A full month has quickly passed since homecoming week. Things have shifted for the better in my daily life. Today also happened to mark a very specific milestone.
Nowadays, right after pushing through the final set of my early morning workout, I head straight back to my room. I immediately crash onto my unmade bed, grabbing a thick book or catching a quick twenty minute nap before the house wakes up.
"Charlie! Come eat your breakfast!" Mom called out, her voice easily piercing through the hallway.
"I am coming," I yelled back, reluctantly dragging myself out of the bed.
The Cooper household was always chaotic in the mornings. Everyone was constantly constantly doing something, fighting for bathroom time to get ready for their daily routines. One bathroom for 6 people. Luckily I do my business very early.
Mom operated as if she had four hands. She was making eggs on the stove while simultaneously packing individual paper bag lunches for everyone in the house. The smell of frying bacon and melting butter always put me in a much better mood.
By the time I finally dragged myself to the dining table, Dad had already finished inhaling his large plate of food. He sat there silently, sipping his black coffee and reading the local sports section of the newspaper.
Sheldon, predictably, was completely ignoring the morning chaos unfolding around him. He was deeply engrossed in reading a thick science textbook. He methodically chewed his dry cereal, his jaw moving exactly twenty times before he finally swallowed each bite. Trauma from choking has not fully passed.
Missy immediately zeroed in on me the exact second I pulled out my wooden chair. She slammed her wrinkled math worksheet right next to my plate, desperately begging me to help her complete her homework that was due today.
I took a slow, deliberate sip from my glass of cold milk and stared back at her with a completely blank expression. I was absolutely not going to help her figure it out at the very last minute just because she chose to watch cartoons last night instead of studying.
She needed to learn how to be responsible. She had already successfully used this exact same frantic trick on me twice before, forcing me to complete her homework right at the breakfast table. I simply shook my head and pushed the paper back across the table toward her side.
Despite her constant, high pitched pestering and dramatic groans of misery, I completely ignored her complaints. I channeled my inner Sheldon for the morning, treating her desperate pleas as nothing more than background static while I peacefully ate my scrambled eggs.
She eventually gave up her act. With an angry huff, she grabbed her pencil and started scribbling random numbers down on the page.
"Have a good day, Dad" I said to him. I made sure to acknowledge him, since most of the kids usually do not bother to say a single word before he leaves for the high school.
"You too, son," he replied with a tired but genuine smile. He grabbed his keyring from the counter and headed straight to the front door, stopping only to give Mom a quick kiss goodbye.
Nowadays, I actually do not go to school early in his truck anymore. I got good enough at handling a vehicle to drive the car completely on my own. Those were Dad's exact words of praise, not mine.
Kevin comes to pick me up for school in the mornings now. He was incredibly proud after receiving a used 1982 Ford Escort from his dad for his seventeenth birthday, and I was more than happy to hitch a ride in the passenger seat.
Dad was honestly a bit sad and unusually quiet for a few days after I stopped riding with him. To fix that lingering guilt, I deliberately pulled Georgie aside in the garage and told him our big secret. I casually let it slip that Dad had secretly let me drive the truck around the neighborhood.
"Wait for me, Dad!" Georgie called out frantically before Dad could walk out the door, a piece of burnt toast still hanging precariously out of his mouth.
Now, Dad has absolutely no choice but to teach Georgie exactly how to drive as well. He didn't want to show favouritism afterall even if I knew that I was the favourite one. He acts annoyed about the driving lessons every morning.
However, I know Dad is secretly really happy about getting that one on one bonding time back with his son. We all definitely made sure to keep the unauthorized driving lessons a strict secret from Mom.
A loud honk suddenly echoed from the street outside our living room window. I quickly grabbed my heavy backpack from the floor and swung it over my shoulder. It was heavy because I borrow a lot of books from the library everyday.
"Alright, I am off to school," I told Mom as I heard Kevin leaning on his car horn a second time. Getting her permission to ride with Kevin was unsuccessful but i still managed to have my way.
It took an incredible amount of convincing for me to finally get Mom to agree to let me ride in a vehicle with Kevin. First she wanted to meet him. She was naturally terrified of teenage drivers and constantly worried about potential car accidents on the main roads.
To ease her severe maternal anxiety, I invited Kevin over for a family dinner one evening so she could properly interrogate him herself. She was initially worried since Kevin was older, but she was also secretly happy that I actually had a real friend.
By the end of the dinner, she realized that Kevin was actually a genuinely good, respectful boy who took his driving privileges very seriously. Despite that positive realization, she still stubbornly refused to officially let me go with him.
I eventually just walked out the door and went with him anyway one morning, completely ignoring her frantic lectures from the porch. After a few days of me arriving home perfectly safe and sound, she simply got used to the new routine and stopped complaining.
