Chapter 1

Ira

“ W hat letter does it look like?” Vera peered at the long potato peel she’d just thrown on the scuffed floor of my scarcely furnished living room.

From what I’d heard, we were supposed to use an apple for this activity. It had to be peeled so that the entire skin would come off in one long ribbon. A woman would then toss it over her shoulder on the night of Sviatky, which took place twelve days after Christmas. When the peel fell on the floor, it supposedly formed the first letter of the name of the man the woman was to marry.

That was one of the many ways women used to try to glimpse into their future from ancient times, before the Great October Revolution happened at the beginning of this century and all religions, pagan and otherwise, had been officially declared the poison of the masses. However, many of the pagan traditions had endured, including the simple rituals that my friends and I were performing tonight, trying to peer into the future.

It was supposed to be done in January, not June, like it was now. Apples wouldn’t ripen for a while yet. All I had in the house were potatoes. So, the results couldn’t be true anyway. But school had been out for a week, and we were looking for something to do other than chores.

Tanya tilted her head and squinted at the potato peel. “It looks like an ‘I,’ I think.”

“I... Like in Igor? Igor Petrenko?” Vera cringed. “Fuck, please no. He has like no teeth.”

“He won’t grow old enough to marry,” Tanya said matter-of-factly and shrugged in response to my questioning glance. “Mama said his teeth are rotting because of some shit he and his stepdad are cooking and taking to get high. She said it’ll kill them both soon enough.”

Alcohol was expensive, so people were constantly in search of substitutes. For as long as I remembered, my parents’ poison of choice had always been moonshine. My dad distilled it from potatoes or from birch juice in our kitchen, making the whole house stink. Mama never minded the stench because making and selling moonshine was the one reliable thing Dad did that brought money.

Dad hadn’t made any moonshine for a while, though. But somehow, he’d managed to get drunk even more often lately. The morning when Mama disappeared, about a month ago, I’d found him passed out on the front porch with his face down in his own vomit. By some miracle, he’d survived. He’d slept for a day, cleaned himself up a bit, then left again. He’d been in and out of the house ever since, leaving me to fend for myself.

Not that he’d ever looked after me even when he was around. I’d been pretty much on my own most of my life, even before Mama left. Since I was eight, I’d been helping Baba Nadya with her huge garden in exchange for fresh milk and potatoes because Dad sold the only cow we used to have. I had also maintained our garden after Mama gave up on it years ago. I collected seeds every fall and got some manure from the Kolenchiks for helping them clean their barn.

“Maybe the “I” is for Ivan?” Vera said hopefully.

“You mean Baba Masha’s grandson?” I asked.

Ivan would be a much better choice than Igor. Years ago, his parents had moved to the city and taken Ivan along. His dad even got a car. Ivan only came to our village in the summer now. It’d be great for Vera if she married Ivan and moved to the city. Except that like Baba Masha often said, Ivan’s parents wouldn’t want a “dirty village girl” for a daughter-in-law.

Vera knew it. She wrinkled her nose in a doubtful expression.

“Ivan would be good,” Tanya agreed. “He’s cute.”

“Whatever.” Vera kicked the peel along the floor. “All boys are gross and stupid, anyway. Let’s do the one with the mirrors now.”

A shiver of apprehension ran down my back. “That’s a scary one.”

“What’s so scary about it?” Tanya propped the mirror from Mama’s bedroom against the back of the couch.

It was an old foggy mirror in a thin metal frame that was bent and rusty in places. It wasn’t big enough to have it on the floor, so we had it on the couch, with an even smaller mirror in a white plastic frame positioned in front of it.

“It doesn’t stay on its own.” Vera shoved the smaller mirror into my hands. “You’ll have to hold it.”

“Me? Am I going first?” I gripped the plastic frame of the mirror so hard, my knuckles turned white.

“Don’t be a scaredy cat,” Tanya scoffed.

Vera struck a match to light two short candles. “This one is not about boys. You’ll get to see your future, Ira.”

“But they say you may see ghosts too,” I muttered softly, as if the ghosts could hear me. Chills spread through my chest, and I gripped the frame even harder to stop my fingers from trembling.

