The Visitor Read Online Free PDF

that,” I said.
    “His friends won’t believe him,” Marco said poisonously, “but a Controller
would
believe him. A Controller would know what it meant.”
    Yes. A Controller would know what it meant. A Controller like Chapman. Or even Melissa, if she were one of them.
    I felt sick. It was like my whole life was nothing but lies. Lies to Melissa. Lies to my mother. Now I was lying by not telling the others the whole truth.
    “Okay, I screwed up,” I muttered.
    “You sure did!” Marco crowed. “You screwed up so—”
    “Marco, let it drop,” Jake said. “Rachel knows she made a mistake. We all make mistakes.”
    Marco rolled his eyes.
    Cassie gave me an encouraging smile. “It
was
dumb putting yourself in that position, Rachel. You need to be more careful. But still, I’d have paid my next ten allowances to see the look on that guy’s face.”
    “The important thing is that it doesn’t sound like Rachel can use Melissa to get close to Chapman,” Jake said. “Not if she’s a Controller herself. And not if she’s going to continue being weird to Rachel.”
    “I guess we’ll have to find another way,” I said quickly. “I mean, we know where Chapman’s office is. We know where his house is. Maybe we could just morph into some small animals and hide out.”
    “Small animals like what?” Marco asked. “When Jake turned into a lizard he got stepped on. He lost his tail. Besides, what are you going to morph into? A cockroach?”
    We all shuddered at the thought. The smallest, strangest thing anyone had morphed so far was when Jake had done the lizard. It creeped him out big-time. A roach would be even worse.
    “The problem with being a cockroach,” I said, “aside from the fact that it is too gross to believe, is that roach senses might not even be useful to us. Can a roach ‘hear’ in a way that would make it possible for us to understand
what
we’re hearing?”
    We all looked at Cassie. She’s sort of our expert on animals.
    Cassie held up her hands. “Oh, come on. Like I know how a cockroach sees and hears? We don’t take care of roaches at the rehab clinic.”
    We all sat there feeling glum for a few minutes. But I wasn’t going to let it drop. This was about more than just striking a blow at the Yeerks. I had to find out if Chapman suspected me. If he did, we were all in terrible danger.
    I happened to glance over at my desk. There was my math homework, still not done. That didn’t make me feel any better. But then I looked at the photos I had mounted in one of those big frames with six different holes. One was of me with my mom and dad on a white-water rafting trip we took. One was of me visiting my dad at his job—he’s a weatherman on TV. We were grinning in front of a map of storms. Another picture was of Cassie and me riding horses side by side, with Cassie, as usual, looking like she’d spent her entire life in the saddle, and me looking like a total clown.
    But the picture that got my attention was one taken a couple of years ago of Melissa and me.
    I got up and went over to take the frame down. I stared hard at the picture.
    “What?” Jake asked. “What is it?”
    “It’s me and Melissa,” I said. “It was, like, her twelfth birthday, or some birthday, anyway, and we were out on her lawn playing with the present her dad gave her.”
    “So what?” Marco asked.
    “So …” I passed him the photograph. It showed me and Melissa in shorts. And between us, a small black-and-white kitten. “So her present was a cat.”

CHAPTER 6
     
    L ook! A kitty door!” Jake pointed.
    “Where?” Marco asked.
    “See the lines of light? At the bottom of the regular door?”
    “Oh, yeah,” Marco said. “I wish the moon were out. I can’t see a thing.”
    The four of us were cowering behind a hedge that bordered the Chapmans’ lawn. They lived in a pretty normal-looking suburban home. You know: two stories, a garage, a lawn. Nothing to make you think that the person who lived