Renée makes a very large grocery trip. Ax deems alfalfa hay intended for consumption by guinea pigs and rabbits to be the hoof-eating equivalent of palatable; it also turns out he can eat a few other things, like carrot tops and turnip greens. He still doesn't like living in the garage, even though it's a different one. Andi finds him a little planetarium gadget that throws star-patterns onto the ceiling.
Renée installs a cot in the basement for Charlie. (His generic human morph is a man about ten years younger than him, plausibly Latino but just as plausibly not, plain and unremarkable. He also picks up a Renée morph. He will be able to drive the girls places, publicly know their names. They can tell he appreciates the opportunity, however weird it is.) Trouble is allowed to sleep on the couch, when Renée learns that he would prefer not to share the basement with Charlie.
Bella sews weights onto all the curtain hems so they won't be easily nudged aside.
The twins also collect generic-human-morphs. Both of theirs are college-age women, samples collected from going on premature college tours and shaking a lot of hands - Bella's looks maybe half Asian when she's done tweaking it, Andi winds up with a complexion much like her usual one but a surprisingly Hawaiian set of features.
Renée never asks to be enabled to morph. Bella eventually offers, "for emergencies", and Renée aggregates a number of her co-workers into the most stereotypical teacher-lady it is possible to Frolis into without requiring vision correction.
Renée makes the arrangements well in advance to homeschool the twins.
Bella quizzes Ax about all sorts of things, for large parts of each day.
As much as he appreciates getting to sleep on the Swans' couch - and he appreciates it a lot; he can handle tucking himself into corners every night, but it's not what he'd call fun - he still spends most of most days out and about as a pigeon.
"Hey pidgies. Ooh, lookit you, brown and white, aren't you fancy, have a cracker. So I could've sworn Mom 'n Dad'd let me get a dog, this summer finally, a puppy, I'd have all July and August to train it to do dog things. You know, just the usual, housebreaking, sit stay speak roll over write the Great American Novel eat my homework and leave video evidence. But noooo."
"Hi theeeeere, little chatty one, coo to you too, share with your friends, huh? And I can't take one of you guys home, for one thing you'd never let me catch you, I'm the pigeon equivalent of a scary walking talking vending machine, right, for another Dad thinks you carry diseases, which, if you do, guys, stop, make sure you're getting regular checkups at the vet, take your meds, wash your feet before you have dinner, get your flu shots. And so Mom says I can get a cat. I bet you guys don't like cats, huh? I bet cats are way scarier than the walking talking vending machine. They do no vending. Cats all flunk out of vending school."
"I mean cats are pretty and soft and all but they aren't lovey, they won't act like the whole world is brighter and better and more full of rainbows just 'cause you came home, you know? Dogs are friendly, I want a puppy who'll love me and not just - well, no offense, but just think I'm a vending machine. A mutt'd be fine. With two different colored ears. Something from the shelter, pay them for its shots, name it, I dunno, Kendall? I like Kendall for a puppy. I think it works for a girl or a boy."
She has waited patiently for them. "Anyway, enough about me and my wanting a dog, you're probably all super bored by, um, the fact that my gibberish has the same syllable in it a whole lot, in which case you're probably having more trouble with the fact that I say pronouns and 'the' and whatnot most sentences, but I'm going to just ignore that since I don't actually have anything else to say about wanting a dog. Pretty simple. Rhea wants a puppy, what else is new. Well, what else is new is I work at the paintball place now, which pays for crap but I get to play free rounds of paintball now and then so that's excellent, yeah. If that hot guy who's probably gay and has the membership ever randomly kisses me I can be all smooth and tell him 'taste the rainbow'. Except no, that's incredibly stupid and also implies that I don't shower after games, thank you for steering me away from that stupid line, helpful pigeons, I will not refer to Skittles advertisements if the probably gay guy kisses me. I'll say something more like, 'I totally thought you were gay'. Is that offensive? I feel like it might be. Man, what is the appropriate thing to say, though?"
