"People on the internet aren't real," Mrs. Piekarski, my best friend's mom.
That quote always makes my best friend and I laugh. If people on the internet aren't real it must be a bunch of cartoons running all those computers. Is that possible? Normally I'd say yes, anything's possible, even though my best friend and I spend hours a day on the computer, but a person has to believe that they are real when you get packages from them in the mail, or talk to them on the phone. If you actually meet them, you know that you are either hallucinating, or these are real people.

Everyone hears stories about people who meet someone from online and find out that they are a fifty year old psycho and end up dead. Something about that doesn't make sense, most people online are not fifty, the older a person is the less likely it is that they can use a computer. Old people just aren't known for using computers, so why do people assume that everyone online is a fifty year old psycho?

The internet scares us sometimes; all we can judge a person on is their screen name, their profile, but most importantly, how they act, just judging by their words on the screen we can't really be sure they aren't fake. Not to mention the fact that bad stories interest us more than good ones, because they make our situation seem better, so we pay more attention to them than we do to good stories; it's no wonder we're afraid to meet people from the internet, all we here about is people getting killed by internet psychos.

What if you met someone who you knew was not a psycho? I went with my mom to meet one of her internet friends, and my older brother now lives in Florida with his internet girlfriend. So is everyone from the internet evil? I got a chance to find out.

It started last winter when I began to read a new series of books called Dragonlance, but it really was my summer. I so loved the series that I wrote kender, my favorite kind of character on my AOL profile. Seeing my profile had kender on it, first GaianaDawn, then Tasslehof invited me to parties of role players, specifically people who role play kenders. I myself tried role playing and loved it, it's really a cross between acting and writing, anything I wanted to say I just typed, and any actions I wanted to do, such as laughing were done like this ::laughs::, or ::she laughs hysterically::, it's a ton of fun for anyone who likes acting or writing, and I love both. Suddenly I'd found something awesome I'd never known about before, and I met a ton of new people, including RTanglemop. His real name's Nick, but remember we were role playing, so at first I only knew him by his character, Raph.

After a while I began to learn more about who he actually was, not much at first, but by the end of the summer I knew everything there was to know about him. I found it very interesting that he was five feet tall, a skater (board), he lived in a town in Connecticut called Southington, he was a freshman just as I was, he read a lot but did poorly in English despite the fact that he was the only one who read the books because of the ever evil literary analysis, and he listened to rap, hardcore, and musicals. I got a pretty amusing picture of this weird guy who could spell no better than I could (my spelling has since greatly improved thanks to the constant corrections I got online). I soon got a pretty good idea of who he was.

We were chatting along on an IM when he asked me to call him, not because he was a nice guy and didn't want me to have to give my number out, because he was cheap and didn't want his parents to bother him. I didn't immediately say, "Oh! I'll go call you!", even though he begged me, which I found pretty amusing, I consulted my best friend, Trish, first. She'd emailed him and was becoming really involved in the whole Nick thing. Eventually I did call him and was surprised by what a high voice he has. A "cartoon voice" as Tas calls it, Tas being a totally different online friend also named Nick who will take an entirely different personal narrative.

After a while I began to talk to Nick more on the phone than on the computer. Towards the end of June, Nick began talking about an amusement park called Lake Compounce that was reopening and was only about five or ten minutes from his house. "I went up to everyone in homeroom and said, "Are you going on the big roller coaster? I'm going on it!" Nick said referring to the new roller coaster they'd added.

"Um, I don't like roller coasters," I said, standing in the living room with the cordless, "I like the really fast spinny rides." I also like amusement parks in general, just not rides with big drops, or that go upside down. I really wanted to go, but I was really paranoid about meeting him.

Before I said Nick and I role play, well, our online characters had by now developed pretty complicated lives; well, I got more into my character, but his character became more like he was, a result of his talking on the phone to me while talking to me on the computer. My afore mentioned friend, Trish, was by now thoroughly involved, as much as I, and often joined us on threeway. She couldn't talk on AOL unless she was at my house because her parents wouldn't get AOL (it was long distance), so she had to get a different provider.

Lake Compounce came up with more frequency and we kept planning to meet there, but summer progressed until I was to my last weekend before school, and Nick had already started going on Friday; we were undaunted however, and we had a plan. It would be easy for Nick and his best friend Jeremy (Jer) to go to Lake Compounce, so all Trish would have to do was to convince her parents to take her family, which would be her; her younger brother, Mikey; her mom, remember "People from the internet aren't real"; and her dad (her older brother who was away at college being excluded), and I'd simply bring thirty dollars for an all day pass and food and go with them.

We found ourselves doing just that; my mom drove me to the Danbury mall to meet Trish (she lives in New York in a town near Danbury, and we usually meet up there because it's easy for my mom to drive to). I got in Trish's mini-van and sat in the way back with Trish wearing my black, button down, long sleeve t-shirt and jeans (it was near the end of the summer and I was already cold, well, I was cool that morning before I had the sun blazing down on me). Mikey sat in the back and talked with Trish and I about Nick right behind the back of Trish's unsuspecting parents, who had no idea we were planning to meet someone from the internet and would have freaked out had they known. We drove off the highway onto a long, curvy back road until we came to the smiling pink carousel horse that symbolized Lake Compounce.

Stretching after the long car ride we stepped out of the car and onto a gravel parking lot and into the 11:30 sunshine and out of it for a moment as we walked under a high tunnel formed by a road going over the road we followed, then back out into the sun again as we came to the entrance/ticket place where I purchased my all day rides pass (a yellow paper band with Lake Compounce printed on it in black writing), and went through the turnstile feeling both nervous and excited and chattering a lot with Trish because of it.

