"Ally! You here?" Dib called up the steps.

"What's all the shouting for? I'm right here!" I said, coming up fast behind him.

He gave a start. "Jeeze, Ally, don't do that. You might be dead, but I'm not, yet. I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible."

"No more spontaneous heart attacks. Got it." I said. "How was skool?"

"Crappy. The same was it's been for the last eleven years." He replied, sitting with me on the couch.

Dib was fifteen by this time. I still looked nineteen, same as I did the night Mae died.

"Sorry I asked." Heavy Sarcasm.

"Hey. When was the last time you'd been out?"

I thought. "Uhm… never…" It was the truth, honestly. For nine years, I had stayed with Dib and Gaz in the house. And when they were out, I practiced. I really was staring to feel like a ghost.

"Oh. Well then you need to get out more."

"Hey, where'd you put your backpack?" Dib pointed vacantly to a spot near the door. I got up and went to get his pack. It fell through my hands once, thudding to the floor, but I was able to get it to him.

"Wow, Ally! You've really been practicing when I'm at skool, haven't you. I thought you were just kidding!" He took the backpack form me and I sat back down next to him.

"I feel loved."

"Sorry." He sounded like he really meant it.

"Oh, hey. I dropped something."

I got up and went halfway across the living room. When I had dropped the backpack, some items had fallen out the front pocket. I bent down and picked them up. Hold on a second…. A tube of liquid concealer and Blush? "Uhm…" I held the items in my hand and showed them to him.

"Oh!" he took them and shoved them back into his backpack. "Those must be Zita's. We have the exact same backpack this year, and she sits right behind me…"

"Oh… Okay… Just make sure that you give them back to her tomorrow. Alright?"

"No Problem. I didn't even know that they were in there." He said, tossing his backpack aside.

"Okay."

Dib sat very still the entire time until he eventually fell asleep.

It was like that every day for a month and a half.

So, I was near to terrified when, once after he came home from skool, he dropped his backpack on the floor, ran upstairs and locked himself in his room. I wasn't stupid enough to ignore that.

"Dib?" I knocked on his bedroom door.

"Go away," was barely audible from the other side.

I stood there stunned for a moment or two and then walked across the hall.

"Gaz?"

No response. I sighed, heading back downstairs. I noticed his backpack lying on the floor. I really shouldn't….

I got down on my knees and actually went through his stuff… In the front pocket of the backpack were a small tube and a plastic container. Cover up and blush. I frowned. Why did he still have these?

Footsteps.

Dib stood at the bottom of the stairs.

"I need my backpa-" I stood up quickly. He put two and two together. "YOU WERE GOING THROUGH MY STUFF!?!" he roared, furious.

"Why do you still have the make-up?"

"I keep forgetting to give it to her." He said defensively. He came up to me and grabbed the backpack from the floor and the make up from me.

He smelled like alcohol. No, not drinking alcohol… rubbing alcohol. The kind that would be used as a disinfectant.

"Dib-"

He turned away from me and headed back upstairs.

I frowned and grabbed his arm to stop him. And it DID stop him. It also brought him to the floor.

"Oh, my gosh. Dib?" I fell quickly next to him.

"I'm fine," he got up quickly, gritting his teeth.

"Dib, what's going on?"

"Nothing." He headed back up the steps. I stood at the bottom, dumbfounded.

I rushed up the stairs after him. "Dib?" I knocked on the door again.

"GO AWAY!"

I frowned, then willed myself to pass right through his door. Normally, I wouldn't do that, but I was scared. Never had I seen him act like that before.

When he saw me, he scrambled to get his jacket back on.

"What's going on?"

"Nothing, Ally. Nothing's going on…"

I sat next to him. His bedroom had changed a lot since he was six. Everything was pretty dark in color, and I really can't say that I minded it… in fact, I think it suited him… "The make up… the moodiness… For goodness sake, Dib, you smell like rubbing alcohol. Let me see your arm."

"Why?"

"Let me see your arm."

Dib hesitated for a moment before taking off his jacket and pulling up the right sleeve of his shirt. There was a good four inch gash on his forearm. "Oh my… What happened?"

"I clipped myself on the fence outside of skool, that's all. I just didn't want to worry you."

I took his jacket. "Take off your shirt."

"What?" he sounded surprised.

"You heard me. Go on, take off your shirt."

Dib sat there for a moment before realizing that I was serious. Slowly, he eased his shirt over his head. "I don't know what you're getting at," he said.

There were few bruises on his back. I took the shirt from him.

He seemed fine, but there was something… small splotches of discoloration on his body. Some were lighter than his actual skin tone, some darker. It was the concealer. "Stay here." I went into the bathroom and got a warm cloth to wipe away all the cover up.

He was covered in bruises, cuts and gashes.

