At lunchtime, I take a break from the computer. I make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on soft wheat bread, cut it in half, remove the crust, and put it on a plate. Mom says 21 Cheetos is a serving and lately she literally counts them and puts them into plastic baggies for me to have at lunch. I empty two baggies onto my plate. She might count the individual Cheetos but it’s not like she actually counts the baggies. I’m pretty sure. 

I go to the front porch and sit on the top step. The wood sags under my weight, and the wasps drone in the high pit of our porch roof, where they keep a nest between support beams. Behind me, a slate welcome sign hangs from a nail. Mom hid a spare key under it because I forget mine a lot. I look idly out upon the front yard while I eat. This is my outside time. Flowers are growing in a rusted wheelbarrow, and there’s an old headboard stuck in the bushes that hedge our yard. That’s what Mom calls landscaping. I’m not the only creative type in the family, she says. 

The summer sun is mild, there’s a gentle current in the air, and Mom’s impressive flower garden waves. Each bloom nods sleepily on its stem, tilting its face upward, its leaves padding in the breeze. No one else is around but me. Mom works full-time in the city, and this summer, my brother’s a lifeguard at the water park, in the wave pool. I’m home alone: too old for Girl Scout camp, too young for a job. Almost thirteen. The only other kids in my neighborhood are high school boys. Their idea of a fun time is smashing our mailbox in the summer and our pumpkins in the fall. 

After I finish my lunch, I go inside. The minute I latch the screen door I feel safer and more relaxed. Now Mom can’t say I didn’t put a foot outside today. I did, I put two feet outside. I dump my plate in the sink, and go back to the computer. It’s a monster of a machine, housed in a seven-foot-tall armoire. The computer’s peripheral devices live on a pull-out drawer; both the keyboard and the mouse have an ergo wrist rest made out of gel. Our computer chair is orthopedic. It’s the summer after the Phantom of the Opera came out on DVD, and the summer before I start junior high. A perfect summer, as they tend to be in the Pacific Northwest. The box fans sift the air, balanced on our windowsills. The glossy needles of evergreen trees that  surround our split-level house catch the sunlight. So far, I’ve spent the whole season sitting in front of this computer. Naturally, I want to spend all my time with my friends. And all my friends are online. 

I start the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack over, skip the overture, and track two begins to play. I sing along at the top of my lungs. I take off my clothes. There’s no one around — my mom and brother won’t be home until after six, and the only visitors that come to our house during the day are Mormon missionaries. I don’t answer the door for them, but they leave the Book of Mormon on the porch anyway. I open the dining room curtains, naked, singing “Think of Me” as loudly as I can into the crypt of our backyard. Our backyard is a wild place. Overgrown bushes tangle into the skyline, the lower pond is solid with green scum, and dozens of small animals are buried beneath our stone bird bath. Think of me! Think of me fondly, when we’ve said goodbye…  

Then I slip back into my sweats and return to my station. I sit in the computer chair, on the edge of the seat, with one foot flat on the ground and the other kickstanded behind me, the pressure on the ball of my foot, bouncing in time to the intro vamp for the next track: “Angel of Music.” The instrumental opening is psychedelic; it sounds as if the organ is underwater. The first chord whomps cosmically, and transforms my living room into a cave. 

I open up Photoshop. I’m working on a new signature graphic for myself. In forum lingo, a “siggy.” It’ll have a matching avatar. A siggy appears in the bottom section of each post you make on a forum roleplay game — an RPG — and generally includes your name and a slogan. 

The new siggy I’m designing is POTO-themed. POTO is the net abbreviation for Phantom of the Opera. The show comes up frequently in our forums, and the title is cumbersome to spell out, so we call it POTO. There’s a correlation between POTO and online roleplay gaming. It’s kind of hard to explain, so you can just take my word on this. Part of it is that all the RPGers I know are teenage girls, and POTO was created for us. We long for deep, suicidal infatuation. Christine! We want to be her, intrinsically gifted and beautiful, desired not only for her looks but also for her skills and talents. We all hope there’s one artistic genius observing and pining after us in the shadows, and another handsome, wealthy suitor pursuing us in daylight. We’re prepared to answer the hard questions of love — we practice in our RPGs. Our characters are early betas of ourselves, and we put them out into the RPG universe to test our private theories of romance before we have to test them out in real life. 

