But that night, Minli could not fall asleep. Even with the dragon snoring behind her, the fire crackling, and her blanket around her shoulders, her eyes did not close. Like the stone dust that the wind blew, thoughts kept circling in her head. She kept thinking about Ma and Ba and the orphan buffalo boy. With pangs of guilt, she thought about how Ma and Ba pushed her to go home early from the field, how her rice bowl was always the first filled, how every night when she went to sleep in her warm bed she knew they were there, and how worried they must have been that now she was not. The buffalo
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