I didn't know what to say. My mouth fell open in a silent 'oh,' and my mind raced with incomplete thoughts. How could he...? Why would he...? Why didn't she stop him from...? Why didn't she defend herself? Why didn't she tell someone? She looked into my eyes, and all those thoughts spilled from my mouth.

"How could he do that? Why would he do that? Why didn't you stop him? Why didn't you defend yourself?" She looked away. "Cindy!"

"Because I couldn't! I couldn't stop him! Don't you think I would have if I could?!" she sobbed.

"You know ty kwon do!" It didn't make sense. "You're the strongest person I know! Why didn't you hit him back? Stop him from..." I couldn't say it. The thought kept stopping mid-way through processing in my brain. Nick had taken, stolen, Cindy's... I felt sick to my stomach.

"I used to be the strongest person you know," she said quietly, rocking back and forth, "But everyone else grew, whereas I didn't. He's six feet tall, Sheen! I'm five two. He's got a good sixty pounds on me. You really think I could stop him from doing anything, anything he wanted to do to me?"

I couldn't breathe when she said those words. The word 'anything' sounded so sinister. I didn't want to think about what he could have– no, what he had done to my friend. And Cindy was my friend. I didn't know it before, but when she was human (which she was, underneath) she was just a tiny, fourteen-year-old girl who had been hurt in an unimaginable way. What if it had been another girl? What if it had been Libby? We had to stop this guy from what he was doing. I wanted to kill him, and I'd never felt that way before.

"Cindy, you have to tell the police." She shivered noticeably, and shook her head, spraying me with water from her pigtails.

"No! No. Sheen, I can't," she whispered. "It's my fault, and everyone will know... God, I'll be like B-Betty Quinlan!" She shivered violently again.

"But what if he does it again, to another girl? Cindy, Nick has girlfriends coming out the yin-yang, and has half a dozen others that want to be one of them. What if Britney is next? Or one of the others? He can't get away with this!"

"No one else refused him," Cindy told me with wide eyes, "He said that." She laughed mirthlessly, and I shivered (and not from the cold of the rain, though it was freezing!). "The stupid thing is, I didn't even like him."

"Then why were you going out with him? He's a jerk! Even more so since he..." She glared at me, and I closed my mouth.

"I was using him to make someone else jealous."

"And he didn't know that?"

"Nope. He thought I was just being stubborn." She sighed. "I signed the pledge, Sheen. It's not fair. I wanted to wait. I'm fourteen! It's not fair!"

"In episode six hundred nineteen, Ultralady was almost taken advantage of by Doctor Destruction after she was captured by his Destruct-oh-robot goons." Trying to relate her problem to Ultralord was a hard one, because this stuff obviously just doesn't happen on children's TV. The closest I could get was an 'almost,' but still.

She sighed, but played along. "What did Ultralord do?"

"He saved her, then killed him." She cocked and eyebrow and gave me the 'Cindy stare'. "I don't think I can kill Nick and hide the body before someone notices he's missing, though. I'm sorry." Cindy laughed (a real laugh, not that creepy laugh she'd done before), and the tiny amount of colour it brought to her pale, sunken cheeks made her look less like a walking corpse than she had before.

"You're right. The police would catch on sooner or later. Thanks anyway, Sheen." She twirled a pigtail around one finger, thinking. "Why are you being so nice to me?" I opened my mouth to reply, and found that I couldn't. I didn't know why, exactly. Cindy was always so mean to me and my friends. I never thought I liked her, but...

"Because you're my friend." A clap of thunder hit right after the word left my mouth. Cindy jumped.

"What? But I'm so mean to you! Why would you try to help me?"

"Because I'm your friend, Cindy. I don't know how it happened, or why, but I care about you."

"Oh." She paused, then looked me in the eye. "And you're not being a spaz today because...?"

"I actually took my medication this morning."

"Oh." The rain started to ease up a little, slowing to a light drizzle. Cindy looked up at the dark sky and frowned. "It's not fair." She shivered, and her teeth began to chatter. "I hate him." I nodded.

"I hate him, too." I looked over at her, then stood up from the bench. My knees, having been in the same position on the cold, wet bench protested— but I just stretched them and stomped my feet to try to get rid of the pins-and-needles feeling in them. "Come on, it's cold. Let's get you home before you freeze to death." Cindy looked up at me from where she still sat on the bench, her eyes as cold as ice.

"I'm not going back there."

I gave her a confused look. "You're not going home? Why not?"

"I can't take it anymore! My mother is convinced at Nick is a gift from God, or something. She keeps going on about how wonderful he is, how thoughtful he is. 'Oh, how polite your new boyfriend is, Cynthia! Why don't you invite him to dinner tomorrow? He is such a better influence on you than that Neutron boy was!'" She said the praises for the bastard in an imitation of her mother's low, slightly-accented drawl. She laughed. "And of course that started a new fight between my parents, because where my mother approves of Nick, my dad doesn't like him nearly as much. So no, Sheen, I am not going home to where I will have to listen to my parents throw things and scream and argue about how wonderful the boy who ruined my life is!" He put her head down on her knees, her pigtails flopping forward.

"Then you're coming home with me." The response was immediate, impulsive, and completely not thought through. Her head snapped up to glare at me again, her mouth open in a half-grimace.

"Why on Earthwould I do that?" That was the defensive 'normal' Cindy shining though. I might have seen her with her guard down for a few minutes, but I wasn't even expecting it to last as long as it had, so I wasn't surprised. I took her answer in stride, though, and answered her with my own snarky remark.

"Oh, I didn't realise you'd rather sit on a park bench in the rain and kill yourself with hypothermia than be in a warm house with dry blankets and some company." I spun on my heel and began to walk purposefully away from her with long, quick strides and my shoulders hunched as though I was upset. Three, two, one... I counted in my head.

"Sheen, wait!" I resisted the urge to smile as I turned back to her. She was on her feet with her hands clasped behind her back, her head tilted to one side. She bit her lip and straightened, balling her hands into fists by her sides. "I'll come with you, but I'm not happy about it."

I nodded and waited for her to catch up with me. When she was at my side, we started to walk to my place. Down Jimmy's street, right past her house, she kept her eyes looking straight ahead and her arms wrapped tightly around her tiny body, though she looked as though she was itching to take a peek in her house's direction. I did for her, and saw the shadows of two adults (presumably her parents) in the window to their living room. One shadow was waving their arms around, while the other seemed to be throwing small objects across the room.

I put a hand on Cindy's back and quickened my pace a little, a grimace on my face. How could everyone have been so stupid? Her parents, Jimmy, Libby, and Britney— none of them noticed how fragile Cindy really was. None of them noticed how she'd changed in the past few weeks, how she'd been sending S.O.S. signals to everyone around her. No one had noticed in time to stop Nick from doing what he'd done.

I was freezing, yet I felt as though my blood was boiling. When I got to school on Monday, Nicholas Dean would have hell to pay.