A/N: Hello Beans! /.\ I'm going for a mood of nostalgia in this chapter, and the music above really helps because, clearly, my writing is never good enough without some great music HAHAHAHAH so do enjoy it with the track I've chosen ^0^ this will give you some insight into Leroy growing up home-schooled and a little bit of his complex relationship with his father. It's not as black and white as it is with Xander and his father, as you might have realized.
Enjoy.
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Dicing onions in the kitchen was the only time he was allowed to cry. Each bulbous root had to disintegrate into cubes of exact dimensions in less than ten seconds for five consecutive attempts. He had not succeeded once.
"Eleven-point-three," said his father, glancing up from the stopwatch in his hand. "You can do better than that."
The little lion found himself wondering if he really could do better than that. He'd started the day at a ten-point-seven and somehow worked his way upwards at every bulb through dangerously blurred vision and a persistent sting at the back of his eyes. The fumes scratched at his sinuses and clung to the surface of his eyeball like a wart that no amount of rinsing seemed to be able to solve. Eleven-point-three was onion number thirteen.
He made no sound; reaching for another bulb from the basket and sweeping the previous attempt off his chopping board onto the countertop with the back of his knife. A slip of his heart's desire made him glance at the safety goggles left abandoned by the sink on his right.
For the whole of September that he'd had onion dicing drilled into his muscle memory, Leroy had taken the most hideous form of protective eyewear for granted. Before that, he'd been julienning carrots for two weeks right after turning eight in August. His 'advancement certificate' had been a full knife set courtesy of his father, which the boy himself had never really asked for. At least, not after he'd moved in with Siegfried to be home-schooled by the latter. Back home, with his mother, sure. He did mention it once or twice. But not anymore.
"Remember. You can't be wearing those for the rest of your life," his father reminded with a gentle smile that looked, to him, sinister in nature. "It gets better once you're used to the sting. All bad things do. The sooner you start, the easier it is."
This was what aching arms felt like; and perhaps soon, they, too, would no longer ache. All he had to do was get used to it. It was only his first day without the goggles after all. He'd been hitting a consistent nine-point-five with their company but now that they were out of the picture, he could very well see the difference.
"Alright, that's enough." Finally, they came to a stop at onion number seventeen and when the clock struck twelve—the end of his morning practical session by none other than the celebrity chef himself. "Make yourself some lunch and I'll be back by two to check on your progress with the bourguignon recipe. Did you check the list for today's menu?"
"Aglio Olio."
His father laughed, hands reaching past the tears brimming in the eyes of his boy to the back of the latter's neck, adjusting the length of his apron. "Good boy. Don't worry about the onions. You'll get them tomorrow."
The man straightened up and left in a heartbeat, crossing out the AM box on the weekly schedule pinned to the corkboard by the doorway of the kitchen on his way out. He'd looked over his shoulder with a final wave before grabbing his coat and heading out, leaving his boy alone in the apartment. To the ticking of a clock.
Leroy did not want to get the onions tomorrow. He did not want to get the onions, ever. He did not want to have spaghetti aglio e olio for lunch. He did not want to come up with his own beef bourguignon recipe.
He wanted mac and cheese; a platter of fried chicken; a bowl of lotus root crisps, topped with cayenne pepper. He wanted to be riding his kart on Peach Beach, picking up mystery boxes along the way and tossing turtle shells at his opponents.
While ordinary eight-year-olds were having a morning of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and eleven plus nines, the little lion was topping his French omelette with finely chopped herbs and memorizing the section of his textbook that went 'How Do You Want Your Eggs: Eleven Fail-proof Techniques' whilst waiting for his father to grade his spelling quiz of culinary terms like sous vide.
'Math' marked out on his home-school schedule was really the ability to estimate how many cups or tablespoons of varying ingredients there were in a bowl just by looking at it. Stopwatches used to time the seconds one would take to complete a list of mathematical equations found purpose, instead, in onion-dicing, carrot-julienning, egg-poaching or the like. Measuring instruments like the simple wooden ruler he'd left behind in kindergarten for kitchen scales and measuring cups and spoons.
