ANIMORPHS #32: THE SEPERATION

well, i like knives. how can you not like knives?

hi hello and welcome back to animorphs weekly, my first foray into running a cult. just kidding! this isn’t my first time.

wanna read a book?

EVERYTHING CHANGES. BUT NOT QUITE LIKE THIS. . . .

man, puberty’s a bitch

this is one of those animorph covers that i feel like i’ve seen all over the internet. this one and the rat. rachel is a very popular meme. i wonder how she’d feel about that…today, dear readers (from left to right), i’m a 2. the uncanny valley of starfish.

it’s a rachel book!

SUMMARY

we open with our usual spiel. i feel like i’ve said this before many times, but i really do have to commend applegate on her ability to give this speech literally 32 times now (more if you include the megamorphs) and never have it fall flat—and to always feel specific to our narrator! i skim over it here because you get the drill, but the voices are sharp and the opinions are clear. it’s good. just trust me.

rachel is currently on a field trip at the beach. it’s a strip of shoreline that’s pretty craggy and cold, and everyone’s supposed to be examining the fascinating life of a tidal pool.

of course what was actually happening was that three kids were investigating life in the tidal pools — including my best friend, cassie — while most of the boys went leaping about the rocks, and most of the girls moved cautiously in little herds of three or four, and all the teachers and teachers’ helpers basically screamed at the boys and chided the girls and occasionally yelled something about echinoderms. your basic field trip.

the three genders: boys, girls, tidal pools

rachel is over the life of gossip — once you have the blood of thousands of aliens on your hands, middle school goss isn’t so hot — and she thinks boys are stupid, so she goes off on her own. as she’s wandering, she thinks about something ancient erek and the chee told the animorphs. apparently, the yeerks are working on an “Anti-Morphing Ray.” why beat around the bush? it does what it says on the label.

this, obviously, will pose a huge problem for the animorphs, considering that’s their whole deal. the team is waiting for more information before launching an attack, but rachel knows one is coming, full of “leaping and screaming and bleeding. and the nightmares.”

she’s twelve!

there’s also a moment here where rachel takes note of her classmates’ relief as she moves away from them all.

i guess i put off bad vibes, as my mom would say.

yoinks

rachel squats in front of a tidal pool. inside is a little starfish! rachel tries to get a closer look, and in doing so, she loses an earring. her dad bought her these earrings in portugal! there’s no way she’ll be able to replace them! she’s pissed. frustrated, endlessly, at her stupid circumstances. she can’t go into the tide pool to get her earring, she’s on this dumb field trip, and she’s mad at her dad for a reason she can’t quite put her finger on.

i’m looking into the camera but it’s a child of divorce thing, not a gay thing

but, when rachel gets mad, she gets actionable. she leans down and touches the starfish, slurping up its dna. she stands up to make sure she’s alone—and she isn’t. ten feet away from her is a guy named bailey. she doesn’t know if that’s his first name or his last name, which is objectively funny. i’m just gonna quote their interaction because it’s good dialogue.

“that leotard and all. you’re looking good.”

i was wearing my morphing outfit. it seemed okay for a trip around the rocks.

“of course i look good,” i snapped. “i almost always do. you have something else to say?”

i guess that threw him. he shrugged.

“looking good,” he repeated. “looking real good.”

“i think we’ve been over that,” i said. “now go away.”

“you are so stuck-up!”

“that’s right, i am. now you know the difference between good looks and a good personality.”

kick his ass!!

dejected, bailey exits stage left. a small family is approaching, but they’re far enough away that rachel isn’t worried about being spotted. she begins to morph.

honestly at this point i can’t even be upset when they morph in broad daylight what do i know who am i to judge

turns out, being a starfish is gross! they’re pretty blind and only have A Mouth, but rachel does manage to wriggle down and snag her earring. she’s returning to the lip of the tidal pool when WHAM!

she’s cut in half!

out of all the animorphs, i think rachel has had probably the most traumatic experiences while in morph. remember when she was a bear and she almost got devoured by fire ants? (also when she was trapped in that woman’s basement in the woods?)

anyway, before she can go gently into that good night, she starts to demorph. the first thing to come back are her eyeballs (weird). she looks around the beach for the culprit. one of the young boys in the family is carrying a little shovel covered in starfish. rachel sees red.

“i’ll kill him!” i said. “kill him! kill the filthy little creep!” morph to grizzly bear and tear him apart! no. no. not the kid. bailey! his fault. he delayed me, otherwise it would have all worked perfectly.

i stood up.

