Disclaimer: I do not own the Percy Jackson characters at all, and I don't own any of the ideas from the novel The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton either.

"Rachel, are you sure you're okay?" I asked my red-headed best friend, rubbing my hands softly on her shoulder so I could get her to look at me. We were currently at her house right now, and I came there to drop something off, but I had immediately halted when I saw her crying figure. I've been trying to comfort her for the past half an hour, but to no avail. That didn't stop me though. I wasn't going to leave until she absolutely needed me to. And even then, I was still here for moral support.

"Wha-what? I'm...I'm fine, why would you think I wasn't?" she replied, still not bringing her face to my eyesight.

I skimmed a quick glance at her ripped clothes, her sticking-up flaming hair, and I didn't even need to look down once to notice that she was missing one shoe. And she wasn't wearing a sock on the foot that she was wearing the shoe. Even though that was normal for a crazy girl like Rachel, something still didn't feel right. "I can think of plenty of reasons."

"I'm fine, Piper," she repeated. "Really."

"You can talk to me, you know that, right? I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere," I told her.

She sniffled loudly, and she wiped her eyes furiously. Then she buried her face completely in her hands and let out a raucous sob. I instinctively reached out and pulled her almost limp body towards mine, and she let her face be hidden in my shoulder. I felt my eyebrows and lips crease and drip with nothing but confusion and concern before letting my fingers run through her long hair and just holding her while she cried into my chest.

I knew that she didn't want me to speak right now, so I didn't dare say a word. And even if I had, she seemed too tired and exhausted to even have the energy to reply back full-heartedly. "I-I'm fine...I am," she whispered again and again, for some reason wanting to be quiet and keep talking at the same time.

"Shhh..." I said gently, still holding her. "You don't have to say anything if you don't want to. I am sorry if I forced you to."

"You didn't," she sobbed, "I needed it. I need to speak. You didn't."

I nodded, kissing the top of her head sisterly. "It's okay, Rachel. You don't need to speak."

"No," she muffled out, finally raising her head and body enough so that I could see her tear-stricken face. "I need this. I can't keep pretending that this doesn't bother me. It doesn't even make sense for me to even think that I'm fine. It's been going on for about two months now. I always thought that I had to accept it by now, but..." she was cut off by another wracking sob.

By this point I thought for sure that she was talking about Percy and Annabeth being together. After all, it was absolutely obvious that she had raging mixed feelings about the boy, but I never thought that she might possibly be in love with him. But then again...Rachel was never the one to cry about some boy. She would never resort to that. At least, I didn't think so. I always thought that she had learned to accept them by now. I looked once again at the girl and saw her tears were still streaming down her face.

No. Whatever happened to Rachel, it had absolutely nothing to do with whatever the hell she was feeling about Percy Jackson. Even that kid would never be able to cause her this much pain. I would have slapped so hard, he wouldn't even be capable of hurting someone like that again. Best friends since childhood, or not.

"Piper...it's my dad," my eyebrows jumped at this, but I didn't dare cut her off. "You know the reason why my dad isn't here that often?"

I nodded my head. "Yeah, because he has work or something, right? Just like mine."

"Not exactly. No," she shook her head, sniffling again but the tears had finally stopped for now. "He's in the hospital, Piper. He's sick."

I blankly stared at her. "What?"

"He had this disease or something. While he was at work. You know how he traveled a bit, right? For research? Well, one of those places were in Africa," she said, her lips beginning to tremble again.

I nodded solemnly. "Yeah. He left to go there two months ago, and you're grandmother is watching you. I remember."

"Piper..." she said, the tears silently falling down again, as if they were also equally sympathizing for her. "He has malaria and a bunch of other things he caught on while he was there studying. In fact, he's been in Africa ever since he left. I haven't even seen him. We don't even have enough money to pay for the entire fee; we can only send a little bit, and that's why he isn't...isn't dead right now. Because there's no one supporting our family anymore. It was always just him and me."

"Why didn't you tell us? We could have helped," I whispered to her, some tears of my own escaping my eyes. It hurt seeing her cry like that. Rachel and I weren't the closest out of the gang, but we still had a really tight bond. Seeing her cry made me cry. It was just as simple as that.

"I...I don't know. I thought that if I didn't say anything then maybe it wouldn't be true. My dad and I did everything together, Piper. Do you have any idea how hard it is to just think that the one thing that was really always there in your life, might just disappear one day? So I didn't say anything." By this time she was full-out bawling, and I held her once more, trying to put myself in her shoes. It seemed to me that everyone nowadays were having their own little daddy problems, but Rachel's was definitely the worst out of all of them.

"Am I the first person you told or found out?"

She shook her head in my shirt. "No. He found out the first day I did. He could read something was wrong all over my face."

"Who?" I dared to ask.

She sniffed again and whispered almost mournfully, "Percy."

And so I held her even tighter.

A month later, half of the school year had already skimmed right past my eyes and that was the very first time I started to notice that something was downright off with the Socs. I always had known that something was bothering them, but I didn't think that it was something that bad. The first person I had noticed there was something wrong with, was Hazel Levesque, that new addition along with her boyfriend in Jason's gang.

It was during Chemistry class, first period, and she was coughing a lot more that she should have. Sure, the toxic fumes were a lot to handle, but we had a covering on our noses so it was hard to take it in. I shrugged it off at first because I just thought that she didn't put the mask on right or something. She seemed a little better after class, though. That was enough to reassure me for the time being.

The next thing was Dakota, and he just seemed more fatigued that normal. He was falling asleep in random classes, and I even saw him practically passed out on the floor by his locker.

The thing that really got me was Jason and Reyna opening up their lockers and bringing out a couple of bags. He took the bag from Reyna and started distributing them to some of the equally worn out and haggard Socs. What was even in those bags? Another quick glance at it made me realize that there was actual healthy food in there. Now the situation was just getting weird.

The Socs received the bag from Jason and thanked them gratefully, which was a look I never thought that I would live to see the day it would appear on their faces. It just never occurred to me that they would actually be thankful about receiving help from others. They always had seemed so proud before. But now...they looked humble.

I realized I was staring at them for a while because Jason turned from handing one of the bags to a small freshman, and he looked at me with a tired expression on his face. He paused what he was doing and frowned in my direction. Obviously he hadn't wanted me to see the exchange. Actually, now that I had thought of it, they were perched there in a really awkward corner, and I turned around slightly to see that my Greaser friends didn't even notice what was going on.

Even though the Socs might not even be that proud as they constantly let people know they are, they really do try their best to hide it. I looked back at Jason to see him still staring at me. It was obvious he wanted to know what I was going to do about this. Whether he expected me to holler out to everyone and make fun of them like they had been doing to the Greasers all year long, or to keep my trap shut, I didn't know.

But if he expected me to actually humiliate him in the most embarrassing way possible in front of everybody, then he was dead wrong. Because there was nothing funny with being weak. Or poor. Or starved. Or sick. Or plainly being a Greaser.

Because the Socs were sure as hell acting like all of them. And I wasn't laughing about it at all. And to anybody who would, then they were ten times worse than any weak, poor, starved, sick, Greaser could ever be.

So I stared back at him with equal intensity, but I didn't say a word.

A/N: I guess this chapter had something to do with my mood. This is the first time I updated since school started, and let me tell you, I was definitely not prepared for this. I've been having five hours worth of homework every single day, and it's only been two weeks. But I know I shouldn't be complaining. This chapter I wrote pretty much explains why.

Till next time,

Penguin