We used the AOL free Internet trials and shared the Internet with our cousins who lived with us. My cousins did boyish-looking things online. My sister and I enjoyed marykateandashley.com.

On a sensory level, the site was pure pleasure. I was drawn to the pink. It was for girls. It was for me. I wanted to live in that website and escape my own life. I wanted to be skinny and thin and famous and more than anything else, I wanted to never feel pain again. There were many reminders I was neither of these things, that pain would always be a constant—mirrors, dressing rooms, school, not being a white girl, my cruel cousins.

When my cousins moved out, I began pushing the bunk bed I shared with my sister up against our bedroom door every night. I would sleep with the telephone pinned under a my pink pillow. I would dream of owning all the clothes Mary-Kate and Ashley wore and living in a girly pink mansion with my sister somewhere faraway.

Pink was pleasure.

Pink was painless.

Pink was a dream.

Pink was the Internet.

Safy-Hallan Farah is a Contributing Editor at Paper Magazine.