Work Text:
Amy had expected the name to be the easy part.
The account form itself held no surprises. She had already filled in the ordinary things and moved through the little boxes with the impatience of somebody who knew exactly what each one wanted. The computer sat on a desk near the window, afternoon light laying a pale rectangle across one side of the keyboard. A stack of school papers occupied the far corner. Somebody had left a pencil there with teeth marks in the yellow paint. The house was not quiet so much as temporarily uninterested in her; doors opened elsewhere, pipes carried a brief rush of water through the wall, and one of her sisters called something from another room that did not require an answer.
Then Amy reached the field marked for a username and stopped.
She had seen thousands of them. Names beside messages, names under pictures, names that sounded serious, ridiculous, mysterious, boastful or deliberately plain. Some people used what was obviously part of their real name. Some did not. Some seemed to have chosen a collection of letters simply because nobody else had taken it first. Amy had opinions about other people's usernames far more easily than she could produce one for herself.
She typed AMY.
The word looked wrong almost before it appeared. It was not that Amy disliked her own name. She liked it perfectly well. That was the problem. It looked like something written on the top of a school paper. It answered the question who are you without answering the more interesting question of what she wanted to be called here.
She held down backspace until the field was empty.
AMYROBINSON looked worse. It had the heavy, adult feeling of a form filled out at a doctor's office. She deleted that too.
AMES came next because people called her that sometimes and because it felt a little less official. She stared at it. For three seconds she thought she had solved the problem. On the fourth, it seemed unfinished.
She added an X.
AMESX.
No.
She removed the X and added 9.
AMES9.
That made her feel as though she had forgotten how old she was and needed the computer to remember. She deleted the number.
Amy tried to solve the problem by becoming more specific. AMESDRAWS appeared, and for a moment she liked its honesty. Then she imagined deciding next year that she wanted to talk about music or books on the same account and resented the name for assigning her a job. She deleted DRAWS. AMESART was worse. It sounded like a shop. AMYART sounded like a shop owned by somebody named Amy who sold framed flowers. She deleted the entire thing.
LIGHTNINGAMES had energy but no connection to anything. She had chosen lightning because it sounded fast, then realized she had never cared particularly about lightning. NIGHTAMES looked dramatic in a way that made her suspicious of herself. She imagined seeing it a month later and wanting to crawl under the desk. She deleted it before she could become attached.
She tried using initials. AR looked too short. AMYR looked like somebody had forgotten the last letter of a word. A_R_85 made her stare in disbelief at her own decision-making. She erased it so fast that one underscore remained by itself for a second before she removed that too.
The exercise stopped being fun. Amy put her elbows on the desk and rested her chin in her hands. Choosing a username had seemed like the part where she would get to be imaginative. Instead every imaginative name felt as though it were trying too hard to introduce her. The plain ones felt like labels. The clever ones became embarrassing as soon as she imagined another person reading them.
From the hall came the quick rhythm of feet and then a door closing. Amy heard two voices overlap, one of her sisters insisting on something and another refusing. Neither came near the room. She was glad. The process had become private without her intending it to. If somebody walked in now and asked what she was doing, she would have to defend names she had already rejected.
She typed AMES again and left it there while she looked out the window. A few leaves had collected along one edge of the yard. The glass held a faint copy of the room over them: desk, chair, the pale shape of her own face. It occurred to her that a username might last longer than she expected. She had seen accounts belonging to people who had clearly chosen names years earlier and then simply kept them. That made every new idea feel even more permanent, which was ridiculous because she could presumably make another account someday. Still, she wanted not to hate this one by next week.
She returned to the field and added BEST. BESTAMES. She laughed once under her breath and deleted it. It sounded like a contest nobody else had entered. SUPERIORAMES occurred to her next, and she rejected it without typing because she was nine, not insufferable.
Only then did she stop forcing new possibilities.
The cursor blinked after AMES. Amy leaned back in the chair, tipping it just enough to feel the front legs lighten before she remembered she had been told not to do that and let them settle again. She wanted something good. Not good in the sense of impressive to strangers. That made the problem worse. A name chosen to impress strangers was exactly the kind that would become embarrassing as soon as she saw it twice.
She tried STARAMES because she had been drawing stars in the margins of her notebook that week. It looked like the name of somebody who cared far more about stars than she did.
She tried AMYACE. That survived even less time.
She considered a reference to a band she liked, then rejected it without typing. What if she stopped liking them? She considered a character from a book, then imagined somebody assuming she had named herself after that character because she believed they were alike. She did not want to explain herself to people she had not met.
For a while the username field remained blank.
Outside the window the light had the thin, clear look of October. The glass gave back a faint reflection when Amy shifted in the chair, her face layered over the yard beyond it. She looked at herself rather than the field. Nine did not feel old to her in any useful way, but it did feel far from three. Three belonged to a period when adults had to lift her to see over things. Three belonged to toys she no longer kept in her room and words she had once said incorrectly without knowing it. Nine was old enough to recognize childishness and therefore old enough to be suspicious of anything that had once delighted her.
That suspicion made Super Ames arrive cautiously.
There was no flash of memory. She did not suddenly see Jennifer carrying her around a room. The name simply surfaced because names were what she was thinking about, and Super Ames had been hers before she understood the difference between a nickname and an identity.
Amy looked back at the blank field.
She typed SUPER AMES with a space.
The form rejected the space before she had even tried to continue. Amy frowned, deleted it, and typed the words together.
SuperAmes.
She stared.
It looked right.
