Reclaiming Fatima

Content warning: This story contains explicit descriptions of sexual activity. Definitely not safe for work.

I was bored. School was boring. All I could think about was getting home and getting back on the computer. No one else really understood. Mr. Grimmel was droning on about the Executive branch, but in my mind, I was tracing over the conversation I'd been having on The Lion's Den, my current favorite BBS.

Worse than boring, school was a trial. I'd started at Catlin School in 11th grade, which made me basically a complete outcast. Catlin started at kindergarten, and the social prominence of any given student could be tied pretty directly to when they started attending.

Catlin School was a prestigeous private school tucked into Portland's West Hills, attended by around 300 students at any point in time. A solid quarter of the kids were boarding students, mostly diplomats' children, coming from all over the world. They were the worst, every one of them chewing tobacco and spitting in soda cans all day long, it was disgusting. I wished they'd stop. I would never, ever, ever forget mistakenly picking up the wrong can of Coke one afternoon and getting a solid mouthful of someone else's tobacco spit. I couldn't even make it to the girls' room before the vomit came up. This did not improve my social standing.

Finally, Mr. Grimmel petered out as the end-of-class bell sounded, a tinny tone, like something produced by a very maladjusted synthesizer. Everyone stood up and filed out of the room, the school day finally over.

I stood outside my car, a rattletrap old VW Bug I'd bought using some of my earnings from the burger restaurant where I worked the cash register, and some birthday money. It was a dusty blue color, which would rub off on skin or clothes if you touched it too hard. It had clearly seen better days, but I'd wanted a Bug since I was young, and this was akin to living the dream.

"C'mon Jonas, where are you?" I looked at my watch and impatiently tapped my foot, fiddling with the key in the door handle to get it unlocked. My brother, Jonas, was supposed to meet me at the car for the 45 minute ride home to far-off Cornelius. In exchange for this taxi service, my parents paid for my insurance, a deal I made gladly enough when it was abstract, but sometimes regretted when the reality sank in.

Finally, he arrived, half-running, his backpack perpetually falling off his shoulder. He got silently into the car, the passenger door making a warning creak as he opened it. I looked at him for a moment. "Ready?" He nodded, a bit sullen. He'd been sullen for a while, but then so had I. Neither of us were very happy with the recent move away from the Seattle area. I cranked the starter, and the Beetle's engine sputter-chirped to life.

In my previous life in the suburbs of Seattle, I hadn't exactly been popular, but when I hit 10th grade and entered high school, suddenly things had gotten better. With a much larger school came a much larger pool of people, and I had finally started to distance myself from the reputation as a huge nerd that had followed me through grade school and junior high. When I discovered theater, I found a group who were the same kind of misfits I was, and finally felt like I'd found my people.

That all came crashing down near the end of the year, when our dad had announced the doomful news: we'd be relocating to the Portland area for a new job he was going to get with some desperately boring-sounding company. It was what the family needed, but holy shit did it fuck up my life.

So, we moved. On the occasion of my 17th birthday, we moved into a furnished apartment in Beaverton that was decorated in a theme my dad half-jokingly called "relocation beige." It was being paid for by the new company until we could find a house, but it only had two bedrooms, so had to share a room with Jonas. It was essentially like moving into hell.

Not that Jonas was bad, but he was so annoying. He would forever tweak my proverbial nose, pressing my buttons, until I'd lash out, and he'd run crying to mom and dad. He was only a few years younger, but the gulf between us was immeasurable, and seemed absolute. To have to share a room with him was mortifying in more ways than I could describe. Let's just say that as a newly-minted 17 year old young woman, having my 15 year old brother sleeping four feet across the room was Not Good.

However, we found a house soon enough, a funky old sprawling rambler-ish thing in the hills near Cornelius. It was a 40 minute drive from Portland, but at least we had separate rooms again, and I could play my CDs and LPs in some amount of privacy. Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux were my more or less constant companions. It was a huge relief to be able to dress myself without having to flee to the bathroom for some privacy.

