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“Imagine a world where we aren’t starving,” says the girl with red hair. She’s sucking on the ends of it, enough to make it look like a fire in her mouth. Dark and red like – hm. Like that, maybe.
“I don’t think there is a world like that,” says a girl whose hair isn’t red. She has a name, probably. It’s something like Danya. She’s smearing her thumb along a cut on the other girl’s leg, licking the blood off her fingers. That is what the other girl’s hair was like, Sofiya, Sofiya’s hair. Red like blood licked off fingers, wet and burning.
“I think so,” says Helena. Helena’s hair isn’t red either. It’s just dark. Later it will be a different color. But not yet.
Later she will know what blood tastes like, licked off fingers. But not yet. Not yet.
Sofiya has been there as long as Helena can remember, and Helena can remember a lot of things. Every single minute she can remember. And if she doesn’t remember she can pretend that she remembers, and tell it like a story. So really she knows every single thing, and she knows that Sofiya was there. Sofiya like a fire, Sofiya whose voice is always too soft when the nuns tell her to speak. Sofiya with the backs of her hands red from the smack of canes. Sofiya, Sofiya.
“You’re so little,” Sofiya says when the nuns leave the two of them together, her voice soft. Well, no. That isn’t what she says. What she says is Ty tak malo, but those words are sharp like beatings. K-k-k-k-k. Later Helena will learn the word you, and the word are, and how those words smash together. You’re so malo, that would be the way to put that sentence together. How soft it would be, then. Soft the way Sofiya always is – was – soft like Sofiya. But she doesn’t know there are languages besides Ukrainian, and so those are the softest words she knows.
“I’m not little,” she says angrily. Helena has been moved from church to church, convent to convent. When she was four they tried to tie a ribbon in her hair and she bit them, so she left. Over and over she bites and leaves. She doesn’t know any other languages besides biting, besides teeth. She is so afraid of being little and toothless. Doesn’t this girl know this, how terrible it is to be such a small thing?
“Yes you are,” says the girl who will be Sofiya. She smiles, whispers: “You’re lucky. The nuns don’t hit you when you’re little.”
Helena’s brow wrinkles. She thinks about this. She’s never thought about being small before, how it could be a good thing. Not being hit, that sounds like a good thing. She decides instantly that this girl, curled up on her cot with a bruise blooming violet and violent over her face, this girl is going to be her friend.
“If they hit you,” Helena says, “I’ll bite them, and they’ll be sorry.” She grins, a mouth full of teeth.
“Oh, vovchenya,” Sofiya sighs. “They aren’t ever sorry.”
If Helena is a wolf cub, like Sofiya says, then she has to have a pack. That’s how the story goes, and remember that Helena is very good at telling stories. So. Here is her pack:
Sofiya. Sofiya’s story has been told already: she is a girl with a soft voice, and a bruise on her face. Red hair red hands. Sofiya sings lullabies sometimes in the dark, when the nuns are asleep with their bellies fat and full. Sleep, sleep, my little falcon. Sleep, sleep, my little dove. Sometimes if Sofiya looks over and sees Helena’s eyes-wide-open in the dark she’ll smile to herself and change the lyrics: Spaty, spaty, sokol'yatko. Spaty, spaty, vovchenya. Sometimes she doesn’t sing. Sometimes she just cries.
Ionna is like a needle, tall and thin and sharp. Here is her story: the pinching bruises that bloom on the inside of Helena’s wrist, like little flower petals shaped like fingers. The bruises all over Helena’s stomach from curious poking fingers. The nail marks on Helena’s hand. There is a game they play called Scorpion where they clench their nails into each other’s hands and whoever lets go first loses. Whoever cries out first loses. Whoever hurts most loses, loses, loses. Helena shouldn’t like Ionna, she thinks, because Ionna is cruel. But remember that Helena trusts her teeth most and first. By the time she is seven-maybe she can beat Ionna at Scorpion and Ionna laughs and laughs and laughs, teeth so sharp and honest in her mouth.
