The worst part wasn’t knowing he thought I was a fool, the worst part was that he had the ability -- from three thousand miles away -- to swoop a giant net of menace over me without any notice.

Our friendship had started so wholesomely -- I knew he was a real person, my mom knew his mom -- I thought that was enough to keep trouble away. But then a common pattern, augmented by the smoke and mirrors of the Internet, was set in motion and we were doomed before we knew it.

He’s a Guy, I’m Devin. We began chatting on Google in December 2009. It was fun and light. We met in person in July 2010. Friendship turned into harassment in October, and Guy finally left me alone in June 2011.

We met at nearly the most innocent place on the Internet: an online forum for homeschooled teens that was a branch of a forum moderated by our moms. The topics we discussed were so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed it might make you sick. Months after I decided I was done with the forum, Guy and I start chatting and before long we were talking every day.

Our upcoming high school graduations. Preparation for college. Possible majors. Our romantic lives, or lack thereof if I’m being honest. Books read and movies watched. Our conversations were pleasant and surface level.

I was the kind of girl who didn’t really believe in platonic friendships between boys and girls (at the time I was 17 and he was barely older.) I had too many friends who had great guys they were best friends with, but the guy just so happened to be in love with them. Or at least ready and waiting to take advantage of any romantic opportunity. Also, I valued my privacy very highly. I went on dates and didn’t tell Guy because he wasn’t a girl, and I wasn’t dating anyone seriously.

Though my husband, who I started dating in the spring of 2010, will laugh and tell the story of how once, within his earshot, I told my friends that I was “Talking to this really cute guy on the East Coast. Sooo cute.” Can’t blame a girl for throwing that out there.

Let me explain a little more about Guy. He was wickedly intellectual. Once he wrote a paper for his classmate, but if you read down the far left side of the page it spelled out “Guy wrote this.” So he also had a sense of humor. He was confident in his opinions, but occasionally showed an insecure underbelly. Sometimes I had to Google messages he wrote to decipher exactly which of Shakespeare’s sonnets he was referring to… I didn’t want to seem dumb.

The distance padded our relationship, keeping it firmly in the friendship arena - thinking that was my first mistake. Later I’d find out that our feelings had grown at much different speeds, and unlike mine, his feelings had never tapered off.

He began to get petty and petulant and irritated. He did weird things like suggest I shouldn’t kiss men. Like that was any of his business. I was dating someone but I wanted to keep things light with everyone. I didn’t want something serious. I wasn’t ready.

Part of what attracted me to him was that he was so different and our conversations had a flavor missing in my other friendships. I wanted to be friends with him, in part, to see what he would end up doing with his life. It was going to be something cool, I knew it. And at the beginning, I had that teenage girl crush on him but in the face of our logistics and his oddities outnumbering his charms, it faded quickly.

In the midst of this, Guy and I meet in person when I visited a city near him with my family. It was okay, but cemented my opinion that we were just friends, and that would be all. At the end of the visit my uncle, very awkwardly, asked if we wanted to be alone to say goodbye and I quickly said, “No thank you!” and bid farewell to Guy.

His charms fell away completely three months later when I sat at my desk at work and shivered in fear. I had found a blog written by him, about me. I had never known fear like this. Fear and rage. Rage against someone I hadn’t considered to be more than a quirky friend.

Guy had recorded our phone conversations and posted them to his blog. One was a conversation between him, myself and my dad - where my dad and I asked Guy to leave me alone. He wrote posts about the phone conversations and made fun of me. Called me conceited and said my Dad had no idea what a liar his daughter was. He wrote about plans to come to my state and never said anything specific, but a threat was implied. He called me a “woman scorned” and a slut.

In the month prior to finding this blog, I had been trying to extricate myself from our friendship. I was busier than I had ever been -- freshman in a rigorous program, working a new job, living on my own for the first time -- and didn’t have time to talk to Guy daily. I told him this, tried to work out a plan where we’d talk occasionally, but he called me a bad friend and became increasingly whiny and aggressive. He started sending me vaguely threatening quotes every day.