“bailey!” i screamed against the crashing waves, shaking my clenched fists in rage. “i’ll kill you! i’ll kill you! i’ll murder you!”

this

is probably not great

rachel finishes demorphing, “screaming and begging for it to be over.” she looks down: half a starfish, left on the lip of the pool, and her earring! she goes to rejoin the others. she sees a young blonde girl, running away. did that girl see her demorph? there’s nothing to be done about it now. she starts to really panic. i can’t pick a part of this chapter to quote because we’d be here all day, so just a quick bullet point list to summarize the whole thing (and the absolute MANIC pace applegate employs here):

• she tries to remember why she was so mean to bailey, and considers making it up to him by going out on a date with him

• except that would hurt tobias’s feelings

• she’s supposed to go meet up with tobias after school to go flying

• but she can kiss bailey

• but she can also kiss tobias

• they’re both nice cute sweet boys

• except tobias kills mice

• a girl named dahlia asks rachel if she’s doing okay, and rachel asks if it shows

• dahila rolls her eyes and tells rachel she’s always so sarcastic

• rachel tries to apologize and tell dahlia she wants to be friends (genuinely)

• dahlia calls rachel a witch

• rachel starts to cry

• rachel gets on the bus, wishes buses had seat belts (weird)

• a girl named elizabeth sits next to rachel and compliments her sweater

• rachel tells her she got it on sale at the mall and elizabeth asks if she’s going to the mall after school

• rachel doesn’t know: does she want to go shopping? or does she want to hang out with tobias?

• would cassie come to the mall with rachel? she doesn’t like shopping, but rachel could ask. or maybe elizabeth would go? but rachel doesn’t like elizabeth, she likes cassie.

• but what about tobias!

• but tobias wants her to fly and flying is so scary!

rachel deals with the absolute craziest shit and i know it’s a metaphor. also, being split in half as a starfish and then demorphing has to have consequences. right?

she decides to meet tobias at his meadow. he asks if she’s heard anything from jake about the mission, and rachel responds with a bone-chilling enthusiasm. she hasn’t heard from jake, she commends the yeerks for always trying to kill them, and then she starts to morph into the bald eagle. she talks about morphing: it’s weird to get small, because small means weak, but then once that wicked sharp beak forms, you realize you aren’t weak, you’re a tearing machine!

as wonderful as the eagle’s beak is, the talons are the true weapons. so powerful they can grab and hold a young lamb. they can snatch and squeeze and penetrate flesh and organ and skull and brain.

hey kids could you lighten up back there

she wonders if she could take tobias in an air-to-air fight, and then decides he’s a true warrior and the right sort of partner for her. they take to the skies, and rachel really goes in on how awesome it is to be a bird of prey. so awesome that she puts the eagle skills to use—spying a school of fish in a stream below, she swoops down and snatches one right out of the water. she lands on a nearby rock and begins to gut the fish. she eats it while its heart is still beating. tobias is like, uh, rachel, why are you eating a. fish? and rachel yells at him to get back because the fish is her kill.

we smash cut to rachel at the mall with cassie. rachel is chattering a mile a minute. kudos to applegate for so distinctly writing rachel that this shift into a hyperfeminine, stereotypical “girl who loves the mall” perspective feels appropriately out of character. cassie cuts in during one of rachel’s monologues about them not wearing the same shirt to school to ask if she’s okay. rachel’s like, why do you keep asking if i’m okay? cassie tries to answer, but rachel cuts her off with another question: “do you think tobias will be really sad that i didn’t go flying with him?”

hm

when i first read this i was like oh they had two dates set up and she went to the first one, ate a fish, and skipped the second one

but now that i’m typing it out—there are two rachels

right?

anyway, to avoid cassie’s questions, rachel skirts around another circular rack of clothes and bumps into a Tall Girl Bully. the Bully tells rachel “get out of my way, airhead,” and cassie comes up behind rachel and tells her to stay calm. rachel doesn’t stay calm. she starts to cry. full on blubbering. and then she runs away. rachel? run from confrontation? hm

cassie came running up. she’s my best friend. so i knew she’d talk to me and be nice and make me feel better.

i looked up at her through blurry tears. she stood with hands on hips and a shocked expression on her face and looked down at me.

“okay,” she said, “what have you done with rachel?”

no time wasted!

the next chapter starts with, “i hate the mall,” which confirms my two rachels theory. she talks about how disgusting people are. applegate is really working something out here.

tired-looking, pasty-faced mommies busily crushing the wild free spirits of their children; galumphing teen boys with idiot expressions covered by acne pustules; high-heeled trophy wives with their squat, bald, fireplug husbands in tow.

galumphing!

since rachel is the resident Pretty/Tough character, and her body has been split right down that line, i’ll use Pretty Rachel and Tough Rachel to distinguish between the two.

Tough Rachel left the all you can eat fish buffet to come to the mall to get clothes that aren’t like the girly, “squeaky clean” clothes currently residing in her closet. she wants leather! getting to the mall was complicated for Tough Rachel, because she can’t focus. she shoves past a couple “getting all goo-goo because their kid was walking” and nearly bowls over the two-year-old. she gets some prime digs in and spots cassie up ahead, running towards baby gap. (product placement!) to avoid cassie, Tough Rachel ducks into a williams-sonoma (expensive product placement!).

in the williams-sonoma is the Bully from earlier. (lots of youths in this williams-sonoma.) thinking Tough Rachel is Pretty Rachel, the Bully calls her a crybaby and grabs her arm. this is a mistake. Tough Rachel pins the Bully to the knife rack—literally, she uses knives to pin this girl’s sweatshirt to the knife rack—and then pinches her cheek and tugs back and forth like a little baby.

