––Describe the circumstances leading up to your first kiss.

Albo: This is all painfully detailed in my “novel” Hornito, which isn’t a memoir, or is, as much as any book named “memoir” these days.

Hollander: I had it all planned out. See, there were rumors going around that Vanessa had done it with Jack Inzerillo (a neighborhood tough) on a cardboard platform strategically placed on the steep walls of the sump. (This turned out to be patently untrue; Vanessa later revealed to me that Jack was a prude and terrified to do anything more than touch her ass with uncommon frequency.) So when Joe Patolano told me that his cousin Vanessa “liked me,” my fantasies leapt straight for fornication, though I understood that a first kiss would likely (though not necessarily) precede that Great And Holy Moment Of First Penetration. I had only a rudimentary knowledge of how sex might work, based on the scrambled images received via The Playboy Channel, before which images I knelt in scrutiny on countless evenings whilst the parentals were elsewhere. So… we walk to the sump together, right? It’s Long Island summer. 900 percent humidity. We should’ve been wearing scuba gear. We strolled the ten blocks holding hands, waiting for the sun to set in a fury of color over the shit-stench of the drainage ditch, which itself sat at the center of our housing development like the black hole around which galactic matter spins.

Jong-Fast: We were at wood shop at the Dalton school in Manhattan. I feel like someone was daring me but I could be wrong.

Robinson: We did the group dance thing for a while, then Jackie and I paired off for “Free Bird.” I didn’t ask her to dance—we were just standing side by side when the song started. And it took a minute to get our arms around each other. I don’t remember even looking her in the eye. Neither of us seemed to have a plan. I think it was just two twelve-year-old bodies being pulled sleepily toward each other. We didn’t kiss during “Free Bird”—the tempo of the song sped up before I could get my mouth up next to hers—but I knew not to make the same mistake during “Stairway to Heaven,” which was, of course, the last song of the night.

Stace: I was in the unique and very happy position of being the only male employed at my grandmother's tea shop, Fletcher's House (birthplace of playwright John Fletcher) in Rye, just around the corner from Lamb House where Henry James lived and wrote. It was a situation with boundless potential, if only in my mind. (Fletcher's is glimpsed in episodes of "Mapp and Lucia" - the TV version of E.F.Benson's books, starring Geraldine McEwan and Prunella Scales: highly recommended.) Actually, Rebecca, who was terribly good-looking and had a lovely voice, didn't work there - she worked at another tea shop: there were hundreds of them, many owned by my family - but knew someone who did. Having paid court to her friend Sally, I asked Rebecca out (probably for tea) and when we parted, I (being well brought up) shook her hand. Apparently, she hadn't been sure about me before then, but this gallantry sealed the deal. A few days later, we went for a walk, on the steep hills behind the back of my grandmother's old house on Cadborough Cliff. We walked with purpose. I remember helping her over a stile, or perhaps through a gate.