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My name is Marco.
And, as it turns out, now I can actually tell you my last name. (Hint: it really isn't Polo.) I could even tell you where I lived and where I went to school. Now that the worst has happened and the Yeerks know who we are, I could probably give you my Social Security Number. On the off-chance I survive this war, I’m not going to, just in case you steal my identity. Anyway. What was I talking about?
My last name is Guerra Alvarez. Those are her last names, too. It's not all that traditional to give your kid both your last names and not his dad's, but I guess by the time my mom had me, she had kind of made her peace with bucking tradition. Her mom and dad, my grandparents, weren't all that excited about the idea of her getting married to a gringo who played with computers for a living and didn't speak any Spanish, but my mom followed her heart and married my dad. But then when I was born, she still gave me both my abuelos' last names. Funny.
No offense, but I think my abuelos kind of had it easy when it came to the Romeo and Juliet thing. Maybe they couldn't really talk to their future son-in-law, but at least he was human.
You get the children you deserve, I guess.
"Marco, your father and I have been talking," my mom said at dinner around the campfire one night. "We would like you to move into our cabin." Something about the way she said 'would like you to' did not make me think it was a request.
"And leave the world of electricity available to me in Chee World?" I asked. "No thanks."
"Look," my dad said, shifting nervously on the log he was sitting on. "I talked to Mr King when he came up on a supply run yesterday. He said he hasn't seen you there in a week."
"I don't know if you've noticed," I said, "but the Animorphs are kind of busy. There's kind of a war on. I'm not there a lot. He probably just missed me."
"Uh huh," Mom said. I didn’t like the look in her eye. "That doesn't explain why I found all your video games and a Rubbermaid of your clothes at the meadow when Loren sent me over there to look for Tobias last Saturday."
"You know about the whole morphing-destroys-most-clothes thing, right?" I asked. "I have to keep my stuff everywhere. Do you think I want to be cutting up my feet on pinecones or whatever every time I want to play Mariokart after a mission?"
"Marco," Dad said. His dad voice was almost as good as Jake's. "Your mother and I know you've had to grow up fast in this war. We know that you're under incredible strain. You know we love you and support you. But we don't think it's appropriate that a child of your age cohabitate with their lover-“
At that point, I choked on my soup. “Dad, you did NOT just use the word ‘cohabitate’ and ‘lover’ in a sentence! This conversation is NOT happening.”
“Marco, be serious,” Dad said, nervously adjusting his glasses. “Your mother and I are worried about you. It's not like we're asking you to stop seeing Ax. We just think you're taking things awfully fast.”
I set down my bowl and stood up. “Okay, how’s this for serious?” I said. “This conversation is OVER. I’m leaving. And I never want either of you to talk to me about Ax again.”
I realized even as the words were coming out of my mouth that it wasn’t entirely true. I did want to be able to talk to my mom and dad about the only thing in my life that was even remotely normal (even if that wasn’t saying much), and I didn’t even resent them wanting to give me boundaries (at least, not that much). It was a nice, normal thing for my two parents, alive and well, to sit me down and tell me they thought I was taking things too fast with my boyfriend. I understood that. Appreciated, even.
What I couldn’t handle was how atrociously uncool and weird they were being about it. It just threw into sharp relief how weird everything else was. These were my parents – the family I had schemed, fought, and killed to get back – and at this point in the war, they had no real leverage or authority over me. If Jake or even one of the other Animorphs told me they thought I shouldn’t be living with Ax, that would be a different story. But coming from my parents, it somehow had a lot less weight than it should have.
I was growing feathers and starting to shrink. It had been a while since I had let stress impact my morphing but apparently my desire to escape this conversation had superseded my conscious will.
From the look on my mom’s face, it looked like she was starting to realize that there was no handbook for this kind of parenting situation. It wasn’t like they could ground me. They couldn’t stop me from storming away. They couldn’t even follow me once I went osprey and flew away.
“Look, Marco,” my mom said. “We love you. We don’t want you to get hurt.”
I stopped morphing and started to go back to my regular self. There must have been enough human in my features to squeak out an eye roll, because the next thing my mom said was, “I know, I know. That’s a crazy thing for us to presume to hope for. This is a war. Of course you’re going to get hurt. You’ve already been hurt, often. It kills us that we can’t protect you from everything that’s out there, Marco.”