“i like you,” i said. “i really do. we could be friends. but watch who you pick your fights with.”

has anyone else seen search party? june and april. that’s what i’m picturing.

we switch back to Pretty Rachel. she’s in cassie’s barn with the rest of the animorphs, and she’s terrified. all the animals are big and scary and it’s dark in the barn and also the animorphs are all there and the animorphs are scary too. even though she herself is an animorph, it’s hard to believe she ever turned into all those gross animals!! but what isn’t scary is boys. i would be remiss if i didn’t include this line in this recap because when i read it i screamed.

jake was there. he’s my cousin. he’s cute. kind of big. i mean, if we weren’t cousins…

APPLEGATE

Pretty Rachel also thinks marco is cute in a different way, and tobias is cute when he’s human. ax is not cute. cousins are fine, aliens are not. sure.

cassie’s like, we have a big problem. we were at the mall, some girl pushed rachel—jake cuts in to chastise rachel for her temper, but cassie’s like no no! she cried. nobody believes her. cassie’s like, i have proof something’s wrong with rachel. she turns to Pretty Rachel and asks her to share with the class what she said about marco on the way over here. Pretty Rachel shrugs and says he’s cute.

marco sat down very suddenly. on the hay-strewn floor.

jake looked pale.

“she’s uptalking,” marco said, shaken. “she said i was cute. she … smiled. at me.”

compulsory heterosexuality is a hell of a drug

the boys think she’s been infested by a yeerk, but cassie points out if she had been infested, she’d be acting totally normal. this is different. tobias admits rachel was weird with him, too, but in a very brutal, eating-a-fish-while-its-still-alive way. ax puts his tail to rachel’s throat, and she starts sobbing. before anyone can really take in that jarring piece of information, the barn door bursts open, and Tough Rachel walks in.

(here, applegate begins to differentiate at the top of the chapter using “nice rachel” and “mean rachel,” but i’m going to stick with Pretty Rachel and Tough Rachel, because this is my blog.)

we stick with Pretty Rachel’s POV. everyone in the barn is alarmed: there are two rachels. marco makes a quip about tobias getting one and him getting the other, but before he can finish the sentence, Tough Rachel literally does a forward handspring and kicks marco in the chest. she grabs his hair and pulls her fist back and asks him to repeat himself. he doesn’t. smart boy.

jake wonders if this is a trick from the drode, that spooky little creature that works for crayak and has pulled trickery before. the two Rachels stare at each other. Tough Rachel sort of bullies Pretty Rachel for being such a wimp, and then she whirls around and challenges jake to a duel for leadership. before that can happen, ancient erek enters. he also doesn’t know why there are two rachels—he just came by to give the animorphs some information on the mission.

“to the yeerk pool!” [Tough] Rachel crowed. “let’s get some flamethrowers!”

“i gotta stop hanging around with you people,” [ancient] erek said. “you people are just plain strange.

[canned studio audience laughter]

we switch to Tough Rachel’s POV. ancient erek explains that the yeerks have purchased a company called the Buyers Research Institute, both as a front and to use the BRI’s consumer ratings to bump up the value of their other companies. Tough Rachel interrupts to offer her solution—murder—and jake asks her to please hold all bloodthirsty comments til the end of ancient erek’s presentation.

basically, tonight the yeerks are planning to begin testing on the anti-morphing ray. if successful, the ray would “destroy the morphing field and cause a person in morph to demorph,” which would be awful for our four human tweens. ancient erek suggests they go and interrupt the testing so as to discourage the yeerks from pursuing this any further. jake says he can leave, and ancient erek gets the hell out of dodge.

well, obviously the animorphs need to take care of this problem, but they’re not going to be able to do it with two rachels. jake asks the two of them what happened today. after some very fun banter, the animorphs are finally able to piece together what happened: rachel morphed starfish, got split in half by the kid with the shovel, and then demorphed. except Tough Rachel remembers demorphing right away, while Pretty Rachel waited a few minutes because she was scared. cassie, of course, is the first to understand.

“starfish. they regenerate. you can chop off a leg and they can grow a new one. somehow when that starfish was chopped in half, the starfish’s regenerative powers created the possibility of two separate rachels. one in each half.”

but somehow the two halves were unequal, subtly different, ax said. this is a very interesting phenomenon.

