and so it began

About five years ago (almost exactly), I created this little web site (what's amazing is that it is still there!) to see what I could create using switchboard's interface. (This was before blogs, but it is where I came up with the idea for Life on the 27th Floor.) Within a day or so I received an email from a young woman who said she liked my site, was thinking about getting into web design, and wondered if I would answer some questions. She said she was 17 and lived in Maine. She said she was adopted.

My initial reaction was flattery. How cool, I thought, I had a little fan. [Timing is important here. You see, this came on the tail of somehow without my even really knowing what I was doing, having the first site I created being awarded "top 5% of the web" by Lycos (and saved me (at least temporarily) from being fired).] So, yes, my ego was feeling quite stroked.

But then another email came, and something didn't feel quite right. The questions she was asking. They were a little off. I told someone of my suspicions, and the response was that I was just being paranoid. Relax. It's okay. You'd make a good mentor.

Remember, this was five years ago. Instant Messaging was just really coming on the scene. You were lucky if you had 56k. So one day I spied my "droopy" little fan on AOL instant messenger (note: you could use it without being an AOL member, as I wasn't), and we chatted. It was President's Day by this point.

Started off as a pretty normal conversation. We talked about what she was doing on her day off from school, the weather, etc. Somewhere along the line I mentioned that my sister used to volunteer working with the elderly. That's when she typed those words.

"What if I said I was your sister?"

I remember removing my hands from the keyboard, and just staring as she typed and things came flashing across the screen that only the two of us would know. Sisterly secrets. Some deep, all dark.

How do you reply to something like this? I wasn't totally surprised. It was what I had suspected. It also seemed like little had changed in over the decade since we had seen or even really spoken to each other. Lies. Deceit. Manipulation. (She was more like 28, lived in New Jersey, and wasn't adopted.) Did I really want to go down this path?

And yet a part of me was curious. I couldn't deny that I hadn't typed her name into a search engine or two. Why was she choosing to contact me? And why like this?

We actually messaged each other back and forth for a couple of hours that day. Somewhere the transcript exists. It was scary almost seeing how two people who grew up in the same household can have such different memories.

I remember one of the things she asked me was about the quote in my signature file at the time: you wonder how different your life would have been if just one thing, just one little thing, hadn't happened -- Finn, "Great Expectations."
Secretly, I think we all know what I was thinking.