“What’s so scary about ghosts?” Tanya shrugged. “It’s not like they can hurt you. They’re dead. Oh, what if you see the ghost of your mama?”

My heart ached at that. I’d just recently stopped crying at night, and now tears prickled behind my eyelids anew. I bit the inside of my cheek until the coppery scent of blood hit my tongue. The sting of physical pain helped to keep the tears at bay.

“My mama isn’t dead, stupid,” I snapped. “How can there be a ghost of her?”

“Oh yeah? But why did your dad dig in the old potato field behind the bus stop the night she was gone? Nastya Kolenchik saw him.”

“Nastya Kolenchik wags her tongue a lot, everyone knows it. She makes up shit.” I shrugged, trying to look calm, even as everything inside me screamed.

Mama left weeks ago, and no one was looking for her. No one ever would.

People disappeared sometimes. Both men and women. It must be normal, I assumed, since no one particularly worried about them or searched especially hard. Vera’s grandpa, for example, had gone fishing five years ago and never came back. They said he must’ve fallen into the river drunk. They said Mama might’ve found a new lover and left with him, but some said she was dead. Either way, no one would investigate it. The only melicia station was two villages over, and they had a lot to do as it was.

The villagers would gossip for a while, then they’d settle on a version of the truth that suited them the most and move on. And so it would remain, unless my mama came back one day and proved them wrong, or her dead body was found.

“Whatever. Let’s just do it. It’s dark enough outside already.” Vera dripped some hot wax from the burning candles on two chipped saucers, then stuck the candles into the wax. “Or I’ll just go home.”

Tanya glanced at our curtainless window in a wooden frame with peeling white paint. “It’s really dark out there. If you leave, I’m coming with you, Vera. I’m not walking at night alone.”

Vera smirked, like a badass that she really wasn’t. “What? Are you afraid to get raped or something?”

“Aren’t you?”

“It’s not rape if you don’t fight it,” Vera said flippantly. “Like my mama always says, ‘If it happens, just lay back and enjoy.’”

Tanya cringed. “What’s there to enjoy?”

Vera lost her virginity last year. How and with whom, she wouldn’t tell. But by her own brazen admission, she’d been with a lot of men since. Villagers shook their heads, lamenting she grew up to be a whore just like her mama. Like Tanya and I, Vera was only thirteen, but people had already labeled her a whore, blaming her for the actions of the men she’d been with.

Tanya told me in secret that she’d also already had sex with the boy she was dating. The boy was also seeing an older girl, who would “give him what he wanted,” and Tanya was hoping that now that she gave him that too, he’d stop seeing that other girl.

I hoped for Tanya’s sake that he would. But then what did I know? I was still a virgin, and the more I learned about sex, the less I wanted to have anything to do with it, if only it was up to me.

“If you fight them,” Vera continued with the practicality beyond her age, “you’re gonna end up with a black eye, like the one that Ilyinishna is sporting. Have you seen her lately?”

I rubbed my upper arms. “She said she fell.”

“Yeah right, fell and landed on her eye.” Vera smirked. “It’s a good thing you wear glasses, Ira. Boys don’t like girls with glasses, anyway. That’s why they don’t bug you.”

Except that they did “bug” me. My thick, cheap glasses might’ve deterred boys from asking me out, but they didn’t make me immune to being groped behind the school building or being spied on in the bathroom. I hadn’t even been kissed yet, but I had already fought my way out of a few situations where the boys wanted far more than just kissing.

“So,” Vera prompted. “Are we doing it or not? Because if not, I’m leaving.”

If they left, I’d be alone. During the day, I didn’t mind it, but nights could be scary, especially after the drunk older boys had broken the glass in my bedroom window two weeks ago. They scared me so much that night, I’d been sleeping on the couch in the living room ever since.

If I could keep Vera and Tanya here longer, hopefully, I’d be tired enough to fall asleep quickly, instead of lying on the couch and listening to every noise this old log house made at night.

“No, guys. Stay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I propped the smaller mirror against my shoulder while Vera and Tanya held a candle on each side of it.

“Now make a corridor and wish to see your future,” Vera instructed.

I straightened the smaller mirror, making it reflect in the bigger one. The reflection bounced from one mirror to the other, back and forth to infinity, forming a long dark corridor of shadows lit by the two candles on each side.

