––If you could go back and do it again, what would you change?

Albo: I wouldn’t have tried to “set the mood” by playing hideous late 80s New Age music and (god this is embarrassing) placed a bowl of strawberries beside the bed so we could do the “erotic” playful things that seem so nauseating to me now. But this was just my way of mimicking the culture, I guess, because it was the height of AIDS education, when “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” was a popular song and everyone was trying really hard to rescue passion, straining and saying “Safe Sex is sexy!”

Hollander: Um… probably the premature ejaculation into my Bellport High School (Go Clippers!) sweatpants. And maybe instead of a fucking sewage pit I might choose, oh, I don’t know, a landfill or a mortuary. And maybe instead of being totally devastated and ashamed by the force of my orgasm, thereby refusing to arrange any subsequent romantic activity with Vanessa, maybe instead I would have realized that orgasm is terrifying by its very nature, and that it did not imply that I had the wrong type of feelings for Vanessa and that I therefore should not seek to fuck her. What I mean is, I was really confused by what it all meant, and I wish I hadn’t been, because she would have been nice to kiss again and to explore the whole sexual smorgasbord with. If only I’d known anything about girls. I wish Vanessa Vega were here right now. I don’t want to change what happened then, but what’s happened since then. I’d like another shot at Vanessa. I can still taste her tongue, smell her fruity smell, strawberryish… ah, nostalgia, you truly are a sadistic motherfucker.

Jong-Fast: Nothing, for third grade I thought I was very suave.

Robinson: Nothing. I was terrified, but that made the accomplishment feel all the more heroic. I had very little physical contact with girls for the next few years. It wasn’t until I was sixteen, when we moved from Maine down to Massachusetts, that I had an actual make-out session with a girl. I was the new kid at school, and someone had a house party the second or third weekend after classes started. We were all in the basement, drinking vodka. We started playing the game where you stand in a circle, alternating boy-girl-boy-girl, and pass a single playing card from one mouth to the next by sucking air in against the card when you want to hold onto it and then exhaling when you want to release it to the kid next to you. The girl on my right was nine or ten inches shorter than I was, and I had to grab onto her when I bent down to take the card.

Soon we were holding hands, and then, in front of everyone, we were kissing. We hadn’t waited for the card to come around again. We just took a short step out of the circle and started making out. I knew maybe three people at the whole party, so I didn’t really care. What I remember is that my teeth kept hitting hers, and we kissed for what seemed like days. I kept my eyes open, but hers were closed. We didn’t stop until someone flipped on the lights. I said goodnight to the girl. Outside, I found the guy who’d given me a ride—a kid named Rich—and as we were getting into the car I asked him, “That girl, who was that?” Rich thought this was hilarious. Here was the new kid, blowing into town, ravishing girls he didn’t even know. It became this big story that circulated the school. I had just wanted to find out the girl’s name, so that if I saw her in the halls I wouldn’t seem like a total idiot. High school was such a pain in the ass!

Stace: I guess we needn't have necessarily been in a field on which things grazed. We probably had to pick the precise spot to sit quite carefully. But other than that, I can think of nothing worth changing, and in fact I wasn't worried about sheep crap at the time, so why worry about it now? We had quite an enthusiastic epistolary relationship after this - but being away at school is hard on an early teen relationship. I don't know what she does now, but when we broke up - I can't remember how - she started going out with a guy from her school called Ronald, and I heard that they got married. had children, and lived happily ever after. I should google her and find out. On the other hand, what if she googled me and found this?