At dinner that night, mom asked how my day had been. As usual, I answered with almost a non-answer: "Fine." Mom pursed her lips, and tried to keep up a friendly tone of voice.

"Did you learn anything interesting?"

I thought for a minute, pausing with a forkful of stir-fried chicken partway to my mouth. "I guess we learned about the Justice Department?" I tried to remember anything of what Mr. Grimmel had been talking about. "They run the courts? No wait, they're like the police, the courts are a different thing." I'm sure my tone was not very encouraging.

Dad piped up. "What about chemistry? What were you working on today?"

"Oh," I said, brightening a bit, "Ms. Stanford taught us how to make esters, like organic artifical flavors and scents and things. Amy and I were making one that was supposed to smell like bananas, but it didn't work. Well, I mean, it did, but only when we poured it out into the sink. I guess we must have messed up how much water the reaction needed? It smelled just like banana Runts!" I smiled at the memory, the artificial-banana smell rising out of the fluid sluicing down the drain.

Finally, after dinner, I slipped away to my room, as was my habit. My parents were watching some drama on TV, and I had no idea what Jonas was doing, but I fired up the computer.

I truly had always been a nerd, that reputation I had wasn't wrong, much though I hated it; this was well before nerds were cool. On my 10th birthday, I got a TRS-80 Color Computer, which could play game cartridges, or could do BASIC. My dad ended up using it at least as much as I did, and it was supposed to be everyone's computer, but I felt like it was mine more than anyone else's. My dad tricked it out with four floppy drives, a wonderfully clear 12" monitor, a new keyboard to replace the horrible chicklet keyboard that had come with it initially, and a ridiculous amount of memory, 64 kB vs. the 4 kB it had come with. I wrote all sorts of little programs: a dice roller and character generator for D&D, a roulette game, a sort of grand do-it-all program called The Boss. However, time and technology moved on, and by the time we were packing up all our stuff to move to Portland, we had a much nicer computer, a DEC Rainbow, and it didn't make sense to keep the CoCo any more. It went to a kid from school before the move.

The DEC was now my computer, and an even newer IBM PC clone with a turbo button adorned my dad's desk, but that was fine with me. The most important thing about the CoCo, and about the DEC after it, was that I could hook up a modem to them, and call out to BBSes.

I'd been calling into BBSes since I was 11 or 12, when my dad brought home a 300 baud modem borrowed from work. They were hundreds of dollars to buy, and we couldn't afford one, but I guess he was nominally going to use it to do remote work, I think submitting jobs to a mainframe or something. In actual fact, once he showed me how to look up BBS numbers in Computer Shopper, it was all over. I was hooked.

I was 17 now, so I was a veteran, in BBS terms. It didn't occur to me then to count how many systems I'd been on so far, but the number surely would have been in the multiple dozens, between Seattle and now Portland. By now, we had a 2400 baud modem of our own that I was using, so no longer could I out-type the modem, and it scrolled by faster than I could read, which was such a huge leap from those first days of 300 baud.

Most of the boards I was on were single-line: they had one modem, and when someone was dialed in, no one else could access the system. So there was a kind of etiquette around making your visits fairly short, and trying not to hog the line. It made a lot of sense to dial up late at night, both because there was a lower chance someone else would pick up the phone at home, and because the early evening was by far the most popular time to call. I had my own line, paid for out of my carefully hoarded allowance and fast food paycheck, so at least I didn't have to worry about hogging the main line.

The Lion's Den, my current favorite board, was kind of magical because it was a multi-line system. Whoever the sysop was, he must have had real money to throw at it, but it had something like 3 or 4 modems with the attendant phone lines, and was up 24 hours a day. Being always-up wasn't that unusual now, but almost all the boards I called were single-line.

Of course, what was magical about a multi-line system was not just that there was a higher likelihood of connecting, but that when you were connected, you could talk to people interactively, instead of leaving messages for others to respond to after you logged off.

