Kenny's POV

In life, whether you are truly alive or just decayed and dead inside, everyone has something that makes them special.

Take my friends, Stan and Kyle. Maybe they were really my friends, maybe not. That aside, they both had that special something, the esteemed quality I grasped at desperately but could never seem to claw free. Talent. It was a strange word, melting on my tongue like an egregious pill for my unconfirmed diseases. Kyle was talented. His books were thicker than my wrists and his quick tongue singed me with words longer than I was tall. Stan was talented, too. He could sprint faster than the girls went flying into his arms. My books were not as fat with knowledge as Kyle's, nor was my vocabulary as droll; my legs were not as powerful as Stan's, nor were my arms, enough to support the racy sluts who flung themselves at me. My heavenly face gave the Hope Diamond a run for its bricks of cash, but that was just it. If I had been born into an unspoiled river of life, instead of the toxic slaughterhouse waste in which my existence resided, then perhaps I could've had flair, too. The closest thing I had to "flair" though was the flare of my jeans, which was true for any pair of pants I wore because I had been solely constructed from gaunt framework.

I came to discover that talent, like money, is terribly overrated. Terribly, terribly. But, to do that, I would first have to make acquaintance with the very embodiment of material possession and finesse. It began as a strained acquaintance. There was nothing about him that was attractive, save for maybe his black-hole eyes, which held enough gravitational force in them to pull in entire worlds into destruction. Thankfully, for mine, it did just that, and peeled away the darkness.

I noticed something was wrong with him right from the beginning. And, if not for his enormous size and pretentious attitude, maybe others would've noticed, too.

For as far back as my memory will stretch, Eric Cartman had been the inexorable parasite of my childhood and majority of my lost adolescence. He was a boisterous, insufferable idiot, and he knew it. Everything about Eric was loud; not just that explosive baritone he would use to attract the limelight back to him, but right down to the way he dressed. Every morning, whether the hottest days of summer or the waterlogged morgue of winter, he was swathed with that wide sail of crimson cashmere he called a sweater. Even when his mother's age caught up to her looks – her usual cliental were as shallow as the grimy dollar bills they'd trade her – and being fat no longer was an option, that sweater would hang from his shrinking shoulders for numerous reasons. In his patched brown jeans, he had the appearance of a long-stemmed rose.

But, in the words of Poison, every rose has its thorn.

Eric specialized in that. His bite was the only thing that could size up to his massive bark. He did not lose; he had slow victories, during which he would dog his opponents until they died. For him, this was not hard to do. He had the uncanny ability for zeroing in on people's foibles, and stung his enemies with cutting invectives. They'd waver under the sweltering presence of his sonic boom voice, then falter and crumble. None of his talents were ever anything vague adults referred to as "beneficial", not unless to him. He took great pleasure in the attention, whether harmful or upbeat, he received from disbelieving eyes. To him, even a glance was on par with a celebratory bash, such as a birthday or holiday. Those went down as memorable, ostentatious events, too, in true degree to his raucous legacy. I would not know of such occasions. My parents remembered one thing in their lives of three children and chronic joblessness: booze. That Eric was even kind enough to allow me access to the enthralling, mysterious world of money was shocking on a number of levels.

And he collected things. So many things. When not drunken off the pompous barrage of praises he would sing to himself, he was using that big mouth of his to barter for various tenures in every walk of life. He was a magpie of sorts whose only interest fell in exuberant, eye-catching things to team up with his flamboyant personality. People were not excluded from his eccentric collections, either. Butters Stotch was the first experiment, but quickly thrust aside after his sense of humanity devastated his ability to throw a punch into the sobbing face of a seven year old twerp behind the community center. Eric would not have compassion or sympathy or anything humanitarian of the sort. He was a natural-born brat who'd been spoiled by a susceptible single whore-mother, so it was no surprise that he was closely fussy about the quality of his pawns. That's why I was a last resort. Being the hooligan I was, I couldn't possibly have anything to offer him. But that must've been exactly what he craved in his subjects, because, in nine days exactly, I became his best friend.

