The Message (4 page)

Rachel was busy with her gymnastics class. Plus she got to go to this ceremony where her mom received some award for being Lawyer of the Year. (And since this is Rachel we’re talking about, going to an awards dinner meant major shopping for new
everything.)

Jake had totally blown a test because he hadn’t studied, so he had to do a paper as makeup work. And I was busy helping my dad out in the barn with
the golden eagle who had almost been electrocuted. He was at a difficult stage of his recovery.

Tobias dropped by one evening and acted kind of snippy about me trying to save a golden eagle. Golden eagles and hawks don’t get along. Probably because golden eagles are known to kill and eat hawks.

It was a couple of days later that Jake rode his bike over to my house. I didn’t expect him, so I was dressed like even more of a slob than usual. Plus I reeked of various horrible things because I was mucking out the stables and cleaning the birdcages.

Typical guy. He had the totally bad timing to show up when I looked like Ms. Manure.

“Hey, Cassie,” he said in his usual casual way, like nothing was going on.

“Hi, Jake. Did you come by to help me shovel manure?”

He grinned. He has a great smile. It appears kind of slowly, like it doesn’t quite belong on his serious face. “I don’t know. Did I?”

“Yes, you did,” I told him. I handed him a shovel. “If I have to smell, so do you.”

We worked a little bit, with no sound but the steel shovel blades scraping the concrete. I knew he had something to tell me. I can always tell. But I figured I’d let him get around to it whenever he was ready.

“So,” he said at last.

“So?” I echoed.

“Look, um, I guess everyone is kind of waiting to see what you decide to do.”

This surprised me. I stopped shoveling. “What? What do you mean?”

“I mean, we’re waiting to see what you decide to do about this dream of yours.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Besides, it’s not just my dream. Tobias has it, too. And all of you guys felt it a little, at least.”

“Yeah, but Tobias figures he isn’t going to be much help when … I mean, if we decide to do something. We’re talking water, and Tobias can’t morph. As for the rest of us, I don’t know. Rachel and Marco were talking about whether it might have just been something they imagined, you know? Because you made it seem so real and all.”

“What do you think, Jake?”

Jake stopped working and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked straight into my eyes. “Cassie, if you tell me it’s real, it’s real. I think you and Tobias are right. But Marco is having second thoughts.” He raised one eyebrow, as if to say “You know Marco.”

I felt a queasy, sick feeling. “You mean, I’m supposed to make some kind of a decision? Like I’m supposed to say what we do?”

“Cassie, you’re the one with the dream. Only you can decide if it’s real, and if it’s real enough for us to try and do something about it.”

“I don’t
know
if it’s real,” I said. What was he asking me to do? Every time we had tried to get into it with the Yeerks, we had ended up barely escaping with our lives. Just two days had passed since I’d heard bullets whizzing past me.

Jake waited until I met his gaze again. “Cassie, you know we all trust your instincts. You’re the best at understanding animals. You’re the best morpher. You know everyone in the group respects you.”

I made a face. “Give me a break.”

“If you think we should pursue this, you know Rachel will be right behind you. Me too.”

“And Marco?”

Jake grinned again. “Marco won’t be right behind you. He’ll be several feet back.”

We both laughed.

“I don’t know, Jake. It’s a dream. It’s like a vision or something. How do I know if it’s real?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Cassie. I guess you just have to take your best shot and hope you’re right.”

I cringed at that. I’m not Rachel. I’m not a risk-taker. “Can’t you decide for me?” I asked, joking.

He nodded solemnly. “If you want me to, sure.”

“And then if it’s a disaster, it will all be on your head,” I said. “You’ll be the one who feels bad. You’ll be the one to blame.” I reached out and touched his cheek. “That’s incredibly sweet of you. But you’re right. I guess it’s my decision this time.”

I sighed and looked around at the barn. It smelled pretty bad, and sometimes it was a nuthouse of yammering birds and howling wolves and whinnying horses, all needing care, and all scared of the care we gave them. But it was the place I felt most at home in the whole world.

Out through the door of the barn, the fields of corn and open meadow stretched off into the distance, till they pressed up against the dark trees of the forest.