Yeva cries the most. The nuns, she says, took her away from her mother and father. From her family. Helena likes Yeva, because she’s never heard of a family before and the idea is big and bright and beautiful. Tell me more, she whispers into her bowl of soup (when the nuns feed them) (sometimes the nuns do not feed them), tell me again about mothers. Yeva cries into her soup – the broth is always salty water, so her tears fit right in. Sometimes she doesn’t stop crying, but sometimes she does and she’ll tell Helena a story. She’ll hold out her finger and Helena will bite it, sharp but not mean, and Yeva will draw it out in blood on the floor. Here is the mother, who is soft and warm and smells like pastries. Here is the father, who is kind and strong. Here is the child, always safe. Yeva’s drawings are beautiful, even though they are made in blood. When Helena is alone she will nip at her own fingers and try to draw families, but they never come out right. Maybe that’s the kind of story this is. Here is Yeva’s story: a perfect family made in your blood on the floor. Here is Helena’s story: stick figures scrawled out over and over again, never looking the way Helena needs them to be.
Danya is the last to come. Danya is maybe not so mean as Ionna, maybe not so kind as Sofiya, maybe not so afraid as Yeva. Danya runs away over and over again, but she always comes back. She brings things up her too-long sleeves, potatoes and tubes of toothpaste with the labels all worn off. She smashes them together in the dark and says: see, like this. Rubs her toothpaste-sticky fingers over Sofiya’s bruised face, delicate, and Sofiya makes a soft (soft soft soft) hurt-noise and then goes very quiet. This is Danya’s story: in her hands, she holds the power to make you stop hurting.
There is Yaryna, too. But Yaryna is one of the girls who leaves.
There are many girls who leave. Adults come to the convent like big bad birds, coats tucked up to their chins so you can’t see their necks. They can always tell when adults are coming because the nuns will burst into the dormitory, grab a girl by the hair and drag her out. The other girls will stare at each other, wide-eyed, and then they will sneak out of the dormitory to the big staircase and hide behind the banister to watch this holy process called adoption. Helena is lucky to get to go with the bigger girls – she is maybe-seven, and she comes up to Yeva’s chest and Ionna’s waist and Danya always rolls her eyes when she tries to come along to the staircase. But Helena is good at being quiet and someone will hold her hand, Ionna’s nails dug into Helena’s palm like the talons of a little falcon, Sofiya so soft Helena thinks her hand will fly away like a little dove.
The other girls used to hold Helena’s hand too – Anna, Liza, Masha, Lena. But now they don’t.
“Why does she get to leave when we don’t,” sniffles Yeva, long hair falling over her fingers and face. (Brown, like muddy water.)
“It’s not a gift,” says Ionna.
“Better than this,” hums Danya. Ionna sneers, pokes her finger into a bruise on Danya’s face. Danya hisses; Ionna snickers.
“She’s leaving,” Sofiya says, her voice soft. They all go silent anyways, press their faces against the bars to watch. Yaryna’s wearing a dress that looks like it itches. (Helena doesn’t like dresses. This is a thing that she knows about herself.) There’s a man standing over her and a woman talking to the nuns and they both look mean and Helena’s confused. She hops around the group to Yeva, jabs a finger into Yeva’s bellybutton. “Brat,” Yeva hisses. (Ionna grins at her, so Helena did well, she did well, she did well.)
“Which one’s the mother,” Helena whispers. She can’t smell them from here, and neither of them look warm.
Yeva looks at Helena like she’s crazy, and opens her mouth – but before she can, Sofiya says: “Neither of them are the mother, Helena. That isn’t what a family looks like.”
All the girls glare at each other for a moment: Danya at Sofiya, Sofiya at Danya, Ionna at Yeva. (Yeva is crying.) But Helena ignores them, watches the not-family pull Yaryna away. “Bye bye,” she whispers as they go out the door. “Bye bye.”
