Julie's phone rings as she's walking down the hall. She slips into the empty cafeteria and answers. It's Matt. "What do you want?" Matt is at a gallery, but he snakes out to go stand outside in the cold, cold rain. Julie is silent for a while. Matt starts to stammer that he knows she's mad and he thinks he'd be mad, too, if that happened. Julie is like "Great, can I go now?" He tells her that he's in Chicago, has a job at an art gallery, and has an apartment. Julie: "Sounds like you've got everything worked out." Matt continues, kind of oblivious to the emotional storm that we can clearly see brewing in Julie, "That's just it. It doesn't feel right, cuz....cuz you're not here." Julie starts to cry a bit, "Well I'm glad I mean something to you. Just, not enough to call me until now." Matt tries to apologize, but it starts to really pale in the face of Julie's superior female powers of articulation: "Matt, we were together for almost four years. I know everything about you. You were my other half. I hate you so much for leaving me."

Cut to poor Matt, in Chicago, leaning his head on a chain-link fence, maybe just now realizing what he's done. She asks how he could do that to someone he loved and he mutters that he just felt that that was what he had to do. "Well," Julie says, "I have to do what I have to do. And if there's anything missing in your life? I suggest you go out and find it." Matt weakly protests, "Julie don't...." but she tells him goodbye and hangs up. Oh, it hurts. And what hurts most is that neither of them is really in the wrong. Matt needed to get out Dillon, to do something for himself, by himself. But Julie is right that the way things happened dishonored their relationship. But that's how, in my experience, those relationships often end. One person realizes that he or she needs to do something that is incompatible with the relationship; and it isn't really fair to think of that as selfish (in the way that an adult pursuing his own pleasure or satisfaction at the cost of a deep and true relationship might be) but just as the way it has to be if we believe (and I SO do) that teenagers can really love one another but also that teenagers should probably move beyond that love at some point.