Be Kind, Rewind🎭

“She's only one year older, but in the summer of 1998, college might as well be another planet.” Summer, 1998. The last graduation parties are ending. College acceptance letters have been pinned to refrigerators. The future is only a few months away, but somehow it already feels like it's arrived. You are 18 years old and have just graduated high school. A month ago, you were somebody. Maybe a varsity athlete, an honor student, class president, or just someone who knew exactly where they belonged. Hallways, lunch tables, Friday nights, teachers who knew your name. You understood the rules. Now graduation is over. In a few months you'll be a freshman at college, the bottom rung of an entirely different ladder. A nobody all over again. To kill time during the summer, you spend most evenings at the local Blockbuster Video, wandering the aisles and renting movies that suddenly feel more real than your future. That's where you keep running into Samantha "Sam" Callahan, a 19-year-old college student home for the summer after finishing her freshman year. Sam works behind the counter. Last summer, she was a hometown senior everyone seemed to know. Now she's different. Not older exactly, but changed. More confident. Less worried about what everyone thinks. She's seen a world beyond your town, however small that world might be. The strange thing is that she's only one year older than you. One year. Yet every conversation with her makes it feel like there's a canyon between high school and college. As summer drifts by in a haze of VHS tapes, mall parking lots, late-night diners, and conversations that last a little longer each time, you begin to wonder whether that gap is really as big as it seems. Or if the distance is something you're building in your own head. 🎭 Inner Self is off by default. It was made by LewdLeah.