I went into 2004 excited as 2003 was finally put to bed. I was almost halfway through my first year in Cleveland which in my mind meant being that much closer to returning to Pennsylvania. In terms of how school was going, I was flying high. My one on one attention from homeschool and being put into the 7th grade instead of the 8th, was allowing me to get straight A's in my sleep. I was also earning moniker's like Smarty Pants, Nerd, and Teacher's Pet. I would normally get offended, but all of those nicknames were true. Especially Teacher's Pet. My worst fear was getting in trouble. The best way to combat that was to literally be a teacher's pet, at least that's what I thought. Also it was a good way to combat bullies as being on the teacher's good side would likely always have them choose my side over the bully. Which in turn earned me the nickname Snitch. As annoying as these names were, I tried for the most part not to let them get to me. Retaliation would mean enemies and that's one thing I didn't wasn't prepared to create.
Despite of all that, I managed to make connections including one with one of the newer kids who transferred halfway through the school year. His name was Zack, which is ironic because as you all know, I had a friend back in PA named Zach. To become friends was written in the stars. Zack would become a good friend of mine as we both shared a love for video games and professional sports. One day, during lunch, Zack mentioned a free online video game where you could create a character, level them up, roam through a massive world, complete quests, and battle creatures. And the kicker was you could play with thousands of other people online in real time. The game was called Runescape.
Up until this point, online gaming with other people wasn't as big as it is now. The only experience I had in that department was when I would sleep over at Jeremiah's house and me, him, and his older brother Dan would stay up until 4AM playing Counter Strike. A game in which six random people would play six other random people in as terrorists vs counter-terrorists. The goal was to eliminate all the other team or set off/diffuse a bomb. A game my parents would've never approved of if they knew I was playing it. But you won't tell right? The games were over in the blink of an eye so the actual interaction you had with the other players was over really quick. Runescape, however, was different. It would become a staple in my life, but also teach me a life lesson I was not ready for.
After Zack told me about Runescape and the website to go to, I didn't hesitate to create an account. At the time, the game ran in the browser on a flash player so I didn't have to download anything which was amazing because trying to download anything on dial-up internet was like waiting for a sloth to cross the road. Once my account was created, I had to give my character a screen name (like AIM). I was still heavily into sword fighting and days of old. And Tom Cruise's movie, The Last Samurai, had just come out and I thought that would be a cool name. So I called my character thelastsamurai13. Why I had an obsession with the number 13, I do not know. But all I knew was thelastsamurai13 was ready to take on the Runescape world.
Within a few days of joining and getting familiar with the game world, I discovered that Jeremiah played too. That made the game more appealing because when I logged on, I could find him or Zack playing and we could play together, even though we weren't in the same room or even at times in the same city. We could make our characters meet in the same location in the same world, and play the game while also talking about life.
As that first week went on, I began interacting with other real life people in the game. There were people willing to trade digital items, help me on a quest, or just make a new friend. That was all going great until I met this one guy trying to help people get free memberships. A membership was a paid version of the game that unlocked an excessive amount of quests, items, skills, and the rest of the world map that you could not get access to on a free account. It was the main way the game developers kept a portion of the game free, because they supplied paying members with all the extra content. So of course, every kid who didn't have money would love a free membership. This guy told me in game chat that there was a special way to do it. My present day self sees this as an obvious red flag. My thirteen year old self who had little understanding about internet safety, had no clue.
The person I was interacting with seemed like he genuinely wanted to help me. He asked me to follow his character and said I needed to pass some tests. The first was I had to kill a level 2 creature to show I was strong enough. I was level 10 at that point so that was no problem. Then we went to one of the biggest and most player populated cities in the game...Varrock. He then said I needed to be able to pay the in game fee of 1 gold piece. I had thousands of those at this point so I gave him one measly digital GP for free. Pleased with my progress, he said there was one last trial. He asked me to follow him. Our characters ended up walking a very long time to a very remote part of the world. I didn't know it then, but his purpose was to eliminate the chance of any other real life players seeing our chat as the chat was open to all players in proximity. Once we got there, he said the last thing he needed was trust. He needed to access my account to upgrade it to a membership account. He asked for my password. Alarm bells should've been blaring. Sirens should've been wailing. The dead should've been waking just to scream at me to run away. But all I could think about was the possibility of being able to have access to all that fun stuff for free. So I typed my password in chat and hit "Enter". He then told me to log out, wait 10 minutes, then log back in and I would have access to a full membership. So I did just that.
Ten minutes later, I went to log in. I typed in thelastsamurai13 and my password. Access denied. Tried again. Incorrect password. My heart sank. My brain was now only processing what had happened. I had given a complete stranger the only thing that could access my account and I gave it to him on a silver platter. I had officially been scammed. To make matters worse, signing up for the account requires a name, address, and other personal information that could easily lead to identity theft. I was devastated. My character that I had put a week's worth of work into was gone. The levels I worked so hard to obtain...gone. The screenname thelastsamuri13...also gone. I was reckless, stupid, and had made a rookie mistake.
