Read The Orphan for Free Online Page B

world, get your PhD, you will never get there by avoiding the stupid little details that accumulate. To do the special thing, the one main thing in life, you have to sweep up the little things like dust, out of habit, without even using your brain. Because you’re that smart. And your life is special, Raya, so don’t do that to yourself. Don’t live your whole life accomplishing less than you are capable of and making things easier on yourself when you could be onto something great. Under

stand?
 
    She hadn’t minded the speech because he wasn’t lecturing her, and she respected her dad. He’d already built his own business by the time she was born. By the time she was three, he owned a strip mall in Milwaukee. It was totally ghetto, but he owned it. So she digested what he told her, and soon she began to notice things, little things that nagged at her when she didn’t do them.
    Like folding her clothes, which looked nice and made getting ready for school easier. Or writing thank-you notes after Christmas or her birthday, which felt like an obligation and a hassle until she did them, then made her feel grateful and calm. Lots of stuff got easier once she got in the habit of just doing them before she made them a big deal in her head. Which is why now, at age fifteen, even something as small as changing out the toilet-paper roll at four in the morning would drive her nuts if she put it off.
    That’s my Lynwood girl
, she could almost hear her dad saying,
go get yourself a damn roll of toilet paper and go to bed.
    Stuffing her phone into the waistband of her pajamas, she walked into the hall. The living-room lights were still on. On the other side of the foyer, she turned into the front bathroom and flipped on the light. The cabinet was stocked, so she grabbed four rolls, making a mental note to tell her mom to buy more anyway, because she liked to have a good supply of everything in her own bathroom, and the mini-fridge, which made her suite like a boutique hotel. Carrying two rolls in each hand, her fingers hooked into the cardboard spools, Raya used one roll to turn off the bathroom light and headed back into the hall.
    She had gone a few steps when her phone vibrated inside her waistband. She thought of ignoring it because her hands were full, but it might be Chad, confessing his inebriation, and she didn’t want him giving up and driving home drunk. Wedging two rolls under her left arm, she pulled the phone out and looked down at the screen.
     
    when he takes away your childhood you can never get it back
    That was it. No punctuation, no context. At first she thought it must be another of Chad’s non sequiturs, until she saw the number, which did not list Chad or any of her contacts and which wasn’t a phone number at all, just a string of zeroes and ones.
     
    010101001001001101100011
    That was weird. She’d never seen a number like that as a source for an incoming message or call. She was reading the text again when it disappeared. The entire screen of her phone went black, as if in shutdown mode. Must have been an error, a message garbled in the company’s servers or something.
    She hadn’t liked the feel of those words, but it was gone now and she was tired.
    Raya was stuffing the phone back into her waistband when it vibrated again. She held it up. The screen was still black but a new text was visible, this time in white letters.
     
    once he takes it all away you can never go back
    The white text seemed to dissolve before she could tap the screen, and then another string of crisp white words replaced it:
     
    first he takes your childhood away
    Again the letters dissolved to total blackness, but almost immediately were replaced by:
     
    then he kills you
    The four rolls of toilet paper dropped to the floor. She looked back toward the kitchen, expecting her mom or dad to be in there, hoping one of them was there to explain this. She needed to show someone. But there wasn’t anyone in the kitchen, and