Arthur Pifflethorpe fell in love. This is not to say he fell in love once and for all, in the tradition we have come to expect from newsstand paperbacks and Hollywood rom coms. Rather, falling in love was in Arthur’s very nature. The young man had been falling in love for as long as he could remember. His earliest memory was of little Megan Harper teaching him to braid the hair of her doll and the thought that he would like to stay there with Megan forever, learning to braid hair. If he were honest, he would confess the sequence of early memories had grown muddled across time and immeasurable distance, but he wanted this to be the earliest, and that was sufficient to fix it thus in his mind. Arthur was quite romantic in such respects; indeed, in every respect touching upon his great loves. The braiding of hair had ever since been tied up in his consciousness with his earliest stirrings of devotion to a girl.

Megan had been somewhat younger than Arthur at a time of life when these differences were important. Nevertheless, being a girl, she was expected to have advanced knowledge of such domestic niceties as braiding hair. It was girls who played with dolls. Hence, Arthur was not put off by a lesson which, in retrospect, had a pedantic and vaguely illicit whiff about it. Even so young, he relished female attention in whatever form it came. He would never have told his friends he and Megan had played together with her dolls. He never even told William. Love or no love, this was just not done. But neither would he have missed the opportunity to play with her, whatever danger came with it.

Truth be told, back then Arthur possessed a doll of his own: an anatomically correct and urologically functional affair of ambiguous race that Mrs. Pifflethorpe had given to him in a furor of enlightened feelings about gender roles and sociological liberality in general. He never told anyone about this doll and used it primarily as a squirt gun when left unattended in the bathtub with William. But neither did he throw it away. The doll likely went some way toward fixing in his mind an empathy with little Megan that had not yet come upon his other friends in their relations with girls. Perhaps this uncommon connection was what first nudged him along his future course. Perhaps it was some other quirk of fate. Really, who could say? Arthur’s life was to see many unpredictable twists and turns, and no one, least of all Arthur, could have predicted where they would lead.

“Left to the middle, right to the middle; left to the middle, right to the middle.”

He could still see Megan’s rosebud lips forming the words in a porcelain face as yet untouched by sun and wind. Her cheeks were still a tad plump and framed by abundant waves of raven-black hair, round spectacles perched precariously on a button nose that had not yet begun to take on the shape it would assume in adulthood. It was the first of many faces Arthur would love and so held a special place among them. It was only with difficulty he remembered them all; there had been so many.

More enduring was a fitful romance with Sloane Villanueva, renewed from time to time during summers at the lake and, sprinkled throughout long intervals between, her occasional reply to an email. By the time Arthur’s online persona went silent sometime toward the end of high school (for reasons which will become clear), such communications with Sloane and many other passing loves were stacked hundreds deep in computer files organized by name and place and date. He reread the happy ones in sad times and the sad ones in happy times, just for the poignancy of contrast. He pored over old drafts in agony over a long silence, wondering what he had said wrong. He mined the trove when at a loss for words, if only in the wanderings of internal monologue.

Sloane responded to his outpourings of the soul, when she responded at all, with vignettes from an adolescent social milieu of which Arthur was hopelessly ignorant. Arthur did not commonly mix with cheerleaders, nor with popular girls in general, in his school at the other end of the state. Sloane was such a girl. It was not that she looked down on unpopular children; she simply did not consider them, the scope of her experiences not having opened her to the inkling that anyone might not be so widely praised and admired as she. Under different circumstances Arthur would almost certainly have faded into the background, but Sloane’s summers at the lake had a romantic air about them that demanded a boy to fill the necessary role. Arthur did nicely in this respect. That thoughts of her might consume her attentive and solicitous friend, even in the long intervals between summer holidays, was another of those notions that would never have occurred to her.

The only people who commonly registered in Sloane’s consciousness were those who fell within a rarefied circle of beautiful, gregarious, and well-born youngsters. By improbable happenstance, far from home, Arthur found himself temporarily cast into this circle. He was thus endowed in her imagination with characteristics he did not actually possess. He felt some degree of remorse at not disabusing her of mistaken impressions, convinced as he was deep in his heart that she would have loved him anyway. He idealized the tender mercies of an undoubtedly virtuous spirit but could never bring himself to anything but equivocal flitting about the edges of the truth.

