Sex on the Moon
picked up once you started taking courses you enjoyed, and it’s obvious you know how to work hard. I’d already made the decision before I got you on the phone. You’re exactly the kind of person we look for.”
    Thad couldn’t believe it. All that anxiety, that built-up adrenaline—and now it was really going to happen.
    “There are two types of people who work at NASA,” Musgrove had finished cheerily. “People who are obsessed with space. And people who are about to become obsessed with space.”
    With that, the man had hung up, the phone going quiet in Thad’s hand.
    And that was it—Thad was on his way. He leaned back in his chair, grinning ear to ear. He was going to be a co-op at the Johnson Space Center.
    Houston, we have liftoff …

4
    The twelve-year-old kids in the Star Trek uniforms should have given it away. That, or the fact that the line Thad was standing in ended in a turnstile manned by a guy in a bright orange space suit. But Thad’s anxiety level was so high, his mind whirling so fast, he didn’t realize anything was wrong until the kids in the uniforms had disappeared into the building in front of him, and he was standing right up against the turnstile, staring past the orange suit into an atrium that looked way more like Disney’s Epcot Center than a working government building. There was a mock-up of the Apollo lunar lander hanging from the ceiling, and something that resembled the interior of the space shuttle jutting right out of the far wall—as if the damn thing had crashed through from the other side, embedding itself for the amusement of the throngs of children scrambling over its fuselage. Stranger still, Thad noticed multiple vending machines hawking everything from colorful space ice cream to baseball hats with the NASA emblem emblazoned across the front. He’d either taken a wrong turn on his way out of the parking lot, or NASA wasn’t the buttoned-down institution he had imagined after all.
    He turned back toward the man in the orange space suit. On closer inspection, the guy couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old.
    “I think I might be in the wrong place.”
    “Depends where you’re trying to go,” the kid responded, barely looking at him. “You here for the zero-gravity show? Tickets are twenty bucks, but you have to get them at the ticket office.”
    Thad shook his head.
    “I’m not here for the zero-gravity show. I’m here for work. I mean, I’m supposed to start today. I’m in the co-op program.”
    The kid in the space suit yawned.
    “Uh, guy, this isn’t the Johnson Space Center. This is Space Center Houston. The JSC is next door. But you have to be authorized to get through security.”
    “Shit, thanks.”
    Thad quickly stepped out of line and rushed back out toward the parking lot. Christ, now he was going to be late—and on his first day. He pushed through the glass double doors and winced as the morning heat hit him full in the face; even though it was the first week of September, it still felt like an oven outside. The sky was blindingly bright and it had to be over ninety degrees. Thad pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket. The shirt was white, with short sleeves, and his pants were khaki and a little too long, hanging down over his black dress shoes. He knew the shoes were entirely wrong, but they were the only pair he owned that weren’t caked in dried mud from multiple dinosaur digs and geological fieldwork. Dress shoes would have to do.
    He quickly found his car—a 1996 bright green Toyota Tercel with Utah plates—and navigated his way around the tour buses that cluttered the vast parking lot. In retrospect, he should’ve known he was in the wrong place by virtue of how easy it had been to drive right up to the squat, rectangular building; after all, this was NASA, it should have been one of the most secure complexes in the country. But Thad was working on barely any sleep, having spent half the night driving the last
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