My Childhood Friend And Lunch Break

According to my childhood friend, “once you finally get to choose what you eat for lunch, you feel like you’ve gone up a rung in the world,” apparently.

And sure enough, once I got to high school and started putting in requests for what went into my lunch box, or buying bread at the school shop and the like, I did feel like I’d grown up, if only a little.

Now then. As for that childhood friend of mine, the one I can never quite decide is grown-up or not, a certain Sakura Ayuri…

“It’s lunchtime! Everybody, asseeemble!”
“Wh-whoaa~…!”
“Oh, Hina says she’s eating with a different group today, so she’s not coming.”
“…So much for ‘everybody assemble’!”

Lunch break.

As always, Ayu came clamoring over to where Houjou Sumire and I sit, arms full of her things. Sumire has the seat right behind mine, so Ayu and Hina descending on our desks at lunch is basically routine.

“Ahh~ Hina really is a beauty with sky-high people skills, isn’t she~ A whole different league from gloomy otaku like us.”
“Though, setting myself aside… you two are the gloomy ones, right…?”
“Hey, don’t lump Sumire and me in with you.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t ‘huh?’ me.”

Rude right out of the gate, and in more ways than one.

“I mean, come on… by the world’s standards I’m pretty spe— …I’m the anime-and-manga-otaku type, I guess?”
“…Yeah, that’s true.”
“And Sumire’s… a novel otaku?”
“Wh-what, I’m hardly worthy of calling myself an otaku…”
“That’s the classic thing otaku say.”
“So relatable~… and Gin, you’re a game otaku.”
“It’s not like I’d go so far as to call myself one.”
“That’s the classic thing otaku say!”

Ayu drives it home, loud and proud, wearing a slightly smug, gotcha sort of face. …Look, that jab came loaded with the fact that you’re the reason my game time keeps getting shaved down, but… whatever.

“…So, did you have some business with Hina?”
“Today I bought something on top of my lunch that could pass for dessert, so I figured we’d all share it… well, if Hina’s not here, let’s just split it three ways.”
“Ohh…”
“So that’s why you stopped at a convenience store on the way to school for once…”

As we talk, three different lunch boxes come out onto the desks.

Ayu, incidentally, leans toward being a light eater. Even so, she likes a taste of all sorts of things, so on the pretext of sharing like this she’s forever roping Hina and me into eating some of hers too.

“If you’re going out of your way to ask, it’s probably not your average dessert… so what’d you buy?”
“This! Strawberry jam bread!”
“That’s literally just bread.”
“Well, it’s sweet, so it’s dessert… is it dessert…?”

With a triumphant ta-dah, she plonked the strawberry jam bread down in the dead center of the desks. It’s an ordinary size, nothing special either way, but sure enough, on top of a full lunch it’s probably a bit much for Ayu.

“So~ when I woke up this morning, I realized I haven’t had anything strawberry-flavored lately, y’know? And once that crossed my mind, I just had to have some.”
“If it was a convenience store… weren’t there strawberry-flavored sweets and things?”
“Jam has a stronger strawberry vibe, I figured! And it’s nice and cheap, too!”
“R-right…”

Well, true. Convenience-store sweets are pricey, and if the worry is leaving them sitting out at room temperature until noon, then I get it.

“Then you should’ve just skipped the lunch box today and gone with bread.”
“They say there’s no time like the present, right? And ‘the present’ happened to be when I’d left the house and was passing the convenience store.”
“Even so, buying it on the spot, brain-dead, is not the way.”

Whoever came up with that proverb didn’t mean for you to act without thinking, either, I’m fairly sure.

Anyway, it’s lunchtime now. Sweet bread though it is, nominally filed under dessert, that thing can wait; we ought to start with our own lunches first.

— Pop.

“…Actually, you don’t really have to force yourself to eat it at lunch, do you? You could take it home and have it later, or save it for tomorrow’s lunch.”
“Wha—! That’s mean, Gin! Right now my mouth is all set for strawberry jam for dessert!”
“Then tell me what it is you’re about to put in your mouth this very second.”
“? …A rice ball, though?”
“There’s no way those two go together, no matter how you slice it.”

It’s already dubious whether jam bread counts as dessert at all; pile a rice ball on top of that and you have to wonder what kind of pairing it’s even supposed to be. Even a growing boy with a bottomless appetite would think it through more than that.

“Well, it can’t be helped! I only just found out what was in my lunch box!”
“You can pretty much guess a lunch box is going to be rice. You really think your mom’s the type to pack sandwiches?”
“…Not in the slightest!”
“Right? If you’d just quietly gone with sweets, I’d have gladly taken some too. Dummy.”