Sloane was generally content to talk about Sloane. For Arthur, avoiding difficult subjects—such as his presumed position on the football team or his dates to various dances—was not difficult given the limited extent of their substantive discourse. He did not want to discuss his friends, who would not have impressed her, nor his grades, which being slightly above average placed him neither among the honors students nor the bad boys. Nevertheless, Arthur’s worries engendered in him a distressing degree of diffidence. Sloane’s romantic imaginings thus placed him in the category of strong, silent type, although assessment by a more careful observer would surely have limited the impression to strictly the latter characteristic. A discerning observer would also be likely to surmise the true depth of Sloane’s character, but Arthur’s love was not of the censorious variety.

Arthur was far too shy to approach a girl in any social setting where his efforts might be remarked upon by third parties. Thus, most of the time he spent with Sloane was on lazy summer evenings, alone together on a sun-bleached wooden pier with the last of the day’s chop rolling in off the water and a sunset dwindling red to purple to black over pine-carpeted hilltops. As night fell and voices drifting out from among the trees along the shoreline faded into silence, they would strip down to their underwear, Sloane giggling delightedly all the while, and slip surreptitiously into the black water. Treading tiny whirlpools onto the surface of the lake, Arthur would draw as close as he dared to the panting, whispering, beloved face that emerged damp and goose-pimpled from reflections of a sliding, warping moon. A thrill would shoot through him when he worked up the courage to brush against her. They would lie on the planks, air-drying in the warm night, talking about things meaningful only to the young and watching for meteors and satellites slicing their way across a milky swirl of stars.

Even then, construction was underway on Beckett Armagast’s Argo. The mysterious orbiting object was just bright enough to be seen gliding through the sky along its recurrent arc from west to east, west to east. Each summer, it grew larger and brighter until it was impossible to miss, sliding through the blackness like a lighted ocean liner on a midnight sea. Happy hours were spent in speculation over its purpose; indeed, the entire population of the Earth could talk of little else. A tentative consensus held that it would be an orbiting playground for the global elite: at best, a hyper-aggrandized St. Tropez (sublimely unapproachable by besneakered tourists) and at worst, a safe vantage from which the fabulously wealthy might observe any regrettable nuclear conflagration. The outermost fringes of opinion had settled upon a manned voyage to Mars. The eccentric billionaire who made the Argo his life’s work refused to confirm or deny any rumors.

Beneath whispered intimacies, Arthur nurtured the dark secret of his true place in the social hierarchy of adolescence, far below that of the luminary lying beside him in her underpants. With age and experience, Sloane eventually surmised this truth for herself. They parted each August with renewed assurances the friendship would not flag despite the distance, but her replies to his emails tapered off as inevitably as the relentless burgeoning of her body into that of a woman. The final break happened sometime during Arthur’s sophomore year, after Mr. Pifflethorpe had passed on and not long before William followed.

A psychiatrist whose opinions overran her willingness to investigate them fully may have surmised Arthur’s long string of unrequited loves had something to do with the passing of Mr. Pifflethorpe halfway through his high school years. After all, it was fashionable for a time to ascribe pathologies in affairs of the heart to a lack of parental consideration during a child’s formative years. It was tacitly understood in the family—but had never been a point of disaffection—that Arthur gravitated toward his father while William was the unspoken favorite of Mrs. Pifflethorpe. As we have seen, however, Arthur’s tendency toward headlong adoration of particular specimens of the fair sex began long before his father’s untimely demise. It is also not entirely clear this propensity should be considered pathological. The possibility will be considered in due course.

Arthur clung to what spare moments he could garner between his father’s invariably late nightly homecomings from the vacuum-cleaner factory and his plunge into a sleep that rattled the pictures on the walls out of plumb with its resonating snore. The family would sit around the dining-room table to eat while Mr. Pifflethorpe drew out his sons with questions about the progress of their schoolwork. He would question them over their respective futures, dwelling for a time on William’s boyhood commitment to the corps of astronauts or on Arthur’s inability to formulate any clear plan of action. Then he would sit back in a deep-cushioned recliner, tug on a wooden lever extending the footrest, and close his eyes as old rhythm-and-blues tracks washed over him from a tape deck arranged on a shelf behind his head. The boys would burrow down into the declivities in his substantial bulk and close their eyes, smelling the lingering odors of the factory thinly masked by the morning’s splash of Old Spice.

