A Girl's Life Online (5 page)

I
n the summer between seventh and eighth grades Karen began saying that we should have boyfriends. By the middle of the summer she had fallen “in love” with a guy named Peter. They had met on a weeklong bike trip with a youth group. I was happy for her, but I didn't see what she saw in him. He wasn't as bright as she was, and I thought people in relationships were supposed to be equals. And maybe it was just the awkwardness of thirteen-year-old relationships, but they never really seemed to talk about important issues and they didn't like to do the same things.

I was very confused. Karen and I had taken all of the
YM
magazine quizzes together to see if we had a crush on someone or if some guy could have a crush on us. Neither of us ever scored very high, but suddenly Karen was light-years ahead of me when it came to dealing with guys. She could talk about a movie in a way that captivated the most popular boy. She knew the exact moment to do the spontaneous flip of the hair, or the subtle glance, and when to brush against him as if it were an accident. Somehow she had learned the art of attraction while I was still trying to figure out what kind of boy I liked.

I thought I wanted someone who would share my interests—music, reading, movies—someone who was intelligent and kind and funny. Someone I could learn from. The problem was, middle-school boys had none of these qualities, and they were only interested in girls for their bodies. They examined girls under a microscope. They picked everything apart. Your hair, your eyes, your smile, your breasts, your waist, your butt, your legs. Everything could be either too big or too small, too jiggly or not jiggly enough. I once heard one boy tell another that he didn't like a girl because her nose was too big. I didn't think something like your nose should matter, and the fact that boys focused on such things was deplorable. But girls weren't much better. They saw guys as status symbols. It was all about image and whether you were attractive enough to get one that was handsome, or rich, or smart, or popular, or, best of all, all of the above.

Like I said before, New Canaan was a town filled with beautiful people and I was pretty much the opposite. So while Karen spent all of her time with Peter, I was trying to fill my time in other ways. That was when Abby came home for the summer and brought along her computer fully equipped with America Online. Suddenly there was an entire new world opening up to me in on-line chat rooms and the World Wide Web, and it was limitless.

I had seen America Online once before, at school, when our class did a science project on the Everglades. At that time, we had only used the Web for research. But I had heard all about the infamous “chat rooms” where you could talk to anyone around the world by sending messages back and forth. So I asked Abby if could use her computer, and of course she said yes. I had no idea what to expect, but I logged on and with a few clicks I was on-line.

It was unbelievable. The list of rooms covered every conceivable interest, and many I would have never imagined, including one called “sexual overdrive,” whatever that meant. Many of the rooms were concerned with sex, but there were also teen chat rooms. These weren't divided into interest areas. Instead they were called simply TEEN1, TEEN2, etc. I thought that these would be the tamest areas and that I would stick to them.

When I first began chatting, my screen name was Atarbox, for Abby Tarbox. It was something my sister picked out. I hated having Tarbox in the screen name. Nobody else used their actual names. Their screen names were more playful or original like Phantom92 or Skywalker2. I planned to get rid of Atarbox as soon as possible.

Entering a chat room is like entering a party where you don't know anyone. You start by telling everyone the same thing over and over again: the basics about age, gender, location, interests. Inevitably things get around to sex and appearance. All the guys on-line say they are at least six feet tall with brown hair and blue eyes. They all describe themselves as if they are Tom Cruise's taller twin. And they all want to know what you look like, especially your body. You can be sure that every time you go on-line someone is going to ask you your breast size. I don't really see why anyone bothers to ask. Everyone lies when they answer.

It didn't take me long to figure out that a lot of the guys in the teen chat rooms were not normal guys. They were animals that just wanted to be excited by someone they thought looked like Cindy Crawford with a breast size of 36F.

Despite all of this—despite all of the weirdos and the creepy feeling of being detached from reality—a small part of me believed that there was someone out there on the Web like me. I knew that this person wouldn't be easy to find, and he wasn't. Every time I met someone we'd exchange basic data and then search around for something real to discuss, but I would slowly realize we had very little at all in common.

