Meetings and Memories By: Forlay

Once upon a time I thought life couldn't get any worse than it was when I was an Animorph. The constant fear, the danger, the killing. But I think I may have found something worse: being a celebrity.
It's been six months since Jake told me he was going to find Ax. Six months since the announcement that two Animorphs were missing. And six months since I was launched back into the media spotlight, just as life had begun to seem normal again. I had a great job, great friends, and a great relationship with Ronnie.
When word got out that military genius Jake and superstar Marco were missing, the first thing CNN, and every other network, did was call me. They didn't care when I told them Tobias had gone along, or that all three were out trying to find Ax. They just cared that there was still an Animorph left. Who else would the tabloids report on when they didn't have any other 'news?'
After the initial calls from my 'adoring public,' I tried to hide. I changed the number at my apartment and made sure the new number was unlisted. When that didn't work as much as I had hoped it would, I moved in with Ronnie. That foiled the reporters for a week before they found me. I don't know if it was luck or if someone ratted me out, but Ronnie told me he didn't mind. He said he knew when he first got involved with me that he was going to have to deal with my fame. He just asked that I strike a deal with someone so they stopped calling and waking us up at two in the morning. So I was forced to start allowing interviews. Within a week of making my deal with the devil, I was on everything from the Today Show to Larry King Live. They even had me scheduled for a celebrity edition of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?'. I, the girl who hated standing in front of her english class to deliver a book report, am an international celebrity once again.
That's why I'm standing in the wings of the stage at my old high school, listening to the principal (a different one than I'd had) give a long introduction about the historical significance of the Animorphs. I'm sure everyone in the audience is about to fall asleep if they aren't already. They've only had to study it in every history class for the last three years, not to mention some of them must have been controllers or had family members who were. The seniors in the audience would have been freshmen at the time the war ended, more than old enough to be involved in the Sharing. Who knows how many faces I'll recognize when I look out into the audience. The faces of innocent kids I would have killed if luck had decided to fail them.
Finally the principal wraps up her speech and I hear scattered applause throughout the auditorium. Nervously I step out onto the stage and I'm nearly blinded by the stage lights. But from what I can see of the audience, the principal definitely put most of them to sleep, and I doubt what I have to say is going to invigorate them either.
I've given this same speech dozens of times at schools across the country, I don't even need the notes that I've always kept out of habit. It's just my first hand account of the war. A chance to make history "come alive" for the students. I hated things like this when I was in school, but at this point I'm willing to do anything to keep the media out of my house. So I give my heavily edited account of the war (the full details are considered too gruesome to tell students, even if some of them experienced it first hand), tell them what I'm doing now, and tell the kids what I know about the mission Jake, Marco and Tobias, as I always have to remind them. I finish the speech with a thank you for being such a good audience (they weren't), then the lights dim and I quickly leave the stage to meet the two body guards that are assigned to me at all times. The assistant principal is waiting there as well.
"Cassie? I'm sure you have a very busy schedule, but there's a reporter here from our school paper who would be interested in interviewing you, would that be all right?" she asks in a rush.
"Um, sure," I say. "I actually don't have anything else planned today. Is the interview going to be back here?" I hope not, I can hardly hear what the woman in front of me (I never caught her name) is saying over the noise the students in the audience are making.
"Oh, no, of course not," the assistant principal says with a nervous laugh. "We have a nice, quiet, out of the way room that he'll lead you to. It's already been checked over by your security and ours, so it's perfectly safe."
"I wouldn't doubt it. This place was a fortress when I was here, nothing gets in here without someone knowing," I say. "So where's this reporter?"
A boy steps out from behind the assistant principal. "I'm right here." His face is strangely familiar. Oh, God, I do know one of these kids. I take a deep breath to calm myself. Maybe I just think I know him. With all the people I've met over the years faces and voices begin to blur together. I'm sure I'm imagining this.