Arthur’s admiration for his father was both tempered and heightened by his distance from him. Mr. Pifflethorpe was, by most accounts, a silent and glowering man with a mop of prematurely white hair often mistaken for a toupee in its improbable profusion. Weathered skin of a firm and square-jawed countenance was overhung by strikingly black brows that seemed to cast in shadow a chin prone to a darkening of sandpapery stubble. Day or night, summer or winter, he dressed in denim trousers soiled about the knees (beyond the best efforts of Mrs. Pifflethorpe) and flannel shirts cut wide and deep to accommodate a great barrel chest. His look was always one of haggard exhaustion. Despite this appearance, however, Mr. Pifflethorpe was by nature an optimistic man whose dogged steps reflected not the resigned plodding of a Boxer but the obstinate resolution of a blue-collar Dr. Pangloss.

Great as Mr. Pifflethorpe’s love was for his children and wife, his need to see them ahead in the world left scant time to revel in their reciprocal affections. Born of immigrants and sons of immigrants in a long and unbroken line that still managed to avoid the inevitable softening, Mr. Pifflethorpe worked. Over long summers, when his beloved wife took their two sons away to the lake, the man trudged his daily routine from bed to assembly line and back again, driving up on weekends in a sagging station wagon loaded with supplies.

These rare weekends bred a panoply of memories that defined Arthur’s prematurely truncated relationship with his father. Away from the factory, away from the too-small and slightly down-at-the-heels brick house with its never-ending list of needed repairs, Mr. Pifflethorpe existed in a state of being both he and his family felt to be well and truly his. In a one-room cabin on the lakeshore, with its plywood partitions and squealing bedsprings, its propane cooktop and streamlined refrigerator, he would rise before dawn (earlier even than he would rise for work on every other day of the year) to wrangle his boys from their bed and motor them out onto the mirrored surface of the lake to troll for trout. He would spend afternoons in a lawn chair, reading from a book about Churchill or the Civil War and sipping hour after hour on the same bottle of flat Olympia beer.

After dark, he would balance a discount Walmart telescope on its wobbly tripod and show Arthur and William strange and distant worlds of rock and fire and gas. Arthur would forever remember Mr. Pifflethorpe’s lumbering explanations of black holes and planetary rings and the gleam in William’s eyes as they reflected the stars that held him transfixed. On rare and special occasions, Mr. Pifflethorpe would chuckle as he allowed the boys sips from his tumbler of mid-grade Scotch. He would send them off to the nightly Villanueva campfire and disappear with his wife into the cabin, locking fast the ill-fitting door with its dangling hook-and-eye clasp and pulling closed the moth-eaten curtains. Voices of Etta James and B. B. King on the tape deck obscured whatever other sounds may have emanated therefrom. There at the lake, Mr. Pifflethorpe was happy. If he could be happy in that one important place in that brief span of time, he considered himself a happy man.

The identity of Mrs. Pifflethorpe was subsumed by the stark personality of her husband and cast its brightness into his dim recesses. At his side, she was something more than the sum of her naturally inward-looking faculties. One found it difficult to imagine what she would be like as the wife of anyone else. Perhaps it was her introversion that drew her to the gregarious little William. She and Arthur were too alike to fill the gaps in what each needed from life. To be sure, this was something Arthur did not consider until later in life. Mrs. Pifflethorpe was a diligent and attentive mother who would never think to play favorites.

It was Mrs. Pifflethorpe who stopped working in order to raise the children and she who was called to the office of the headmaster after a playground scuffle. Mrs. Pifflethorpe knew the names of the village grocer and the woman who delivered the mail. She could be seen from time to time about the hardware store, speaking earnestly with Mr. Underwood to determine whether a household repair was within her capabilities or had better be left to Mr. Pifflethorpe. But it was, in hindsight, she who drew strength from her husband. After he was gone, after William was gone, she began to wither inexorably away.

Arthur’s final memories of his brother were from the year after Mr. Pifflethorpe’s death. There had been one last summer when Mrs. Pifflethorpe tried her best to make it work. She put in extra hours in the months leading up to their annual trip, so she might take off the necessary weeks. She rented the same ever-deteriorating cabin and packed the car full of the same fishing poles and lawn chairs and board games. It was not, in the end, the morass of memories that made this the last year they would go to the lake. In fact, the three still managed to find solace in sunshine and old friends. What sealed the break was William’s illness that followed soon after and its obliteration of whatever hope remained in Mrs. Pifflethorpe. Her will eroded along with the brightness in her eye, the youthful resiliency of her skin, and even the town itself, which crumbled away along with the vacuum-cleaner factory’s dilapidated warehouses and smokestacks.

