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him.
    I grabbed a sweater for Cassie and held it out for her.
    â€œLike I would ever wear that ,” she said. “It says ‘dry clean only.’”
    We went to the next-to-last dressing room and closed the door behind us.
    â€œLet’s do this,” I said tersely.
    We had all decided the best way to go was in cockroach morph. The last time we’d morphed into roaches, things had not gone well. But roaches were fast, and their senses were good enough to use for our purposes. Also, they might go unnoticed.
    I was not looking forward to doing the roach body again. I don’t like becoming anything that can be stepped on. Besides, if you think looking at a cockroach is gross, try being one.
    I looked at Cassie and let out a yelp. Two hugely long antennae were sprouting from her forehead.
    â€œJeez, you could have warned me you were starting.”
    Morphing is not some neat, sensible process where you just gradually become something else. It is much weirder than that. Different changes happen at different times. Body parts appear suddenly, other parts disappear. And the sizes don’t always match up till the end.
    The first change on Cassie was the sudden appearance of the antennae, which shot straight out of her forehead like two fishing poles.
    Then her skin started to get crispy-looking.
    At the same time, we were both shrinking, which feels just like falling. I mean, you see the walls shooting up, higher and higher. You see the ground rushing up at you like you’re a parachutist whose chute didn’t open.
    Unfortunately, since it was a dressing room, there were mirrors on two sides.
    â€œAAHHH!” I cried, startled by the nauseating sight of the skin of my back melting into two huge, hard, brown wings.
    Cassie was too far gone to say “shh,” but she held one of her hands up to what was left of her lips. Just then her extra legs came popping out of her stomach, and I think I would have yelped again except that I no longer had a mouth.
    I heard a slurping sound as the last of my bones dissolved, and I sagged into my exoskeleton.
    My clothing was piled around me like a huge collapsed tent.
    Human sight was gone now. What I could see was vague and muddy and shattered into a thousand pieces. But I’d had practice being a roach. I could make some sense of the roach’s confusing way of seeing.
    And there were compensations. The antennae that had sprouted from my head were amazingly good at reading vibrations and smells.
     I asked Cassie.
     she said.
     I said.
    The straight pins were steel shafts that looked as big around as the crossbar of a swing set. The sharp ends didn’t seem very sharp at this size. And the blunt ends were like big steel beach balls.
     I said.
    We scurried on our six legs over to a corner underneath the small triangular seat.
     Cassie said.
     I agreed. When you first morph an animal, it is almost always a struggle to adjust to its particular instincts. We had morphed roaches before, so we were prepared, but the first time I had become a roach it was all I could do to control the panic.
    Even now, the roach’s jumpy instincts were barely under control. “Run!” it said. “Run!”
    I heard loud, crashing vibrations. Something huge moved over our heads. I couldn’t see well enough to recognize him, but a few seconds later he began to morph down into our world.
     I asked.
    
    After that came Ax, who had to morph back into his Andalite body and then into a roach. Jake grabbed all the clothing we had shed, stuffed it into a bag, and took it away to store in one of the coin lockers out in the mall. Then he came back and morphed