![]() ![]() And so I set one for him, and there I’d be, lying on my bed, when I’d hear the alarm go off, and before I could shoot upright and make it to my computer, I’d hear the next sound-that wonderful, heavenly bing-and I’d know it was him with some silly message crafted just for me.ĭuring the day, I’d see him in school, and we’d smile and talk a little bit, but nothing ever like our conversations that were saved for those little white chat boxes each night. I could make him lol. AIM offered a feature perfect for stalkers and overly anxious teens (it knew its audience well) in which you could set an alarm to go off every time a specific person signed online. Without needing to face him in person, I felt braver, more open, my fingers unafraid to hit “send.” I discovered I could be quick-witted, funny even. I didn’t have to pause and think about what I wanted to say to him, I just typed it. Our conversations flowed quickly and naturally. I talked to him just like I talked to my other friends: about stupid stuff, which episode of “Family Guy” was our favorite, how much geometry homework we had, how goddamn boring the suburbs were, and about real stuff, too. ![]() I don’t remember quite how it happened: I think a friend of mine was chatting with him on AIM one day when I was over at her house (because that was a thing we did, too… went over to our friends’ houses to watch them chat online with other people), and she gave him my screenname (msmolly718, for those curious) and before I knew it, Michael and I were chatting all the time. One boy in particular-let’s call him Michael because 85% of the boys in my class were named Michael-who I thought was very cute and very funny and therefore was very terrified of exchanging more than two words with him in school. Particularly good conversations would be printed out and stashed in our rooms to later relive when we were feeling low.Įventually I got my very own (GIANT) computer that I decorated with puffy stickers and I’d sit in my bedroom late at night, talking to friends on AIM into the wee hours, cracking each other up, making each other smile.Īnd then, at some point, I started talking to boys. We talked about real things, too-fights we were having with our parents, unrequited crushes that were eating us up inside, insecurities, secrets, dreams. We talked about what we were doing, what shows we were watching, what snacks we were eating-basically Twitter, just one-on-one. I used AIM to talk to my friends when we were supposed to be doing our homework. The # key didn’t mean hashtag, it just meant pound. This was before my friends and I had cell phones, before cell phones could do things like text, and well before social media as we know it-no newsfeeds, no tweets, no instas, no snaps. But once you were on, it was magical.īy the time I was in 7th grade, AIM was my main form of communication. “Going online” meant waiting the ten minutes while the modem dialed and groaned, searching for that ever precarious connection. There was one computer in my house, and you could only go online when somebody wasn’t on the phone. When AOL Instant Messenger was introduced in 1997, I was 11 years old. Typing, on the other hand, was a different story. If you don’t have anything absolutely brilliant to say, I thought, don’t say anything at all. So I built up a wall, put on a muzzle, protected those words like precious jewels. Especially when it came to boys, I had no faith that my looks alone could charm anyone-my oversized ears, my flat chest, my eyelids that didn’t have the right kind of crease for the sparkly blue eye shadow that everyone was supposed to wear. Not wanting to come off stupid or silly, never wanting to say the wrong thing. I’ve thought a lot about why I was so shy. Why don’t you speak up more in class?” I looked at him silently and started to cry. ![]() Mayer, who never knew he was my favorite English teacher because I never actually talked to him, came up to me after class and said, “Molly, you write such interesting ideas in your essays. I never spoke in class except when called upon, even though I often knew the answer, even though I often had something to say. Always voted “Quietist in Class” (seriously why do they offer that superlative, it’s just rude). ![]()
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