AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I start the car and drive away, thinking about the reason for my smile. Said reason does not have green eyes, a sea of freckles, and copper hair. The double cat paw wave could be the reason. It could be, so I will go with that because it’s the safest reason.
CHAPTER 7
Lindy
Even though I don’t want to show up at Kirian’s work the next day, I do. I do because I said I would, even if I don’t like it.
I also don’t like that I wasn’t able to sleep last night, and it’s not really because I’m on a weird schedule and tried to sleep at an off-hour after having already napped during the day. I can’t even blame it on my cats keeping me awake. I have a king-sized bed for a reason. The cats disperse quite well during my sleeping hours and don’t tend to bother me. God, most days, even if they fall asleep right on my open mouth and fill it with hair from their ass region, I wouldn’t wake up. There are stats out there that say a person swallows eight spiders a year. I think I probably swallow eight cat buttholes a year. Give or take. I mean the butthole itself. I don’t literally swallow it, but you know, some butthole-related material might have entered my mouth at some point.
I know I really shouldn’t sleep with cats because there’s a risk of cat butthole, butthole juice, butthole matter, or cat farts, but whatever. I can deal with all that. I mean, it’s only eight a year. Times four cats? Or just eight? I’m not entirely sure about the science behind those stats because cats aren’t spiders. But I hate sleeping alone. I don’t need a man to fill that position because people, in my experience, are more trouble than they’re worth, so yeah. Cats, it is.
I used to think I could get by without the need for human contact in my life in any form. Back when Lisa and I were young, bouncing from foster family to foster family, it was rough. I learned early on that I couldn’t rely on people because most people just let me down. Even more than that, they don’t give a shit. There were not many people in our lives who could let us down because that would mean they had to promise us something in the first place, and most of them didn’t care to get to know us well enough to find out what we actually want and then not give it to us.
I guess that’s why I got into computers. I can be whoever I want to be online. I’m not talking about being bad and catfishing people. No, I’m talking about the good parts of belonging to online groups, having friends there that I’d never get a chance to meet otherwise, and also experiencing and learning new things.
This is coming from someone who was a very lonely and confused teenager with more than the usual amount of teenage angst, thanks to my past. Coding was something I fell in love with and into, just like how other people get into sports or dating or underage drinking. For me, coding was like finding oxygen again after years of my lungs screaming for a breath. Coding was like waking up from being asleep and finding out that there’s this whole other world waiting out there.
I say coding because, for the longest time, that’s what I was into. I’m twenty-four now, and I happen to have a degree in computer science that I earned entirely online. Coding was my lifeline.
The hacking didn’t come until later. When I was twenty-one, I met this guy online while searching for answers to a few coding problems I was having for a project I was working on. We never met in person, but I would go so far as to say I was romantically interested, at least in what I knew about him. Not only did he show me how to fix my coding issues, but he also showed me how to solve some of my financial issues as well. Living in a shit apartment and working two to three jobs still wasn’t paying my bills, let alone my tuition. My debts and student loans were adding up.
Hacking was similar to coding. Addictive. I didn’t do anything major at first. I just messed around, playing what I liked to call practical jokes—things like farging with people who were doing shitty things so they couldn’t do them anymore. I guess I was a messed-up version of a cyber Robin Hood.
And then, from there, things might have spiraled slightly out of control. I found a group of people who lived in Seattle, and things went downhill from there. I took on a few jobs that were not legal and didn’t really hurt anyone, but it also didn’t not hurt people. I will just say that they had it coming. I didn’t hurt or scam anyone innocent, but I did enough things that a few people who weren’t going to call the police ended up paying other people to figure out who I was, and…yeah. It’s why I had to leave in a hurry.
