“You should leave that behind,” I said to Nina, pointing to the blanket she was tying on to her backpack, already crammed full of clothes and laden with a rolled sleeping bag. “When it rains, it will be too heavy to carry.”
She had only a smattering of English, but she understood. She flexed an imaginary muscle on her scrawny eleven-year-old arm, smiled at me in the mirror over her bed, and bent to finish securing the blanket.
