I love Instagram. It’s probably the app I spent most of my time on. I don’t have a big following or anything, but I love to share pictures. Guess it’s pretty normal for a teenage girl like me.
In my time on Instagram, I saw my share of weird things. There were, of course, the spam bots and fake accounts who would comment on your content. Then there was nudity and pornography. For a site that has a strict policy against this, you sure stumble upon a lot of it. One thing, however, had been a bit creepier. There had been a guy who had a crush on my friend Lisa. We found his Instagram by accident and saw that he’d shared dozens of pictures of her on the account.
Two weeks ago, though, I found something else that was way creepier. It was an account by the name of cutzieee52. It had only a few followers, but it had posted a fair amount of pictures. When I scrolled through them, I saw they were all of young girls. Most likely the account of some guy who posted pictures of girls he found attractive, I thought. As I continued to scroll through it, I realized they were all about my age or even younger. After a while, I noticed something even more unsettling. All the pictures were unprofessional and seemed to have been taken in secret. Here was a picture of a blond girl on her way to school. There was a picture of a brown-haired girl on a bus. It continued on like that. What the hell was this? Was this the account of some creepy stalker or something? I checked out the comments on the newest picture. It was of a young girl with dark hair at a train station. I already knew what I’d find: lots of perverted comments. When I read through them, though, I found none of that. All I saw were smiles and thumbs-up. I’d have written it off as nothing but spam if not for the numbers. In between all the spam, a random number would be posted. The first one was 300, followed by 500, and going all the way up to 1200. When I clicked on one of the many posters, all I found was an empty profile or a deleted one. I continued on with the other pictures, but all I found was more of the same. Spam and numbers, nothing else. In the end, I told myself it was the account of some perverted creep and left it alone.
To be honest, I’d forgotten about it until today. I’d gotten home from school and was about to check my emails. I use one of the popular German email providers. It’s one of those pages that is stacked with news bulletins and other “recommended” articles. Most of it is rubbish or celebrity gossip. Today, though, I saw an article about a missing young girl. As I clicked it, I read that young, fifteen-year-old Emily H. had been missing for a few days now. The girl had vanished near a train station on her way to school. There was something about her picture, though. I had seen it somewhere before, but I couldn’t say where. Maybe in a newspaper?
It was later that day, in the evening, that I went on Reddit to search for something interesting. Half an hour later, I found a thread about one of those weird internet mysteries. When someone mentioned Instagram, I suddenly remembered the creepy account I’d seen two weeks ago. It took me a while of searching through my history, but I found it again. I was about to copy the link and start a thread when I noticed something. The latest picture the account had shared. The dark-haired girl at the train station. As I stared at it, I knew why I’d recognized the fifteen-year-old girl in the news article. This was her. This was Emily H., the young girl that was missing. I checked the comments once more, but it was all the same, spam and numbers. What the hell was this? I was so utterly creeped out. I copied the link of the profile and sent it to one of my friends via WhatsApp, but she didn’t read it.
“Dammit, Nicole, check your stupid phone!” I cursed.
An hour later, she finally read the message.
“Oh, miss popular has got another stalker, hasn’t she?”
As I read it, I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Wait, what do you mean, Nicole? Do you know that girl?”
No reply. I sent her another message and then another one. Eventually, I called her.
“Oh, Marie, what’s up?” she answered the phone.
“Nicole! What are you talking about? You know the girl in the picture?”
“Well, duh, dummy, I’d recognize you anywhere!”
As she said this, the phone almost dropped from my hands.
“What the hell are you talking about!?”
“That picture of you! Guess some creeper has a crush on you. Isn’t that just like what happened to Lisa back in…?”
I didn’t listen anymore. What the hell was she talking about?
“Marie, hey, you still there?” I heard her call out to me.
With shaking fingers, I clicked on the link again. With each passing second, I cursed at my computer to load the profile. When it finally did, the phone dropped from my hands. Right there, at the top of the profile, there was a new picture. It was me standing in front of a store in the mall. It was from this afternoon. When I checked the comments, I saw the same thing I’d seen before, smileys and numbers. They were all posted recently. I refreshed the page and saw the numbers climb up. Finally, though, after I refreshed it again and again, I got an error message. Sorry, this page isn’t available. Whatever I tried, nothing turned up anymore. Searching for the account name on Google turned up nothing. For all I know, the account is gone.
As I’m sitting here now typing this out, I can’t make sense of what I found there. I keep telling myself that this was just the account of some pervert or stalker. That picture of Emily, though…those numbers…it’s all way too strange. I’m thinking that there’s something terrible going on. Please, tell me it’s just my imagination. Tell me that nothing is going on here. Tell me I’m not in danger.
