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I think I want to get another piercing in my left ear one day. A lot of us ex-hosts want to be invisible in public, but some want to stand out a little, and spot each other. An extra earring on the side your Yeerk went in and out of—every Yeerk had a preference—is one way.
Another way is a hearing aid, if you need one. All ex-hosts have some kind of hearing loss in the ear their Yeerk used. The tiny bones behind the eardrum are called ossicles, and it turns out they don’t last long when something’s shoving them around twice a week. Me and other people who weren’t infested for too long, we’ve just got a little hearing loss. I barely notice mine. But some people who were infested for years, who are deaf all the way on that side, wear little hearing aids developed from Andalite tech. They look like a metal watch battery sort of stuck to your head, in front of your bad ear. Pretty stylish, honestly.
Some ex-hosts who want to stand out get tattoos instead, around their ear or even on it, which sounds like it really hurts. A tattoo might be too much for me—nevermind that my parents would definitely lose their shit—but I got my ears pierced when I was eleven, and it only hurt for a minute. I could do that again, no problem.
For now, though, my parents are drawing the line at two earrings. That’s okay. I’m not going to push it; they let me cut off my hair this year, all the way up to my chin, and that’s enough for me. It was pretty long, before: down to the middle of my back, and, really, even longer than that, since it’s so curly. I told them I was sick of taking care of it, but that was only most of the truth.
See, Aftran had loved my hair. She’d loved running my fingers through it, brushing it out, tying it into clumsy ponytails and braids. After she set me free, even years after, sometimes when I did those things again myself it was like I could still feel her doing them, too. Like suddenly my hands would start moving on their own, and I’d look in the mirror and see my face making an expression I hadn’t put there…
Yeah. Short hair is good.
I’ve thought about getting it dyed, too, but that’s another argument I don’t want to have with my parents. I mentioned the idea kind of casually to my mom one day, and was that a mistake. She was all, why on Earth would you do a thing like that, and, but it’s such a pretty color!
Aftran had thought so, too. Red was her favorite color.
In the end, Aftran had still kept her promise, the one she made to me and Cassie that awful day in the forest: giving up a world in color in exchange for my freedom. Whales see in black and white.
———
Cassie’s taken me to visit her. She has a whole pod now, all nothlits. Ex-Yeerks. They’re members of the Yeerk Peace Movement that she started after she freed me. I guess they swim all around the world together, or at least where they’re allowed.
On our first trip out, Cassie didn’t push me to talk to her. She just had her people take our boat out far enough to see her, and let me watch. Aftran breached a couple times, which was neat. I’ve seen whales do that in documentaries and stuff, but you can’t really appreciate an animal that big hurling herself all the way out of the water like that until you see it in real life. Cassie morphed wolf and sat down next to me, and didn’t move away when I fisted my hand in her thick, warm fur. She could feel that I was shaking a little, and she leaned her big, solid shoulder against my leg.
She told me that she was going to talk to Aftran in thought-speech, and gave me another offer to opt in: Aftran would talk to me, in my head, and Cassie would tell her what I said back. My answer was working my fingers tighter into her fur and shaking my head. They talked in private, instead. I watched Aftran the whole time, clutching the boat’s railing in one hand and Cassie’s wolf mane in the other.
Later, on the ride back into the harbor, I didn’t ask her what she and Aftran had talked about, and she didn’t tell me.
On our second trip, I told Cassie I was ready to talk. We took the little motorboat farther out from the big boat and killed the motor, and Aftran swam slowly up to meet us, being careful to not make waves big enough to tip us over. She was huge, way up close like that. She had patches of barnacles on her rubbery gray-black skin, and she breathed out in big plumes of spray that settled on our hair and clothes in a silvery mist.
Cassie promised me that she’d relay what I wanted to say to Aftran word for word, then she morphed seagull and stood on the seat next to me. It was nice of her to promise that, but she didn't need to. I trusted her.
I tried to be ready, but I still almost lost it when Aftran spoke inside my head. It’s just thought-speak, I reminded myself, but I gripped the edge of my seat so tight that it hurt, and I suddenly felt so dizzy and sick that I completely missed everything she said. Cassie must have said something to her, because she waited a while before trying again, and this time, she sounded really guilty. After that, talking to her went a little better—as long as we took things slow, and I remembered to breathe.
The longer we talked, the more stuff I realized I wanted to say to her. Six whole years’ worth of anger, sadness, and everything else I’d been keeping pushed down wanted to come rushing up out of me like foam out of a shaken-up soda bottle. But hearing her voice in my head eventually got to be just too much, and I had to tell Cassie that I needed to stop.
<It’s okay,> she said, and let me stroke her damp feathers. <We can always come back.> That made me feel better. I turned and watched seawater wash over Aftran’s huge back as she drifted next to us. She had still sounded like herself—enough that hearing her voice made me feel nauseous in a way I couldn’t blame on the rocking boat—but she also sounded different. More chilled out, I guess. More patient. A little melancholy. And the biggest difference of all was that she listened to me.
She had really changed since she’d set me free. Duh—she was the size of a yacht now, instead of a slug. But she’d changed as a person, too, on the inside. Maybe that’s what living in the ocean as a whale for five years did to you, but I knew that wasn’t the whole story.
She had changed because of Cassie.
Being around Cassie again had been changing me, too. She’s just like that.
She was still a seagull next to me. When I looked back at her, she tilted her white-feathered head and looked up at me with one beady yellow eye. <Before we head back in, I’m just going to say goodbye, okay?>
I nodded, knowing from our last visit what she meant, and shifted to give her some more space to spread her wings. She caught the breeze and flew farther away from Aftran and me, then straight up, until she was a little kid’s squiggle drawing of a seagull against the bright blue sky. Bracing myself for what I knew was coming next, I yanked my windbreaker hood up, held tight to the side of the boat, and watched wide-eyed as Cassie started to fall like a stone, the dark shape of her changing, getting bigger and bigger—and then, SPLASH!
The boat pitched and rocked, and I crouched down and ducked my head—and when the rocking slowed enough for me to peek up again, two humpback whales that weren’t really whales were swimming away from me, side by side.
They slid underwater like synchronized swimmers, and disappeared. The word for when whales dive like that is sounding, and they can stay under for a long, long time. Just as my mind was starting to drift from watching the waves move over where they’d dived, Cassie and Aftran burst up again through the surface at the same time, showering me with seawater.
I watched them play together, diving and leaping and crashing back down in bursts of white spray, and let myself feel a little happy for Aftran. After she’d set me free, she had finally learned how to make a real friend. She has Cassie. She has her Peace Movement pod, and back on land, she has more friends—or allies, at least—that Cassie told me about, but I haven’t met.
Maybe she has me, too. I wouldn’t call us friends yet, exactly, but Cassie offered to take me out to visit her again the next time her migration brings her back to California, and I said yes.
It’s a start.