A/N- DAVE TIME! I love Dave. He's so awkward and cute! This is what pops into my head every single time I hear that line from Ballrooms & Biscotti about how Dave went to Cali for school. It's just an unavoidable thought process.
California Blues
UCLA is a great school, Dave reminds himself. Great music program. His parents are shelling out huge bucks to send him here, to give him the best education he can get. Of course, he applied to a school across the country before he met Lane. Stupid stupid stupid, he thinks now. These sunny California girls are no replacement for her intensity and her inspired, rambling monologues.
Then, at the tail end of August, just past the end of his first week of school, the miracle happens.
He finds a friend. Well, not so much finds as rediscovers and not so much a friend as much as a friendly acquaintance.
Lane had told him that Jess Mariano had run away from Stars Hollow back in May, and that Rory was really busted up over it (Dave hadn't been able to tell, but Lane claimed she knew all due to her Best Friend Radar). And it seemed that the bad boy from the big city had lost his heart as well. When Dave first encountered him on the boardwalk on a Saturday trip to Venice Beach, he was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ocean with eyes that were a little too bright considering that it was morning and the sun wasn't exactly reflecting into them.
They never talked about the girls they'd left behind, not directly. But Dave could tell when Jess was feeling melancholy, and became adept at cheering him up. As for Jess... well, the quiet boy had always been intuitive. He did a good job of getting Dave back into a frame of mind to be a music major.
By the end of October, though, Jess was gone again. There had been some fight with his father. But every couple of weeks Dave would check the mailbox in his dorm and discover unsigned postcards from different locations across the U.S., each one getting gradually further east. Dave knew who they were from.