Friendship.com Anonymous

The "dot-com revolution" of the mid-to-late 1990s began to take hold just as I was entering my middle school years. I was eager to try new things, including this new Internet technology, because my inner self was also changing and becoming restless in the tiny bubble created by my small town, private school upbringing.

As soon as I registered my first e-mail address, in sixth grade, I was fascinated by the new possibilities offered by the World Wide Web. Among these was the ability to design my own web page-which I did in 1999. I began to network with other young teenagers who enjoyed web design and treated it as a form of artwork. I soon became acquainted with a girl named Kelcie, who was a year older than myself and had an admirable aptitude for web design. We became fast friends, not only because we shared a common hobby but because we were similar in many other ways as well. The fact that she was from California and I lived in Michigan was almost inconsequential to us.

For several years we kept in touch through Instant Messenger and our websites. We saw each other leave middle school and move on to high schools, with Kelcie deciding to move from a private school to a newer, larger public high school her junior...