said. He turned a chair around backward and straddled it.
I hesitated. For some reason I didn't want to talk to Cassie with Tom listening in. "I'll just see you there in a couple hours, okay?" I told Cassie. I hung up.
I looked over at Tom. He's bigger than me, even though I'm not exactly small. His hair is darker, almost black, while mine is brown.
I had always trusted him. He wasn't like a lot of guys who pound on their younger brother. We were always kind of close. At least, until the last year or so. Somehow we just weren't spending as much time together. Partly it was that he was involved in this club called The Sharing. They did all this stuff together, so he was busy a lot of the time.
The thing is, Tom should have been the very first person I told about all the stuff that had happened. But as I was sitting there watching him munch toast, I just had this feeling. This feeling that said No, this has to be a secret. Even from Tom.
Instead I told him the other thing I was afraid to tell him.
"I, uh… I didn't make the team," I said.
"What team?" he asked. He looked puzzled.
"What team? The basketball team. Your old team."