The Video

Sam Whitfield was ten years old, and most Saturdays she felt exactly the same amount of bored.

Not sad-bored. Just the kind of bored where you've already read your favourite book twice, and your bike has a flat tire, and your best friend Rachel is away at her grandma's for the whole weekend, and even the good cereal is gone.

She'd tried everything that morning. She'd built a fort out of couch cushions and gotten bored of it in four minutes. She'd started drawing a horse and given up halfway through the legs, because horse legs, it turned out, were unreasonably complicated. She'd lain upside down on the couch with her feet on the wall, which usually helped when she couldn't figure out what to do with herself, and it hadn't helped today either. She'd even reorganised her sock drawer by colour, which was the kind of thing she only ever did on the most desperate kind of bored Saturday.

Outside, she could hear the neighbour's dog barking at absolutely nothing, the way it did most weekends, and somewhere down the street a lawnmower droned on and on. Inside, the house smelled like the pancakes nobody had quite finished eating, and the kitchen radio was playing the same three songs it always played on Saturday mornings.

"Come look at this," said Sam's mum, holding out her phone from the kitchen doorway. "You'll like this one."

Sam almost didn't get up. Her mum showed her videos all the time — cooking videos, videos of baby goats in pajamas, a video last week of a man who could solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded that had honestly been pretty good, and one the week before that of a dog learning to skateboard that had been less impressive than advertised. But something about the way her mum was smiling — a specific, private kind of smile, like she'd found something just for Sam — made her put down the remote and swing her legs off the couch.

On the screen, a man in a bright turban was dancing on a late-night TV show, and the drums were so loud Sam swore she could feel them in her chest even through the tiny phone speaker. His shoulders popped up and down like they had springs hidden inside them. The audience was clapping so hard their hands were probably sore the next day, and the host of the show was laughing and trying to copy the moves and failing in a way that made everybody laugh harder, including, after a few seconds, Sam.

"What IS that?" Sam asked, already reaching for the phone to watch it again.

"That's bhangra," her mum said. "Dancing from Punjab, in India and Pakistan. Pretty amazing, right?"

"Play it again."

She watched it four more times that night, sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor with the phone propped against a stack of books so her hands would be free. Then five. Then she stood up in the middle of the living room, all by herself, nobody watching, and tried to make her own shoulders do the thing.

It did not work. Her shoulders just sort of wobbled, like they weren't quite sure what job they'd been given, and one arm went up while the other one seemed to have entirely different ideas about what it wanted to do that evening.

She did it again anyway. And again. By the tenth try her legs were tired and her shoulders still weren't doing the springy thing, but something in her chest felt lighter than it had all week, and she didn't really understand why, and she didn't really need to. She fell asleep that night with the song still looping quietly in her head, the drums going dum dum da-dum somewhere behind her closed eyes.