Tough Rachel thinks this could be awesome: Pretty Rachel can cry her way through school and keep the peace and home, and Tough Rachel can be a full-time animorph just constantly kicking yeerk ass. jake rolls his eyes. no way. not on his watch! he orders both rachels to stay home. the animorphs are going to handle BRI and the AMR without them.

now they’ve got to share a room!

we switch to Pretty Rachel’s pov. she tells us that Tough Rachel sneaks into the house as a cockroach and demorphs right in front of her. as a person currently fighting a roach infestation in their apartment, i can only imagine the horror this would inflict. they argue about who’s going to sleep in the bed and then rachel’s little sister jordan knocks on the door.

“are you…are you talking to yourself in there?” jordan asked.

“yeah, you got a problem with that?” [Tough] Rachel yelled.

“no,” came the muffled response. “i just like to keep track of your level of insanity.”

fair point

remember when rachel literally broke their house

both rachels are having a tough time focusing. they keep thinking of things and then immediately forgetting them. been there, sister. Tough Rachel finally remembers—she wants to go on the mission! she tells Pretty Rachel to turn around and to stay off the bed or she’ll break her arms. she’s gone!

Pretty Rachel struggles to remember her own plan. ah, yes! she wants to call her dad. why does she want to call her dad? she can’t really remember why. she starts trembling. her whole life is a nightmare, and it started with elfangor. but the worst horror of all?

…was seeing what had grown inside of me like some kind of cancerous tumor. [Tough] Rachel was getting stronger with each passing month of my life as an animorph. pretty soon she would have become all of me and there’d have been nothing left of me!

dramatic, maybe, but not totally off the mark. it would be pretty jarring to see all of my anger literally outside of myself as myself. eeesh

we switch to Tough Rachel. she’s an owl and she feels like a god. she scowls at all of the puny humans below and struggles to remember what she’s doing. right! she needs to fly to the BRI to fight the yeerks. she’s pissed the other animorphs didn’t let her come. and she thinks maybe if one of them gets torn apart by hork-bajir it will teach them a lesson! grim! she sees a cat below and thinks that a fight with the alleycat will be exactly what she needs to warm up for the yeerks. unfortunately for Tough Rachel (and fortunately for the cat), she misses. and she gets angry.

i couldn’t think. couldn’t focus. madness. like blood in my eyes. the rage, it was like someone had exploded a hand grenade in my stomach. like the explosion couldn’t get out but was all contained inside me.

my wings … they wouldn’t work. i … couldn’t focus … . mine, mine, MINE! my kill! my kill! my kill!

:/

not great, bob

she lands on the grass near the road and just screams. literally! screams forever and ever and ever. finally, the rage dissipates just enough for her to identify an underlying emotion: fear. fear of herself. but! she’s Tough Rachel! she will not be afraid! she flies towards the buyers research institute. when she gets there, she can’t immediately see the animorphs. that’s fine! she’s Tough Rachel and she’s ready to kick ass!

an alarm begins to blare. she needs to get inside the building to help her friends and kill some yeerks. there’s a truck bay that leads to a sublevel. the steel door is closed. she looks around. in the parking lot is a car carrier. “you know, one of those trucks where they precariously pile five or six new cars on the ramped trailer?”

hell yeah i do

she morphs into grizzly and lopes over to the truck. the driver is in the cab, but not for long. Tough Rachel rips the door off the truck and then pulls the driver out. he canonically pisses himself. Tough Rachel then climbs into the truck—still in grizzly morph—and drives the truck into the steel door. she goes flying through the windshield, but she’s a grizzly bear. and she’s inside!

we cut back to Pretty Rachel. she’s on the phone with her dad. there is a Lot of miscommunication: Pretty Rachel tells her dad everything is terrible, her dad asks if she’s on drugs. she says she took two motrin. he tells her he just did a three-part story on drug use among young teens and his studio made him cut it down to a minute thirty. she reminds him that this conversation is about her. he asks if she’s talked to her mom—he assumes this has something to do with a boy.

“yes, yes it does! how did you guess? actually three boys. i mean, four if you count this one guy who is like, you know, okay, not exactly a boy, if you know what i mean.”

“a man!” he shrieked in my ear. “a man? you’re going out with a man? are you seeing a college kid?”

“no daddy, duh! that’s not what i meant, it’s just that he’s…foreign.”

“an alien?”

i lowered my voice to a whisper. “how did you know?”

her dad literally says his cleaning lady is an alien. she’s from ukraine! not exactly the same and also not a term we use anymore, but, you know. Pretty Rachel keeps babbling about how she really needs to talk to her dad and asks him to come visit tomorrow. he hangs up after agreeing to come visit. Pretty Rachel feels relieved: finally, she can tell her dad all about the yeerks and the animorphs and her crush on the birdboy, tobias.

i heard the phone ring but by then i was already heading downstairs. my mom picked it up. i could hear her voice, sounding icy.

