I was one of the lucky ones. Most parents don’t handle the news of their kids losing their virginity too well. I can’t imagine it’s music to their ears, but my mom took the news in stride. There were no punishments handed out, no sighs of disappointment. The way she found out (a way I won’t get into today, but maybe another day) was through happenstance, and thus, she decided not to go off the deep end. Later, she even joked about how she wished I had told her directly instead of letting her hear about it on whatsapp from an aunt. My girlfriend in high school on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky.

Both of us lived under the watchful eye of strict mothers who, if allowed, would have put tracking devices on us. It’s not like we were bad kids, we just had extremely protective mothers who wanted to make sure we weren’t doing anything crazy. But, as it turns out, they couldn’t always watch us, largely because we both lived in single mother homes and the demands of their jobs often called for long hours. One night, the two of us wanted each other badly, but on this particular night, it seemed none of that would be happening since both of our parents had the night off from work. Tonight, we weren’t going to be able to do anything within the confines of our respective bedrooms, which at the time, was preferred. After all, we were still new to the whole sex thing, so our preference when it came to locations was a tad conservative and lacked imagination. Still, when the two of us left the movies, it was a full moon, the night wasn’t getting any younger, and our curfews were fast approaching. We had to think of something. Turns out that something was going to be her car, or rather, her mom’s car. With only an hour left before the two of us had to be home, the two of us pulled into the parking lot of one of the local parks, not far from where she lived. When we got there, I admit, I wasn’t prepared to go all the way with it. Up until this point, both of us had managed to keep our newly discovered sex life a secret from everyone except our closest friends. We were both careful and discreet, and doing it in the park, doing it in a car, was hardly careful or discreet. Still, our make out session was getting intense, the windows were completely fogged up and we decided to go all the way. I don’t know how much time had passed (I know it wasn’t long enough for either of us to finish) before a very bright light shone through the driver’s side window and knocks on the glass followed.

“Folks, this is the police,” a voice from the outside said. My girlfriend got off from on top of me, and the both of us were scrambling to put our clothes back on or as much of them as we could. This was a dead giveaway we were new to the ways of car sex. The two of us were like, completely naked. I had my shirt off, she had her shirt off. In retrospect, I have no idea what we were doing. It was supposed to be a quickie and yet we were disrobed like two people making love in a room full of candles. But getting our clothes back on were the least of our troubles, and we both knew it. Scrambling to put our clothes back on, I can hear my girlfriend quietly sobbing, scared. “Relax,” I told her.” “We’re going to be fine. We’ll eat the ticket, okay? No one has to know.” She wasn’t hearing me. She was crying still, now even more so than she was before. I think she was turning on the tears in hopes of getting sympathy from the cop, who was still waiting for us to collect ourselves. When she rolled down the window, there was a bald, ruddy-faced looking cop with glasses, the kind of guy we can tell was going to be a jerk. The tears didn’t make him feel sorry for my girlfriend, instead they made him suspicious. “Mam, are you okay?” he asked. “What’s wrong?” “We’re fine,” I said. The cop flashed the light in my direction. “Be quiet,” he said. “I’m talking to her.” “No, no, no, we’re fine officer,” my girlfriend said. “This is my boyfriend, and we were just, just, just…” She starts crying again. “Having sex! Don’t arrest us! Please!” The officer took another look at me, as I was consoling my girlfriend, and then said, “We’re not going to arrest you mam, but I do need to see your driver’s license and registration. I’m going to have to ticket you two. So sir, your ID too.”

My girlfriend and I handed them over to the officer and waited as he went back to his car. Not three minutes went by before the officer came back to my girlfriend’s car and gave both of us our IDs back. “You all can go home,” he said. Thinking we got a break, the two of us started smiling immediately and thanking the officer profusely. “Oh I wouldn’t thank me,” the officer said. Then he looked over at my girlfriend. “But I would thank your Mom. She said she’ll see you in the morning and told me to tell you, to be ready for a long talk. She wants you up at 5:30 when she comes home.” While the two of us were at the movies on a night we thought both our parents were home, my girlfriend’s mother got called in to cover the graveyard shift for someone out sick. What did my girlfriend’s mom do for a living? She was a 911 operator, whose duties include doing background checks on the people police pull over and consider ticketing. As the officer walked away, chuckling to himself, my girlfriend once again, started crying. Only this time, we both knew she had a good reason.