The author with her first color cell phone (2003).I remember he said it like a fact. Calmly — an if-then statement. To my teenage ears, it didn’t sound like a threat. Paul didn’t sound like a calculating monster saying the words to control me. He was just informing me what was likely to happen if I hung up the phone on him.He was going to kill himself.Sometimes, where once was love, there becomes a web. Sometimes, if you’ve been caught in the web long enough, it feels unclear who is the fly and who is the spider.When I was a freshman in high school, I met a boy online. This was in the early 2000s, when young people visited AOL chat rooms and lied to each other’s queries of “A/S/L?” Paul and I became friends, and then fell in love. Back then, meeting a partner online was considered desperate. I’d wanted a boyfriend but a primarily online-boyfriend seemed like the best I could attain. In the beginning it felt like we were play-acting romance, gesturing at a pale impression of what a real-life, in-person relationship would be. As months passed though, what started as a game became something more robust.Paul was from a big city, and he seemed so worldly to me, a kid from rural Maine. He knew so much about music, sports and movies, I was always learning something from Paul. Plus, he was funny. There was a lot of laughter. We chatted on AIM. We talked on landline phones with prepaid calling cards. Paul and