POTO is the pinnacle of romance. It’s the gold standard. When I listen to it, I imagine myself to be very close to the acquisition of bottomless romance.  

In my new siggy, I cut out a red rose with the magnetic lasso tool, and then clean it up with the eraser tool. I cross the long stem over a white phantom mask. The matching avatar, a 20-by-20 pixel square, is the mask alone, centered and set against black. Both the siggy and the avatar are bordered in a translucent rainbow stroke. Along the bottom border, I type out my slogan in white script. It’s a line taken from the lyrics of “Music of the Night”: “Darkness stirs and wakes imagination.” At the top of the panel, I write my username. 

Online, I’m known only by username. No one knows my real name. But it isn’t because I don’t trust my online community with my real name. It’s just that in this world, we get to choose who we are. I’m Kloshe. Kloshe is a Chinook word that means “good,” part of a Chinook phrase — kloshe nanitch — meaning, literally, “watch well,” or “watch yourself.” I learned the word because my mom once owned a golden retriever that she named Kloshe, and I liked the way it sounded. Plus, I’ve always liked names that began with “K.” I find them prettier and more feminine than the name I was given. 

*

It’s sort of complicated but I’m going to try to explain. 

First of all there are the RPGs. RPGs are roleplay games that allow users to tell interactive stories. It’s not the same as being a gamer, don’t get me started. Each RPG starts off with a premise, like a storyline, and a universe with its own rules and main characters. The RPGs are run by a team of admin. The admin are teenagers with no lives offline. They write a descriptive introduction to the world of the RPG. The intro explains everything that went down in this fantasy universe to get us here — at the point of the game’s inception. Like, for example, a meteor fell on the planet and all the humans died, and now the world is taken over by wolves. You’re a sexy wolf. Go. Users create characters, insert them in the world, and move the story forward through the characters’ actions, which are written out in a sort of blog post on the forum. Each character has their own life, their own past and motives, and they relate to and interact with other characters on the forum. 

This is where it gets a little harder to explain. When you make a post for a character, you insert an image at the top of the post, which depicts their appearance and aesthetic. It’s like, in real life, you see a person when they’re talking to you. So on RPGs, this is how you see the person who is talking. The image is personalized. It’s representative of the character. Usually the image has a name and slogan, and an image of the character against a backdrop. You might find an image of a person or animal online, or put a few images together on Photoshop and make a character out of the composite, which looks exactly how you imagine your character to look. 

Not everybody who plays forum RPGs knows how to make RPG graphics. So they go to other forums called studios, where people sit around waiting for RPG players to request a graphic, and then they fulfill those requests.  

That’s where I come in. 

I fulfill requests. 

*

The computer takes a long time to wake. I press the power button on the machine, it depresses and clicks in place, the fans begin to whirr. The monitor flatlines and then blinks. The homepage blooms. I log onto AIM. As soon as I’m in, I set an away message, so it won’t look like I’m the first person on my buddy list online. Then I open up every RPG and forum in which I participate, log onto my accounts, and check my inboxes to see if anyone’s sent me a private message. I review the forum boards to see what threads have been bumped, and I catch up on the progress of each discussion. A lot happens overnight, usually activity from the users in Australia. The day before, I started a chat thread in my studio’s general discussion forum titled Spoom Chat. Spoom is forum lingo for random or spazzy discussion that has nothing to do with the actual business of the forum. Instead of spooming on discussion threads with an actual purpose, users spoom in a designated area. 

“come if you are hungry or full or if you are just in between,” I wrote. “…man, i wuv poptarts but my mom never buys them. i also like choco. and fruit. yum. i am hungie.” 

