“Three minutes till curfew.”

My mom taps the bench, and I pour myself some water and sit down beside her, so close our arms touch. I’m actually bursting to talk about what happened.

“I wasn’t watching the clock. I trust you. So?” my mom asks, and I rest my head on her shoulder, grinning. “That good, huh?”

“Amazing,” I say. “Best night of my life.”

My mom smiles too, and I watch as my joy fills her up like a balloon. My happiness is her happiness. This is one of those things about parenthood, or perhaps only motherhood, I don’t understand. I mean, I get why she’d be happy for me, but she’s not happy for me. She’s happy because of me. This feels not unlike one of those SAT logic games, the who ends up with what at the end of the day when everything is dished out in a long series of hypotheticals, though I imagine happiness is not finite or tangible. It’s a feeling, not pizza slices.

“Tell me everything,” she says, so I do, or most of it, anyway. There are a few details I save, because I guess that’s part of growing up. Allowing some bits of ourselves to not be shared with our parents. I don’t tell her that when he drew my body closer to his, I shuddered with joy.

I tell her about the kissing, though, because my mom, between television seasons, used to make her living making movies about magical kisses at Christmastime, and now, between television seasons, makes movies about magical kisses at Christmastime, though instead of playing the woman getting kissed, she plays her mom. Which is to say, she’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

“It was so great, I’m not even worried about whether he’ll still be into me tomorrow.”

“Of course he’ll still be into you. What’s there not to like?”

“Mom,” I say.

“Okay, fine. I’m biased. You are my favorite person in the world.” My mom says this all the time, though she says the same thing to Isla.

“What about Dad?” I follow our script.

“A very, very close second,” she says, pinching her fingers together, as she always does. Do all families have these sorts of inside jokes? I wonder. Once, when Isla was about four, she sat up in the middle of the night, and apropos of nothing screamed, “Lizard breath!” And so even now, every so often, one of us will shout “Lizard breath!” at random and we’ll crack up.

“Levi Haas, Mom,” I say, because I still can’t quite believe what has happened tonight. How much my life has transformed. “Levi. Haas.”

“I bet he’s sitting in his kitchen right this minute with his mom saying Chloe. Berringer.”

“I don’t think so.”