It had been nearly a year since he'd moved in with his father to an apartment a street down from Central Park, New York, a minute away from the latter's first Michelin star restaurant. It was expensive; that much, he knew as an eight-year-old. Despite his initial disappointment with the building's general boring glass exterior and lack of play areas like a rooftop playground or a pinball arcade, he came to realize the importance of an indoor pool and a gym on the fifty-eighth floor overlooking Central Park. Those were the kind facilities real men appreciated. And while Leroy had no intention of looking up to his father who had, for all intents and purposes, worked his way up the pyramid without a single helping hand from those above him, the little lion found himself desiring the qualities of a grown-up. Independent and apart. Strong and tall.
And perhaps quite alone, too.
After all, it was the only time he could bask in the comfort of someone that was truly himself. Even with just his father around, he felt the presence of three in a room. His father, him... and another him. There was something about the Leroy Cox dicing onions and julienning carrots that he found oddly disturbing. Back then, he'd attributed this discomfort to being a sore loser. That after years of hating on 'professional' cooking that, on a whole, his father seemed to represent, he was now entering the very world he had claimed to dislike.
He'd given in.
The radiant heroism of a child putting his feelings on hold for a greater purpose—becoming a chef worthy of 'revenge' and proving those malicious critics wrong before finally helping his mother regain her standing as the head chef of a small, humble diner but a grand, celebrated re-opening. He needed to be better.
Moving in with Siegfried was a tough decision he had to make as a child. The first couple of months were bearable. They hadn't started on knife techniques because the paediatric physiotherapist his father had hired said to wait until the bones in his hands were at a stage of sufficient development. He'd done a total of six X-rays until they were finally given the green. Before that, it was hours and hours of practice with fakes and easy tasks like pancake flipping.
Playing with fire had never really been an issue for the little lion himself. Apart from the fact that he was a familiar friend of heat, the boy wasn't likely to do anything dangerous under his father's supervision. He was on charcoal grills, cast iron pans, gas torches and all three different kinds of ovens available in Siegfried Cox's battle-ready kitchen, meant to occupy nearly half the apartment. Even if he did burn himself, they were mostly the doing of deep fryers or an open pan—dishing out oil splatters every now and then for a good jolting of one's attention. Flinching was an instinct he could not control.
"Feels like a pinch, doesn't it?" His father had chuckled, nodding. Knowingly. Annie would've never let him anywhere near the deep fryers, especially not the ones back in her diner. They were off limits. Those crackling, spitting hot things she'd make her signature fried chicken with.
Back then, he was naïve enough to assume that her secret ingredient had something to do with those deep dryers (and that she was throwing him off by using the word 'ingredient'). Now that he'd tried it himself, he could safely debunk the myth he'd somehow conjured at the back of his mind.
Apart from these hands-on practical lessons conducted by his father every morning, the little lion was made to put his skills to the test in no place other than the kitchens of his father's restaurants. Two weeks after his first visit to the Michelin star kitchen a minute away, he was on a flight to Shanghai. Siegfried terms these 'Exams XX', marked out in red on the home-school calendar for a good month of quiet anticipation.
Leroy was the kind to remain less vocal about his feelings, be it excitement or enjoyment. These examinations were the learning journeys he'd missed out on; the excursions he'd always wanted but never had. And though his only form of companionship was someone he wouldn't willingly choose to be with, the man, his father, was inevitably the only person he could rely on.
Both in New York and Shanghai, he remembered being introduced to the team behind the scenes of velvet seats and golden champagne. The first thing his father had ordered them to do was not to treat like a child. In the kitchen, he was an equal and as such, expected to deliver on a level that could keep up with every other twenty, thirty-something-year-olds on the team.
Last month, he'd been julienning carrots on the same counter as a graduate of the Culinary School of Shanghai. Needless to say, he wasn't as fast; nor were his cuts as consistent and precise as the assistant chef beside him but were nonetheless good enough to slip past the restaurant's hellish head chef who was particularly fond of calling everyone 'bastard cunts'. There was an abundance of cursing in every kitchen, or so the boy had come to think and observe. The one and only reason behind his only source of vocabulary expansion.
His trip to Shanghai had not only consisted of said practical assessment that ended up lasting for nearly five hours (the little lion then took a luxurious four-hour nap), it also involved some planning of his future education.
