A/N: HI HI HI itsa mee, Cuppie! I'm back (kinda) but also reaaallllyyyyy unsure how often I can be updating because I really do want to write more of Flight School so as usual, I'll inform/update you Beans on Instagram (hisangelchip) three or four days before I update! Plus sneak peeks for you to peek for sneaks. 

Enjoy the chapter! I've served it in Leroy's POV, so. HEHE.

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[Leroy]

His pen was in my pocket and the idea of seeing him again after parting for five minutes was tempting. I'd felt it only after running into Raul at the nutrition building, where we had to scan our passes to head in and I'd reached into the pocket of my pants.

I was thinking about this; how far he'd gone and if catching him at lunch was the better idea, stuff like that, while Raul pointed out a couple of other people and waved them over. Then it was something about AB, which was apparently first period. So that gave me more reason to go after him to return his pen and let myself be late for class.

Raul was nice. He'd asked if I needed him to save me a seat when he saw me glancing down the other hallway to the main building. I told him that I'd just fill in anything else that was free and he said I was going to end up with one up front. I snorted because he had a point.

But I turned and started down the way we came anyway, taking a left for the shortcut to the first-year lockers. It wasn't hard to spot him; just, surprising since he had barely five minutes till the bell and he was talking to someone. I could tell from the way he had his back turned my way, and from the silhouette of someone else he was facing. He was the kind of person who would arrive and be seated fifteen minutes before the start of class. This was off.

I neared them and because whoever he was talking to had their face turned my way, I could see who they were. Chen spotted me first. He was looking away by the time I registered who he was and, deliberate or not, continued the conversation with a smile that was dangerous.

I wasn't too happy about that, but it wasn't like a rule or anything to not speak to anyone else. That would be messed up. I mean, I get where they're coming from, but—okay he's moving closer.

They were closing the distance between them like there was some secret to share, ten feet in front of me, and I felt an odd snapping of something inside. Chen was staring at his face and I followed the signs, checking his ears and noticing that he'd removed his glasses for some reason.

The next thing I did wasn't exactly an idea; or a planned sequence or anything like that. It was instinct and it came without reason. I was right up behind him without knowing I was, with a hand over his eyes and feeling the tickle, the brushing of his lashes against my fingers as he blinked.

He had been saying something to Chen whilst wiping his glasses and froze the moment he felt my touch. But as quickly as he'd reacted to that, his shoulders relaxed after a second and he seemed to ease into my hand.

"I can tell it's you, Leroy."

Just that would have been enough to surprise me (apart from the other, uh, more illegal things that it did) but he had to go on and explain how he knew this—something he always did, anyway—and fuck me over. It was very cute.

"Your hands aren't that similar to everyone else's and it doesn't help that you made me sweet potato balls this morning either. You do know that your hands are warmer than an average human being's, right? This game doesn't work. But I'd be surprised if you knew that since, well, it wasn't like you had much self-awareness to begin with."

Initially, I'd done this to... I don't know, on instinct but thinking back, a couple more reasons surface and it somehow includes being annoyed the someone else got to see him without glasses even though it wasn't like he'd lost them or anything, so. Might have been why I went for his eyes, but.

The point was: he had made my point for me. Aside from the fact that he'd instantly flipped my 'off' switch the other way or fuelled my flames with his words, he'd done the double deed of surprising Chen as much as he'd surprised me. I'd watched the latter's eyes grow wide at every additional word and, after he'd finished, turn to me with a blink.

I was thinking of a reason for him resting his gaze on me when I realized that I had been smirking. And my mind, so clearly fucked up by the insanely cute things said by the one in my arms, had to act on its own—holding Chen's gaze and mouthing the first word that came to mind.

*

It took Chen another five minutes of repeatedly insisting that they set a date for coffee in front of my face before he finally decided to leave at the bell. Whether or not he actually got my cue or had genuinely planned on leaving asap instead of walking the irresistible being in front of us to class, I didn't know or care.

"I suppose you thought you'd seized the perfect opportunity to embarrass me in front of the school's number two, but there you have it—you thought wrong," he said only after spending a moment being startled by the bell, turning to his locker and fumbling with the lock.

