“Are we going to live here forever?” Dana asked gloomily.
“Why, darling?”
“Because it’s too small for me. I need a bigger town.”
On Dana’s first day at school, she came home depressed.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you like your school?”
Dana sighed. “It’s all right, but it’s full of kids.”
Dana’s mother laughed. “They’ll get over that, and so will you.”
Dana went on to Claremont High School and became a reporter for the Wolfpacket, the school newspaper. She found that she enjoyed newspaper work, but she desperately missed traveling.
“When I grow up,” Dana said, “I’m going to go all over the world again.”
When Dana was eighteen, she enrolled in Claremont McKenna College, majored in journalism, and became a reporter for the college newspaper, the Forum. The following year, she was made editor of the paper.
Students were constantly coming to her for favors. “Our sorority is having a dance next week, Dana. Would you mention it in the paper…?”
“The debating club is having a meeting Tuesday.…”
“Could you review the play the drama club is putting on .. . ?”
“We need to raise funds for the new library…”
It was endless, but Dana enjoyed it enormously. She was in a position to help people, and she liked that. In her senior year, Dana decided that she wanted a newspaper career.
“I’ll be able to interview important people all over the world,” Dana told her mother. “It will be like helping to make history.”
Growing up, whenever young Dana looked in a mirror, she became depressed. Too short, too thin, too flat. Every other girl was awesomely beautiful. It was some kind of California law. I’m an ugly duckling in a land of swans, she thought. She made it a point to avoid looking in mirrors. If Dana had looked, she would have realized that at the age of fourteen, her body was beginning to blossom. At the age of sixteen, she had become very attractive. When she was seventeen, boys began seriously to pursue her. There was something about her eager, heart-shaped face, large inquisitive eyes, and husky laugh that was both adorable and a challenge.
Dana had known since she was twelve how she wanted to lose her virginity. It would be on a beautiful, moon-lit night on some faraway tropical island, with the waves gently lapping against the shore. There would be soft music playing in the background. A handsome, sophisticated stranger would approach her and look deeply into her eyes, into her soul, and he would take her in his arms without a word and suavely carry her to a nearby palm tree. They would get undressed and make love and the music in the background would swell to a climax.
She actually lost her virginity in the back of an old Chevrolet, after a school dance, to a skinny eighteen-year-old redhead named Richard Dobbins, who worked on the Forum with her. He gave Dana his ring and a month later, moved to Milwaukee with his parents. Dana never heard from him again.
The month before she was graduated from college with a B.A. in journalism, Dana went down to the local newspaper, the Claremont Examiner, to see about a job as a reporter.
A man in the personnel office looked over her résumé. “So you were the editor of the Forum, eh?”
Dana smiled modestly. “That’s right.”
“Okay. You’re in luck. We’re a little shorthanded right now. We’ll give you a try.”
Dana was thrilled. She had already made a list of the countries she wanted to cover: Russia…China…Africa…
“I know I can’t start as a foreign correspondent,” Dana said, “but as soon as—”
“Right. You’ll be working here as a gofer. You’ll see that the editors have coffee in the morning. They like it strong, by the way. And you’ll run copy down to the printing presses.”
Dana stared at him in shock. “I can’t—”
He leaned forward, frowning. “You can’t what?”
“I can’t tell you how glad I am to have this job.”
The reporters all complimented Dana on her coffee, and she became the best runner the paper had ever had. She was at work early every day and made friends with everyone. She was always eager to help out. She knew that was the way to get ahead.