Shawna’s eyes burned from all the tears that had fallen in the last twenty-four hours. Her brain had been picked apart and scrambled like an egg in a fine restaurant, and her bones ached from the sobs that wretched her body back and forth. Paint was splattered unceremoniously across the plain white walls of her bedroom, and the light from her fish tank danced obliquely on the red and blue splotches. An unfinished canvas lay broken harshly in two at the end of her bed. My own eyes glittered with tears that matched Shawna’s fingernail polish. Her moans and sobs ripped her back and forth in my arms like a runaway sailboat on the high sea, and as hard as I tried to comfort her that night, the pain still ran fresh in her mind. The torment in her normally soft, calm voice brought more tears gushing from beneath my eyelashes. The night around us stood still and calm in the gently whispering breeze. It was almost as though the storm outside had paused in order to wreak havoc on Shawna’s soul. As her wailing sobs decreased to high-pitched hiccup-like noises, her fingers intertwined with my own. My chocolate-colored skin beside her soft ivory hand suddenly reminded me of cookies and cream. The deep color against the white told a story far better than any I would have been able to spit out that night. Her head fell back against my chest and inside it felt like I was about to throw up. Shawna’s ankle was twisted when I found her in the alley behind Gary’s Bar. The red strappy high heels that had framed her delicate legs so perfectly earlier that night lay in pieces behind the back door. On one the heel had completely broken off. Her chestnut hair was stringy and covered with blood, and her black tube-style dress was in tatters. She hadn’t screamed then, she hadn’t been able to. All she had done when I made my way toward her was stare wide-eyed like a child that had lost its innocence. The gun was nowhere to be found. Her purse was missing too. The wallet, cell phone, and chapstick must have fallen out when they shoved her out the window. Her voice dropped to a soft mew as I held her close. Her body had finally stopped shaking so violently. My fingers ran over what was left of her dress carefully in attempt to cover her up. How had they justified their actions? How could they sleep with themselves at night? How could they hurt her, Shawna, my Shawna? My heart pounded like a racehorse in my chest and I wanted nothing more than to put her torn soul back together again, to protect her from the memories that ran like a roll of never-ending film in the back of her mind. I wanted to scream out from the rooftops that these men were criminals. I wanted to go straight down to the nearest police station and force the description out of Shawna. I wanted to hurt Josh and Jason for hurting her. “Levi?” she whispered hoarsely. A wall flung itself up over my violent thoughts and a sad smile spread over my face as I hugged her closer. I felt so terribly responsible for encouraging her to go to the party that night with her friends, for thinking, even for a second, that she “needed to get out”. What she had needed was someone to protect her from the world outside her stained-glass window, and I’d let her down. My eyes stung with hot, piercing tears as I remembered the mascara running down her once-innocent face. She had looked up at me, her eyes pleading for me to rescue her. Jason and Josh had been long gone by then. I was screaming bloody murder inside and out. They’d slipped a date-rape drug into Shawna’s plastic glass of Sprite when she was talking with a guy from her Civics class. There hadn’t even been alcohol mixed in, it was just Sprite. Shawna would never have touched alcohol. Before she’d known what was going on, they’d had her upstairs in a bedroom. After they’d had their fun, Shawna woke up screaming. They’d pushed her toward the window trying to get her to be quiet, to stop screaming rape in their ears. She’d fallen through the glass. They had ripped her dress to pieces, and everything she’d had when she’d left my father’s house earlier that morning was gone. Her innocence, confidence, faith, and hope that God would see her through; all gone. Her voice suddenly burst out in a heart-wrenching sob. I stroked her hair tenderly with my fingertips and slowly maneuvered her head against my chest in an attempt to block out Shawna’s rushed recollection when I’d found her. How could they have dared hurt a pastor’s daughter? My head lulled against Shawna’s as my broken heart weighed heavy in my chest. The sun was coming up through the stained-glass window and brilliant pinks, purples, and golds blocked out the destruction of last night’s storm. If only innocence could be reborn each sunrise as well.