“no, she is not on drugs. i would know! unlike certain people, i see her every day.”

get him!

back at the BRI, Tough Bear Rachel is hotwiring a silver mercedes. not a bit! she jabs her bear claw into the ignition and it works. the basement level of the BRI is a huge testing facility. she spots a group of hork-bajir hustling somewhere and she slams on the accelerator. she sends one fLYING through the air. WHAM! she slams another one into a “small mountain of bags of Doritos, Fritos, and Tostitos.” nice! she just keeps grand theft auto-ing through this basement, chasing down hork-bajir and destroying machinery in the process. and then she finds the other animorphs!

perhaps as many as fifteen hork-bajir. four humans. three taxxons. versus a tiger, a gorilla, a wolf, a young andalite warrior, and a hork-bajir that had to be tobias.

it was a scene of perfect beauty. blood slicked the concrete. taxxon guts lay in steaming piles. there were bellows and cries of pain.

cool

we cut back to Pretty Rachel. she’s rudely awoken by a swift kick to the ribs. it’s Tough Rachel. she yanks Bobo Bear (a stuffed animal) out of Pretty Rachel’s arms and literally rips him limb from limb. she’s fucking pissed. and it’s all jake’s fault. apparently, mid-battle, Tough Bear Rachel got her arm chopped off. instead of mourning the literal loss of her limb, she picked it up and used it to beat up the hork-bajir that cut it off. that’s not why jake is upset, but it is why i’m upset!

jake’s upset because Tough Rachel ruined their stealth mission. the animorphs weren’t there to cause a ruckus, they were there to do recon. of course, Tough Rachel doesn’t see it that way. she kicked yeerk butt. that’s the point of the animorphs, right? Pretty Rachel tries to agree with her, and Tough Rachel tells her to shut up. it’s sleep time. Pretty Rachel lays in the dark and comes to the terrifying conclusion that Tough Rachel would totally kill her given the chance.

the next day at school, cassie approaches Pretty Rachel. cassie says there’s a meeting after school at her barn—and then she offers Pretty Rachel the option to go shopping instead. but! Pretty Rachel knows she’s being tested. she tells cassie she’ll be there because the meetings are more important. still, she has to meet her dad. he’s flying in for only an hour on his way to an assignment in argentina, and she has to take the bus to the airport to meet him. she could fly, but flying involves morphing and morphing is totally gross and also fucking terrifying, so that’s out of the question.

marco walks Pretty Rachel to class. he goes on for a bit about how Tough Rachel will end up with tobias, and asks how Pretty Rachel is handling being split in two.

i stopped walking. “you know i’m not, like, this total moron now, okay? i know you’re testing me…jake told you to check on me. see if i seemed like i was maybe losing it. right?”

but they’re at class. Pretty Rachel starts to panic. is marco going to tell jake she’s unreliable? is cassie? is Tough Rachel going to kill her? will the animorphs stop her if she tries?

back to Tough Rachel. she’s early to the meeting at the barn. she decides she’s going to spy as a fly. morphing is really fucking gross and Tough Rachel loves it. she laughs gaily. she buzzes around for a bit, and then ancient erek enters. Tough Rachel thinks he’s super pathetic because he famously reprogrammed himself to be a pacifist after singlehandedly killing hundreds in mere minutes. Tough Rachel makes a mental note she won’t remember to ask him why later. enter the rest of the animorphs, minus Pretty Rachel. ancient erek tells them the yeerks are planning to move the Anti-Morphing Ray. three trucks will leave Buyers Research Institute, but only one will hold the AMR. a classic ball-and-cup trick!

ancient erek asks where the Rachels are. no one knows. cassie asks if something’s bothering ancient erek. he hesitates, and then admits he’s jealous.

“of rachel. the nice one. she’s done it, hasn’t she? she’s found the way to fight a war and suffer none of the pain. she takes all the evil inside her and sends it off on its own to do … to do what has to be done. i guess there are times i wish. well, forget it.”

and then he leaves! talk about a mic drop

then tobias speaks. they need to talk about rachel. he’s been talking to ax. maybe — maybe — there’s a way to put them back together. of course, it would take enormous amounts of power. both rachels would have to agree to the process. and there’s a possibility, according to ax, that both halves of rachel will die in the process.

“unacceptable,” cassie snapped.

“what is acceptable?” marco asked. “the present arrangement? a pathetic whiner who’s made up of all the fear and self-doubt and indecisiveness and airheadedness that hide way down inside of rachel? or the psychotic killer, the rage machine that rachel has managed to keep under control for so long?”

inside you there are two wolves

cassie points out that there’s more to the split than Mean and Nice. Tough Rachel isn’t capable of long-term thinking, as was made clear by her interrupting the mission last night. Pretty Rachel planned a shopping trip for her and cassie with all the strategy of a war general. but Pretty Rachel doesn’t have short-term focus. i get that—obviously, it’s taken me a very long time to get this blog out to you.

jake says they can’t use either rachel, and this is enough to drag Tough Rachel out of hiding. she begins to demorph, shrieking threats the whole time. jake says ax’s name, and the andalite moves closer. Tough Rachel begins to scream, “don’t kill me! i didn’t mean it!” and then immediately says, “you can’t kill me! weaklings! fools!”

this is literally exactly what i feel like when i haven’t eaten all day

Pretty Rachel shows up, sees Tough Rachel half-fly/half-human, and starts screaming. can’t blame her! Tough Rachel, who is basically A Big Fly, lunges for marco. she begins to choke marco with her hands, and then uses her large proboscis to cover his mouth and nose. marco punches her in the stomach. jake tries to do a running jump, but Tough Rachel dodges out of the way, and grabs tobias by the throat!

