'My Trip to America is not as Expected'
Chapter 13: Still, It Was Thanksgiving for Them
After a piss that felt like it had gone on for 480 days, I washed my hands and walked out of the bathroom, out of the bedroom, and into the kitchen area, where a vast array of smells penetrated my nostrils, and almost made me forget about my morning breath. Almost.
"Good morning, Hachiman. I'm glad to see you finally managed to find your way out of the bathroom."
I could always count on my girlfriend, Yukino Yukinoshita, to give me such encouraging words to start my day.
'My girlfriend, Yukino Yukinoshita.'
'Yukino Yukinoshita, the girlfriend of mine'
'Yukino Yukinoshita is my girlfriend'
For some reason, I felt the compulsion to keep repeating variations of this sentence in my head, to try and wrap my head around the meaning of it. It was as if I spent so much time in the bathroom, secluded away from the world, that I'd forgotten the basic facts of my own existence, and that I would need to learn it all again to keep the story straight.
"Ah, yeah. It was a rather long time, wasn't it? I must have drank too much last night."
"Oh? I don't remember there being alcoholic beverages, as much as perhaps you wished there was."
"I'm not talking about alcohol. Water, MAX Coffee, that type of deal. Since when have I been an alcoholic"
"Well you're clearly a man of many surprises, so I guess I just allowed myself to consider you in many forms. Even still, you spent a rather long amount of time in the bathroom. I don't mean to insert too much hyperbole, but it felt like 480 days passed since you've been in there."
"Huh. You don't say?"
"In reality, it was more like 15 minutes. Which is still rather unnatural, Hachiman, for just a pee break. I don't know how you could hold all that in, honestly. I guess I will have to hold off on buying some diapers for you, since you apparently have a bladder that extends to where your guts should have been."
"Oh God Yukino, I'm not ready for this right now. At least let me have breakfast first before we engage in our usual banter battles."
"What do you think I'm doing right now?"
She gestured towards what her hands were doing, and that was making breakfast. What kind of breakfast? I don't know. It was breakfast of some sort. A big breakfast.
"I think you mean what we're doing right now, Yuki-chan"
The interjection came from the other side of the kitchen, where Haruno Yukinoshita was also making breakfast.
"Good morning, Prince Charming" said she, as she approached, lips puckered to make her play.
Like hell I'd give her the chance.
I performed a magnificent sidestep, the precision of which came from years of avoiding the school hallway's minefield of potential social interactions. She cleanly missed, and, had she been a tenth lest coordinated, she'd have fallen face first onto the hot stove upon which Yukino was cooking, and the dating games Haruno played based off her beauty would have to be reworked a fair bit.
But today was not to be the day where Haruno Yukinoshita learned to transcend her reliance on physical appearance in order to find her new way in the world. She instead quickly regained her balance after the miss, and turned to face me.
"Oh Hachi-kun, how you can be so hurtful! How could you let your darling nee-san fall into risk of perhaps scalding her face on a hot stove?"
"Risk implies there is a potential negative that could come of such an outcome. I am having trouble seeing such a thing."
"Such abuse for a person who is cooking you breakfast, to begin the great Thanksgiving cookoff!"
"Thanksgiving? Cookoff?"
"Yes Hachi-kun, as I said yesterday, Yuki-chan and I are partaking in battle to win your heart with our cooking. You might have tried to skip this altogether with your strategy of staying in the bathroom for 480 days, but you failed, and it is still Thanksgiving!"
"I'm still not sure what exactly Thanksgiving is, though. What's the occasion, really?"
"Well," Yukino chimed in "it is an American holiday that celebrates the American accomplishment of colonists landing their boat on an interesting rock, which is pretty close to here, and managing to survive by eating some food with Native Americans, who, in the following 250 or so years, would have their land and livelihoods violently taken away by the descendants of those people they helped. Also, turkey is fetishized this time of year."
"Oh cool, so this is basically another excuse for Americans to gorge themselves with enough food as possible, right?"
"Pretty much, with the creeping commericialist undertones of Christmas hanging in the air."
So with that, I left Yukino and Haruno to their cooking. They finished breakfast, and I ate it. They cooked lunch. I ate. They cooked dinner. I ate. They made some dessert. I ate.
"So..." Yukino asked rather shyly "Whose food did you prefer?"
"Oh, uh..."
Nerves overcame me. For even in the time of the food being made and me eating it, I hadn't paid attention of what precisely had been made, much less who made them. All I knew was that they were meals, and they tasted good.
'Was there really anything to commend then if I can't even remember what was made? No... It was good, still. Maybe I'm just off my game. It could be the jetla-'
Suddenly, I slumped over onto the ground. The jetlag and the food coma must've hit me all at the same time. Clean knockout, and yet, saved by the bell from having to reply to a question of which I had no answer.
A/N: It's been a long wait, as you all can tell, for this one. Almost as if it's been 480 days. Sorry for horribly breaking my promises of speed, I'll make sure never to promise such things again, for good measure. Hopefully the next chapter won't be this short, but I hope you enjoyed this one.