They try to give her a check-up at one point while she's being processed. It's not a very heartfelt attempt. Or at least not enough to insist after she flees the clinic and refuses to go anywhere near after being caught. Not enough to suffer being bitten again, anyway. Serves them right. The case worker should've listened when Angela told her she wouldn't go.

The orphanage they put her in is… better than the camps, for sure, but still overpopulated and still miserable. The building is old, but only a little run-down. There's enough beds (once her ad-hoc bunk bed is built, anyway), and food, and they even get some pocket change once a week - about enough to buy a packet of chewing gum.

It could be worse. Ner new home is farther away from the fighting. No sirens wake them up at night to send Angela's heart into a pained stutter.

It could also be better.

She tries to keep in touch with her friends from the old school, but it's hard when her new home is dozens of kilometres away. When the only computers they have are almost always hoarded by the older kids. When her phone's been taken away by the police and months pass before she gets a new, older one - time enough for a chasm to grow between them that they never bridge again.

She doesn't really make new friends in their place. Being dropped-in in the middle of the school year, everyone's already in their cliques, not to mention how her dedication to actually study at school seems to alienate her further. So does having to sit out the PE. She can't play with her peers after school, either, what with her heart aching whenever she walks a little too fast a little too long. Being unable to afford going out for movies, or to eat out, or anywhere else really, doesn't help matters.

All this at least gives her a lot of time to study. That's good. She needs to get good grades to get into a good school, then a good university and become a great doctor. She's sketchy on the details but that probably means going to Berlin or some other big city. All of which are vastly outside of her budgetary capabilities, meaning she'll need to earn a scholarship to make her dream a reality.

It's understandably (and in Angela's case, heartachingly) upsetting when one of the older kids at the orphanage all but pulls her off the computer while she's preparing her part for a school project, just to boot up some dumb game. She still aces her project, of course, using a computer in her school's little library during her free PE period that she normally spends watching nature documentaries online. Nobody ever wants to watch these at the orphanage, and it's a majority vote there.

But then it happens again. And then it keeps happening. One day it'll be a computer on those already rare occasions that she gets to use one, the next it'll be taking her small allowance for the week.. Angela tells on him to the Matron, and she has a talk with him which only leads to the boy pushing her to the ground to kick her in the stomach and promise he'll do worse if she tattles again. The pain in her stomach fades in seconds. The one in her chest persists for hours.

The next time he takes the computer, Angela waits until he's distracted with his game and smashes the heaviest lamp she can find over his head. Somehow, she's the only one to get punished, and has her already pitiable computer access taken away altogether.

She's taken to a counsellor. The woman asks her about why she knocked that boy out. If she knew a hit like that could've killed him, and why is she so angry. Angela thinks the woman believes her stupid.

She hit him in the head because she's smaller and weaker and even though she can't truly get hurt, she can't actually win a fight, either. Of course she knows there was a chance a hit like that could've killed him, a low chance, but still - now he knows that too. She's angry about a lot of things. She's also smart enough to mention none of that, instead hanging her head in feigned shame.

She wants to go home, or, at least, away from the office and the dumb questions, so she tears up with apologies and promises to be good, even repeating that to the boy she hit when they go to the hospital to visit him. Angela knows he's still seething, but when he gets back with a scar on his head he doesn't go anywhere near her anymore, so that's fine - she's not vengeful, and entirely satisfied with ignoring each other's existence.

Following the incident more kids want to be her friends than she ever spoke to over her stay in the orphanage. It seems she wasn't the only one the boy bullied around, just the only one to do anything about it, which makes her something of an idol among the others. It's nice, being adored like that. Useful, too. She still can't play with them half the time, and still struggles to find something interesting to talk about, but she lets them follow her around regardless in exchange for their own computer time for the duration of her punishment. Privately, she thinks they'd be better off if they hit the boy in the head, too. But she's not about to complain.

She's twelve to the day when she realises she hasn't grown even half a centimetre since she last checked her height over a year prior, back when still living with Uncle. And even then she'd only grown very little compared to the last time she measured her height before that - some time before the surgery. She'd dismissed it back then as her growth spurt running late, and not given it much thought since, but now? It dawns on Angela that whatever Uncle did to her must have stunted her growth as a side effect. She goes to the Matron to ask if she can somehow get her old school ID to compare the photo with her own reflection. The woman tells her not to worry, that when her growth spurt comes around she'll surely grow taller than all the other kids.

Angela eats her birthday muffin in sullen silence. What good are birthdays if she stays the same throughout them?