Cyberbile & Grounded Read online

  FIGURE 6: Last year I was away for the whole term in Germany, going to school there and when I was over there I was checking my Formspring and there were lots of comments saying, ‘don’t come back, you don’t belong at Silver Wattle High’, and stuff like that, but luckily I am a strong person and I really didn’t care. I find it kind of amusing how people were bothered enough to do that and yeah, these people tended to write as if they were the whole perspective of the year while I knew I had friends here. Some of the messages would say, like, ‘no-one at Silver Wattle High likes you’, ‘don’t come home’, and it was stupid because I obviously know I have friends because I was in contact with people and they couldn’t wait until I got back. So it was yeah, kind of stupid. And the other main thing has been with me and my boyfriend ’cause he’s a bit older and people he is friends with have come on to my Formspring and said, ‘what are you gonna do with him?’ and things like that and then go onto his and say that ‘going out with a 14-year-old I’ve lost a lot of respect for you’, and things like that. He’s 18 and he is still in school and he’s been my best friend for ages. We’re actually family friends so we go to family dinners and things, it’s not a big deal. We’re not planning to do anything big of course. But you still get comments like, ‘oh, if age is just a number then jail is just a room’, and it’s like well that’s just stupid, he’s not going to jail. It’s not like he’s a big predator or anything like that—it’s really stupid but, um, we both find it really amusing actually.

  SCENE FOUR

  ORIANA enters with two figures either side of her. Both are wearing horned ‘bull’ heads which might be masks or papier-maché prosthetics. They complete the actions as described in the poem—winding a sheet around her and spinning her in it, dragging her to and fro like a cocooned silkworm, then pasting words and letters onto her, not necessarily coherent but perhaps with asterisks and stars. There also might be an ‘el bulli’ chorus of smaller bull figures who dance or otherwise move during these dream sequences.

  ORIANA: I had a dream that was not all a dream

  and in it I was stalked by horned creatures

  ‘el bulli’

  and my sheets were wound around me

  tight as the night

  wrapped like a cocoon

  like a worm

  and their weapons

  were not knives

  were not swords

  but felt the same

  their weapons were words

  used commonly

  brute

  raw

  without beauty or clarity

  only short

  vulgar words

  to seal my misery

  words like blades

  their edges sharp and razor-like.

  Awake, my helpers and come, my friends

  for I am needled with cruel jokes

  and my courage is flowing away from me

  my confidence seeps out of me, like blood.

  There might be a dance sequence here with music and choreographed ‘binding’ and unbinding of ORIANA. Finally she is left in a heap on the floor.

  CELINE: Oriana?

  ORIANA: What?

  CELINE: Are you okay?

  ORIANA: I feel really tired. Do you get days like that when you just feel so tired?

  CELINE: Maybe you should go home.

  ORIANA: I want to collate those new replies that have come in.

  CELINE: So you’ve seen it?

  ORIANA: Seen what?

  CELINE: Do me a favour and delete your Formspring account.

  ORIANA: Why? What’s on it?

  CELINE: It’s just some weirdo. You don’t want to see it.

  ORIANA: Tell me.

  CELINE goes to the computer and brings it up.

  I have herpes? But I don’t have herpes.

  CELINE: They’re gonna make it your thing.

  ORIANA: But it’s not true.

  CELINE: Watch it become true.

  ORIANA: It can’t become true.

  CELINE: Of course not.

  ORIANA: So what do I do?

  CELINE: It sort of doesn’t matter what way you respond to it, people will assume that you’re hiding something. Like with a case like this, if you say no people are going to think ‘oh, she’s lying’ and if you joke about it they’re going to say ‘she’s hiding something’ and if you get angry they’re going to say ‘you’re trying to hide the truth’. So it’s one of those things you just can’t win. On the other hand, you can’t let it go unchallenged because then everyone will just think it’s true.

  ORIANA: They’ve posted the date I went to the doctor as evidence.

  CELINE: So they’ve hacked into your email.

  ORIANA: Are you joking?

  CELINE: Did you confirm the doctor’s appointment on email?

  ORIANA: On sms. Oh, and there was an email.

  CELINE: So.

  ORIANA: But it wasn’t even for that. It was a flu vaccine.

  CELINE: They’ve got it.

  ORIANA: What is this? An episode of ‘SVU’?

  CELINE: Now we report it.

  ORIANA: No.

  CELINE: Yeah, we do.

  ORIANA: I want to see what happens with it.

  CELINE: What happens is that everything turns to rat slime.

  ORIANA: I’m fine. I don’t care.

  CELINE: Someone has hacked your email.

  ORIANA: So I won’t use my email.

  CELINE: Oriana. I’m serious. You have to report this.

  ORIANA: Celine. I’m seriously fine with this. What do I care about some anonymous lie? But I am interested in how other people react. This is more gold, for the project, you know.