“mess with me and bird-boy here is a dead chicken.”

she then announces that she’s taking over the animorphs. jake, with all the energy of a tired father who has walked the entirety of disneyland, tells her she can be the leader. he’s tired of the responsibility. he slowly steps towards her as she outlines her first order as leader: she wants marco killed! no, not killed. punished! she suggests whipping. jake punches her. cassie, ax, and jake hold Tough Rachel down as she thrashes and screams. the whole time, Pretty Rachel is just sobbing. she wants to deny that Tough Rachel was ever a part of her, but she can’t deny the truth.

she had made me brave. she had made me strong.

poor, sick, twisted thing, she had made me…me.

damn

the meeting ends shortly after that. Tough Rachel goes home and tries to plan her next move. to her surprise, she…can’t. cassie’s right—Pretty Rachel has all the planning. Tough Rachel realizes she needs to take it back. but how? her first thought is, of course, kill her, but that probably won’t work. she storms into their bedroom, but Pretty Rachel is nowhere to be seen. where is she?

Tough Rachel spots a new note on their calendar. in purple ink, Pretty Rachel wrote, “Daddy. Flight 545. Gate 17.”

well, looks like all rachels are headed to the airport!

we jump to Pretty Rachel. she’s sitting in a restaurant, eating an overpriced croissant, waiting for her dad to arrive so she can…tell him about the yeerks? her dad arrives and Pretty Rachel becomes suspicious. how does she know her dad’s not a controller? she tries to grill him, but it mostly sounds like incoherent. finally, she decides she’s just gonna tell him. she glances around to make sure no one’s listening when she spots Tough Rachel sitting across the room! Pretty Rachel starts to cry and she flees for the bathroom!

Tough Rachel takes her spot across from dad. (she also turns the chair around so she can sit in it backwards, so i guess Tough Rachel is also Gay Rachel.) she yells for service and snarks her dad about not loving her. to think—this all started because rachel dropped an earring in the tidal pool, an earring that was a gift from her absent father. bad dads! Tough Rachel spots Pretty Rachel sneaking around the table so their dad can see both of them. to stop this, Tough Rachel throws the croissant and shouts “FOOD FIGHT!”

no one joins in. rachel’s dad drags her away, gets on his flight, and washes his hands of the whole thing. Pretty Rachel goes to find cassie, who is on her way to meet up with the others. there’s a mission tonight: the anti-morphing ray is being moved, and the animorphs need to tail the three trucks. Pretty Rachel asks cassie and tobias if they’re like, mad at her. they aren’t—they just want the Old Rachel back. jake, marco, and ax arrive at the barn, and jake drops a bombshell.

jake rubbed his head like his hair was annoying him. “rachel, look, we need you.”

the convoy has three trucks. three directions. if they don’t take either rachel, one of the animorphs will be tailing a truck alone, and jake doesn’t like that. everyone needs backup. Pretty Rachel is terrified—she doesn’t want to morph! from inside a stall, Tough Rachel begins to demorph back to human. jake and marco take tiger and gorilla form, and ax demorphs into andalite. Tough Rachel laughs, thinking she’s got them scared. ax points out she would lose in a fight. Tough Rachel tries to tattle on Pretty Rachel, but the animorphs are one step ahead: tobias and cassie followed them to the airport.

jake reminds Tough Rachel of david, the last kid who tried to betray the animorphs. he ended up trapped in rat morph and dropped on an island to die. Tough Rachel tries to attack jake. he waits until she’s worn herself out, then points out she just attacked a tiger while in human form. she’s unpredictable and uncontrollable, she cannot go on the mission.

but Pretty Rachel can.

“why do i have to go?” i wailed.

because. it’s your duty.

“my duty?” i thought about the word. duty? what was duty? [legacy. what is a legacy] what did that mean to me? nothing!

only, it did mean something. to my surprise, it did. it was kind of weird. but down inside me, untouched by the split, i felt the word resonate.

[Tough] Rachel got the courage. i got the sense of duty.

