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✧✧✧
It's pretty cool of his classmates to give him candies without having to dress-up for it — tucking them into his shoe locker, desk and bag, and leaving all but the echo of loafers before he can turn to give his thanks. A pinker, more convenient Halloween, Langa concludes, assessing the stash dumped over their dining table. Or maybe a heart-shaped Easter?
Regardless, he’ll share some with Reki who says he’s never gotten any chocolates, much less enough to fill a backpack and the spare duffel he uses for gym. Some will go to Joe and Cherry and the rest of them, and whatever’s leftover, he can leave for ADAM who seems like the type that’ll take anything from him just because he’s SNOW.
There are some brands he recognizes, but also a bunch that he doesn’t — and, Langa’s unsure if he should spoil dinner by taking a few bites out of each. It’d be good to see which are filled with nuts or caramel (good) and which are laced with horrible raisins (bad) before he starts — and he can’t foresee any consequences to eating a few dozen before Mom comes back.
She appears at the doorway before he can though, a clipped ‘okaeri!’ as she settles her jacket atop the coat rack.
“Good day today?”
“Yeah. Chocolates.”
One of her eyes opens and then the both of them, round with disbelief once she’s joined him at the dining table. Beneath her hands, the entire thing rattles and Langa almost asks her if she’s having a stroke.
“S-so… S-so many girlfriends,” she manages.
"Chocolates," he states, unsure if they're seeing the same thing.
"No. Langa. Honmei choco."
✧✧✧
It’s another cultural oddity that Langa’s yet to understand, his mother taking a sheet of printer paper and drawing out the hierarchy. He leans in, studying it with all the diligence of his child self, learning the differences between lions and tigers. The pen starts at the pyramid’s top, tapping the paper: honmei choco, surrounded by highlighted hearts. True feelings chocolate, in English, often homemade over store-bought, as an expression of devotion. Next, tomo choco. Twin stick figures, holding hands self-explanatory. And then at the bottom, giri choco . Obligation chocolate, surrounded by X’s. Chocolate for co-workers and acquaintances.
“Valentine’s day is a girl’s holiday,” she concludes. “White Day is when the boy answers”
“I see…” Langa raises his hand, but doesn’t wait to ask his question. “So, it’s like… the girl tells you her feelings, and then you have a month to answer?”
“...Well, yes.”
“Okay.
“And, if I have an answer now, can I give it tomorrow?”
Mom’s face goes completely white and her pencil drops in slow-motion. His head tilts, unable to make out whatever she’s telling Dad’s portrait in a panic.
Ah.
“No, Mom. It’s not that, I mean.
“I don’t really feel that way about any one from today — and, it’s kinda weird, just stringing someone along like that, you know? Waiting around, just for a guy to say ‘no.’”
“Oh.” All that blood returns to her face, those shoulders going from tense to completely laxed. His head goes the other way as she places a finger to his forehead. “I’ll pick-up something at the store, then!” Tap. “It’s proper form to return a gift, even if it’s just an obligation.” Tap tap.
“Tomorrow?”
“Langa.” The finger presses into his skull.
“Okay, fine. White Day.”
If it’d only been a day, Langa might’ve forgotten all about it. But, like the chunky potato stew he’d prepared that night for dinner, all the ingredients coagulate into something else altogether, given time to rest after a couple nights spent thinking about it.
Langa knows that Reki’s grown-up around all this stuff, so it’s probably important to him too. Unfair to have never gotten chocolate and doubly-unfair for his best friend to give these strangers presents, leaving him high and dry. These form his first set of thoughts.
His second is on the logistics, because.
What if it were a boy, wanting to express himself to another? Was there another color? Blue? Red? Or, would it just be rolled-up into White, because that’s too many days to remember when Mom’s already said that it’s a boy’s day anyways.
