A Girl's Life Online (11 page)

I had hoped to forget Mark, but instead found myself thinking about him even more. As I sat on the bus with earphones in, my mind wandered to him. I thought about the way he made me laugh, and how he challenged me to think differently about life. He was the first person in my life who recognized that I had too much pressure on me. He made me look at how fast I had grown up and encouraged me to relax and have more fun. Whenever it snowed he would tell me, “Go out and build a snowman. Be a kid.”

When he said these things, I felt as if he really cared about me, really saw what my life was like, what I had gone through. Maybe I had been doing too much. Maybe he could see me more clearly than anyone ever had. Thinking about this made me feel closer to him. It also moved me toward a decision about how I felt about him. At the start of the trip to Italy I was considering ending our friendship. By the finish, I had begun to think that what I felt for him was not friendship, but love.

The idea that I could love Mark and be loved by him was reinforced by my experience with Italian men. At home I knew I was not the prettiest girl and I worried about whether I was attractive at all. In Italy, the men made me feel that I was. I had heard that Italian men like blondes, but I had no idea what kind of attention I would receive. In Rome, Karen and I sat on the Spanish Steps sipping sodas and one man after another came up to talk to us. And they made me feel, for the first time, that I might be attractive in the way women are attractive to men, and that Mark might feel that way once he met me.

The confidence I got from this experience, combined with thinking about Mark nonstop for eight days, helped me realize that I loved him. I slowly decided I didn't really care that I felt no physical attraction. My feelings were deeper than that. I loved the way I felt when I talked to him. I admired his intelligence and sense of humor. I thought about his success as a person. And instead of feeling strong and independent, I felt that being without him was a struggle.

We flew home from Italy on the last Sunday in February. It was hard because it wasn't a night flight but instead one of those long day ones. I hadn't packed any books, so I had to pass the time with the onboard movie and music selections. The movie was
The American President
, which had some vulgar language in it. They edited out the F-word, which was hilarious because you could tell when Annette Bening was saying it, even though you heard something else. Karen and I found this ridiculously funny.

My parents were the only ones who met our group at the airport. Though the school had arranged for a bus to take us to New Canaan, my mother had decided to pick me up because Carrie was flying into LaGuardia around the same time and it was convenient to get us both. I was thrilled that they were coming to the airport. I was also thrilled to be going home to AOL, and to Mark

I didn't think that Mark would miss me while I was away, but I had hoped that he had thought about me like I thought about him. When I got home, I found an e-mail letter from him:

I smiled at the computer as I read it. It was the first time I really felt love, or at least what I thought was love, from a man. I wanted to see him more than anything in the world, but I didn't think it would be easy to explain him to my family. I sent back a lengthy e-mail, telling him that it just wasn't a good time to visit. He replied with this:

Knowing that he felt the way I did made our relationship even more comforting. We had both reached the same conclusion when I was in Italy. We needed each other. I wanted to see him, if only there was a way.

Now that I knew how much Mark cared for me, I decided to tell just one person. It wasn't my sister or Karen. It was another friend named Ashley. I had grown closer to her as my friendship with Karen had waned.

I had known Ashley for a long time. We went to school together and swam together. Like me, Ashley had taken some time maturing. I guess that is what I loved about her. We didn't have long serious discussions about heavy topics. Instead, we spent hours jumping on her trampoline. Just like me, Ashley was the kind of girl that New Canaan never really noticed.

I had become so close to Ashley's family in the past year that I was invited to their Boxing Day party, which they reserved for their closest friends and relatives. I loved listening to her family speak, because they were from England and they had the most amazing accents. Once we even made tape recordings of her grandmother as she watched Ricki Lake. A bunch of gangsters were fighting, and Ashley and I almost peed in our pants when she said, “Look at them getting into a scruffy dog-and-cat fight.”

Of course, the language thing could cut the other way, too. I used a lot of phrases that were different from theirs. Once I described someone as having a lot of spunk in front of Ashley's English friends. They were horrified because the word means sperm in England.

There was no language barrier of any sort when I finally decided that I had to tell someone about Mark.

It happened during a sleep-over at Ashley's house after swimming. We were eating ice cream and drinking Diet Coke in bed with the lights out. At the time Ashley had a crush on a boy named John. She had just finished talking about him when she asked, “Do you have a crush on anyone, Katie?”

I thought it would be better not to get into the Mark situation. But I didn't feel like I was lying, either; I mean, Mark wasn't a crush, it was deeper.

“No,” I said as I grabbed the can of Diet Coke and placed it on the white carpet.

“No, not at all,” she said, mocking me in her half-British accent.

“No, but I am talking to someone on AOL.”

“You are not. How weird is that, Katie?”

“No, it isn't, we've been talking since September.”

“Who is he? Where is he from?”

“He's from California, near Los Angeles. And he's
twenty-three
.”

“Yes.”

“Katie, he just wants to talk to you about sex.”

“No, actually we don't ever really talk about sex.”

“So you don't have cybersex with him?”

“Ashley, don't be gross. You know me better than that.”

“I thought I did, but I guess I didn't.”

The Internet was still new to most people. Ashley knew about AOL, she even had her own account. But she didn't really try to talk to people on the Net.

“Ashley, he's a really great guy, really intelligent.” I was beginning to regret telling her. “He's very caring and sensitive. Some guys are, you know. Maybe not the boys we know, but real guys can be.”

“Katie, he just wants to talk about sex with you. He's just feeding you this bullshit now so that later he can get into all kinds of gross stuff and you'll accept it. What's his screen name, anyway?”

“Vallleyguy, with three l's.”

“What a freak.”

“No he isn't, not at all.”

Ashley dropped the topic, and I didn't say a word more. I knew she wasn't going to be able to understand the nature of our relationship.

Ashley had proved to me that no one else would be able to understand either. Besides, Mark had recently told me that he was not twenty-three but rather thirty-one. I didn't get upset about this, because by now I couldn't imagine letting him go. But it would make the age difference even more dramatic in the eyes of others. I decided again that secrecy would be the best policy.

Something about the secrecy was seductive. There was a certain kind of power, control, even romance in knowing that together we were building our own relationship that no one else could influence, control, or even see. I just assumed that Mark hadn't told anyone about our relationship. As far as I knew, he didn't have much family. And I also assumed that any friends he had he had made through business, so I didn't think he really had anyone to tell either.

Of course, I was a little embarrassed by it all. I mean, Internet relationships are not exactly something that people respect. I know that my sister Abby believes it is like giving up on real life. And she has serious doubts about any guy who is looking for someone on the Internet. Why would any normal guy spend his time surfing the Net instead of going out in person to meet people? But I was using the Internet to meet people, too. I had to imagine that Mark was like me, a regular person who was looking for someone special.