Chapter 10: A Kind Stranger Online

Friday Night, Week 5

It has been a grey month. It has rained nearly every day since the start of week 4, the kind of thin rain that doesn't look like much and soaks you anyway. We have a big lab report due on cell division, and my microscope pictures came out blurry twice, so I have had to take them again. Lina is busy with a group project every evening and comes home after midnight. Marcus is doing better, slowly, but he works extra shifts now, so our lunches have shrunk to ten minutes at the bench.

I am not complaining about any of them. I am only noticing that I eat dinner alone most nights, and that I have started talking to the kettle. On Sunday, Grandma asked if I was all right, and I said yes, because I was, mostly. It is hard to explain to someone far away that nothing is wrong and everything is a little bit grey.

So here is something nice, and I am writing it down because nice things should be recorded too. Two weeks ago I joined an online study group for students taking cell biology. It is for students from many universities, and people post questions and help one another with diagrams and old exam questions. I posted a question about my blurry pictures. Within ten minutes, a person called Adrian answered with a long, kind, clear explanation about focusing at high magnification, and a joke about microscopes having moods. His advice worked. My third set of pictures is sharp.

Since then, Adrian has written to me every day in private messages. He sends good morning messages and little questions: how was the café, did the professor wear the tie with the fish on it, did I eat something warm. He says he is a student too, in his final year, living a long way from where he grew up, and that he knows what the grey months feel like. He sends pictures of the sky from his window: plain sky, clouds, the edge of a roof. He remembers everything I tell him. When I mentioned that my grandmother tells me fables, he asked me to tell him one, so I typed out the mouse and the painted cheese, and he said it was beautiful.

I am going to be honest with my diary. I look forward to his messages. I check my phone in the morning before my eyes are properly open. It isn't romantic, or at least I don't think it is. It is just that someone notices me every day, in a month when hardly anyone has time to. That feels very warm.

Saturday Night, Week 6

Last night Lina asked me who I am always smiling at on my phone. I told her about Adrian, the microscope and the pictures of the sky. She said, "That's nice. Have you seen his face?" I said there was a photo on his profile: a young man with dark hair and a friendly smile, standing by a lake with a backpack.

She asked, "Have you talked to him on video?" I said not yet. At the time I didn't think much about it.

But afterwards I did think about it, and I realised that I had asked him. Twice. The first time, in week 5, he said his camera was broken. The second time, last weekend, he said his roommate was asleep and the walls were thin. Both reasons were perfectly normal. Cameras do break, and roommates do sleep. I only noticed that I had collected two reasons when I wrote them down here, one under the other.

Then, today, something new happened. Adrian told me he had a secret. He said he doesn't usually tell people, but I am different, because I am careful and clever and would understand. His aunt "trades", he said, on a platform where she knows people, and every month she helps him put in a little, and that is how he pays for his studies without worrying. He said he wanted to help me the way his aunt helps him, because he hates seeing me stressed about money and working so many café shifts.

He sent me a link. He said I could start with "a very small amount, just the price of a textbook", and that he would "guide me through it" so that I couldn't make mistakes. His aunt, he said, had a "special window" this week.

I felt two things at once, and I want to describe them precisely, like the results of an experiment. The first was warmth: he cares about me, and he wants to help. The second was a small cold drop somewhere in my stomach, a clear little feeling that something had just changed shape. For three weeks this had been a friendship about microscopes and rain and fables. In one message, it became a friendship with a link in it.

I didn't open the link. I didn't say no either. I wrote, "That's kind of you. Let me think about it." That is my 24-hour rule, except that this time I am going to take longer than twenty-four hours, because I don't yet trust either the warm feeling or the cold one, and I would like to check before I feel anything else.

One more thought, so that I can come back to it tomorrow. If Adrian is who he says he is, he will not mind a video call, and he will not mind me asking Lina what she thinks of him. If he is not, those are the two things he will most want to avoid.

