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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 meliciawas 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. “Hearwhat?”

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.