That probably wasn't true. Eric had no friends, except maybe for his strangest fixations yet. Because, above all of the other useless paraphernalia, Eric collected dolls. Marionettes, princesses, toy soldiers. They lined innumerable shelves in his bedroom, columns of polished porcelain and custom-stitched clothing and utilitarian eyes. Of course, I would never have known this if I wasn't burdened with admittance to his demented double-life – a dark path to walk, indeed. I would not know a lot of things about Eric, who remained a conundrum of his time right until the very end.

I remember the photograph mounted above his bed. A sepia portrait of the Nazi master himself. In the photo, Eric's softly smiling face seemed untouched by deceit. No hatred roiled in the limpid amber flames of his charming eyes. But, then again, he was only four. Too young to have the steel-plated fist of a tyrant.

If not for those china goblins, maybe I could have been his closest companion. But that was another of life's chimeras I squandered pointless time chasing after. Walking alongside an antagonist of his nature was a foolhardy position to be in. Stan and Kyle were sure to warn me of that. Eric would rob me of breath, sentiments, and my very life, until I was another soulless anima with more breaks than what could've been fixed. They were wrong, though, suspended in a vat of misconceptions they'd attained over the years. I had nothing capable of being stolen from me. That had been accomplished long ago, before I had even met Eric. It just went to prove how much my friends knew about me. Their vision was as shallow as the cheap glass in the skulls of Eric's dolls…not very hard visionaries to mislead. Thankfully. For, if not for that, they would've eventually seen the pain etched in the scrim of my aura. I was not as good an illusionist as Eric. And only he knew that unattended-to turmoil latched to my atria was slowly burgeoning within me like parasitic fungi. Each breath I drew in was toxic, whether grimed by cigarette smoke or not. He conned and observed. That was his biggest role in life's stage: a peeping Tom with full view of the cracked window to your soul.

And because of that – because of many things… he was such a sick fuck.

This wasn't something he made particularly obvious, however. To anyone who didn't know better, Eric came off as a smooth, verbally-adept king. However, he was really a vituperative egomaniac who excoriated those below him and vilified those above. Haunted by illusions of grandeur, his troubled foundations were no glorious sights to behold. He had squabbled, crawled, and battled his way to the top like any tramp, tearing through the waste to reach sunlight. I had all but done the same, though my journey from sordid to serendipity had been a little less than successful. And I was no egomaniac. If I believed in anything, it was that karma was the concubine unknowingly silhouetted you to the grave. "Myself" was not a concept to believe in, for I had been scraped hollow over merciless time. What remained of "myself" was an eye for trouble and a mouth for indecency. Physical pain did not compute with me.

For such a clever adversary, a lot of things did not compute with Eric. His heavy opinions and foul views swamped him into a choking menace. If no one had scientific evidence that the Earth was a sphere, he would revert right back to the ancient thinking that the planet was the center of the universe, and mount his throne atop it. He spent the days of his sophomore year infantilizing with those nightmarish dolls on the floor of his bedroom and make them speak and act out his darkest thoughts. To him, the world was meant to conform to his ways and his alone. His dolls spoke like his proper partisans, all flourished in lace garments, uttering through truly vile, high-pitched guises that life's only motive was death. I was all too familiar with that touchy subject. In many ways, his berating of other cultures and beliefs through those vibrant puppets was sickly amusing to me.

I wanted to run. I really, really did.

But I didn't, for various reasons. I was always there whenever he demanded it, through thick and thin, the best and worst of times. For so many nights, I accompanied Eric without complaint. Like my own broken home, no authority figure was present at Eric's house. In the earliest shards of the morning, occasionally I'd hear the distant slam of the front door, but I never encountered the trollop who followed the shuddering bang. That entertained Eric; he whispered into my ear once that his mother's unkempt appearance could not arouse even a response from me. I never saw her, so I would never know if what he'd said was accurate. If so, it would be the first truth I ever recall Eric telling.