Other users continued the discussion while I was asleep. Euphoria, who lives somewhere in Australia, wrote that she’d purchased three hash browns and a nutella for lunch, but her friends had eaten one and a half of her hash browns. They were scabs, she said. 

“The hot food we get at lunch is… chicko roll, sausage roll, meat pie, pastie, chicken rounda, pizza rounda (don’t ask), hot-dog, apple pie, hash browns and cheezies… depending on what time you get them,” Euphoria wrote. “It’s hell scabby… NO variety and everything is a complete rip-off… yay… vegemite roll for lunch! Who the hell goes to school and buys something they could make in 5 secs at home?” 

“Vegemite rolls?” I typed in response to Euphoria, “Sounds like a parasite, or an insect. -imagines fireflies on a roll- ewww….”  

There’s a short window of overlap between intercontinental users. None of us own personal computers. We use our family computers. So even though we might like to, we can’t keep chatting with our friends all night. A period of inactivity during our respective nighttimes is unavoidable. I’m very lucky that Wings, my best friend, lives in the same time zone as I do. She’s one year older than me and owns a real life horse. Her parents take her to horse shows and pay for riding lessons. She once posted a photograph of her new horse on the Spoom Chat. The connotation of new horse suggested there was also an old horse. I can’t help thinking that if I had any type of horse, new or old, I wouldn’t waste my days on RPGs. But I keep that thought to myself. I don’t want to offend Wings, or dissuade her from spending as much time online as she does. The more time she spends online, the more time we spend together. 

Wings and I met in a user-run online graphic design school. It’s not like real school. Here we learn stuff we’re actually interested in, like Intro to Photoshop Tools, How to Make Composite Backgrounds, Photo Cutting Skills, etc.  

Let me back up. 

It’s a forum, and people who know how to make graphics go on there to teach other people how to make graphics. Nobody pays and nobody gets paid. Wings and I were both students at the academy, learning how to make pictures. We call the images we create on Photoshop “pictures.” They’re composites of lots of different photographs, and we put them all together to make the exact picture we want, so it’s perfect, fantasy, and couldn’t really happen in real life, only in RPGs. 

OK, that’s the background. It doesn’t really matter if you get it or not. 

The point being: that’s where it all started between Wings and I, months ago. Wings and I are graphic designers now, and we started our own graphic design studio together. We can make any image you want. Name it and we can make it real. She’s better than me, but she wuvs me anyway. 

* 

“Are you getting paid for this?” my mom asks. 

I groan. I start the POTO soundtrack over again. 

My mom and brother came home to find me in the middle of an urgent order. I made a bad graphic. It doesn’t happen often, but it happened tonight. After all, even Kloshe is human. The stupid part is that, like an absolute n00b, I offered to redo the pic, and the customer took me up on it. Now it’s after six and my living room isn’t a whompy cave anymore, it’s just a living room, and my mom’s making tacos and listening to NPR on the kitchen radio while my brother lurks over my shoulder. He wants on the computer, and says I’ve been on there all day and it’s his turn. 

“Nobody would pay for this crap,” my brother says. 

He’s making that up, and has absolutely no authority on this subject. He doesn’t know what’s good and what’s bad. Plus they don’t get it, my mom and my brother. They think hard work’s only worth it if you’re getting money, but they just think that to make themselves feel better, since they waste all day doing stuff they don’t like just so they can have money. Yes, so we can eat, my mom would say. OK, so we can eat, whatever. I don’t do this for money, I do it for love, love for my craft, love for my community. These are my people and they count on me! 

I cover the graphic with my hands to hide it from my brother. 

“MOM!” I yell. “I just need five more minutes.” 

“Five more minutes,” Mom concedes. 

I hear her set a digital timer in the kitchen. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep-beep. I hate it when she sets the stupid timer. 

But lately it seems like I’m the only one who’s still committed to the craft, to the community. My online friends have been disappearing for weeks at a time — summer camp, vacation, whatever. My friends in Australia say some people in other hemispheres are actually in school right now. The worst excuse, which is coming up more and more: real life. 