When I joined a new board, I frequently used the same handle, MageGirl, though occasionally I'd pick something different. When I first started out, I called myself Zaphod Beeblebrox because I thought it was such a cool name, but I got out of the habit when people kept assuming I was a boy. At least with MageGirl they knew who I was, but I got some gross comments, and looking back on it, I occasionally wish I'd been a bit more anonymously-gendered on those boards. It's not like now, I didn't get dick pics or anything, but some of the guys (they were mostly guys) on the board would make weird comments that I didn't understand at the time. I was pretty innocent, honestly.

However, for the Lion's Den, I wanted to do something different. I had, by nature, sort of wavy brown hair down to my shoulders, with bangs, that was otherwise kind of shapeless. I'd shot up in height when puberty hit, so I was nearly six feet tall by the time I was 15, and I towered over the boys in my class by the time I was in 5th grade. Despite my early growth spurt, I didn't get my first period until I was in 7th grade (its own embarrassing story, for another time), and despite wearing a training bra at my own insistence in 6th grade, didn't actually start developing that I could tell until most of the way through 7th grade. I felt like the last girl to get boobs.

Anyway, I had developed this idea of an alternate way I wanted to look that wasn't possible in reality, but was possible in the photograph-free world of the BBS. I thought of this look as a kind of invisible friend I admired, who I named Fatima.

Fatima was 5'1" tall (the impossible part), with a fine, heart-shaped face and pale, china-doll-like skin. She was slender and petite, unlike my acne-prone, big-faced, tall and gangly self, and she held herself with poise and beautiful mystery. I would later recognize her as an almost completely stereotypical goth girl, with heavy eyeliner, dark purple lipstick, and a perfect inverted black bob, with perfect straight hair, unlike my messy brown waves. I was allowed to wear makeup when I turned 14, but it was more of a phase than anything else: my mom never wore makeup, nor did anyone in my extended family, and I came to see makeup as being a kind of pretense. It didn't help that when I wore makeup to school, instead of people thinking I was pretty, they said I looked like a kid who got into her mom's makeup bag without a mirror. Kids can be amazingly cruel.

But Fatima was pretty. She was mysterious. She was sexy. She was desirable. And when I signed up for the Lion's Den, I only dithered for a moment when I was filling out the new user registration field:

Now, important context for this story is that at the ripe old age of 17, I'd never had a boyfriend. I'd had crushes on a bunch of different people (including other girls, which was confusing and made me withdraw into myself). I'd certainly never so much as held anyone's hand (willingly, anyway; another story for a different time), much less made out or -- gasp -- had sex. I had masturbated, so I felt like I pretty much knew what sex must be like. I'd even put a finger inside. I figured I was practically an expert.

When I signed on to the Lion's Den, it was pretty much like all the other systems. There were message areas where people talked about sci-fi books and TV shows, there was a big Star Trek area. There were the general message boards, where topics ranged all over the place. But the special thing was the chat function, where you could actually live-chat with other people.

It didn't take long before I started to see references to "hot chats." By the time I'd been there a couple months, I knew that these were chats where people talked about sex. It took me a long time to work up the courage to join one. I wanted to as soon as I figured out what they were, but it was daunting. For all my theoretical expertise, I knew on some level that I had no clue what I was doing.

However, on this night, with Siouxsie quietly singing to me of her Happy House from the record player, and a trio of pillar candles casting their gentle light from the desk beside the computer's case, I decided that I would do it. I would join a hot chat. The rest of the house was certainly asleep by now, it was after midnight.

Hesitantly, I pressed the 5 key, and the screen cleared itself.

I regarded the list of users. I had seen all the names before, but I didn't really know any of them. I was pretty sure they were all guys, though Cap'n Twiggy wasn't very familiar, so I couldn't be as certain there. I assumed it was probably a guy, just because most people who called in seemed to be.