That annoyed her slightly because she had been prepared to work harder. After all the options she had invented and discarded, this one had arrived already shaped. SuperAmes. She read it silently. The capital letters divided the words without separating them. Ames still sounded like her. Super changed it just enough.
Amy put both hands in her lap.
The problem now was whether it was babyish.
She had been very little when Jennifer started calling her that. Amy knew the broad outline of the story because she had lived it, though memory had sanded its edges. There had been flying. There had been the period when she thought she was an aeroplane. She could remember engine noises mostly because people had repeated the fact later. She remembered discovering the superhero part more clearly: the sudden sense that the name contained a meaning she had somehow missed. She remembered one-fist flying after that, and missions, and powers that changed whenever she needed them.
At nine she understood perfectly well that Jennifer had carried her every inch.
That knowledge did not make the flights foolish.
Amy rested her fingertips on the keys. She imagined someone at school seeing the name over her shoulder. Would she be embarrassed? Maybe for half a second. Not because it was bad. Because anything personal became embarrassing when somebody else noticed it first.
She imagined Tracey seeing it and making the old engine sound.
That possibility was real enough to make Amy narrow her eyes at the screen.
She did not delete the name.
Instead she tried to make it more sophisticated. SuperAmes94.
No.
Super_Ames.
Worse.
SuperAmesX.
She recoiled from the same X that had failed earlier.
The plain version returned.
SuperAmes.
Amy studied it again. The superhero part still appealed to her, though not in the same absolute way it had at three. She no longer believed a person became invisible by closing her eyes and persuading her mother not to look. She did not believe she could lift a house. She did still like superheroes. More importantly, the name had survived the period when she believed such things literally. It had become familiar after the games themselves faded. Jennifer still used Ames. Sometimes, if Amy was being especially pleased with herself or carrying something far too large because she had refused help, Jennifer would say Super Ames in a tone that meant both the old child and the person standing there now.
Amy realized that was the part she liked.
The name was old enough to belong to her.
That distinction settled the question. A childish thing was something she had outgrown and no longer wanted. Super Ames was something she had grown around. The difference was difficult to explain, and there was nobody in the room asking her to explain it anyway.
She moved the pointer down the page, then stopped before confirming.
Maybe someone already had it.
The idea felt unexpectedly offensive. She had never thought of Super Ames as a phrase another person might independently choose. It was absurd, of course. The world contained other Amys and probably other people called Ames. Somebody somewhere could have put the words together. Still, when Amy submitted the name and the form paused, she leaned toward the screen with more tension than the situation deserved.
The account accepted it. A small confirmation line appeared, then vanished as the next page loaded. Amy read the name once more in its new place, no longer editable text in a box but part of the page itself. That tiny change made the choice feel more settled than pressing the key had. She could still have gone back and started over. She did not want to. For one second she rested the pointer over the account settings anyway, testing herself. The impulse passed. She moved away from the settings and toward the page she had actually come to use, already more interested in what waited beyond the form than in the decision she had just made.
SuperAmes appeared near the top of the next page.
Amy smiled.
That was all.
There was no fanfare in the house. Nobody entered at the exact moment and saw what she had chosen. Glenda did not pass behind her and ask about it. Tracey did not lean over the chair and make the engine noise Amy had imagined. Jennifer was nowhere nearby to recognize the name. None of Amy's sisters had any reason to know that something from her early childhood had just been carried into a different part of her life.
Amy clicked into the page she had actually wanted to use.
She had come online because somebody had told her about a collection of illustrated stories and discussion boards where children traded drawing ideas, and she had wanted to see a particular thread about making backgrounds look deeper. The new account was only a door she had needed to open on the way there. Now that it was open, she stopped thinking about the handle.
The page loaded. Amy scrolled past several drawings, stopped at one of a city street, and read the comments underneath. Somebody had explained perspective badly. Somebody else had corrected them more clearly. Amy fetched the chewed pencil from the corner of the desk and pulled one of her school papers closer, turning it over to use the blank side.
She copied two lines from the screen, then drew a row of boxes shrinking toward a point.
The username remained in the corner.
SuperAmes.
Amy did not keep glancing at it. She did not sit there feeling the weight of twenty possible future years. She was nine. The account was new. The name felt good. That was enough.
A message somewhere else in the site caught her interest and she clicked it. Then another. She forgot the perspective exercise for several minutes and read an argument about whether a comic character's cape was physically possible. Amy thought both sides were taking the cape too seriously. She nearly wrote a reply, then decided she did not care enough to enter the argument. The empty response box closed.
She found a gallery of animal sketches. One dog looked like it had six legs because the artist had not understood how paws overlapped. Amy laughed, then felt bad because the rest of the drawing was good. She saved the page to come back to later.
Somebody in the next room called that there was food if she wanted it.
“In a minute,” Amy called back.
She had not yet used the new account to speak to anybody. No stranger had called her SuperAmes. The name had not left the screen and entered conversation. It existed only as a little line of text attached to a profile that, so far, contained almost nothing.
Amy drew another box on the back of the school paper. This one was better. She added two windows and tried to make them follow the same perspective lines. The result looked crooked, but crooked in a way she could fix.
The sunlight shifted across the desk. The reflected yard in the window became stronger as the room darkened by degrees. Amy worked, clicked, read, erased, and forgot that she had spent nearly twenty minutes trying to decide what to call herself.
When she finally got up to find the promised food, she left the account page open. SuperAmes sat in the corner of the screen, plain and unobtrusive, as if it had always belonged there.