By the time Helena knows for sure she is seven, the nuns have already decided that she is Bad. Helena doesn’t know how to be anything besides her teeth, and the nuns hate her teeth – Sister Irene slaps Helena across the face when Helena breaks the skin of her hand, and Sister Sonia won’t let her eat for two days, and Sister Olga…
Sister Olga leaves Helena in the cellar. It’s dark, down there, and cold. Helena huddles into herself in the dark with her legs pressed close to her chest but it isn’t as warm as huddling in bed with the other girls in the Ukrainian winter. It’s just cold, and she’s alone. She’s not very good at being alone.
“Hello,” she whispers to the dark. The dark doesn’t say anything back. Helena tries to move her voice up, up, up, high like Sofiya’s. “Hello,” she says again, and it’s close. “Hello, Helena. How are you doing?”
“Not good,” she says. “It’s dark in here, and I’m cold.”
“Don’t be weak,” she hisses, a little like Ionna. She digs her fingernails into her knuckles, her palms. Scorpion, scorpion. The pain helps a little bit. She lets her tongue dart up her face to see if she can taste her own tears. Salty. Like Yeva’s.
“Could be worse,” says Helena-Danya. “It could hurt. Good thing they’re not hurting you, right? It’s just dark. It gets dark every night.”
“Yes,” Helena says. “But I’m alone.”
She opens her mouth, but the words on the tip of her tongue are: eventually they’re all going to leave, and you’re going to be alone. So she closes her mouth again. Presses her fingers to her stomach, where she can still feel some of Ionna’s bruises. Sings to herself. Sleep, sleep, my little falcon. Sleep, sleep, my little dove.
When they let her out of the cellar, Yeva is gone.
“Good riddance,” Ionna hisses, and Danya hits her across the face just like the nuns do.
“Stop,” Sofiya shrieks, her voice so loud they all get frightened. Helena’s teeth hurt. She sucks her lips between her teeth to keep from biting Sofiya in her fear.
“We can’t be like them,” she says. “If we act like them we’re going to grow up to be them and we’re all going to live together in this convent forever.” Her voice shakes. Helena’s brow furrows, confused. Is that not – is that not what it’s supposed to be? All of them here, together? Forever?
She wishes she could ask Yeva, if that’s what a family is like. But Yeva is gone. Yeva is gone, and she took family with her – Helena has no fingers to bite, and Ionna huddles in the corner of the room winding her long blonde hair around her fingers until the circulation’s cut off, and Danya’s slithered out the window, and Sofiya is crying again. Helena feels just as alone now as she did in the cellar.
She slowly moves to the other corner of the room, moving around all those empty beds until she finds Yeva’s. She bites her own finger, hard, until the blood comes up. Draws a mother and a father and a daughter on the sheet but it doesn’t look right. So she does it again. And again. And again. Her finger stops bleeding so she does it with dirt from the ground and it doesn’t look right and “Stop now, vovchenya,” Sofiya says, pulling Helena away from the bed. The sheets are all covered with stick figures, mothers and fathers and daughters all in dresses and none of them look happy, none of them look as happy as Yeva should be. Helena wonders if Yeva has stopped crying now. Helena wonders who bites her fingers to get her blood. Sofiya’s hand is stroking over her hair, dark the way it won’t always be, and Helena doesn’t know how to say: maybe if I draw a family well enough, she’ll come back.
Helena is eight now, maybe. Yeva never comes back.
She is eight (maybe) and in the cellar again, in the cellar again, in the cellar again. She is eight-maybe and hungry all the time. She is maybe-eight and growing and her hair is long and dark and tangled because she hides when the nuns decide it’s time to brush it, even if they hit her afterwards. She hates them. She cries all the time, and none of the other girls can fix it. She lies in bed at night and cries. It’s so dark and cold and she’s hungry and—
“Wake up, malyuk,” says Danya, and Helena wakes up. It’s night time. She can hear Sofiya breathing in her sleep, Ionna’s rattling snores. Helena opens her eyes wide as wide, but she can barely see Danya in the dark. Her dark skin makes her a night-creature, so she’s just eyes and a gargoyle silhouette over Helena’s bed.
“Hello,” Helena whispers. She’s too curious to be upset.
“Come on,” Danya says. “We’re leaving.” Helena opens her mouth, but Danya hisses over her, “Not for good, stupid. You haven’t been out of this place for years, we’re going.”
