You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day Read Free Book Online

a tavern (called the Drunken Stupor) about our Ultima Dragons characters. Meaning, ourselves. Example:
Codex Dragon enters the tavern with a tough look on her face. Busting open the door with her high-heeled boot, then she strides over to the bar and then slams down her silver sword of Grandia. She looks at Tempest Dragon with torrid eyes, “You! I don’t know whether to kill or kiss you.” Tempest looks up. Like he wants her to do both.
    Looking back, there’s an uncomfortable dose of S&M in the stories I wrote at fourteen. I attacked other Dragon members with swords and whips a lot, and Codex always wore sexy leather outfits with stiletto heels. The guys LOVED how creative I was! Their feedback onthe stories made me discover that flirting was fun. So I proceeded to do it with a lot of people.
    Um, pretty much everyone.
    You gotta understand I had NO OTHER GUYS in my life! Sure, there were some boys in my dance classes and community theatre productions I acted in, but the other chorus members of Brigadoon didn’t generally put their Ps in Vs. The guys online were into girls, and I had access to them. Do the teen math: I wanted all of them .
    We started sending pictures to each other (physically in the mail, yes), which either fueled or quashed the fire of awkward teen romance. I got a ton of positive feedback on my submission:

    This picture was originally taken for a JCPenney modeling competition. I was not a winner in the eyes of the department store, but the Dragons all thought I was a treasure.
    Yes, those are velvet high-tops.
    I got pictures back in exchange, and it was weird to put a face to an online personae. They never matched up the way I imagined. The asshole goth punk of the group turned out to be a Midwestern blond guy in a football outfit, straight out of Friday Night Lights . The friendliest of the group turned out to be a little person, which was a shock, but then cool, and no one brought it up again. Several of the other guys had really long stringy hacker hair, or were old, so I stopped flirting with them (kinda), and two standouts got my thumbs-up endorsement for continued romantic flirty times.
    On the one hand, Wolf Dragon’s picture was a Sears portrait special, with the bokeh-blurred edges, and a splattering of pubescent facial hair, erratically spread, like a limp hair-gun had shot follicles at his face. But I liked his personality online, and he had kind eyes that overcame the velvet waterfall behind him. I was into him for his brain, mostly. And his cat named Poe.
    Camouflage Dragon, on the other hand, was, by Dragon standards, the hottie. He did have a significant unibrow, but he had eyes the color of a tiger’s eye gem, ochre and deep, and he was into math, which I liked because my grandpa would approve. I gave myself permission to get a crush on him, too.
    I wasn’t ready to commit to one boy or the other fully, I wanted to keep both in the romantic-type running, so we became an online trio, sending messages back and forth to one another in private email boxes. We also sent handwritten letters snail-mail style filled with song lyrics. Mostly Bangles and Aerosmith.
    “Camouflage, I like the idea we could all go to the same college. That would be so cool, but I don’t wanna hope too hard. Like Steven Tyler says,
You’re callin’ my name, but I gotta make clear
I can’t say, baby, where I’ll be in a year.”
    We would three-way call every other night. The guys each lived in different parts of New Jersey, and I remember thinking, Wow, their accents are so exotic . We mostly talked about the Ultima games, but we got into other things, too. Like . . . other video games. Our conversations were always fraught with veiled sexual innuendo. “What kind of armor do you hope your character wears in Ultima VIII, Codex? What kind of corsets?”
    My mom was cool with all of this, by the way. She had recently gotten more defensive about our socialization; maybe the state started checking in on