“What do you want your future to be like?” Tanya asked.

“I...I don’t know. I just want to be happy, I guess?”

Except that I couldn’t even define what “happy” meant. To me, happiness was just an abstract idea, where I wouldn’t be cold, or hungry, or alone. My imagination didn’t reach far beyond that. In the thirteen years I’d been alive, I hadn’t seen a single example of true happiness.

My parents weren’t happy. They screamed at each other when they were together and couldn’t care less if they were apart. Everyone in our village had their share of problems that they tried to drown in drinking, or fighting, or both.

The only adult I enjoyed having around was Natalia Borisovna, my Language and Literature teacher. She was young, just out of university. She came to our school through a contract with the government that had granted her admission into the university under the condition that after graduation, she’d work a year in a rural area like ours, where few teachers wished to live permanently. But Natalia Borisovna’s year was up. She left at the end of May and returned to the city.

Maybe that was where happiness resided? In the city?

“So? What do you see?” Vera shifted at my side impatiently, making the flame of her candle flicker.

The light bounced back with a gazillion reflections, forcing the shadows to shift and lurch down the endless, dark corridor inside the mirror. At the end of it, all I could see was darkness.

Was that what my future held? A dark nothingness?

It was a grim realization for a thirteen-year-old. But we all matured early here, and maturity meant looking at things realistically. Nothing bright or shiny waited for me in our village, only a dead-end life.

As if sensing my somber thoughts, Tanya heaved a sigh. Her candle flickered, nearly going out. The mirror tunnel darkened, momentarily turning into a black abyss. The shadows solidified in the middle, looking impenetrable.

The flame of Tanya’s candle burst back to life, mirroring the one on Vera’s side. The two lights stretched down the corridor until the reflections turned from gold to silver.

Then, I saw a face.

A pale, beautiful woman stared back at me from the mirror. Her silver-gray eyes studied my face, moving from my eyes to my nose to my mouth, then back again. She was dressed in a dark long robe over a white shirt. And she saw me.

“Ahh...” My mouth fell open.

I shrank back from the couch. The mirror slipped from my shoulder and crashed to the floor. The old glass cracked, breaking into four jagged pieces.

“Fuck, Ira!” Vera leaped back, narrowly avoiding a cut to her bare knee. “What did you do that for?”

“Hey, what did you see?” Tanya asked softly. “Was it your mama?”

The woman in the mirror had luminous pale skin, raven-black hair that blended with shadows, and silver eyes that glistened like stars. She couldn’t be any more different from my mother who had ruddy skin, a bulbous nose that was permanently red from heavy drinking, and light-brown hair that I’d inherited.

“No. It wasn’t Mama.”

“Then who was it?” Vera asked.

“I don’t know.”

I had no idea who the woman was. I had never seen anyone like her before. But she looked real, and I wished she had stayed.

I LAY ON THE COUCH in our living area with the kitchen just behind a partial wall.

The girls left shortly after the mirror had broken. I’d walked out with them to use the outhouse. After returning to the house, I locked the door, made sure all the windows were also locked, then propped a chair under the handle of the closed door to my bedroom. I put a plate on top of the chair, then an upturned glass, and finally balanced a fork on top of the glass. This way, if anyone were to climb through the broken window in the bedroom to get to me in the living room, they’d tip the chair with all the dishes and hopefully make enough noise for me to wake up and run. A heavy sleeper like me needed a lot of noise to wake up.

Only sleep wouldn’t come to me tonight as I lay on the couch, clutching the knife I’d kept under my pillow ever since Mama left.

The wind howled in the rafters somewhere. A mouse scratched inside a wall. The miraculous vision of the silver-eyed woman in the mirror tunnel didn’t stay in my thoughts for long, replaced by real-life concerns I faced.

Mama was gone. Dad said she left us. If so, I didn’t blame her, I just wished she’d taken me along.

If the rumors were true, however, then she hadn’t run anywhere at all but lay dead in the old potato field. Maybe I should borrow a shovel from Baba Nadya and dig behind the bus stop tomorrow. I’d look for Mama since no one else would.

