Having climbed aboard the bus, she found a free seat next to a woman playing Murder Snails on her phone, one of the few passengers who wasn’t staring at her. In a way, she could see where they were coming from. Her entrance had been anything but inconspicuous.

But enough was enough. She really wasn’t all that interesting. The more she thought about it, the more it irked her. What gave them the right to stare at her like a monkey in a cage? Who the fuck did they think they were? Fucking pricks.

Fifteen minutes later, she got on the Öresund train to Helsingborg, and when that proved to be no better, she decided to give people a taste of their own medicine. Meet their eyes and stare back until she’d won each battle. One by one, she would make them look away. Make them crawl back into their holes until no one dared to so much as glance at her out of the corners of their eyes.

She started with the old lady sitting diagonally across from her, and it took only a second or two to make her look away. The same was true of the young man sitting next to her. He looked down at his phone before she could even get started.

Why had she never thought of this before? Why walk around all worried, acting like the world was coming to an end when it was likely nothing was going to happen at all? That man in the car was probably a completely normal taxi driver who was entirely justified in wondering what on earth she was doing, and all the people staring were just rude idiots who could be put in their place with a simple glare. No, from now on, she was going to stop feeling afraid and reclaim her life.

By the time the train approached Helsingborg, she had defeated them all, except for a man in a baseball cap and T-shirt sitting further back. Maybe he’d figured out what she was doing and decided to engage. Or maybe it was just a pathetic attempt at flirting. Either way, she wasn’t going to give up.

Staring a complete stranger in the eyes was exhausting. It did more than make time slow to a crawl and each second last for a minor eternity. It made everything stop. Suddenly, she could see every detail of his face. The cluster of hairs on one cheek that he’d missed shaving. The dark brown snus stains on his front teeth when he smiled.

She didn’t like the way he kept smiling at her. As though this wasn’t hard for him in the slightest. As though he was in fact enjoying having her full attention. No, she didn’t care for it one bit, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he undid his fly and started masturbating.

Or maybe that was him.