Door Squeak

A tale from the Hrselover5 to EventEquestrian to xXsWeEtMiZeRyXx to burningupcall911 pipeline

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“EventEquestrian” was a name I went by for roughly a year or so around 2001. It was the perfect screen name as it immediately established me as an English rider in the Animals & Pets, Gay & Lesbian, and Music (where I allegedly met Christian from BBMak but of course actually didn’t) AOL chat rooms, allowing me to potentially magnetize those who shared my main life interest as soon as the door squeak announced my arrival. I don’t recall the exact room in which I met Melissa and Amy (at least one of these names has been changed for witness protection purposes) but we immediately bonded over a shared hunter/jumper obsession. I had my initial doubts about Amy being that her s/n was not outwardly horse themed (it was something more along the lines of soundofmusicgal689) and she was a new rider, but she seemed eager enough to climb the ladder of equine fandom. Our first chaperoned video chat revealed that reality did in fact match up with both of their a/s/l stats, and we quickly got into a practice of meeting at least three times a week after collectively finishing our homework to share insights about the days of our lives as horse girls.

One of the things we bonded over early on “in these rooms” (a term I now associate with Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs that I attended while in a mental rehabilitation facility last year despite having no addiction problems) was a shared affinity for Thoroughbred and The Saddle Club Book Series. Through what can only be described as a stroke of blatant serendipity, The Saddle Club had three main characters… and so when, inevitably, we decided collectively to assign each one of us a character to “be,” of course Melissa declared herself as most comparable to Bubbles of The Powerpuff Girls which I only mention because it’s relevant to her character development. We would plan to read them simultaneously and then discuss the goings-on in our video chats. My biggest thrill back then was running straight to Juvenile Fiction at Half Price Books to find the shelf stocked with the next item necessary for me to acquire in order to read both series in their intended sequences. I chased that rush by reading by night light every evening so I could continue finishing and buying more books, therefore obtaining more and more horse related narrative references to share with my precious cohort. My appetite was insatiable.

After months of chatting, I was somehow allowed to fly across the country to Amy’s family home in New York as a nearly mute eleven-year-old to go meet these people. My dad had spyware on my computer that allowed him to watch my screen on his screen (which was never spoken about but I would see it if I tiptoed quietly past his office and caught a glimpse of him sitting there looking at the message board I had just been perusing on gURL.com. He was seemingly waiting for me to do something incriminating and otherwise simply enjoying the blatant domination of my privacy) so he must have been confident that I wasn’t up to anything suspicious on my end… and I can only assume my parents chatted at length with the other parents and I suppose there was just an element of collective faith or collective negligence involved in the decision-making process. At any rate, it was the most exciting thing I could ever have imagined - to venture to the Northeast (the Union, not the Confederacy) to ride horses with my best friends (I couldn’t relate to anyone at school - I jumped hurdles at a canter in gym class).

So I flew to Buffalo, New York wearing a necklace that was awarded to me by an airline attendant at the check-in counter that branded me as an unaccompanied minor. It was beautifully designed; a lanyard that attached to a translucent purple plastic envelope that fit my photo ID, snack money and boarding pass so perfectly that it felt almost cosmic. I arrived at the airport to Melissa and Amy holding signs for me that I don’t fully recall the aesthetic of but must have involved glitter and tape, as I had long boycotted regular glue due to the threat of potential horse-related gelatinous involvement which was something I made clear to anyone who knew me even remotely well. I had a huge personal responsibility as the sole founder and host of a very low-traffic anti-horse slaughter website after all. My recollection of emotion in adolescence is fuzzy because I was so armoured but I’m sure that it was incredible to feel that people were so excited to see me.

We then went on to have a truly wholesome week that included daily horseback riding lessons, a trip to Niagara Falls and The Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum (where I discovered I could do something unique with my tongue in a two-way mirror), being regularly serenaded by Amy’s beautiful voice as she sang songs I didn’t recognise (as 102.9 The Mix was my exclusive music source… lots of Aerosmith), and home-cooked meals prepared by her gentle (!) father.

But there was an issue one night……

You see, Melissa was thirteen (I was twelve, immediately plummeted me into a lesser-than position on the food chain), blonde (or.. blonde ish, rather), had braces (which I wanted so bad), Canadian (I was obsessed with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police… I’m from Texas and had an ex-undercover cop Father so please give me a break on that) and rich (spoiled) with a palomino back home. Amy and I came from far more humble beginnings - although I did grow up and live in a two-story house that looked like a majestic castle (by DFW area standards at least) on a hill across the street from a nature preserve… but I was an only child and homes like that were under 200k at the time. Anyway I’m saying it’s not like we were struggling - we always had what we needed. We had a boat on a lake, I took horseback riding lessons, was allowed a couple of Abercrombie shirts per year from the sale bin (though that came later - at this point in time I was only wearing horse themed t-shirts from the State Line Tack located inside of Petsmart), got as many Snack Packs, Dunkaroos and Chips Ahoy cookies as I wanted at Kroger and my Mom clipped coupons. I didn’t grow up exorbitantly wealthy though like - well, like Melissa for instance. For the record I’m certainly not trying to foreshadow the rest of this story by insinuating that Melissa was some sort of monster because she was raised in a way that indulged her agenda, but she certainly possessed the auric field of someone who was used to getting what they wanted.

Anyway, as a socially awkward only-child I was generally unfamiliar with intimacy or sharing space with other human beings, so when Melissa appeared to be having some sort of outburst one night it was as if I was watching behaviour so foreign and reflexive that I could only compare it to the wild animals I’d read about in my issues of Ranger Rick and Zoobooks. How could a peer of mine just express themselves like that? I couldn’t possibly relate to it, but I did understand that she was very clearly upset. After a demonstration of emotional performance in Amy’s somehow both sprawling yet cramped attic room, Melissa walked around the partitioned wall (which I believe was actually just a pile of bins and things that separated one side of the room from the other) and laid down in the bed to seethe on purple cotton sheets as opposed to somewhere else.

Amy and I were on the other side of the object wall, where we’d been innocently examining her Breyer collection, when we glanced at each other with a shared sense of fear and concern. Katie grabbed one of her copies of Throughbred, perhaps “The Bad Luck Filly” (Book 42) or “Pride’s Challenge” (Book 9), found a gel pen, opened the cover and began writing. “What do you think she’s upset ab…” was being written across the top of the novel in softly bubbled letters. “I’m not sure but she seems really mad,” I wrote back in a more angular penmanship before passing it back. We went on like this for a while - not saying anything particularly incriminating as we were both certainly too meek and nervous to do something like that at the time (things change <3) although it’s possible that we mentioned feeling that she was being rude to us… (which she was… but sometimes those things are hard to admit because of the heartbreak it can cause to either party to acknowledge). Anyway back to my story which is about how eventually a few hours later when tensions were still high despite it seeming like we were in slightly calmer waters, Melissa somehow discovered the interior of the book (was she psychic alongside everything else? This girl can’t catch a break) and confronted Amy and I about it. “What is this?” she asked with the air of a seasoned bratty-argument veteran. But me and Amy were both dweebs and I blacked out so I can’t exactly even trust my memory when writing about how we responded - though I do recall being mostly silent but trying (hard) to say I was sorry and that I didn’t intend to hurt her. I meant every word while simultaneously feeling like my consciousness was a frozen and numb stone encased inside of my skin. To be clear this wasn’t an unusual sensation for me to experience and in fact could perhaps have been described as my modus operandi at the time - likely a result of an inability to inhabit and therefore process emotion. Plus on top of it all my moon is in Aquarius