How she outsmarted a rapist: twenty-year-old Shaina Drouillard eluded her would-be attacker by thinking fast. Then she helped put him behind bars.(REAL-LIFE READS: THE Cosmo Post)

Each weekday morning, Shaina used to leave her home in Queens, New York, at 6:30 to commute to her job as a health aide in Hempstead, Long Island. At that early hour, the streets of her normally bustling neighborhood were nearly empty, and Shaina relished those moments of quiet and calmness. That all changed on the morning of June 13, 2006, when a stranger approached her as she waited at the bus stop.

"First he asked me for the time," remembers Shaina. "Then he said, 'I have a gun in my pocket, and if you don't do what I want, I'm going to kill you.'"

"What do you want?" she had asked, her voice trembling.

"I want to fuck you, and you're gonna like it!" he shot back.

Though panic-stricken, Shaina managed to have enough presence of mind to try to talk her way out of being raped. "I told him I had my period, thinking it might gross him out," she says.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It didn't. The man grabbed her wrist and started to lead her through a dark parking lot behind a post office. "I couldn't stop crying, and my legs were so shaky, I could hardly ...