I save a .PSD of the image and send the customer a message to say that I’ll complete the remake the following day. Then I check AIM. Wings still has an away message up. It’s not even a different font or color or anything. It just says “ugh.” 

We’re fighting. 

She wants to quit our studio, because she’s busy with real life. OK, I went a little crazy when she said that, and now she’s mad at me because she says I’m dramatic and she started doing all this stuff to get away from the drama of real life, not so she could have double the drama.  

But I don’t understand how another realm of her life could be any more real than the one we share. What does she even mean by real life? 

I’m asking because I’m actually kind of curious. When summer ends I’ll be in junior high, and surrounded by actual people, real people, in the flesh. I’ll have to talk with my actual mouth and say words out loud, like, immediately, instead of having time to think about it and type it and delete it and retype it.  

I start to compose a message to Wings. I want her to know that if she’s quitting our studio, I’m quitting too. Yes, I know that I’ve said that before, but back then I was trying to manipulate her, and now I really mean it. I’m actually okay with it. I just want her to know I’ll miss her. But the timer goes off before I get the message right. I log off, and let my brother have the chair. 

*

I invited a real person over to my house today. This is me, trying it out. The real life thing. Her name is Andi and she just moved down the street from me. Now there are two of us in the neighborhood, instead of me vs. a million criminal high school boys. 

At noon exactly she rings the bell, and I run down our carpeted steps to the landing. She waits on the other side of the screen door, eyeing my great aunt’s monogrammed bowling ball, which Mom recently nested among the lamb’s ear. It’s a beautiful afternoon. The wasps shush one another overhead. Noticing this, Andi ducks and screeches. I slip the metal hook from the eye, open the screen door, and Andi rushes in.  

I make us nachos in the microwave, the way I’ve seen my mom do it: a pile of tortilla chips with a pile of grated mild cheddar on top. We blow on the chips to cool them down. Andi asks if I have soda, and I find a can of my mom’s Diet Coke. She says she doesn’t drink Diet, so juice, or whatever, will be fine. I have no juice, but I offer her a glass of my mom’s Crystal Lite lemonade. She shakes her head. 

Andi can’t believe there’s no supervision at my house. Her mom stays home all day and she never has any privacy. Although on the bright side she has normal person soda and her chips aren’t counted out into serving-sized bags.  

She nods at the computer. 

“Have you ever been on chatrooms?” she asks. 

Chatrooms? Maybe like our Spoom Chat in the forum RPG, I think. Yes, that’s basically a chatroom. I say I have. Then I quickly set to blowing the heat off another chip, to ward away any follow-up questions she might have. 

Andi types in the URL for a chatroom. We agree that, if asked our A/S/L, we’ll say we are 16/F/CA, which is not so far off from what we are, and not too old to be unrealistic. 

New people come into the chatroom all the time. Their alias shows up at the bottom of the chat list with a little green orb beside it, to indicate that they’re active. Users who have been away from the computer for a while have a yellow orb. Any time a user leaves, there’s a sound of a door slamming, and when a user joins the chat, the creak of an opening door. The feeling of a chatroom is of endless opportunity, but also endless missed connections. Everyone’s faceless and fair game. The only metric is their A/S/L. So if they’re like, approximately teenaged, then there’s a good chance they could be boyfriend material. 

The pace of conversation in the general chat session is very fast: the moment you read an introductory line that seems viable, it gets pushed out by some new line of dialogue at the bottom, and it’s archived into the expanding vacancy of the scrollbar’s track. You have to act fast, on any possible lead, and then evaluate the choice more scrupulously in the arena of the private chat. Then, at least, you’ve gotten them away from the lion’s den. If they turn out to be a dud, or gross, you can easily close the private chat and resume your hunt in the general chatroom. 

