There was, however, no doubt about one thing: those first two words. It was the first positive comment anyone had made about something she had written.
When she had finished staring at Bim’s words, she noticed that it actually said ‘Comments (2)’ below the poem. She scrolled down and found another reaction, this time from Caroline, aged seventeen. It said, ‘A completely incomprehensible poem about nothing. Get a life.’
Teresa stopped breathing. Her eyes prickled and the tears began to well. She clamped her hands together. Then she got up, fetched a hand towel and rubbed her eyes so hard that her eyelids swelled up. She scrunched up the towel and breathed into it, slowly and deeply.
She sat down at the computer again, went into Hotmail and got herself a new address, then created a new account at poetry.now. This time she was Sara from Stockholm, eighteen years old. She searched for Caroline, and found that she had written a number of poems. Most were about unhappiness in love. Boys who had betrayed her. The comments were very positive. Sara from Stockholm was of a different opinion. She said, ‘I have read several of your poems about unhappiness in love and it seems to me that you don’t really deserve anything else. You are a vile, self-obsessed person no one could ever love.’
She could hardly breathe as she pressed send. Then she lay down on her bed and took out one of the poetry collections she had stolen from the library. It was called He Who Does Not Speak Is Dead.
It seemed to be completely unopened. Nobody had read it before her.
The following day Teresa became acquainted with the term ‘troll’. She had thought no one would react to Sara’s comments. She was wrong. Caroline seemed to have a lot of fans on poetry.now, and eight people had commented on her comment, a couple of them at some length.
Every single comment, whether long or short, made it clear that Sara was a very bad person who had no feelings-you come up with something better, then. And so on. In two of the replies she was called a ‘troll’, and realised it was some kind of term. She looked it up and found that ‘troll’ came from trolling: dragging a baited hook through a shoal of fish and waiting for them to bite. Translated to internet forums: posting unpleasant or stupid comments just to get a reaction. A person who does this is a troll.
Teresa crossed her arms tightly over her chest and looked out of the window. She felt happy and peaceful. Lots of girls had read what she’d written and felt compelled to express their point of view. Because she was a troll.
I am a troll.
It suited her perfectly. She lived in the world of humans even though she had been swapped in her cradle, and really belonged to the dark, wild forest. A troll.
During the winter and the spring she was a regular visitor to the library, reading her way methodically through the poetry section. When she got home, trolling took up a considerable amount of her time. She created several different aliases on various forums. She was Jeanette, aged fourteen and Linda, twenty-two. On a forum dealing with anorexia and bulimia she was My, aged seventeen, and received over thirty-five replies to her contribution in which she stated that all anorexics should be force fed and then have their mouths taped shut so they couldn’t run off and throw up.
By chance she ended up on a forum for people who enjoyed renovating old houses. For this she created Johan, twenty-eight, who absolutely loved vandalising, even burning down, houses like that. On a site for those who considered themselves environmentally friendly Tomas, forty-two, wrote about how much he adored his 4x4, and campaigned for a reduction in the tax on petrol.
But she tended to stick to forums like Lunarstorm, where young girls discussed their problems. Their indignant little comments would make her shudder with pleasure, and as time went by she discovered an even more effective weapon than cynicism, namely irony.
On a forum about animal rights, containing despairing accounts of cruelty towards the dear little furry creatures, Elvira, fifteen, wrote about an experiment in Japan where they had poked out the eyes of eight hundred baby rabbits just to see if it affected their hearing, then set fire to them to see if the little blind screaming bunnies could find their way out of a labyrinth. Elvira got over forty replies, quivering with rage over the cruelty of man.
The only exception was the wolves. On a forum where the rights of wolves were discussed, her alias Josefin maintained a more reasonable tone, and put forward Teresa’s own views. She needed at least one place where she could be herself, or almost herself.
Trolling gave her a key insight: you don’t need much energy to provoke a powerful reaction, as long as you use that energy in the right way. Something as simple as a broken plastic fork stuck in the lock of a classroom door could lead to a circus lasting at least half an hour, involving the caretaker, a locksmith, teachers and relocated lessons, and it only took five seconds to do.
How long did it take to put a drawing pin on a chair, and how much chaos did that cause? It was just like on the internet: all it took was a few clicks, a few words in the right place and in seconds there were twenty people busy expending far more time and energy on responding than it had taken her to write the comment in the first place.
Teresa might not have looked like much to the rest of the world, but through her alter egos and her well-planned little tricks she, the troll, took up more of other people’s time and thoughts than pretty Agnes, for example, could ever hope to do.
Everybody loved Agnes, and Teresa just couldn’t work her out. She was so bloody nice. All the pretty girls Teresa had known had been full of themselves, stupid, and obsessed with their appearance. Not Agnes. She was nice to everybody, worked hard in school and didn’t seem to care at all about how she looked.
If she had her hair in plaits she looked cute, if she wore it loose she looked pretty, and if she tied a scarf around her head she was as beautiful as a movie star, but without seeming to notice. Teresa ought to have hated Agnes, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.
One afternoon when Teresa was standing by the poetry section in the library flicking through some newly arrived collections, she heard a discreet ‘Hi’ behind her. She turned around and was met by a breath of fresh air mixed with the scent of flowers, emanating from Agnes.
Teresa said, ‘Hi,’ and felt a blush spread over her cheeks. As if she were about to sit an exam and hadn’t done a stroke of work. She stood there like a lump, saying nothing. Agnes seemed uncomfortable too, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Then she pointed to the shelf behind Teresa. ‘I was just going to…’
Teresa moved to one side and surreptitiously watched Agnes, who was glancing over the thin spines of the books. When she was apparently unable to find what she was looking for, she began to move slowly along the rows, reading every single title.
‘Were you looking for anything in particular?’ asked Teresa.
‘Yes,’ said Agnes. ‘It said on the computer that they had several books by Kristian Lundberg, but I can’t find them.’
‘Do you read Kristian Lundberg?’
‘Why?’
‘No, I just…nothing.’
‘Do you?’
‘I might have read the odd thing.’
Agnes carried on peering at the section where the books should have been, and pulled out a volume of Kristina Lugn’s collected poems instead. She flicked aimlessly through it and said, ‘It was Mum who said I ought to look at that Lundberg guy. But I don’t know, I mean he’s not much fun, is he?’