The next time I saw Jeremiah, I told him what happened and he confirmed I had been scammed. He said people try to do that to newer accounts just to get all the items and other things you earned to give to their main accounts. To say I was frustrated would be an understatement. But there was a silver lining here. I now was aware of scamming and realized it could happen to anyone...even me. This time it was a gaming account that did not have a credit card attached. It could've been much worse. I got lucky, but a life lesson had been learned. I created a new account and called it Ninja2421. I was going to be the one in the shadows and made it a vendetta to go up against any wrongdoing I saw. This will come into play later.
Switching gears to a matter that was out of my control. I had been a relatively healthy kid up to this point. No medications, no allergies, no broken bones, and no ER visits. But in early January on a Monday morning I had gone to school with a bit of an ache. By second period, I was not doing so well and Mrs. Morris thought it best that I go home. My dad came and got me. I went straight to the doctor's office. There they diagnosed me with the flu and prescribed medication. I was a bit scared because I knew what the flu could do to older people and that it wipes anyone out for days. I was told I had to stay out of school at least through Thursday unless my symptoms worsened. My heart sank as I knew how much work I'd have to catch up on and that I'd have to go on medication. I couldn't catch a break.
Monday got worse and by Tuesday I was in so much pain it was hard to sleep. My head hurt, my throat hurt, I didn't feel like eating, everything was a mess. I thought for sure this was going to last for a long time. By Wednesday, things started to get a bit better, but I still felt crummy. My siblings brought home make-up work given to them by my teachers. Having nothing better to do, I tackled what I could and hoped for the best. By Thursday, I woke to my siblings getting ready for school, having slept through the night for the first time in two days. After they all left and the commotion died down, I fell back asleep and did not wake up again until almost 2 in the afternoon. By this point, I was feeling about 85% peachy. When I woke up Friday morning, my temperature was normal and I felt well enough to return to school. I was a bit worried because I didn't finish all the work, Mrs. Morris and Ms. Bentkowski had grace on me and didn't count the assignments I couldn't complete. They were simply nixed from my grade. I thought it was going to take me awhile to catch back up, but it turned out that I was fine because I was still familiar the material from homeschool. What I was able to take away from this was that sometimes in life, some things are out of my control. And rather than worry about the storm, I should focus on the recovery from the aftermath.
One final life lesson is actually a throwback to December of 2003. The school decided it would be a fun idea to have a door decorating contest for the Christmas season and the winning class would get a pizza party. Looking back it may have been more to brighten up the dull ancient building that was Nathaniel Hawthorne and to get the kids into a bit of school fun. Now there was a bit of a rivalry between the two 7th grades. Mainly because one was full of advanced level kids and the other was full of standard level kids. I was in the standard level because they didn't know if I was ready to be placed in the advanced. There was another girl in my class who should've been in the advanced, but she had refused and wanted to remain with the kids she had gone through most of middle school with. Her name was Oliva.
The rivalry formed because it was two groups of kid with different statuses. While we all generally got along, whenever competition came up, the heat was on. Backed behind the enthusiasm of Mrs. Morris, we were all in to win the contest. The materials were supplied and we went to work. The door was edged with frame paper and wrapped in colorful wrapping paper. We added gold stars with paper gingerbread men and stuck a picture of each student's face on each one. A wreath of red baubles was hung and a cut-out of the Grinch was slapped on the front. The final touch was golden tassels at the top of the door. We were proud of that work, but weren't sure if it was enough to get us to #1. But Mrs. Morris had a trick up her sleeve. She told us that the day before the judging was to occur, she was going to bring in her secret weapon. A large inflatable Santa Claus. We went nuts. We knew there was no way the other class was going to see that one coming. But we had to keep it a secret for a few days.
The day before the "secret" Santa was to arrive, we all were in Ms. Bentkowski's room for English. I don't remember exactly what happened, but someone or something had rubbed a boy in our class the wrong way. His retaliation was to spill the beans on Santa. We all went simultaneously shouted his name is disbelief. Ms. Bentkowski tried to hide her laughter. I thought we were done. Our secret had been exposed. When things had calmed down, I witnessed something of what made a teacher want to be a teacher. Ms. Bentkowski, without any initiation on our end, said she'd make us a deal. She would not tell her class our secret if we managed to finish class under sound circumstances and everyone completed the assignment. Somehow that proposition worked.
When we returned to Mrs. Morris's classroom, we gave her the bad news that a certain someone had spilled the beans. She wasn't too pleased. But we explained Ms. Bentkowski's compromise and things cooled down once again. The next morning when we arrived to class, there was the large Santa, greeting us at the door. As the students from the other class came in, their jaws dropped. The term gobsmacked would suffice here. We knew Ms. Bentkowski held up her end of the deal.
A couple days later, before we went on Christmas break, we heard Mr. Pempin come over the loud speaker to announce the winners of the door contest. We all became quiet. He went on about the heated contest and the great effort everyone put in. Then, after a brief pause, he announced the winners as room 202, Mrs. Morris's class. Anything he said after that was drowned out by our joyous uproar. It was an incredible feeling. I learned two things in that moment. 1) When there's a moment of weakness that can be taken advantage of, compassion is the path least traveled, but is the honorable thing to do. 2) Teachers teach for a reason. And while there may be a few bad apples in the bunch, most care about those they teach, no matter how difficult they sometimes may be.
There's a lot more I have to say about 2004, but for now I'll leave you with a pretty dashing photo.
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