Sunday Evening, Week 6

I almost didn't tell Grandma. It felt embarrassing, as if I were confessing that I had an imaginary friend. But she asked, "What made you smile this week?" and so I told her about Adrian from the beginning: the microscope, the morning messages, the sky. Then I told her about the aunt and the link. She didn't say anything for a while. Then she said, "Write this one down carefully. I made it up long ago, for one of my children, the first time that child lived away from home and was lonely."

Grandma's Fable: The Nightingale Behind the Wall

A young dormouse once moved to a new garden, far from the hedge where she was born. Her new nest was in a crack in an old stone wall. At first she was very lonely, because the other animals in the garden were busy with their own lives, and nobody knew her name.

Then one evening, a voice began to sing on the other side of the wall. It was the most beautiful song the dormouse had ever heard. When it stopped, the voice said, "Good evening, little neighbour. I am a nightingale, and I have watched you working. You gather so carefully. You must be very clever." The next evening the voice came again, and the next, and soon the dormouse was telling the nightingale everything: about her old hedge, her mother and the cold.

The nightingale remembered all of it. It asked about her day and sang her to sleep.

Once, the dormouse asked, "Will you come over the wall, so that I can see you?" "My wing is hurt," sang the voice. A week later she asked again. "The sun is in my eyes on your side," sang the voice. The dormouse did not mind. She only noticed that the two reasons lay side by side in her memory, like two pebbles.

One evening the voice said, "Little friend, I can't bear to see you work so hard. My aunt keeps a berry garden where berries double overnight. Push your berries through the crack in the wall, and I will take them to her, and in a week you will have twice as many." The dormouse looked at her small pile of winter berries. She wanted to say yes, because the voice had been so kind. But she said, "Let me think until morning."

At dawn she climbed the old apple tree beside the wall. It was a long climb, and her paws were sore. From the highest branch she looked over the wall. There was no nightingale. There was a jay, sitting on a pile of berries from many different gardens, practising a nightingale's song. Jays can copy any bird they have ever heard.

The dormouse climbed down slowly. She was not frightened. She was sad, because the songs had been the best part of her evenings. Then she went along the wall to the woodpile, where a family of wrens lived, and said good morning to them. The wrens were busy and noisy, and they did not sing very well. But they asked her name, they were really there, and when she knocked on the woodpile in the evening, they came out to see her.

The jay copied the song of the bird that the dormouse most wanted to hear. I think that is the worst part, and the most important. Adrian is exactly the person I would have wished for in this grey month: a student, kind, patient, interested in microscopes and fables. Maybe that is exactly what makes him worth checking. And the dormouse didn't have to break down the wall or shout at the jay. She climbed the apple tree herself and looked. I know which tree to climb.

Wednesday Night, Week 7

I climbed it. Here is everything, in order.

On Monday I asked Adrian one more time for a short video call. "Just five minutes," I wrote. "I'd like to see the sky outside your window for real." He replied that his camera had stopped working again, and that he was in the library and couldn't talk anyway. Then, in the same message, he asked whether I had opened the link yet, because his aunt's "special window" closed on Friday. That was a third reason, and a countdown again. I wrote it down under the other two.

On Monday night I did a picture search. That means giving a search engine a photo, so that it shows you other places on the internet where the same photo, or very similar ones, appear. I saved his profile photo, the dark-haired young man by the lake, and searched with it.

It came up on three other profiles, on other sites, under three other names. On one profile he was a doctor. On another he was an engineer working abroad. The lake, the backpack and the smile were the same every time. The man in the photo may be a real person somewhere who has no idea his face is being used, and I felt sorry for him too.

On Tuesday I checked the platform anyway, because I wanted to be complete, and because this diary has taught me to. I did not use the link. I found the official office that supervises banks and investment firms by typing its name myself, made sure I was on its own website, saved its address on my phone so that I would never need to search for it again, and searched the register for the platform's name. It was not on the register. On the warning list there was a name that was the same except for one letter. I don't know whether they are the same firm, and I didn't need to know. Not being on the register was enough.

