By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 22, 2006; C01

Sometimes the memory comes out of nowhere. Maybe you're sitting on your deck on a summer night after the kids have gone to bed. Or stuck in traffic after work, thinking about the 800 things you have to pack for vacation. A certain song comes on the radio, and all of a sudden it's summer, years ago. You're 16 or 17, and there's a boy, and you're looking at him and thinking, "It's going to happen. Not now, but soon."

And it did. He's the one you lost your virginity to. Remembering, you may feel a small smile tug at your face. Or a touch of sadness.

More girls lose their virginity in the summer than at any other time of year, according to researchers at Mississippi State University. There are all kinds of reasons. You remember. You had more free time and less supervision. You met a new guy at church camp whom you'd never see again, or were about to say goodbye to an old friend before you both went away to college. Maybe you were in love or maybe you weren't, but those sticky summer nights almost demanded surrender.

Margo DeSantis was 16 when that moment came. Born Margo Walczak, she was a Polish girl living in a small town outside Detroit who spent hours every morning making her straight blond hair look like Farrah Fawcett's. Her boyfriend was a tall Italian with thick brown hair and, according to DeSantis, a "white Trans Am and killer body." They had been dating for almost a year, traveling to rock concerts and hanging out at her house to watch "The Love Boat" and "Charlie's Angels." Every once in a while he would ask her whether she wanted to have sex, and she'd say no. But one night in August, right before senior year, in her house with her parents out to dinner, she looked into his green eyes and said yes. He had a condom and "I was ready," she says. "We had done everything else." They made love on the living room floor. "It was carpeted, thank goodness," she recalls.

She's now 45, selling real estate in Pelham, N.Y., happily married to someone else and the mother of two teenagers. She thinks of that night not as a loss but as a gift to her first love. "It rocked," she says. "I remember thinking this is what our bodies were made for."

Not everyone's memory is sweet. Losing your virginity, for girls, is not like losing your cellphone or your car keys. You can't pick up another "V-card" in a kiosk at the mall. Boys may be eager to shed the label but girls are less so, even girls who head out for a party at night wearing what would pass, in a previous decade, for underwear. They talk endlessly about doing it and they set deadlines: prom night, by high school graduation, the night of their wedding. They also ponder the implications. If they don't do it, does that mean they don't like sex? Will their classmates call them a prude? If they do it and their parents find out, will Mom or Dad ground them for life? (For the record, most "first times" take place in the boy's or girl's house, not in a car, as many people believe. Perhaps the possibility of being discovered adds to the thrill.)

As Judy Blume portrayed it so well in her 1975 classic "Forever," losing your virginity is closing the door on childhood and stepping into adulthood. If you're not ready for it and do it anyway, it can feel "like death," as one young woman put it. You just want to put it behind you, except that you can't.

Laurie Cooper, now 40, knows that feeling. Like DeSantis, she was going to be a senior in high school. The year loomed ahead with a bunch of unknowns -- what colleges she'd apply to and how well she'd do on her SATs, for starters. Then there'd be the transition to college. It was too much to think about alone.

Problem was, she didn't have a boyfriend. She had everything else: loving, if strict, parents; good, if somewhat geeky, friends; and bright, if not always exciting, teachers at a private school in St. Louis. Everything, she says, except: "I was afraid I'd go off to college and be the only person who never seriously dated anybody." Early that summer she called a boy she had known since childhood. He was a minister's son and a popular guy, someone other girls would flirt with on the street. She felt pretty special riding around with him, going to movies and parties. They'd make out and she told herself she wasn't going all the way.

But she began to feel that maybe she should, and he was putting pressure on her. She wasn't in love with him, but who knew? Maybe he'd wow her, maybe she'd amaze him.

On Labor Day, the two of them were lying on his bed. His parents were away. He was a tennis player, watching the U.S. Open on television until suddenly, he wasn't. One thing led to another while she carried on an internal debate many women would recognize.

"You're not supposed to be doing this yet," her good-girl side warned. "You're not ready and, by the way, he isn't either."

"Nonsense," countered her dreamy alter ego. "This could be the start of a great romantic adventure."

The dreamer won, and then lost. She soon learned she was pregnant. Her boyfriend hadn't used a condom and she hadn't insisted that he do so. Her mom took her to get an abortion. She broke up with the boy, never telling him about the pregnancy. Now a 40-year-old development consultant, she agreed to tell her story hoping that it will be a cautionary tale for younger women.

