Chapter One: Chloe

Every summer I break someone’s heart. This has been the pattern since I was eleven years old and my friend Neil tried kissing me and I laughed. I didn’t mean to. When I say it like that, breaking people’s hearts, it sounds intentional. It isn’t. I don’t set out to do it. To say that hearts get broken may be an exaggeration. I’m sure they don’t, not really, even if it feels like that at the time. Boys are surprisingly emotional about some things.

Just over a year ago, two things happened in our school that made the teachers start panicking about what they call ‘cyberbullying’, which seems to be one of those words that only adults who have the very vaguest ideas about how the internet works actually use. This past year, we have had entire days devoted to lectures about how even though the internet can be a useful educational tool, it should also be used with caution. They talk about ‘internet safety’ as though it’s like driving or sex or something. What they are worried about is people using certain websites, the ones that the school’s internet provider blocks anyway, for making other people in the school miserable. Pages devoted to ‘why Chloe Cullinane is a bitch’ apparently fall into this category. I don’t kid myself. I know very well that it was the Dominic stuff that was more important. Dominic was a fifth-year student who decided to post his suicide note online, which if you ask me was a cry for attention or help or something and all his friends who left farewell messages for him were rather missing the point. The school were also missing the point by obsessing over the internet aspect of things, but I suppose it’s easier for them, when you have one student dead at seventeen and then, two weeks later, have the outraged stepfather of another storming in demanding an explanation for why the school haven’t intervened in the ‘filth’ that one student has put online.

There wasn’t actually anything particularly filthy about Steve’s page, just a lot of incoherent swearing about why I was a whore. The pictures were Photoshopped as was obvious to anyone with a clue (which would exclude, of course, the outraged stepfather – Martin still gets paranoid about paying for anything online with his credit card, convinced it will be his undoing), and it was more pathetic than anything else. I wasn’t the one to point it out to Martin. It went up two days after I broke up with Steve and I could see that he was stressed – it was May, we had the Junior Cert coming up, and even though he’s not particularly bright he does care about school – and I didn’t worry too much about it. But Martin tries to get involved in school things – as though teaching Junior Infants makes him an expert on how teenagers are or should be educated – and knows lots of the other parents and someone pointed it out to him. And that was that. We were sent out letters over the summer and it’s been a year of ‘how not to use the internet’.

The real issues were two very separate things but I suppose I am glad that they haven’t been focussed on. I didn’t know Dominic. I probably shouldn’t comment. But if you have a student who wants to kill themselves it seems to me that the important part isn’t the idea of announcing it online, though the newspaper stories about the whole thing focussed a lot on the idea that ‘this generation’ simply don’t understand reality, that we’re disconnected from it. I wish they’d make up their minds. One moment we are too connected to each other, unable to go five minutes without checking the phone or the internet, the next cut off from the world entirely.

And the real issue about me and Steve was not that he put a rant up for everyone to see, but that he was angry. I don’t think I broke his heart but I think he felt it at the time. And that is what happens, what keeps happening. Not that I want to break hearts. Not that I think I am some amazingly brilliant, gorgeous, charming goddess with such tremendous power over everyone I come into contact with. But it keeps happening, this messy ending of things. Steve was the worst, I suppose, in many ways. If only because all that fuss meant we had to sit through so many talks on thoughtfulness and consideration towards one another ‘even in online forums’, and I couldn’t roll my eyes and sigh about it being all about me because of course it wasn’t, it was about Dominic, and my role in the saga was minimal – no, not minimal, but not enough, on its own, to make a difference, and just enough, after that, to make all the difference and shift the focus of his tragedy entirely. I feel guilty about that more than Steve, I think. But I can see it from their perspective. Don’t talk about feelings, mental health, what it means to be depressed, what it means to call someone a whore. It is quite different to talk about these things in the context of ‘internet safety’. It allows for darting around the main point and obsessing over passwords and sharing of information and being conscious of the importance of anything you say online, recorded in black-and-white (or indeed green-on-black, as Steve’s thing was).

Anything you say to or about anyone is important, when it’s something like ‘whore’. That’s indelible no matter what. For the record, I never had sex with Steve. I don’t know if it matters, though. It’s a word you throw out in anger and it means more than just sex. I think he meant, basically, that I was a bad person. That I was inconsiderate of him and his feelings, that I treated him badly, that I broke up with him at a bad time or without an adequate explanation. All of this is true, I suppose. That is the most damning thing of all, not that he put up badly altered images of me, but that somewhere amidst all that cursing and all those typos he was right.

This summer, there is a Boy, not like Neil or Steve, not like Raymond, the first Steve whose friends referred to him as ‘Steo’, or Larry (from my summers at twelve, thirteen and fourteen, respectively), but a Boy who I can nevertheless tell you, right now, that I do not Love-with-a-capital-L.

And even though it is only barely June I can tell you that I am asking myself already: if you don’t love them, well, what’s the point?

© Claire Hennessy 2009