And so we rolled on 28 along the river, the two of us, Katie’s headlights stabbing through my back window, her face indistinguishable among the shifting reflections of trees on the windshield. Used as I was to the streetlights and sidewalks of Squirrel Hill, I still wasn’t all that comfortable driving out in the country, never quite able to convince myself that the road didn’t suddenly end around the next dark curve. Katie, on the other hand, was born to it, her huge house set in a huge tree filled lot at the most exclusive edge of suburbia, and she crowded me impatiently.

Now that we’d begun, the strangeness of our mutual endeavor was starting to sink in. We’d hardly ever been alone together, just the two of us, only collaborating previously on various group hi-jinks in track with devious Heather and the others. What was she thinking about back there? Was she listening to music? If she was there was no doubt it was WDVE, the station everybody listened to, myself included, the kettledrums of Love, Reign O’er Me percolating from the rear speakers of my parents’ Ford Granada.

But music didn’t seem to mean much to Katie aside from her occasional stiff strutting to Earth, Wind and Fire at parties. She was probably sitting there in silence, peering intently over the steering wheel, fuming, picturing ways to pinch Ungie’s head off. Of course she blamed Ungie for what was or wasn’t happening in that bedroom back at the party when there was no doubt that it was all Bill’s fault. In a moment of high candor Ungie had once confided in me that she never initiated, only presented herself until the guy inevitably "tried something," at which point she either acquiesced or protested, at the beginning almost always choosing the former and at the moment of truth the latter.

It seemed a shame that a lout like Bill would gain the devotion of a tough and confident girl like Katie – a reflection that brought my thoughts to Virginia. True, her boyfriend Tad was the pick of the litter, cut smarter, sharper and stronger than twin Bill, who at times seemed like a crude copy of his brother, but there was no denying that they were made of the same stuff. I’d always thought of them as the Krays of our school, achieving eminence through sheer balls and the willingness to back each other up to the hilt.

It was surely that testosterone that attracted the coeds to them the same way Ungie’s oversized, cartoonish pneumatics mesmerized the guys. It was the way of nature, inevitable yet inexplicable, the power that had bound me to Virginia rather than some more suitable girl. In the spring you could see the force of it all around you, the mad germination of life chasing the earth down and making it its own.

But maybe Katie was back there thinking about Pan, himself very like a force of nature, and all the rumors and stories that had crystalized around him, especially in circles like Katie’s that had had very little direct contact. But the conformist imagination, however, was far too prosaic to have any idea of what we were heading toward.