Don't Send Your Teenager to France by Charles Joseph Albert

We sent Sam for 9 days thinking it would give him something memorable, maybe a few places would have resonated, maybe he'd like to see how other people live. We put aside three hundred dollars a month for twelve months and it was a good thing, it was a sacrifice for our diligent student who did well and took pride in his accomplishments, and we thought darkly that perhaps it wasn't optimal that his friend the disrespectful slacker was going because who knew what kind of a bad influence on our son this kid was going to be, but hey, he was still a friend. And it wasn't possible to do much about that. Was Sam having a good time, we wondered, because his texts back to us were monosyllabic and the one photo he sent was of the Eiffel Tower, so it wasn't clear if he was getting anything out of the once-in-a-lifetime trip, at least for one that we were paying for--his older brother is going to college in a year--so this was his moon shot, and all that money was either going to be a monumental waste or a really good thing. What neither of us anticipated, what we did not know how to respond to, was how Sam would come back so enamored with his European adventure that he was good for nothing but bitterness for day upon day after his return; oh, he did bring little gifts for his brothers, yes, little containers of edibles, but he is so glum, and bursts out in sighs when one of his parents is talking to him, and says "I wish I were back in France," and he says it so audibly, and with such misery, that I wish now I never sent him, I wish I had just flushed that money down the toilette and made him instead spend the 9 days pulling weeds and washing cars --that would have made him a little less unhappy to be in the exact same position he is now, which is pretty goddamned privileged.

Charles Joseph Albert works as a metallurgist in San Jose, California, where he lives with his wife and three boys. His work (the poetry and fiction, not the metallurgy--that would be pretty cool!) has appeared recently in First Lit Review, FreedomFiction, Dual Coast, The Wifiles, Asissi, The Ibis Head Review, the MOON, Chicago Literati, the Literary Hatchet, the Lowestoft Chronicle, and The Literary Nest.