Page 5 of Downfall of a Princess

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 ameliciaraid, 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 neighboron 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 thatoften 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.

Afterperestrojka, 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 turnedto 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.

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