You're most of the way through high school already, gearing up to graduate early, so the eighteen year old girl naked on the bed thinks you're older than you really are. Girls at the school like you, and you don't know why. You don't give them anything more than small talk, but the little bits of attention they can glean from you make them happy. You don't understand it.
You've got no shirt on, a condom in the back pocket of your jeans, and this is a ritual, this losing virginity, and you might as well do it now because you have to do it sometime because it's something people do. She's pretty enough, doe eyes, blonde hair, president of the drama club and already well worn in.
You get hard, and you have sex. It's alright. She moans a lot and twists herself in knots under you, which makes as much sense as anything else girls do because it's just sex. It doesn't feel that good. You assume it's a kind of acting, that maybe this girl and you have more in common than you thought at first. Her acting comes out of a love of attention, yours from necessity. Maybe you do understand her, understand this, and you wonder if this is what it's all about, all the whispers in locker rooms and dirty magazines passed around like old gold. It's all a legend, all a fiction spun around something functionally decent but nothing like the way it's meant to be when you get it into practice.
You come. She's got long eyelashes, and she tell you how wonderful you were. You smile a smile that goes nowhere underneath and tell her she was wonderful, too.
The door opens, and you go through it, and the smile disappears like it never was, since it never really was to begin with. That's what everyone at school, everyone in the world, is willing to do anything to get?
You're unimpressed. Underneath that you're confused, uneasy, unwilling to admit to yourself that maybe it's not everyone. Maybe it's just you.