The Visitor by K. A. Applegate Read Free Book Online Page B

crept into every part of my mind. I hated the way I wasn’t sure, not really, totally sure, that I could trust her.
    “Good night,” I said. “Thanks for rescuing me from that nightmare. Whatever it was.”
    She started to walk away. Then she turned, lit from behind by the garish bathroom light. “Before you started screaming, you were yelling something.”
    “What?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
    She looked puzzled. “I think it was ‘maggots.’ Something like that.”
    I forced a shaky smile. “Good night, Jordan.”
    I crawled back into my bed. The pillow was soaked with sweat. The sheets were clammy.
    Maggots. Squirming, crawling, busy little white maggots. They were all over a piece of rotting meat and fur. In my dream it was a dead cat. A deadcat covered with vermin eating the decayed flesh.
    A shrew was getting in on the feast, eating the dead flesh and the living maggots with equal enjoyment.
    In my dream I knew: I
was
that shrew.
    “You look tired,” Jake said the next morning. We took the same bus to school.
    “Thanks,” I said grumpily.
    “Didn’t get enough sleep last night?”
    “I guess not, if I look as bad as you say.”
    “I didn’t say you looked bad, I just said you looked tired.” He hesitated. He glanced over his shoulder, checking to see whether anyone was listening. Fortunately, the noise level was pretty high in the bus. Jake lowered his voice and leaned close to my ear. “You didn’t get creeped out by the shrew, did you?”
    “Why? Just because I’m a girl, you think the shrew bothered me more than it would have bothered you or Marco?”
    “No, that’s not it at all,” he said earnestly. “It’s just … see, when I did the lizard morph, that bothered me. I had nightmares —”
    “Nightmares?” I said it too loudly. Then I lowered my voice back to a whisper. “Nightmares?”
    “Oh, yeah. Definitely. When I morphed the tiger I had dreams, too, but not nightmares.”
    “What kind of dreams?”
    He smiled. “Kind of cool, really. Stalking through a dark forest at night. I was hunting something. It was like I wanted to catch it, but at the same time it was like if I didn’t catch it that would be okay, too. Because just running and creeping and then running some more through the woods was the best thing in the world.”
    I nodded. “I felt like that after the elephant morph. It was this incredible feeling of being huge and invincible. Like I could never even possibly be afraid of anything.”
    “But the shrew was different, wasn’t it? Same with the lizard.”
    “I guess it’s the different characters of the animals. Maybe some are good matches for our human brains. Maybe others aren’t.” I looked out the window for a while. Then I said, “You know what scares me?”
    To my surprise, Jake nodded. “Yeah. You’re afraid that someday we might have to morph into bugs.”
    I shuddered. “I don’t think I’ll be willing to do that. I think that may be too much.”
    “Well, your next assignment is a cat. Tobias was a cat. He said it was amazingly cool. He liked it. Just like I really enjoy being a dog. Sometimes when I’m feeling depressed, I really wish I could just morph. Dogs know how to have fun.”
    The bus pulled up in front of the school. “Another day of school. Normal life.” I looked over the crowd of kids milling around on the lawn and on the steps. I spotted Melissa.
    “See you later, Jake,” I said. “Thanks.”
    “No problem. We’re all in this together.”
    I made my way down the bus aisle and ran to catch up to Melissa. But when I got close I saw that her eyes were red and swollen. She’d been crying.
    I didn’t know what to do. In the old days I would have just run right up to her and asked what was the matter.
    “Hey, Melissa, how’s it going?”
    She looked at me, confused. “What?”
    “I said, how’s it going?”
    She shook her head slowly, like she couldn’t believe I was even talking to her. “What do you