“Get up from there, you wretched little orphan—you’ve got that clean dress all filthy,” shrieked Miss Hannigan, a skinny, hatchet-faced woman with short, jet-black hair. She reminded the orphans of a particularly unpleasant-looking—and all too real—Halloween witch. Miss Hannigan had yanked Annie to her feet and given her a dozen whacks across the backside with a heavy oaken paddle. But Annie hadn’t cried. Even as a tiny tot, Annie had never cried when Miss Hannigan beat her, a show of spirit that infuriated Miss Hannigan. Because Annie was at once the spunkiest and the most intelligent of the girls in the orphanage, Miss Hannigan hated her more than any child she’d had under her charge in all her twenty-three years as headmistress of the orphanage. “I’ll break that little brat yet,” muttered Miss Hannigan to herself, and she constantly gave Annie extra chores to do—greasy pots and pans to wash in the orphanage’s steamy basement kitchen, grimy windows to wash, floors to scrub on her hands and knees.