Tough Rachel says if Pretty Rachel goes, she goes. jake agrees. and then ax knocks her out with the flat of his tail blade. cassie points out they can’t really tie her up, since she’s still an animorph and could bust out of a rope pretty easy, and jake agrees.

she may come after us. if she does…if she does, assume that she is an enemy.

awesome! yeerks ahead and Tough Rachel behind. what could go wrong?

jake assigns partners: ax and cassie, tobias and marco, jake and rachel. they’ll assemble in the air over BRI. they’ll wait for the trucks to depart and then follow. one member of each team will demorph every half hour, to avoid the time limit issue. the chee will take their places at home.

marco groaned. “i hate it when we do that. the chee who plays me always cleans my room. i can never find anything!”

this implies that somewhere in that basement full of chee, there’s like, a cast list of who gets to play which animorphs. do you think they like their assignments? do they rotate? a cast and understudies? so many questions

Pretty Rachel morphs into an owl, terrified the whole time. cassie tells her when she’s finished—friendship never dies—and they take to the skies. as they’re flying, Pretty Rachel ruminates on how scary flying is. she used to look forward to missions and morphing. but now that she’s thinking about it, it wasn’t that she was totally fearless, but Tough Rachel made her brave. she thinks about the others: if they’d gotten split in half, what would that have looked like? jake and ax would have certainly had dark sides. Pretty Rachel thinks cassie would only have a teeny tiny bit of rotten. and tobias?

he flew, still his own hawk self, a little above, and a little apart from all of us.

if you split tobias into halves you’d have what you already had: a hawk, and a boy.

spit poet

they make it to the BRI building. marco spots the trucks first, and jake quickly assigns them in the air. he and rachel are tailing truck number three. they shoot out after it, and jake tells her to land on the truck. she starts to freak out. they were just supposed to be flying! but an owl cannot keep up with a truck, so land they must. Pretty Rachel repeats her new mantra, “duty,” and follows jake towards the truck. she screams and tells jake she’s scared. he admits he is too! he tells her to let the owl take over, and to her amazement, it works. the owl knows how to target. she manages to grab onto the strap on top of the truck, but the truck lurches hard, and she loses her grip. she starts to rolling over the top of the truck, and by the luck of the irish, one of her talons catches in a tiny little screwhole. she’s safe! for now.

jake tells her she has to demorph. he talks her through it, and Pretty Rachel manages to demorph back into human, sticking better to the top of the truck. and then jake tells her she needs to remorph: this time, to cockroach. Pretty Rachel starts screaming.

i don’t blame her!

but she’s gotta do it, because the truck is approaching a tunnel. she’ll get scraped if she doesn’t. she is fucking terrified. she’s morphed a ton of times, she knows this. but the part of her that grew used to the morphing—and the fear—is in her other half. still, through the teeth-chattering and probably pants-shitting terror, she manages to do it. the truck slows down and passes from “cool outside air to much, much warmer air.” the truck heads downhill into some sort of tunnel.

there was a smell …

gas!

de… jake said.

and i was gone.

the next chapter is literally half a page and it’s just Pretty Rachel awaking as a cockroach, realizing she’s trapped in a box, and screaming. i don’t blame her. jake is also there, and he tells her she can’t demorph or she’ll die. awesome!

we switch back to Tough Rachel. she wakes up in the barn. someone put a blanket under her head as a pillow and draped a blanket over her to keep her warm. my money’s on cassie. of course, she doesn’t recognize the act of kindness. she’s pissed at getting knocked out and at getting left behind. she needs to follow them. she morphs owl and takes to the skies. she flies around in a rage—and spots a truck “with something that could only be a girl morphing to cockroach.”

owl eyes!

before she can swoop down and have her vengeance, the truck pulls off the highway and onto a smaller four-lane road.

i don’t know anything about driving but. four-lane road sounds pretty big to me.

anyway

Tough Rachel follows the truck and fantasizes about killing jake and Pretty Rachel. maybe she’ll eat them! she’ll rip off their legs and leave them helpless on their backs.

no, wait. that wouldn’t work, would it? but why? some reason. they… i strained my mind, trying to figure out what it was that was bothering me about that scenario.

…

frustration was building now. it was a physical thing, like a pot coming to a boil in my guts. and the more it boiled, the less i could focus, the more it boiled, the less i could focus, the more…

uh-oh! critical thinking is hard :(

Tough Rachel follows the truck to a “vast, rusty fantasy of steel.” cool! she swoops down. critical thinking is for losers. eat first, ask questions later.

meanwhile, Pretty Rachel is having a crisis. she’s trapped as a roach in a little box with no way out! she’s just screaming and screaming as jake tries to remind her of all the times the animorphs have been in tough scrapes before. finally, he pulls rank and tells her to stop screaming. he lets her know they’re not the only bugs trapped—the yeerks used gas to knock out all the bugs in the truck and capture them, just in case. then he tells Pretty Rachel to name everything she can see. shadows (hork-bajir) and a clock with red numbers that’s counting down.

jake tries to tell Pretty Rachel that it’s all mind games and she needs to keep her cool, but she literally cannot handle the thought of being trapped forever as a cockroach. no kafka for this gal! instead, she screams in open thought-speak, help me! i’ll tell you anything, just let me go!

WHAM!

my box was snatched up.

fwit!

i flew through the air.

then, slice!

i fell through the air.

