The Visitor Read Online Free PDF Page A

You can turn left there.”
    “I know where you live,” Chapman said.
    I almost swallowed my tongue. Was that a threat? Did he suspect? Did he guess? Was he looking at me strangely?
    Or was I just being paranoid?
    He pulled up in front of my house. My heart was hammering, but I was determined to act casual. “Thanks for the ride, Mr. Chapman,” I said. “Hey, Melissa, I was totally serious about us getting together, okay?”
    She nodded. “Sure, Rachel. Absolutely.”
    I closed the car door behind me. I had escaped. I was alive. I’d probably just been imagining things.
    Then I heard Melissa call out to me. “Hey. What happened to your shoes?”
    I looked down. My shoes were in tatters, the result of my feet growing from a size six to a size three hundred in about five seconds flat.
    “See?” I said, as lightly as I could. “I told you I needed to go shopping.”
    Melissa just looked puzzled. Her father stared at me with an expression I could not read.
    I was shaking like a leaf when I walked into my house. I headed upstairs to my room and stuffed my ripped shoes into the trash. Only then did I go back downstairs and say hi to my mom. She was at the kitchen table, half hidden by a pile of buff-colored books. My mother’s a lawyer, and she brings work home a lot so she can be around me and my two little sisters. She and my dad are divorced. I only get to see my dad a few days a month, so Mom feels guilty when she isn’t there for us.
    “Hi, honey,” she said. Then she got her “suspicious mother” look. “How did you get home? You didn’t walk, did you? You were supposed to call me.”
    “Melissa and her dad gave me a ride,” I said. Well, it was the truth. Sort of.
    She relaxed and made a point of closing her book. “Sorry. You know I worry about you.”
    “Where are Jordan and Sara?”
    “They’re in the family room watching another one of those scary shows. Of course, tonight Jordan will be sleeping with her night-light on and Sara will end up in my bed, no doubt. I don’t know why they like things that frighten them. You were never that way.”
    It almost made me laugh. I felt like saying, well, Mom, I don’t have to watch things that are scary; I am scary. Should have seen me a little while ago with tusks sticking out of my mouth and a three-foot-long nose.
    What I really said was, “So, what’s for dinner?”
    My mother winced. “Pizza? Chinese? Anything else you can order over the phone? I’m sorry, but I have this brief and I have court in the morning.”
    “Mom,” I told her for maybe the thousandth time, “I don’t mind pizza. Sorry, but your cooking isn’t all that great, so it’s no big deal ordering pizza.”
    “Well, at least get some veggies on it,” she said.
    After dinner I called Jake.
    “Do you want to come over?” I said. “I got that new album, if you want to listen to it.”
    There was no album, of course. It’s just that we always have to be careful. Like I said, Jake’s brother, Tom, is a Controller. He could be listening on the extension. Then I called Cassie and Marco and told them the same cover story.
    When they arrived I told them about Melissa, and then I told them about my little run-in with the creep. I did not tell them about Chapman driving me home. I don’t know why. But when I saw the way Marco exploded, I was glad I hadn’t told them the whole story.
    “Oh, that was dumb! Dumb! DUMB!” Marco said. “What if that guy is a Controller?”
    “He wasn’t a Controller,” I said scornfully. “Why would the Yeerks want to make a Controller out of a punk? They want people in positions of power.”
    “We don’t know that for sure,” Jake said. “Tom isn’t in a position of power.”
    “And how about people driving by in their cars, or looking out of the windows of their homes?” Marco asked. “And what if he runs and tells someone about this girl who suddenly sprouted a trunk and tusks?”
    “No one is going to believe a lowlife like