Near-Earth Orbit

Imagine: a boy graduates high school, three months of summer ahead before the real world waits to engulf him. The boy decides to go to California, no real plans in his head - or, maybe just one. 

California: there, because he knows he has a gift, and others have confirmed him in that assessment. The boy is there two days and finds a summer job. 

Summer: perfect blue sky, always sunny, always work whenever he wants it. He is not a virgin but he looks like he could be. They give him a pair of glasses, tell him to pretend he's back in high school, this woman is his teacher.

     July bleeds into August. Every day for two months, several times a day to be specific, he works. 

At first it is better than working at the baseball stadium, selling tickets. 

Then suddenly he is dead inside, a machine, a figure moving on the other side of a keyhole.

The boy stops and leaves California and goes back home. If he ever tells people about his summer job, the real one, they always (the guys anyway, he can't bring himself to admit it to the girls yet) call him bro and say fuck yeah and assume it is the best job in the world.

In mid-August, he was with a girl on a bed, and they accidentally made eye contact, and he could see she was as dead inside as he was. She'd smiled a defeated smile, he'd put his face next to her ear and whispered I'm sorry and they had both pretended until it was over.