“She answers me: ‘But, Miss Sanders, I loved him so much.’”

“The ultimate excuse. Obviously, he didn’t love her; he notched his belt and went on. These kids!”

“And, Paul, none of the girls in your high school got pregnant?”

“Oh, there were girls at the graduation ceremony glad enough that the robes were so loose. But seniors are one thing; freshmen are another.”

“Jennifer is in 10th grade.”

“When is she due?”

“Sometime in January.”

“Looks more like October.”

“She’s a small girl.”

“My point exactly. Anyway, if she’s due in January, she was impregnated in April. A freshman then.”

...

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“You ask me for a date, drive me all across the county so we won’t bump into parents, fellow teachers, or -- God forbid -- students; you buy me this scrumptious food. Then I turn the evening into just another workshop on teens in trouble.”

“Well, really, I wasn’t just trying to hide you. I think this is the best Pad Thai I’ve found in the county.”

“It is delicious.”

“And teaching is more than what we do. It’s what we are. I’ll bet that when the Dodgers are socializing, baseball comes up.”

“Even so, I might have kept counseling from coming up until later. Where was this marvelously moral place where you went to high school?”

...

“You’ll date a beautiful, dark-eyed, coworker.”

“Help. I’m prisoner in a fortune-cookie factory.”

“What does it really say?”

“Nope. It wouldn’t be fair unless you told me what yours really said, and I prefer the version you claimed.”

“Ready to go?”

...

“That was delicious. You told the truth about the food, even if your description of me was blarney. You have much prettier girls in your classes.”

“I’ll admit that some of the girls in Senior English could compete with you from the neck down, but you’d have to sew their mouths shut to make them bearable -- much less make them attractive.”

“Maybe you’d like to sew my mouth shut, too, after I spoiled the meal with my talk about Jennifer.”

“You didn’t spoil the meal for me. I like it that you care about your students, even if I might care about mine a little less ... You know what the problem is?”

“The problem with us? The problem with them? The problem with... ?”

“The problem with them. Teenagers don’t pet any more. When you and I were in high school, we got over our awkwardness, we danced, we kissed -- I can remember when getting a kiss in private, rather than at the front door, was a serious bonus requiring a serious verbal commitment -- we necked. By then, we were older, and we had moved gradually through several steps. If a boy wanted more from a girl, he damned-well promised her protection.”

“Although there were pregnant girls in your graduating class.”

“Well, yes. It wasn’t always a perfect system. But it worked a lot better than the current shortcuts. I swear, when these guys decide that girls won’t give them cooties, they go out and risk giving them crabs -- or babies.”

“A ringing endorsement of petting. One might think that you had an agenda that went beyond high-school mores.”

“Actually, I hadn’t ... Though ... With a beautiful woman in the car with me, I was stupid not to.”

“I doubt that you’re stupid.”

“Fast at learning about literature, slow at learning about life. I did mention, though about what a treat it was to get a kiss before getting to the front door.”