Helena nods, stands up. She would put her feet into her shoes but she hasn’t owned shoes in years. Danya boosts her up and out the window, and her feet land in the dusty ground. She can’t help laughing. The world is big, and it’s true: Helena has forgotten how to be outside.
Danya grabs Helena’s hand and pulls her along. “Anyone ever teach you how to whistle,” she hisses, not quite a question.
“No,” Helena says, and Danya sighs and spends the walk teaching her. Helena looks around at everything as she peeps notes, dee doo deedee doo. There’s a village down the hill and that’s where they’re going. There’s nowhere else to go. Danya pulls Helena through the sleeping streets to a building that smells like—
Helena starts crying.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” Danya says, and Helena’s so shocked by that word that she forgets to cry for a second. “Fuck,” she says.
“Yes,” Danya says.
“God will strike you down.”
Danya shoots Helena a look that says: really. “Why the waterworks, kiddo,” she says. (Well, she says malyuk again, but you know.)
“This is the place where mothers are,” Helena says, because the air smells like pastries and like being warm. Danya looks at her for a second and her face goes soft. “Helena,” she says, “families like that, they don’t exist.”
“Yes they do,” Helena says insistently. “Yeva said.”
But Danya shakes her head. “Nope,” she says. “If you want a family, you’ve got to make your own. No mother’s ever going to come and rescue you, hug you all soft and warm. Mothers are just a story we orphans tell ourselves because we want to believe they’re true. But they don’t exist.”
“Did we make a family,” Helena whispers.
Danya smiles, a little. “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe we did.”
But then she blinks, and Danya is Danya again and not this strange soft thing. “Come on,” she says, “there’s not mothers in there, there’s something better.” She pulls out a piece of wire and sticks it in the doorknob. Something clicks, and the door opens. Helena’s mouth hangs open and low. Danya sees her, snorts, grabs her hand and pulls her inside.
It’s dark and there are big loaves of – something, everywhere. The air smells so good. Helena’s stomach roars and her mouth fills with drool. Danya grabs a cake, pulls it down, pushes it at Helena. Helena doesn’t know what to do: she shoves her face in it, rips into it with her teeth. She sits down on the ground. Her mouth tastes sweet, like sunshine. She makes a sound. It tastes so good.
“Babka cake,” Danya says, going around the store and taking – small pastries, little things she shoves down her shirt for the others. “Raisins, honey.”
Helena makes a noise that is something like hahrmm. She’s still eating. “You’re gonna be sick, kiddo,” Danya says, but Helena just sticks her tongue out (food sits on it, half-chewed) and keeps stuffing her face. Danya sighs, but doesn’t stop her. “I’ll be back,” she says, and goes.
Helena finishes the cake. She licks the sweetness off her fingers. Danya comes back, juggling potatoes and toothpaste and one precious orange. She throws the orange at Helena and Helena fumbles, catches it. “Clumsy,” Danya laughs. “Clumsy clumsy Helena.”
“I’m sorry,” Helena says.
“Don’t be,” Danya says with a shrug. “Let’s go.”
They go. They sneak back to the convent and in the moonlight Danya shows Helena how to make the paste, how to heal. Silver gilds her skin like something holy, even though Helena knows that’s blasphemy to think.
“Don’t forget it,” Danya says when Helena trails her finger through her own precious bowl of making-better. “You don’t know when you’re going to need it.”
Helena realizes with a jolt like a slap across bare skin: Danya means don’t forget me. Danya thinks she’s going to leave. That’s why she took Helena outside, that’s why she’s giving away her secrets like this. Danya thinks she’s going to go, for real, not like all the times she left but couldn’t leave them all behind. The other girl’s staring at the salve all over her fingers. She looks like she’s going to cry.
Helena wraps her own sticky fingers around Danya’s, stands up and pulls them both to her bed. She burrows into Danya’s embrace, stays there with her head pressed to Danya’s chest. None of us are leaving, she thinks, like if she can think it hard enough it will be true. All of us are going to stay.
