Chapter Eleven - Candy

“I said I’ll answer it!” Emi’s voice echoed from inside the house as the door swung open to reveal the smiling, yukata-clad form of Ms. Harada.

“Greetings, Fujimura-san,” Ms. Harada bowed low and swept her arm to the side to indicate I was free to enter. As per usual her Yukata was impeccable, as was the dark hair with flecks of gray drawn on top of her head in an Icho-gaeshi and secured with floral Kanzashi.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Harada,” I bowed in return, beginning to take my shoes off.

“Ugh!” Emi pouted; cheeks puffed out in displeasure and arms crossed at the end of the hall. “I said I’d get it!”

“While I am here, I must perform my duties, ojou-sama,” Ms. Harada replied serenely.

“Don’t take your shoes off,” Emi stomped toward the door. “We are going shopping.”

“Oh. Ok,” I murmured, putting my shoes back on. I always felt like a child around Ms. Harada. She had an aura of serene authority, like a mother whose very patience and serenity left no doubt who was in charge.

“Are you certain you’ll be fine alone this evening?” Ms. Harada asked as Emi put her shoes on and grabbed her jacket from the closet near the door. “I don’t mind staying.”

“I’m an adult! I will be fine by myself!” Emi flapped her arms in frustration, certainly not acting like an adult.

“By law you are still a minor,” Ms. Harada pointed out.

“By law you’re…” Emi paused, plainly mentally flailing for some sort of biting comeback. “I’ll be fine! We’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“Then I will wish you a good evening and ask you to mind your parents’ instructions,” Ms. Harada bowed as Emi dragged me out of the house. “It was lovely to see you again, Fujimura-san.”

“Lovely to see you, Ms. Harada!” I shouted as Emi slammed the door behind us.

“You have no idea how glad I am you’re here,” Emi stamped her booted feet as she dragged me along the path leading to the front gate of her house.

“Trouble in Seto mansion?” I smirked at her.

“Yesss,” Emi hissed. “I wanted to make candy. I found a recipe for Jolly Ranchers and wanted to make them, but Ms. Harada has to stick her butt in everything I do.”

“She stuck her butt in your candy? Gross,” I empathized.

“’Remember when you burnt the candy last time?’” Emi wagged her finger whilst trying to emulate Ms. Harada. “One time! I burnt candy one time and all of a sudden, I’m a three-year-old who has to be supervised!”

“The volcano thing?” I asked. Emi had tried to make…something. To this day I wasn’t sure what, but it had turned out rather horrifying. The entire mass was black, roiling, and bubbling like a beast unleashed. In the end it had burnt itself onto the sides and bottom of the metal to the point the pot had to be thrown out.

“It was for science!” Emi protested. She had passed the entire episode off as her attempt to create a magma chamber for a school project, but Ms. Harada had seen through the ruse immediately. “I mean, in retrospect the two kilos of azuki beans may have been a miscalculation. What the hell does ‘sweeten to taste’ even mean? If they’re going to say things like that they need to be prepared for the consequences when someone likes it super sweet.”

“So she kicked you out of the kitchen, I assume?”

“No. She insisted she help me. I don’t want her help! I’m capable of doing things by myself, you know!”

“I know,” I chuckled to myself, Emi’s small face screwed up angrily, her fists clenched at her side. “You have pubic hair, now.”

“Exactly!” Emi eyes sparkled with pride, her fists unclenching. “So I don’t need her! I’ll go buy stuff and then later on we’ll all make candy, and it will turn out wonderfully and she’ll be sorry for ever doubting me!” Emi cackled maniacally, rubbing her hands together like a 100-yen novel villain.

“Fight the power!” I raised my fist in solidarity.

“And fight I shall!” Emi raised her own fist into the early evening sky defiantly. I hoped against hope Emi would forget about making candy. It could only end in tears and flame, I felt.

Emi and I walked down the aisles at the candy store. I marveled at the sheer quantity of candy she stuffed inside the basket held tightly in one thin arm, chattering all the while about the different candy we saw. The salient points of the chocolate, the consistency, the sweetness, tartness, aroma, after taste, chewiness, crunchiness, size, packaging; all were discussed in greater depth and insight than I even dreamed a human capable of. There were people in the world who were foodies. Then there was Emi, a true candy connoisseur. A candie, as it were.

“I don’t like the new packaging,” Emi scowled at the Twix bars she was shoveling into the basket at a prodigious pace. “Too much brown, not enough pink.” She shook her head sadly. “Do you know what brown says to me?”

“Chocolate?” I answered dutifully, my mind not on the marketing strategy behind candy bar wrappers.

“Poop,” Emi retorted, shaking the innocent chocolate-covered shortbread bar ruthlessly, plainly blaming it for its new look and same great taste. “Brown is the color of poop and should not be used to sell anything except fake poop.”

“But chocolate is brown,” I gently tried to steer her away from mentioning poop in a busy candy store.

“No, no, no,” Emi shook her head, waggling the package at me again. “The bars are pink. Brown shouldn’t even be on the packaging. It’s deceptive. Not to mention these two fools walking under the tree here.” She jabbed her finger at the larger package on the shelf with a couple walking hand in hand under shedding cherry trees. “It’s enforcing a hetero-normal stereotype than is harmful to real societal progress on recognizing differing points of view and disparate lifestyles.”