"It backfired," I was laughing, leaning against the locker beside his. "Didn't know you could be so cute. I was embarrassed."

He had the door of his locker opened in my face, blocking my vision from whatever it was he had to be taking with him, when I noticed the pen, pencil marks and scratches that were all over it. He couldn't have done all that. They looked almost like letters... and pieced together—

"Here," he closed his locker and there was a stack of papers in my face, bound together by a string. His expression told me that he clearly hadn't heard what I'd just said. "My notes from two years ago in high school. I brought it with me some time last week but I kept forgetting to bring it to our tuition sessions, so. I hope you find them useful and, um, feel free to clarify terms that you don't understand. Oh! And you can keep the entire thing or share it with your friends. It's up to you."

I held out his pen, somewhat in exchange for his notes before realizing that they were all tabbed and categorized by topic. "And let them in on my secret? No thanks..."

He gave a pointed look. "So I'm a secret now? How reassuring."

"You go around giving everyone a map to your treasure?" I shot back one of my own and he appeared slightly fazed, blinking twice. As usual, I hadn't paused to think about words until I said them and as stupidly infatuated I'd sounded back there, he went right on to assume that I was referring his notes.

"Well I, um... you're—the notes? Yes, well... I can see how people might feel about that, I suppose."

Had we not been speeding down the hallway (only because the one beside me wasn't actually planning to be late for class), I'd have given his forehead the usual. My next thought was to ask what he and Chen had been talking about but respecting his personal space came before whatever it is I wanted, so I did not. Still, he seemed to have read my mind.

"So, um. Last night... remember what I said about Layla Tenner? Chen's been asking around, too. He hasn't seen her... which means there wouldn't be anything on your chat group either and I'm worried."

"That's why he asked you out for coffee?" I frowned, unsure.

"Of course," he blinked behind his glasses, peering up. "Why else would he want to speak to me? We practically have nothing in common and maybe he hasn't thought of raising this to Keith yet, so a mere member of the press would have sufficed. Plus, I did tell him I'd started some investigative journalism on the issue. That might have piqued his interest."

I said the thing that came to my head. "I'm interested too, so why don't you guys talk over coffee at my workplace?"

He bought it. "Oh! That's an idea. The second floor's always nice and quiet too—"

"No, the first floor's better. It... has... a view," I wasn't even lying by this point. It didn't help that he was the kind to believe everything I said. "And someone comes by for coffee refills every thirty minutes."

His face was priceless. "What! You—you never told me there were free refills for coffee. I would have gone for that instead of tea. Alright, this is me," we stopped outside some seminar room for culinary journalism and he turned to wave. "See you, um... sometime. Soon. I guess. Um, alright goodbye."

I watched him knock on the door like the polite and well-mannered student he was, entering the class and closing the door quietly behind him.

The time was five to eight. And already, I needed lunchtime to be in the next couple of minutes so that I had some kind of reason to see him again but yeah. Impossible case. So I got going. Needless to say, I took the longer route and ended up at the lecture theatre only fifteen minutes later.

Heading through the door on the top-most floor of the room, I got the usual turning of heads and stare-thing that people tended to do. Only, it's about a hundred pairs of eyes this time since AB was core and required one of the bigger lecture theatres. Naturally, class was already ongoing and Prof Qin was not happy. But he never really was when it came to me, so.

"—correlation. And can the perpetually-late Mr. Cox, Mr. Leroy Cox, tell us what the relationship between a student's late minutes and their AB grade is? The data set is projected right on the screen." He pointed at something.

So I had been in the middle of going down the stairs when he called me out, quietly walking and minding my own business, already heading to the closest available seat. He wasn't going to miss every opportunity to say my name. And technically, I was the one enabling him.

Either way, people were whispering and giggling, craning their heads for a better look but honestly, there was nothing to look at. I stopped and frowned at whatever he was pointing at; weird fucking dots on the projector screen with some line in the middle of it and two more lines that made it look like a graph.