For the record, my own lunch is rice too. Ayu buying the thing because she wanted it is one matter, but why should I be the one stuck eating something with such a lousy flavor pairing?

“You don’t want any, Gin?”
“Well, my lunch is rice too.”
“You’ve gotta eat lots or you won’t grow big!”
“Yeah, you eat plenty, little Miss Ayuri, seeing as you’re the one shorter than me.”
“…I’ve got P.E. after this, so I don’t really wanna stuff myself totally full~”
“Come on, quit being so careless… if you can’t finish it now, why not eat it as an after-school snack?”
“Well… true…”

If she’s set on treating the jam bread as dessert, that’d be about right. Though knowing Ayu, I can just picture her family scolding her for it: ‘You won’t have room for dinner!’

Anyway, whether she’d gathered from my attitude that getting me to eat my share was a lost cause, or was simply won over by my argument, Ayu made a show of mulling it over,

“Hmm… yeah, okay, I’ll set this bread aside for now and figure out what to do with it after school.”

And with that, she gave up on forcing it down. Well, if she’d really dug in her heels I could’ve eaten some for her, but better that than cramming it into her stomach by force.

“Good call, good call.”
“Yeah, so let me just collect it for now… huh, where’d it go?”
“Huh, it was right in the middle a second ago…”

— Riiip.

“…Huh.”
“Huh?”

The sound of a bag tearing open reaches Ayu’s ears and mine. We both turn toward it, and there’s Sumire, ripping open Ayu’s jam bread.

“Sumire…?”
“…My lunch today was a sandwich, so… I figured I’d just help myself first, without worrying about food pairings.”
“…W-well, if you weren’t listening to our conversation, then I guess it can’t be hel—”
“I was listening, though…”
“You were listening and opened it anyway?!”

Oh my. This girl’s more rock ‘n’ roll than I gave her credit for.

“My reasons for opening this bag even though I was listening… there are three of them. Will you both hear me out?”
“That’s quite a few… I wanna hear, I wanna hear!”
“Then starting with the first… I’m of the policy that I take whatever’s offered, and I’m the type to save the best for last — so I wanted to leave this egg sandwich for the end…”
“Ahh, that one can’t be helped.”

After all, Ayu was the one who piped up with ‘let’s split it three ways!’ in the first place, so once it’s sitting in the middle, when each person eats it is their own call.

“The second… we haven’t known each other long, but Ayuri, you’re a light eater… right?”
“…Well, you could put it that way.”
“So when it looked like things were heading toward you not eating it, I thought, ‘it’d be funny to open it now and force the issue~’”
“That’s your reason?! You don’t have to go doing something so… so Gin-like!”

This one surprised even me. She’d only just met Ayu, and she already worked out that this would get a funny rise out of her, and then actually went through with it. Sumire’s kind of amazing, isn’t she?

“And now the third…”
“The third is…?”
“…”

And she’s a good sport, too. My first read had her pegged as the bashful, shrinking-violet type, but she’s turning out to be a lot of fun.

“…Do you want to hear it?”
“Ehh?! Tell me, tell me!”
“…Um, watching you and Ginko go back and forth, looking so close… I got a little envious.”
“Eh… oh, stop it! So cute!!”

And Ayu, for her part, is getting worked up way too easily, won over way too fast. Did she already forget, in the space of a second, that this girl’s little prank is what caused the whole problem in the first place?

“Ayu, Ayu.”
“So cute, Sumire… huh, what’s up, Gin?”
“The remaining two-thirds — buckle down and eat up.”
“Huh? …Oh.”

The jam bread Sumire had torn into was down to two-thirds now. And since the filling is jam, trying to haul it home as-is would inevitably turn Ayu’s bag into a disaster, so she had no choice but to eat it here and now.

“…You won’t eat any, Gin?”
“Hmm… honestly, I was kind of thinking I’d eat some for you if you really insisted, but…”
“…The way you’re phrasing that means…”
“After hearing Sumire’s second reason just now… I’ve decided I absolutely don’t want any! So — go get ’em.”
“Gin!!”

Well, it’s not that big a piece of bread anyway. Two-thirds, one-third, what’s the difference.

If this finally breaks her of bringing food on the premise of sharing just because she wants a taste of everything, then from here on out, that’d be cause for celebration.

And so Ayu, out of allies now, tearfully crammed the bread she’d bought for herself into that little stomach of hers, somehow or other.

…Incidentally, in P.E. afterward, watching Ayu clutch her stomach and look thoroughly miserable, Sumire and I both apologized, figuring maybe we’d overdone it a little. Though we did make a point of reminding her not to buy what she can’t finish on her own.