Siegfried had brought his son along for a private tour of the top culinary school in Asia which he'd requested beforehand; and with the winning title of 'celebrity chef', no culinary school was in the right mind to reject an opportunity to show off grand facilities and a remarkable system. Thus, Leroy was introduced to the world of culinary education—though all he ended up remembering was the fried chicken stand outside the main gate of the massive school.
Most of the menu handwritten in Sharpie... he could not read. They were in simplified Chinese, yes, but his author guarantees that even if it had been in a language he was familiar with, the result would have been exactly the same. After all, the boy was one to operate purely on visual stimulation.
Glancing over his shoulder to check on his father about a hundred-or-so feet away, he could see the latter still speaking to the school's headmaster and culinary dean, thanking them for their time and seemingly deep in discussion about matters irrelevant to young Leroy's chicken-filled brain and rumbling tummy. So back to the fried chicken it was.
The goal was to get himself a portion without his father's notice. He gave the inside of his money pouch a glimpse and counted the change he'd received from the soft-hearted sous chef earlier on, who had pitied the young julienning-carrot-boy and slipped him twenty yuan. Currency conversion, by the way, was not in his realm of math. Like most children, Leroy had assumed that the world was operating on an international version of moolah.
"这孩子也太帅了吧," the owner of the food cart was a stout granny with a brilliant smile, who appeared to be chatting with a group of girls whom she'd handed a white craft bag of chicken each. They giggled.
The first thing that caught his eye was how bite-sized the pieces of chicken were—grilled first and then coated and fried with flour and seasoning mixture for an added crunch. Bits and pieces of green among the chicken bites could be observed, which, from the fragrance wafting from the stand, he deduced were either curry or basil leaves, fried along with the chicken.
The group of girls dressed in their school uniforms waved in his direction but Leroy was too busy staring at one of them digging into her crisp, piping hot order and noticing that some had their chicken slightly more peppered in red than the others and one other girl even had bits with a golden, creamy molten core that his brain automatically dubbed as cheese. He needed that one. He needed it now.
"She can't believe you're so young and can be so handsome." One of the girls said to the boy as soon as he neared the stand and came up to the very front of the menu with his money pouch. He'd paused, slightly caught off-guard by a language he understood.
"Oh... thanks."
Leroy was not familiar with the definition of 'handsome' although he'd heard it many a time from random adults like waiters and waitresses, customers back at the diner and sometimes even strangers on the street. All he knew was how to respond to it, which Annie had drilled into his head three years ago.
"他想吃什么？你们问问他。"
"She's asking what you want to eat," the girl told him and immediately, he'd pointed at the bags of crispy goodness in their hands, specifically the one girl who had ordered the chicken with cheese filling. They all laughed and nodded.
The owner then rummaged through her store things and produced a smaller, laminated version of her menu that were blessed with pictures. She then pointed to the square containing a slice of cheese and some Chinese characters below it. Leroy nodded; fast and furious. His father was going to arrive any minute now. He'd never approve of fried chicken, let alone fried chicken from a nameless food cart along the street.
"How old are you?" The girl standing closest to him asked and before he knew it, the group of five were gathered around him in a circle, taking turns to pat his head.
"Eight."
"You are lost street?" "Where is your parents?" "Do you have enough money to pay for the chicken?"
He shook his head at the 'lost' and pointed in the general direction of trees when the word 'parents' came up before finally holding out his money pouch. The girls peered in. One of them burst out laughing.
"这20元—" "你别吵了嘛、20元对孩子来说可是100!" The girl who got herself some cheesy chicken smacked the first girl's upper arm. "但这一定不够呀！" Their eyes softened at the miserable, pitiful state of his money pouch before reaching into their bags and producing their own fancy leather purses, taking turns to slip five and ten yuan notes into the pouch. Leroy blinked.
"Now you have fifty-five!" One of the girls counted before showing him to the collection counter. "Can buy two chicken flavour. You eat spicy?" He nodded hard, mouth watering at the thought of some cayenne pepper. The girl gave him a thumbs-up before seemingly ordering an additional portion for the hungry lion.
He ended up receiving three in total; the last of which, courtesy of the nice owner herself and was apparently her personal favourite, was lime and yuzu pepper. The acidity and heat of the seasoning, he realized, cut through the crisp, salted richness of the chicken bite's exterior before melding with a juicy chunk of thigh meat.
