Xavier Watson, age 17

I read a VICE magazine article one time about a Chinese boot camp for internet addiction. I think it was run by some kind of shrink that used to be in the Beijing army, and you were dropped off in the middle of nowhere then dressed in fatigues and made to do all sorts of hardcore exercises. Tyrone showed it to me, now that I think about it- he pulled it up on his phone and shoved it in my face, talking about how I should move to China and register for it. I tried to say that in order to book the flight to Beijing, I'd have to, you know, use the Internet, but he didn't listen.

"Dude," I had said. "That's like being forced to shoot up in order to go to heroin rehab. It doesn't make any sense."

Tyrone is intensely worried about my internet habits. He installed an app called Hooked onto my tablet which was supposed to monitor how much I used it. Honestly, I'd think the fact that your Fallout Shelter vault dwellers are dying off by the second is more important than cubic functions, but I guess Tyrone doesn't share my logic on that. All I had to do was pause it to play games, then resume the app whenever I actually used my iPad for legitimate school purposes. It was easy. My parents let me keep it in my room for alarm reasons, so I always have access to the Internet and I'm usually up until the wee hours of the night. It's hell on my grades, but hey. That's what Black History scholarships and Affirmative Action are for.

Okay, I'll admit I do kind of understand why Tyrone said I was making black people look bad, but that's not the point. The point is figuring out how to get to sleep soon.

I pick up my iPad from it's charging deck and unlock it. The slim white sans-serif lettering on my homescreen reads 1:48 AM and I realize that maybe I should go to sleep. I have emsemble band tomorrow at six, and I don't even know where my French Horn is.

If I fall asleep right now and wake up at 5:30, I'll get three hours and forty-two minutes. How much sleep are you supposed to get, anyways?

I heard on Dr. Oz that kids my age are chronically overtired, though I did turn the program off the moment he started talking about yet another magic herb that was supposed to make you more social and less stressed out. I don't think it was that magic herb, but I guess we'll know what exactly he endorsed when middle-aged white housewives start showing up at Seven-Elevens all over the country begging for munchies. Then again, I probably shouldn't act holier than thou about TV ads; when Mom went to work and I was home alone sick back in seventh grade, I grabbed her credit card and ordered a set of Ginsu knives, a Wearable Towel, and, as a surprise gift for my parents, a mysterious brown substance in an aerosol can that was supposed to cover your gray hair but just made the room you sprayed it in smell like a mixture of cologne and sewage water.

What was I thinking about again? Oh yeah, sleep. I type "how much sleep are teenage boys supposed to get" into Google. The little gray box that you see when you enter in a question pops up with a message from the Mayo Clinic website, claiming that adolescents need about nine hours per night. Well, shitfire, I think to myself.

No time to worry about my sleep health now. I do my nightly rounds: Cracked, GameFAQs, RapBasement. I don't see anything new, other than the fact that Kate Upton's tits really want me to play Game of War: Fire Age, so I start wondering what other sites to visit. The deep web? I mean, getting up there can't be that hard. But I know it's probably a bad idea- I heard a story somewhere on the news about three high school kids my age in Arizona who got tangled up in some crazy child porn drama on the deep web. It might have been total fiction reported as fact, but the point still stands. Don't drop out of school, don't do drugs, and stay the hell away from the deep web. It's my moral code. Just abide by those three rules and I know that I'll be fine.

I pull up a random Daily Mail article I got linked to- knowing the Daily Mail, it's probably something about millenials and their evil SnapGrams and InstaChats causing gay Muslim cancer. The Daily Mail has a very limited array of topics that they're willing to cover- things that cause cancer, the gay agenda, the Muslim agenda, things that cause cancer, pedophiles, the moral turpitude of kids these days, and things that cause cancer.

Did I mention the cancer?

Maybe I should go to bed. I've gotten so lost online again that I don't even know how much time I've spent up here- and I'm not sure I want to know. I spend an embarrassingly long time trying to fit the charger into the slot at the bottom of my iPad, blink to rehydrate my eyes after staring st the dark screen, and roll over. My hands feel weird when I'm not typing.

But I guess I'm just a teenager, right? I wonder how my zombies are doing as I feel myself drifting off, finally.