“I know this is crazy,” I said, “but the ocean scares me a little. I understand the land. I understand soil and things that grow out of it.” I laughed. “I guess I’m just an old farm girl. You know this farm has been in my family since the Civil War?”

Jake winked. “Do I know that? Puh-leeze. I had Thanksgiving with your family last year, you may remember. Your grandmother gave me the complete history.”

“Going all the way back to when dinosaurs ruled the earth,” I said. “Grammy does tend to go on about our history, doesn’t she?”

He looked serious again, almost hard. “It’s your call, Cassie. It will be really dangerous and we probably won’t do much good. I mean, it’s a big ocean out there. But it’s your decision.”

“Yep,” I agreed. I shook my head slowly, sadly. “I believe these dreams are real. I believe there’s an Andalite out there, somewhere … somehow … trapped. Calling for help.”

“Good enough,” he said. “Now. How do we get out there?”

I frowned, thinking of the possibilities. “Some kind of fish? It would have to be something fast. Something that isn’t prey. You know, not some fish that’s going to get snapped up by a hungry tuna or whatever.”

Jake nodded. “And it has to be something we can acquire. Which means, probably, something at The Gardens.”

“They have sea lions. And dolphins. But we can’t morph them, can we?”

“Why not?”

“I … I don’t know. It’s just that, I mean, dolphins? They’re highly intelligent. It seems kind of, I don’t know, kind of wrong.”

“Well, you decide,” he said, leaning his shovel against a wall. “I have to go. I can’t blow another test, and I have to study.”

He climbed back on his bike.

“You’re just saying that to get out of shoveling manure,” I said.

“Cassie,” he said, “I would rather shovel manure with you than do homework without you, any day.”

I think it was a compliment. Sort of.

He rode off, leaving me much less at ease than I had been before he’d come.

T
he next day after school, the four of us headed toward The Gardens on a city bus. Tobias flew. He said he’d be there before we were, but he wasn’t sure how close to
us
he actually could get.

The Gardens is this big amusement park that also includes a zoo. Only they don’t call it a zoo, they call it a “wildlife park.” My mom works there. Actually, she’s the head of medical services, the head vet.

I have a pass to get in anytime I want, but the others all have to pay, which is kind of a drag because Marco never has any money. Ever since Marco’s mom died, his dad has been kind of messed up. He
just takes temporary jobs, and they’re always broke.

I guess I kind of think it’s romantic, the way Marco’s dad has never gotten over his wife dying. But on the other hand, it’s like I had to learn when I started helping my dad with the animals— sometimes death just happens, and all you can do is get over it the best you can.

It’s tough for Marco because he feels like he has to take care of his dad — instead of having his dad taking care of him.

On the bus, I glanced over at Marco. He was looking out of the window, being kind of quiet.

“Hey, Marco,” I said.

“What?”

“Is that a new haircut? It looks good.”

“Yeah?” He looked surprised. He ran his fingers back through his long brown hair and kind of smiled.

I did some homework on the bus (math, gag, yuck!) and listened to music.

When we got there, it turned out there was a special on tickets — buy two and get the third ticket for a dollar. Marco had a dollar, fortunately, so we didn’t have to go through any big scenes.

We cruised through the area where all the rides were, heading toward the wildlife park.

Jake shook his head sadly, looking up at the monster roller coaster. “That used to be the coolest thing in the world to me,” he said. “But ever since I morphed a falcon, it just hasn’t seemed like any big deal. I mean, you’re going maybe eighty miles per hour on a steel track. When I was a falcon I did, like, two hundred miles an hour in midair.”

“This morphing stuff does kind of change things,” Marco agreed. “I used to want to get all pumped up. Then I morphed into a gorilla, and it was like, why bother lifting weights? I can just become a gorilla and bench press a truck.”

“I don’t feel that way,” Rachel said. “Being a cat made me more interested in gymnastics. I mean, as a cat I was just so totally, totally in control and graceful. Ever since then I’ve been trying to use that feeling. When I’m on the balance beam I try and remember that cat confidence.”

“And then you fall off just the same as always?” I teased.

