"I can't believe it!" Leon exclaimed furiously for possibly the millionth time. "Greg said he never invited me, even though he asked me to come to his house for a playdate a week ago!"
Though he had absolutely no clue who this Greg boy was, or when he'd invited Leon to a playdate on New Year's Eve, Vicente nodded patiently as he did his holiday review. Leon and his friend had had a long, enraged phone call a while ago, which ended in his usually level-headed brother slamming the phone back on the receiver so hard that everyone in the apartment had heard it (even their parents, who had been engrossed in their own loud discussion — well, their argument — had popped their heads out of their room to check on Leon).
He paused for air, and Vicente took the chance to ask, "did your classmate say why you couldn't go to the playdate?"
"No!" And Leon was back to ranting. "Greg invited every boy in the class to go to his house, and it was going to be awesome. Did you know, he has a WHOLE bookshelf of comic books, and an X-Box, and a Nintendo DS. And now everyone's going to get to play with that stuff, and I won't."
It was certainly strange; why Leon, who'd always been popular despite, contrary to what happened in most books about school, being a good student and what most kids would call a "nerd", would get excluded from what seemed to be one of the biggest events in his second-grade school year. Vicente grabbed the ratty old comic book that Leon had clutched in his fist before it could crumple up even more. "Well, look on the bright side. Since you can't go to the playdate, at least you can spend time with us."
"That's not a bright side!"
"I'll remember that the next time you need help with your homework." Vicente held the comic book high above his head as Leon jumped for it. "And if you want your comic back, you can't try to destroy it."
"Why do you care, you don't read them!"
"Because," Vicente continued, standing on his bed and rising on tiptoes, "you only have five of these, and if you go on treating all your books like this, they'll turn into waste paper for Yao to wrap cabbage in. Can you imagine your comic books being used to wrap cabbage?" He added at the end, "and since we don't have pocket money, you won't be able to buy them back."
He jumped again for the comic book. "Gimme the book!"
Vicente jumped, too, keeping the comic away from Leon's hands by a hair. "Only if you'll be nice to it." The whole thing was petty, and, having turned ten just a few days ago, Vicente ought not to act like so, but he couldn't resist being silly.
"Just gimme the book, you dumb, stupid, heck-ing — "
The door swung open, and Yao stepped inside looking frazzled. "Jia Lin, Jia Long, can you help — "
He stared at the brothers, who froze. Vicente let go of the comic. It landed on Leon's head with a soft thwack.
"Jia Lin, Jia Long," Yao repeated, pretending he didn't see Leon flip Vicente an obscene hand gesture, "I'm making almond cookies. Can you help me?"
"Of course."
"No way."
Leon stared at Vicente as though he'd grown five heads. He stared back. "What, is this the first day you've known me?"
He jumped off the bed, careful not to accidentally step on Leon's comic, and followed Yao to the kitchen. An enormous bowl of almonds was sitting on the kitchen counter, as were a stick of butter and a bag of flour. Yao bent down to pull a strange contraption out of the drawer. It looked a little like a juicer, but with blades in place of the juicing tip.
"We don't have an actual food processor, so this will have to do." Yao opened up the top of the contraption and dropped a handful of almonds inside. "Pull the string on top, until the almonds inside are all ground up," he instructed.
He took the processor and tugged on the string, watching as the blades inside the container spun around and began to break up the almonds. Vicente pulled it again and again, listening to the bits of almonds clatter around. But soon his arm tired, and he switched to use his left instead. Next to him, Yao was chopping his own almonds into thin slices.
Yao unhooked the wok from its spot on the wall, and Vicente looked at him confusedly. Then he heated the wok up, poured the sliced almonds in, and Vicente understood.
In less than a minute, the kitchen was filled with the delightful scent of roasting almonds. It was even better than any of the other pastries he and Yao had made before. It lingered long after Yao turned the heat off the stove and mixed the almond slices with the flour, sugar and ground almonds, even as the two of them melted butter, measured water and slowly formed the dough.
"Father bought me a box of almond cookies once, when we lived in Macau." Yao pulled out half the dough from the bowl and began dividing them into smaller globs. "The bakery had put them in moulds, so they all had such pretty patterns on them. But we don't have them, so this is all we can do."
