Photo by Federica Galli on Unsplash
I was 11 years old and my parents had just signed up for Prodigy, which was like AOL but the more under-the-counter version. You couldn’t even create your own user name. Instead you were assigned a random combination of letters and numbers by the service provider, which appeared in emails and chatrooms in lieu of a preferred name. It was like being an inmate at the coolest jail in town where commissary came in the form of a sick-ass lo-res JPEG of Kurt Cobain that took only three hours to download via dial-up modem. As long as mom didn’t pick up the phone. Which she always did. Moooooom!
I met Lark and Rachel in a Prodigy chatroom in 1994. They were real-life friends who lived in Staten Island and I deduced that Lark was the cooler one, mostly — okay, only — because of her unconventional, super-hip name. Imagine the confidence of someone named after a striking songbird? There was no doubt to me and my underdeveloped sense of the how the world worked that regardless of life’s challenges, it gave her the freedom to float nimbly through it all. Because how could anyone be named Lark and not be cool enough to let things just roll off their back?
So to one-up Lark’s coolness, I told her that my nickname was M-E, which was not, under any circumstances, ever my nickname. We progressed from internet friendship to snail-mail friendship, sending letters every few weeks — because as fun and novel as the internet was, having a penpal to write to in silver gel ink and envelopes to decorate with puffy neon stickers was still way more fun.
One summer afternoon, wedged among a pile of teen magazines and a life-affirming Delia’s catalog chock-full of overpriced platform boots, quirky logo tees, and scented body glitter, I received an unusually bulky envelope from Lark. I opened it to discover she had made me a pastel pink-and-blue friendship bracelet with an “M-E” lopsidedly woven into it. I was so excited I almost passed out — but instead I got to work on my bracelet for her. It bolstered my secret hope that Lark would grow to find me, an elusive fifth-grader on the other side of a computer screen in Brooklyn, just as cool as (maybe even cooler than?) Rachel.
I had plenty of real-life friends as a kid, but there was something so exotic about an internet friendship at a time when only a handful of people in my neighborhood could afford the internet, or even knew what it was. I wasn’t a lonely or unhappy child, nor had I been wronged by a close friend and sought to replace a broken bond. But I became obsessive in my quest to prove my worth to Lark (and, I guess, Rachel). The idea that I could be the best version of myself — the pair hadn’t known me since kindergarten like the rest of my classmates, or known that I’d worn glasses, braces, and a back brace at the same time — was exhilarating. The internet gave me a fresh slate: a platform to practice being the most interesting, charming, effortless-joke-slinging person I’d hope to grow into in my teenage years, without fear of appearing like a sham.
And then, there was the exoticism of Staten Island. Though I’d heard the rumors — a pervasive smell of trash infiltrating the mysterious fifth borough — it may as well have been Beverly Hills. All I knew was that I had been there once, with my best friend to visit her cousins, and their house was enormous, impeccably tidy, and full of fancy-people furniture. Logic would have it, then, that Lark and Rachel also lived in sprawling homes with expensive fixtures. This only amplified the pressure to prove that I was worthy of their fancy-people friendship.
Many months of letters and Prodigy chats later, the three of us somehow convinced our (naïve or amazing?) mothers to accompany us to meet at the Hard Rock Café in midtown Manhattan. I had no concept of chain restaurants vs. fine dining, thus no concept of how poor a choice this was. I had seen the Hard Rock Café mentioned in the ad section of teen magazines, so I figured if it was cool enough to for YM, it had to be beyond cool enough for a few excitable preteens. Worse yet was that my mother — my “let’s go to Olive Garden for Mother’s Day,” unironically, mother — likely had no concept of how dire this choice was either. We weren’t bedsheets-for-curtains poor like a lot of households on my block. But we were a single-income, working-class family who never ate at restaurants that weren’t KFC or the local pizzeria where my uncle worked. Jimi Hendrix’s jacket in a glass box and a framed photo of Journey’s 1983 tour as the backdrop? Looked like class to us.
When we arrived — my mom and I via subway, the others via car — we scanned the horde of Saturday-afternoon tourists outside the restaurant for the other party, armed with a shaky idea of what they would look like based on an earlier phone call describing what we’d be wearing. After successfully flagging one another down, we hugged and nervously joked about how glad we were to all be real mother-and-daughter pairs, not creepy old men. Lark and Rachel were white, average-height, forgettable-looking tween girls, one with slightly darker brown hair than the other.
We all made small talk as we sized our IRL selves up, then learned that all six of us loved watching SNICK, the (frankly incredible) Saturday night Nickelodeon lineup, especially the creepy, Tales From the Crypt-esque Are You Afraid of the Dark? — but that was pretty much where the similarities ended. The girls were getting ready to head to their local high school in a year’s time, while I already had my sights set on the top specialized public school in New York City. My mother found the wine-guzzling moms “uppity,” as she put it, with tough shells to crack, and I found Lark’s conversation skills and general energy rather unremarkable, especially for a 13-year-old. Hanging out in the park with my best friend was way more fun.
Our innocent meet-up also culminated in a shocking discovery: Lark wasn’t actually named Lark. Her real name, I learned, as the foundation of what I thought was shaping up to be an indestructible bond crumbled before my very eyes, was Jill. Jill! It had all been a lie built exclusively upon her fondness for Lark Voorhies, of Saved by the Bell fame, who played the snobbish, fashion-forward Lisa Turtle. Jill’s mom admitted that she had advised using a fake name to protect her against online predators, but I was skeptical, given that Rachel — her supposed BFF! — hadn’t followed suit. Plus: Rachel was in on this too? I was so deeply betrayed I felt sick to my stomach. I didn’t finish my fries.
My mother, who doesn’t drink, had ordered us the cheapest items on the menu. She wound up splitting the bill, at the suggestion of the tipsy moms from Staten Island. Out nearly $100 for two burgers and an order of fries, she banned me from meeting up with internet friends on her watch ever again.
I continued to chat with the girls online after our ho-hum lunch date, and the next week I received a friendly letter, “Jill ‘Lark’ Florentino” in the return address. We never exchanged another friendship bracelet.
Emmy Favilla is a New York–based writer and editor whose essays, reported pieces, and weird lists have been published in BuzzFeed, Tenderly, Teen Vogue, Pigeon Pages, Queen Mob's Teahouse and other publications. She currently works full-time as deputy editor for CNN Underscored and is the author of a book about the intersection of language and technology called 'A World Without 'Whom'' (Bloomsbury, 2017).