Too late to justify bothering her further, Langa flops himself onto bed and turns to the next best thing, typing in variations of “white day for men,” “choco for guys” and “honmei between two dudes” into his phone. Concluding on nothing, the search terms become just “recipes” and “chocolate” and “ beginner” with Langa scrolling his feed for glossy pictures of truffles and bonbons — what could be, if he just followed a bunch of directions. Fifteen minutes in though, and he’s come to realize that he actually doesn’t know what Reki likes to eat, revisiting all the flashbacks to school and A&W, and finding that he’s just been spacing-out, soon as he orders his own food.
Langa places the device over his forehead and then the pillow atop.
He really was hopeless, wasn’t he?
✧✧✧
“Take a picture. It'll last you longer.”
Langa blinks from their lunch spot, realizing he’s been staring this entire time. There’s no rhyme or reason to the pieces that Reki’s chosen to sample for himself, so Langa’s still at choco square one.
“Reki,” he says.
“...yes?”
“Which of these is the tastiest.”
“Weird question, dude.”
“No. I need to know.”
“Well. Okay.” Reki makes a cute face, wiggling his fingers over the pile of wrappers between them.
Langa leans forward, waiting on bated breath, foil and plastic of all colors, shining in the sun. He likes the idea of Reki liking gummy candies, happily chewing as he tells Langa all about a new rig that’s come in. But, he also likes him with a lollipop, hanging by his lip like a gangster’s cigarette. Or, maybe, Reki will choose the sour ones, as a show of virility, and then end-up as a rollie pollie, just for Langa to laugh and join him.
The box he lifts is neither of these, but better — and he thinks: yes, he would’ve liked to have taken that picture.
...
Off the high of learning something new about Reki, Langa places a fresh pack he’d bought from the conbini as reference, staring it down as any skater that deigns to challenge him down Crazy Rock. It’s a pink column, covered in koalas: the ones in the foreground, dressed as strawberries, the ones in the back, climbing a palm tree. Across the middle, the characters read Koala no Machi.
Koala's March.
He'd landed an ollie in two weeks and can cook a few good meals just fine. So, recreating a childhood snack in a month should be easy enough. Langa rolls his uniform sleeves up and pushes back his hair with a tie, taken from his mom’s side of the sink. From his hand, the hand mixer whirls impatiently, brandished as a weapon to see him through the path to true feelings chocolate.
✧✧✧
He’s never been more wrong in his entire life, even at school.
Unlike skating and cooking, where a combination of hubris and instinct can take the wheel, allowing him time to find his balance or feel things out, baking, apparently, requires precision. With so little opportunities to “make shit up,” he produces one fuck-up after the next, where the dough won’t rise enough to fill it with cream… or it crumbles altogether, either mid-bake or right after, just by the slightest touch of his hands. Chocolate, he learns, is his worst enemy, more formidable than anyone he’s ever faced-off at S, because if he doesn’t move fast enough or picks up the temperature too quickly, entire bowls of it will seize, becoming hard and unworkable, even when he tries holding a flame to it.
He’s on week three of baking and tempering hell when his mom gives a knock from the door frame, tissue in-hand to dab his face and the counter. This batch is no better than his first, and he dumps the entire thing into the trash, despair taking hold.
“Let me help you,” she says.
“...Mom…
“How long have you been watching?”
✧✧✧
Pâte à choux are far easier than filled cookies, she explains, turning down the oven to preheat. It’s all the same ingredients he’s picked up, except they all come together with the kind of ease he could have only dream of watching all those YouTube chefs — the strawberry pudding mix is folded neatly into the cream and milk in smooth, confident motions, covered with plastic and refrigerated to set for the next hour.
“Close,” she explains, patting it about the rim, “so a film doesn’t form on top.”
Langa nods, repeating her motion in his own bowl, just as dumbfounded as he’d been, watching Reki on that skateboard when he’d started out.
To know so many amazing, talented people; Langa thinks he must be the luckiest person in the world.
