Courtney Carlyle was only happy when she was alone in her room. Behind her closed door, she’d put in her headphones, close her eyes, and dance. She moved her body without fear or worry, far away from the skinny girls at school who told Courtney she was no good at dancing, who told her to stop, who made her quit the classes she’d enjoyed as a girl. Courtney knew she wasn’t a skilled dancer, but alone in her room she didn’t have to be. She floated on joy and solitude, lost in the pop music, eyes squeezed close.

But this night she opened them and locked eyes with a man in the house next door, a young man she’d never seen before. An undeniably hot man in his mid-twenties who’d just moved in and had seen her flailing.

She froze, mortified.

He smiled at her. He applauded. He gave her a thumbs up.

She felt safe. Like somehow they already knew each other. She smiled back at him, then shook her shoulders, moved her hips. He gave her an okay sign with his hand.

She laughed and blushed, then waved goodbye and closed her blinds. She fell back onto her bed, allowing herself to run wild with this silly schoolgirl fantasy.

*

At school, Courtney’s crush grew. She couldn’t stop thinking about her neighbor, and the dream life she invented — dancing with him on a beach, touching feet under a blanket — made the miserable school day bearable. She knew it was meaningless and unreal, surely inappropriate, but she let herself have it.

That night, she danced, and he arrived in the window again. He mirrored her moves. Together, for nearly an hour, she taught him one move after another without saying a word.

She fell asleep telling herself this wasn’t love, this couldn’t be love. But that word was the only one in her head.

*

When the final bell rang at school, Courtney gathered her books from her locker and walked past the gym. She looked in the open door and saw him, standing in the center of the basketball court. Her heart raced. Had he come to pick her up?

He pressed a button on a boombox and pop music played and he danced, eyes closed and serious, performing every move she’d taught him the night before.

Courtney stepped into the gym and saw the sign: FRANKIE FOSTER’S LOS ANGELES DANCE CLINIC. Three hundred girls packed the bleachers, ogling Frankie, gasping and blushing and cheering for him as he did Courtney’s moves, dressed in an all-leather outfit, a rock-and-roll black jacket covered in severe metal studs and sharp medallions.

For once, Courtney didn’t feel meek in front of the other girls. She approached the bleachers and took a seat in the center of the front row. She smiled at Frankie, and then she whispered to Trudy Thompson, the meanest girl in school, “I taught him this routine.” Trudy rolled her eyes and told Courtney to stop lying, but Courtney knew her moment had finally come.

Frankie finished dancing, and the crowd went wild. He asked if anyone had any questions for him. Girls asked about his life in Los Angeles, his experiences dancing for Jennifer Lopez and Dua Lipa, and his cool jacket, covered in all those pointy accessories.

Courtney waited for her turn, and finally Frankie called on her. “Hey,” she said, casually. “Would you be able to, maybe, tell everyone here where you learned those cool moves? Who taught them to you?” She winked at him. “Maybe a cool girl you saw through a window?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a professional choreographer,” he said. “I created this routine myself. That’s my job and I take it seriously. I’d never steal anyone’s moves.”

“But,” Courtney said, struggling to breathe. “You, um, didn’t you watch…” She felt dizzy, like she’d been punched.

“I have no idea what she’s talking about,” Frankie said, and the other girls laughed. “Maybe you should go see the nurse, get your head checked out about these schizophrenic visions of girls in windows.”

The other girls howled, and Courtney ran out of the gym.

*

That night, Courtney sobbed in her room until she heard a tapping noise. She looked up and saw Frankie in the window. “Sorry,” he mouthed. He found a sheet of paper, wrote on it, and held it up: HAVE TO MAINTAIN REPUTATION AS CREATOR OF MOVES. WHOLE CAREER RUINED IF I CREDIT YOU. UNDERSTAND? ARE WE OKAY?

Courtney thought it over for a minute, knowing she should stand up for herself and tell him his actions were unacceptable. She looked back at him and nodded. “We’re okay,” she mouthed. He smiled. She said, “Want to dance?” and he nodded.

Courtney put her headphones in and for hours she led Frankie Foster in another lesson, inventing a new routine for him. She lost herself again, letting go from the stress of the day, and she showed him a new move: right hand to left shoulder, pulled fast across the body back to the right side. Over and over they did the move together until it was slick and natural and easy.

*

After school the next day, Courtney arrived early to the dance clinic and she sat in the back, a hat pulled low on her head. The bleachers filled and the girls bounced with electric energy when Frankie arrived, wearing his signature jacket pocked with all those sharp metal details.

He pressed play on the boombox, counted himself in, and launched into Courtney’s routine: reaching his right hand to his left shoulder, where he gripped one of those metal studs, and then he whipped it hard across his neck in rhythm to the beat, slashing open his neck.

The girls shrieked as Frankie’s throat gushed red blood, and his dead body dropped limp onto the floor.

Pandemonium broke out while the boombox kept playing, and in the center of all that mayhem, Courtney Carlyle rose from the bleachers, threw her hat to the side, and stood at center-court, dancing for the first time in front of all those girls, giving each move her all as she stood over Frankie’s body, feeling pure and alive and free.

Six teenage boys slap each other in the beer aisle you want to enter. They are ripped, backwards baseball caps and sleeveless shirts. They are confident and they have nothing to lose. Your cart overflows with 18 mega-jumbo rolls that equal 72 regular rolls of toilet paper. It’s Friday evening and you are all alone and just need to pick up that beer and you can head home, stocked up for the week. But you’ve been standing here — hiding — in the vitamin aisle for five minutes. They’re smacking each other in the crotch, pretending to punch each other in the face, trading insults. It’s a minefield out there, and you know they will stop you, they will mock you and the items in your cart. They may assault you. But you want to go home, and so you grip your cart and push forward, telling yourself that you — age thirty-one — are the dominant one, and you will assert that dominance as you step into their aisle.