Then I told Lina all of it, the good parts and the strange parts, sitting on the kitchen floor at midnight when she came home. I was afraid she would laugh, or say she had known all along. She did neither. She sat down next to me and said, "Oh, Tess," and put her arm around my shoulders. Then she said, "You checked. You didn't pay anything. You did everything right."

I said that I didn't feel as if I had done everything right. I felt as if I had lost a friend. Lina said, "You did lose something. It just wasn't what he said it was."

Today I wrote to Adrian once, briefly. I said that I would not invest in anything with someone I had only met online, and that I would not be messaging any more. I didn't accuse him, and I didn't mention the picture search, because I didn't want to start a conversation in which he could find new reasons. He wrote back within a minute, with a long message. He was hurt, he had trusted me with his secret, his aunt had already "reserved a place" for me, and if I didn't trust him, maybe I had never really been his friend.

Ten minutes later a second message came, all warmth again, as if the first one had never happened. I didn't answer either of them. I reported the profile to the study group's moderators, the people who look after the group, with the results of the picture search, and then I blocked the account.

What did the person behind Adrian want? My money, of course. But first, I think, that person wanted to become the one I talked to most, the warm one, the one who understood. And I think what that person feared most was exactly what happened: a video call, a friend sitting next to me on a kitchen floor, and a grandmother who tells fables about walls. Every one of the three reasons was there to keep me from looking over the wall.

I am not going to pretend that I feel fine. I miss the good morning messages, even now that I know what they were. That is embarrassing to write, but it is true, and I think it matters that it is true. It means a person can know that something is false and still miss it. That isn't foolish. It is just how people are made. Grandma said during the long break that hearts are often the first thing such people ask for, and now I understand what she meant.

So tomorrow I am going to do what the dormouse did and go to the woodpile. The residence has a cooking evening on Thursdays that I have walked past every week, and I am going to go in. Marcus says he will come too, because he wants to "learn to cook more than pasta, now that pasta is my whole budget". Lina says she will come if her project lets her. They aren't nightingales. They are wrens, and they are really here.

What I Checked This Week

A video call that never happens is a warning sign. One reason is normal: cameras break, and roommates sleep. But when the reasons keep coming, each one sensible on its own, write them down one under the other. If someone can talk to you every day but can never let you see them, ask yourself why seeing is the one thing that is always impossible.

A picture search is a simple check that anyone can do. Give the person's profile photo to a picture search and see where else it appears. If the same face shows up under other names, the photo is borrowed. A search that finds nothing does not prove that a person is real, but a search that finds the same face under different names tells you a great deal.

Never invest through someone you know only online. Not through a link they send, not on a platform where their aunt or uncle or friend "knows people", not even a small amount, and not even if they offer to guide you. This rule doesn't depend on whether the person seems kind. The kindest messages in the world are not a register. If someone you know only online starts to talk about money, that is the moment to stop and check, and the check always comes from outside: the official register, found on the official office's own website, by you.

Talk to someone you trust, in person or on a call where you can hear each other's voices. I nearly didn't tell Lina or Grandma, because I was embarrassed, and telling them was what made everything clear. A person who truly cares about you will not mind you asking your friends about them. Only someone with something to hide needs you to keep them a secret.

Things to Talk About as a Family

Tess ends this part of her diary a little sadder than usual and also a little stronger. Loneliness is a normal part of moving to a new place, starting at a new school or having a hard month, and a kind voice at the right moment can mean a great deal. The people behind scams like this one know that, and they are patient. Sometimes they wait for weeks before they mention money at all.

Here are some things you might talk about together. When you feel lonely, who are the people you could message or call, even late at night? Have you ever made a friend online, and how did you come to know that the person was who they said they were? If someone in your family were getting kind messages every day from a new friend online, how could you ask about it without making them feel judged or silly?

One small thing to try together: choose a photo that one of you has taken yourselves, such as a family picture from your own phone, and try a picture search with it to see how the check works before you ever need it. Then agree, as a family, that if any of you ever meets someone online who starts to talk about investing, you will tell one another, and nobody will tease.