He pulled smoothly out of the driveway and drove to the movie theater with an easy confidence. He repeated, gamely, what they both already knew (“So your cousin knows my sister from Ladycliff and my sister told your cousin all about me and your cousin told my sister all about you…”), leaving out, from sheer awkwardness, the part about Clare having broken up with an old boyfriend, as well as, from sheer tact, his sister’s description of Clare as beautiful. He could not have been more pleased to discover that the latter, which had caused his hand to tremble when he raised it to her doorbell, was inaccurate. He could not have been this charming, he was certain, as he pulled into a parking space and opened her door for her with a bow, had it been true.

First time to find herself among the denizens of date night – a newly discovered time of day lit by streetlight and movie marquee and scented with aftershave and patchouli and popcorn and spearmint gum. First time to sit beside a boy at a movie, to make small talk before it begins (“So, do you want to go to Ladycliff?”), sharing a tub of popcorn, elbows touching on the single armrest which she had always, until now, thought unnecessarily stingy. First time to laugh, in this new society of her dating peers, when someone cried out, “Start the fucking movie already,” and the whole of the theater erupted in applause.

They went to the diner after. He ordered a cheeseburger platter and she, demurely, a grilled cheese on whole wheat. In his car in front of her house, he put his arm across the back of the seat as they talked more about the difference between college and high school. Her first kiss was soft and gentle and lasted long enough to make her wonder how to breathe. His tongue tasted of dill pickle. Hypothetically, her plans about how far to go with a boy when the opportunity came involved the coy catching of a hand or the playful but firm whisper of “No, no, no.” But the reality was that this was the first time she had been held in anyone’s arms and there was no certainty whatsoever that it would happen again, so rather than the coquettish straightening of the spine and the flirtatious reprimand, she found herself simply giving in, falling into him, letting his tongue fill her mouth and his hand brush her arm, her thigh, and gently make its way under her shirt to her bare skin. His fingers covered her breast and he stirred and sighed and moved his legs out from under the steering wheel. His fingertips hooked themselves over the cup of her bra and tugged a little and were it not for the fact that Betty Kelly had told her he had just broken up with a longtime girlfriend, she might have seen this as an indication of his inexperience. He moved his hand to her back, brushed the hooks of her bra, and then, as if he had been barred from the door, moved his hand out of her shirt and onto her arm. He lifted her own hand and placed it on his thigh and were it not for his sister’s lie, he, too, would have seen the way she simply kept it there, unmoving, as proof of her inexperience as well. As it was, they both believed the other’s awkward hesitation was due to a painful remnant of affection for someone else and they broke apart, a little breathless and shy once more.

Each of them wondering if they could ever replace the phantom ex in the other’s loyal heart.

At her door he said, his eyes on the welcome mat, “Do you want to go out again tomorrow?” and she said, softly, “Okay. That’d be good.”

In only a few weeks’ time, the refrain of first-first party together, first walk on the beach, first dinner in a restaurant-exhausted itself in the social realm and came to refer exclusively to the physical milestones they marked during their hours together in the dark: first love bite, first success with those hooks, first glimpse of her bare breasts in the shadowy streetlights, first obedient touch of her hand, first nakedness against the plush cloth seat, first astonished completion of what they had begun, the silver shimmer of their success spread across her bare belly.

That summer, Barb Luce, who had been Clare’s best friend since fifth grade, accused her of abandoning their friendship because of a boy-an error they had marked in other girls at their school and had always condemned-and Clare denied it, but without conviction. She would not return to those suffocating Saturday nights of TV movies and cake mixes and playing with each other’s hair for all the best girlfriends in the world. “Maybe we can double date sometime,” she told Barb. “You know, when you meet someone.” And that was the end of that.

It was the girls who already had boyfriends, or who already had a string of them, who noticed his ring around her neck the first morning back at school. Clare was part of their sorority now.

In the second week of the term, a priest visited, as was tradition, to hear confessions and to say Mass, but he was a young guy-a new assistant at a nearby parish-with thinning hair and an effeminate voice, and in an effort to keep the sacrament relevant to the girls he asked that they first meet with him in small groups so they could all have a conversation about life, about their accomplishments (he said) as well as their transgressions, before he met with them individually to offer absolution. He was pale and earnest, gay, they were pretty sure.

In Clare’s group discussion, held in the small room that usually served as the PE teacher’s office, she and Christine Dodd and Cynthia Pechulis talked about being nasty behind their friends’ backs and lying to their parents about stupid things and using fake IDs to buy beer, but no one said anything about sex. In her individual meeting, Clare shyly bent her head when the young priest asked her if she had anything more she wanted to discuss. He suggested that they both take a minute to “open our hearts to God” before they said an Act of Contrition together, and although she bowed her head again, it was not as easy, at that moment, to keep a silent conscience. For surely if she had ever sinned it was when she had first let him, helped him, to slip her sweater up over her head, to slide her jeans off over her hips.

Without opening his eyes, the young priest suddenly began to say an Act of Contrition and softly, Clare followed along. He then blessed her, and absolved her, and as he did, she noticed that his fingernails were bitten to the core. It was the kind of thing Pauline would have pointed out. It was the kind of thing that indicated, Clare already knew, that the man wasn’t as sure of himself as he seemed.

That Saturday afternoon she walked down to St. Gabriel’s and slipped through the eight-paneled door of one of the confessionals. This, too, in the way of contemporary churches, was just a room, not terribly different from the PE teacher’s office at school, but empty except for a freestanding kneeler before a folded screen. Early on (Clare had memories of her first confessions here), when everything still smelled of wood and paint, there had been just two chairs, but her parents, and others, it seemed, had claimed Father McShane had taken the modernization thing too far and the kneeling bench and the screen had been added. Father McShane, now Monsignor McShane, was seated behind the screen, she could see his profile clearly, his cheek in his hand. There had been rumors, when she was in grammar school, that he slept through most confessions, sometimes even snored if you went on too long. She repeated the list of sins she had been confessing since those days-adding only “I let my boyfriend take some liberties,” which she placed between, “I lied to my mother three times” and “I took the Lord’s name in vain twice.” The priest prescribed for her penance four Our Father’s and four Hail Mary’s and the avoidance of the “occasion of sin.”

Kneeling in the pew to say her prayers, she recalled how she once had thought an occasion of sin meant a social occasion dedicated to wrongdoing-St. Patrick’s Day or Mardi Gras most likely. She smiled into her hands. Of course, what it meant now was the backseat of Greg’s father’s car, the couch in her basement when her parents weren’t home, the friend’s apartment near Marist where, he had assured her, he and she would have a room to themselves, undisturbed, when she came up to visit him this weekend, getting a ride from his sister, who would stay with friends at Ladycliff and assure both sets of parents that Clare too was staying there. She had bought new pajamas. He said he was buying new sheets. She would brush her teeth and wash her face, tie up her hair in a ribbon and then kiss him. They would sleep together in the same bed for the first time and in the morning they’d go out to breakfast together-he’d said the diners upstate were pretty lousy but he had a favorite spot for waffles and fresh juice. After breakfast, they would take a long walk-he had the trail all planned. The leaves were just changing and he knew a farm where they sold hot cider. There was a rugby game to watch Saturday afternoon and a keg party that night. His friends would treat her with that delicious graciousness otherwise wild and sometimes gross boys reserved for the girls who were loved by their buddies. And then a second night in bed together, like a married couple.