Not long after he'd introduced me to his collection of beautiful captives, he began to call me "Ken-doll." It took the longest time to understand why, but hearing him purr so affectionately at me sent a sugary tear through my unprotected spine. Eric never spoke positively to anything, save for cats, his dolls, and me. Even his mother fell out of his line of warmth into the unforgiving cold. However, being revered by Eric Cartman was almost as taxing as being ostracized by him. In my own, masochistic sense, though, I suppose I enjoyed being called a doll, a toy, a harem to the cruelest king. Anything but the alias I had gone by my entire life: nothing. A nobody. Ken-doll, in spite of the insulting bloodlines from which it came, meant more to me than I think Eric ever realized. He cooed it to me when we hugged, when we were in school, and when we bid goodbye in a voice so thick with saccharine that it made it hard to breathe. I sang to him wordless embraces and fluttered my fingers back and submitted to his perverse game like a lovesick fool. It was that docile behavior that he wanted, so that's why he kept me for as long as he did. Though, of everything he ever raped and destroyed, he was very careful with me. I didn't know why. I wasn't a fragile commodity. Years of slaving through a vile dictatorship of childhood had left my bones with a martyr's diamond resolve. Still, Eric Cartman, predator as he was, was not one to understand kindness. Returning me to my pedestal every night seemed to require painstaking practice, which he somehow managed through graceless, loping hands.

I went through my youth with his lewd fingerprints all over me. They were the access codes to his secret order, and darker than my true skin tone. He could not touch without breaking, murdering, or spoilage. I received the short end of that element.

When not home, we would meander down to Stark's Pond and smoke without much verbal persiflage. He supplied the cigarettes, which always came in a magnificently-designed turquoise pack that informed me of their menthol content and many scanty hazards. Sometimes, he would tilt toward me, lit death stick in his mouth, and light mine with the tip of his. I'd giggle behind the filter, because I assumed it was some form of a joke. We'd do this until an old prude threatened us, which led to our departure through a wall of white pollutants. But not a day passed without at least a mention of his treasured dollies. There was one in particular that he was very fond of. Scrounging gaze running over the doll's rosy porcelain face, the wide sweep of dark lashes around demon's cornflower eyes, and the scoops of lace in buttercup yellow rosette-wavelets, he would murmur, possibly to himself, that it looked like me. It was indeed the most beautiful tool in his army, and disturbing to say the least that he considered it as me.

That was the first doll that, in a fit of rage, he would go on to smash against his dresser.

I did not like Eric from the start; he was simply too lurid, too loud, too much for me. But some morbid fascination captivated me with him, even when he'd strike me roughly across the back and nearly fracture my scapula like a pair of butterfly wings. This was his way of showing brute affection, which I did not feel through the reverb of his actions. It felt more like a disciplinary smack you'd give a disobedient child. Perhaps he was training me like you'd train a circus poodle to jump through flaming hoops. Eric wouldn't know much about that, then. He was not a dog – loyal, affectionate, operating by a pack's hierarchy. He was more or less one of his previous obsessions, a cat – pompous, fat, and sly. It was curiosity, not fondness, that drove me to run with him. If I had listened to that ridiculous feline cliché – which worked against me in more ways than one – perhaps I could have prevented calamity from ensuing like it did. But Eric taught me that there are many twists in the spool of life. Eric taught me a lot of things; maybe beneath his knowledge, but I did learn from him, and he learned from me. We co-existed to feed off of each other. He certainly got the better end of the deal, maintaining his extra weight while I continued to wither around my skeleton. His flavor was the sharpest salt of sin. It went down like knives and was not one I preferred.

My most important lesson from Eric was achieved through true horror, during the first months of my sixteenth year when I was beginning to explore the loose curse we used to throw around on the schoolyard to look cool.

So was he, with unforeseen potency. I myself was no saint, but Eric took me by surprise with his seediness. When the sluts on Colfax were hiding from him, dolls' skirts were lifted, as was the screen from the long-neglected division of his mind. It was then that I realized just what a sick fuck he really was. The reflections of our female classmates in his golden eyes warped to prizes twined with rotten intent. Through a series of clichéd courtships and coy backwards glances reeking of trouble, seduction became another toy he tampered with. Nobody was safe, even if he repulsed them at first. Take Wendy Testaburger, our raven-haired classmate since preschool; she was a pocket Venus, petite in stature and captured from the brightest receptacle of the sun. She was also, inevitably, Eric's first failed project, which ended in her knotting a rope around her perfect, swanlike neck with far more than two pieces of her heart in her heaving chest, while Eric was poised to swipe the stool away in leering malevolence. It held a twisted fascination with him; luring enticingly naïve females and watching their adoring eyes fracture with floodwaters. Their despondent sobs became a personal drug strain to Eric, tempting and all kinds of corrupt. Romance, though, could not touch him. He consumed love, an affliction that bothered as much as it satiated him. Unlike every needy whore that he broke, though, I preferred to waste my indulgences elsewhere, on a far tamer being.

Craig Tucker.

In a world of rules, he was the exception. Though not particularly interesting, he sold affection from the sensitive palms of his hands. Those same hands I allowed into the confines of my jeans not long after the kissing began. In our brief, unspoken-of affair that was neither passionate nor of a propitious origin, he was a guilty pleasure. Without his aid, I would have undoubtedly converted back to my promiscuous behavior that granted Eric the right to call me a tease. How it began was a faint interest that ripped across life's tracks into a full-scale roller coaster ride, accelerating from demure glances to shivering sensuality. Whatever I saw in that charcoal-headed boy, I did without much purpose or emotion. He seconded that. After school, Craig pinned me against my locker with sinful touches for forty-five untroubled minutes. He was sure to be quick, easy in-out, as to not interfere with football practice. I didn't mind, nor did I have any desire to expand our connections from desire to love. Love was a stressful ailment that I was determined not to drop palms with. Fate had never been an opponent to throw dice to; any kind of roulette was out of the question, namely Russian.

I still felt the presence of a sleek, phantom barrel against my skull, though. Eric sat on my brain, a malignant tumor firm on rotting my judgment. My affiliation with him had unwittingly conquered every aspect of my life. I was a fool for believing that I could smuggle my secrets past him. We slept under the same sheets with the same artificial aroma of lavender Downy in our nostrils. Even so, nothing evaded Eric's acute radar. He could smell the toxic sugar of sex on me, and grimaced at each tangle in my hair should I have grown tired and tipped toward him to rest. I was guarded, but a watched kettle will not boil. Eric was well aware of my devious secret and the desire to hide it, so he remained infuriatingly aloof. He sat back, neck-deep in the shadows of our joint soul, with his arms folded over his monolithic chest and a shark's smile accentuating all thirty-two of his vampiric teeth, and waited as I squirmed in unease. Unspoken confessions festered behind my deceitfully closed mouth, spoiling as they asphyxiated me. In spite of the vital need to speak, I would not crack. Only later did I realize maybe I should have. All paths ended in paralyzing belittlement. Eric fed off of any emotion I had to offer, so I stifled every white flare collapsing me from within.

But, knowing Eric, his hypersensitive antennae probably picked up on it all. It showed in the deadly curl of his leering grin.

Try as I might, I could not ready myself for the impending apocalypse. That was another thing about Eric; he was untraceable, which therefore made him untouchable, and that therefore made him uncontainable. So many of my hours were exhausted on charting his infinite globetrot for world domination. However, all that I turned up was a grip on the shriveled petals of stolen time. I accomplished nothing from my ponderings except a new nip at the heel from Eric. What a silly Ken-doll I was, going into matters that didn't even concern me.

At that, irony strangled me until I was saved by the dark arms of merciful death.

Craig wasn't terribly vigilant, and took no notice to the hesitation of my body. He only saw the delectable opalescent finish, not the rusted fear below. Eric didn't even have to look; his bloodhound's nose detected the shift into full-scale anxiety in sly secrecy. To say that I didn't know this, and that I expected him to strike when he did, are both lies. I had adopted some insight from the methods of his madness, and while this enabled me view of that teasing flicker in his aura, no amount of mental perception could've forewarned to the approaching storm. He would pounce when he felt like it, and there was nothing in my power to prepare. So, with bated breath, I allowed life to carry on as normal, if my antics were appropriate to be labeled as such.

