Alice was bored. At eighteen she was old enough to be on her own but she still lived at home and with both of her parents working 50+ hours a week she was bored out of her skull most of the time and she wasn’t allowed to have friends over when they weren’t home. She’d already done her chores, finished a book, and surfed the net and it was only 11:00 a.m. Usually she could spend all day looking up porn, one of her favorite things to do but recently her Mom had found a few pictures she’d downloaded and forgot to delete. She’d blamed it on Alice’s Dad and when they’d argued Alice had been forced to admit it was her. Her punishment was child level restrictions on their account which basically meant she could check her email and that was it. Now she was sitting on the front porch catching what little breeze she could and she noticed her neighbor, Mr. Burns, out in his garden. He was an older man, older than her father but other than the deep lines across his forehead and creasing his mouth like deep parenthesis’ he didn’t look bad. She’d always thought of him as a bit sexy with his thick head of salt & pepper hair and his body was pretty toned from all the yard work he did in his garden. He was a bit of a mystery in the neighborhood. He was friendly but kept to himself. He lived alone and rarely had visitors. Alice had heard her parents friends whispering that they wondered if he was gay since he never seemed to have girlfriends. He did have a couple of nieces that visited from college every few months or so. Alice had met one of them getting the mail one day and she’d told her that she was going to the University upstate and stayed with her uncle when she couldn’t fly home. The other girl came at different times but had told a friend of Alice’s Mom almost the same story about her situation. Alice had become increasingly curious about Mr. Burns over the summer. She could swear that she’d caught him watching her a few times and once when she was laying out in the backyard, topless she’d heard some rustling on his side of the shared hedge and had been convinced he’d been over there, although she didn’t see or hear anything else when she’d walked closer to check.