The girl, whose name is plausibly Rhea, dispenses crackers. "I guess telling him I thought he was gay implies that I gave the question thought? Is that flattering? Maybe it's flattering if you think about it but I dunno if he'd do that, basically all I know about him is he's hot and likes paintball and is probably gay, and given he's probably gay I should probably not dwell on what I'd do if he did something even most straight dudes do not do. Actually, literally no straight guys have ever decided to spontaneously kiss me unless you count elementary school. What do you think, pigeons, does Valentine's day in third grade count?" She shakes her head. "Nah. And I had a boyfriend for like a month last year but that doesn't count as spontaneous even if it counts as kissing, y'know?"
"Chatterbox," she accuses. "Chatterbird. What kind of box chatters? I've never seen one do it. Maybe it's a metaphor for television. Saturday Night Live was pretty good the other day. Poor pigeons, you probably can't watch TV, even if you sat on the right windowsills people would change the channel without ever offering you the remote and it'd just be frustrating."
Rhea crumples up the cracker wrapper. "Soooo tempted to be a litterbug, they need to put more trash cans in this park," she sighs, "but probably some little birdy would choke on it looking for more crackers and then I would feel bad and also dead birds attract flies and flies are not at all cute and feathery. Tomorrow's menu is day-old bagels," she adds.
Volunteering to throw out her trash for her would not be appropriate pigeonly behaviour, he's pretty sure. Even though he is immensely cute. Trouble wanders in aimless circles instead, keeping close to Rhea, because his pigeon brain thinks that hanging around where there has just been food is an awesome idea. And, really, he can't argue with it.
She doesn't seem to be on the lookout for pigeon stalkers. She has a mile and a half walk home, which she spends humming, kicking small rocks, picking at a ragged spot on her pants pocket, and stopping for an ice cream cone from a passing truck, which she pays for entirely in dimes. She lives in a small apartment building; Trouble will not have a problem learning the code to get in the gate, if he wants it, though flying over would also be pretty easy.
The next day, though, he's back at the appropriate time for those day-old bagels.
She shows up a little later on this day, with day-old bagels in sesame and pumpernickel, methodically shredding them as she approaches her bench. "Hey, guys, the auditions for Les Miserables are a few blocks west, all I have is bread," she says when she sits down and starts scattering. "Bread and my charming conversation, but we all know what you're really here for, right? So guys, what is the consensus among pigeons about how long teenage girls should be allowed to spend on the phone, because an hour is not a lot of time if you have, you know, friends."
"Which'd be one thing if he was ever like 'Rhea, you have a job now, chip in for the phone bill' but he never even asked me, just thinks it's bad for me to spend so much time on the phone. He completely approves of me walking to the park and conversing with birds, that's fine, that's getting fresh air, but actual socializing with humans is going to turn me into a pumpkin because there's electronics involved?"
"I like Six Flags better actually, more intense coasters, but Disneyland's more a special occasion thing. They kind of put the theme in theme park awfully intensely. Mouse ears everywhere. Dad calls you guys flying mice. I wonder if you'd get along with mice if you met mice? You could be all enemy-of-my-enemy with cats, anyway."
"I'm so gripey with you guys sometimes, you'd think nothing neat went on in my life," Rhea sighs. "It's easier to find people to talk about the nice stuff with. But who wants to hear me whining that Dad doesn't let me talk on the phone or that I wish I had a little brother or that I took a paintball to the forehead yesterday and it kind of really hurt? You don't care as long as I show up with food, I can respect that kind of arrangement. Bagel bits for everybody."
"I can't actually stay too long today," sighs Rhea, "I picked today to go to the library and get my summer reading books, the only reason I'm here in the first place was because here's on the way to the library. When you guys finish the bagels that's it for today, maybe tomorrow too."
Rhea walks back to the apartment complex, on the way attempting to open one of the books to read and dropping the other three. She collects them back up, smooths a blank page, and tries again with more success, and reads two chapters of The Scarlet Letter on her way back to her apartment.
"Rhea, are you doing your reading?"
"I read like half a book!" Rhea yells back.
"Then you've only got half a book to go!"
"But Mom -"
"Rhea, I've gotta go to work, I don't want you only getting things done when I'm home to nag you, got to learn responsibility."
"I'll get it all done before school starts! That's in like a month!"