The front door screeched open, then slammed shut. I jumped on my couch, pulling the knife out. Then realized it must’ve been Dad coming home since he was the only one who had the house key. His stumbling footsteps and grunting noises confirmed it. At least he didn’t crash on the front porch this time, managing to get inside on his own.

I stuck the knife back under the pillow and lay down, pretending to be asleep. Hopefully, he’d just go straight to his bedroom without trying to speak to me. Listening to his mumbling rants would be a waste of time. But at least when he was too drunk to stand upright, he couldn’t punch hard enough to hurt.

Instead of the bedroom, however, Dad stomped into the kitchen, mumbling, “I’ve got nothing, man... Nothing. The bitch left. Took everything. But I need it. I’ll pay you later. I’m good for it, man... I swear.”

He wasn’t talking to himself. Someone came with him, as another set of footsteps followed him into the kitchen. Then, the light flicked on, illuminating the space behind the partial wall and out of my view.

“You really think she’s left, huh? You don’t remember anything at all?” a male voice replied. I didn’t think I’d heard that voice before.

“What’s there to remember? She’s gone. Took everything. Now, I’ve got nothing.”

“You’ve never had anything, you idiot. You’ve long traded for booze anything worth something. But booze is cheap, and the potato piss you distill is even cheaper. But this here...” A chair screeched, being shoved aside, then a plastic bag crinkled. “This shit is expensive, dude. I told you before, it was gonna cost you.”

“I know, I know... But I need it now...” Dad’s voice dissolved into blubbering. “Take it. Whatever you want. Take the house...”

“This old shithole?” The man laughed. “What am I going to do with this rat-eaten log shack in Bumfuck Nowhere? Huts like this one are abandoned and rotting into the ground all over the place around here.”

“It’s a good house. Warm... big enough...” Dad was trying to talk up our “shithole,” which only made him sound even more pathetic.

“Hey, you have a daughter, don’t you?”

The stranger’s words shook every idea of sleep from me. I sat up, my eyes flying wide open.

Why was he talking about me?

“Yeah... Sure...” Dad mumbled. “I do. I do. Ira is her name. Ira, Irina,” he repeated, as if proud that he still remembered my name.

“Yeah, I saw her at my aunt’s house another day. She did some weeding. A young thing, isn’t she?” The male voice flowed lazily, like warm bacon fat, making me feel greasy just from hearing it.

Now, I recognized the man. He was Baba Nadya’s nephew, the one who lived in another village and came for a visit every now and then. I’d seen him smoking a cigarette on the back porch of Baba Nadya’s house as I was weeding her expansive tomato patch. At some point, he’d put the cigarette out and headed my way, but I was pretty much done with the weeding by then, so I just hopped the fence and ran home before he had a chance to get close. He was at least three times my age, fat, and bald, and I had nothing to talk to him about.

“I’ll take the girl for a bag of this,” the man said.

My insides froze, the chills spreading through to my limbs.

“The girl?” Dad sounded confused, not angry. Why was he not angry at that asshole? “What girl?”

“Your daughter. Ira.”

“Right. Ira... What do you want her for?”

“Just a little fun, buddy. Nothing you probably haven’t done with her yourself.”

My dad hadn’t touched me. Sometimes, I questioned whether he was my dad at all. I didn’t look like him. He was tall and lanky, with dark wavy hair. I was tall but more solid, with my mama’s lighter hair that held no curls whatsoever. My eyes were gray green, like bog water on a cold November day. Nothing like my parents, who both had blue eyes.

I wondered if Mama told him that I was his because it was the only way she knew how to protect me from the man I had to share the house with. Or maybe she did it to protect herself?

Either way, it’d worked so far. He never touched me, not in that way, anyway. He’d hit me plenty with a fist, or a belt, or whatever happened to be close by when I misbehaved or when he was in a bad mood. But that was it. Until now.

Now, he was trading me for drugs.

“Like... a night with her? For this whole bag?” He was considering it. No, he sounded like he’d already decided. He was just trying to figure out the price.

Deep inside, I knew that the man he was negotiating with could simply walk in here right now and take what he wanted for free. Dad would do nothing to stop him.

“A whole night?” The man laughed again. What a derisive sound that was. I hated it. “An hour would be more than enough, dude. For now, anyway.”

