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He wouldn't come to school.

He said that sometimes school was just too depressing because people were always fighting and teachers were quitting.

And also, his mother worked two jobs and was just too tired to make him come.

So I made it my job to get him to come to school.

And because I was crazy and 22 and zealously optimistic, my strategy was just to show up at his house and say, "Hey, why don't you come to school?" And this strategy actually worked, he started to come to school every day.

And he started to flourish in my class.

He was writing poetry, he was reading books.

He was coming to school every day.

Around the same time that I had figured out how to connect to Patrick, I got into law school at Harvard.

I once again faced this question, where should I put myself, where do I put my body? And I thought to myself that the Mississippi Delta was a place where people with money, people with opportunity, those people leave.

And the people who stay behind are the people who don't have the chance to leave.

I didn't want to be a person who left.

I wanted to be a person who stayed.

On the other hand, I was lonely and tired.

And so I convinced myself that I could do more change on a larger scale if I had a prestigious law degree. So I left.

Three years later, when I was about to graduate from law school, my friend called me and told me that Patrick had got into a fight and killed someone.

I was devastated.

Part of me didn't believe it, but part of me also knew that it was true.

I flew down to see Patrick. I visited him in jail.

And he told me that it was true. That he had killed someone.

And he didn't want to talk more about it.

I asked him what had happened with school and he said that he had dropped out the year after I left.

And then he wanted to tell me something else.

He looked down and he said that he had had a baby daughter who was just born.

And he felt like he had let her down.

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