Cate Kennedy’s short story “Cross-Country” explores a particular way the internet can affect relationships after they end: cyber-stalking an ex-partner. Through the use of first- and second-person narration, the narrator and protagonist, Rebecca, makes the reader complicit in her online stalking. She makes it seem inarguable: anybody would Google their ex after a bad break-up. By positing cyber-stalking as just the uglier side of human nature, Rebecca makes her actions seem innocuous rather than invasive. Beyond her ex-partner’s right to privacy, she is seemingly indifferent about how seeing his name or his pictures will make her feel, not caring if they make her sad or jealous. The internet offers Rebecca a temporary relief after a breakup—but while viewing snippets of her ex’s life online may help ease the immediate pain of him moving out, it doesn’t change the fact that the relationship is over, nor does it help her move forward with her life. In “Cross-Country,” Cate Kennedy considers the internet’s potentially detrimental role in healing after a bad breakup, suggesting that the ease and relative anonymity of the internet has blurred the line between what’s harmless and what’s invasive when it comes to searching other people online.
Kennedy’s protagonist attempts to justify her questionable Google searches, asserting that seeking out information about her ex online isn’t just acceptable, it’s her right to do so—even though her ex-partner appears to disagree. She rationalizes her cyber-stalking by claiming, “It’s just a few shreds of information I want. I supported him for a year, after all; surely I have a right to know whether he’s finally submitted that thesis and where, incidentally, the graduation ceremony is going to be held.” Rebecca struggles with the harsh transition from being her ex’s life partner (and financial supporter) to being a veritable stranger, and thus decides that since she was at one point privy to the happenings of her ex-boyfriend’s life, she should still be allowed to know what he’s up to. However, the story suggests that Rebecca’s ex-partner has no intention of letting her back into his life. She notes, “It takes a special kind of thoroughness […] for him to redirect even his superannuation statement and subscriptions to his new address […] suggesting that he’d do anything rather than leave a single excuse for re-contact.” Rebecca seems to be aware that her ex-partner does not want her to contact him, which makes it clear that her search efforts are indeed invasive and undesired.
As Rebecca continues her search, the story raises the question of whether the ease and anonymity of typing someone’s name into a search engine really means that it’s a harmless thing to do—or if that ease and anonymity means that it’s dangerously easy to invade someone’s privacy. Continuing to rationalize her behavior, Rebecca suggests that what she is doing is nowhere near as bad as in-person stalking. She claims, “It’s not as if I’m going to go over there, drive past his house, lie on his lawn drunk and make a scene, harass him.” Instead of invading her ex-boyfriend’s physical space, Rebecca is able to hide behind the anonymity of a computer screen. Because she’s just lying around in her pajamas in the middle of the night and typing things into the computer, it seems like her searches aren’t all that bad—after all, she’s not harming anyone. However, the story emphasizes that the person whose “desk drawer Google has no qualms about throwing open” typically has no idea it ever happened, making internet searches seem eerie and violating in their one-sidedness. So, while Rebecca feels a comforting sense of anonymity as she sifts through search results to find where her ex is now living and what groups he belongs to, the story suggests that it’s not a good thing that she’s able—and willing—to unearth this kind of information about someone who clearly no longer wants her in his life.
When Rebecca finally stumbles upon a piece of information about her ex, she fantasizes about how she might use that information to weasel her way back into his life—yet another indication that her online searching is intrusive and arguably creepy. She notes, “He’s on some kind of roster. […] A roster for a sporting club. […] Just on the other side of the city, probably. One of those beachside suburbs he always said he’d like to live in.” Upon finding her ex’s name on a roster for a local cross-country running club, Rebecca quickly uses that small shred of information to discern where he is now living, which leaves readers to wonder if she actually does intend to stalk him in-person. Rebecca immediately begins to daydream about joining the very same running club. The daydream, of which there are several versions, is a “short film looping in [her] head” of her running effortlessly during one of the club’s events and dazzling her ex with her independence and poise, presumably to either win him back or make him regret ending the relationship.
At the end of the story, Rebecca’s hopes of impressing her ex are dashed when she finally realizes that the roster is headed with the words “Under-fourteens.” After all her planning and daydreaming, Rebecca has only found information about a local kid with the same name as ex. After grappling with the shock of this, Rebecca clicks out of the window and turns off her computer with a sense of finality. The distraction she felt while cyber-stalking her ex was a digital bandage for grief, but pixelated names and photos of an ex aren’t the same as actually processing the loss of that person. Though she doesn’t seem repentant for her invasive searches, she does grasp that they were fruitless. Scouring the internet for any sign of her ex didn’t change the fact that the relationship is over and that she now must move on.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Internet, Cyber-Stalking, and Privacy ThemeTracker
The Internet, Cyber-Stalking, and Privacy Quotes in Cross-Country
Live in the world, and there’ll be a trail you leave behind you, even if it’s a trail of crumbs. That’s what they call them, don’t they? Cookies. No matter how vigilantly you try to cover your tracks, they’ll be there. The recorded minutes of a meeting you attended, some team you’ve been; there’s your name on the screen. Try it for yourself and see. Google your name, in one of these extended empty sessions of free time when the cursor’s waiting like a foot tapping, and there’s nothing else in the universe you can think of that you need to find out about. There you suddenly are, undertaking all the trivial pathetic things you think are hidden, so that anyone in the world can see you exposed.
It’s not as if I’m going to go over there, drive past his house, lie on his lawn drunk and make a scene, harass him. It’s just a few shreds of information I want. I supported him for a year, after all; surely I have a right to know whether he’s finally submitted that thesis and where, incidentally, the graduation ceremony is going to be held. If he’s joined a church group or a golf club, I need to paste that into my new identikit. I’ll take any crumb, any trail, any vague lead.
I don’t know why they call it surfing. They should call it drowning.
Down through the layers of US family-tree pages and rambling travel blogs of dull strangers, I hit paydirt at last. My heart knocks in my chest. I find he’s attended a conference but not presented a paper there. Thesis still unfinished, then. Too many emotional upheavals. His thoughts too scattered after a traumatic breakup, distracted by guilt and second thoughts. I’m settling into this train of thinking, hungry for its possibilities […]
It’s ten past four. Jittery with caffeine and MSG, I snoop in the desk drawer Google has no qualms about throwing open for me. He’s way down the ladder: coming thirty-fourth. That must be humbling. Thirty-fourth in a field of what—fifty or so? That would make anyone feel like a nameless nobody in a crowd, face blurry in the back of someone else’s photo, reduced to nothing but pixels.
‘See, you can reduce all this to just a system of binaries,’ I remember him explaining […] ‘Just infinite combinations of zero and one.’ I wonder if he understands that better now, struggling home in the middle of the pack. How it feels to be rendered, finally, to those low-resolution dots of shadow and light, a conglomeration made up of nothing and one.