“Do I get just one bag?” Dad whined.

I didn’t listen to the rest of their negotiations. I slipped out from under my tattered cover, crossed the creaky floor as quietly as I could, removed my makeshift alarm system by the door, and tiptoed into my bedroom.

Here, I threw on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt, stuffed more clothes and whatever money I had saved by doing chores for others into my schoolbag, then climbed out of the broken window.

They’d be looking for me soon enough, but they didn’t even know whether I was in the house to begin with. With any luck, I’d have plenty of time to put a good distance between me and this place before anyone would notice my absence.

After a few days, Dad probably wouldn’t even remember he had a daughter at all. Just like he didn’t remember what happened to Mama.

I had a vague plan but a clear destination. I’d walk about fifteen kilometers to the next village. Then take the bus from there to the town. From there, I’d take the train to the city.

Quite a few people from our village had moved to the city. No one had ever come back. I figured the city was where happiness lived. And if so, that was the place where I should be too.

HOW BADLY I WAS MISTAKEN . The city, at least the version of it that I got to experience, held not a trace of happiness. On the contrary, with the larger number of people, the misery seemed to multiply here as well.

I lasted a few days on my own, sleeping behind garbage bins outside of an apartment complex at night and shoplifting food during the day. After an attack by the local gang during a melicia raid, I stopped hiding and let the authorities arrest me.

Afraid they would send me back to live with my dad, I faked memory loss, claiming I didn’t know who I was. It proved easy enough to do because I didn’t wish to remember it anyway. Once they’d determined I was underage, they sent me to an orphanage until my next-of-kin came forward to claim me.

As I’d expected, no one had come for me in the three years that followed. By now, I assumed both my parents were as good as dead. Even if they weren’t, they’d probably be glad I was someone else’s responsibility.

One morning, about three years after I’d become the ward of the state, I woke up to the sound of someone crying.

The girls’ bedroom was illuminated by the muddy yellow light of an early spring sunrise. It was time to wake up, but the day nurse hadn’t come in yet. Actually, she wasn’t called “a nurse” anymore, but “a sister.” Since the orphanage was privatized two years ago, its ownership went from the government to a charity organization that was funded by a church. Girls had been separated from the boys, which I didn’t mind at all, and instead of nurses and a supervisor, we now had sisters and a head mistress to look after us.

Thankfully, they had kept most of the teachers. I happened to like the school here. Some of the teachers I even liked more than Natalia Borisovna, more so because thinking of her made me remember the village where I came from, and I did not want to remember.

Another muffled sob came, prompting me to sit up in bed. The metal bed frame creaked as I turned around to my neighbor on the left. She was a few months older than me and belonged to the group of girls who often made others cry with their bullying and teasing. However, seeing her vulnerable like this stirred compassion in me.

“Vika? Are you okay?”

She quickly wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her nightshirt, then turned with her back to me. “Fuck off.”

Her response didn’t offend me. Rudeness was so common in my life, it almost felt like a norm. The appropriate response was to either be rude in return or just ignore it. I chose to ignore it. It was easier that way. The less people noticed me, the better off I was.

The morning shift sister finally swung open the door to our huge common bedroom.

“Wake-up time!” She flicked the lights on.

I squinted in the bright light of the long fluorescent tubes under the ceiling. It bounced off the glaringly white walls, making the space appear even brighter.

The girls climbed out of their beds. There was close to a hundred of us in the senior girls’ bedroom where I was moved to when I’d turned fourteen. I took the stack of my clothes from the nightstand next to my bed, the only piece of furniture each of us had to store all our worldly possessions in.

Life in the orphanage wasn’t too bad. The building was warm. They fed us three times a day. The food was bland and the menu boring, but I didn’t complain because despite my best efforts to forget, I still remembered what it was like going without any food at all.

We went to school Monday through Saturday, and after classes, we worked in the factory next door.

I didn’t mind being here. I accepted the monotonous routine, the inevitable bullying by the older girls, the yelling and the occasional slap from the staff, the rules and restrictions that often made little sense, and the unfair punishment that came from breaking them. Despite all of that, I felt safer here than back home or out on the streets. And safety was all that mattered.

