conclusion. Our fear had been that it was his other professors, his failures in their classes, that had caused him to leave the university, whereas he’d actually left because of us. He was used to the poor opinion of others. He’d always been expected to fail. To him failure was a warm embrace, as familiar and reassuring as his family and the grungy little town he’d spent his whole life in. What Rodney and I were offering him was an entirely different narrative, one he must have yearned for at some level or else he never would have gone to college to begin with, but up close it was so
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