The concept of losing one's virginity seems a bit out of place in a world where zillions of teenage girls watch MTV's naughty "Laguna Beach." Yet deep in the female psyche, parental lectures and Sunday school lessons reverberate, counseling abstinence. What girl hasn't been warned that no guy is going to buy the cow when he can get the milk for free? (Though sometimes true, this is terribly insulting to guys, but that's another story.) First-time intercourse is painful, girls also are told, and unlike their male partner, they'll get no pleasure out of it. What they may get is a horrible infection or a baby. Those warnings prove accurate for some girls. This may be why many say later they wish they had waited.

But when you're 18 and dressed in next to nothing, sauntering down the road with your girlfriends during beach week and getting honked at by every passing Tom, Dick and Harry, you don't give a flip about cows or babies.

What you do care about, if you're Ashlyn Howell from Richmond, is the guy you've been flirting with since sixth grade who shows up at your house party.

Howell and her Romeo had been best friends. They had never actually gone out but she had a "total crush" on him. The summer after senior year he joined her and her friends for a beach week on North Carolina's Outer Banks.

Howell remembers: "We were having a big party, playing a lot of Bob Marley and Madonna. Everyone was drunk." He gave her his sexy half-smile and she said, "So are you staying here tonight?"

She continues: "At some point, he went into my bedroom. I headed for the bathroom and brushed my teeth with someone else's toothbrush. I looked in the mirror and said, "I'm getting ready to have sex. Okay, cool, whatever."

He was waiting for her in the white wicker bed. "He was someone I trusted," she says. "We'd been friends for years. It was bound to happen at some point."

She had hopes that that night would be the beginning of something. It wasn't. When she woke up mid-morning, the spot next to her was empty. She walked out to the living room and saw her new lover sleeping on the floor with several other guys.

"Wait a minute -- this sucks," she thought.

She made enough noise tossing beer cans in the trash to wake up the floor boys. Her friend got up, dressed, gave her another smile and left. That night, he partied in a house next door and never walked over to see her. She cried, really hard. He left the beach without saying goodbye.

Howell is now 25 and a conference manager for a national organization of sex educators and counselors. She shrugs off the ending to her saga -- "Some guys just get all dorky and freak out" -- and says she doesn't regret her decision. It was deliberate: She had heard about drunken fraternity bashes and didn't want her first time to be some random hookup at college in a couple of months with a near-stranger. She wanted to lose her virginity to someone she liked and trusted, and she did.

There is a certain wisdom, here, as Danielle Dunbar discovered.

Dunbar lived in a trailer park. Her boyfriend lived on a farm. She was 5 feet 4 inches and a little pudgy. He was 5 feet 4 with crooked teeth. She was the breadstick girl at Fazoli's, a fast-food Italian place in Wooster, Ohio. He made pizzas there. He asked her to go out one night while they were washing pots and pans.

It was her senior year in high school, his junior year. They went on dates to the drive-in in his red Camaro and to a couple of Tori Amos concerts. Around Thanksgiving, she decided she wanted to have sex with him, so she and her best friend went to Planned Parenthood, where she picked up birth control pills. They dated through the winter and spring and then, in late May, as school came to an end, she decided to go for it. She would be leaving for college in the fall, he'd be staying behind. On a Saturday when his parents were out of town, they began their long goodbye.

She drove to his family's big white farmhouse to pick him up. They had plans to join some friends who were fishing at a nearby pond. A gentle rain was falling, she loved him and she knew he was "very much in love with me." She told him: "Let's go for it."

Afterward, they headed over to the fishing pond and as soon as they got out of the car, took some ribbing from their pals. "You guys did it, didn't you!" yelled one guy.

"We fished for a while, went back to the house and did it again," she recalls. "His parents got home and we ate dinner. I had to be home by 10. So we got back in my car to go home and did it in the car." That whole day, she said, was "picture-book adorable."

Two weeks later, Dunbar's best friend had sex for the first time with a boy she barely knew. They ended up dating, getting married and living in the area.

Not Dunbar. The fall after she graduated from high school, she moved to Springfield, Ohio, to go to Wittenberg University. She now works in Washington at National Public Radio.

He's managing a sports bar in Columbus, Ohio.