After many years and many nights out on their pier, that final summer Arthur at last steeled himself to give Sloane a kiss. It was his first attempt at the enigmatic and vaguely absurd social convention, and he was far too old to be so caught out. She did not suspect the hopelessness of his inexperience until they were too far along for her politely to divert the impending fiasco. Teeth grated on teeth in a blind rush to outpace his faltering resolve. He tried far too hard to emulate the devouring passion of the movie stars, who were his only examples of the appropriate way to carry oneself in such circumstances. To Sloane’s credit, she played along. She let him have his moment, and then she slipped quietly away. The only sign of her for the rest of the vacation was a voice carrying over the water in the evening—perhaps imagined, perhaps from the end of some other pier far down the shoreline where she sat with some other boy. Arthur’s spirit was slowly crushed in the weeks to come as realization of his failure dawned upon him. The only thing that could push it from his mind was William’s diagnosis and rapid decline some months later.

Mr. Pifflethorpe had been dead for quite some time before the town doctor at last surmised what it was that had carried him off. Indeed, it was not until William fell ill under similar unexplained circumstances that anyone had thought to check for underlying genetic disorders. That the gene in question was present in the son (and not in Mrs. Pifflethorpe) was reason enough to extrapolate the cause of the father’s death, even long after he had been tucked away beneath the lawn of the town’s clapboard chapel. Needless to say, Arthur had also been tested for this virulent sequence of deoxyribonucleic acid. He had been given a clean bill of health. But this was meager consolation for a woman who had already lost two of the three men in her life.

Make no mistake, Mrs. Pifflethorpe henceforth poured all of her efforts into the remaining son. She returned to work in the administrative office of the vacuum-cleaner factory, filing papers until they went the way of the post and answering telephones until they migrated into the jacket pockets of the corporate executives. She put in long hours formerly the province of her husband in order to secure for Arthur his place at the state university. It was not the march of technology that put her out of work at the factory; she was too respected and admired for that, as was her late husband. What put her out of work was the end of the factory itself. She carried home her little box of personal effects and switched to two jobs: one at Mr. Underwood’s hardware store during the day and another at the diner in the evenings.

Arthur took note of all this. He knew the pain Mrs. Pifflethorpe felt as a hollow emptiness into which one’s stomach was ever and again slipping with a sickening lurch, falling, only to find itself once more back above and teetering on the edge as in some recurring nightmare. He knew because he felt it too. But understanding the reasons for his mother’s distraction, her self-immolation in ceaseless toil, did not lead to knowledge of what he could do to help her. Once more, it would not be until far later that he would come to realize there was nothing else he could have done. Mrs. Pifflethorpe had her own private miseries, as Arthur had his, and the best he could do to make her happy was to make himself happy. But at the time, her distance was yet another of the relentless blows landing upon a tender and sensitive spirit. He learned to live with the ache of absence in his chest and even began to recover from it, as the young are wont to do. But he was unable to draw out the sparkle of happiness in his mother’s eyes through the slow rejuvenation of his spirit. He struggled to detect the glimmer of intimacy that would give her labor the cast of love. They lost touch, like two friends separated for too long.

This unhappy episode accompanied what was undoubtedly the lengthiest gap in Arthur’s nearly unbroken string of infatuations. But time worked its healing, or perhaps only hurried him along toward what new intimacies might fill the void of all that was lost. He found another girl worthy of the rapturous soaring of his unquenchable love, that most powerful of forces in what must thus far be considered on balance a melancholy life. This time it was Isabel Weiss, newly transferred in from some far-off and romantic place where she had matured far beyond the petty enthusiasms of small-town life in the Rust Belt. Her father, it was said, was a business consultant hired on to turn around the declining fortunes of one of the town’s remaining industrial concerns. Business was big in those days, or at least it was everywhere else. Even if he was not one of them, Mr. Weiss worked among the great titans of industry who had come to supplant in importance even the government. Isabel moved in higher circles.

