“The fact is,” Marisol was saying. “A big reason I came to this school is because I knew you were here…”
I laughed, swirling my coffee. “That means a lot to me.”
Autumn. The perfectly manicured East Coast campus was just starting to turn golden with the chilling weather. Marisol was eighteen, and a gorgeous little waif of a girl: wavy hair that naturally seemed to move between black and light brown; dark, quick eyes; and dusky skin. She wore a short skirt that showed off the goosebumps on her dark legs, and a thick, woven sweater.
I had tutored her as a kid: it was one of those *Freedom Writers*-type stories. I volunteered to teach creative writing at a mediocre inner city school, to a group of spectacular eleven-year-olds. The smartest, the funniest, and the most charming, though, had been Marisol–she practically had a novel written by the end of the year! At eleven!
I kept in touch with her and her family–not really even her family, but her grandmother, with whom I communicated in broken Spanish, with Marisol’s help–for a few years until I moved away. I went to graduate school, got married, lost my wife, and got a job teaching literature and writing at a major, prestigious university. A lot had changed.