––What are your outstanding memories?

Bohjalian: At Plumbley’s we were both on our best behavior. We tried to be the erudite adults we had seen around us throughout the 1960s and the 1970s – grownups pulled straight from a novel by Richard Yates or John Cheever – and so she ordered rye and I ordered scotch, and we both ordered an angioplasty-inducing death meal called the Webster’s Plate: Steak and crab legs smothered in béarnaise sauce.

Henkin: Of the date itself, I remember not quite letting on to my parents that I knew this girl no better than they did. Also, I apparently made an idle comment about the comely appearance of another girl in the Hillel cafeteria, in response to which comment my father later said to me that it was impolite/unwise to say such things in front of one’s female dinner guest. To which I responded that my father was backward/uncool/fifty years behind the times, all of which no doubt was true. Though it also could be argued that I was simply being a lout.

Ireland: After I closed my diary and locked it with the tiny, looks-like-gold key, returning it to its hiding place in the drawer with my retainer, I heard The Boy talking to his brother through the aforementioned catty-cornered bedroom window. “I kissed Perrin,” he said.

Kyle: I wore my favorite pink tee-shirt and my stone-washed denim skirt, which I thought was the height of fashion and hoped made me look both older and taller. After the movie, Randy and I stood outside the mall, sharing a Dr. Pepper while we waited for my mom to pick us up. Just as I was taking a sip, Randy made some large, sweeping hand gesture, hitting the Dr. Pepper can, which then smashed into my mouth, cutting my gums and causing blood to spill down the front of my pink tee-shirt. Years later when we were graduating from high school, I would write a note to Randy in the Senior Memory section of our yearbook, something along the lines of, “Fond memories of our first date. Remember the blood?” The yearbook committee must have thought I was referring to something more lascivious than a soda can to the mouth because when the yearbook was released, my note to Randy would be replaced with the word, “Censored.”

McMasters: My strongest memory from that night is actually of John’s mother. She was the kind of blonde that I would later come to recognize as out-of-a-box, and kind but hard. She was thin and a smoker and I remember her in a short skirt with tanned legs, toned from constantly being on her feet rather than jogging. She sold flowers at a kiosk in the middle of a strip mall parking lot in town near our favorite Chinese food restaurant and the Shirley/Mastic train station. I don’t think there was a father in the picture and looking back I realize they were probably really struggling. When she came to pick me up John came to the door and she stayed in the car. She was distracted and John was slightly uncomfortable because she was clearly pissed in a toe tapping, wired movement kind of way. Some kids from her neighborhood had egged her car and then slathered it with shaving cream, maybe toilet paper. Some eggshells and a thin layer of grease was still visible by the time they came to get me. I didn’t understand why she was so upset, although now of course I realize she was concerned because the eggs would eat at the paint on the car. This incongruity sticks in my gut—on a night when I was imagining a fairy-tale first date here was this scrappy yet still beautiful single mom dealing with more than I could have imagined at the time.