I could not feel the change in the air that Thursday. All good performances go out with a bang; however, seeing as my performance with not good – in fact, it was the sweetest kind of wrong – it did not go out with any bang. It fizzed and shriveled and died in the musty hallways of the boy's locker room. Eric carried out his businesses in quiet espionage. This was no different, even if its circumstances were foreign to him. Or not. Perhaps he had already dealt a belligerent hand of cards to another termagant who had deceived him before. The concept didn't seem too unreasonable. Deception itself is an unreasonable name to my venture. When Eric had drafted me, he had not lain down any restrictions to my interpersonal affairs. Although, to me, more than once had it registered as treason; to Eric, I imagined, it was a lethal twist of the knife that threatened the feigned prosperity of his dynasty. Crossed loyalties were not permissible; not from me, not from the wide-eyed horrors he called his children. Not from anyone, whether citizen, patriarch, or soldier in his kingdom. From us was expected outspoken, back-breaking devotion. He could not allow us to play for any other league than his, and wager a possible betrayal.

He just…couldn't.

Thursdays began and ended the same as any other school day. Everything (I assumed) was in order until, in the midst of our starting kiss, Craig's lips left and did not return. I had no time to question his hesitation because of a distracting prod in my shoulder. It was neither forceful nor demanding. Just a harmless tap. So I followed it, right into the hooded gold bullions of my despot.

In bitter musings, Craig demanded to know what the fuck Eric thought he was doing. I might have as well – that I didn't already know – if I could have freed myself from the liquid amber that was steadily crystallizing around my decaying remains. Eric cut Craig a dark glance before training the spotlight back onto me. I boiled and threatened to incinerate to cinders beneath the harsh yellow glow. A frightening smile began to reshape his greedy lips. Hands constricting the brittle bones of my wrists, he wrenched me away from that soundly indifferent boy and charred an unheard scream into my esophagus. Cold needles of sweat spawned across my prickling skin. The shimmering fear in my eyes, echoing a silent plea through the tension, dealt no damage to the intervention. With moist fetters clamped on me, Eric infringed his violent tongue on Craig, using his finest silk for ensnarement. According to Eric, in so much useless chatter, I was late for an appointment. And Craig, eyes blank through the net draped over him, accepted. It was such a beautiful lie. Even I'll admit that. It really was.

And what's even more extraordinary is how he could manipulate beauty into absolute dismay. I always knew that Eric had many talents, but manipulation rose above the rest. They had such an unhealthy relationship, Eric and manipulation. Practically synonymous, the power pulsated between them. It would never be claimed by either battalion, though. No. Then the game would end. It had to be swindled, haggled and coaxed at an agonizingly lethargic pace. I imagined Eric was good at that; it certainly worked well on me in his car that afternoon. He sat me down like a problem child in the back, and, great expanse of his blood red sweater invading my periphery, began a hellish puppet show. Meticulously, he picked at my fraying seams and bit hard into my flesh with questions that could only leave blue-black tracks in their wake. Dry flame lingered behind each word, a harsh crackling dissonance that bolted me to the battered leather upholstery until I could endure no more. I finally screamed that I would show him what Craig and I had done, why I had been so illusive in these past months. And, with the heavy embarrassment threatening an aneurysm, I crashed my lips right against Eric's in a genocide I would never fully identify with. Just like him.

Hands breezed up my back while one of mine groped the window's glass. We kissed and fought and ignored the stabbing at the vicinities of our pumping hearts in agony's icy grip, reeling through the jet-black zeal I had never experienced with Craig. It became not an act of persistent will, but a display of dark attraction and loathsome need. I devoured that fat, talkative mouth to the point that I tasted his last meal: my surrender. Funny he would have an appetite for such a thing. It was bitter to me, only slightly dipping into the territory of sweet. He was the one to end it, drawing back with the desire appearing to strop a razor's edge in his hungry eyes. He returned to the front seat, unspeaking, and for a naïve moment, I actually waited for the blow. It was only my fault. I had granted him access to my emotions in that one instant, and knew that he would snatch up what remained of my innocence by reminding me exactly of what I was. By the time apprehension clouted me, though, it was too late for me. I was his now. Ken-doll. A plaything. It was an iniquitous victory, against the rules by my count, but Eric played by no rules except his own. And those scoundrel laws always assured he'd win. So, with defeat conquering me in a second through skirling sweeps of silent mirth, I sat and waited for the name. Another beautiful concept he would alter into an unspeakable ugliness.

And it never came.