I genuinely love my mother with all of my heart, but she can be incredibly stuck in her own rigid ways on certain things. She desperately wants to control every single aspect of our lives to keep us completely insulated and safe from the outside world.
However, she needs to realize that every single one of her children is not going to listen to everything she says.
I am certainly not like Sheldon, who is a momma's boy through and through. I have my own independent life to live, and sometimes that means quietly pushing back against her suffocating boundaries just to establish my own necessary freedom.
Kevin eventually parked the Ford in the student lot. We gathered our bags and walked through the double doors of the high school. The bustling hallways felt completely different to me now.
Random people whose names I do not even know offer me a polite nod as we cross paths, and I simply have to nod back to maintain the peace. Several girls even go out of their way to stop by my locker and say hi.
I honestly liked the sudden attention for the first few days, but it quickly became an exhausting daily chore. It was tiring trying to remember faces and return fake smiles just to avoid seeming arrogant.
Some of the girls even got a bit too pushy with their lingering conversations, stepping into my personal space. Helen actually had to step in a few times, dropping her books on my locker shelf and fighting them off with a sharp glare.
I am not going to lie, watching her get fiercely protective of me and mark her territory was incredibly hot. She would hook her arm through mine and drag me to class, leaving the other girls completely speechless.
The sudden shift in schoolwide attention is probably because everyone knows I am a genius and I also look significantly better now.
My consistent morning workouts finally paid off. I leaned out considerably over the last few weeks, but I still maintained solid, functional muscle definition on my arms and shoulders from the pull ups. I am finally beginning to physically break out of the awkward early teen phase.
My height actually increased by a full inch in the last month alone, forcing me to ask to buy longer jeans because my ankles were showing. I used my own money now. It was a good feeling to spend myown money
Even my voice is noticeably maturing alongside my body. It recently dropped an entire register, completely losing that embarrassing teenage squeak that used to happen whenever I got overly excited.
"Hey Charlie!" Helen called out from down the hall, instantly pulling me out of my wandering thoughts.
She was looking absolutely beautiful, just like she always did. Her soft, curly blonde hair framed her delicate face perfectly, bouncing with every step she took. Her wire rimmed glasses sat neatly on the bridge of her nose, perfectly highlighting her stunning, bright emerald eyes that seemed to sparkle under the fluorescent hallway lights. I don't know how I didn't notice her before. But she was really beautiful to me.
She walked directly over to my locker and wrapped her arms warmly around my neck in a tight hug. I immediately wrapped my hands securely around her waist, pulling her close.
When she finally broke the hug to look at me, I deliberately did not let go. I kept my hand resting comfortably around her side, holding her exactly like a real boyfriend should do in public.
Yeah, I finally asked her to officially be my girlfriend last week during lunch. She had just sighed, rolled those beautiful green eyes, and said, "Finally you ask that, you dumb genius."
Despite the teasing insult and the exasperated tone, she was incredibly happy about it. A massive, radiant smile had taken over her face right after she said yes.
We have gotten pretty close now. We even bunked school and hanged out a lot in the last few days. I have gotten to know a lot of fascinating new things about her personality.
For example, I recently discovered that she actually loves to play the drums in her garage to blow off steam. She has an entire drum kit set up behind some old boxes.
How incredibly cool is that? Most girls her age are obsessed with cheerleading or painting their nails, but she spends her weekends smashing cymbals.
I was honestly never more attracted to her than in that exact moment when she casually mentioned her loud, messy musical hobby. It added a completely new, rebellious layer to her quiet, nerdy image.
After the warning bell rang, she gave my hand a quick squeeze and went on her way to her morning classes. I headed straight down the opposite hallway toward the quiet school library.
Since I tested out of the standard curriculum, I get to spend my free periods studying absolutely anything I find remotely interesting on the shelves.
Today, I seamlessly transitioned from reading a dense psychological profile book about human behavior to a massive historical encyclopedia detailing ancient military tactics.
Having the ultimate freedom to guide my own education without sitting through painfully slow lectures is the greatest gift this school could have possibly given me. This school at least has a good collection of books. I won't get bored for a while here.
After the final school bell rings, I usually go home with Kevin in his Ford or catch a ride with Mom. Once I am back at the house, I listen to some music or just do more calisthenics exercises.
It really just depends on exactly how much energy I have left in the tank. Georgie eventually comes home with Dad in the truck after his exhausting football practice finally wraps up.
As soon as he walks through the front door and drops his sweaty gym bag on the floor, I immediately drag him right back outside. There is simply no time to rest.
Even if he complains loudly that he wants a day off or desperately needs a break time to watch television, I still force him to go out with me every single day.
We walk down the neighborhood streets and collect the advertisement cards from the people who said yes to our painting service. We knock on their doors and confidently tell them we will complete the job today.