The other girls think that they are leaving too. Helena can tell. Sofiya brushes out Helena’s hair, soft and tender, and teaches her how to make shadow puppet shapes with her hands – a little wolf, just like Helena. Danya lets her sneak outside again to listen to something called a radio in someone’s house. (Helena remembered the way the song went; when they got back to the convent she jumped up and down on the bed, laughing, yoo arr my candee grrl yoove got me wanting yoo, words in a language she doesn’t even understand. But everyone joined in, laughing and it was the happiest they’ve been in months and Helena was so happy, so happy she could)
Helena is eight, now, maybe eight, maybe nine, and all these girls are giving her pieces of themselves so she doesn’t forget about them. She decides that she’s nine, because she doesn’t think the shoulders of an eight-year-old girl are strong enough to hold it. All of this.
So she’s nine, when Ionna sneaks into prayer and hisses come on with a pinch at Helena’s wrist. They leave. Ionna goes outside through a door, in the back, and Helena wonders why Danya uses the window.
Then she sees where Ionna’s leading her, and she stops thinking about Danya.
There’s a dog on the ground. A little dog, skull crushed in – a rock, maybe. Ionna’s staring at it like it’s something beautiful instead of something hurting.
“I saw you and Danya come back,” she says, like that was last night instead of a long time ago. “She got you a present. So this is my present to you, my little scorpion. Better than cakes, yes?”
No, Helena thinks, but Ionna’s nails are tight on Helena’s palm like being afraid. So she crouches down on the ground. The puppy’s bleeding, legs jerking in little limb twitches. It’s—
She collapses onto her side, spits bile into the grass (not much) (she hasn’t eaten in a little while). It’s still alive. It’s still alive. She lies there, shaking like the dog – like – lies there, shaking, until there’s a hard nudge in her side. Helena turns and sees Ionna’s hand, holding a slingshot and a rock. She didn’t even know Ionna had a slingshot. It looks hand-made. If Helena wonders how long Ionna had the slingshot, she doesn’t have to think about what Ionna wants her to do with it.
“Shoot it,” Ionna says, because she isn’t kind enough to let Helena stay stupid. “Use your stinger, little scorpion.”
“No,” Helena croaks, “no, I don’t want to.”
Ionna fists her hand in Helena’s hair, pulls her up to standing. Shoves the slingshot into one hand, a rock into the other. “It’s hurting,” she says, brushing Helena’s hair out of her face with nails that scrape across her forehead. “It’s hurting, and it’s weak, and if you don’t put it out of its misery it will just lie there and cry until it dies.”
Danya took Helena’s hands and made them something like mercy, covered in salve. Helena looks at her hands now. Is this a mercy, maybe. Is this a gift?
She puts the rock into the slingshot, pulls it back. It’s weak, and it’s hurting, and Helena has to be strong and fix it. It’s like saving it, maybe. Like an angel.
Ionna grins at her, you’ve done well, you’ve done so well. Helena shoots the puppy.
Afterwards Ionna takes her slingshot and leaves, bored with the way Helena’s sniffling. Helena goes back into the convent building and moves numbly through the dormitory until she finds Sofiya, sitting in the window and sucking on her hair. Helena hops up onto the windowseat and shoves her face into Sofiya’s stomach, like she can burrow all the way in and find comfort. Sofiya pets Helena’s hair. Her fingers are so soft.
“What’s wrong, Helena?” Sofiya asks.
“Ionna gave me a present,” Helena croaks back. Sofiya sighs out a watery breath; spit-soaked chunks of hair fall out of her mouth, dangle around Helena’s head like a halo of fire.
“It wasn’t the kind of present you wanted, was it,” Sofiya says.
“No.”
Sofiya strokes Helena’s hair and Helena breathes in through her nose, hard, trying her best to smell pastries. Sofiya is warm but she is mostly bones; Helena thinks God is trying, maybe, to make Sofiya what Helena needs. But God has not brought them food for a long time. So Sofiya just smells like dirt.
“Ionna says weak things die,” Helena whispers. “Or they cry until they do. And that’s bad.”