Qin was back at it before I had time to think. "As expected, a latecomer would not know the relationship between a student's late minutes and their AB grade since if they do, they wouldn't be—"

"It's a strong negative correlation," I told him. Right across the hall.

People shut themselves up on cue and I watched the professor's face crumble for a bit, like he was clearly offended but trying not to show it since correct answers seemed to him like cheating students more than students who actually know their stuff. Which was exactly what my answer was, by the way. Correct.

For some reason, people were clapping. So I moved to the seat I had been eyeing a minute ago and dropped my bag on it. The guy beside me had his mouth wide open. "Thought you were dead! How did you know the answer? He barely started the topic fifteen minutes ago."

I wasn't going to tell him that I'd spent the last fifteen minutes walking from seminar room three to the lecture theatre admiring someone's handwriting about the Pearson correlation coefficient, least squares regression analysis, and diagrams filled with fucking dots.

*

So naturally, I ended up sleeping all throughout the rest of the lecture only to have Qin call me out five minutes before the bell and swear that I was never going to pass the module with the zero class participation score he was going to give me. I didn't know what to say. I had been expecting a zero in every other grade component except class participation.

"You're so freaking bad at staying awake in his class," Rosi was waiting for me at the door after the two-hour lecture, driving Raul away after he couldn't stop laughing at me. We had five minutes to get to the next kitchen for ICT practical. "He was so pissed when you knew the answer, holy shit. It's first period, yeah, but like, can't you do something about keeping your eyes open?"

"Mmn." I wasn't awake yet. She rolled her eyes. "I was up last night. Doing... something."

"Wow, okay, way to end a friendly conversation because I'm ending it now," she threw her hands into the air. "Too much information."

"You just need a bath," I told her. "Hey, is lunch—ah fuck." I'd forgotten about line production duty and production meant that I wouldn't even be up front serving food, which gives me no chance of seeing him for maybe the rest of the day.

Not after school too, since I'd planned on shopping for his birthday present. And that was another problem unsolved; I had no clue what to get him. ICT was kind of brainless with individual assignments featuring brainless shit like kofta spiced meatballs so I ended up racking my brains for ideas that weren't just books or stationary. After class, I searched up Si Yin's number in the group chat and sent her a straightforward text before heading to the student commons for prep work.

It was starting to get cold outside. And because the staff's entrance could only be accessed through the back of the building from the loading bay, I had to walk an extra two hundred feet with the wind in my face. Right outside the door was the sign-in sheet and the lunch menu for today.

HIGH VOLUME PRODUCTION KITCHEN: THE LINE

HEALTH TUESDAY

Starter Head: Leroy Jeremy Cox (2A)

Assistants: Jesse Ernest Meyers, Jingrui Li (1B)

STARTER: SOUP

FRENCH ONION

CREAM OF PUMPKIN

COQ AU VIN

It being health Tuesday wasn't exactly the problem; it was the fact that I had to handle a bunch of kids who may not know what they were doing. A month into high school and they get first years on the line? They'd either die from the pressure or from the number of fingers they cut off by the end of the two hours.

All I had to do last year was mind my own business and complete the tasks I was told to do but having high expectations wasn't going to do my current situation any good. Either way, I had to make do.

I checked the time above the lockers. Two hours from now meant that I had to get started on the coq au vin or it wouldn't get to the line on time. Hit the fridge first and get out the marinade. The prep group last night would have done it. Then drain the marinade, get started on the beef stock, leave onions and pumpkin to the kids—

"Cox?"

I was in the middle of changing into my whites and mapping out when someone else came in. He looked familiar enough, but all I really knew was that we shared a common last name and people used to get us mixed up. "Hey."

"You on entrée too?" He started to undress.

"No I'm on soup." The list is there for a reason. Read it. I was almost done.

"Wait," he was holding back a laugh. "The one with the first years? I passed Chef Kirov briefing them out in the back. None of them looked like they understood a freaking word!"

"Thanks for the warning," I told him, and didn't see any point in continuing small talk so I left the room after a nod in his direction. "See ya."

