My girlfriends and I would flit through AOL chatrooms, meeting guys (A/S/L: 19/f/Florida we thought Florida was an exotic place to be from). It started off as an activity at sleepovers. I spent a lot of my adolescence talking to older men on the internet. I told him I was in my late twenties, but I was 12. I built us a room with a tiled background image of purple velvet curtains and a quiet Fiona Apple loop playing in the background, and gave him the URL so only he and I could access it. In 2000, I taught myself basic HTML coding so I could design a private chatroom to use with Tom, a fortysomething-year-old man who liked skiing and listened to the Fine Young Cannibals.