“Oh, yeah,” Rachel said with a laugh. She made little walking fingers in the air that then fell over. “Boom. I slip right off. But I feel
confident
while I’m falling off.”

We reached the wildlife park entrance. The marine mammals are one of the first exhibits. There’s a main building, then there are several outdoor tanks.

We went straight for the largest outdoor tank. There were bleachers all around it on three sides where people sat for performances. A show had just ended, and hundreds of people were leaving. The next show would be in a couple of hours.

“Good timing,” Jake said. “Not too big a crowd.”

“It’s a weekday afternoon,” I said. “It’s never all that crowded on school days.”

We forced our way upstream against the rush of people, and reached the side of the tank.

It’s pretty big. Like four or five big swimming pools. It’s very blue, very clean-looking. There’s a low platform on one side where the trainers stand to communicate with the dolphins.

“So what’s the difference between porpoises and dolphins?” Marco asked. “Both are just fish, right?”

SPLOOSH!

The placid surface of the water exploded a few feet from us. Water sprayed across me.

“Oooooh!” we all said as one.

He flew straight up out of the water, like a sleek, pale gray torpedo. Eleven feet long from nose to tail. Four hundred pounds. He simply flew into the air, seemed to hang there, ten feet above the surface of the water, took a skeptical look at us, gave us his permanent wise-guy grin, and slid back beneath the water so smoothly that there was barely a ripple.

“That is a dolphin,” I said to Marco.

“Okay, I like that.
That
is excellent,” Marco said. “Did you see what he did?”

You know how really great athletes never look like they’re even trying? Like Michael Jordan? How everything they do is perfect, and you know they must have practiced for a million hours, but they always look like, “Oh. No big deal. Of course I can fly through the air. Nothing to it.”

That’s a dolphin in the water. Effortless. Perfect. Utterly in control.

Fish swim through the water. Sharks swim, tuna swim, trout swim, even people swim. Dolphins don’t just swim through the water. They own the water. The water is their toy. The water is one big trampoline and the dolphins bounce around like kids having a good time.

Just watching them makes you happy. It also makes you feel like you’re just this clunky, awkward windup toy, jerky and stumbling and clumsy. Human beings may be the smartest creatures on Earth, but we sure are dorky compared to a lot of other species.

“He’s trying to get me to give him some more fish.”

We all spun around. It was one of the dolphin trainers, a woman named Eileen.

“Oh, hi, Eileen,” I said.

She nodded toward the dolphin, who was just exploding out of the water again. This time he turned a neat little somersault. “Joey is the biggest con artist. He’s always trying to get extra fish.”

“He’s amazing,” I said.

“Yes, he is,” Eileen agreed, with a look of pride.

I introduced Jake, Marco, and Rachel. “We were looking at some dolphin information on the Internet,” I lied, “so we thought we’d come out and see the real thing.”

“Well, as you know, we have six dolphins here. Joey, whom you’ve met, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Rachel. Hey, you guys want to feed them a little? You start throwing fish in the water and they’ll all come over.”

“It won’t upset their schedule?”

“Nah. Just don’t let Joey get it all. He’s kind of pushy.”

Eileen left us with a nice big bucket of fish.

“That
is some nasty-looking fish,” Marco commented.

“Once you morph into one of these dolphins, you won’t think that,” Rachel pointed out.

Marco gave her a skeptical look. “Do you realize that just a couple days ago we
were
fish? Not that much different from
these
fish?”

He was right. But it wasn’t something I wanted
to think about. I’ve always been very involved with animals. But it is a whole different thing when you can
become
different animals.

I took a fish by the tail and tossed it into the water. Just as Eileen suggested, the rest of the dolphins showed up very quickly.

“Wow. Think these guys like to eat?” Rachel asked.

The dolphins put on quite a show. They obviously knew how to impress humans.

“It’s just weird the way they grin at you,” Marco commented. “I mean, it’s like they actually think something’s funny.”

“And they make eye contact,” Jake pointed out. “They look right at you, right in the eye. Most animals seem like they’re looking past you, or just looking to see what you are. These guys look at you like maybe they recognize you from somewhere.”