After finding the blog I was done. I just wanted it to stop.

I started getting messages from his friends. Some were antagonistic. Some tried to help us clear up the “misunderstanding.” Some told me I deserved it.

Eventually, once I stopped reading the blog and responding to the friends, it stopped. After much anxiety, offers from my friends to kick his ass, and long conversations with my parents going over the details of the situation, it ended.

What had I done wrong? Why was this happening? I just didn’t feel comfortable telling him everything about my life - did that make me a liar? So many questions ran through my brain.

Maybe he kept updating the blog but he stopped contacting me so much. For a while on holidays he would message me. A friend of his emailed me on my little brother’s birthday saying Guy wished my brother happy birthday. Even as we were finally drifting apart, he couldn’t respect what I’d asked him to do: leave me alone.

The Internet makes many things easy, and thank goodness for that. The dark side to the efficiency coin is that menace is easier than ever online. Just type some words on a page, private words, and share them publicly. Mock someone for things they said in confidence. So easy, and so soul crushing for the person on the receiving end.

Because the abuse happens in email and text, not flesh and blood, people go along with it so easily. My best friend of five years, who I thought would be my maid of honor or godmother to my child, sent me an email one morning and said she couldn’t be friends with me anymore because of how I treated Guy. This was after months of her dismissing my concerns and telling me I was just playing hard to get. It stung to know that she chose Guy over me. Her final, condescending, email was a letter of freedom. I could clearly see she was no longer my friend, and I let her go.

The sad thing is that I know how tame this story is. I was safe the whole time. My parents, brothers, boyfriend, and close friends knew about it. I was never physically harmed, and the emotional damage has healed. It has left its scars though, lessons learned that I value highly. It made me trust people less. It made me value my privacy, and my right to demand it, more. It made me thankful for relationships I’ve built face-to-face.

It took someone telling me through their repeated actions and words, “I don’t respect your boundaries” for those lessons to be learned. Guy wanted me in a greater capacity than I was willing to give, so he decided to make my life hell. That’s the basic formula we see repeated everywhere. But there’s a sneaky way the Internet makes that formula seem less frightening. People told me I was overreacting. “He’s all the way across the country! Nothing’s going to happen! Just play along.” And they were right, technically. But I made the mistake of underestimating him at first, and once I realized the depths he’d go to scare me I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

One of the root problems was that close and constant contact became equated with a relationship. Sometimes that does manifest into a deeper friendship or romantic connection, but other times that contact just makes one person realize the chemistry isn’t right, the friendship won’t last. Online it’s easier to fake enough interest to not hurt someone’s feelings but even I, the harlot liar, saw the dishonesty in that.

The more that Guy demanded from me and called me a liar, the happier I was that I hadn’t told him everything. His blow-up showed me beyond any doubt that he didn’t deserve to know anything I didn’t want to tell him. His utter arrogance and persistence made me realize that there were bigger demons he was dealing with, and I just needed to make it out of our entanglement alive.

So now, five years later, I sit at the breakfast table with my 16-month-old son after saying goodbye to my husband as he leaves for work. I rarely think about Guy, or the girl friend I lost, or any of the garbage they brought on me. When I do think about it, I smile bemusedly. The blog about me is down but, sitting in a folder of my old GMail account, I have screenshots and emails and chats from the worst of it. I have that baggage just sitting there. Maybe there’s a small paranoid part of me that thinks someday I’ll need to prove that I wasn’t a liar. Whatever the reasons are, I can’t bring myself to delete everything for good.

I remember sitting in my bedroom on the phone with Guy, trying desperately to make my point when he began talking over me, louder and louder. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of accusations and I couldn’t speak fast enough to dig myself out. Then something clicked in my brain and I hung up the phone. He didn’t deserve my explanations because he wasn’t listening.