That Thursday afternoon, through a self-provoked assault, I had rendered Eric Cartman's constantly moving mouth – now bruised by my own doings – absolutely speechless. He had no rebuttal for my defiance, no hostile insult to administer. The silence was strange, though rippled through me with ghostly pleasure. Though, what was truly disturbing was not the fact that I had won, but the fact that I truly felt it. I returned to school the next day and saw Craig without a grace of failure ever touching me. I recall even waving, though not if he returned or if he even noticed. Not that I cared. What a tempting affair, wasted. Shame. And it was that ebb of familiar notions my mind conjured that haunted me to no end. The more time I had spent around Eric – the more I had allowed his train of unwell thought to merge into my head – the more I was beginning to see his frightfully malicious expression budding onto mine. He was a delightfully expressive person, but that was a quality he retained with little appeal. If nothing else, he was the labyrinth's Minotaur.

He recuperates quickly, I'll give him that. For every bruise I gained from him, no offensive evidence could be found on him until much, much letter. A temperamental flame, after my first success, Eric began splitting his time between being an influence to being under the influence. This was a new obsession that was far more attractive than dolls, so I joined in. I preferred him drunk, which held the only occasions when he wasn't able to take command of my strings. A puppet master is nothing if he can't even control his own person. But, even with alcohol in him, Eric did not deter far from his iconoclastic sovereignty. He continued to bite and cut down infidels through callous slurs. Nothing would ever change that, except for maybe a bullet or knife. And I liked that. I would throw my head back from the rim of my glass and titter in the middle of his garbled harangues as if I was seeing the dark humor where it was not meant to be found. When, really, all I was seeing was the outcome from the successful goal he had made in his sport. I liked Eric when he was drunk because I was still his, his Ken-doll, trussed by the blood promise of "Best Friends Forever", which was written exclusively in mine. That, I did not like. But it was either like or die, so I maintained my mindless service by laughing and drinking and returning to make penance the next morning in a home devoid of control or integrity. My triumph, along with the haunting thrill we felt from each other's skin, was all but forgotten.

Kyle's rational mind was right to run. Tantalizingly and unfairly right. He would have been the first willing trainee recruited, if he'd been willing. But fiery Kyle was obdurate against life itself; Eric especially, for every juvenile reason that their blockades were fabricated from. He smelled the potent danger on Eric long before I did and dodged the inexorable floodwaters, safe on the apex of a nearby hill. For the longest time after that, I wished I was allowed the option of freedom from the Nazi. However, another disloyalty risked retribution from an entity that sent shivers down the Prince of Darkness' spine. I had encountered the grave countless times, but Eric's unique brand of torturous punishment, I came to discover, was not meant to kill. It was meant to scar you with the overwhelming nausea of regret. Eric attacked anyone who dared to cross him with their weaknesses, a slow process that ate away at each layer of the combatant's skin until they were a ghost in their own bodies, all armor having abandoned them long ago. They would scream and thrash and kick and feed that sociopath's ravenous stomach for misery. The cravings only subsided in the presence of his dolls, myself included. Lights would die and life would brace his dying touch.

But even the dolls began to suffer from his rage. Something had changed in Eric's bearings since the day I struck back. It fully fermented midway through our junior year of high school – one we were bullshitting our way through, I might add. A sand grain of confusion, his unease compressed it into a black pearl of insanity. And, as the dark disease inside of Eric spread, he began to mix the drunken nights with doll playtime into a poisonous cocktail that even he himself would have avoided. His rituals with them no longer pursued the same blackened roots as before; he quickly grew aggravated and impatient with his dolls. Annoyance coalesced like virulent bacteria into something much, much worse, something I do not dare name; he would throw them and scream opprobrium, either at me or to his chaotic thoughts, that they were just no good. No good, no good, no good.

Nothing was ever good enough for him.

Still, it was not my place to complain about his intermittent tantrums and worsening fastidious nature. I did not like them, but had not strength to speak out against them. Whatever I'd gained from my Thursday afternoon conquest had been tethered to him through a soundless arrest. He was a textbook narcissist. Any lack of appealing idolatry would send me in a death-march back to abusive tosspots at that hell's hospital I used to live in, far more loathsome than even him. Just seeing the tarnished silver doorknob each time I passed by gave me the chills as if it was a surgeon's waiting scalpel. And, admittedly, I owed Eric some respect; after all, for such a hectic and charred individual, he was somehow able to sum up enough sympathy from that dying soul of his to allow me into his home. And a bed shared with Eric Cartman was better than no bed. If it was between dressing up his dolls, or dressing up wounds from failed interventions for my parents, then I picked the former any day. He pitied me. And, pathetic as I was, I respected that.

