Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey Read Online Free PDF Page A

them in spite of the fact that they're not."
    Jodi Picoult
     
    Even when I worked at the school for
handicapped kids, I still talked to Donna for hours every day. I
basically spent all my free time on the phone with her. Sometimes
we talked until the sun came up and I went to work without having
slept at all.
     
    By now I had lost all interest in the
illegal hacking scene, so Lucifer had retired. But I still
continued to run my software company as Goliath and we had produced
a few popular video games. Some of them were distributed by a
German software company that later became part of Electronic
Arts.
     
    I was only 20, but I had already made a nice
amount of money with those video games and I ended up flying to New
York whenever I had a chance, to spend time with Donna. During one
particular 3 month time period I ended up flying to New York 6
times. Sometimes just for a weekend.
     
    The handicapped kids I worked with were
always sick. Long time teachers are used to it. They have a pretty
strong immune system and they don't get sick all the time from
being around sick kids. But I hadn't been around these kids for
that long, so I wasn't as immune as the other teachers were, and I
caught every cold those kids had. One time I caught the chickenpox
from them. I figured, while I was on sick leave, it was the perfect
excuse to hop on a plane and go visit Donna in New York for a few
days again.
     
    I can't believe they actually let me on the
plane. I felt like patient zero. I could have had the swine flu or
Ebola or something. During the flight, my chickenpox got worse and
worse. By the time I got off the plane, I looked like a leper. I
was seriously afraid the customs officers at Kennedy Airport would
take one look at me and quarantine me or something. But they let me
right through. So much for border security.
     
    A few weeks later I caught pneumonia. Not
sure if it was the result of having caught 3 consecutive colds from
the kids, or because I had spent so much time in freezing phone
booths, talking to Donna. Either way, I collapsed at my parents'
house with a very high fever.
     
    For days I had this really bad cough that
just wouldn't go away. Then, while brushing my teeth one night, the
bathroom suddenly turned black and white, and everything seemed to
move away from me. Obviously that was just what it looked like,
because the blood was leaving my head, so my eyes were playing
tricks on me. But it really did look like the whole room turned
black and white and moved away from me. I think that's why people
see a tunnel of light when they die. I think it's simply the blood
leaving their eye balls and their field of vision narrowing to a
pinpoint.
     
    I was able to call out for my mom and my
stepdad right before passing out. They called an ambulance and I
was rushed to the hospital. Turns out I had pneumonia for a while
already, before I finally collapsed that night. The doctors told my
parents they weren't sure if I was going to make it. For the first
few days in the hospital, there was a pretty good chance I might
die. But I got through it. After I got out of the hospital, I was
on sick leave for a few weeks. So of course I hopped on the next
plane and flew to New York again.
     
    When I had first started talking to Donna
over a year earlier, to convince her to make her bulletin board the
exclusive online headquarter for my hacking crew, she had mentioned
that she had a roommate. This guy Jeff, who worked as a technician
in an electronics store, and spent all his time fixing broken TVs
and VCRs and stuff like that.
     
    Whenever Donna and I talked on the phone, I
often heard her yell at Jeff to get out of her room, or to go let
her dogs out, or get her cigarettes. She was treating him like
shit. Like he was her personal servant or something.
     
    As the weeks and months went by, and we
talked every day, we got closer and closer. Donna and I started
having phone sex. This was before the first time I flew to New York
to