  CELINE: So you’re asking for it.

  ORIANA: I am not.

  CELINE: Listen to you, you’re almost pleased this is happening now. While you’re doing this project.

  ORIANA: Yeah, but I’m in control of it.

  CELINE: They’re saying you’ve got herpes.

  ORIANA: What if I can work out who it is?

  CELINE: Why would you want to do that?

  ORIANA: To find out what people really think of me. I’m curious.

  CELINE: But you don’t even know if it’s someone you know.

  ORIANA: It must be for them to know my name. They still have to type in my name to make it come up. So they must know me.

  CELINE: So that’s worse. Some sicko you know is doing this. Saying stuff that they won’t even say to your face. Maybe they don’t even mean it, they just want to see how you react.

  ORIANA: So I’ll show them. If this survey has taught me anything it’s that you’ve got to stand up to them. Period. And if I can find out who they are they’ll get exposed. In this project. Big-time humiliation. Stick that in your herpes cream, Nurse Ratchett.

  SCENE FIVE

  FIGURE 7: So I’m a young woman. Obviously I’m a young woman and here’s the scariest thing about what goes on. I think it’s the same as what has always gone on but because it’s in print on the net it just seems uglier. But that’s not what I mean by the scariest thing. The scariest thing is this—you scratch just under the surface of what boys are thinking and you get this massive, massive dose of misogyny. Right there. They call you slut, they call you whore. They brutally rate you on your physical attributes like a meat market. And if they talk about sex they make really crude comments about how much you, for instance, moved or not. Comments about how you smell, comments about various bodily fluids and whether there is too much of them, if you know what I mean. And this comes close to the scary thing for me, like, I just can’t believe that this is not what young men have always talked about you know and that’s the scariest thing for me. Because you want to believe that only a few boys are nasty freaks but with the root-rater sites and all of that you see that it’s more that the nice guys are the exception and I don’t know if I can explain this but for me as a young woman that really puts me off boys. Like I’m not saying that I’m going to turn into a big le
zzo or anything but it still puts me off trusting boys. Not just for sex either. More just… for any reason. Like I wonder if we are the first generation where the ugliness of adolescent men and the ruthlessness of young women is really right there en masse in print. It’s just the sheer organisational hatred of women that really shocks you. Am I making any sense? You kind of sense that it is there but in our generation it’s right there. You know. And a lot of the nasty comments are about girls and their appearance, seriously. Boys get it too but for girls it’s just totally there. And you hear about newsreaders and other women in the public, what’s it called, public face, public eye, they get the most hideous feedback on especially their appearance. It just… freaks me out, I mean is all society like that. Is there this deep-seated hatred of women like everywhere?

  SCENE SIX

  ORIANA is hanging in a ‘web’ of telephone cables and wires onstage. She is caught there like a fly in a spider’s web.

  ORIANA: I had a dream that was not all a dream

  and in it I was trapped in a web

  not of my own making

  and lines of lies were wound around me

  indelible as the past

  forever available

  and this weapon was not poison

  was not acid

  but felt the same

  their weapon was rumour

  and lies

  forever suspended on servers

  cruel

  wrong

  without the possibility of compassion or forgiveness.

  Awake, my courage and come, my faith

  for lies are written on my body

  and my sanity is flowing away from me

  my hope leaks out of me, like hot tears.

  She is crying in a pile on the floor when CELINE enters.

  CELINE: What’s happened?

  ORIANA: It’s nothing.

  CELINE: It’s not nothing.

  ORIANA: It is. I’m just being lame.

  CELINE: What’s happened?

  ORIANA: I can’t…

  She is having trouble breathing she is so distressed. After a moment she recovers herself.

  CELINE: I’ll be you.

  ORIANA: Okay.

  CELINE: I’ll be you.

  ORIANA: Okay.

  CELINE: Where did I go?

  ORIANA: Party.

  CELINE: The party at Emmaline’s?

  ORIANA: Why weren’t you there?

  CELINE: I wasn’t invited.

  ORIANA: You be me.

  CELINE: I’ll be you, invited to a party at Emmaline’s.

  ORIANA: Yes.

  CELINE: And who are you?

  ORIANA: I’m this guy.

  She bursts into tears again.

  CELINE: What guy?

  ORIANA: Just a guy.

  CELINE: The guy from the beach.

  ORIANA nods.

  He was there?

  ORIANA nods.

  What happened?

  ORIANA: You know I had seen him that time at the beach and he bought me that can of Coke.

  CELINE: You liked him.

  ORIANA: I thought he was okay.

  CELINE: You liked him.

  ORIANA: Maybe I did.

  CELINE: What happened?

  ORIANA: Well, I was just getting, I dunno, getting something from the kitchen and he came in and he just said to me… [She starts crying.] He asked me if I… you know…

  CELINE: What?

  ORIANA: I can’t.

