2006 was the year that I discovered the internet. I spent most of this time doing nothing but watch Harry Potter fanvids and tracking down so much Harry/Ginny fanfiction that it’s probably the reason I hated that ship for so long, kind of like when you were in fourth grade and you realized that bologna was actually Really Bad and you started aggressively avoiding it? Yeah, it was like that. Harry/Ginny was the bologna of my formative fandom years.
So I’m eleven years old and for the last two months or so I’ve been just shoving my brain full of all kinda of mature narratives that I really, probably, should not have been putting my mind to at the time. My parents knew that this was how I was occupying my time but I think that they thought, since Harry Potter was a kids’ book series, the people who were writing the fics were…kids. And they eventually did wise up to the fact that I was reading Really Very Adult Things and put kid blocks on the computer for all of five minutes. But, y’know, that’s another story.
It wasn’t really porn that I was reading, per say, as much as writing that just…wasn’t meant to be consumed by an eleven-year-old. For instance, stories about government espionage and criminal crime. Things that the HP books touched on, sure, but in a way that was consumable by the very young and very naïve. These fics weren’t for the uninitiated. And I take full responsibility for exposing myself to those things. I very purposefully did a few things that I should not have in order to access this content. One of those things was making myself an email, without my parents’ permission, at an age two years younger than the Yahoo terms of service allowed at the time. I listed my age as eighteen on the email account because that was the age you needed to be to get into some of the archives I wanted access to and I had no idea that the administrators had literally no way of checking if my email was registered to an eighteen year old person or not.
So, I don’t know if it was because of being registered as an adult or because of the forums I was visiting, but I got a lot of very weird spam. And since I was eleven and I had no idea how any of that stuff worked, I thought it was real people…sending me emails. Thankfully my parents had only raised a little fool, not a big fool, so I never clicked any of the links or anything. I was just quietly upset that people thought I cared about car insurance and online gambling when all I wanted was to read the Marked Mature Chapter Of That Harry/Ginny Wedding Fic. A fic in which ‘glass of water’ was used as a euphemism for orgasm, which was something that I did not pick up on until I suddenly remembered that line when I was sitting in a lecture hall ten literal years later.
So one day I’m looking through my email to see if I have any new reviews on my Harry Potter/Hannah Montana crossover fic (Yes, I know) when I come across an email the subject line of which is just “Confidential.”
“Cool,” says little Maggie, who maybe at that point didn’t really know what confidential meant, and clicked on it.
This was a very long time ago so I really don’t remember the content of the email, let alone the exact warning, but the gist of it was something like:
WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID SEND 10,000 DOLLARS TO THIS BANK ACCOUNT OR THE GOVERNMENT WILL BE NOTIFIED.
This is very obviously recognizable as a scam to somebody who isn’t eleven years old. It’s not even a very good scam. It’s the kind of thing that only children and elderly people with dementia would react to.
Unfortunately, I was a child. A child with a guilty conscience because I had been reading Things I was not supposed to for several months now, and had also lied about my age by some SEVEN YEARS to access the very email account by which I had been sent this ominous message.
Predictably, because I was both an overreactive child and apparently an idiot child, I freaked out. I deleted the email and panicked, very quietly, in the corner of my dad’s home office for a good ten minutes. Then, for reasons that are completely unknown EVEN TO ME, I retrieved the email from the trash bin and printed it out. I then slipped it into my backpack and brought it to school the next day.
Even worse, the first thing I did was drag my two friends into the situation.
“Meet me in the bathroom,” I said to them, because some part of me seemed to think that my life had now become a Cool Spy Movie. We huddled into a stall in the bathroom and stared at the paper.
“I don’t have ten thousand dollars,” I told them.
“What did you do?” asked one of my friends.
“That’s none of your concern,” I said.
“Do you think it’s the FBI? Or the CSI?” (Not a typo—she said CSI)
“Yes,” I said, and did not elaborate.
“What happens if you don’t pay it.”
“I’ll be kidnapped,” I said, with utmost conviction. “That’s what happens when the government doesn’t like you. They make you disappear.”
We eventually returned to class. I was pretty jazzed at being the center of our friend group’s attention for the day. It was a Friday, and the height of my concern for the actual situation had waned and, by the time I got home later that day, I had mostly forgotten about my fear of being violently kidnapped by the CSI.
Something that I’ve not mentioned to any of you—and something that I had not mentioned to my friends at the time, either—was that this was my last day at that school. I was due to start at a new school that coming Monday. I hadn’t told anybody because I was switching to a public school from a private school and I thought that telling people would make them think I was dumb? I don’t know, but I hadn’t told literally anybody that I was switching schools. Not even my teachers. I assume that my parents informed them at some point but I still have the middle school-level math book hanging out in my closet that I never returned because I never told anybody I was leaving.
I had no way of contacting any of my friends from the other school. I wouldn’t get my first cell phone for probably another six or seven months. I also stopped going to the Youth Group that I was in with one of them because my dad got spooked when I dropped some Knowledge About Christ on him at one point and decided that the group was way too fundamentalist. (It was, but I was very upset about being pulled out at the time.)
So please imagine. Friend comes to school with ominous email from ~the government~. Friend stops coming to school. Friend stops coming to unrelated activity. Friend doesn’t ever contact you again. You’re eleven years old.
I’m not saying that there are two girls out there who still remember me as “That girl who might have been kidnapped by the government.” I like to think that they probably came up with a more reasonable explanation as they got older. But it’s a possibility that, for a little while sometime in 2006/2007, I accidentally convinced my friends that I had been kidnapped by a shady government agency.
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