She explains each step as he follows after, bringing water and butter to a glistening boil, and then stirring in flour and salt until the mixture forms a ball. “You beat in the eggs one at a time,” she says, “Otherwise they’ll scramble.” He offers a fresh arm once she’s gotten things started, following the motion of her arm as she supervises. It’s thick and mushy as he moves his spoon through the dough, but it smells enough like a bakery that his soul lifts entirely.
By the end of it, the mixture is dropped in tablespoons onto a baking sheet, the oven humming as it waits for them.
“I didn’t know you could bake,” he says.
“Let’s just say that mom’s learned a thing or two, trying to impress him,” she laughs. “I’m really not that good.”
✧✧✧
Langa asks about that. Dad.
The picture she paints is stupid in its sentimentality, though he’d insisted that it really wasn’t. How she’d moved over to Canada during college and met him there, lost between classes. How she’d kicked herself for her timing, falling in love so close to Valentine’s day that she had no lead-up time to figure something out… Settling on sad, lumpy truffles and biting her own knuckle as he took the first piece.
“He said it was the best thing he'd ever eaten,” she sighs.
“It’s just like him.”
“It is, isn’t it? He asked if I’d had fun and I’d said ‘no…’ So, we spent the entire evening in my dorm, right up until it was.”
The memory warms them both alongside the oven’s heat, and Langa asks her more questions. Did Dad know how to bake too? Did he make anything for her? Was it good? And, Mom blinks, because it’s unexpected but also nice, sharing something precious and sweet. Stuff like that gets stale when you’ve put it away for too long.
“I figured he didn’t know anything, being in Canada and all. But, he’d asked around campus and put two and two together, and well. No.”
“Runs in the family.”
“Hasegawa-strong, right?”
Mom’s eyes are a little wet and shiny by the end of it, but she’s laughing and correcting his form as he readies himself to pipe the shells. When he’s good, she snips the corner of the ziplock bag. The cream is soft and fluffy, but flows quickly over the edges, with Langa too distracted by how perfect the color had come out.
“I think he would’ve really liked him. Reki, I mean.” Langa caps it anyways. It's no Koala no Machi, but he likes this even better.
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Hey, Mom?”
“Mm?”
“Thanks. For always helping me out.”
“Of course.
“Show him who’s a lucky guy.”
✧✧✧
Langa never figures out who exactly got him what because the month is a long time to hold information he knows isn’t important. Reki accompanies him as he passes the bags of marshmallows indiscriminately, a firm “thank you” punctuating each exchange. There’s no reason or time to really linger on anyone’s reactions either though he feels the air cool by at least 5 degrees as he exits each room.
“The last one’s on the roof? Like, where we eat… or…?”
He settles the box they’ve been using as a tray, giving a great stretch, now that they’ve reached the metaphorical peak of his journey. The sky is even wider and bluer today, the wind passing through his hair and then Reki’s.
“Yes.”
Langa takes the box from his bag and presents it forward.
“...Been wondering why your hands’ve been looking so fucked up lately.”
“Battle scars,” he states. “For you.”
The box lifts and a delayed realization comes over Reki’s face.
“Ah, jeez dude. I didn’t even get you anything.”
“You make me stuff all the time.”
“For fun!”
“Then, you gotta let me have fun, too! Reki.”
“F-fine!”
They’d picked the prettiest cream puffs to decorate, embedding confetti sprinkles and edible glitter around the fresh strawberries. When he’d asked his mother if they were honmei enough for Reki, she’d nodded, and said that it’d surely pierce his heart. Which is exactly how he reacts, clutching the chest of his hoodie. Langa takes his opportunity, leaning into Reki’s space.
“You don’t have to wait a month, though. To let me know if you accept.”
“I know that, stupid. I, yeah. I accept. Thank you. Langa.”
He takes Langa's hand as if it's the most obvious thing in the world, chapped lips pressed delicately over his knuckle band-aid. He feels the entire thing glow and Langa'd always known it was worth it — but, now he wishes there were more days, excuses, to make him other stuff too.
Their first White Day though, he just stares at his hand and then back over Reki, content to bask in his warmth on this cool, spring day.