  CELINE: I’ll be you.

  ORIANA: He told me he liked me but he needed to know if I really had herpes.

  CELINE: He did not.

  ORIANA: He did. Which means he’s been looking at my Formspring profile.

  CELINE: So you just said, ‘no of course I don’t’.

  ORIANA: That is what I said.

  CELINE: And that’s it.

  ORIANA: That’s it?

  CELINE: I mean. That’s what you said to him?

  ORIANA: No, I looked at him and I was so shocked that I just went really red in the face and I shook my head but he just stood there and then he started looking around and he said, ‘yeah, whatever’, and then he just left me standing there.

  CELINE: You won’t be so shocked next time.

  ORIANA: What?

  CELINE: I mean next time you see him.

  ORIANA: Celine. That information is up there forever.

  CELINE: You can delete it.

  ORIANA: And what about the next party I go to? Or don’t, more’s the likelihood. How do I know how many people have seen it?

  CELINE: You’ll be laughing it off by then.

  ORIANA: I won’t.

  CELINE: I told you to report it.

  ORIANA: Do you think it was him?

  CELINE: What?

  ORIANA: Do you think he was the one who put it up that I had herpes and he did that at the party to see whether I had been affected by it?

  CELINE: I thought you liked him.

  ORIANA: He reckons I’ve got herpes!

  CELINE: But was he… like was he really asking or was he doing it deliberately to upset you?

  ORIANA: How should I know?

  CELINE: Well, was he like laughing or was he sincere?

  ORIANA: I can’t remember. It’s a blur.

  CELINE: So what did you do then?

  ORIANA: I got maggoted.

  CELINE: Why?

  ORIANA: Because it’s a really sensible thing to do when you’re upset.

  CELINE: It’s not like you.

  ORIANA: No, and I don’t have herpes either. But apparently that is now my profile.

  CELINE: It’s not.

  ORIANA: I’m never going to another party again.

  CELINE: You will.

  ORIANA: What would you know, you weren’t even invited.

  Pause.

  CELINE: I’ll upload whatever’s come in.

  ORIANA: Okay.

  CELINE: You should go home.

  ORIANA: You think it will be alright?

  CELINE: I’m sure it will.

  ORIANA: Okay. [Pause.] Sorry.

  CELINE: Don’t worry about it.

  ORIANA: Celine.

  CELINE: Don’t worry about it.

  ORIANA gives her a kiss on the cheek and exits. CELINE continues to enter information into the computer.

  SCENE SEVEN

  FIGURE 8: Yeah, I am a bully but I’m like the Dexter of bullies. You know ‘Dexter’, the TV show. There’s this TV show about this guy who is a serial killer but he’s a really good serial killer, you know. He is. He only kills people who are already murderers, or child molesters. So he’s kind of like an avenging angel. Well, I’m an avenging bully for my friend. She had sex with this guy and then he blogged about it in explicit detail, the scum, and so I started to bully him, like for her. I put stuff up about how I had slept with him too and he had a really small you know what and he was really hopeless and he cried and stuff. I’m sure it wouldn’t have affected him one bit but I still did it and it felt good to at least put words up against him. The scum. He totally deserved it.

  FIGURE 9: My mum has been teaching me to drive and you know, all my life when we are in the traffic my mum yells at the other drivers. Not bad stuff, well yeah, swear words and stuff but lots of sarcasm you know, ‘oh, that was a really smart thing to do dickhead’, or ‘get back in your own lane you imbecile’, stuff like that. Sometimes quite loud and sometimes she holds up her little finger like in those ads about speeding and I asked her about it once and she said that in the city the traffic is so fast-paced and aggressive that it’s almost just a way to psych herself into the role. Like she said she’s just playing a role, like working herself up into a state where you can like push in where you need to and cross across where you need to. Because let’s face it you can’t be all polite and get around. You just can’t. So… what’s that long story about, girl? Well, just like my mum’s traffic aggro has never turned into road rage I think most cyberbullying is kind of the same, it�
��s just this kind of role you play to be part of the online community… you give a little bit of attitude and stuff but that doesn’t mean that you necessarily want to turn into a full-blown bully. Like you’re going to encounter bad drivers and aggressive drivers and you need to give back as good as you get but really it’s just part of driving and you shouldn’t get too hung up about it. Same with online chat—you’re going to get a bit of attitude and a bit of aggro but just blow it off and keep going. If it turns into road rage and you’re getting out of your car with a tyre iron to smash up someone’s car then it’s a problem but if it’s just low-level aggro I don’t think it’s a problem.

  SCENE EIGHT

  ORIANA stands in the centre of the stage. As each of the ‘el bulli’ characters speak they throw some kind of sticky substance at her.

  FIGURE 1: Oriana Matthews is a just a tease, bro, she can’t make up her mind, she’s not worth it and you should no way consider asking her out.