The day that all changed, I was on my way to Eric's house. It had no longer become the cedar-shingled two-story with a nice lawn; it had become a home to me, where myself along with Eric had imprinted fragments of my soul into the remaining of the delicate, ribbon-festooned fiends that occupied his shelves. I went armed. Whether I was planning on reclaiming my demolished spirit that day remains unclear. However, if not for that baseball bat, I wouldn't have survived when a tentacle of a hand snapped out from the bushes and drowned me through the thicket. I lost a shoe in the vegetation. Awaiting me were three boys whose names escape me. All I knew by their hideous expressions was that I had wronged them once, perhaps cheated them out of skank floozies who never found anything more in these "men" than a free fuck, but still. Whatever the reason, this was my punishment.

The first punch threw my world into a dazzling array, which was hauntingly beautiful. It also threw all rational thoughts to the floor of my spine. I crippled beneath the weight of their beating, as knuckles and massive cubic-zirconium stones battered my tender flesh. I was dead beneath their abuse until something stripped my mind wide open into a fresh, searing wound.

If Eric saw me wrecked like this, I would no longer be his Ken-doll. I would be Kinny. Fucking Kinny McCormick, a ghetto ruffian the likes of whom were not allowed within the Cartman residence, let alone within the breathing walls of his demented sanctuary. And beneath the baby blue paint were the recordings I could not afford to lose. It was that possibility to that released a crossfire of bloody fucking murder through my skull. I was repulsive enough. Another death had not been on my agenda that day. So, in the midst of the bedlam, I whorled through a bout of superhuman strength and took the bat as a crutch, swinging it in God-knows-what direction. A pack of tawny-eyed wolves, they retreated, more awed than intimidated. At their first dazed attempt to launch into another brute ambush, I took a batter's lopsided stance and swung at their opened jaws. One ripped loose a bloody, yowling shriek, which served as an exodus for my hasty escape. I was not followed.

Eric answered after the first knock, something he did not usually do. In the face of my enemy, my friend, my God, I broke for good. The loose stitching he had held me together with worked instantly free and was lost in a gale. Not even to Eric; to the fucking wind, as bits of me lurched past him into the foyer. A biting aroma of stark black coffee carried in ribbons from the kitchen to obscure every sense I had. Without them, I became painfully aware of the unattached crimes my body was committing. From my mouth, sounds, unfamiliar and foul, coated my tongue in rust. A swamp of salty tears bleached the surface of my eyes. Grief enough to make me cry had not contacted me in so long that its return was excruciating. At least, I had not been willing to release my bottled sorrows since I'd been grudgingly united under Eric's nation. I crumpled and cried and broke on the floor, for seemingly no reason at all, when more than misery from my psychical harm. As far as karma goes, this was her cruelest deliverance yet, for I was at Eric's feet. Where I'd always been.

It was a strange sound that ghosted out from the mouth of the greediest great white.

Shh.

It must have required effort for him to summon such a noise. A rush of comforting air that did not register anywhere in the English dictionary. No words, no persistent mockery, no stimulus to utter rage from such a vague command. Just "shh." I did just that as he drew me into his summer-warm arms, taking my malnourished front against the furnace of his heavy stomach, and held me. And while I burned beneath his heat, mulling in the conflagration, the hostile emotions lurking below shook free with little resistance. Caging a beast as belligerent as Eric's secret passions is a simple procedure that entails little more than a poker face and the proper constraints. It's keeping those roiling tumults in check that will impose on your resolution until there's nowhere for them to go but right through your skin. I had spent my entire life freaking out, allowing the hate and resentment to diffuse from me. But Eric grew fat from not only the foods he ate and the souls he devoured; it was his own sentiments that created such a large curve in his middle. He offered no condolences, instead preferring to shuffle them into authoritarian silence. Though, try as he might, this did not eliminate their presence in his bloodstream, lingering like plaque in his arteries.