“Ionna thinks crying is bad,” Sofiya says, “because she’s afraid that if she cries she’ll be weak, and if she’s weak she’ll die. But that’s not true, Helena.”
“Really?” Helena whispers to the girl who told her that being little was an alright thing to be.
“Yes, of course,” Sofiya says. “I cry, don’t I? And I’m still here.”
Helena nods, her head butting into Sofiya’s stomach. This is true. Sofiya is soft and soft and sad and she is still here.
“You can’t leave,” she says firmly. If Sofiya stays, this will prove the truth of the thing. You can be soft, and survive.
“Alright, vovchenya,” Sofiya says with a little laugh. “I won’t.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” Sofiya says.
She lies.
None of them speak, they all just shove their cots together and lie down on them. Helena, Ionna, Danya: all that’s left are the girls with teeth. Sofiya cried when they took her out the door, someone’s hand placed firmly in the small of her back. She kept looking back at them, a fistful of hair in her mouth. Helena thought maybe Sofiya was looking at her, just her, only her. Her fingers clenched around the railings of the staircase, hoping.
“She wasn’t strong enough to make it,” Ionna hisses, tying Helena’s hair in knots.
“Shut up,” Danya says. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
“It’s true!” Ionna shrieks. “She’s going to go out there and she’s going to forget about all of us and grow stupid and placid and fat and then she’s going to die.”
“You’re a piece of shit,” Danya says.
“She’ll forget you first,” Ionna says, something mocking and cruel in the corners of her mouth and the desperate shining of her eyes. Danya recoils, like she’s been slapped, and then makes this low hurt sound in the back of her throat. Her eyes are wet with tears. They all sit there for a moment, silent, and Helena’s lips are between her teeth, and they are all very still, and then Danya lunges forwards and slams Ionna’s head against the headboard.
“Stop!” Helena yells, “You can’t fight, you can’t, stop,” but the other two are yowling like wildcats and hurting each other in any way they can and Helena isn’t Sofiya, doesn’t know how to make her voice small enough to slip through the cracks in that anger. She just sits there as the bed rocks like a sea and the other girls scream and bleed—
—and then the world goes silent, and Helena realizes she’s shoved herself between the two of them, a hand on either of their chests. Oh. She didn’t realize she was a creature of hands. She thought she was teeth. Maybe she’s growing older, then. Maybe she’s growing up.
She drops her hands, twists them nervously on her lap. “Stop,” she says again.
“You’re gonna be next,” Ionna says, and her words are mean and her face is mean but oh she looks so afraid. “Look at you. Soft. You don’t remember anything I told you, do you. The nuns are going to take you next and me and Durnyy-a here are going to eat each other alive.”
“Fuck you,” Danya spits, swiping tears off her face with the back of her hand.
“But we’re a family,” Helena whispers. “We love each other.”
Ionna stiffens, Danya goes limp. “Oh, kiddo,” Danya says. “Sometimes the only way you can show you love someone is by hurting them.”
They fight all the time, now, and Helena watches Danya and Ionna and Helena learns what it is to love someone without being soft enough that you are taken. Love is when Danya almost chokes Ionna to death, love is when Ionna shoves her foot between Danya’s thighs at the dinner table. Love is hurting.
(Sometimes Helena wonders what Sofiya would think, about that. But thinking about Sofiya makes her cry and thinking about Yeva makes her cry and when she cries Ionna frowns at her like she’s disappointed so Helena doesn’t. Cry. She doesn’t cry.)
But love also means Danya making salve, teaching Ionna to whistle; love means Ionna yowling to distract the nuns so Helena can smuggle bread up her sleeves and share it with them at night in the dormitory. Love is hurting, but love is healing too. Sometimes it gets confusing which one is which. Helena finds it hard to understand.
And on top of this: love means that they are shoved apart, more and more, as Sister Olga puts Helena in the cellar and the broom closet and the space-under-the-stairs until she learns penance and makes God forgive her. Love is Helena being alone. And when Helena is alone she lets herself remember the girls who are gone, draws stick figures all over the walls of the cellar with pencil stubs and her own good blood, makes shadow shapes and sings lullabies to herself. Has conversations with herself in the dark. I’m happy, Helena, I promise. You should be happy too like me.