As I was growing older, however, concerns started invading my mind. Next month, I’d be turning seventeen. And a year after that, I’d be graduating school. Then, like the other girls put it, I’d be “kicked out” for turning too old to stay in the orphanage.

I’d get my high school diploma and some money, then be “sent out into the world.” The money was barely enough for a few meals. The job we held with the factory was contracted through the charity organization; we lost it the moment we left the orphanage. And the high school diploma was of little use in the country where university graduates had to compete for table-waiting jobs to survive.

After perestrojka , the new way of life came with many sporadic changes. The government-owned companies went under. The privately owned ones couldn’t keep up with job creation. Unemployment was sky-high, and nepotism flourished.

I racked my brain about what to do next.

The older girls whispered about finding a “sponsor.” That was a fancy English word that came into our language along with other terms of capitalism. The girls talked about affluent men securing jobs and renting apartments for young women. In exchange, of course, the women gave the only thing they had—themselves.

I still hadn’t tried having sex, and not just because of the orphanage’s strict rules against dating. The idea of having a man’s hands on my naked body made my skin crawl with tiny imaginary spiders. From everything I’d learned about sex, back home and later in the city streets, it was always about the man’s pleasure. A woman was just a tool, a device for him to use.

But if a woman’s fate was just to serve as a device, then why not be the device that men paid to use? From that point of view, getting a sponsor made sense. Maybe my repulsion of sex would go away once I actually started doing it?

Except that to attract a sponsor, one had to be pretty. And I wasn’t sure if I made the cut in that department.

On my way back to our bedroom that night, I paused in front of the large mirror on the stair landing and took a good look at my reflection.

I was tall, maybe even too tall, one of the top ten tallest girls in our group. My body had gained some curves over the past few years, unfortunately not in all the ideal places. I had boobs. The buttons on my chest struggled to hold my dress closed with my breasts pushing against them as if trying to burst free. My belly protruded slightly both above and below my belt. My stomach was never completely flat even when I’d been starving. What remained flat, sadly, was my ass. My relatively narrow hips made my waist look wider, which was far from the classic feminine hour-glass shape that men seemed to prefer.

My hair was too dark for a blonde but too pale for a brunette. My eyes seemed too round to pull off a sultry look, and my lips too thin for a naturally sexy pout. I had freckles. And of course, I had my glasses in an outdated plastic frame that didn’t help.

Personally, it didn’t bother me how I looked. I was strong and healthy. This body had enabled me to weed a field all day and to work a mind-numbing assembly line at the factory six days a week. I was capable and willing to work hard. Except that the world didn’t seem to value these abilities enough for me to earn a living. Someone like me—with no family, no money, and no connections—had to at least be beautiful in order to survive.

A shadow fell across the mirror. The thought of the silver-eyed woman flashed through my mind. Every now and then, I’d think about her pale face and the surprise in her eyes that turned to kindness as she looked at me. By now, however, the vision of her had faded in my memories, becoming nothing more than an echo of a dream.

Instead, the face of the night-shift sister appeared in the mirror next to me.

“Time to go to bed,” she reminded me.

I’d hardly spoken to her before now, but the anxiety about the future prompted me to ask, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

She gave me a surprised look.

“Vanity is a sin, Ira.” The reprimand came out flat, with no passion behind it, as if the sister had grown tired of her own mantra. She heaved a sigh, then said in a more animated voice, “You know what they say, ‘Don’t be born beautiful, be born happy.’”

Happiness remained an abstract concept to me. I still associated it mostly with safety and security, nothing more.

“Or lucky,” the sister added. “One needs a lot of luck to be happy.” She sighed again, then ushered me into the bedroom along with the other girls coming up the stairs.

I changed into my nightshirt. The bedroom had no privacy partitions, but I’d long gotten used to undressing in the open, like other girls did.

The bed on my left remained empty even after the sister gave the first warning about the lights being turned off soon.

“Where is Vika?” I asked Vika’s neighbor on the other side of her bed, but she just shrugged with no answer before getting under her covers.

The girl on my right, Dina, hissed behind me, “You’re such an idiot. Don’t you know anything? The m elicia was in the Head Mistress’s office this morning. They said Vika ran away.”