This wasn't the kind of street food he was used to having. Hotdogs and ice-cream stands scattered across the park near his old house back home were the only street food he'd come across and unlike his father, Annie was a big fan of mobile food kiosks in the form of vans or carts.
He liked that the owner had given him a pair of long skewers that could double up as chopsticks (he'd learned how to use them after a tedious week of Siegfried's coaching) but he ended up stabbing away with the sharp end of the stick and sending the chicken bites into his mouth whole. Heaven.
The little lion didn't spend much of his childhood bawling for food or toys and attention. Unlike most children, neither words nor tears were a part of his ammunition as a toddler. He did not need to arm himself with 'I hate you's and 'You promised's or a bucket of ready-made tears to get exactly what he wanted. He'd just get it himself. Leroy never really understood how his peers could associate crying with fulfilling any immediate desire. As far as he knew, he'd only ever met one person who didn't.
In that instance, however—standing in the middle of the sidewalk with a group of girls much older than himself waiting for his verdict and a smiling granny whose fried chicken reminded him of home—his vision began to blur.
How odd it was to be crying out in public.
"他、他怎么了？为什么哭呀？你快问问他。" The owner panicked as soon as she heard him sniffling and rubbing the back of his hand over his eyes, worried that she'd added a little too much pepper for his liking. "是不是太辣了？"
"Are you okay?" One of the girls rushed over with a handkerchief. It smelled of flowers. "Too spicy? You want some water?"
Leroy shook his head. "I like it. I like it a lot."
"Okay then why you cry? Tell big sister." The girls gathered around him once more and he felt weird enough, bursting into tears in front of strangers and somehow about to willingly reveal that he was, ultimately, homesick and incredibly alone—missing his mother and his gaming console and the playground and that one, special friend he no longer had. He'd had enough of pretending to be grown-up. To be strong and used to dicing onions and oil splatters and everything that seemed to hurt.
"I'm so sorry. Excuse us... that's my son," Siegfried parted the group of girls and for a moment, they stood still staring at his face, frozen in awe. Then, after exchanging a look, they all started panicking. "Leroy... what are you doing, crying in the middle of the street? Come on. Dry them off. We're going home."
"Siegfried Cox?" "是Mr! Mr Cox, okay? 你这笨蛋！" "Can you sign my notebook?"
They recognized him at once and the celebrity chef could not refuse their excited, enthused requests—flashing them a perfect, well-rehearsed smile before taking two of the three craft bags of chicken bits in Leroy's arms and holding his hand that was now free. He said nothing about the street food or the fried chicken on their journey home. Not a single word. Not even after his little lion finished all three portions in a heartbeat. He did not stop him.
*
One days when his father busied himself in the restaurant on holiday evenings like Christmas, New Year's Eve or perhaps even Valentine's Day (not because it was the only occasion he'd be fully booked since, as a matter of fact, all his restaurants had a waiting list of four to five months), Leroy would watch TV.
"Don't worry. You'll be up there soon," his father had told him with a confident smile, ruffling his hair. The boy never quite knew how he should be responding to words like these. Siegfried said it often enough; and he was perceptive enough to tell that these were, indeed, compliments. Yet, he'd always wondered why they never seemed to make him truly happy.
True joy was the him riding his kart on Peach Beach with a friend; biting into that juicy chunk of freshly fried chicken in the middle of a sidewalk; watching TV while haphazardly folding his clothes; playing at the seesaw under a tree that was red.
Once, he was bored enough, alone at home, to pick up a book by choice. Charlotte's Web was the only children's text they had in an entire shelf of what seemed like cookbooks, so he'd flipped it open, arriving at the contents page and skimming through the words like a seeming professional.
"Be-for-e. Break-fast." Then he was stuck. What was a Wilbur? What was an Es-cape? These words were too hard for him. He'd closed the book in five seconds and placed it back in its original position on the shelf. How did his friend get past the contents page of his encyclopaedias? Leroy could not comprehend. So he stuck with TV.
TV was a good companion and all but most of what his father subscribed to were cooking channels and more often than so, the little lion would chance upon the man himself on screen—which was, for him, incredibly off-putting. He'd then toy with the remote and switch away to something else but that, too, would somehow end up with Siegfried on screen.