He probably reminds me of someone I knew when I was his age, I assure myself as I follow him down the hallways of my old school. I would have met him when he was in fifth grade otherwise. Controllers that young were few and far between, and how else would I know one of these kids if not from the war?
The boy leads me to a small room I don't remember being here when I went to school. The boy must see my confusion because he explains, "This is the couch room. They just converted it from an old storage closet last year."
"Must have been a large closet."
The boy shrugs. "I guess. Maybe they knocked down a wall to make this, 'cause it's pretty nice. It doubles as a teachers lounge sometimes, and for meetings of small groups. The principal said I could use it today to talk to you."
"All right," I say. I sit down on a couch and the boy sits across from me. "Can I ask a question first?"
"Um, sure," he says.
"Your assistant principal never told me your name."
"Oh." The boy blushes. "I'm Forest Stevens. I like to be called Steve though."
"All right, Steve. Go ahead, ask what you want."
The interview is a nice change from what I'm used to. Steve doesn't ask about Marco, Jake and Tobias. He doesn't ask about my living arrangements with Ronnie. He just asks fun innocent questions, like what my favorite movie is, and if there's any career I'd want besides the one I have. As he begins to wrap up the interview he asks if he can ask me something off the record. I'm curious about what this boy may want to ask me "off the record," because even though he seems sweet, I remember what high school boys were like. But I give him the benefit of the doubt and tell him it's okay.
"Did you, or maybe Rachel, ever use the morphing power to warn someone that his father may be a controller?"
And in that moment I suddenly realize just where I knew this boy from.

Steve?
The boy looks in my direction. "Who said that?"
I step a little out of the shadows. I did.
The boy takes a step toward me. "But you're a dog. And you're talking in my head."
I'm a magic talking dog.
The boy raises a skeptical eyebrow. "A magic talking dog. Okay. Right. I think the mystery meat at lunch had drugs in it or something."
If my mission hadn't been so serious, I might have laughed at that. I want to talk to you, Steve.
"How do you know my name? No one here calls me Steve. Everyone calls me Gump."
I told you, I'm magic.
Steve rolls his eyes, but steps closer to me. "What do you want to talk about?"
You've been going to a chatroom on the Internet, haven't you? Where people talk about Yeerks?
Steve isn't so skeptical of me now. "Yeah. How do you know that?"
That's not important. I don't have much time. You can't go back to that website, Steve. You can never go to that website, or into that chatroom again.
"But no one else knows about the Yeerks! Those people there do. And I want to help my dad!"
I know how you feel, Steve, but the website is bogus. It's being run by the Yeerks. Some of the people who go there are legitimate people who want to fight the Yeerks, but many of them are Yeerks themselves, trying to find new recruits. There are people out there trying to fight the Yeerks, but talking to the people in the chatroom about them won't help the fight.
"Are you one of those people?"
I take a chance. Yes, I am.
"So can you do anything to help my dad?"
If I was human, I'd start to cry now. I - I can't, Steve. And neither can you. You can't talk to your father about the Yeerks. You can't trust him.
Steve frowns and looks like he might start to cry. "Okay, I. . . I guess. Um, thanks." He pats my head and runs back to his friends. I watch him for a moment, but I know there's nothing more I can do. I jump back over the fence and run into the trees to demorph. . . .

"You're Gump," I say quietly. "The boy from the chatroom."
"It was you?" Steve asks. All I can do is nod, I'm too overcome with emotion to say anything. For weeks I wondered every day about what had happened to this boy. Then as the weeks became months, and the months became years, he'd receded from my everyday thoughts. Fragments of my worries resurfaced in my nightmares occasionally, but even those passed eventually.
Steve gets up from his couch and comes over to mine. Awkwardly, he puts his arms around my shoulders. "Thanks, Cassie. You very possibly saved my life."
I sniff. "How? I told you not to trust your father. Only a monster could do something like that to a little boy."