As summer passed, what little bit of hope I once felt about locating a kindred soul in those chat rooms began to fade. But I didn't stop visiting. On most days I'd spend a couple of hours on-line. Usually my parents weren't home to even know what I was doing. When they did check on me, they warned me about giving out my real name and address or any information that would help a stranger find me. I wasn't worried about that. I would never take such a risk. Aside from these warnings, they didn't have much else to say. They trusted me, and they didn't really understand how big and broad the Internet was, anyway. Neither did I, but I was learning fast.

If I had a saving grace in my thirteenth summer it was the time I spent with Abby driving together to volunteer at a Boys and Girls Club that was about ten miles away, in one of the poorer parts of Stamford. Abby was one person who let me change the radio station as much as I liked. She sang along with me, and it was fun because she had a way of screwing up the words, too. Normally we talked about silly things, but that summer the church wanted me to decide whether I was going to be confirmed or not. Though my family hadn't taught me much about God or Christianity, I did know that I didn't want to be confirmed in something I didn't believe in.

So on those rides to Stamford and back, I asked Abby how she had decided that God existed. She couldn't explain it in a way that was convincing to me. She tried, but it always came down to a simple matter of faith. I needed actual proof, and in the end I decided that it would be hypocritical for me to go through with confirmation, since I really couldn't say I believed.

I wasn't disappointed that Abby couldn't convince me to believe in God. That wasn't what I was after. I just wanted someone I trusted to answer my questions. She did this for me. She took me seriously, treated me like an equal, and this made me feel closer to her than I had ever felt.

In the last week of August, Abby went back to school, and I started to face the fact that I was also going back to my own school routine. I wasn't going to have Abby to talk to every day. Instead, it would be just me, my parents, and my little sister again, living our mostly separate existences.

Moving to the eighth grade would be a big adjustment. Because of overcrowding I was going to have to go to New Canaan High School. I was going into a building where some of the kids were eighteen years old. They drove cars and had jobs. They were practically adults, while I was closer in age to elementary school kids.

The high school was a truly hideous concrete building, and to make things even worse, we were going to be crammed into classrooms in the basement, where the windows were few and the light was never sufficient. Although the walls were painted bright puke school colors, the floors were dark, which made the whole place feel cold. This is what I had to look forward to every morning when I got up alone to face the school day.

On the Sunday before school started, I was scheduled to spend the whole day swimming laps to raise money for our swim team. I woke up at 5:30 A.M., and I don't know if I was lonely or anxious about the new school, but I couldn't go back to sleep. Dressed in my pajamas, I walked into Abby's room and turned on the computer. (I had made sure to install AOL on it before Abby returned to school with her laptop.) I signed on and let it sit there for a couple minutes while I went down to get some cereal. I brought my bowl of Lucky Charms up and sat on my sister's bed.

Although I didn't know it at the time, I was actually one of the first users of America Online. I certainly was the first in my group of friends to use the Internet. It was 1995, and although most people had modems, I don't think many of them understood that some small internal computer thingy was able to connect them to millions of other computers. Most people, including my parents, were pretty ignorant about the Internet. The movie
The Net
had just come out that summer.

It's funny to think about connecting to cyberspace from Abby's room. Her walls were decorated in a Laura Ashley pink flower print, with a coordinating border. The curtains matched the walls, which matched the bedspread. It looked like a room at a bed-and-breakfast, except for the computer.

I sat there with my cereal, pointing and clicking my way to my usual destinations in the teen chat rooms. There weren't many people on-line that morning. I guess people weren't eager to talk so early on a Sunday morning. In fact, there were so few people that I was debating whether to sign off and go running instead. But I compromised and decided I would stay just a little bit longer, to see if anyone had any interest in talking.

Then I heard the small chime sound that signaled that I had an instant message at the upper-left-hand corner of my screen. Someone who called himself Vallleyguy—with three
l
's—wanted to chat.