I stopped by the freezer pantry for the marinade and took that to the soup station, checking the rest of the ingredients on a list they'd provided for heads. Boxes of onions and pumpkin took up most of the space, leaving the rest of the ingredients in a final box separated by containers.

Other students on duty started to filter in. There was Jungwoo, Equestrian's vice-captain. He was apparently heading for entrée.

"Thanks again for giving the briefing yesterday afternoon... it was super last-minute but you saved our asses thank god."

I told him it was fine. "Just don't do it again. I was busy."

"Busy with what?" His laughter was carefree, the way he'd always been. "First day back from SOY and already you had assignments to do?"

I didn't see a point in lying. "Busy flirting."

He nearly doubled over. From laughter or embarrassment, I couldn't tell. I was draining the marinade. "Who—what? You're kidding, right? This is one of your straight-faced teasing. Forget it. I can never tell. So... but who? I don't care if you're lying."

The kitchen doors opened at the exact time he decided to end his sentence. Blank faces filtered in, dragging their feet and shuffling about. An instructor came in after them. He would be the one in charge of the overall production kitchen for the week, ensuring the smooth running of the line.

"Stop whatever you're doing, I need your attention for five seconds." He pulled out a list while everyone else in the kitchen turned reluctantly. "Your assistants for today. You two—salad. Killiney, raise you hand. You two—grain. Yeah, there. You two—soup. Yes, with him. Heads, you know what to do. Get started. Go! Don't just stand there, I still have the dishwasher to brief."

It was part of the job to give the kids something brainless like knife work or de-seeding, anything close to prep and had nothing to do with flavours. As heads, we were supposed to advise and guide. Which, in the kitchen, really meant bossing people around.

"Slice the onions. Thin. Halved." I looked at one of them, making my instructions as short and concise as possible. The box was right in front of him, which meant that no further words were required. I turned to the other one.

"Pumpkins. Cut, peel, deseed. Can you do that?" I wasn't sure if they'd taught them how to deseed a pumpkin in the middle school division but the technique was easy enough that I didn't think it would require actual training to execute. Still, checking with the person doing it was the safer option. He gave a vague answer.

I don't like vague answers.

"Maybe. What's the cut?"

"Diced."

"Okay then."

I frowned. "Is that a yes or a no?"

"I mean, I'll try I guess," he scoffed, shrugging. I checked his breast pocket. No name tag.

Harping over incompetency was the worst way any chef could spend his time so I moved on, setting a timer for the marinade and getting started on the rest of the ingredient prep for the other soups. On one side was the carrots and potatoes for the pumpkin recipe, and on the other was garlic and beef stock which I'd yet to heat. That had to go first. And then peeling, roughly chopping the carrots and potatoes. Thirty each under five minutes.

It would have sounded impossible, especially for the untrained. I wasn't always like this; I wasn't born with a knife in my hands. Someone put it there. When I was four. And a spatula. And a frying pan or a wok.

So while everyone else had their fun in school, playing ball on a field, running on a track, swimming in a pool, I had a kitchen. The substitute of a sandbox. The spatula was my spade; the skillet, my bucket.

Home school isn't for the weak—or at least my understanding of home school isn't. Peeling and dicing up thirty potatoes under five minutes was more than basic. 'Do it everyday and you'll never need to remember how you did it.'

A knife he wanted to sharpen. Ten years of sharpening, he's never thought how dull it'd made the knife look. Dull and not a spark underneath the light.

"Done?"

I set the ingredients aside, chopped and ready for the pan, checking in on the kids. Over the past couple of minutes, I'd glanced over once or twice but generally left them alone to do their thing. After all, it was just onions and pumpkins they were doing.

Turns out I was overestimating their abilities. The one doing the pumpkins wasn't even at his station and onions had barely chopped up one-fifty of his box. I couldn't tell. It looked like he hadn't touched it at all.

"Where's your friend?"

"Uh," his hands paused from cutting, looking up with a gaze that was all over the place and I could see why. Across the tabletop were eight different kitchen knives, all laid out in the open and over three cutting boards of different sizes and material. He couldn't even give an appropriate response. "I think maybe he's gone to the toilet or something."

