12 - Helping out at home

When my punch hit him in the face, I felt my right hand stinging slightly, making me think that gloves for moments like these could be good. Seeing him fall to the ground, instead of waiting for him to get up and take revenge on me, I just came closer and put my foot on his chest and leaned my weight on it, making him look at me with his eyes bulging as the air rushed out of his chest.

"I told you to leave me alone, you piece of shit. Do you think I'm going to keep listening to you talk shit to me while I keep quiet? As far as I'm concerned, you're just an insect that I could crush at any moment," I said, as he tried to use his hands to get my foot off him, but my weight of 139 kg was no joke. No matter how hard he tried, I just had to push down a little harder to keep my foot on his chest.

"Please let me go..." he wheezed out with what little air he had, while looking at me with a desperate expression.

Knowing he was about to break down, I lifted my foot slightly off his chest, allowing him to finally breathe, until I moved my foot to his stomach and stomped down hard, pushing all the air he had managed to inhale in that second back out, even making the rest of the food in his stomach threaten to leak out.

With a shocked expression, he stared at me without knowing what to think, just feeling the oxygen running out in his head to the point where he almost fainted.

Looking at him, I said nothing more and just turned to leave.

As I turned back to my brother and the girl, I imagined I would see both of them with frightened expressions, but to my surprise both Ethan and his little friend were looking at me with eyes as bright as two pairs of headlights!

"Woah, Noah, that was amazing!" Ethan said excitedly as he ran up to me and imitated the punch I threw at that piece of shit. "Where did you learn to fight like that?!"

Even his little friend, although a little shy, was looking at me with shining eyes as she clenched her little fists.

"I learned it on the internet," I said as I rubbed Ethan's head and left.

If we had been in a secluded place, I'd have had no problem breaking some of that dirtbag's limbs, but as we were on a busy street, I'd be arrested if I did something like that.

Looking around to see if there were people watching was a habit I picked up in my previous life, since at that time I was very used to fighting in the street. Breaking someone's legs wasn't something that happened very often, but I had done it once or twice.

"Can you teach me?" Ethan asked expectantly.

"Do you need to fight?" I asked while raising an eyebrow.

At my question, Ethan became silent and didn't know what to say until his little friend answered.

"Yes, there's a boy at our school who occasionally tries to pick fights with Ethan," she said, making Ethan look at her shocked, while turning to look at me worriedly.

-------- Ethan's Commentary --------

On the sofa, Ethan was scared as he looked at the camera.

"Shit, now that Isabella's told Noah, is he going to be disappointed in me?" He said a little sadly.

"The way he fought that bully looked so cool! I imagined myself punching Tony like that when he was fighting with me at school... It would be really cool to punch Tony like that!" he said excitedly, but soon became worried again, wondering how Noah would react to what Isabella had said.

-------- Commentary End --------

Seeing Ethan's concern, I laughed. "Don't worry, Buddy. If you want, I can teach you how to fight so that boy will never bother you at school again."

If our mother knew what I was trying to teach Ethan, she would probably freak out, as the mere thought of one of her children fighting at school was an abomination to her, but I knew that knowing how to fight was something that would do more good than harm for Ethan's future, so I was going to need to think of a way to deal with this problem in the future.

Walking home with excited children pretending to fight imaginary enemies, I couldn't hold in my anxiety and pulled out my cell phone to see how many views my song currently had. Like the YouTube of my previous world, MeTube also had an Analytics application where the channel owner could see the channel's more technical statistics and graphs.

Opening my Analytics app, I saw that my video already had 1,083 views, which was a great number, but the graph in front of me showed that the views the song was getting per minute were decreasing.

Looking for the reason, I saw that all the people who came to listen to the song came directly from the link I posted on Tweep or from the girl who posted it on InstaBram. No views had come from MeTube recommendations, since the site hadn't released the song yet.

Rather than being disappointed by this, I was actually very excited, since MeTube hadn't released the song yet, so when the site did, it would probably gain even more views, finally with the possibility of going viral!

Reading the comments, a smile appeared on my face.

[Listening to this song was like reliving a nightmare. It reminded me of the constant fights between my parents and the fear I felt every day at home. But at the same time, it gave me a sense of relief to know that other people have gone through similar situations and managed to move on].

[Crap... I can't stop crying... every lyric in this song is like a knife cutting through my eyelids and making me see things I couldn't see my girlfriend was doing to me...]

[Although it's got sad lyrics, I feel a bit bad for being happy to see that my family is very good to me and that I've never suffered anything like this, my condolences to those who suffer from it].

