Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. Lena Dunham

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СКАЧАТЬ parent-teacher conferences my teacher tells my mother and father that I show “a real hostility toward technology.” She wishes I was willing to “embrace new developments in the classroom.” When my mother announces we will be getting one of our own at home, I go to my room and turn on the tiny black-and-white TV I bought at a yard sale, refusing to come out for over an hour.

      It arrives one evening after school, an Apple with a monitor the size of a moving box. A guy with a ponytail installs it, shows my mother how to use the CD-ROM drive, and asks if I want to see the “preinstalled” games. I shake my head: No. No, I don’t.

      But the computer exerts a magnetic pull, sitting there in the middle of our living room, humming ever so slightly. I watch as my babysitter walks my sister through a game of Oregon Trail, only to have her entire digital family die of dysentery before they can ford the river. My mother types a Word document with her two pointer fingers. “Don’t you want to try it?” she asks.

      Finally, the temptation is too great. I want to try, to see what all the fuss is about, but I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I already went back on being a vegetarian and was so ashamed I told the girls at lunch that my sandwich was tofu prosciutto. I have to be true to myself. I can’t keep rejiggering my identity, and hating computers is a part of my identity. One day my mother is in her bedroom organizing her shoes, and the coast is clear. I walk into the living room, sit down in the cold metal office chair, and slowly extend my finger toward the power button. Listen to it boot up, ping, and purr. I feel an exhilarating sense of trespass.

      

      In fifth grade we all get screen names. We message with one another, but we also go to chat rooms, digital hangouts with names like Teen Hang and A Place for Friends. It takes me a little while to wrap my head around the idea of anonymity. Of people I can’t see who can’t see me. Of being seen without being seen at all. Katie Pomerantz and I jointly take on the persona of a fourteen-year-old model named Mariah, who has flowing black hair, B-cup breasts, and an endless supply of smiley faces. Aware of Mariah’s incredible power, we ensnare boys, promising them we are beautiful, popular, and looking for love, as well as rich off of our teen-model earnings. We giggle as we take turns typing, reveling in our power. At one point, we ask a boy in Delaware to check the tag of his jeans and tell us the brand.

      “They’re Wrangler,” he writes back. “My mom got them at Walmart.”

      Feverish with triumph, we log out.

      

      Juliana is new to ninth grade. She doesn’t know anyone, but she has the confidence of someone who has been popular since kindergarten. She’s a punk: her nose is pierced, and her hair is spiked. She wears a homemade T-shirt that reads leftover crack, and her face is so beautiful that sometimes I can’t help but imagine it superimposed over my own. Juliana is a vegan for political reasons and seems to genuinely enjoy music without a melody. When she tells me that she’s had sex—in an alleyway, no less, with a twenty-year-old guy—it takes me a week to recover.

      “I was wearing a skirt, so he just pulled my underwear to the side,” she says, as casually as if she were telling me what her mom made for dinner.

      Two months into school she uses her fake ID to get a tattoo, a nautical star on the back of her neck, the lines thick and inelegant.

      I ask to run my fingers over the scab, unable to believe this will exist forever.

      A lot of Juliana’s punk friends live in New Jersey, where she often goes on the weekends for “shows.” At lunch, we look at their homemade Angelfire.com websites, one of which has an image of a decomposing baby carcass on the home page. But mostly they post pictures of themselves sweaty and piled high in front of makeshift stages. It’s hard to tell who’s in the band and who is just hanging out. She points out Shane, a pretty blond she has a crush on. His website is called Str8OuttaCompton, a reference I won’t get for another ten years. In one of Shane’s photos, a picture of a concert in a cramped basement, I notice a boy, tan with chubby cheeks and vacant blue eyes, moshing off to the side, a bandanna tied around his head. “Who’s that?” I ask.

      

      “His name is Igor,” Juliana tells me. “He’s Russian. Vegan, too. He’s really nice.”

      “He’s cute,” I say.

      That night, an instant-message bubble pops up from Pyro0001. I accept.

      Pyro0001: Hey, it’s Igor.

      

      For the next three months, Igor and I instant message for hours every night. I get home around three thirty, and he comes home at four, so I make myself a snack and wait for his name to appear. I want to let him say “hey” first, but usually I can’t wait that long. We talk about animals. About school. About the injustices of the world, most of them directed at innocent animals who can’t defend themselves against the evils of humanity. He’s a man of few words, but the words he uses are perfect to me.

      I am no longer opposed to the computer. I am in love with it.

      No guys like me at school. Some ignore me while others are outright cruel, but none want to kiss me. I’m still distraught over a seventh-grade breakup and refuse to attend parties I know my ex will be at. At this point, my heartbreak has lasted twenty-four times as long as our relationship.

      Igor wants to see a photo of me, so I send him one of me against my bedroom wall, on which I have drawn trees and nudes with a Sharpie. My hair hangs in a yellow, flat-ironed curtain, and I am cracking a glossy half smile. Igor says I look like Christina Aguilera. He’s a punk, so it seems more like a factual assessment than a compliment, but I am thrilled.

      We message through dinner, through fights with our parents. He describes how quiet it is when he gets home, how his parents aren’t back until eight. He says “brb” when he goes to the door to get his delivery dinner, which is usually eggplant parm minus the parm. He tells me that he goes to the kind of school that has popular kids and losers, jocks, and freaks. A big public school with a class full of strangers. My school is supposed to be different, small and creative and inclusive, but sometimes I feel just as isolated as he does. I start describing kids at school as “bimbos” and “fakes,” words I never would have thought to use before he introduced them. Words he’ll understand and that will draw him to me.

      

      When I go on vacation with my family, I ask the hotel office to let me use the computer so I can send Igor an email on Valentine’s Day. He tells me he doesn’t want to send me a new picture of himself because he’s had “some СКАЧАТЬ