Lately, it is the family sink that Auburn fails to fix. All night long, it drips and drips, keeping Dasani awake. She knows that her mother has pleaded with the staff to repair it. Finally, Dasani gets fed up. She crouches down to examine the pipe. “Nobody thought about pushing it in and twisting it,” she says. A few quick jerks and she triumphs. Her siblings squeal. It goes unremarked that here, in a shelter with a $9 million budget, operated by an agency with more than a hundred times those funds, the plumbing has fallen to an eleven-year-old girl.