Boring times called for extraordinary measures, which had involved ransacking the apartment for things to do. The boy had chanced upon more cookbooks and teaching manuals and drafts and drafts of words in his father's bedroom and only once found a stack of old, non-culinary DVDs (finally!) in the wardrobe only to realize, five minutes in, that he wasn't supposed to be watching two women undressing one another.
There was nothing to do. Leroy wasn't given a phone and his father's laptop was password protected; he'd had enough of TV and the floor had been lava for five months; the guest bed was not bouncy. His last resort had been his father's and anyone, anyone could tell how far gone he was when bouncing on the bed was his only form of entertainment.
Leroy had never been the kind of child to bounce on beds.
Eventually, he got tired of bouncing on his father's bed and, while lying spread-eagled on it, noticed a cool-looking brown box thing with grooves and two knobs on each end. It looked like a stereo speaker. The kind they had outside in the lounge to go with the TV but, just... older-looking. Retro.
Curious, he turned the knob. Just a little.
It sparked to life at once, sizzling and crackling in the foreground and startling the lion into a jump before whizzing off into a series of voices—unclear and distant. He couldn't quite understand what was happening but after adjusting the knob left and right and further down, he came across a... rather pleasant sound. Back then, he couldn't quite identify the instrument since, after all, the only instrument he knew was, like, the piano or something. So he just stood back and listened to it go.
Then it was voice. And he found himself sitting on the edge of his father's bed, listening to that. And then lying down to the fizz and the crack of muted tones that were oddly soothing enough to lull the little lion into a mood for sleep, dreaming of a distant past. It would play on in that dream.
A dream of frozen lakes and autumn leaves under his feet, singing to the creak of a seesaw—the company of another.
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"Oh good god. Leroy." He heard a voice that soothed the heated flames within and felt himself rising to the surface. He sat up slow, eyes struggling in the face of a fluorescent light. Oddly enough, he could still hear the music in his dreams. Turning to the source of the sound, he soon realized that it was the portable speaker placed on top of their picnic basket.
He had been resting the side of his head on a blessed shoulder smelling faintly of chamomile. Under his feet was the picnic mat they'd laid out in his room and by his hand, a dangerous bottle of coke, uncapped.
"Goodness! We missed new year's. It's fourteen minutes past midnight. O-oh, happy new year, by the way. Here's to, well, a great year ahead. With you. Ideally. I mean, I'd personally prefer to have it that way. Unless you wouldn't...?"
He stared down at the bespectacled bean peering up at him with a mug of chamomile tea in his hands, then picked up his bottle of coke and met the mug with a clink. "Dumbass." They were the eyes of a frozen lake and they made him wonder how it would've felt like to skate on it. Unconsciously, he began to smile like a certified, lovestruck idiot.
The lake seemed to melt, just a little, from the heat before gently pushing the mesmerized face aside. "I'm warning you. The authorities will come knocking on your door in the morning."
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A/N: I'm not sure if readers are generally accepting of languages other than English in a chapter but I actually really like doing it. It's written in a way that, even if you don't know how to read that language and there isn't a translation, the next couple of lines will give solid clues on what is being said in the other language. I rarely write in a way that forces someone to know what is being said in the other language in order to understand what is going on, so! I hope you're okay with that.
It's also somewhat pleasant to be in the shoes of the person listening to them and not understanding what they are saying—as in the case of Leroy. He's confused and he doesn't know how to speak to strangers and just WANTS HIS CHIKKKEN but he's doing his best to make do with the situation around him and everyone is nice enough to help him out too. The relief of translation is also kind of what he would be feeling as a child. And it's nice to have my readers feel that way too.
So even if you don't understand the language and there isn't a translation, the next couple of sentences will definitely allow you to understand what is being said! 😊
I'm only fluent in spoken English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Singapore Sign Language which is similar to American Sign Language, but I am fond of sometimes writing dialogue in a complete different language like Tagalog for Flight School. To be exact, I don't even speak English because frankly, I'd say my spoken language is Singlish so guess what—I have no idea what I'm doing HAHAHAHA. Alright, see you on Sunday.
-Cuppie.