Chapter 14

It had begun gradually, the change. At first it had just been something in his voice, something that made him sound a bit distant. I had just figured that he had a lot of new stuff to take in, after all college was supposed to be a lot trickier than high school. Me on the other hand had few challenges to face at school, more than the fact that I ached for Dan on a daily basis. Every class was more dull than the previous and I could not wait to graduate and be able to go to college with Dan. I hadn't really thought much of college choices before meeting Dan, but since he'd had his eyes on the prize since middle school I soon adapted his hunger for higher education and we'd agreed on going to University of Arizona when the time was ready. Sure we'd rather have applied to a more exotic college or perhaps even one of the Ivy league schools, but not I nor Dan really had the money to pay for the tuition and only Dan could dream of landing a scholarship at one of the better universities. So we settled for UA. We visited the school a couple of times, just to make sure we'd chosen the right school, and every time we left we'd agreed on that it would be a great school to spend some time at, as long as we would get to go there together. But that was then...

Come fall Dan went away to UA and I wasn't concerned at all. We'd made plans on how to make it work and I went to visit twice and Dan came home every other weekend. During the week we'd talk on the phone for would call me every day as soon as I'd gotten home from school and we'd jabber away for hours, comparing life in Phoenix with the life at UA. Dan often talked about how much he missed me and ever so often I'd get letters with little poems, funny notes and drawings that he'd made for me. I just couldn't wait to finish high school so I could join him at UA. We had it all figured out, how we'd get an apartment outside of campus when I'd graduated and how we'd finally get to live together. I couldn't even imagine what it would be like to get to wake up next to Dan every morning.

But it wasn't long before things started to change and I got the feeling that things perhaps wouldn't be as easy as I'd hoped. Dan started sounding more and more distracted as the fall semester passed and almost every time I called he gave me the sensation that he'd rather be talking to someone else. I tried to ignore the feeling, but come Thanksgiving things had gotten out of hand. Dan had given me a long lecture the week before about how he needed to focus more on his studies and that he couldn't be bothered with my incessant phone calls every evening. I had been caught off guard, but had meekly agreed to reserve my calls for the weekend. Dan had always been very ambitious about his grades, but still, this was not Dan. This was someone else.

But afraid of pushing him away as I was I was prepared to take a whole lot more than restricted phone calls before I gave him up. So instead of confronting him I tiptoed around him, which I can now see probably only bugged him even more. I mean, who wants to be the guy to break a good girl's heart? Not Dan Whitaker to be sure.

But by the time of Thanksgiving the situation had become insufferable. Dan hadn't invited me and my family over for Thanksgiving dinner and I knew things were going downhill from now on. I'd called him in the morning, not even bothering to ask for an invitation to dinner, but just to ask to be given the oportunity to speak to him in private. He on his part did not bother to try and invite us to his family's annual turkey bonanza but instead told me to meet him by the playground on Dalloway lane at nine. I didn't need more than that to know that the battle I'd been fighting for the last couple of months had been lost.