We usually manage to secure around ten to twelve painting jobs a day just from the returning cards. We have gotten quite fast with the tricky stencil process now.
We are incredibly efficient with the work now. Actually Georgie was better than me in this regard. He was good at handwork like this but I was not too bad either. Now it feels like second nature.
In the last month alone, we have made a good amount of cash from this simple neighborhood hustle. It is honestly way too much money for an average teenager to possess in this era.
I constantly find myself looking at the stack of bills hidden in my room, realizing that we are good money
My mind went back to calculations I did last night as well through the streets. We charge exactly eight dollars for our curb painting service.
Out of that eight dollars, three dollars goes toward our operational costs, leaving a solid five dollars in pure profit per house. The cost breaks down to roughly two dollars and fifty cents for the physical paint material.
The remaining fifty cents covers the paperwork permits or any extra miscellaneous costs, like replacing broken stencils or buying fresh masking tape when we run out.
We consistently managed to average eleven completed jobs a day. We worked through the blistering heat for exactly twenty five days in the last month. We took off one day every week.
Doing the math, we made 25 multiplied by 11 multiplied by 5, which equals exactly 1375 dollars in pure profit over the last month. We also prudently put aside 137 dollars and fifty cents to cover any unexpected future expenses.
I handed out the money to Georgie on a strict weekly basis, separating his exact cut into a paper envelope. He completely trusted me with the accounting and the numbers.
He knew deep down that it was much better this way. If he had all that loose cash sitting in his pocket every single day, he would lose all motivation to work.
He would simply take the money and immediately want to go blow it all playing games at the local arcade. Holding it back kept him hungry for the next job.
He was incredibly happy to receive a steady, reliable payout of 170 dollars a week. That was a massive, life changing fortune for a teenager living in the late eighties.
I handed him his weekly envelope and offered a piece of serious advice. "You really need to save this money for when we have to buy a reliable car or something important in the future," I told him.
"But we can always just go out and earn more cash," Georgie said back to me, waving the thick envelope with a confident grin.
"Not really, brother," I told him, instantly shutting down his endless optimism.
"What? Why would you say that?" he asked, his smile faltering slightly.
"We will completely run out of unpainted houses in this town in half a month if I am not wrong," I explained logically. He looked a bit sad at the realization, but he remained surprisingly optimistic.
"That just means we will find something else to do. We are the Cooper business bros, after all," he said back to me. He flashed his silly, trademark smile that always manages to lighten my mood.
"Yeah, we certainly will," I agreed.
It was a simple truth that we would eventually run out of viable houses. We have already distributed our flyers to a little under one thousand houses in the surrounding area.
Out of those thousand flyers, we successfully secured exactly 253 paying jobs. That high conversion rate suddenly reminded me that I needed to go restock our printed cards again by tomorrow morning. Most people preferred doing the painting themselves to save a few bucks.
Medford has around sixteen hundred residential houses in total. It was a relatively small Texas town, after all, and the boundaries were fixed.
Considering I secured jobs from almost a quarter of the cards we distributed, the remaining market is shrinking rapidly. We only have roughly one hundred and fifty potential jobs left.
That limited inventory means we only have about half a month of steady curb painting work left. Most people did not need to repaint their curb numbers for at least two to three years.
Because of that long cycle, I will definitely have to figure out a completely new business venture soon. I will be damned if I am still kneeling on hot concrete painting numbers two years from now.
We both got home just before dark after collecting our final cash payments from the local homeowners. We washed the paint off our hands and sat down for a nice, quiet family dinner together.
After cleaning my plate, I went back to my bedroom and lay on the mattress. I stared up at the ceiling, thinking deeply about exactly how I will earn our next stream of money once the curbs dry up.
I had a few solid business ideas bouncing around, but today was something far more special than just financial planning. Today officially marked my ninetieth day anniversary of tooling the gacha wheel for first time. That means the 90 days cooldown was over.
I was entirely too excited to fall asleep. My mind was racing with endless possibilities.
I tossed and turned, completely failing to manage a wink of sleep until it was 12 onclock. To force my hyperactive brain to shut down, I started mentally counting perfect squares in my head to distract myself.
When I finally reached the square of 1341, the mental exhaustion finally overtook me, and my eyes fluttered shut. I fell fast asleep.
The dream materialized. I was in the same space where everything was white except the wheel. There it was, standing before me in the endless white, the legendary gacha wheel.
It was unimaginably bigger than anything I had ever seen. The massive, glowing structure stretched endlessly upward into the sky and I could not even see the top of it piercing through the clouds.
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AN: 3100 words chapter. Bigger than usual. Hope you like it.
No chapter Tommorow. Have to go somewhere.