I nearly laughed in his face. All this while, I'd thought it was common sense to know that the kitchen wasn't a place you could enter and leave as many times as you liked. There just wasn't the luxury of time and not to mention, hygiene. Do everything before, not while you're cooking.

"Your culinary technique instructor. Who is it," I wasn't going to stand around, waiting for some first-year to show up and finish the pumpkins I needed in less than ten minutes, so. I took over.

"Uhh... Lindy."

"Lindy never taught you guys how to cut onions?" I said on purpose, keeping my eyes on the cutting board while speaking. "You don't need eight knives. Or three cutting boards."

"Oh, uh," the guy dismissed my comment with a wave. "I was just trying out to see which of them worked best with onions."

What the fuck was this kid serious? I was feeling genuinely amazed. "And your safety instructor never taught you which one's for which? Do you even attend your classes?" I could barely hold it in.

He ended up being mildly offended. "Yeah sure but what's the problem with using two to three more knives? There's enough to go around."

I didn't bother hiding my frustration. "Every station has their own equipment. This is covered in safety," I snorted, trying to be patient. This was why I couldn't stand talking to idiots. "And you didn't just use two to three knives, it's eight on your counter. If someone else needs them now, you're giving unnecessary work to the dishwasher and wasting time." Don't curse don't curse don't fucking curse you barely met him fifteen minutes ago. "And keeping your station neat is basic shit. Common sense."

Well if only your room was as clean as your station, a familiar voice at the back of my mind lectured and it even sounded bespectacled. Great, now he's a coping mechanism on my shoulder, participating in everything that I did as though having him on my mind wasn't already enough.

"Okay, okay. I'll go bring these to the back." The guy finally gives in after hearing my warning for the third time. Just when I thought he could be left alone for the next five minutes, he proceeded to do the stupidest thing anyone could possibly do after a safety warning.

In a hurry, he gathered all eight knives in his hands and held them away from himself, pointed at me. All eight looked like they were about to fall from his hands and slice his toes off clean.

"No you fucking idiot—" I held back, realizing that I'd nearly raised my voice at a kid. Then I breathed and told him, very slowly, to put the knives down. "I said, put them down before you drop them on your feet."

He put them down.

"Now, cut your onions," I went on at the slowest speed possible. "Because if I don't have them in the next ten minutes, your friends out there will be having the shittiest onion soup they've ever had. You got that?" I lodged the tip of my knife in the cutting board where it stood firmly, done with the pumpkins.

With little time left on the clock and some precious minutes wasted on talking, I multi-tasked the rest of the prep whilst getting started on the coq au vin and pumpkin soup. Also dicing up half of the onions within the time an idiot took to get ten of them done. Halfway through, I'd glanced at the label of the bottle of wine they'd put out and cursed. It was a dessert wine.

The kitchen was heating up with more than a dozen people in a rush and the noise was something that everyone was talking over, calling out time and instructions. I shouted at the assistant to run for another bottle so that I could stay and start on the French onion but when I turned at the lack of a response, I saw that both were gone.

"Fucking idiots." I went to get it myself.

====================

[Vanilla]

To think a culinary school decked with luxurious facilities and modern architecture and design believed in hand washing trays and mixing bowls—it all felt rather offensive. Granted, knives couldn't exactly be put in dishwashers and immediate requests for trays and other utensils would have been easily solved by having a human on standby since, well, no one was going to wait for the washer to beep after fifteen minutes when everything came in bit by bit and not batch by batch.

Brainless activities like dish washing wouldn't have been so bad if all the taps in the room, handles turned in the direction of the red dot, hadn't the bite of January flowing from its head.

There had to be something wrong with the water heaters back here and the amount of dishes that had to be washed did not exactly allow me the luxury of leaving my station to check the switches at the operating panel two rooms down. And to say that the water flowing out of this tap had the ability to solidify upon landing on my hands was a near exaggeration of the truth.

