The boys especially are transfixed, spending every free moment tap-tap-tapping on the keyboards, playing a simplistic game that involves stacking blocks in an effort to make them explode. I stay away. I have only touched one other computer, at my friend Marissa’s house, and found the experience disconcerting. There was something sinister about the green letters and numbers that flashed on the screen as the computer booted up, and I hated the way Marissa stopped answering questions or noticing me the second it was turned on.
My distaste for computers has an almost-political fervor: they’re changing our society, I say, and for the worse. Let’s act human. Converse. Use our handwriting. I ask to be excused from typing class, where we use a program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing to learn which finger should touch which letter. (Pinkie on P, she says. Pinkie on P.) While the others try to please Mavis, I write in my notebook.
At parent-teacher conferences my teacher tells my mother and father that I show “a real hostility toward technology.” She wishes I was willing to “embrace new developments in the classroom.” When my mother announces we will be getting one of our own at home, I go to my room and turn on the tiny black-and-white TV I bought at a yard sale, refusing to come out for over an hour.
It arrives one evening after school, an Apple with a monitor the size of a moving box. A guy with a ponytail installs it, shows my mother how to use the CD-ROM drive, and asks if I want to see the “preinstalled” games. I shake my head: No. No, I don’t.
But the computer exerts a magnetic pull, sitting there in the middle of our living room, humming ever so slightly. I watch as my babysitter walks my sister through a game of Oregon Trail, only to have her entire digital family die of dysentery before they can ford the river. My mother types a Word document with her two pointer fingers. “Don’t you want to try it?” she asks.
Finally, the temptation is too great. I want to try, to see what all the fuss is about, but I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I already went back on being a vegetarian and was so ashamed I told the girls at lunch that my sandwich was tofu prosciutto. I have to be true to myself. I can’t keep rejiggering my identity, and hating computers is a part of my identity. One day my mother is in her bedroom organizing her shoes, and the coast is clear. I walk into the living room, sit down in the cold metal office chair, and slowly extend my finger toward the power button. Listen to it boot up, ping, and purr. I feel an exhilarating sense of trespass.
In fifth grade we all get screen names. We message with one another, but we also go to chat rooms, digital hangouts with names like Teen Hang and A Place for Friends. It takes me a little while to wrap my head around the idea of anonymity. Of people I can’t see who can’t see me. Of being seen without being seen at all. Katie Pomerantz and I jointly take on the persona of a fourteen-year-old model named Mariah, who has flowing black hair, B-cup breasts, and an endless supply of smiley faces. Aware of Mariah’s incredible power, we ensnare boys, promising them we are beautiful, popular, and looking for love, as well as rich off of our teen-model earnings. We giggle as we take turns typing, reveling in our power. At one point, we ask a boy in Delaware to check the tag of his jeans and tell us the brand.
“They’re Wrangler,” he writes back. “My mom got them at Walmart.”
Feverish with triumph, we log out.
Juliana is new to ninth grade. She doesn’t know anyone, but she has the confidence of someone who has been popular since kindergarten. She’s a punk: her nose is pierced, and her hair is spiked. She wears a homemade T-shirt that reads leftover crack, and her face is so beautiful that sometimes I can’t help but imagine it superimposed over my own. Juliana is a vegan for political reasons and seems to genuinely enjoy music without a melody. When she tells me that she’s had sex—in an alleyway, no less, with a twenty-year-old guy—it takes me a week to recover.
“I was wearing a skirt, so he just pulled my underwear to the side,” she says, as casually as if she were telling me what her mom made for dinner.
Two months into school she uses her fake ID to get a tattoo, a nautical star on the back of her neck, the lines thick and inelegant.
I ask to run my fingers over the scab, unable to believe this will exist forever.
A lot of Juliana’s punk friends live in New Jersey, where she often goes on the weekends for “shows.” At lunch, we look at their homemade Angelfire.com websites, one of which has an image of a decomposing baby carcass on the home page. But mostly they post pictures of themselves sweaty and piled high in front of makeshift stages. It’s hard to tell who’s in the band and who is just hanging out. She points out Shane, a pretty blond she has a crush on. His website is called Str8OuttaCompton, a reference I won’t get for another ten years. In one of Shane’s photos, a picture of a concert in a cramped basement, I notice a boy, tan with chubby cheeks and vacant blue eyes, moshing off to the side, a bandanna tied around his head. “Who’s that?” I ask.
“His name is Igor,” Juliana tells me. “He’s Russian. Vegan, too. He’s really nice.”
“He’s cute,” I say.
That night, an instant-message bubble pops up from Pyro0001. I accept.
Pyro0001: Hey, it’s Igor.