Naima’s going to the Scholomance. Neither of her older sisters did, and now, of course, she has no older sisters. But Naima is going to the Scholomance, and while she can’t be certain she’ll make it out alive, she likes her odds a lot better than she did when she wasn’t going. If she makes it out, this is the last time in her life that she'll be as free as she is, but that’s better than dying. No use trying to imagine herself into having better options than the one she has.

She’s aware that she’s going to be at a disadvantage on the resources front, compared to a lot of the kids there. Her parents are not wealthy, and the enclave that’s giving her their spare spot isn’t interested in much additional investment in her on top of that. She’s fine with that. 

Her greatest asset, of course, is her mind. She knows her affinity is for healing, which she thinks is a pretty good one, as affinities go. She’s still trying to figure out how to get the most out of it, but she’s optimistic. She’s also pretty good at clothing enchantments, for her age, and all of the clothes she’s bringing with her bear mana-storing beadwork and basic healing enchantments that she added to them herself. She’s coming in with eight languages (English, French, Mandarin, Arabic, Persian, Middle Egyptian, Coptic, and Latin), and she’s not fluent in all of them but she’s pretty sure that she can puzzle out anything she gets in any of them. Her magical self-defense skills are solid, although she has to admit that she’s definitely on the weak side, physically. This just means that she’ll be able to build up mana faster as she builds up strength, in the early weeks of school, and that she’ll be able to carry in more materials because she isn’t weighed down with muscle.

She’s keeping her hair, for now. She’d think twice about how that makes her come off, if it wasn’t going to be hidden under her headscarf anyway, but she can’t shake the feeling that she might need it later. She’s bringing a pocket loom and her sewing kit with her, and she feels like it’s entirely possible that fiber for further clothing creation or embroidery projects may end up being in short supply at some point.

Aside from that, she’s got a first aid kit (lightly enchanted, again by her), toiletries (many of them altered to save space; the toothbrushes have had their handles sawn off), two sets of running shoes, labeled bags of painkillers and antibiotics and multivitamins and some other medicines, an assortment of herbs and seeds that have been carefully selected to be potentially useful for experimentation while weighing almost nothing, a kindle packed with mundane reference materials (which may well end up disappearing on her, but her plan is to copy over as much useful information onto ordinary paper as possible before that happens), a crank charger, a clip on book light, a non-electric pocket microscope, microfilm letters, several care packages for older students, twelve beautifully embroidered book covers that she's been working on for years, two large dry erase board wall stickers, three dry erase markers, three tide pens, sticky tack, bobby pins, extra thread, and a few other items that have all been very carefully optimized for maximum weight efficiency.

She’s also got a pair of earrings enchanted to enhance hearing (not by her, these she got from someone in the Cairo enclave). They warned her that they could be annoying, but as far as she can tell, all the earrings really want is to be told that they’re pretty and impressive, and that seems like a very reasonable thing to want, as far as Naima is concerned.

“We look very pretty today,” she tells her earrings, as she looks in the mirror to make some final adjustments to her headscarf.

She does not eat breakfast; she doesn’t have any nausea meds strong enough to counteract the induction process. She hugs all of her younger siblings, and of course her parents. She prays. She weighs in, and puts back one tide pen when she’s just barely over. 

“See you in four,” she says, looking at the clock, with self-assurance that she isn’t entirely sure she actually feels.

“God willing,” says her mother, sternly.

“God willing,” echoes Naima, only a little begrudgingly. And she’s off.