“This can’t go on like this.” He continued, “Maybe it’s time to start taking responsibility and find yourself a job. Then you can take care of those things either by learning to defend yourself, or by paying the price for chickening out.”
I snatched the price list out of his hand and walked back to my room. I had finished several programming jobs by now and could indeed pay for the textbooks myself. Though if this kept up, I still needed a regular job with a more regular income. Then again, I was still only fifteen and didn’t think a paper route would pay enough to replace my phone every month. Though, thinking about it, why did I even bother replacing them? Because of the bullying in school, I barely had any friends left. And I refused to invite any of them into this house to witness what was happening here.
So, the next day, I went to a Diner on my way home from school that had a “Help Wanted” sign at the counter, and got myself a job waiting tables. Minimum wage ($7.25/hour) for fifteen hours per week would not make me rich. I calculated that, if I kept it up without spending any of it, I could buy myself a cheap used car in about 64 weeks. Isn’t that a motivating thought? Well, it didn’t come to that. I was fired after a single week because of me “causing disturbances”.
Since the Diner was so close to school, quite a few of my fellow pupils stopped by regularly. I couldn’t work a single shift without someone recognizing me and shouting “Tiny Tim”. Not even just other kids, there were even a few vaguely familiar adults among them I thought were friends with the parents. People throwing dick-jokes at me, much to the other guests’ displeasure, or intentionally tripping me while I was carrying someone’s order, much to the Diner’s owner’s displeasure. He recognized that I didn’t actively cause any of it, but I was still the cause of it. Simply letting me go was the easiest way to deal with the disturbances in his Diner, so that’s what he did.
I knew what happened would surely repeat itself with any student job I could get. Even if I got something further away, it would happen less frequently, but it would still happen. I needed an actual job, but for those I needed a reference since I was still fifteen. Asking my direct family was useless. So, I decided to give Uncle John a call. He was a corporate consultant, so he had a shit-ton of contacts. I figured he might know someone.
“Well, what are you good at?” he asked, after I explained my dilemma to him.
“I already made some money programming and designing stuff over Craigslist. I’m pretty good at that.”
“Really? That’s new. Anything you’d care to share?”
I sent him the links to the sites I created, as well as the names of my Apps that were already available in Google Play and the App Store. He called me back the next day, with the offer that would finally start the new chapter in my life. An old friend of his ran a security firm and needed, at the very least, a completely overhauled website. He’d vouch for me to overcome the problem my age presented, but I’d have to convince them of my capabilities myself. The appointment was made for the following Friday, and I had compiled a portfolio outlining all the noteworthy characteristics of my previous projects, as well as my skill set.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to put in so much effort. John’s friend, Bill Carter, was indeed skeptical at first because of my age. That was, however, already solved by Uncle John simply asking him to try me out as a favor. And since he, as he phrased it, “doesn’t know shit about this computer stuff”, I agreed to simply start working on it. When I had something presentable, he would send it around for people to try.
I worked on it the entire following week, and was able to create a nice and expandable CMS that would allow them to edit the pages themselves, and included all the needed APIs for their accounting and staff-Apps to exchange data over it. I sent him the login data on a Sunday evening, and he called me to discuss salary two days later.
I offered him thirty dollars per hour with flexible hours. He offered me to go fuck myself, but he was laughing while saying it. In return, I asked him to check with his accounting for the rate he paid the agency that made his previous system, and how long it took them to deliver a finished product.
To my surprise, that actually worked! We settled on a lump sum payment of $4,500 for the work already done, and an hourly rate of thirty-five dollars for all future work. All of that as a freelancer, for now, since the hours I was allowed to work as an employee would be strictly limited and regulated by labor law until I turned sixteen. My first job would be to rework the apps his men used to upload photos, surveillance-videos, and to log their hours. I was fully prepared to get stuck with minimum wage again, since I was ‘just a minor’. Gladly, Bill didn’t care about that in the least. As long as the work was done right, I would be paid like any other employee who did their job.
The next day, Claire accompanied me to the bank to open an account. As we were sitting in that bank, the idiot teller tried to make her open a custodial account for me, which basically means that the account would be in my name, but I couldn’t do anything without either Claire’s or Aaron’s signature. She was all for it, but I told her in no uncertain terms that, since I was working for that money, it should be my money. She compromised with a joint account with safeguards for reckless spending. I could live with that. At that point, I was seriously worried about getting money transferred into an account the parents had access to. Sadly, contrary to Bill, the bank did absolutely care about me being ‘just a minor’, so I didn’t have much of a choice.
The single debit card and the login data for the online banking were sent directly to me alone, so the only way for them to check my account balance, or make withdrawals, was to actually walk into the bank and ask for it. My hope was, since they didn’t know about Bill paying me more than minimum wage, they wouldn’t feel the need to go through that trouble. At least as long as I didn’t give them reason to. So, no reckless spending for me. Back to feature-phones and cheap snacks.
I also had no idea how taxes work for freelancers, since I never made enough before to file for them. So, I would save as much as possible until I found that out. I made only two mentionable investments: A small fridge for my room to store my food in, and a nice gaming chair. The fridge didn’t cost nearly as much as I thought it would, and I figured, if I’m going to spend a lot of time in front of the computer, I might as well sit comfortably while doing so.
The fridge, though, did not go unnoticed. When I carried it inside, Logan saw me and his eyes grew wide immediately. Last I saw before reaching the stairs was him pulling out his phone. I learned whom he called when Aaron stood in my door as soon as he arrived home.
“Boy! If you’re going to put a fridge in here, you’ll have to pay rent. Those things burn energy like a hair dryer running non-stop!” he told me in an annoyed tone.
I didn’t know if this was yet another attempt to piss me off, or if his children were demanding personal fridges of their own now, so he wanted to nip this in the bud. Either way, I looked at him for a while, contemplating my options. Then I took all the bills out of my wallet that were left after my shopping spree, counted them, and handed him seventy-five dollars. I made sure he saw I only had a whopping six dollars left, hoping he wouldn’t think I wasn’t hurting for money.
“That should cover the rest of the month. I’ll set up a money transfer order starting from the 1st. I hope three-hundred bucks a month are enough for this room?” I asked him, with my now usual tired voice.
I waited a little for a reply, but he just looked at me confused, so I closed the door in his face. He apparently didn’t expect me to readily pay up without complaining. And certainly not such an amount. However, as far as I was concerned, this interaction had finally officiated our new relationship. I hadn’t felt like part of this ‘Family’ in a while. Now I was officially nothing more than their tenant. Too bad nobody else would rent out a room to a fifteen-year-old kid, regardless of him having an actual taxable income. I’d have been out of that house in a heartbeat.