"I'm gonna quit school, Miss C," the girl said, looking me straight in the eyes.

I shouldn't have been surprised. She and her boyfriend had come to me about eight months ago with the news that she was expecting. They hadn't told their parents and she hadn't received prenatal care and she was at least four months along.

She'd had the baby girl a couple of months ago and taken her maternity leave, but now that she was 'officially' back to school, her name was a permanent fixture on the absence list. I stopped counting at 76, and that was several weeks ago.

She was almost halfway through her senior year and she was going to quit. My heart shattered into a thousand pieces as I raced to reason with her. I was twenty-four, had no kids, could speak English without an accent, and would never be able to relate to what this young mother was enduring.

I bit my tongue. I wanted to tell her she was being estupida. I wanted to tell her she was another bad statistic. I wanted to scream at the young lady, anything to make her think about providing a future for her daughter. But instead, I folded my head into my hands and stared at my desk, trying to take it all in.

She braced herself for my impending rage. She knew me well enough to know there was a storm brewing inside me, but I remained quiet for a couple more seconds.

I opened my desk drawer and pulled out a ruler. When I had it in my hand, Ana pulled back, expecting the worst. I slammed it onto my calendar and took out an ink pen.

I placed a blue line a little before the eleven-and-one-half inch mark and pushed the ruler into her hand.

"Look at the ruler," I demanded as she obliged me. "You see where that blue line is? See how close it is to the end?" She nodded. "See how far the distance is from the start of the ruler to where that mark is?" Another nod.

I kept quiet to give her the chance to ponder the ruler's meaning.

"Ana, you realize that the blue mark represents where you are today with your education, right? And you realize that the little more than half an inch that remains is how far you have to go." 

"Yes, Miss C, I know that," she answered as she kept hold of the ruler.

I took the ruler from her and reached for a highlighter. "So you also know that if you walk out that door, you will waste all of this," I colored from the start of the ruler to the blue mark, "when you are only this far away from graduation. That seems really foolish to me."

Somehow, Ana stayed in school that day and came back the next. As the days turned into weeks, we marked the ruler to celebrate her decision to finish her high school studies. 

On the last day of school, I gave Ana her ruler, and at graduation, I cried as her name was called.

A couple years ago, I received a Facebook message from Ana. "Miss C, I still have that ruler and think of you every time I see a ruler. I will never forget what you did for me. Thank you."

                        *                      *                    *                    *                  *                        *    

So I sit here now, struggling to write The Green Rising, as I have on so many days over the past two years. Sometimes, I just want to delete the whole story. Sometimes, I just want to write a different story. And most times, I wish Lily Goodwyn (my main character in The Green Rising) would just leave me alone.

And then I think about the ruler. And I think, "Wow. I'm more than 90,000 words into the story."

There's no turning back now. I can't--and won't--walk away from that.