
When I was eight or nine, I had this neighbor, G, whose house I’d run over to whenever I was bored. She was a few years older than me and I thought she was extremely cool, partly because she had this little compartment under her bed that you could crawl into, but mostly because she had unmonitored access to the Internet. In the dark, warm crawl space under her bed, G introduced me to 2010’s online north star: online chat sites, but specifically Omegle. G became Parisian; her hidey-hole a mansion in the Alps, G became Stefania or Alecia or Coco, she was a model, an actress, G was rich and famous and definitely not eleven. I was kind of just there. Sometimes she’d turn away and hide her screen and laugh, and I would want to know what she was typing out or looking at so badly I wanted to throw up. Usually I settled for poking her in the back of the neck until she turned towards me again.