His heart attack, if you would call it that, pounded against my ear until it nearly rattled my sanity out. Perhaps that had already been done. No thanks to Eric.

In eerie tranquility, he lifted my head to the grand camber of his and, with an altered cadence of voice, asked who had done this. Who had broken his precious dolly? In my traumatized state of mind, I did not detect the underlying tone of sputtering hatred in the garland's question. I could only give him what he wanted. That's all I had ever done; grovel to an undeserving master. It was an unfair exchange of contemptuous stares, deprecations, and candid tuition that I was of his ownership and his alone. Anarchy to his rule, from Craig in particular, delivered demoralizing blows to both sides of the crevasse. His proposal of justice was never right, but justice is remarkable like that. It's often not as beautiful as ignorance makes it out to be. To shine the sanguine light, it's what's fair…to one part or another. So he calmly entranced me with his words, and I gave him what he wanted. All I wanted to do was take a bath. The smell of blood and their rancid cologne was constricting my throat and cutting off my air supply. If I freed my hide of the evidence, perhaps I would survive the ordeal.

Eric left then, and did not return for a great deal of times, three hours, I'm guessing. I remained on the couch, rolled into a defensive ball against the harsh fabric of the brick red cushions. That devil's color only hooked my focus on Eric. What he did in those three hours, I would not know until he returned, arriving through the door drenched in too much crimson to comprehend. Even the couch paled in his presence. Without offering me a second glance, Eric ambled to the laundry room, and came back in a spotless change of clothing, and crumpled beside me. Asphyxiated by the god-awful aroma of familiar blood, I asked what he had done. His silence pricked a fresh hole in my heart, so I asked again. And again, and again, until, rolling his vacant head around, smooth pits of poison located me from under matted, dark-stained bangs. The crest of his wide shoulders heaved as he told me in a trashed pitch that everything was fine now. When I pressed, he wouldn't budge, sitting like a block of lead to my meager margarine attack. Black blood embellished his fingertips. They curled like the legs of a murdered tarantula and rose from the dead, extending toward me. Escaping in a wounded sigh, Eric affectionately crooned, My Ken-doll. Nobody will hurt my doll anymore.

The day they were finally able to break me, Eric found them. Maybe, if they had watched themselves, he wouldn't have gouged their eyes out. If they hadn't called me a poor fuck, maybe he wouldn't have ripped their mouths off. If they hadn't touched me, he wouldn't have plucked their fingernails and severed each finger. Eric would not have a stain in his immaculate collection. I was the prettiest of them all. So, as soon as they were sobbing and wounded, he took his share of their pain and then took to me, repairing every crack, scar, and fracture with weighted practice. He would not be a hoarder of ugly things. Honestly, though, that manifestation of anger toward my aggressors was a black emotion that, of all the events it could've triggered, shifted my view of him from rancorous sociopath to sentimental provider.

It's like I said. Justice is the darkest coolant to our scorching vendettas.

I was finally able to murmur to the uneven tune of my pulse that I wanted a bath. He produced a satanic grin at that, the last I would ever see, and hoisted me until I was clutching at his torso with every limb like I might have done to the father I never had. Hands reviving me, he escorted me to the tub and, as soon as it had been filled and heated to my liking, lowered me into it. And, with my pale, bruised body lying below, he skimmed his fingertips over the thin membrane of the water and muttered about how skinny I was. You're so freakin' bony, Kinny. Like a hooker. Then he turned his regal head and fitted his honey lips right over mine. Eric kissed me that day, and called me Kinny in that spoken-cocaine drawl of his. I was no longer Ken-doll, his pet, servant, and adherent. I was just Kinny. Kinny McCormick.

That day, I got my life lesson. Eric Cartman was no monster – he was just a wounded soul seeking consolidation of power. And how he achieved his avarice was through us. People. A big collection for his taking. That's all we ever were to Eric: just puppets. Just dolls. Just. Dolls. His techniques were not parsimonious in the slightest and justified nothing. I know it best, considering I was the only one he decided to keep for himself. Which was unfortunate for me…

…I thought.