Online Traps: Real Stories from Internet Years

Author: (American) Taborioks, translated by Luo Han and others
Translator: Luo Han, Cai Xiaoyue
Country:
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2000-12-01
Features: No one has ever truly understood me, and they often left and were replaced, so I never felt attached to them or comfortable being with them. Besides the nanny, we often hired a cleaning lady. My parents didn’t like cleaning (though they would do household chores when forced), and I was never assigned any chores either, because my parents didn’t believe doing housework could be good for our development. My mother’s philosophy was that children should be children—they had the rest of their lives to clean up the house. At the age of 13, my relationship with Ellie was much closer than with Kerry. We often teased each other. I teased her curly, unruly hair, which was like badly curled hair, and she teased my chest—A cup—while Ellie had already developed fully by the time she was fifteen. Ellie and I often compared our heights, but it wasn’t a problem because we were both short. Although Ellie was four years older than me, everyone always thought she was younger. She had an innocent face—freckles, curly blonde hair, blue eyes, a small nose—which made her look only thirteen, even though she was now in college. She looked like a child, but she could handle herself well in most adult situations, and I learned a lot from her. When I was eleven, we were allowed to go to New York City alone to see the musical "Guys and Dolls." I only felt like I was growing up when I was with Ellie. When we arrived in the city, I was a little hungry. Ellie might have been hungry too, but we only had three dollars on us, so she didn’t plan to buy me anything to eat. However, I kept complaining, and finally she softened. We went into a Starbuck’s convenience store, bought a small lemon cake, and split it. Later, I was extremely thirsty, but we had no money left. Finally, I made a small cup out of the store’s advertising flyers to hold the milk they used to make coffee, which quenched my thirst. This was an adventure only experienced when I was with Ellie, though it seemed very insignificant. With Ellie, I felt comfortable and had a lot of fun. In those years, Ellie and I did basically the same things, so my mother and stepfather could easily compare us. Of course, we compared ourselves too. I still remember what happened when I received my Connecticut state exam scores. My mother hinted that my scores were better than Ellie’s used to be, and we placed the two score reports side by side to compare. My mother insisted on comparing the total subject scores. She wasn’t curious but didn’t want us to compete with each other, but I still felt terrible when I realized my scores were lower. Although I was happy with Ellie, the period after she moved out of the house to attend a private school in New Hampshire was the closest we had ever been. With her leaving, competition, fighting, and arguments decreased. Unfortunately, our actual time spent talking to each other also decreased. I often wished I could talk to Ellie about boys, just like the sisters in the movies, but even then, I knew more about dating than Ellie did. Ellie was seventeen and had never been kissed—not because she was unattractive but because she was shy and didn’t really care about dating. She was the type of girl who followed the book, and the book was called "How to Be a Good Girl." When Ellie was fifteen and I was eleven, she moved to a boarding school, which meant only Kerry and I were left at home. The sense of competition suddenly shifted. Now, Kerry and I often compared ourselves. I might be a better student—this was obvious—but Kerry had started swimming in sports events at a younger age. When it came to swimming, she had an advantage, and this always bothered me. My mother kept records of our performance in every sports event. Sometimes, if she really started working on these records, she would make a table of our scores. No one ever stood up and said, "Kerry swims better than me," but you could see it in the numbers. Swimming wasn’t the only thing Kerry excelled at. Kerry was the only David’s biological daughter, which meant she was the only one of us who lived with her biological parents. To me, it seemed like David favored her. I wasn’t jealous of the attention she got from him. But she had a biological father she could talk to, and that was a fact. What was worse was that, like many of my friends with both parents, Kerry didn’t seem to appreciate everything she had. I often argued with Kerry when I was with her, and these arguments often escalated into pushing, shoving, pinching, and hitting. I think my jealousy was part of the reason we fought, but it was never the clear reason. Fights usually started when she did something that annoyed me—like crossing the "three-eight line" in the back seat of the car—or took something of mine. This always happened over clothes. We almost fought over each other’s closets every day, debating who took what and whether the clothes were returned. Once, when I came back from school, I saw her wearing my favorite Gap crew-neck shirt. She had never asked to borrow it and gave a clumsy excuse, saying that I had taken some things from her room, so she had the right to wear my shirt. That might have been true, but I wasn’t in the mood to accept the excuse at the time. The argument escalated into shouting, and then Kerry took out a blue permanent marker and scribbled all over the shirt while she was wearing it. "Now you can have it," she taunted. You might ask, where were my parents during these events. Usually, they were out, but even when they were home, they usually just left us to figure things out. In these frequent wars, they only intervened when things got rough. In the crew-neck shirt incident, my mother said she would buy me a new one. However, she didn’t buy me a new one, and Kerry wasn’t punished either. Sometimes, when I think back to how fiercely we fought as kids, I’m amazed that Kerry and I are still alive and getting along. Although my grandmother said fighting was good for children’s development, I think we took it to the extreme. Interestingly! Our fights were usually over nothing. I guess that’s why my parents always told me, "You must choose your battles wisely." The person who influenced me the most in my life was my mother. Just from her appearance, you could tell she was very poised and charming. She was tall, about five feet ten, and she was beautiful. Her weight fluctuated, but no matter what, I always thought she was beautiful. I guess everyone thinks their mother is beautiful, but I really believe my mother is a beautiful person. My mother liked to talk about how to be a great pioneer in a male-dominated world. She said she broke the glass ceiling, and I admired her success in her career. Since she became the main financial supporter of the family, she strictly controlled everything in the house. However, interestingly, she liked to talk about how much she hated men, but she also showed that she liked them. Although my mother could be very strict, she was also my mentor and best friend. I liked it when my friends said I looked like my mother. We did look very similar, and I even wished I looked more like her. I also knew that my biological father was a complete waste of space. However, when I was very young—seven or eight—I didn’t want to accept that fact. My father and mother met in college, and I tended to imagine them as the couple in "Love Story."