Post-Divorce Unwanted Kid: Receipts for Every Spend Chapter 03

Post-Divorce Unwanted Kid: Receipts for Every Spend Chapter 03 Wanna Get Back at Them?

Mom said, “Are you borrowing money behind my back? Because if someone shows up asking for repayment, I’m not covering for you!

“Lily’s starting piano lessons, and we’ve got expenses. Don’t make things harder for me.”

I took a deep breath, and my finger hovered over the screen for a long time.

Then I clicked “Leave Group.”

If I was just dead weight to them, then fine. I’d cut myself loose completely.

After I did it, I looked over at Harrison.

“Can I… borrow your computer?”

He blinked, like he hadn’t expected me to ask for that.

“What for?”

“To make money. So I can pay you back.”

He let out this short laugh, but he handed over the laptop anyway.

I opened the browser and logged into an international coding competition site. I’d found it years ago when I was teaching myself to code at internet cafes, hiding from my parents’ screaming matches.

I didn’t have money, but I had a brain that worked. Numbers and logic just made sense to me in this almost freakish way.

I found a bounty task-fixing a security flaw in an encryption algorithm. The prize was 300 dollars.

My fingers started flying across the keyboard.

My incision still throbbed, but the pain actually helped me focus.

Harrison had been watching casually at first, but gradually, he sat up straighter. His expression shifted from dismissive to surprised, and then to something more curious.

Two hours later, I hit enter.

A green dialogue box popped up on the screen. “Success.”

I handed the laptop back to him. My face was pale but my eyes were bright.

“The account’s yours, so the money’ll go to your card. After that, I still owe you—”

“Don’t worry about it.” Harrison cut me off, staring at me with this intense look.

“It’s not enough money. But I’ve got this big project going, and I need someone to do grunt work. You interested?”

I looked at him. “Does it come with room and board?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m in.”

The day I got discharged, I didn’t go home. I went straight to Harrison’s workspace instead.

Turns out it was just a two-bedroom apartinent near campus, packed wall-to-wall with computer equipment and tech gear.

Finished

Harrison was this legendary computer science major at Astoria University, and the project was an AI model his team was building.

My job was pretty basic-data cleaning, basically feeding information to the AI. Boring as hell and repetitive, but at least I got three meals a day.

Harrison had a sharp tongue, but he paid well. He even gave me an advance on my first month’s salary and told me to buy some decent clothes.

“Stop dressing like a homeless person. You’re making me look bad,” he said as he tossed the cash at me.

I took the money to the mall, bought two T-shirts on clearance, and saved the rest.

During all this, my parents called a few times. I blocked both their numbers.

When they couldn’t reach me, they actually tracked me down at school and somehow snuck into the college awards ceremony.

Mom grabbed the microphone right off the stage and started sobbing into it.

“My daughter Gwen ran away from home, and she’s not even going to class anymore! Please, someone help me find her! She’s so young. She can’t drop out!”

Dad stood next to her with a scowl on his face. “That ungrateful little brat probably ran off with some guy!”

There were about ten thousand people there.

The microphone was loud enough that I could hear it from way across campus, and I literally almost blacked out as I ran toward the ceremony hall.

The whispers started spreading through the crowd, and the teacher had to step in to calm everyone down.

“Gwen’s grades have always been excellent, though she has been absent from class recently….”

“She’s obviously out there doing God knows what!” Mom/shrieked. “She even scammed us for five thousand dollars, claiming she needed surgery! Learning to commit fraud at her age!”

The crowd erupted.

“Oh my God, she scammed her own parents?”

“She looked so normal. Never would’ve guessed.”

All those judgmental looks felt like needles stabbing into my skin.

I clenched my fists so hard my nails dug into my palms.

I was about to charge forward when a hand landed on my shoulder.

Finished

Harrison was standing right behind me. I hadn’t even heard him approach. He was a head taller than me, and he was looking down at the whole mess with this detached expression.

“Those are your parents?”

“Ex-parents,” I said flatly.

Harrison’s mouth twitched into a smirk. “Wanna get back at them?”