EPTWhen I was 9 my parents told me that they were considering moving. I cried when they said that because I didn't want to leave all of my friends behind and said that I was happy where I was, but my mom told me that it would be better in the long-term if we moved somewhere with a more close-knit community. We started visiting Bainbridge Island and we visited the property in the south side of the island that would be our home, and it felt too full of nature and big and scary. My parents told me that I would love it once I was there for awhile, and I didn't believe them. I told all of my friends that I was moving and they said that they would miss me, and I don't remember anything else about it. They decided to move early, before our house was fully built, because it was the end of the summer and they wanted Emma and I to be able to go to school and meet people there for the first part of the year. I wanted to stay in Seattle longer. Eventually it was the day that we were leaving, and the car was parked on the side of the street opposite the house on Corliss Avenue that I had been born in. My parents helped me pack all of our stuff in the car and I took one last look at the house and tried to capture the moment in my memory, because I had done that before randomly and it had ended up working, but I wasn't at all emotional about it. I realized that I should be, but when you're 9 years old nothing really seems as important. I knew my life would be changing, but my brain couldn't really wrap itself around the magnitude of that. My sister and I hid in the moving van on the way over under the boxes because there was a big fort underneath.
When we got to Bainbridge, we moved into a small rental apartment while we waited for our main house to be built. We had been traveling there and back for awhile, and my mom would stand by the grounds where our house was going to be built and talk to the people building it, and my sister and I would play on the field. We had a small TV set up and a crappy computer, but everything was different and I didn't like it. It felt scary not knowing anybody and not having any friends.
My mom and I visited the playground at Blakely, the school that I was going to go to, and we got on the swings and played on the swings together. It was very happy and I told my mom that maybe bainbridge island wouldn't be so bad after all.
It was the first day of 4th grade at Blakely and I wanted to make a good impression for all of the kids there. Mrs. Conelly called me up to introduce myself and I remembered reading a book the other week about a kid who just moved to a new school and how shy she was when she was called up and I didn't want to be shy, so I bounded up to the front of the classroom and yelled out my name and said that I was happy to meet everybody in a really corny voice. I was scared that I wouldn't make any new friends on the inside but I figured that if I was loud and outgoing enough I would meet new people in no time.
The class sat there and glared at me, and there was a silence before I was sent back to my seat, and suddenly everything was big and scary and everybody else in the classroom was frightening. I was just starting to feel embarrassed more and more at this point, and I was embarrassed that I was getting embarrassed because I was never a shy kid growing up, and I was expecting everybody else to welcome me and to be excited to meet me just because I was ready to welcome them into my life. And when nobody even introduced themselves to me or looked at me for the rest of the day, I felt more and more scared of my new life. I tried to find something in common with everybody in the class and I tried to make friends with as many people as I could, and one kid named Jared Bell told me that he played Starcraft sometimes and I latched on to that because I needed a friend. We talked over break and I asked him what his favorite unit in Starcraft was and he told me, and then we didn't have anything else to talk about and it was strange for me that I was nervous and awkward-feeling because I was so unused to the emotion.
Time went on and my home life was more and more chaotic. My mom was always on the phone yelling at the company who was building our house because they were going bankrupt and they said that they might not be able to build it for us. My dad was gone for work most of the time, because he had to commute to Seattle in the mornings now so we couldn't bike to school together anymore and so I barely saw him. I had one friend, and that was Jared, and we didn't have anything to talk about and it didn't even feel like he liked me very much. I biked to his house and asked him if he wanted to go bike around, and he said he was busy. I tried again and he was ok with it, but I don't even think he liked bike-riding and he was acting like it was a chore. I went on new meds because my mom was starting to think that the ADHD meds that I had been on weren't working for me, and they made me feel exhausted all the time. I started to spend Recess at Blakely by myself reading instead of playing with other people. I started getting into fights with people and I started getting sent to the principal's office every day, and then more than once a day. I was told later that Jared Grosten and I had both independently broken the record for the most detentions ever in one year by a student by the second month. Three months into school I told my mom that I wanted to drop out and be homeschooled, and that I hated blakely, and she let me.
The new house wasn't coming along at all and it didn't look like we were going to move into it during that year- the foundations weren't even built yet- and so near the beginning of 4th grade we all moved into a small temporary house on the corner of a road near Blakely, a ways up. It was purple and tiny, and it smelled rancid all the time. There was a pen outside the house with some chickens and a goat in it, and my computer room was downstairs. Jared was fading away as a friend at this point, and because I was homeschooled I didn't know anybody. My mom was still busy all the time with the house. The company in charge was finally building it, and they would use the house as an advertisement to keep up their business. The toll it took on my mom was immense. She was stressed all the time and although she tried to homeschool me properly, she couldn't handle the stress of both making sure that I got a good education and trying to get our house actually finished. I was pretty much left to do what I wanted, and in a house with dial-up internet and no functioning cable TV that wasn't much. I spent all of my time playing video games by myself at this point in my life. I had a new game, Black and White, that I had gotten from the store and I became obsessed with it. It was a god game where you could build lands and control a pet creature. I finished it about 30 times over the course of that year and then found community websites for it with our crappy dial-up internet connection. I was starved for social contact at this point- about 4 or 5 months into 4th grade- and I found my outlet through making online accounts on internet forums and integrating myself into their communities. I created an alias on a site called Gamefaqs.com and posted silly things on the general forums thread and talked to strangers over the discussion board about random topics. Although I had been interested in games since I was a little kid, I had always wanted to play them for fun. That year they turned into an outlet for me, a way to connect with people when I didn't have anybody to connect with in my real life. As I grew out of browsing gamefaqs, I found a link to a small black and white fansite called Kayssplace with a tight-knit community of people. I made an account and started posting, and quickly became one of the central community members. I amassed over 1000 posts and I would constantly be browsing it during the day, writing collaberative stories with the other people on the site. I made friends with two users that were my age, who I knew as FotD and Shaon, and spent all my time talking to them over MSN instant messenger. FotD was a year older than me and Shaon was my age, and they were the only two other people on the site who were in the same age range as I was. I began to live two lives: my real life and my online gaming identity.