Trish, Mikey, and I walked to the beach with Trish's parents so we'd know where they were, then we scurried off to the arcade where we'd agreed to meet Nick. Suddenly paranoia struck. "You go first Trish," I wasn't about to go first myself.

"No you go first you met him first." After a good five minutes of arguing and avoiding it we ran through the center together. Finding no one who could be Nick or Jer we checked the sides of the arcade and decided they simply weren't there. A ride, the perfect way to solve anything (except sickness) in an amusement park, would save us.

"How are we going to find them, everyone here's a midget skater," I complained as every guy in sight wore the baggy pants I associated with skaters, but we headed of to go off on the park's new roller coaster, the Zoomerang. Actually, I didn't intend to do anything more than watch Trish and Mikey go on it.

Walking off to the Zoomerang we passed two skaters. One was fairly tall with black hair and brown eyes, he was kind of cute; the other was considerably shorter with dirty blond/light brown hair cut really short, brown eyes, and baggy army pants that would haunt Trish for the rest of her mortal existence. I got a pretty bad view of him and he looked messed up, he does look ok if you look at him from the right angle and he's frowning. I only got a quick sidelong glance, and Trish only saw the army pants so we were both left with a pretty weird impression of Nick. That weird impression is probably the reason I was later quotes as saying "That's not them, is it?" it was whispered to Trish, but we were going right past them. They immediately knew it was us, and we immediately knew it was them, but we continued on towards the Zoomerang and they to the arcade.

The Zoomerang was huge, but there were almost no lines in the entire park including to the Zoomerang, so Trish and Mikey got to the back of the roller coaster, Trish's favorite spot, right away. The knowledge that Playland's Dragoncoaster was the most I could handle without throwing up kept me waiting below one of the high loops. I watched the coaster pull Trish and Mikey backwards and far upwards, only to send them flying up a loop, sideways, down another, around another giant loop then forewords up a giant ramp just like the one they gone backwards up at first, and the racing through the entire thing backwards until they finally halted at the place they'd gotten on. The wave of long blond hair that flashed by and the high soprano screams told me exactly where Trish was all the time. When the ride ended I met Trish and Mikey at the exit.

"Now, do you think I could ever have gone on that ride?" I questioned Trish. She agreed that I couldn't, an opinion she would later change in her annoyance about the fact that I would go on no rides that went upside down or had steep drops. Onward, toward the arcade we journeyed. Now the problem we'd experienced before of not wanting to go in there again came up.

For what must have been far more than five minutes Trish and I stood outside trying to bring ourselves to enter with Mikey yelling at us to do it. Unable to convince ourselves to enter from the front entrance we went around to the back entrance, which was just like the front entrance. We almost succeeded in walking in, but we located Nick and Jeremy playing a car racing game that was in the middle section near the back.

A minute amount of courage, and the threats Mikey was beginning to make about telling Trish's parents if we didn't go in to meet them soon prompted us to go in and hide behind one of the 'Big Choice' stuffed animal machines directly behind them. Despite my nervousness I wanted to finally meet him, so I suggested to Trish that we yell out Monty Python and the Holy Grail quotes as Nick was so familiar with that movie. Believing it wouldn't work Trish declined, but I convinced myself it would and quoted away. I yelled some of my favorites, about a little white bloodthirsty bunny guarding a cave.

Nick and Jeremy showed no reaction, probably because of a combination of all the noise reverberating through the arcade and listening to too much hardcore. So, that tactic abandoned, we once more found ourselves in front of the arcade contemplating what to do. Because Mikey's threats were becoming more serious we thought it best to go up to them before we were turned in to Trish's parents. Past a couple of machines, an incredible third of the way there we stopped. Those army pants had really scared Trish, and even though I was by now so impatient I was ready to march right up to them, I wouldn't go without Trish.

The idea of yelling out their names came up, and I, getting more and more impatient by the second, said, "It's easy, you just yell 'Nick and Jeremy!" I actually yelled the Nick and Jeremy part in absolute bravery, but they still didn't hear; I guess the video game took all the concentration within them.

Mikey's persistent threats finally got to Trish and we made it to five feet away from them. Nick and Jeremy were intent on their game; they sat down at the two race car seats staring at the two screens that gave them each the race from their cars' point of view playing with the stealth that only teen-age boys who spend hours a day playing video games instead of leading real lives have. Nick apparently had spent more time playing than Jeremy because he won. He didn't once look up before that however, except when Trish called him a rather obscene name (Dumbass).

With the all important video game finally completed they stood up and came over to where we were standing and said hi. It was strange because I was both nervous and excited, but I mostly felt weird about meeting them. They didn't chop our heads off, and they weren't psychos. The rest of the day was pretty fun, although it would have been more fun with a different internet friend I have who also doesn't go on upside down rides or rides with steep drops and wouldn't have bothered me about not going on them.

So I met someone from the internet, and I didn't get killed. In fact, I had a good time instead of getting killed. The interesting thing about this is that Nick now insists that Trish and I aren't real. "Because you don't act like the people in my school." I'm real as is Trish, so Nick's wrong; Nick's real, so Mrs. Piekarski's wrong. So the internet is full of real people. I often think of that summer as lost; I sat at home all day, I didn't finish the books I'd intended to read, nor did I clean my room, I certainly didn't get a job, but it wasn't really wasted. I had fun, I made a bunch of new friends, I learned how to type at a decent speed, I created a website, and best of all I proved Mrs. Piekarski wrong. It may have been one of my laziest summers, but it was fun, I enjoyed it, and I finally stopped hating computers. So one of the best, and shortest, summers came to and end when I left that amusement park after one last ride on the swings. The full extent of my summer really only being seen here and on my webpage