Time passes. They are all a hurricane of teeth and claws.
Time passes. There are three girls.
Time passes. This is a story, and there are only so many words you can shove in front of the story to keep it from moving forward. Time passes, the story moves forward.
They take Ionna next.
The nuns come into the dormitory in the middle of the day, Sister Olga baring all her teeth at Helena because she knows Helena’s not allowed to bare them back. Danya has been put in the cellar and so it is just Ionna and Helena and they look at each other because: they both know Helena is going to go next.
But no. Sister Irene grabs Ionna’s arms and Ionna and Helena both scream, high shrill sounds. Ionna screams louder. Ionna bites Sister Irene’s face so hard that a flap of skin peels off and she hurls herself across the room, starts scratching and biting at Helena furiously. Helena stays very still and lets her. She doesn’t know what else to do. Ionna claws at Helena’s stomach, bites her ear, kicks her shins with feet that are so much bigger than Helena’s.
“Don’t you forget me,” Ionna snarls, her teeth full of Helena’s skin. “Don’t you forget me, Helena, scorpion-girl, don’t you dare.” She sounds so afraid. Above everything, she sounds so very afraid.
“I won’t,” Helena whispers, and she takes her very sharp thumbnail and shoves it into the skin above Ionna’s liver. She hopes it scars. She doesn’t want Ionna to forget her either.
Sister Olga backhands Ionna so hard she flies across the room, crumples in a pile of silvery hair and battered limbs. Helena stays still, but Sister Olga hits her too. She’s down on the ground, breathing shallowly, when the nuns pick up Ionna and take her out the door. Ionna meets Helena’s eyes as she’s dragged out.
She grins. Her teeth are covered in blood.
When Danya finds out, she sits down on the ground, rests her head in her hands. “What kind of person would want Ionna,” she whispers. “She’s gonna burn their house down or something, you watch.”
“I can’t watch,” Helena says, confused. “I’m here. With you.” And she is: she’s sitting on the ground, right here. How could she watch Ionna?
Danya smears her hands down her face and looks over at Helena. Her face is filled with this sort of all-consuming despair. She looks much older than – oh. How old is Danya? Sixteen, seventeen maybe. Helena thinks she herself is ten. That sounds about right. She’s lost track.
“Oh, Helena,” Danya sighs. “You’re a good kid. You know that, right?”
Helena tilts her head to the side, considers this. She only knows that she’s good when other people say she’s good, only knows she’s smart when these other girls say she’s smart. If Danya says she’s good, she’s good. So. “Yes,” she says slowly. Pauses.
“Do you love me?” she asks.
Danya lets out a huff of breath through her nose, runs fingers through her hair. One of her feet starts to twitch, slowly at first and then faster. “No,” she says. It hits Helena like a blow.
“I thought—” she begins, desperate, but Danya unfolds her legs and is crouched in front of Helena quick as a snake striking.
“I lied,” she says, the words so very harsh. Harsher than Helena thought Danya could be – but Danya is still talking, hands twisting nervously in her lap.
“Love is important,” she says. “You have to hoard love! You can’t go giving it out to everyone or you’ll lose it all. Look at you, all wrecked ‘cause Yeva left, or – Sofiya, or Ionna. You can’t give your heart to us, Helena. You’ll lose it.”
“But I already did,” Helena whispers.
Danya tilts her head to the side, smiles. “Then take it back,” she says. “Save it for someone who needs it. Save it for someone you think will stay.” She leans forward and brushes a kiss over Helena’s forehead, lips softer than Helena’s ever known Danya to be.
“I’m leaving, kiddo,” she says. Helena opens her mouth to say some despairing thing and Danya presses her fingers to it, shh. “It’s time for me to go, for good. I can’t stay here anymore.”
“Don’t leave me here alone,” Helena whispers against Danya’s fingers. “Please, I don’t want to be alone.”