“Maybe I didn’t express myself very well, and I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” Dad said, “but that’s all we’re trying to do. Protect you from the one kind of danger you’re dealing with which we have experience. I might not know much about fighting aliens, but I can tell you when you’re on a fast track to getting your heart broken.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get it, you have nothing but good intentions. Can you just take it down a notch? You two hardly even know Ax. What makes you think he’s gonna break my heart all the sudden? We both know I’m the heartbreaker in the equation.”
I could hear the false bravado in my own voice. I was starting to realize with a sinking sensation that they were probably right. This relationship, whatever it was, probably didn’t have much of a future outside of the war. Best-case scenario, where we won and the Yeerks peace out back to the homeworld or whatever, Ax had made it pretty clear that he misses his folks and wanted to go back home when possible. I doubted that Andalite technology was good enough to make a long-distance relationship from Earth to the Andalite homeworld doable. And that was already making the insane assumption that somehow both of us would a) survive, b) not be infested, and c) be on the winning side.
My mom and dad didn’t say anything. Mom just kind of raised an eyebrow with an ‘I told you so’ kind of expression and held her arms out to me for a hug.
"I’m not a child-" I tried to protest, but my voice broke and I decided I’d better just give the woman a hug before I actually lost it.
“Look, sweetie,” Mom murmured, stroking my hair like she used to do when I was little. “I know what it’s like to fall for a guy who doesn’t make a lot of sense to the rest of the world. I’m not saying it’s impossible to make it work. I just want you to know that it’s going to be really hard, and I think you’re making it harder than it needs to be. But your dad and I are always going to be here for you, no matter what.”
Have you ever wanted to believe something bad enough that you were half-convinced it was true even though you knew it was total bull? My parents might love me, but there was no way that they could promise me that they were always going to be there for me. My mom had been turned into a Controller and it had taken us as Animorphs years of intelligence and botched attempts and never knowing if she was alive or dead before we finally rescued her. My dad hadn’t been there for me when we thought she had died and he couldn’t even blame it on the brain-stealing slugs from outer space. Assuming they both lived, ‘no matter what’ was still a pretty big promise to be tossing around.
I didn’t say any of that, though. I just clung to my mom like my life depended on it and then my dad wrapped his arms around both of us and it really felt like we were a normal family again. Maybe a little worse for the wear, but hey, we were still in one piece. For the moment, at least.
I had already missed my cue to wriggle away from a parental display of affection by at least a few seconds, but better late than never. “Okay, get off, you’re suffocating me,” I said. My mom and dad let go. My mom has a better poker face than my dad, but I could tell that both of them were relieved that I was out of temper-tantrum mode, but they both still looked like they were waiting for me to say something so they would know if I was still mad at them.
This was so messed up. Under normal circumstances, my parents wouldn’t worry about whether or not I was mad at them because they had told me not to do something. My mom and dad were never particularly authoritarian – they raised me in Southern California in the early nineties, so that says a lot - but they would expect me to respect their rules because they were my parents. Now that automatic authority didn’t exist.
There was really only way to make this something approaching normal again. I sighed. “Did you two have somewhere for me to sleep tonight?”
The look of relief on my dad’s face was immediate. “We’ve got an extra hammock but Toby agreed to make us an ash slat mattress if you’d be more comfortable with a regular bed.”
“I might be more comfortable in my own cabin,” I said, mostly to test the waters a little. “I’m a suburban kid. I won’t cope well without my own room.”
“I think we can figure that out,” Mom said. I had a feeling she knew that I was acting like a brat to save face but didn’t feel the need to call it out. We both knew that she had gotten what she had set out for not because she could really enforce any limitations that she set on me but because I kind of wished that she actually could still boss me around. We both knew that everything about the situation we were in was uncomfortable and strained and there was no getting around it. And we both knew that if we pretended like it was okay, it probably would be. “Finish your soup before it gets cold.”
We sat around and ate our soup and talked about dumb stuff and listened to my dad go on and on about astronomy and finished our dinner in peace. Watching my dad do the dishes, it seemed crazy that all of what went on between my mom and me went over his head. I wondered for a minute if my grandmom on the Alvarez side had been as analytical and sneaky as my mom is.
As I am.
We had to get it from somewhere.