Ever since he was a little kid, Eijun's mother always told him to stay away from pumpkin and that it would make him sick if he ate them.
At first, he thought nothing special of it, figuring it was just a fact every mother told their children. It wasn't like it was all that common of a food item or ingredient where he was from.
Sure, there were some people who used pumpkins as a decoration here or there for Halloween. But it had never occurred to him that real pumpkins were edible. He thought they were just one of those… decorative vegetables, and that was the reason they didn't grow them on the farm. It only made sense to think that eating them would make him sick.
Then, one day in October of his freshman year of highschool, Chris had come back from his parent's house one weekend with a tub full of some Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Cookies his mother had made.
"Oh! I was wondering when you were going to bring these in!" Jun yelled out as he saw the tub in Chris's hands.
Chris passed the cookies to Jun, who opened it up greedily and started eating one. Then as he turned around, he saw Eijun standing behind him. "Sawamura!" He greeted his underclassman. "Have you had one of these? Take one," Jun said as he pushed the tub toward Eijun.
Eijun looked down at the tub in Jun's hands. There were some type of cookies, with obvious chocolate chips in them, but were they orange? "What are these?" Eijun asked.
"Chris's mom's Pumpkin Chocolate chip cookies," Jun answered, again pushing them closer to Eijun, asking him to take one.
"Pumpkin?" Eijun repeated, questioning, his eyebrows furrowing.
"Yes, Sawamura," Tetsuya nodded, his face serious. "It's apparently a really popular flavor in the US during this time of year, Chris's mother loves it, so she always makes these cookies."
"You should try one, Sawamura!" Jun said as he pushed the tin into Eijun's chest.
He looked down in the tin, the cookies did look good, like little chocolate chip cookies with an orange tint to the cookie part.
He picked one up and slowly brought it to his mouth. That was when his mind flashed back to a memory of when he was a young child. He didn't really know the context of it, but he could clearly remember his mother telling him not to go eating pumpkin.
He brought it away from him. "But aren't pumpkins inedible?" Eijun asked his senpai.
"Huh?" Jun asked. "What are you talking about?"
Eijun looked down at the cookie in his hand, studying it. "My mom always said that pumpkins are inedible," he explained.
Jun paused in thought. "Well… maybe raw pumpkins, but once you bake them into stuff it's fine… I think."
Eijun thought that explanation over. He guessed that made sense, and the cookies sure did look edible, everyone was eating them.
He shrugged, bringing the cookie back up to his mouth and taking a bite out of it, savoring the taste as he chewed it. His senpai were right, it was delicious.
As they returned to the card game, Eijun felt a strange feeling start up in his chest. He couldn't describe it really, just that it didn't feel quite right. It wasn't anything that was hard to ignore though, so that's what he did, ignored it and returned to the game.
The weird feeling remained though, in fact, it was starting to grow uncomfortable now. A couple minutes later and the feeling in his chest started growing up his neck.
"You guys," he said, a little dazed as he rubbed a spot on his chest. "I don't feel so good."
Haruichi looked over at his friend. Eijun didn't look good at all. Overall he looked more pale, but his nose and lips were a bright shade of pink. In fact, they looked like they were swelling up.
"It's- It's getting hard to breathe," Eijun said, well, more like wheezed. That was definitely what Eijun was doing right now, Haruichi noted. He was barely breathing.
"Hey!" someone yelled out. "Someone go get one of the adults, I think he's having an allergy attack!"
It was getting harder for Eijun to breathe, it felt like his throat was closing up, and his face was starting to feel itchy. He reached a hand up to scratch his face, but someone took it and moved his arms away.
About an hour later, Eijun found himself in an emergency room, along with Takashima-sensei, and his roommate, Kuramochi. Luckily, or as the doctor claimed, Eijun had a 'light' allergy attack.
Eijun wouldn't have called that experience lucky.
"Do you recall having any foods with new ingredients today?" the doctor asked Eijun.
"Umm…" Eijun thought that question over, running through his mind everything that he had eaten that day. Oh! "Chris-senpai's pumpkin cookies!" Eijun recalled.
"Pumpkin cookies?" At Eijun's nod, the doctor wrote something down in his notebook. "Have you ever been tested for an allergy to pumpkin?" the doctor asked as he looked through his notes.
"Um…" Eijun took a second to think it over. Had he? Was that why his mother told him multiple times not to eat pumpkin? Either way… "I don't think so," Eijun answered the doctor.
"Well," the doctor said. "Before we let you leave I'm going to have one conducted on you. We should have the results for you by noon tomorrow. In the meantime, don't eat anymore of those cookies."