Living in a remote, mountainous region of Tennessee during her teenage years, Alicia remembers feeling lonely. “My parents were missionaries and we moved around a lot,” she says. “I come from a conservative Christian background and didn’t go to school, so my upbringing was very different from that of other kids my age.” By 1997, she had started “trawling the internet for friends” and connecting with people across the world. “There was a website called Key Pals that was like an online connection platform. It gave you basic details and email addresses of other people who had registered.”
She sent emails to lots of kids her age, including Tola, a young girl living in London. “My parents were software engineers and quite progressive about encouraging us to use the internet,” says Tola. “I was regularly using chatrooms.” She responded to Alicia quickly, telling her about a holiday she was taking to the Six Flags Over Georgia theme park in Atlanta. “I thought it was close to where she was living, but in reality it was miles away,” she says.