"Well, even if you didn't have enough sense to tell me, at least you had enough sense to rub the cuts with alcohol." I said, "What happened?"

"I told you. The fence."

"That's one aggressive fence."

"You don't know the half of it." He said, burying his face in his hands. "It's every DAY." He sighed. "Between almost all of my classes… At least in elementary and middle skool, half the kids didn't know what physical abuse was. Hell, half the kids still don't, but they DO know how to do damage."

I hugged him gently, so as not to hurt him. He twisted around and hugged me back, burying his face in my shoulder. "Love you." I said, quietly.

"Love you, too." He said.

I was surprised, to say simply. I hadn't heard him say that to me since he was twelve.

"Allyson! Allyson!"

"Bedroom!"

Dib came bounding into the room, almost hitting the doorframe in the process. I looked up at him and gasped. There were several bloody cuts on his face and hands. "Oh, Dib, what happened?"

"Never mind that," he said, wiping the blood from his eyes. "You'll never believe what happened today!"

"You were fed through a wood chipper?" I headed to the bathroom to get the disinfectant.

"No. There's this kid in our class… He just got here today. Allyson, he's not human… I just know it! He's an alien, I just KNOW it! I can just FEEL it!" Dib took the alcohol doused cotton swab from me and started to dab his wound with it, wincing as the alcohol stung the open cuts.

"And HE did this to you?"

"Kind of. He pushed me into someone's yard. They really should have a 'beware of dog' sign on their fence somewhere…"

"Man, that dog scratched you up pretty badly…"

"Eh, I'll be alright…" he said, dismissively. "But the ALIEN, Allyson! Everything we were hearing up on the roof for the last how many years? It was REAL!!! I TOLD you! I TOLD you they were coming!" he smiled widely; I smiled back.

Dib launched himself into a very elaborate recap of the day.

Apparently, the other kids at skool hadn't believed him about the alien, even though, Dib said, it was so obvious that Zim WAS an alien…Then, once skool let out, he had chased the kid clear across town, was pushed into the yard where he'd gotten cut up, followed a trail of smoke from the alien's FLYING DOG, reached it's bizarre house with sleep-cuffs at the ready and right as he had the alien cornered, on of the lawn gnomes in Zim's yard turned to him and blasted the cuffs, disintegrating them!

And without anything to actually capture Zim with, he had come home.

Well, after that point, Dib had a habit of coming home with a few cuts and bruises. Eventually, I couldn't tell if he was still being assaulted at skool, or if the bruises were from chasing Zim halfway across the city. I imagined that it was the latter, because every day he'd come home excited and full of energy, usually rambling off about what had happened that day.

"So, after that, I realized that it was just a hologram projection, and right at that moment, the worlds biggest water balloon comes hurtling right towards me. The entire town is completely flooded." He finished, with a big gesture.

I laughed lightly, watching him ring out his coat and towel-dry his hair. The poor boy was completely soaked. "Just be happy you didn't drown!" I said, handing him a dry towel. A small pile was starting to collect on the bathroom floor.

"No kidding…" he mumbled into the towel. "But at least I know a major weakness! Zim won't go anywhere NEAR water!"

The door slammed open, almost hitting me (not that it would have really mattered.). Gaz stood there, looking… angry. But that wasn't much of a surprise… "Dad just called. He said that he can't come home tonight. Do you know why?"

Dib stopped drying off and looked up at his sister. "Uh…"

"He can't come home because his car is completely water logged."

"Oh." I said. This wasn't going well already. The kids had been able to wad through the water and come home, but the professor's labs were clear across town.

"Hey, that's ZIM'S fault. HE was the one who dropped the 6000 ton water balloon on the town."

"But whose dumb idea was it to have a water balloon fight in the FIRST place?" She picked up one of the wet towels on the floor and threw it at him.

"Jeeze, Gaz. Chill out." He said, catching the towel.

"Chill out?" she picked up another fistful of towels. "Because of you, we're going to miss family dinner night. Dad can only spend one night a YEAR with us. And YOU messed it up." She came at him, flinging the towels at him. Dib backed up away from his sister, falling over the rim of the bathtub.

"Oh!" we cried simultaneously. I tried to help him up, but Gaz turned on me.

"But out, Allyson!" she roared, already halfway turned back to her brother.

"I'm sorry, Gaz. How was I supposed to know that he was going to flood the entire town?"

"You WILL be sorry, mark my word. I swear, I'm going to make you wish you had drowned in that flood." She threw the remainder of the towels that she had in her fist in his face and then stalked off, out of the bathroom.

I helped Dib up out of the bathtub; he looked shaken. "She means it you know." He said, as he continued to dry himself off as if nothing had happened. "She's going to make my life miserable until family dinner night next year."