 I sat in that waiting room waiting for him to live or die, and when I came back to my composition course on Monday after having missed Wednesday and Friday, I had not written the personal essay I was supposed to write. So I tore those pages out of my spiral and turned it in, and the teacher should not have considered that, but she not only considered it, she read it and passed it on to the creative writing faculty who typed it up, entered it into a contest, and I won that contest, and I wouldn't be writing right now if she hadn't done that, you know?