“Take a good look at your future, fellas,” you say, pushing your loaded cart forward, avoiding eye contact. “I was just like you once, so know that this cart of hygiene products is what you have to look forward to. All these embarrassing but necessary items your mom currently buys for you; before you know it, you’ll be the one buying it all for yourself, alone on a Friday night.”

They clear a space, confused, and you get your beer. But the aisle is long, and you aren’t free yet.

“Nice toilet paper,” you ramble — knowing if you leave any opening in the conversation they’ll seize it and destroy you with brutal insults — “it’s expensive, but you’ll learn your lesson quick that the cheap stuff just isn’t worth the wear-and-tear on your hole. Then you’ve got the aloe-soaked wet wipes, a must for keeping an adult man’s ass clean and respectable. Take a look inside the cart, sure, laugh it up, but one day soon you, too, will be spending four hours at the office discreetly researching hemorrhoid creams and finally — after months of failure — finding one that seems to ease the pain. And then, of course, the Band-Aids every adult needs to help heal his ass after routine defecation. All standard items every adult uses as part of a basic restroom routine. I am neither embarrassed nor ashamed of anything in my cart.”

Just a few more feet. “All right, fellas, you boys have a nice night and stay out of trouble.”

You pass the endcap, step into the white light of the store’s entrance, heading free and clear towards check-out.

“Wait,” one of the boys shouts. But you know their moves, and you do not turn back. “Mister,” he calls. “Sir?”

You stop, knowing it may be a trap. But you liked how sir felt. No one has ever called you that before.

“Sir, are you sure those are all standard items every adult uses?”

You slowly heave your heavy cart around to face the boys. “The thrilling world of adulthood,” you say.

The boys don’t look rowdy or condescending. They seem concerned. “I just…” one of them says. “I don’t think my dad needs Band-Aids on his ass.”

“If he’s a normal guy, he does.”

“And, mister?” another of them says. “I hate to possibly embarrass you, but there’s a dark-red stain on the back of your shorts.”

“Because I’m out of Band-Aids,” you say, rolling your eyes. “Hence this shopping trip.”

“How often do you…” the boy steps closer, whispering, “bleed down there?”

You raise an eyebrow. “Every day? Like an adult man does?”

The boys peer into the cart, seeing the towels and bottles of bleach and tools from the Automotive department you use to clean up the mess each morning and night. The box of new bathroom tiles, three new toilet seats. “All this stuff is to deal with your ass?” one of them says. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this, sir, but just based on my experience with my dad and my step-dad, I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that all adult men are doing this.”

The others nod. “Obviously none of us are gastroenterologists, but my dad is, and based on the bits I’ve picked up from him, I think there might be something wrong with your system, and it’d be best to have it checked by a medical professional as soon as possible.”

“It very well could be colon cancer,” another one says. “I think you should go to the emergency room.”

The air hangs silent for a long time. You look over each boy’s serious face, considering what they’ve told you.

But you can outsmart them. You were once a mischievous teenage boy like them. You know their tricks, their inside jokes. You know how they like to mess with strangers for the thrill of the reaction, creating outlandish stories to rile up residents of our sleepy suburb.

You smile at them. “Nice try, boys, but I’m a little too old to fall for the pranks of bored teenagers. Have a good night and stay out of trouble.”

Proud of your victory, you strut to the self-checkout.

The following morning, you pass away on the toilet.

The best thing I did to help curb my smartphone addiction was banning the phone from my bedroom. Like many people, I had fallen into a bad habit of scrolling through my feeds late at night and then checking them again the moment I woke up. This impaired my sleep and kept me on an endless cycle of stressful updates that, frankly, I didn’t need to know about at 11pm or 7am. Now, as I’m getting ready to go to bed, I simply turn my phone off and leave it on the kitchen counter, far from my bedroom upstairs, where it sits until I allow myself to turn it on when I’m eating breakfast in the morning. My bedroom is now a serene oasis, free from information and updates. No one can contact me when I’m up there, and I can’t contact anyone. Everyone has to wait to hear from me until morning — friends, family, coworkers, and, I suppose, even the police. With this system, if someone were to break into my home — say a big guy with a heavy pipe — and charge up the stairs headed straight for my bedroom, I’d have no way of alerting the cops before he got in here and beat the hell out of me. Jesus Christ. There’s no way I’d be able to make it downstairs to get my phone before this huge guy noticed me and bashed my god damned face in with his thick lead pipe. This son of a bitch is out there plotting his attack right now. He’s probably reading this, scanning the internet to find dumbasses like me who leave themselves vulnerable and defenseless to men like him. So, look, I’m going to adjust my routine. From now on, I definitely keep my phone in my bedroom, active and plugged in all night. Right next to my bed. With a 9-1-1 speed-dial button on the home screen. And there are three more backup phones stashed in secret locations in the bedroom, in addition to the seven 55″ monitors mounted at the foot of my bed, each displaying live feeds of security cameras covering the perimeter of my home. Extremely bright blue light blares into my eyes all night long. I don’t sleep anymore, as there’s always some movement to inspect on one of the seven screens while I sit upright in bed grinding my teeth and gripping two guns. But for the first time since starting my foolish attempt to curb my smartphone addiction in order to get more rest, I feel safe. You’re going to want to install your own command center as soon as possible. I wish you all the best of luck stopping the scroll, spending more time in the now, and defending yourself from the dangerous man who’s on his way over right now.