Two of Me

There are two of me, and only one of them is any good at being a person. The good one lives on my phone. Her name, online, is junotopia, and she has three thousand and forty followers, and she is funny. Genuinely funny — I'm not just saying that, I have the numbers, the little hearts pile up under her posts like she's collecting something. She gives advice. She made a thread once about how to apologize properly that got shared four thousand times by strangers, including, I happen to know, two adults with actual jobs. She is warm and quick and she always, always knows what to say. The other one is me. The one typing this. The one who, twenty minutes ago, ate a granola bar sitting on an upturned bucket in the art-supply closet of Eastfield High School, because the art-supply closet is the one room in this building where I am reliably, gloriously alone. I have eaten lunch in that closet for most of this year. I want to be honest about that up front, because junotopia would never admit it, junotopia would make it a bit — she'd post something like "ate lunch in a supply closet again, the paint fumes are my found family now lol" and people would reply that she's so real, and the realness would somehow make it not real, would turn the closet into a joke instead of a fact about a girl on a bucket. But it's a fact. I'm the girl on the bucket. I haven't raised my hand in class since ninth grade. I've worked out the exact math of it — if you simply never volunteer, and you do well enough on the written work, most teachers will let you dissolve. They have thirty other kids who do want to be seen. A girl quietly choosing to be wallpaper is not a problem a teacher goes looking to solve. So I dissolved. Tenth grade, all of it, I was wallpaper with a backpack. And it worked, it absolutely worked, nobody bothers wallpaper. It's just that wallpaper doesn't have anyone to eat lunch with either. That part they don't mention. Here's what I've figured out, sitting on my bucket, being the bad version of me. The internet didn't make me shy. I want to say that clearly because people love that story, the story where the phone breaks the kid. It's not my story. I was shy first. I was shy in a deep, old, structural way, shy like it's load-bearing. What the internet did was give the shyness somewhere to put me while the brave version went out and lived. Online there's a gap. You type, you wait, you fix the sentence, you delete the sentence, you find a better sentence — there's a whole workshop between you and the other person, and in that workshop I am fast and clever and kind. junotopia is just me with the workshop. Me with time to think. Real life doesn't have the workshop. Real life is live. Someone says "hey, what'd you get for question four" and there's no draft, no delete, no gap, just the terrible bright now of it, and the brave version isn't there, she only works in the workshop, and so the bad version stands there going warm in the face while the moment closes like an elevator. So I'd made my peace with it. Two of me. The good one online, the wallpaper one here, and a strict no-overlap policy between them, like they were two countries that had agreed not to acknowledge the border. And then, three days ago, junotopia got a message. I get messages constantly, that's the whole engine of the account, strangers asking junotopia what to do about their friends and their parents and their crushes. But this one was different. This one said: hey. you probably get a million of these. but i don't really have anyone to ask irl and i think you might actually go to my school?? eastfield? you mentioned the vending machine that eats dollars and we have that EXACT vending machine. anyway. i eat lunch alone in a weird spot every day and i'm starting to think something is wrong with me. is something wrong with me. I sat on my bucket in the art-supply closet, holding my phone, reading a message from someone at my own school who eats lunch alone in a weird spot and thinks something is wrong with them. And both of me — the brave one and the wallpaper one, the whole carefully separated population of me — went completely, perfectly still. Because junotopia knew exactly what to say to this person. She'd have it drafted in ninety seconds, warm and funny and right. And I, the real one, the one on the bucket, knew something junotopia's three thousand followers didn't: that there was nothing she could possibly type that I would have the courage to do.