"But I needed to hear it, Cassie. What would have happened if I had talked to my dad about it? As it was, your warning was the one I needed to get out of going to the Sharing. Dad brought it up every weekend about how great it was and how it would be a good father-son bonding experience. I finally ended up moving across town to live with Mom it got so bad. But it kept me free. And that's what's important, right?"
"What happened to your Dad? Is he free?"
Steve sighs. "We don't know. Someone told us he was on that Yeerk ship that got away. That one your Andalite friend was chasing. We haven't any idea what happened to him."
"I'm sorry," I say quietly. "I'm so sorry. I - I should have done more to help you. Warning you wasn't enough. You were in elementary school, for God's sake!"
Steve begins to look uncomfortable. I recognize the look. It's the same look I'd bet all kids get when an adult starts to have a breakdown in their presence. And for all the maturity Steve seems to posses, he's still a kid. "I turned out okay, Cassie. Everything did for me. Maybe Dad isn't with me anymore, but I can hope that he's free somehow, can't I? I mean, out in space, the Yeerk couldn't have had access to Kandrona rays, right?"
He sounds so hopeful, I don't want to tell him that Yeerks had ways of carrying Kandrona's on their ships. And Steve doesn't need to know that. I've done enough to screw with his life. "Yeah, you're right." I grab a Kleenex that's on the table next to the couch. "I'm sorry, I really am, Steve. Stuff like this tends to get to me still."
"It's okay, really it is," Steve reassures me, obviously relieved that I've regained my composure.
"Do you need anything else for your article?"
"No, I think I've got it."
"Well, here." I take a scrap of paper and a pen out of my purse and scribble my address and phone number down for him. "So long as you promise not to sell this on eBay or anything, I'll give you my address and phone number. You can call me if you have more questions, or if you just want to talk. When I'm not out on the lecture circuit, my life's pretty boring."
Steve makes a face. "Boring? A former Animorph?"
"I don't have a life outside of my work and my boyfriend. It'd be nice to talk to someone else sometimes."
Steve smiles shyly. "I'll see what I can do." He stands up. "I need to be getting back to class. Thanks again for the interview, Cassie."
I stand, too. "It was my pleasure, Steve. You'll send me a copy of the paper, right?"
"Sure! Um, talk to you soon."
"You too, 'bye." Steve nods one more time before he finally leaves the couch room. I guess he isn't quite an expert interviewer yet, but then again, it's a nice change from the professional blood hound reporters I'm used to dealing with. With a sigh I pick up my purse and leave the couch room.
I walk slowly through the halls of my old school. When I was a student here, I never thought I'd miss it, but now I realize that I do. Not the place so much, and definitely not the homework, but I miss the friends I had here, a lot of whom I lost in the war, but never found out until after the fact. I miss the experiences I never got to have, like prom and graduation. And I miss things that never existed while I was here. Innocent high school kids with nothing more serious to think about than who will win the Homecoming competitions, or what college to go to.
But as I walk, I remember some of the good times, too. I walk past my old locker and remember the first time Jake kissed me at school. I walk past the girl's bathroom, where Rachel often dragged me to have an impromptu girl talk at lunch. And there's the cafeteria itself. . . okay, no happy memories from there.
With only a few wrong turns, as every hallway in the school still looks identical to the one before it, I make it back to the parking lot where my car is. Still feeling a little melancholy, I get in my car, put it in gear, and drive away.

Author's notes: I know, I've freaked everybody out writing a fic that could actually fit into the canonical Animorphs timeline. I'm a little frightened, too. This is a new style for me in many ways (and was a bit of a test to see if I could still write a decent Animorph fic. My Powerpuff Girls fic has begun to take over my life a little bit, but Animorphs is till my true love. ~sigh~) I'll have another fic out in this category soon, I promise. No later than November 3. Why? Well. . . let's say I have a bit of a birthday present for some of you. ~evil cackling~