Tough Rachel morphs into hork-bajir to blend in. there are three other hork-bajir in the room, and a dozen pedestals, each with a small glass box holding a tiny little bug. she’ll be the ones to kill Pretty Rachel and jake, thank you very much. she kills the first hork-bajir with a wrist blade to the throat. she rips the guts out of the second one, but before he can die, he pulls an alarm. the third gives her a bit of trouble. they’re tossing bug boxes at each other. they’re slamming each other into pedestals. there’s blood everywhere. but in the end, she beheads him. sick!

a wall behind her rolls up to reveal twelve more hork-bajir and

SOUND THE ALARM / FINISH YOUR DRINK

visser three!!!!

Tough Rachel tells him to come into her bug room so she can kill him. visser three admits she might, so instead, he’ll wait. he tells her to call him when she’s ready to submit. the wall closes again, separating the animorphs from the yeerks. the ceiling begins to slowly descend, and one of the walls begins to press in.

is there anything an andalite fears more than being slowly, inexorably crushed? visser three said softly.

i don’t think that’s a fear specific to andalites

back to Pretty Rachel. she’s on the ground, out of her box, but still in roach morph. she hears visser three and Tough Rachel’s conversation. she’s afraid to demorph because Tough Rachel will kill her, but she can’t stay a roach forever. besides, the room is shrinking and they need to do something about it. both Rachels demorph. Tough Rachel admits she came to kill Pretty Rachel, but they have bigger issues to deal with. Pretty Rachel asks where jake is. Tough Rachel says she stepped on a bug. maybe that was him. Pretty Rachel cries for poor dead jake.

“if he wants to kill us, why doesn’t he just kill us?” [Tough] Rachel demanded.

“he doesn’t want to kill us,” i said. … “he wants our bodies. only not our bodies. he thinks we’re andalites. he wants us to surrender. wants to break us so we’ll let him take our andalite bodies to use as hosts for yeerks.”

Tough Rachel agrees. agrees! and then she asks Pretty Rachel what they should do. teamwork! Pretty Rachel can think of plans, but they’re too brutal for her to enact.

but not too brutal for Tough Rachel…

teamwork!

the next chapter is Tough Rachel’s POV. Pretty Rachel, in hork-bajir morph, calls out to the visser and threatens to slit her own throat. that gets his attention! he opens the wall. Tough Rachel, in fly morph, zips over to visser three. she lands by his ear and speaks to him. he freaks out. there’s two!

yeah. and guess where i am, visser? … i’m in your ear, visser. way down inside your head. i can practically see the real you, the yeerk slug. and here’s the thing you need to think about visser: what happens when a morphed andalite the size of a fly demorphs inside your head?

you’d die! he yelled.

so would you.

the Rachels are able to negotiate their freedom, thanks to Pretty Rachel’s plan. they’re released, the visser threatens to kill them next time he sees them (classic visser), and then they’re running away. once they’re far enough from the building, they demorph. Pretty Rachel cries for jake. surprise! he’s been there the whole time! he was stuck to Tough Rachel’s foot for awhile. but really, he needed them to see that they needed each other. without Pretty Rachel’s planning and Tough Rachel’s rage-fueled courage, they’re useless. an animorph needs to be able to plan, to have a healthy capacity for fear, and a sense of duty.

and friendship!

“look, ax has a plan. both of you have to go along, or it won’t work. may not work anyway. but [Tough] Rachel, if it wasn’t for her, your other half, you’d have lost back there. she saved you, and you saved her, and you’re both just huge pains in all our butts the way you are now, so do it, do it, just do it, or i swear i’ll give you both to visser three.”

jake needs a break!

we’re back in the barn. both Rachels are there, all the animorphs, and ancient erek. on cassie’s count of three, the rachel’s acquire each other’s dna. then ancient erek electrocutes them. seriously! he shocks them so bad with his little robot body. ax yells at them to morph into the other! they do! and then—

there’s only one.

cassie asks if rachel’s okay.

okay? i wanted to cry. i was me again. for whatever that was worth. the coward was in me. the killer, too. human and animal.

cassie asks if rachel wants to sit down and talk. she promises rachel she’s there for her. but it’s not cassie rachel wants to talk to. she locks eyes with tobias.

yeah, let’s go, rachel. he said. the two of you and the two of me. let’s go.

and that’s how it ends!!!!!!!!

REVIEW

3/5. one of my favorite episodes of teen titans is when starfire and raven switch bodies and have to learn each other’s powers. this was kind of like that. i do trust applegate to have rachel deal with the ramifications of literally being split in half as the series continues, and i’m looking forward to that. shit is really heating up. all our animorphs are being put through the emotional RINGER. love it. too stressful.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• what would your two halves be? i think mine would be Emotional Bianca and Robot Bianca

PREDICTIONS

• MOMS MOMS MOMS MOMS

that’s all i have for you this month, folks! we will get through this together. as always, drink some water, stay masked, and do something nice for yourself today. see you later!