Byron, 16/M/FL, seems normal, plus his name is princely and Florida is hot, so he’s probably tan and maybe even surfs or something. In our private chat he sends us a photograph of him playing golf, and from the photograph, we deduce that he’s not only fit and attractive, but probably rich. Nobody we know plays golf; it’s almost ridiculous to imagine someone our age playing golf. We chat with Byron for a while, deliberating over every choice we make in the private chat. Andi and I are named Brittany. We feel a little bad for deceiving Byron, but we figure that if there’s a real possibility for an online relationship with him, he’ll be receptive to the truth, and Andi and I can reach an agreement about who gets him. We’re really only misleading him by a few years, 500 miles, and a proper noun. Everything else is true, like both of us have the favorite color of blue, and both of us have a favorite subject in school of art.  

“Brb,” Byron writes. “I have to go help my sister in the bath.” 

Andi and I look at each other. We deliberate for a minute and then decide to type: “lol wtf?” 

“She can’t reach her back, so I have to soap it down for her.” 

We stare at that for a second. I hover the cursor over the red X in the corner of the private chat. 

“What, you just let your back get all dirty?” Byron asks. 

OK, we should definitely close the chat. Yes, this is getting really weird. I have the mouse right there on the little red X. We should definitely close it out before it goes any further. Andi types into the chat box that she (Brittany) uses one of those brushes with a long handle, like a normal person. 

“Do you ever rub yourself down there?” 

We both scream out loud, I click the X, and Byron disappears from our lives.  

It takes us a few minutes to recover. That was seriously a close one. Except not really, because Byron is all the way in Florida, and he believes we’re a 16-year-old conglomerate in California. We think about that for a second and decide it’s fine. OK, one bad egg. It can’t be indicative of internet-wide rot. But we’ve lost our gumption. We close out of the chatroom and go to the park.  

*

When I get back from a camping trip with my mom and brother a week later, I have a bunch of PMs waiting in my inboxes. The girl I was supposed to remake a picture for is pissed, she’s going to a different studio because mine is shit, she’s spammed all over my favorite RPG that I’m flakey and nobody should bother ordering graphics from me, plus there are tons of unanswered picture requests from other RPGers, none of the designers that work for me have claimed the jobs, so the requests are just sitting there, soiling my good name, and people have been posting on the Spoom Board, like, Klo, did you disappear? Did you abandon us?  

Yes, time moves quickly on the internet. The clock rolls all day and night, and there are no time zones. A week is like a year. It occurs to me that though these people are my best friends, I think I’ve only known most of them for, like, three months? 

I begin to respond to requests, but some of the inspiration has left me. It’s been over two weeks since Wings has posted. In her last post, she said she was taking a break, and handing over full ownership of the studio to me. Without Wings, the forum feels empty. Plus, I don’t know, I’m just feeling like, how can I be sure that these people are really my friends, and not actually Byron or someone like that? It’s sort of hard to explain. I guess this was my safe space and it feels like the outside is leaking in. 

I’m not ready to make any definitive decisions yet, so I tell everybody I’m going on hiatus and I wuv them but I have a lot going on in real life atm. I make Euphoria an admin.  

I close out of each forum, plug in my mom’s camera, and download the pictures from our camping trip. My brother at the top of a mountain we hiked. My mom making a fire. As I look through the photos, I queue up the soundtrack to POTO and skip forward to “Think of Me.” 

I hesitate a moment. Then I type the URL to the chatroom in the search bar. 

This time I link up with Luke, 17/M/NY. Luke lives in Manhattan, and I ask him some questions about it. He seems normal enough, and he sends me a normal picture. He’s just a normal guy in a normal room, not off golfing somewhere like a weird old person who apparently scrubs his sister’s back. Plus Luke is really cute. 

“Pic for pic,” he writes. 

I’m Brittany again, and living in LA. I unplug Mom’s digital camera from the computer and hold it out. Smile, click. I study the photo, and decide that I look 16. I plug the camera back in, download the photograph, and then take it to Photoshop, where I erase a few pimples from my forehead, add a sparkle in my eyes, and put a couple filtered layers over the image. Then I send the picture to Luke. 