“How do you do so bad in Japanese?” I asked, truly bewildered. “Not to mention how in the hell did you get all that from a candy bar package?”

“Not to mention the guy looks like a complete tool,” Emi ignored me and stabbed her finger into the cartoon male’s face. “I hate you Sakura Twix guy.”

“What’d he do to you?” I actually felt kind of sorry for the cartoon guy given Emi’s sudden, irrational hatred of him.

“He exists; therefore, he is a legitimate target of derision and scorn,” Emi grabbed the package and dropped it into the basket to join the rest of the candy piled inside.

“I thought you hated him.”

“I do. Doesn’t mean I don’t like the candy. I’ll just burn his face off later with a lighter,” Emi grinned at me, and I was very glad to be her friend and not her enemy. “I think this is good! Let’s go!”

“Lead away!” I gestured toward the blonde gyaru-looking girl manning the front counter.

“So, when are you going to tell me?” Emi munched thoughtfully on a travel-sized candy bar as we made our way along the mostly deserted streets back toward her house. The wind blew cold and harsh and, though no snow fell from the sky, the clouds were dark and threatening.

“Tell you what?” I glanced over at her; the paper bag filled with candy weighing me down on the left side causing me to walk with a slight waddle.

“What’s on your mind,” Emi replied, sucking on the candy in her mouth before sticking her tongue out to reveal she’d sucked the chocolate off it, leaving only a damp barren cookie. Emi was the piranha of candy. She could skeletonize a Twix in less than 5 seconds.

“What makes you think something’s on my mind?” I muttered, trying to evade the question as well as I was able.

“Because I know much that is hidden,” Emi declared, slurping the candy back in her mouth and biting down with a vengeful crunch. “So, tell the Emonster.”

“Emonster?” I cocked an eyebrow bemusedly.

“It’s my new nickname. I just gave it to myself and…honestly, I’m not sold on it, yet so I figured I’d try it out for a bit. Tell me. Tell me and I’ll give you a big sloppy kiss.”

“What if I don’t want a big sloppy kiss?” I looked at the remnants of chocolate on her lips.

“Everyone does. Now share!”

“It’s just…I met Aria’s family at work this morning. Well, her uncle and aunt and cousin, anyway,” I corrected myself. I tried to run my hand through my hair before realizing I was simply patting myself on the hair with my cast and let it drop to my side.

“Uh-huh,” Emi skeletonized another candy, pocketing the wrapper. “Were they fuckholes? Shitholes? No, fuckholes works best.”

“No, no, nothing like that. They seemed nice and all, it’s just some stuff they said has me thinking,” I shook my head.

“Thinking of what?” Emi glanced at me with a look of concern and trepidation I hadn’t seen before.

“Just…stuff and things.” I shrugged.

“You do know who you’re dealing with, right?” Emi peered at me like a tv police detective preparing to tear apart a criminal in an interrogation. “You do know I will wring it out of you. I suggest you spill it now before I have to get tricky.”

“Well,” I giggled at her serious tone. “We can’t have you getting tricky.”

“No, indeed. Now tell your friend the Emonster what’s on your mind. Emonster…ehhh…not really liking it, yet.”

“There’s a lot about what Aria says and does that’s just…” I struggled to find the word I wanted to say without actually saying the word I wanted to say.

“Sus?” Emi cocked her head to one side. It was as good a word as any, I supposed.

“We’ll go with that.”

“We really should be going with the word you want,” Emi shook her head. “Say what you want to say.”

“Do you think Aria is cheating on me?” I asked after a moment’s pause. It seemed foolish to ask something like that after only dating someone for a month, but I was pretty sure there was no tried and true time limit on cheating. I wasn’t wise in the ways of these things, admittedly, but I was relatively certain you could call it cheating regardless of how long you’d been together. I mean, we had the rules in place, but rules only worked if both parties agreed and were actually following them. Emi stared at me for a long minute before sighing.

“I don’t know,” she finally replied, shaking her head. “You’re my best friend. You know that. I’ve heard rumors and stuff about her, of course. But I can’t separate those from that weird-ass agreement thing you two have as to what’s true and what isn’t.”

“Yeah,” I scowled. “That fucking thing. I hate it.”

“You told her you hated it, of course.” It was not a question, simply a matter of fact.

“Yeah, I did.”

“I think that should be a warning to you, Kasumin,” Emi was suddenly serious. What did she mean by that? I wondered. “If I hear anything concrete, I will tell you, because you deserve to know. But I think you should be careful.”

“With Aria?”

“With all of it,” Emi shook her head. “There’s a lot of moving parts in what you two have. Far more than I think are probably healthy for a relationship.” Moving parts? What did that mean? Emi was being surprisingly cryptic today. Or I was being extremely dense. “Not that I know, of course, having never been in a relationship before.”

“You were recently confessed,” I pointed out and Emi’s customary grin spread across her face, and she stripped and had another candy in her mouth in three seconds flat.

“Yes, indeed! I am Emi! Hear me roar!” She proclaimed, before curling her fingers and pawing at the air. “Nyah!”

“Oh!” I breathed. “Fierce indeed!”

“Hell, yes, I am! Now let’s get our party on!”