Well then, it would appear that I would be talking to Zippy, who had presumably named himself after the Pinhead of the same name. I wasn't experienced enough in the world to even wonder about the implications of a name choice like that.

My parents only rarely drank, and when they did, this was pretty much their cocktail of choice. I'd been enough of an outcast that I'd never been invited to the kind of party where your peers pressured you into drinking, so I knew almost nothing about it, but naming a cocktail seemed like the right idea.

This required some fast thinking. What would Fatima be wearing? I thought about my fanciest dress, but immediately rejected it: it was appropriate for a formal dance, but seemed like the wrong thing for here. I'd never really imagined what Fatima's wardrobe might look like, I'd been so focused on her face and physicality.

By this point, I feel like I've never been quite this aroused before. I can feel the wetness between my legs, and heat coursing through my torso and running in waves up my face. I've felt like this before, but not this strongly. I give a thought to touching myself, but don't want to slow down my typing. My eye falls on one of the black taper candles I bought in a fit of witchiness, and I quickly slide it between my legs, so I'm sitting on it like I was riding a broomstick through the air. The pressure of it through my panties feels far better than I thought it would, and I rock gently on top of it as I continue typing.

The pressure was building. This was nothing like masturbating. Is this was sex was like? But surely this was not like the real thing, was it? I had no idea, but I was quickly realizing that I was an expert in nothing. I was doing what I'd read in a sex scene in a romance novel I'd sneakily borrowed from the library, and Zippy might as well have been reading off the same script, but the feelings were huge. Much bigger than when I'd read the book, though I'd thought then that the feelings were pretty intense.

I almost felt panic. Where did he go? Did I scare him off? The heat in my body crashed down and turned into a weird coldness, but my face was still hot. I sat, feeling a sudden sadness wash over me. The candle under my butt was suddenly just an uncomfortable lump, where before it had felt like the best thing in the world.

I could keep typing, I could keep up the game, but it felt weird all of a sudden. I tried to push the weirdness down. I wanted to keep going.

It kind of worked. The chilly feeling subsided, and the heat had started back up. Zippy's replies were coming slower than before, like he was having to think about each one. I felt like I was going to float off the seat, I was so wet now. This would probably be a huge mess. I tried not to think about it.

Not only was the heat back, the pressure had become almost unbearable. I felt like I was going to explode. The part of me that's always detached and watching noted that the chair, an old wooden chair we'd had forever, was making ominous rhythmic creaking noises, and I realized I was rocking hard over the candle, actually sliding around a little bit on the seat's aged leather. I had soaked completely through my pajama pants.

I was quivering, so close to coming I almost couldn't make it to the bed, stumbling over discarded clothing. I fell onto the bed and ripped down my pants and panties, flinging my legs wide as I laid into my clit like there was no tomorrow, wet like the ocean was flowing out of me. My whole body was on fire and throbbing, and when I finally did come, it was all I could do not to scream out loud. It washed over me in multiple waves, pinning me to the wet spot on the bed as I bucked and shivered, my legs quivering uncontrollably. I probably did make a bunch of noise. I had so little control over myself in that moment, those moments, those minutes. It seemed to go on and on. But no one came to check on me, so I must have been quiet enough. The record player had long since returned the tonearm to its cradle and gone silent.

I laid in bed, just feeling the afterglow wash over me, idly tracing fingers along my belly. The warmth seemed to radiate off me, the profound feel of completion slowly lapping around me like body-warm ocean water. I don't know how long I laid there. At some point, impossibly, I started to get cold, and pulled the blankets up over me. I was just barely conscious when I heard relays in the modem clicking, as the inactivity timer on the BBS logged me off and ended the call. I managed to stumble over and blow out the candles before the bed reclaimed me.

I drifted off to sleep, my shirt twisted around my chest, nude from the waist down, blankets drawn haphazardly across my body. In my dreams, I danced with a woman in a shining black tuxedo, with enormous Siouxsie Sioux hair, across a floor made of social studies textbooks under glass.