Morning crept through the windows and cast a few rays of harsh sunlight on the opposite bed. Tatiana wasn’t there. I rolled over in my own bed and peered over the edge of the sheets to find her on the rug, slumped over her laptop screen.

“Hey, you alright?” I asked.

She turned her face groggily at me, her eyes baggy and bloodshot, then whipped back to the screen. “Ellie! Thank God you’re awake.”

“Have you … slept? At all?”

“No,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Take a look at my screen.”

I stumbled out of bed and sat down on the rug next to her. Her laptop screen was messy, full of icons strewn everywhere and browsers with so many tabs that you couldn’t see their titles, but her current tab was clear. It showed a video feed of her kitchen, from the vantage point of some upper cabinet. Atop her stove was a pot of water, and the flame underneath it was on, and underneath the glass lid was—

“Is that … Debney?”

“Yes,” she said. Debney was her frog. “The Airbnb guests threw him into the pot and tried to boil him last night.”

“What? Why the fuck would they do that?”

“I don’t know! They looked drunk out of their minds,” she said, her eyes still glued to the screen. “I am never hosting frat guys again.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, fuck them. Is there anything you can do about it?”

“They’re there for three more days.”

“Can you just, like, kick them out?”

“Okay, so the problem is, I never disclosed to them that I have cameras in the kitchen and living room, so if I called them right now, they’d find out I’ve been watching them and they could sue me.”

“Yeah. I’m so sorry,” I said. “Debney was a good frog.”

“No, the thing is,” she turned to me for a second, “he’s still alive.”

“What? How?”

She pointed to her eyes, and then to the screen. “A watched pot never boils.”

“Wait. Like the proverb?”

“Yes. I’ve been watching the pot. And it hasn’t boiled yet.”

“But … that’s just a proverb, right? It isn’t, like, literally, physically—”

She circled the rim of the pot on the screen with her finger. “No steam, right?”

And it was true! So far, even though the flame on the burner was clearly on, and water was clearly sloshing around beneath the lid, there was no steam rising from the pot. In full defiance of the normal laws of physics, the proverb was apparently holding. So long as the pot was being watched, Debney was safe.

“And it starts to boil when I look away,” she concluded.

“Wait, so is that why you haven’t slept all night? You’ve been staring at the screen? Watching the pot?”

“Yes. That’s what I’ve been doing.”

“You really need to get some rest.”

“Yes. I do.” She turned to me, finally for more than a second, haggard and sleep-ridden, betraying the full extent of her sleep deprivation. “And that’s why I need you to keep your eyes glued to that screen until I wake up.”

“Wait, what?”

She collapsed soundly into the rug.