––How did your relationship/contact with your first date end?

Bohjalian: Five and a half years later, we were happily married – and we have been ever since.

Henkin: We ended up going out for a year, arguably two, depending on how loosely one defines such things, college relationships being slippery, nebulous affairs. Suffice it to say that things turned frosty between my roommate and me, and I never spent another night in my dorm room. And since Laura was one of four suitemates living in a double, we spent the rest of freshman year sleeping on the common room floor, and woke in the morning to roommates and other strangers walking perilously close to our heads. On the principle that what goes around comes around, Laura ended up marrying her roommate’s ex-boyfriend a few years after graduation. The last time I saw her was at our tenth-year reunion, which is eleven years ago now. Though, weirdly, I gave a reading a few months back at the Larchmont Public Library, and since Laura grew up in Larchmont, I made some off-the-cuff remarks about my own history in Larchmont—sneaking around late at night while your girlfriend’s parents are asleep, setting the alarm so you’re back in your designated bedroom at six in the morning. Afterward, the librarian who organized the event asked me the name of my college girlfriend, and it turns out Laura’s parents are her landlords: the librarian, her husband, and their kids rent the very house I snuck around in when I was eighteen! How truly odd….

Ireland: Soon after, The Betrayer’s family received orders back to the mainland, and I was required to attend the traditional going away party in the ship’s cabin, carrying the requisite lei. I avoided eye contact, staring steadfastly at the ocean pulsing at the porthole. When it was time to go, the group stood on shore as the ship pulled out of the harbor, waiting until the vessel grew small, waving until our arms ached, waving until we no longer knew what we were waving at. I’d agreed to care for his parakeet, Kiki, until it was my turn to abandon the island. Pale blue and white, with black flecks—his beauty took my breath away.

Kyle: The relationship was, alas, doomed: I needed too much attention, and Randy was gay. At the time, though, we saw things in more complicated terms. I thought that we needed to advance beyond hand-holding to kissing on the mouth, possibly with tongues. Randy did not. We broke up over the phone and the next day in school, Andy Thatcher (a boy I barely knew) told me he was glad Randy and I had broken up because Randy was too good for me. I was devastated and rushed to the girls’ restroom to weep uncontrollably while my friends fretted around me, petting my hair and promising that everything would work out okay. My friends were right, of course. In eighth grade, Randy and I would travel to Washington DC together; after high school, we would go to Italy. For a few years in college, we would live together, talking each other off various relationship-induced ledges, watching Fame over and over again, eating Boston cream pie on elementary school swing sets at three in the morning. And while Randy and I were never destined to have a relationship based on sharing saliva, it turned out that the kind of deep, familial love I now have for him didn’t require that we ever kiss with tongues. But I still hate Andy Thatcher.

McMasters: The dance cemented our relationship as boyfriend and girlfriend. He was the first boy I held hands with and I remember them as a bit pudgy, his fingers and palms gummy as if he’d just moisturized. Later, in ninth grade, my first French kiss would be similarly jarring—again, it took place at a Halloween Dance, and my boyfriend at the time was diabetic and his tongue felt strangely swollen and soft in my mouth. Back in third grade, though, my romance with John was cut short when he moved at the end of the school year. The flower kiosk was turned into a photo hut where they sold cigarettes and film, and I never saw John or his mother again.

Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston.