A few blocks away from my house, right by the intersection, there is a sweets shop. It’s a small cottage-house, with pink vaulted roof and pots of summer plants hanging by the porch; above, there is a carved wooden plaque, written there: “Yui’s Sweets”. If you go inside, all four walls are painted light pink, and there are giant-sized stickers of strawberries and candy canes on them. The three sides of the walls are packed with shelves, while the other side is used for a long cashier counter that lies athwart from corner to corner.

When I moved into the neighborhood when I was eight, it was already there, albeit the building looked a little duller and the walls were still white with no stickers. My mother and I went there on our first day. As we entered the shop, we were welcomed by towering shelves of jars of candies, pretty-looking cakes and pastries, and even flavored drinks and milk.

The owner greeted us. She was a Japanese woman in her early thirties. She said she had just moved into the neighborhood a year back, right from Japan, all due to her husband’s work. She was really fluent in our language, though. As Mother and she talked along and I clung onto Mother’s skirt, the kind owner introduced us to various kinds of sweets. Some of them were lovely, crafted traditional Japanese candies. The rest were the classic sweets: canes, jellies, bubblegum.

“My daughter is around your age,” she looked at me and said suddenly. “She likes making handmade candies. Won’t you love to meet her? She’s inside right now. Come, come.”

I glanced at Mother. She nodded.

We went upstairs and to a room where a little girl sat with her back on us, diligently rolling candy pastes and sprinkling sugar. When her mother called out to her, she turned her head, and frowned when she realized that she had visitors.

This is Yui. Her hair was short and dark, the same color of her huge eyes. There was a small mole above her lip. Naturally, she was cute, despite the slightly acerbic attitude. She said something to her mother in Japanese, maybe along the lines of who are these people?

Yui was tall and had a sour look on her face, so all I could do was to look down at my own feet and stay silent. Unexpectedly, Yui gave me her hand, and I felt that I would be more impolite than she was if I didn’t take it.

“Yui,” she said.

“March.”

“You new here?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let’s get along,” she shrugged. “Come over anytime you like. We can make sweets together.”

After that encounter, I began to see Yui almost every day. She taught me how to make her stuff, even if she couldn’t cope with me being awfully slow, and I couldn’t take her speedy explanations. At the end, all I did was watching her as she worked.

Perhaps it was all those attentive watching that got me into this state.

Yui enrolled into my junior high school, and still stayed after we graduated and continued our paths to senior high. For a few times our classes were separated, but on our last year, we became classmates. She is always so quiet and reserved, the ever-present sour look on her face never ceases to exist ever since her childhood.

Still, though, she’s a lovely person. Her looks have changed a bit since the first time I met her; her hair has now touched her shoulders, tied by a black hair-tie, which, for me, makes her look like a classic school delinquent often portrayed. And she kind of is one. She skips classes, secretly eats during lessons, swears like a sailor – at this point, everyone, teachers and peers alike, scowls at the sight of her.

On the other hand, I am one of those kids put into the ‘nerd’ class. I don’t know the laws of school-based nomenclature, but I know that I’ve been called names on my back, and ‘nerd’ is one of them.

The nerd and the delinquent, the perfect match made in the Heavens…if I should be honest, this really does sound like a novel-length fan-fiction, and its tags include childhood friends, one-sided pining, and slow-burn, except the burn is excruciatingly slow and unending that all of this might as well actually get burned into debris.

A sweets shop owner and the girl who scribbles stories about eyes as saccharine as cotton candies, lips as full as plums and as red as cherries – doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Yui invites me for a sleepover, once upon a time. She sits on her seat next to mine, immediately puts both of her legs up the desk, and tells me with her chin tilted, “Visit me tonight. You can sleep in my bedroom.”

“Oh,” I gape at her. Yui likes to speak in subtlety. She doesn’t say with words that I should stay over the night, but it’s more than obvious that her invitation suggests so. I lose words. “Sure.”

“Cool.”

She continues chewing her bubblegum, while humming Japanese Breakfast’s Boyish.

I can’t get you off my mind / I can’t get you off in general.

Yui says, “so I’ll also teach you how to make candies. For the sake of old times. It’s been years and years since you’ve been into my candy room. Hasn’t it?”

“Ah, but you do know that I can’t do it…”

“Do I care?” she blows the bubblegum. It pops, and she puts it back into her mouth with her tongue, before saying again, “You can just sit and watch.”

There is a blush of pink across Yui’s cheeks, but I barely notice. Maybe it’s her blush-on?

***

I arrive at Yui’s house, the sweets shop, at six in the evening. Yui’s mother, Mrs. Nakamura. She is informed about my stay-over and invites me in, guiding my way to the ‘candy room’, even though I've been there hundreds of times before. The path there is more familiar than my own heartbeat.

“Marchi,” Yui nods at me, voice stern and somehow shaky. Then she smiles. Yui doesn’t smile so often, and when she does, her smile is more acceptable to be called ‘sour’ rather than ‘sweet’. But for me, when Yui smiles, she looks like a little child. The child I knew…making candies by herself, and then together with me in this very room, never scolding me even as I always screwed up and made a huge mess.

“Yeah. What are we making today?”

“Sweetheart.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know, those heart-shaped candies with tiny words printed on them?”

“Oh. Oh, yes.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

I sit on a chair beside her. She starts to diligently craft the candy, starting from the base using this and that, ingredients which names I don’t even know. When she’s done with the dough, she uses heart-shaped cutters to cut hearts out, and then I watch as she writes something on it with a thin brush. Her eyes are only inches away from what she’s holding, and her hair shielding me from seeing what she’s writing.

She gives it to me. By instinct, I nearly pop it into my mouth.

“Stop!” she exclaims. Her eyebrows are furrowed, a dangerous, desperate expression across her face – a look that is definitely new for me to see from Yui. “Don’t – don’t eat it yet.”

“I’m sorry.”

I put the candy down on one of her clean bowls. It reads ‘I’.

“I?”

Yui doesn’t answer.

“You know, Yui…”

“Ssh. Keep it for later, Marchie.”

The second candy is finished as quickly as the first one. This time it’s the word ‘like’ is written there. I stay silent, because Yui doesn’t quite look like she wants me to be speaking my mind out loud. Deep within, I’m so, so confused. Answers are what I need at the moment; not agonizing silence.

The third candy is ‘you’.

After that, she stops her hands from crafting. She wipes her hands on the sides of her jeans; eyes fixed on me. Had she wanted me to say something, she could have just said it, or at least put on a smile instead of a bitter expression that hesitates me from talking.

“Uh, I take you want an opinion?” I ask. “Well, I’d say you should just write ‘I like you’ on one candy so that it’ll be much sweeter, not in taste, you know, but in the sense of…how do I say it – see, when someone receives a candy that just says ‘I’, that’d be weird, right?”

Yui sighs deeply. She looks at me as if I am the most witless person she knows, which is funny, because she probably forgets that we share the same brain cell together and ride the same crests and troughs of the same wavelength. “I swear, you are so dense.”

“Oh, sorry. I mean, you’re right, three candies are better than one, but—“

Another sigh.

“So, can I eat this? Usually you want me to be the taste-tester.”

“No,” she replies, voice stern and face even sterner. “I want you to accept it.”

I don’t know what Yui is up to. She’s speaking in broken riddles. What she wants exactly is what I need to find out by myself. I try to balance out all the possibilities in my head, but none of them sounds correct. I try, “so, you want me to bring these home?”

She takes a handful of her hair, obviously frustrated out of her common sense. “What do they say? What do the candies say?”

“Which one?”

“Three of them combined, what do they say?”

“Well, I’d need a calculator for that.”

“What the—why?”

I had wanted to tell her that I would need to use permutations to tell the possibilities of the combination, but I stop myself; Yui looks too scary to be handled right now. I’m not talking back on purpose; I’m merely trying to give myself the answer I want.

“Forget it,” I finally say. “Please tell me what you mean, in direct and easy words. You know I’m not the brightest.”

“Marchie,” she says, softly, surprisingly so. I’ve never heard that kind of tone from her, not ever, never. Yui touches the back of my hand. A gentle hold that catches me off-guard and embarrassed to no end. “What do the candies say, from the order I gave to you?”

“I like you.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“I still don’t understand the context, though.”

“It’s a confession,” Yui seems to have already given up with her self-frustration and facing my dimness, but the sudden switching to this alien, gentle demeanor is out of character. Meanwhile, I’m so damn in character that I still sit there unmoving, face red.

“So, what you were trying to say was that…you like me? And you were trying to court me through sweethearts?”

“Court you,” she laughs. “Yeah, more or less. I guess that’s the big point.”

What a mess, we are. Yui is quiet, I am quiet, the room is quiet and so is the world. To avoid an awkward staring contest, I avert my eyes from hers to the floor. Yui catches that, unfortunately, and says, “Don’t look down. Look at me.”

Slowly, I look at her. Her eyes are calm. “Okay.”

“If you can’t accept it, that’s also fine.”

“No, I do, ah—” words are difficult, cruel little things in a moment like this. I am far from eloquence and when things are like this, coherence itself is hard to find. “So, like, are we girlfriends now?”

“Sure.”

I eat one of her sweethearts into my mouth. It tastes like what a typical strawberry candy would do. My favorite. Yui always knows me best.

She continues her crafting, now with a smile on her face, a smile that doesn’t fade even as she hums another line from Boyish.

So here we are, we’re just two losers.

Previously published in Adore Art Magazine