Fifteen minutes into dishwashing duty, I could no longer feel the fingers attached to my palms; whether they were still or moving made no difference. There was absolutely nothing to be felt. Somewhere along the way, I'd managed to slip on a pair of rubber gloves I'd found in one of the cabinets, but the option only seemed to make it worse. They were three to four sizes too big and a perfect way for the freezing tap water to seep in from the opening, perpetually soaking my fingers in an icy coldness.

I was at a point whereby the instinct to brace myself every single time I had to stick my hands under running water to rinse a tray could not be controlled. Shivering was the next thing that would occur and it did so despite mentally preparing my physical self.

Most importantly, these first-world problems of mine could have mostly been solved by some pre-emptive warning, in which would have given me time to bring a pair of rubber gloves in my size.

It was just yesterday that I'd been assigned to gardening duty for the week. A classmate of mine, however, had come up to me this morning after first period, requesting for a private swap. The reason she'd provided was that her club had decided to hold an urgent meeting over lunch, which meant that she could not be in the kitchen washing dishes and had to replace her duty with something that would commence only after school had ended. Naturally, I couldn't bring myself to turn her down and had agreed to the swap... which ultimately meant that I'd brought this upon myself.

"Hey."

I had been in the middle of washing up three mixing bowls as per the salad team's request when Li came through the doors with a couple more trays stacked on top one another. He crossed the room and slid them onto the counter by my right before heading off to the door on the other side. The ingredient pantry.

"Hello Li. These need to be...?" It was his fourth time stopping by. Earlier on, it had been cutting boards and knives. "Oh, um—"

"Yeah. A-sap," he said, appearing fairly rushed with a hand on the door to the pantry.

Naturally, I felt immensely apologetic for disrupting his flow by calling out to him. "Definitely. Um, oh could you... sorry," his brows furrowed when I stopped him and he seemed (reasonably so) annoyed. "Do you think you could maybe check if the water heater's turned on for the taps in this room? They might have tripped. The switch is in the operating panel down—"

"Yeah sure," Li acknowledged faster than I could blink, already past the doorway with his voice fading behind the swinging doors. "See ya."

"Thank you!" I struggled to call after him over my shoulder, forgetting about the running water. Distracted, I'd leaned a little to far into the sink and allowed the running tap to instantly fill my gloves with arctic liquid that had me sent into an unholy fit of shivers.

*

It had been the longest fifteen minutes I'd ever had the privilege of experiencing (since, well, it must necessarily mean that I was a sheltered, spoiled little child) after Li's disappearance into the ingredient pantry since every second under the tap felt like an eternity of waiting for it to start magically spewing out warm, heated water. This never seemed to happen.

After handling the immediate requests of the inner kitchen and washing up every tray, dish, mixing bowl and knife they'd sent in, I stumbled upon the luxurious opportunity of a pause. And with everything on the list figuratively checked, the temptation of going two doors down and paying the operating panel a visit seized the forefront of my thoughts.

Surveying the rest of the counter and glancing over my shoulder to confirm that everything was in order, I hurriedly made my way past several swinging doors and two rooms later, found the red border box that I'd recalled passing on the brief tour given by Chef Kirov earlier on. After which, we'd been dropped off at our stations and left to fend for ourselves which, um, wasn't a problem, I guess.

Giving the rows of switches a quick scan, I quickly spotted one that had the small light above it turned off. It was under the section labelled 'heating' and had a code number printed underneath the switch. Since it was the only one without a light, I made a reasonable deduction of its function and turned it on, hoping to get back to the dishwashing station as soon as possible.

"What are you doing?"

I'd barely made it past the holding room connected to the loading bay, just a door away from the washing area, when an instructor in her whites emerged from the exit of the loading bay and, well, stopped me in my tracks. Startled, I couldn't think of anything else to say except the truth.

"Um, sorry ma'am I was just, in the... just turning on the water heater for the dishwashing room because—"

"Sorry love but you've got to be a better liar if you're thinking about slacking off," she had a clipboard in her arms and a smile on her lips that did not reflect the look in her eyes. "I run this kitchen every day. First person in, last person to leave, so I'm sure the water heater's turned on in every room because I do the switches myself. Any other excuses? Or should I be reporting this to your instructor-in-charge?"