Free Men, Women & Children by Chad Kultgen Page A

who belonged to fan pages for Noam Chomsky or World of Warcraft .
    Near the bottom of his home page, six profiles were suggested to Tim as people he might be interested in based on other common friends. One of them was a profile for a gothic-looking girl named Freyja who claimed to be twenty-five years old. Freyja’s resemblance to Brandy Beltmeyer, the girl Tim had unsuccessfully attempted to ask out on a date via text message the year before, was uncanny. The makeup Freyja had on was transformative enough to stir significant doubt in Tim’s mind that this person actually was Brandy Beltmeyer in some type of alter-ego disguise, but the small scar over her left eyebrow, which he knew Brandy also had, erased whatever doubt the makeup had conjured.
    He saw that Freyja was online and had the impulse to send her an instant message asking if she knew Brandy Beltmeyer or was related to her in some way, or perhaps even overtly proclaiming that he knew her true identity. Instead, he clicked on Freyja’s picture section and viewed twenty-three albums containing pictures of Brandy dressed in various gothic outfits and makeup schemes. He found it a strange coincidence that her profile was randomly suggested to him by whatever means Myspace defined these suggestions. Tim reasoned it must have had something to do with he and Freyja both having a large number of friends who had links to other friends who were involved with fantasy and gothic games and lifestyles. He read some of her blog entries: “My First 3some,” “Anal Only Hurts A Little At First,” “My First 3some With 2 Grls,” and “Swallowing.” He wondered how many of these blog posts were based on actual experience, or if they were all fabricated. If they were based in reality, he wondered if his sexual inexperience had played a part in her ignoring his text-message movie invitation the year before. He had a vague notion that Brandy’s mother ran some kind of parental watch-group for Internet abuse, based on the fliers his father had received advertising monthly meetings at Brandy’s house and giving helpful tips for parents to keep their children safe from Internet predators. He wondered if her mother knew her daughter was Freyja.
    Tim wrote a brief e-mail to Freyja. It read, “The Myspace references thing popped you up when I logged on. Just thought I’d say hi.” He didn’t want to let Brandy know that he knew who she was. He decided to see what her reaction would be to his e-mail before doing anything else.
    Brandy had just sent a response to an e-mail from Dungeonmax, part of an extended conversation about True Blood regarding which of the vampires they found to be the most sexually attractive, when she saw a new message from Tim appear in her in-box. The subject line read, “Hello.” She was instantly nervous and slightly afraid. She frantically wondered if she had been discovered by one of her classmates—and not just any classmate, but one whom she had had romantic interest in the year before. She opened his e-mail and read the message, which seemed innocuous enough not to warrant any alarm. Nothing in the message led her to believe he knew it was her, and even if he did, it didn’t seem like he was the type to divulge this information to her mother or anyone else for that matter. Despite her understanding of the situation, Brandy decided to ignore his message and delete it.
    In his room, Tim waited fifteen more minutes for Brandy to respond. In those fifteen minutes she never went offline and she never sent a response. He assumed her reasoning was identical to the time he sent her the first text message: that she was uninterested.
    D anny was allowed to pass twice in the first half, each time resulting in a gain of over fifteen yards, once resulting in a touchdown throw to Chris Truby, who was alone in the end zone. Despite the success of both passing plays, Coach Quinn forced Danny to execute a battery of running plays. The final play of the first