As a kid, I must’ve spent more than 200 dollars trying to make my Penguin look hot. All the coolest clothes, hairstyles and Igloo Furniture was Members-Only, and I needed to be cool, so from every birthday check, lemonade stand, and monthly allowance, I extracted the necessary funds to maintain my ritzy Club Penguin lifestyle.
It was a dazzling escape from the harsh realities of middle school circa the early-2010s.
When I was in sixth grade, the highlight of every day was logging onto Club Penguin, an online universe in which you controlled a cartoon penguin, taking it on adventures across the Iceberg and meeting other players. I was allowed to be online for 30 minutes each night. Mom made me set a timer. Of course, I’d insist it was only fair to start the countdown once the game had loaded, which often took a while due to the hundreds of thousands of other tweens streaming in during the 3-o’clock-after-school-rush-hour.
To be left home alone by my parents was a real treat, as nobody would be there to track my time on the computer. The moment I heard keys twisting the back door open, I’d quit the browser and turn off the computer, and whistle my way out of the room. Though once, I must have been acting suspiciously, and Dad put his hand on the back of the monitor to find that it was still hot, the exhausted computer fan unable to prevail in the face of an early virtual reality.
After that, my parents put a password on the computer—I could no longer be trusted.
In 2009, when I was in fourth grade, I created a Club Penguin account with my best friend, Nat. We chose the username Cleopatra1000, because we were studying ancient Egypt in school and thought Cleopatra was a badass. We played on this shared profile whenever we were together, bonding over mini-games and the latest Penguin Fashion magazines.
But a couple of years down the line, in late September of sixth grade, Nat starting hanging out with Cece. Cece and I had been frenemies since kindergarten. But that year the weak ties of our friendship came undone after we were sorted into two different sections of the middle school social hierarchy. Cece was deemed the “second hottest girl” in school, and the popular (and cute-enough) Dominic asked her to be his girlfriend; I hid in Aréopostale sweatshirts, pimples sprouted from my once-pristine pores, and, inconveniently, I found my heart fluttering each time Dominic entered the room.
With her new claim to fame, Cece told everyone that I was a bitch and annoying. Nat began to ignore me. Cleopatra1000 went dormant.
In the Club Penguin World, I was popular. On my new account, Ellimac2000, my Friend List was always at the maximum capacity of 100. This was because Ellimac2000 usually dressed as a boy, wearing his spiky blonde hair, football jersey and red sneakers, which was the sexiest outfit for male Penguins at the time. Sometimes, he became female, wore a brown side ponytail, sunglasses and a cheerleader uniform. I preferred his male attire because, even in virtual world for children, men held all the power. Ellimac2000 captured the attention of all the ladies. They’d fight over him, each declaring, “He’s mine!” to the others. And I loved it.
Cece broke up with Dominic at the end of the month. I felt so certain that he would want me to be his next girlfriend, because, merely in an effort to get closer to him (and to be kept up to date on whatever shit Cece was talking about me), I’d dedicated many hours to coaching him on how to be a great boyfriend, which was bound to land me in an end-of-the-movie, she-was-right-there-all-along kind of role.
Dominic asked Nat out a few days after the breakup.
“Yeah, he’s cute, I guess I’ll go out with him,” Nat said. We were at a park by the school, chatting from adjacent spring riders.
“Do you even like him like that?” I asked.
Nat put her feet down in the wood chips, bringing her horse to a standstill.
“Yeah, I guess so,” she said.
Dominic must have known that the fastest way to an 11-year-old girl’s heart was, “I have a crush on you.” But it was more complicated on Club Penguin—there was stiff competition.
At the Hockey Rink, there were always at least 20 Ellimac2000 lookalikes. Some of them ran back and forth across the ice, kicking the puck around; others watched from the bleachers, or stood around the Snack Shack, ordering non-existent shakes and fries. Ellimac2000 spent most of his time at The Lockers where everyone pretended to grab their school books and accidentally bump into the nearest jock. It was there that Ellimac2000 practiced his seduction skills religiously, until he became a master:
“*Looks Into Eyes*… *Looks Away*,” he’d say.
“What’s Wrong?”
“Oh, Nothing. You’re Just… Nevermind.”
“What? Tell Me!”
“You’re So Beautiful.”
“*Blushes*.”
Ellimac2000’s relationships almost never lasted longer than the half hour I was allowed online. He had a new girlfriend every day.
Dominic had dated 16 girls by the end of sixth grade. I was one of his last that year.
Our fling started in early March, when he told me during recess he wanted to kiss me. We went just out of view into an alcove on the side of our brick school building. He made a smooching sound when his lips touched mine. My eyes were open, and I could see him puckering. It was over in a matter of half a second. Then we walked side-by-side, in silence, off the playground and back to class while a girl named Eleni wolf-whistled at us.
I was shaking all over with nervous excitement. Throughout the remainder of the afternoon, the hallways were abuzz with the news of my kiss with Dominic. Friends, acquaintances, people I barely knew were coming up to me and asking, “Did you really kiss Dominic?” and I’d have the pleasure of explaining that yes, I really had kissed him.
