The Girl Who Sat in the Corner

Chapter 4 - Online

His room was large, but except for his bed, a few bookcases and his computer table, fairly empty. Despite its size, there was only one small window on the wall across from his desk. His computer table was a comfortable haven of clutter: books, folders of papers, notebooks and a collection of knick-knacks and crazy toys he'd play with when he was thinking. A large, stuffed Totoro sat in one corner of his room, his companion since a Christmas years ago when things seemed happier.

Tonight, when he booted up his computer, he felt a slight fluttering in his midsection. He avoided social websites like he avoided everything else social. But tonight, he felt a little excited about exploring one in particular.

Connecting to vid.io, he created an account with his favorite identity, string-nut77, an homage to his love of obscure physics. He quickly found navajo ninja's profile page.

Unlike the quiet loner he saw in school, Navajo-ninja was a virtual star on vid.io. She had hundreds of followers and her creations attracted thousands of likes. The evening flew by by as he stepped through her posts. She seemed to love making the lip-sync videos that were now super-popular and he loved watching them. Though they weren't as technically extravagant as some of the others, they were beautiful, sometimes funny, sometimes happy and often sad. As she sang, her face was an encyclopedia of expressions, giving life to the lyrics with more skill than any singer he knew.

It also gave him the chance to do something he never could in school, look at her for more than a brief instant at a time. As always, he was fascinated by her eyes. He got the feeling that they had seen a lot, possibly far more than anyone her age should. It came out most in the sad songs, but even when they were happy, it was still there, like her smiles were a quiet and brief victory over some deeper sadness. She was beautiful in a way that he ever expected anyone to be.

Many of Kai's videos were based on sad songs and tagged with words that, in some cases, showed how tired of life she had become. In one, there was a brief flash of a soft, pale forearm with a series of red, parallel lines drawn across it. He froze a moment when he realized those lines weren't drawn on.

She posted a few stories, mostly fan fiction, and a series of poems. Outside of English class, he never read poetry but he felt himself drawn into hers as a window into her mind and heart. Each line of poetry was short, but their words worked a kind of magic on him. He recognized in her words some of the most private feelings of his own that he never could express nor trust anyone to hear. But in spite of the many kinds of beauty he saw in her, she noticed nothing of it in herself. It was as if somebody had hung the sign "worthless" around her neck long ago and she believed it. Like him, she was the frequent target of bullies, a category that included her sister, who he recognized in the background of some of her videos. Rima was one of the "in" kids who hung out with all the right people and pushed around all the "wrong" ones.

Along with his Likes, which he attached to virtually all her posts, he started adding comments, telling her how much he enjoyed something and arguing (as politely as he could) with her criticism of herself. He also sympathized with her periods of depression, something he was all too familiar with in himself. He tried to be a little funny when he could (his sense of humor was a way he protected himself from his darkest moods). Wesley began to feel a bit protective. As creative and popular as she was online, he understood that she was still a very fragile creature. Strong as she was in some ways, she was easily hurt in others. 

Somehow, her writing made him realize that all through his life, his parents' "support" was always in the form of criticism rather than encouragement. As hard as he tried, they never mention what he succeeded at, just the ways he had messed up. Maybe all these years, that depressing weight he felt he was carrying as a "worthless" sign of his own.

It was well past midnight when he finally signed off and shut down his computer. Before he did, he left her one private message:

"You're awesome!"

She still had no idea who "string-nut77" was and he kind of liked it that way for now.

His mom never Skyped, but there was a text from her on his phone saying she was tied up in a late meeting. He read it with a mental shrug. He had a much nicer evening with Kai.