Giovanna

Giovanna left the fashion magazine on the chair and approached one of the three cribs in the room. The child was crying excessively.

Hoping to calm him down, she picked him up and cradled him in her arms, but it was no use. He continued to cry. His cries were insistent, high-pitched and loud.

The superior came to the doorframe and faced Giovanna with the baby in her arms, and the way she looked at the child, annoyed yes, but not with pity, reminded her of the day she arrived there, fifteen years ago, in the arms of a woman who had that same look.

"What's going on here?"

"He won't stop crying."

"I realized that, Giovanna. Why is he crying?"

"Ask him." She said threateningly and arrogantly held out the child to the superior.

The superior took a deep breath.

"He must be hungry. He's always hungry."

Giovanna stared at her coldly and went back to cradling the child.

"His formula has run out. He's allergic to ordinary milk... His food ran out before its time. I'll have to ask them to increase his portion. A few bottles of his formula will arrive tomorrow...".

Giovanna put the still crying child back in his crib and tried to get past the superior, who wouldn't move.

"You can't leave here. I have no one else to help me with these three babies..."

"That's not my problem." Giovanna answered, crossing her arms.

"Don't be so insensitive, Giovanna. Just like you, they don't have parents..."

"That's true. And just as it's not their fault that I'm an orphan, I had no part in abandoning them."

The superior sighed.

"Help me find a solution." She asked humbly.

Giovanna stared at her as if she were facing a madwoman. The superior always, on several occasions, treated her as if she had divine powers.

"We can't leave him here with the others. We can't even leave him in this building, or half the children will be awake before sunrise. And you'll have eighteen children crying in your ears." Giovanna said analytically.

"I can't abandon him elsewhere. These are difficult times. You know that orphaned babies are no longer accepted by society."

"Grace must still have formula. She always does."

The superior's eyes lit up.

"Yes! Grace! I'll make a call to her... But there's still the problem of fetching..." The superior said, already thinking that she would have to take money from Giovanna's fortune for that expense, but confident that she would be able to replace it later.

"I can go there." Giovanna offered, unable to contain the anxiety in her voice.

The superior looked at her quickly. She couldn't allow that girl to leave. She would run away and even if she didn't know it, if she lost her, she would be condemning her life, because she had no doubt that the people who sent her to that orphanage would kill her.

"I can't allow it... You're an orphan. God knows what they'll do to you if anyone finds out..."

"I'll take the child with me. Then they'll believe I'm a mother. Just another banished mother."

The superior thought. She was right. Mothers who chose to have their children the traditional way were banished and considered scum. No one would go near her, as if she had a contagious disease.

"Okay. You'd better take him, because he's going to wake up this whole building, as you yourself emphasized... Put the label on your head while I get some money and call Grace. You'll find me in the office."

The superior made up her mind and left.

Giovanna glared at her with hatred and went to the room she shared with six other girls. All of them younger than her. She opened the drawer and saw the label there and took it and tied it like a scarf around her head. Then she went back to the babies' room and picked up the crying one and went down to the office, the superior handed her the money for the formula and she left.

It was the first time she had been out, in a way, on her own. The superior took her several times to Grace, who sold products given to her by her clients and then resold them to the superior and to other clandestine shelters.

There was only one orphanage in that country. The one she lived in. There were shelters for people living in poverty, run by a few businessmen, but Giovanna suspected that this act of 'kindness' must have come at a very high price, so they weren't very popular. She tore the tape off her head and put it in the pocket of her dress. When she was close to Grace's house, she saw an unusual movement.

She recognized the slogan of the most famous TV on a sticker on the van and leaned against the corner of the street, hoping to pass unnoticed, but when she looked back, for some reason she couldn't remember, she bumped into someone hard. She almost fell, when a strong hand held her up and stopped her fall.

The child stopped crying.

Giovanna looked at the amused glint in the beautiful green eyes and shook her head. Next to that strong, handsome, young man was another, short, ugly and staring at her as if she were a worm. She remembered that she was without her tag.

"I'm sorry." She said and walked off towards Grace's house.

"What's a pretty young woman doing on a dangerous night out, alone and with a child?"

Giovanna found it amusing how he followed her and flirted with her, but she continued on her way in silence and he followed her.

"I'm an American soccer player. We're doing a story on the place where I was born..." he started to say.

Giovanna saw in the distance that there was a line of boys in front of Grace's house. Possible customers. It discouraged her, but she went there anyway and took her place in the queue. She looked at the child in her arms. She was sleeping peacefully.

"If you hadn't apologized when you tried to knock me over, I would have believed that you suffer from aphasia. It's not very common, nor flattering, that you didn't recognize me and are indifferent to my presence... Do I smell or have bad breath?"

Giovanna looked at him with an amused smile.

"I... I'm an orphan." She said to get it over with.

He remained silent for a few minutes. Which she found comforting. Sometimes being shunned by society had its benefits.

"That doesn't answer my question."

Giovanna turned her admiring eyes to him again. This time, she was more attentive to the details. He was tall, with golden-brown hair, a very perfect face and he wore the clothes of an American soccer player. What was he doing? He was probably rich enough to be any teenager's dream. Even her own.

"Maybe your parents shielded you from the reality of the dark world I'm part of, but generally, an orphan doesn't have access to anything that keeps her up to date with what's going on in the rest of the world. You're sure to find a conversation with me tedious, because you'll discover that I have limited knowledge and know nothing about American soccer, and I have no interest in sports and don't like them, and besides, the only thing that impresses me is your need for me to inflate your ego even more with flattery."

He cocked his head to one side and the amused twinkle had returned to his eyes.

"For someone who doesn't have access to information, I can assure you, you look like a spiteful old shrew, still full of wrong opinions about other people's lives."

Giovanna turned to the queue and pretended to be interested in the progress. She knew he had just insulted her, but she didn't understand why he was still there.

"You... You remind me of someone. Your silky black hair, your gray eyes and even your arrogant, indifferent look are things that draw me to you, as if you were my magnet."

Giovanna was surprised, but didn't look at him. People usually referred to another person as their magnet when their interest had crossed the friendship barrier. And they weren't even friends.