Ellimac2000 had his first kiss long before I did. He’d kissed many-a-girl, waddling closer, closer, and closer still until his beak touched hers. In order to communicate what was happening, I had to type “*Gives K*” into the chat-bubble because the word “kiss” was inappropriate and could get us temporarily banned.
Three weeks after the kiss, I broke up with Dominic via a handwritten letter. I wrote it in Mrs. Rumph’s math class, and folded it in half five times before wordlessly dropping it off at his desk. I immediately began to cry. But the tears didn’t come out of sadness so much as frustration that for some reason I just hadn’t been able to keep the spark alive. “It really isn’t you, Dominic,” I had written, “It’s me.”
Some time during the second week of our relationship, I’d developed a repulsion towards Dominic—and, actually, I don’t think it had anything to do with orchiectomy he’d apparently received over the weekend. (Neither the purpose nor the credibility of this rumor was ever confirmed.) Rather, I think the repulsion spawned from a place of self-disgust.
I had started to feel gross—the earliest symptoms of sexual repression that I ever suffered. I was gross for kissing a boy, for holding his hand, for calling him from the landline to have awkward conversations. I felt like I was trying to be an adult when I was still just a kid. To make matters worse, nobody else around me appeared to have been infected by The Ick. Everybody else was making out with each other, saying shocking things like, “If something ever falls down your shirt, I’ll be there to catch it for you,” even going so far as to proclaim their love at the milestone one-week-anniversary mark.
“Dominic is in love with Cece,” Dominic’s best friend, Jack, told me one day in late May.
I can’t remember where we had been when Jack told me this. It definitely wasn’t during class. Maybe it had been during one of those after-school hangouts that I occasionally got invited to, where us sixth-graders would gossip on the play structure, or walk a few blocks to J&T’s Market to buy Baby Bottle Pops and Pixie Sticks (the sugary powder of which the boys would often snort).
In any case, I remember perfectly the words he had said: “That’s why he dated so many girls, he was just trying to get over her.”
Ellimac2000 fell in love once, with a girl named Maxie2700. It was perhaps the only relationship Ellimac2000 ever had that lasted longer than those 30 precious minutes per day. They used to go to her Igloo and change into matching, Members-Only outfits. Then they’d saunter around the Pizza Parlor, or the Night Club, or the Coffee Shop so the other Penguins could see how slick they were. Sometimes, a lonesome traveler would try to insert themself into Ellimac2000 and Maxie2700’s clique, at which the friends would crack inside jokes until the outsider gave up.
Ellimac2000 hadn’t seen Maxie2700 for at least nine years by the time Club Penguin shut down. Over the years, when I would occasionally log-on for old-time’s sake, Ellimac2000 would swing by her Igloo, where all her Members-Only furniture—the light-up dance floor, the disco ball, the flat-screen TV—still glittered. But she was never home.
It had been even longer since I last saw Dominic. Once or twice, I’d stumbled upon his Instagram and gave it a scroll-through. By 2016, he’d gone punk (or emo, or goth-rock, or something) and his feed consisted exclusively of Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, and The Cure covers. This had come as a surprise, seeing as all he’d ever performed in sixth-grade was Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are,” which left us all fan-girling, even though it had been a weak rendition.
Club Penguin closed forever on March 29th, 2017, so that was the day Ellimac2000 died. He was 3123 days old. A week earlier, I had taken him out for a final spin. He hung out by his old locker, kicked the puck, and ordered imaginary grub from the Snack Shack. Over the years, the jocks and cheerleaders had disappeared, because us Penguin-owners had forgotten our passwords, or finally graduated from eighth-grade, or typed a really inappropriate word into the chat-bubble that had gotten us permanently banned.
In any case, none of our Penguins got out alive.
I graduated from high school in June of 2017. It was a shame that Ellimac2000, my good friend of eight-and-a-half years, had to miss it.
The summer before I went off to college, I briefly reconnected with a handful of my sixth-grade friends, including Nat. I drove us out to Sauvie’s Island, where we used to catch frogs and pick blackberries, take hayrides and climb trees.
Out in the woods, we found the remains of one of our old forts—a rotting picnic table ensconced by the sagging branches of a red cedar. We stopped by the Kruger’s Farm Market, bought some honey sticks, and sat out in a field talking about the future, and about smoking weed and trying coke (or if we hadn’t yet, if we ever would), and about how, man, it sure feels strange to be leaving the place where we grew up. We didn’t talk about sex—that would’ve been too weird.
There was talk of middle-school, mentions of Dominic and Cece, recollections of the games we used to play, of the people we used to be.
The beauty of Ellimac2000 is that his story ended before he could change. To this day, he floats somewhere deep in Internet space, a Penguin-shaped collection of ones-and-zeros that somehow make-up the out outfit in which I laid him to rest: his signature spiky blonde hair, his football jersey, and his red sneakers.
Even in death, I know he looks irresistible.