Yet when she first arrived in the whitewashed cinderblock classroom with its tile floor and corroded aluminum-frame windows, Arthur caught a glimmer of fright beneath the veneer of glamor. He had a knack for such insights into the secret cogitations of girls. Regrettably, these insights rarely accompanied meaningful intuition as to appropriate ways of acting upon them. Isabel’s vulnerability, thinly veiled beneath an imperious curl to lips painted an implausible shade of red, caused Arthur to fall immediately and helplessly in love. This is not to slight the authenticity or depth of his continuing feelings for any number of past loves. His was a heart capable of loving wholly and perfectly on many simultaneous fronts. Indeed, there had been innumerable minor loves that blinked past Sloane Villanueva’s enduring radiance like meteorites against the constant and mounting glare of the orbiting Argo, which had by then come to rival the morning star in its intensity.

The beginning was simple enough, as these things go. Isabel trod the well-worn path of new kids in school and found a desk by itself to the rear of the classroom. Arthur took an adjacent seat, with no intention of speaking a word. Merely basking in the ethereal brilliance of such a girl was enough, and saved him from potential humiliation made possible by more direct engagement. She, however, felt no such inhibition.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” said Arthur.

“How’s Mr. Hibbert?”

“I hear he’s OK. I’ve never had him before.”

A restless silence followed as other children filtered in, boisterously reacquainting themselves after the summer holiday. The boys moderated their enthusiasm upon spying the pretty new blonde girl in the back row and eyed Arthur with ill-concealed contempt.

“You any good at calculus?” She spoke in a voice rising barely above a whisper. She avoided eye contact, her gaze darting about the room to measure up each potential ally and each potential rival.

“I’m OK.” Arthur was good at calculus.

“I’ve never taken it before,” she said.

“I just did pre-calc. It’s not so bad.”

“Study partners?”

“OK.” The leap of joy in Arthur’s breast was moderated by an incipient wave of panic. Was that two or three times he had used the term OK? Had she noticed? Did she think he was stupid? That his vocabulary was limited to cliches? That he was trying too hard to be casual?

“Have you lived around here for long?” Isabel’s eyes continued to survey the room. Mr. Hibbert had entered with a brisk step that said he was a no-nonsense type of man. He wore a brown woolen suit with a yellow print tie. A thick mustache was trimmed flush with the corners of his mouth. He settled himself at his desk, casting glances at the chattering students from beneath long, wispy eyebrows.

“All my life,” said Arthur.

“Does it suck? I heard the only movie theater just went out of business.”

“It’s OK.”

“What do you do for fun?”

“The homecoming dance is in a few weeks.” At this, Arthur well and truly panicked. Would she suppose he was asking her to accompany him? He forged on, his head in a fog. “I run cross-country. The team does a lot of traveling. There’s also mountain biking and rock climbing out at the state park, if you like that sort of thing.”

“But where do you hang out?” Isabel said. She had turned to study him, and he held her gaze.

His mind continued to race. He shrugged. “There isn’t much. A lot of kids go to the mall. I think it sucks.” Had she used that word already? Had he struck the right balance of acidity and aloofness? He could not get his mind to focus.

Isabel stuck out her lower lip and blew a jet of air that flipped an errant strand of hair up off her cheek. Then she seized it and began to twirl the lock around a manicured finger. Before she could go on, Mr. Hibbert mercifully rose from his chair, and the class began.

As it turned out, Isabel was not one to be shy about asking for what she wanted, nor was she the sort that tended to be rebuffed. She would certainly get no such treatment from Arthur. She was indeed bad at calculus and felt no compunction about keeping Arthur late in the library to pump his brain on derivatives and the chain rule. Needless to say, Arthur did not mind this one bit. With growing familiarity, his diffidence began to wane. They would lean close over a book, whispering and laughing until shushed by a passing librarian.

Mrs. Pifflethorpe was by this time working evenings at the diner and had largely dropped from consideration in Arthur’s arrangement of his daily activities. Several weeks into the semester, with their first exam approaching, Isabel spoke the words Arthur had been longing to hear. Ms. Landry had walked past their table for the second time, tapping on its surface quietly but firmly with a wooden ruler. This indicated the library was closing.

“I’m hungry,” said Isabel, slapping closed her textbook.

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” Arthur asked.

“It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless,” she replied.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Arthur. “You’ve already got most of it down.”

“I’m going to fail.”

“If you want to grab some food, we can keep studying.”

“Do you mind?” Her eyes turned on him, wide and bright, with a look she had found certain to elicit the desired response from young men such as Arthur.

“Of course not,” he said.

“How about the diner?”

Arthur did not want to go with Isabel to the diner. His mind ran through possible excuses before settling on the most obvious. “My mom works there,” he said.