“Nice,” he says. “Flash the camera?” 

I take another photo, this time using flash. I edit it and send it to him. 

“Yeah, but flash the camera this time.” 

“I did use flash,” I write, confused. 

“No,” Luke says. “Flash the camera, like, show me your boobs.” 

I stare at the screen. Then I hold out my collar, look down my shirt. My mom recently bought me my first bra. It’s by a brand called “Barely There,” which has humiliating implications. There’s actually space between the cup of the bra and my chest. My belly is more substantial than my boobs are. But that’s just the angle. It’s not so bad. If I use the clone tool around my torso, I could nip off an inch or two, and I could easily use the dodge tool on my cleavage to create the illusion of light reflecting off of ample tits… Just then, I hear the front door open. My mom and my brother are home. My brother is telling Mom some story about a big guy in the wave pool today who trapped a little kid under his boogie board and almost drowned him. They had to evacuate the entire pool, and my brother didn’t give the kid mouth-to-mouth, but he was really really close to having to do it. My heart pounding, I delete the photos of my face from the digital camera. I close the chatroom window on the computer. A second later, my brother’s at my side, snooping over my shoulder.  

“Get lots of work done today, seester?” 

Mom goes directly to the kitchen and sets a timer. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep-beep. I have five minutes starting now, she says, so I better finish what I’m doing pronto. 

I open up AIM. Wings’ status no longer reads as “ugh,” meaning she’s definitely been online. Which also means she’s avoiding me, or us, I don’t know, the world we created, the one we live in (lived in?) together. Her icon reads as idle, but she hasn’t set an away message. I open up our chat. 

Wingsy? I can’t believe you abandoned me, after everything we’ve been through. 

Delete, delete, delete. 

Let me start over. 

Think of me, think of me fondly, when we’ve said goodbye…  

Hi Wingseth, I just want to say I’m taking a little break because I have a lot going on IRL. 

Delete. 

Remember me, once in a while, please promise me you’ll try…  

If you’re reading this, you know me as Kloshe, and I know you as Wings, from before the internet got bad.  

I log out of my account on the computer, and as soon as I’m up, my brother takes my spot in front of the screen. He logs onto his own account and opens up AIM so he can chat with his new girlfriend. Her name’s Brittany; she’s actually sixteen, and lives in the same town as us, like a normal person’s girlfriend. I don’t even feel like teasing him about it right now, which is pretty off for me, because I’m almost always in the mood for teasing him. 

Instead I go out to the front porch. In the summertime it stays light until late. The sun is just beginning to set. There’s a new feature in the landscaping, I see. It’s a sculpture made out of energy drinks. Let me explain. The backstory is that this summer, my brother got hooked on an energy drink called Bawls. It’s packaged in blue bottles that are patterned with raised bumps. I think the idea is that it’s supposed to give you balls, like, guts, if you drink it. Mom saves up the bottles because she thinks they’re very aesthetic. So now she’s actually made a sculptural arrangement out of some of them. It’s hideous. She slid the bottles, mouth-down, onto green stakes, and then bundled the stakes together and fanned them out like an alien thistle. She planted it in the ground beside the rhododendron bush. I sit there on the porch, watching the bees land in confusion on the blue glass. They’ve been deluded into thinking that the Bawls are blossoms. 

Mom’s calling from inside. Tonight is tuna melt night. The tuna’s melted, she says. While I’m outside, could I go and grab the mail? 

I check for cars and cross the road. When we got home from our camping trip, we found our mailbox had been smashed in by the boys who live in my neighborhood. I can’t say it was them for sure, but mom said that it was a pretty safe bet. She built a little cage around it this time so it’s totally unsmashable. You can’t stop them from driving around with a baseball bat, she said, but you can stop them from smashing your mailbox. That’s how it works in the real world. You can’t watch out for everybody. You just have to watch yourself. 

The cage is built so that you can still access the mailbox the way that it’s meant to be accessed, you just can’t come at it from the sides. I open it up, get the mail, and go inside for dinner.