Amidst The Stars

Hopeless

   "Have you asked her out yet?"

  Leon had asked him the same question the evening before, when he came home from spending an afternoon with Madeline — he'd apparently heard the news from Ling. Both last evening and today, he gave his brother the same answer, and he'd responded the same way: "why?"

  "Because," he replied on the second day, "it'd be awkward. I can't just interrupt Madeline in the middle of drinking coffee and go, 'hey wanna go out with me?'."

  "Of course it would be." Leon rolled his eyes. "That's not even how you ask someone out! You don't randomly throw in a confession while having a conversation. You wait until a special moment when it's all quiet and the two of you are alone together, then you pop the question. It's like proposing but without a ring."

  Vicente stared at him. "How do you know how to ask someone out?"

  Leon stared back. "Okay, maybe that's how they do it in romance movies. But the couples mostly worked out in the end. So if you do the same thing, it should be fine."

  "I'm not going to ask her out. Yet."

  "What's stopping you?" Leon demanded. "I mean, now that you know telling Madeline you like her in the middle of a conversation isn't how it's done, you could easily ask her to meet up with you under the moonlight later today and ask her."

  He replied, "because first of all, asking someone to meet up with you in the dead of night is creepy, even if it works in books or stuff. I'll tell her when I'm ready." He ruffled Leon's hair. "You're too invested in my sorry excuse of a love life, you know."

  He went back to the kitchen as Leon sulked behind him, marching off to clear someone's table. Yao was hard at work, as usual, chopping up shrimps so quickly his knife was a blur. Vicente took his place at his bench and eyed the sheets of paper taped to the wall. Yao had finally figured out how to make mooncakes filled with lotus root, and the newly-written recipe for it was placed next to the ones for egg tarts, custard buns and other desserts.

  "No orders for you yet," Yao shouted over the noise. "Go heat up some red date pudding and prepare some tarts."

  He placed three servings of stone-cold pudding into one of the steamers to finish cooking, then pulled the tart shells and filling out of the fridge. Soon, a tray of egg tarts was in the oven, and Vicente went to Yao's bench once the oven door was closed. "What do I do now?"

  "Make beverages." Yao pointed to the row of orders hanging by a cord on the wall. "People love your yuen yeung, they say you get it right every time."

  Swiping a clean glass from the shelf, he got to work making the drink. All around him, the sounds and smells of dishes coming together combined into a melodious, fragrant symphony. This feeling would never get old.

...

  Even though the doors of Huang's were closed for the night, Vicente's work was far from over. He studied the mooncake recipe on the wall, taking out the required ingredients while he listed them out loud. The Mid-Autumn Festival was two days away, and he didn't have much time to perfect the mooncakes.

  The mooncake dough was rich and fatty, only requiring oil, golden syrup, flour and a tiny bit of lye water. He combined the wet ingredients together to start, then gently sifted in the flour, and mixed. It took a while, but the dough finally pulled away from the bowl after a few minutes of mixing. Vicente tapped his whisk against the bowl, dropping whatever dough had gathered there back in.

  He couldn't mould and bake the mooncakes just yet — the dough had to rest for forty minutes first. He covered the bowl with a moist tea-towel and put it in the fridge, then carried the rest of his equipment to the sink. Vicente checked his watch once he'd cleaned his whisk and measuring spoon and placed them back into the closet. He still had over twenty-five minutes left.

  The minutes slipped by, and his train of thought led to Madeline again. They'd gone to The Cove this afternoon for tea like they always did, and he wanted to see her again. It was weird, absurd really, to have spent nearly the entire school day with her and even more afterwards, yet still miss her once they were apart. 

  There was still twenty minutes until the dough would be ready. Vicente picked up his phone and called Madeline.

  "Hello?"

  His heart skipped a beat. "Hi."

  "Why did you call me? Do you need help with anything?"

  "No, not really." Vicente left the kitchen and sat down at the nearest table, suddenly feeling dizzy. "I just wanted to chat. Sorry if I called while you were doing something, I can hang up if you want — "

  "I'm not working on anything in particular," Madeline said. "We can talk for a while."

  He smiled. Madeline seemed to have some sort of power to make him happy just by existing. "That's great! Er, since you're not really in the middle of anything important, what are you doing right now?"

  "Just looking something up." Her audio cut off for a moment. "Not for school, just for fun. I remembered you talking about mooncakes yesterday, and I got a little curious."

  "I just happen to be testing a mooncake recipe right now. It's going to have a lotus paste filling." His cheeks burned. Why could he never speak like a normal, functional person when he was around Madeline? "Uh... what did you find out from your, um, research?"

  "There's apparently a folk tale that Ming revolutionaries hid secret messages in mooncakes to overthrow their oppressive rulers towards the end of the Yuan dynasty. People say that the person who thought of this was... Zhu Yuanzhang. Did I pronounce that right?"

  "Not really." Vicente had learned about the origin of the mooncake in first grade, but it sounded so much more engaging when Madeline talked about it. "But it's fine, continue."

  "Well, the mooncakes had the messages printed on top of them and distributed in packets of four. Then the receiver would cut the cakes in four parts and piece them together to reveal the message," Madeline recited. Even through the phone, her voice was music to his ears — he could listen to her all day. "And the message was to kill the rulers on the eighth day on the fifteenth lunar month."

  "The date was the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month," Vicente corrected. "And that day is now the Mid-Autumn Festival."

  "How do you celebrate that? It sounds a bit similar to the Midsummer celebrations they have in Northern Europe."

  He checked the timer on his phone. He still had fifteen minutes before he'd have to take the mooncake dough out of the fridge. "We eat mooncakes, of course, and light lanterns. I haven't seen lanterns for the Festival in a while, but I remember some of them being lit by tiny LED lights, and some by candles. The last time my siblings and I celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival was back in Taiwan. Leon's lantern caught on fire."

  Madeline laughed. "Oh no, I hope nobody got hurt!"

  "Thankfully the only casualty was a bottle of soda. I'm excited to get to celebrate this again. Brings back some nice memories." Vicente pinched himself; he felt even dizzier than before. "If you want, you can come over to Huang's this Friday. We'd be happy to have you."

  "I'd love to. Should I bring anythi — "

  Vicente jumped when his phone timer went off right next to his ear. "The mooncake dough's ready," he said out loud. "I have to go. But you don't have to bring anything on Friday."

  "I'll see you tomorrow," Madeline said. "Goodnight."

  "Goodnight." He hung up and went back into the kitchen, realising that he was still smiling. He really was hopeless.