“She did? Why?”

“She must’ve had enough.”

“Enough of what?”

Dina gave me a long, disgusted look.

“Didn’t you hear?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Hear what?”

The sister clapped her hands together.

“Lights off!” she yelled before hitting the switch.

Her keys rattled as she locked the plastic box over the light switch so that we, heavens forbid, didn’t turn it back on to have a party after she’d left.

“Hey, Dina,” I whispered from under my covers the moment the sister’s footsteps died down outside the bedroom door. “What do you mean? What was I supposed to hear?”

“You really sleep like a log, stupid,” she scoffed, turning with her back to me.

I’d always been a heavy sleeper, now especially so, since I no longer had to keep a knife under my pillow. Between work and school, we barely got eight hours for sleep, which never seemed enough. I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, and I rarely woke up before the lights went on in the morning. Because of that, I often ended up as the target of pranks. The girls would paint my face with toothpaste while I slept or pour a glass of water under my covers to make it look like I peed myself.

The night that followed, however, something did wake me up.

My legs felt cold with the covers off. Without opening my eyes, I patted around in search of my blanket. Instead, someone’s hands slid up my legs and under my nightshirt.

Terror shot through my chest like an electric charge, startling me wide awake. With a gasp of horror stuck in my throat, I sprung upright.

“Shh, keep still.” Mihail Pavlovitch, the representative of the charity organization, the highly respected member of the church, and the major benefactor of the orphanage, gripped my hips, digging with his fingers in my underwear.

A picture of him with his smiling wife on his arm during a publicity tour of the orphanage last year flashed through my mind, just before I kicked him into his protruding belly.

“Fuck!” he cursed, then slapped my face with a heavy hand.

The blow rang in my ears, making his next words sound as if reverberating inside a giant bell.

“Lay still, little bitch, or it’ll be worse.” He plopped on top of me, making the metal springs of the bed whine.

He smelled of sweat, tobacco, wool of his suit, and the cologne that made me gag. The thin mattress sank under his weight, pressing me into the trap under his heavy body.

Panic blinded me. Whatever he’d meant by “worse” couldn’t be any worse than this.

He leaned back to open the zipper of his pants, and I used the chance to scramble from under him. I fell to the floor, hitting my knees, then crawled between the beds to the main aisle.

“You stupid bitch.” He stomped after me. The menace in his voice left no doubt that I was not getting away.

Finally finding my voice, I screamed for help. Only no help came. Someone must be awake in the bedroom, but the girls didn’t dare intervene. What could they do against him, anyway?

Helplessness amplified my terror. Every fear I’d ever felt snowballed, rolling over me and threatening to crush. Slamming the bedroom door open, I ran out onto the landing.

The sister was rushing up the stairs, her shape blurry without my glasses. The moment she spotted Mihail Pavlovitch behind me, she stopped in her tracks.

“Go back to your bed, Ira,” she said in a hollow voice. “And keep quiet.”

“If it happens, just lay back and enjoy,” the “wise” advice I’d heard before rang through my head.

Only I always knew it wasn’t about any actual enjoyment.

It was about resignation, giving up when there was no more hope. When one lost all control over her body, the only thing left to do was to separate her heart and soul from it. To save the little she still could.

Except, I wasn’t there yet. I could still fight.

Run.

Do something.

The sister was blocking the stairs. I turned on my heel, but he was right behind me, reaching for me. I lurched aside to evade him, tripped, and fell against the massive mirror on the wall. My chest and both hands hit the cold smooth surface.

Panic shook me. There was nowhere to run. I wished the glass would melt like ice and the darkness behind it would take me.

“Fucking skunk,” he hissed behind me, grabbing my hair. Yanking my head back, he slammed my face into the mirror.

The glass was supposed to break under that blow. The shards were supposed to hurt me, cutting my skin and disfiguring me for life if I survived. Blood was supposed to splash over the mirror and the wall.

But none of it happened. The hard surface suddenly felt soft. The shadows from inside the mirror reached out. Two arms embraced me, pulling me in.

The beautiful face of the woman with silver eyes was right above me, guiding me like a full moon on a dark night.

A voice sounded, soothing and kind, “Come to me, child. Here, you’ll be safe.”