The Paperback Edition

Around the end of April, I told Bobby that Mel and I were going to the Spring Festival Dance next month with a couple of friends.

Mel and I had both been on the planning committee for the dance and we had been working really hard to make everything go smoothly and to make the gym look pretty.

Mel was going to go with Stuart Archer, her boyfriend and I was going to go with Marty Nichols who had also been on the planning committee…we were just friends.

I really wanted to go.  It did not occur to me…not for a moment that Bobby might not like me going…or even care as long as I was happy.  I was very wrong.

Bobby wrote back right away…something he had not been doing for the past three months.  He was brief.

“Absolutely not!”  He wrote and I could feel desperate anger in his words…uncommon for Bobby who seldom got mad at anything.

“How are you waiting for me if you are dating other guys?  How are you my girl?” He had asked.

I wrote back quickly and re-explained that Marty Nichols was just a friend…in fact…Bobby knew him.  They had been in freshman Spanish together.

Another quick reply from Bobby.  “No!  If you go to this damn dance, Sammy, we are finished,” Bobby wrote back.

“You obviously don’t care about me anymore.”

And then he added the most hurtful words of all…words that showed me Bobby had really forgotten me…forgotten who I was…forgotten who we were.

“I’m sure Marty is probably looking for more than just to dance with you.  Maybe that’s what you’re looking for too..”

He had just signed it “B”.

I sat on my bed and held his short letter in my hands for hours…tears of heartache and disbelief pouring from my eyes every time I read it…glad for once I was all alone.

When Saturday night came…I went to the dance.

Two weeks later I wrote Bobby a letter.  I told him that I had a great time at the dance and that Marty was such a nice guy.

I told him that I wouldn’t be writing to him anymore…and that I would toss any letters from him away without opening them.

Of course, that was all a lie.  The dance was awful.  I didn’t want to dance so close to Marty when they played slow dances and he got really angry.  He and a couple of his buddies got drunk from some whiskey they had smuggled in to the dance.   It was a wretchedly, lonely night.

Mel and Stuart brought me home.

And that was the end of my junior year in high school…