"Wouldn't you rather have it done in advance so you can have the rest of summer with no homework? Especially if you could read them all before Disneyland."
"Mo-o-om!"
"If you have your first book finished by the time my shift's over I won't say a word about it for a week, but you need to be on top of your school things," says Rhea's mom. "I'm going to work. See you tomorrow."
Rhea listens for sounds too faint for Trouble to hear. Then she flicks the music on and dances for a few more minutes before flumphing into her hammock again and picking up the book.
Well, the video games occupy her and/or any alien parasites she may or may not be harboring for a couple of hours, and then she looks at the clock, swears loudly, and picks up her book again. This time she finishes it, although she's turning pages fast enough that it looks like she's skimming. Then she goes out of the room and comes back with a bowl of steaming soup. She eats a spoonful, burns her mouth, blows on each future spoonful before eating it, and leaves the bowl on her nightstand with two glasses and a plate that have also been abandoned there. Then she goes and comes back with a Fudgesicle and the comics section of the newspaper.
After she has finished her Fudgesicle, she leaves the room again and comes back with a phone handset. She talks with varying audibility to three different people in sequence until her dad comes home. He opens her door to ask her what she had for dinner, finds the answer satisfactory, asks how her summer reading is going, finds that answer satisfactory too, and says she can have another half an hour on the phone. She takes forty-five minutes and then protests when her father takes the phone handset away.
- Talks on the phone some more.
- Goes to the pool (the regular, chlorinated, swimming pool) with two of her friends. Looks very nice in a bikini.
- Buys a new (to her) pair of jeans at the thrift store; dithers over but does not get the cute shoes.
- Gets about a third of the way through her second summer reading book ("The Great Gatsby").
- Appears for her brief shift at the paintball place, renting out equipment.
- Goes out with her parents to dinner at Burger King, where they eat burgers and fries and she is able to wheedle them into getting her a milkshake.
They get lunch, then split up, and Rhea takes the remaining free tortilla chips and goes to the park.
She talks about the movie (she liked it) and about how she would like more shifts at the paintball place for the extra cash but she likes having free time too and about how her parents aren't that bad really but she cannot keep track of Mom's work schedule and about how they are out of Fudgesicles.
"Hi," he says, bouncing a little.
Turning into the fluffy kitty seems to go a little bit faster than coming back from the pigeon, or maybe it's just that it all happens at once in a muddle instead of having that long growing stage first.
Then he is a tall spotted cat with a long fluffy tail, and he climbs into her lap and flops over and purrs.
<Well, depends. Sometimes they just kill somebody who knows too much. But most of the time they send in an evil cultist to take over your mind and walk you around pretending to still be you while you sit there in the back of your own head and watch. They wanna do that to everybody someday. That's what the Sharing is for - recruiting fresh puppets.>
<It's happened to me,> he says. <I was lucky enough to get away. If they found out I'd showed up again this close to home, they'd want to drag me back in for sure. And if they found out I was connected to any kind of talking animal they'd get really serious about it. There's kind of a feud going on there.>
He turns into a soft cuddly owl, which for some reason involves his hair merging into giant feathers before anything else happens, and then the usual minute or two of other changes in apparently random order. But then he is a very sleek pretty barn owl, standing on her bed and looking huggable.
"She's really cute," he reiterates. "We talked for a while and I didn't bring up aliens or use any sensitive vocabulary but I told her not to go near the Sharing and that I'm a shapeshifter, and she took me home and recognized me from a newspaper ad but she's not gonna turn me in 'cause I told her I ran away for reasons, and then we made out for like three hours, and can I make her an Animorph? Maybe?"
"I'm pretty sure if she knew anybody in the Sharing she would've mentioned them when I said it was an evil cult, or like, anytime in the ensuing several hours, it's not like most people in the Sharing are quiet about it. She gets that I am a secret talking pigeon who is on the run from evil cultists. I pretty much left her in the dark about whether or not I have any talking pigeon friends. So, yeah, the worst thing that could happen is somebody's gonna find out I'm in Phoenix and I can morph. Pretty fucking bad, yep. I did it anyway."