[How come no one is commenting on this singer's voice? Wow, what a beautiful voice! @BlackVelvet, what's your InstaBram? My dog wants to know...]

Everything was going well down to the last comment which made my self-esteem rise a little. I was so excited to see everything going up. The song was currently at 97% retention, meaning that at least 1,000 people had listened to the full song. Well, it could have also been that a bit fewer people than that had listened to the full song and some had listened to the song more than once, which was a great sign!

Of the almost 1,100 people who listened to the song, 198 had already subscribed to the channel, which was a very high number considering that people rarely tended to subscribe to a channel that they only saw a single video on.

The only slightly disappointing thing was that as the song was 3 minutes long and MeTube needed 4,000 hours of viewership to monetize the channel, I would need just over 80,000 views on the song to be able to make money from it. So I'd still need to keep drawing Furries to make money, but since my art sales were doing so well, this wasn't a problem.

When our car finally arrived at the place where the other children? were, Ethan and his little friend Isabella didn't want to try to interact with the other kids and went to play in the backyard, just the two of them.

I said goodbye to them and went into the house, as it was almost time to leave with my father.

"Hey, Champ. Shall we go and buy that workout gear?" My dad asked excitedly.

"Let's go!" I replied a little more excitedly.

"Be careful. Don't go too fast, Jonathan," my mother said worriedly, to which my father just nodded and took the car keys.

The family car was a Toyota Camry, which surprised me the first time I saw it, not because it was a brand of car I knew, but because of the family's financial condition. The car was a 2010 model, already a car with more than 10 years of use.

"This friend of mine said that his wife was fighting with him every week to get rid of his equipment, since he hasn't used any of it for over a year, so the price he's going to ask for is probably going to be very low." My father explained proudly, since it allowed him to help me. "He said it was a lot of equipment and that he spent over $500 when he bought it, but since we work together, I think I can get it from him in two installments of $150."

Hearing this made me feel a little bad, since despite our family's condition, my father was still willing to spend $300 to buy me workout equipment. Even if he couldn't pay the $300 outright, he would split it into two installments to make ends meet.

So I decided to tell him about my art.

"Dad, I don't think you'll have to pay for me..." I started to explain, until he interrupted me.

"Noah, don't worry about it, son. This little bit of money your father can afford," he said, trying to remain firm, "You can save the money from the sales of your comics in case you want to buy something else."

"No, dad, I don't think I've ever told you, but I've always had a hobby of drawing characters from the comics I read, and recently I posted a drawing on the internet. Someone came and asked me to draw their own character and paid me for it. Since then I've been receiving drawing requests every day and I even have a queue of people wanting drawings," I explained, leaving my father shocked.

"You mean you're making money by drawing characters for other people on the computer?" he asked incredulously.

"Yes, I only started this week, but a lot of people are liking the drawings," I explained with a little pride.

I took the puppet art I'd done for the cover of the song Numb on my cell phone and showed it to my dad, and he was shocked by the quality of it.

"Woah, that's amazing Noah! But still, don't worry. Save that money you're earning to buy something you want."

He tried to stick to buying the equipment for me.

Shaking my head, I knew that this would be a matter of pride for him, so I didn't insist any further, but I knew that he still didn't understand how much money I was making, so I thought of something.

"All right, Dad, but I want to help with the household bills too. How about I choose some bills to pay? The drawings make me a lot of money."

Surprised, my father took his mind off the traffic while he looked at me with a mixture of surprise and pride.

"All right Noah, in the glove compartment of the car there are some bills that I'm going to pay tomorrow. Pick one. I would recommend the gas bill, which is the lowest," he said with a big smile on his face.

Surprised, I opened the glove compartment and saw several pieces of paper with bills to pay. Leafing through the papers, I found a bill for $130 and I decided to pay it.

When my father saw that I had chosen the bill I had selected, he was surprised and told me, "Noah, that bill is too expensive. Pick a cheaper one; it's fine."

Laughing, I replied, "Dad, now I get $100 for every artwork I do, and I can do 1 or 2 artworks in a day, so you don't have to worry. I'd even like to pay more bills, but I don't have that much money on me right now since I just started this week."

Currently I only had $463 on me, so I couldn't afford more than that, but considering that if I did one artwork a day from Monday to Friday, that would be $2,000 a month, and if I did two artworks a day that would raise my income to $4,000 every month. Setting aside 20% of that to help with household expenses wouldn't be a sacrifice for me, but it would be a great help for my parents, and consequently for my siblings too.

And from the amazed and thrilled look on my father's face, I could see that it was all going to be worth it.

////NunuNote/////

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