She blew the lock of hair up off her cheek. “My folks are at my house,” she said. “How about yours?”

He nodded, unwilling to test the firmness of his voice.

The matter was settled, and Isabel stood, stuffing textbooks and notecards into her backpack. Arthur did the same. They walked through the gathering night. A low overcast leaked a mist of rain that wetted the pavement until streetlamps reflected from it in diffuse streaks of yellow. Oak trees lining the boulevard shed heavy drops that pattered on the sidewalk and left damp blotches on Arthur’s button-down cotton shirt. A row of too-small and slightly down-at-the-heels brick houses sat back from the street on rectangular plots that would never be snapped up and rebuilt with the oversized craftsman estates in vogue with the high-brow suburban gentries of Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

The flush of excitement that had animated Arthur only moments before began to subside, replaced by a creeping twinge of shame. Maybe this was not such a good idea after all. He retreated into brooding, and they walked in silence. Isabel took in the strange, dimly illuminated surroundings with casual scrutiny. Arthur built up in his unruly thoughts the withering deprecation he assumed must be filling hers. There was no going back. He turned onto a concrete walk that cut an unimaginative line through a lawn that had returned a good way to its natural state. He unlocked the door as she stood behind him, shoulders hunched against the gathering rain and hands thrust firmly into the pockets of her raincoat.

Arthur’s mounting worry eased as he led Isabel into the foyer and snapped on the overhead light. The carpet was getting a tad worn along a path that wound its way through the living room furniture to the kitchen. The ceiling was still encrusted with its unfashionable popcorn. The dining room table stood on legs of chromed metal tubing, and Formica on the kitchen countertops glistened with tiny gold stars. But the home was neat and cozy, the final refuge of a woman to whom the world outside had not been kind. The sofa was new, and a large television was mounted to the wall over the fireplace. Photographs filled gaps in the shelves of a bookcase and lined a freshly painted mantelpiece. Arthur took Isabel’s coat and hung it beside his own on a set of hooks behind the door. He led her through the living room and dropped his backpack on a peninsula of countertop as he passed on his way to the refrigerator.

Isabel stopped before the fireplace and stood examining the row of photographs. She paused at one of them. “Who’s Buck Rogers?” she said with a giggle. “Is this you?”

Arthur walked back to stand beside her. He stared at the picture he had stared at a thousand times. In it, William looked out from the visor of his spaceman helmet, smile stretched nearly to bursting with the joy only a child can understand. Shreds of wrapping paper littered the floor around him. “That’s William, my brother,” Arthur said.

“I didn’t know you have a brother.”

“He’s gone.”

Isabel glanced to Arthur’s face, and for once he did not meet her eyes. His solicitousness had vanished, and he was far away. She knew not to ask where William had gone. Instead, she took Arthur by the shoulders, turned him about, and pushed him back toward the kitchen. She perched on the faux-leather cushion of a barstool as he went to the refrigerator to retrieve a cardboard box containing a half-finished pizza. He flipped it open on the counter between them.

“How’s this?” he said.

“Perfect.” She selected a slice and began to eat it cold. Arthur leaned his elbows on the counter across from her and did the same. Slowly, through a silence intensified by the patter of rain, the mood began to lift. She patted the stool next to her, and he slid around to sit.

“Where do you want to start?” Arthur asked between bites, zipping open the pouch of his backpack.

Isabel ignored the question. “Are you going to Homecoming?” she said.

“I hadn’t thought about it.” Arthur had, in fact, thought about it a great deal.

“Come with me.”

The expected flip-flop in his chest was strangely quiet. “OK,” he said.

She looked him full in the face and screwed up her eyes as if telepathically probing his thoughts. They had stopped eating, and she set aside the nibbled slice of pizza. She rested an elbow on the countertop, her chin on the heel of her hand, and studied him some more. Then she sat up straight and prim, scooched forward on her seat, and leaned close. She hesitated, peering questioningly into his eyes in the instant before she kissed him on the mouth. It was a brief, closed-lipped, utterly dry affair that lingered for only a second or two before she pulled away, but it lasted long enough for Arthur to feel the soft firmness of her lips and inhale the damp sweetness of her breath. It was a good kiss, and his previous one with Sloane would thenceforth be relegated to the status of an inconsequential anomaly. It was this kiss he would remember as his first.

She paused again, smiled at him, and began rummaging in her bag for a book.