Its funny isn't it that sometimes a single moment that can seem so unimportant at the time can so alter your course in life. I remember such an instance like that in my life it happened in my fifth year at Hogwarts just after we finished taking out O.W.L.S. In this moment before me stood different boys both with a choice to make one choose the right path and the other the wrong.
This incident was like so many before it over the course of the years preceding this one at Hogwarts the Marauders were picking on Severus yet again and I tried to help him. This time however Severus did something that made me realize that everything my friends had been telling me about Severus for the past few years was true he called me a mudblood. He was changing before my eyes becoming someone I hardly knew. He tried to apologize to me time and time again but I feared that Severus that I knew was gone and the one that stood before me could never really change I tried for so long to help him and while he might change his tune while I was present he was someone else when I was gone. He really believed all the things that the pure blood fanatics were telling about people who came from non magic households that they were lesser that they didn't deserve magic that only those who were pure deserved magic even though he himself wasn't pure blood. I watched Severus for the next couple of years hoping that he would change but he never did. He told me once when he was my friend and that my birth didn't matter at all but it did. He lied it was the thing that mattered the most to some.
On the hand I saw the impact that my words of admonition to change had on someone else that day, James one of the marauders. I told James that he was an arrogant toe rag and over the course of the next year I saw James changing before my eyes. In sixth year I noticed that he didn't hex people nearly as often before he stopped trying to show off all the time he even started to get fewer detentions. By the time seventh year came James was so much more mature. I was shocked when James was named head boy but secretly pleased to because it showed I wasn't the only one that noticed James increasing maturity over the last year. The last year of school when I finally gave James a chance first as friends then as my boyfriend I saw someone who was willing to change for the better not only because I asked him to but because he saw that what he was doing was wrong. James didn't ever fully stop all of his antics but I don't know it I really want him to because if he did he wouldn't be James any more and I love James just the way he is.