The Invasion by K. A. Applegate Read Free Book Online Page A

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.”
    “Oh. Too bad,” he said.
    “Too bad?” I repeated. I could not believe how little he seemed to care.
    “It’s just sports,” he said. He munched another big bite of toast.
    “Just sports?” I couldn’t stop repeating what hesaid. Tom, saying sports were no big deal? No way. He lived for sports. “Yeah, I guess I just don’t have your total skill.”
    He shrugged. “Well, I quit the team, anyway. A couple days ago.”
    I practically fell off my chair. “You
quit?
You quit the team? And you didn’t even talk to me about it? What’s the deal?”
    “I didn’t say anything because I knew you and Dad would make a big thing of it. Look, there are more important things than throwing balls through hoops,” he said. He had this mysterious look in his eyes. I figured he meant girls were the more important thing. “Besides,” he added, “we do much cooler stuff at The Sharing. Maybe you should join up.”
    I was stunned. Obviously, Tom and I were further apart than I had realized.
    When we were done talking, I headed outside to mow the lawn. I mow the lawn every Saturday. It’s my major chore. That, and taking out the trash, which I hate, because we have to