Time passed. I started to develop back problems, and every day I would ride my bike down to Waltz grocery store to buy a kit kat and some oreos. I got on first-name basis with the clerk of the store, and I would sit there at the store reading the comics that they sold for hours. When I went back to the house, I was quickly bored again. I would spend time playing with Phoenix, who was just as bored as I was, and I have some good memories of walking around outside picking blackberries, but almost all of my time was spent inside on the computer. I was still into Starcraft at this point, and I would always play it on the house's terrible dial-up connection. Everybody that I played with would always leave the game because my internet connection was so bad and they didn't want to have to deal with the latency that it caused, so I found it hard to make online friends there.
The chickens were starving to death because nobody was feeding them. My mom was still always trying to get the house worked out and my dad was always at work. I remember going outside and trying to feed them myself, because I didn't want them to die, and being horrified to find them start to pick each other to death to try to get at the food. There were also coyotes or raccoons or something that lived nearby, and during the night they would run into the chicken coop and try to eat the chickens. The goat was getting bone-thin, and eventually the food got rancid and we never got any new food, so I was scared to feed the chickens because I didn't want them to die from the rancid food. I withdrew back into the house and played a fighting game that I had found, meticulously memorizing all of the moves in it. I was starting to get chubby from all of the kit kats and oreos that I was eating every day. Around this time, my mom left for two weeks to go to a Buddhist monastery where they didn't talk at all to each other. She said it was to help with her stress. My sister and I had nothing to do on weekends, and I remember that we sat there once the entire day watching 13 going on 30 literally 8 times in a row. She finished it, and then we would rewind it and watch it from the beginning again because that was the only movie that we had in the house at the time. My mom came back from the buddhist monastery a bit more refreshed seeming and calm, but I was still scared that she had to go there. I was still talking to FotD and Shaon every day, and we never talked about our real lives so I just kind of hung back on the internet and used it as an escape.
She was filled with new purpose at this point and tried to tour me around the island to teach me, and I played a bunch of educational games. She brought me to a small building near bainbridge high school that people who were homeschooled could go to connect and talk to each other. I met two brothers, Jake and Wyatt Gibbons, and I immediately became good friends with both of them- Jake at first, and then Wyatt as well. I went to their house and played soul caliber with them, and walked around with them in the park behind their house, and we had a wrestling contest once. They thought I was very strong, which I thought was funny because nobody had ever called me strong before. I was a little flattered, but I was embarrassed because I didn't think I was actually as strong as they thought I was and I didn't want them to figure that out. They had a friend named Casey Chiarello, and I got to know him as well. He was very similar to me at that point in our lives, and I walked along with him by the trees outside his house and explored the forest.
At this point in my life I was also very interested in greek mythology. I brought a book about greek mythology and started reading it, and then I brought a bunch of other books on greek mythology and started reading those, and soon enough I knew every greek god that existed, their backstories, and all of the popular greek stories that were out there.
Time went on and suddenly it was the end of 4th grade and it was summer, although at this point time had sort of lost its meaning since it had been some version of summer all year for me at this point. The house was actually coming along at this point, my mom's constant and relentless phone calls were finally paying off. Casey chiarello was going to try public school the next year, and since he was my closest friend at this point I wanted to follow him into public school as well- and my parents agreed. The public 5th grade school on the island was called Sakai Elementary School, and we visited it once and I liked the fact that there was a Tetherball court in the playground and lots of opportunities for wallball so I was excited to go to it. I was also completely desparate to know more people. I had been on the island for a year now and I barely knew anything about it besides the excursions my mom had taken me on for school in the past year. I definitely wasn't a part of the island's community at all. I was still happy and excited about everything at this point.
The house was finally finishing its construction, and I was excited to move into it. Around half of our chickens were dead from starvation and the other half were completely manic, and the rental house had gotten smelly and gross to live in. It had a depressing vibe about it. The family who we sold it to had a kid around my age named Lauren, and we became friends. I showed him all my games and he seemed not super interested, because he had never played video games before. I showed him the chicken coop, and I don't remember his reaction.
The parts for the house were completely finished. We had chosen a strange way to build it: all of the rooms were built separately, in a factory off in Poulsbo, and only the foundation was built on-site. The rooms were brought to Bainbridge in a big moving truck, and my family and I all went a little bit past the bridge connecting bainbridge to poulsbo and watched the truck carry all of the rooms to our future house to bainbridge. They spent a few more months getting everything in place and putting all the rooms together, and then we moved in. I don't actually remember moving day, but I remember being happy that my mom wouldn't be so stressed all the time about it, because her stress was having a serious effect on me. The first day that we were in I was excited because we had a high-speed internet connection, something that I had never experienced before. I was finally able to play my online games without everybody yelling at me for causing the game to lag.
Around this time, an online game called Maplestory went into beta and I forget where I learned about it. I started playing it all the time with Casey, and I got Shaon and FotD, who were my best friends at that point, to play it with me. FotD never really got into it, but Shaon loved it and she started playing it a lot with me.
