Well, kind of.

See, what happened was this: Mr. Melching’s advanced biology class was the period right before lunch, and around that time I’d start to jones for a snack. There was a concessions stand right around the corner from the lab, and the treats were cheap–less than a dollar was usually enough to satisfy a couple of  thrifty teenagers. But I almost never carried cash on me, and neither did my three closest friends (Lindsie, Ingvild, and Tracy), who all shared the class with me.

So one day, brazen huckster that I was, I just walked up and down the aisles demanding “taxes” from my fellow classmates. “I’m hungry,” I declared, as if that was explanation enough. “Gimme your spare change.” (If it helps, try to think of this less as bullying and more as a social experiment. I was the kid who turned an offhand joke–”Hey, Cari, how’s the baby?” after a particularly satisfying lunch–into a nine-month performance art piece, culminating in a baby shower during sixth-period World History, complete with invitations, gifts, and a “birth.”)

The first day I tried this, it worked great. No one complained or even questioned me; they just handed over enough spare change to feed the four of us for two days straight. So when the cash ran out, we tried again. And then again. Eventually, someone asked why I should be entitled to their hard-earned money. I thought fast. “We’re communists,” I said, barely even sure what that meant. “I am your dictator, and I am redistributing your wealth.”

“Oh, ok,” he said, and handed over a dime.

Always one to push a joke too far, I assembled my three co-conspirators in the back of the class and demanded we formalize this fledgling nation. As any seventeen-year-old girl knows, the most important thing is the name. “Ingvild,” we said to the foreign exchange student of the group, “give us some funny words in Norwegian.”

“They don’t sound funny to me,” she pointed out.

“Ok, fine.” I said, impatiently. “What’s ‘Communism’ in Norwegian?” The answer was disappointingly familiar-sounding. “What’s ‘money?’” Another loser.

“What’s ‘fat baby?’” I asked.

“Feit unge.”

We giggled. “Perfect,” I declared. “Feitunge. That’s the name of our country. I’m bringing in my iZone tomorrow and we’re making membership cards. I want to be the dictator,” I added, probably unnecessarily.

“So do I,” said Lindsie, so we agreed to split it. Tracy wanted to be the treasurer, presumably for alliteration, and I appointed Ingvild the historian because she was secretly my favorite and that was the position I had lobbied for, unsuccessfully, several times in elementary school. If I couldn’t have it, I could damn well decide who did.

You’ll notice that the cards refer to a website, but when we printed these, no such website existed. Didn’t matter. I had big dreams for the little country that never was, and I was already working on a web presence. Tracy’s boyfriend was an aspiring web designer, so we asked him what it would take to put together feitunge.com. He’d do the labor for free, he said, but the domain registration and a few months of hosting would run us about $100. Between the four of us we easily could have pooled the money, but that would have been contrary to the entire point of the “country.”

“We’re going to make a website,” I announced after class one day. “And you’re going to pay for it.”

This was the deal: if they wanted to become citizens of our country–a designation that bore no significance except a worthless membership card–it would cost them $1. One dollar would get them a card (even then I knew that was free marketing) and classification as a member of the “proletariat” on our website. If they chose to give more–say, $10–they could be listed as “bourgeoisie.” We’d even give them a bio.

I collected the first year’s fees in less than a week.

So Tracy’s boyfriend set to work, and I emailed him several times a day to suggest site features. The ruling class (the “aristocracy”) should have public diaries, I decided. Which is how I got set up with my first blog, a LiveJournal I maintain to this day. My username was, of course, “dictatorcari.” We also set up a forum for our friends and classmates to chat with each other, email addresses @feitunge.com to anyone who wanted them, and a news section.

On the fourth of July, 2002, we went live.

For the first few months, the forum (sadly, now disabled) was hopping with kids from the high school, most of whom had just graduated and wanted a way to keep in touch over the summer. People loved seeing their names on the website, and we got a lot of late orders for membership cards. But as we all went off to college, the site suffered from a lack of attention and finally slipped quietly into oblivion. By the end of freshman year, it was as if the whole thing never happened.

You can still visit the fake country that never was, if you want, thanks to the Wayback Machine. Poke around. Buy a shirt. In the words of former Dictator Cari:

How will we fight? With our hearts! With our minds! With your wallets!