“We’ll be here,” Danya says; she reaches out to tap the space over Helena’s heart but Helena moves forward, throws her arms around Danya. They tumble to the ground and Danya taps Helena’s stomach instead, right over the gouges Ionna left in her skin. Danya laughs. “Alright, alright, we’ll be in your stomach. Right in your bellybutton, kiddo. Don’t drown us in babka cake.”
“I won’t,” Helena says, serious as stone. Danya untangles herself and presses the pads of her fingers to Helena’s face, where sometimes they are healing things.
“You’re gonna do something great, Helena,” she says. “I can feel it.” And then she climbs out the window, and everyone is gone.
Everyone is gone, and Helena is alone.
Alone in the dark.
Time passes.
Helena’s in the broom closet, where she’s taken to spending her time. She’s been in there for – hm. Months, maybe? Maybe two months, where she hides all the way in the back and the nuns can’t find her. She wonders if they think she ran away too. She wonders if they’re looking for her, with their nasty yellow claw-nails and their howls of blasphemy, sin. She doesn’t care, much. She sits in the dark.
The only time she leaves the closet is when she’s too hungry to stay still, when hunger forces its way out of her belly and keeps her moving. Every time she leaves she checks, and: the marks Ionna left on her belly are still there, little claw marks. She can see them. She can’t feel anyone, though, Danya or Ionna or Sofiya or Yeva or Anna or Liza or Masha or Lena or anyone. She sits in the dark and puts her hand on her stomach and cries when nothing happens, when she’s alone.
Two months. Helena thinks she’s eleven. She tells herself it’s her birthday and pulls out a stale bread crust she stole when the nuns weren’t looking. “Happy birthday, Helena,” she whispers. Looks at the wall, the army of stick figures she spent three days drawing. Waits for them to speak. (They never do.)
Happy birthday, Helena, says a voice.
Helena drops the crust of bread, scrambles for it, picks it up. She sits very very still. The voice doesn’t sound like anyone she knew – knows – doesn’t sound like anyone.
“Hello?” she whispers.
Lift your shirt up, kiddo, it’s stuffy in here.
The voice says kiddo and Helena thinks about Danya and her stomach does giddy flips. She peels her shirt up, watches the scars on her belly wiggle as her eyes try to adjust to the dark.
Oh, no. They’re actually wiggling. Something crawls its way out of her bellybutton, all claws. A shadow in the dark.
“You’re so little,” Helena says. “Who are you?”
What, says the blotch of darkness. You’ve never seen a scorpion before?
“No,” Helena says. She saw one in a book once but that was a long time ago. It’s true, though: that is a scorpion, climbing up over her stomach and onto her arm and onto her hand. A perfect little spot of night-darkness in the shape of pincers and claws.
“Where did you come from,” she whispers.
Looks pretty lonely here, the scorpion says conversationally. What, you don’t have any friends?
“They all left,” Helena breathes.
Real friends don’t leave. They couldn’t have been your real friends.
“Shut up,” Helena hisses, and then regrets it. “No – I’m sorry. Don’t leave.”
Don’t worry, Helena, says the scorpion. I’m not going anywhere.
“You know my name.”
Of course I do.
“What’s your name?”
I don’t need a name.
“Everybody needs a name,” Helena says insistently. She tugs her shirt back down over her stomach, giggles to herself. “You can be Pupok.” She tilts her hand back and forth, watches the scorpion scuttle angrily all over her fingers. Pupok. Belly button. Didn’t Danya say that’s where her friends would be, when she needed them? So Danya was her real friend, and Pupok is her real friend too.
That’s a stupid name, hisses the scorpion, and Helena giggles again. “It’s your name,” she says. “So you’re stupid too.”
Well, says the scorpion bitingly. Can’t argue with that kind of logic. Helena moves her fingers around, watches her friend climb up and around them. Pupok, Pupok. Helena wonders if the scorpion knows any lullabies. That’s alright. She knows lots. She knows a lot of things, and now she has somebody to teach them to.
“We’re going to be good friends,” she says to Pupok. “I won’t leave you, little scorpion. I will never go away.”
Good, says Pupok, because I’m not going anywhere.
Don’t worry, kiddo. With me around you’ll never be alone again.