Vicente stared at the cookies, which were perfectly smooth and round but did look rather boring. Then he noticed the small canister of toothpicks at the corner of the countertop, shoved away to make room for their baking tray. "Brother, I have an idea."
"Hmm?"
Shocked that Yao would even consider what he thought of, he said tentatively, "what if we drew on the cookies with the toothpicks? Would that work?"
He was already reaching for the toothpicks.
"Now, why didn't I think of that?" Yao shook out two toothpicks and handed one to Vicente.
They drew patterns on the cookies; flowers on Vicente's and animals on Yao's. After every one of them were adorned in their artwork, they laid the cookies on a baking tray and placed in into the oven. But the moment Yao shut the oven door, he let out a small "ah!".
"What is it?" Vicente asked.
"I just thought that Ling would've loved to do that." Yao clapped his hand to his forehead. "Silly me, not asking her to come out and help."
"What are you making?"
Speak of the devil!
Ling emerged in the kitchen doorway, sniffing the air. "Something smells nice."
"We're making almond cookies." Yao hooked his thumb toward the oven. "They'll be done in fifteen minutes."
"Fifteen minutes is so long."
"It's not. You know, Mother once taught me how to make a stew that took six whole hours to cook."
Her eyes widened, and she didn't say anything more about how long it took for the cookies to bake.
The oven dinged a while later, and Yao slipped on oven mitts to pull the tray out. Then it took five more minutes of trying to extract each brittle, piping-hot cookie onto the cooling rack with chopsticks before Vicente gave up and decided to tip the entire tray, baking sheet and all, onto the cooling rack.
Half of their batch broke and ended up more crumbs than cookie, but the surviving cookies, with their hand-drawn patterns, didn't look too bad. Ling tried to take one cookie, with a turtle drawn on top, before Yao swatted her hand away. "Not now."
"But they look really good!"
"We can have them later, while we're counting down to the new year." Yao nudged Vicente's hand away next. "Until then, nobody can touch the cookies."
He pointed to Yao, pushing broken pieces of each cookie together to form a rough circle. "But you're touching them now."
"Now I'm not." Yao brushed his hand on his shirt and backed away from the tray. "Let's all keep away from the cookies until tonight, at eleven o'clock."
…
Predictably, by the time eleven at night came around and the family gathered in the living room to watch the new year's countdown, half the cookies were already gone. Ling, Leon and Vicente guiltily brushed cookie crumbs off their clothes while Yao glared with fake anger, before dissolving into laughter.
Everyone was in a good mood, even their parents, who'd actually bothered to make dinner, leaving Yao to teach the siblings how to play chess while they had worked in the kitchen. The TV blared a pop song that Leon hummed along to, the earlier fiasco about his playdate forgotten, and Vicente leaned across the coffee table to keep Ling's colour pencils from rolling off.
"It's the last minute of 2014, folks!" The commentator on TV announced. "Get ready for a countdown!"
Leon passed their mother a cookie. Yao checked the time on his cell phone, and Vicente looked at the clock. He ducked to make way for Leon, who poked Ling on the shoulder. "What's your new year's resolution?"
"My what?"
"It means what you want to do better in the new year," Yao supplied.
"Oh." Ling tapped her pencil against the coffee table in thought. "I think… I want to draw more pictures. And make more friends! Making friends would be nice." She leaned closer to Leon, lowering her voice and whispering, "and I want Mother and Father to stop shouting at each other."
He smiled sadly. "That's not really a resolution, but I want that too." Then Leon caught sight of the TV screen, and said, louder, "ten!"
The countdown was starting. Vicente continued the count, "nine."
"Eight!"
Yao jumped when he was elbowed, and missed his count. "Six," he made up for it.
"Five!"
"Four!"
To their surprise, their parents, who'd just started talking again, joined in to count. "Three!"
"Two!"
"One!"
Ling fell off the couch, Yao's cell phone somehow landed on their father's stomach and Vicente dodged Leon's waving arms as they all yelled, "HAPPY NEW YEAR!"
That night, after finishing off the entire tray of almond cookies and chasing each other around the living room, their parents practically had to drag them back to bed. And as his bedroom door swung shut and he saw Leon duck under the covers with a book and a flashlight, Vicente hoped that the new year would mean things would get better.