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Your name is Chobin 749. You are a Yeerk. And right now your knuckles are pretty bruised.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t expel you, Harrison.”
This is not turning out to be a very good day. In retrospect, you should have just stayed home today. Or curbed your temper. All of your mothers told you to just let these things go.
But you’re not good at “just letting things go.” You fight. If you hadn’t stood up for yourself—for them—when you were little then you wouldn’t have become the person that you are today. You fought then, you fought earlier today, and… Screw it, you’re gonna pick a fight now, too.
“My name is Chobin 749,” you insist. You took that name for yourself.
Principal Lyons carries a mixture of amusement and annoyance on his face. “Really,” he says tonelessly. He pauses to tap on the keyboard for a moment. “Wait, no. Your student record seems to say that your name is Harrison Rowe. Not Chobin. Or did you steal somebody’s place? I’m afraid that I really can’t allow you to stay if you’re not Harrison Rowe.”
That patronizing asshole grins at you like he’s said the funniest thing in the world. You have to shut your eyes to block him out. Punching a student is one thing, but you don’t think that all of the fights you’ve ever gotten in would come close to matching the trouble you’d take if you punched a principal. Your mothers alone would make sure of it.
You just have to keep a cool head about this.
“So, why did you see fit to hit a fellow student, Harrison?” He smiles, like your human name is a joke or something.
“He… insulted one of my moms.”
“Really. And that’s all. Hm. And here I had thought that the two of them had finally taught you some self-control.”
“Three.” It’s all that you can do not to yell at him. He chose that number deliberately, you’re sure of it. He’s trying to egg you on.
“Oh, my mistake. Wait,” he says with mock surprise as he consults your record again. “It says here, Annette Rowe and Florence Rowe. Now, I don't have any problems with nontraditional families, but I’m afraid that there are only two parents listed here.”
You have to keep a cool head. He is trying to incite something. You can’t give him the pleasure. You only have two months before graduation, and then you’ll never have to deal with Principal Lyons again.
“You forgot Lindel One-Nine-Five. Sir,” you add after a moment’s thought. If he can play the mock sincerity game then so can you.
“The parasite that Mrs. Annette Rowe carries in her head is not your mother.”
You almost have to bite your tongue. “I would… appreciate it if you… did not call her a parasite,” you reply.
“I am afraid that there is nothing in the books that forbids me from calling her a parasite. It is a scientific classification, of course.”
“Symbiont.”
“Sometimes.”
You shake your head. “I am afraid that you’re wrong. There’s a paper by Bradford and Schwab that you might want to see that establishes that ‘symbiont’ applies to all long-term relationships between two or more species, whether they be mutualistic, commensalistic, or… parasitic.”
“Let’s not quibble over definitions, son. I didn’t call her a slug, did I?” He’s skating on thin ice there. You wish that you had thought to record this conversation on your phone or something. For all the good that it would do. “Why did you see fit to assault another student? Or was it really just that you couldn’t tolerate some schoolboy insulting your mothers?”
You look away. “He called Jake Berenson a hero.”
“For helping to save the human race from enslavement by, ah, symbionts, yes. I suppose that you wish that you had one in your head, don’t you? I really shouldn’t blame you; it’s a case of brainwashing, really.”
He’s partly right. You’re going to apply for a Yeerk partnership as soon as you hit your eighteenth birthday and it’s legal for you to do so under Oregon state law. You even know the one that you want to work with. You’ve been communicating with Jost 808 for eight months now.
“I’m not brainwashed.”
Or maybe you are. But if you had been raised Catholic or to think that French culture was best, nobody would have called that brainwashing.
“Then what would you call yourself?”
You don’t really remember your birth parents. Like you, they were taken as a host. Unlike you, they weren’t made hosts at the age of four.
You are a special case. You were not just a host, or at least your Yeerk was patient with you and saw value in treating you as more than a dumb animal to control. Perhaps you were a long-term investment. She died before you were old enough to ask the question.
“Bicultural,” you finally answer.
The effect was the same either way: from the age of four to the age of ten, you didn’t get human culture. You walked around in it, sure, but that was a camouflage. You got Yeerk culture. You found yourself hearing—and picking up on— Galard at least as often as English, and you asked questions about Vissers and learned about the songs of the Pools, which you would never hear yourself.
“I hope that you realize that you wouldn’t get to call yourself bicultural if the… Yeerks had won.”
“I know that.”
“Then what of your dislike for the man?”
You hesitate, wondering if you should bite your tongue. Probably. But you aren’t going to. “Jake Berenson is a war criminal. I would have thought that’s what you call someone who kills twenty thousand defenseless people for a military advantage.”
The principal frowns, and looks at you with… pity. You know what he’s thinking. That you’re scarred. Broken, suffering from Stockholm syndrome, a poor victim who can’t be blamed for what spills out of his mouth. After all, not everyone made into a host at such a young age turned out the same way. For some it was a source of trauma. Many others found it disquieting, even lonesome, to not have anyone sharing their headspace, an effect found among long-term hosts of any age but especially common among children.
He thinks that you need special help, counseling, counter-conditioning, like some of the other, less-stable child hosts. He thinks you’re crazy, dangerously insane. Probably still thinks of hosts with that Andalite slur, Controller.
“That’s less than the number of people who died in the Hiroshima bombing,” he finally says. “Would you punch someone who celebrated Paul Tibbets?”
“Yes.”
“Then… don’t.” Principal Lyons sighs, and looks at the clock. “That isn’t how humans deal with their problems. Punching another student is simply out of line.” He turns to the computer. “You will be suspended for a period of ten days. There will also be a formal disciplinary hearing in which you may be suspended for a greater length of time. Likely with a psychiatric evaluation… Unless you have anything else to say?”
You shake your head. What can you say to Principal Lyons that you haven’t already? He is too stuck in the past, too stuck in the Earth that existed when he was a kid, when humans were all there were. You know better. You are part of the first generation of humans to really understand the mind and culture of an alien race, and to find a sense of belonging there. You are the future, and this patronizing, bigoted, xenist old fogey is the past.
And even as you go home to your moms, who you just know won’t give you any sympathy, you know that you’re going to leave Lyons and his world in the dust. You’re a fighter, for better or for worse, and you won’t give the future up to people like him.