In the midst of heartbreak, new bonds are forged.
At the end of their first year at UA High, the students rely on their tight friendships and hard work to get through finals. New alliances and friendships are made between the outgoing hero classes a...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
5 years and 294 days. It had been roughly six years since my parents passed. That's 72 months, 2,191 days, and 52,548 hours since the last time they were around to make Shepherd's Pie. Having it again was a trip to when I was ten and my dad let me cook with him. He always took charge of the stove and the knives, but I got to stir the sauce. And I always felt pretty damn proud of my skills.
Unfortunately, my cooking talents didn't hold up after six years. Koto was patient with me though. She definitely knew her way around a kitchen, even one that was never regularly used in six years.
Soon after grabbing our plates and cleaning up the kitchen a bit, I walked with Koto upstairs to eat. She seemed unsure about it, but I never used the formal dining room. Koto seemed creeped out by the house enough that I figured I'd spare her having to eat in silence in a bare room with my mom's paintings all over the walls.
I took her upstairs to the media room. Calling it a "living" room felt a little contradictory, but the two were fairly the same. It was one of few rooms in the house I was often in. Since attending UA, I haven't had a ton of time to spend around the house, but if I were home and the ghosts weren't driving me crazy, I usually stayed either in my room or the media room.
Koto had suggested we watch a movie while we ate. At first, I was skeptical, seeing as how movies for a long time never grabbed my interest. But Koto told me she brought some of her vintage movies with her to take home for winter break. I could tell she was a little anxious about talking to the ghosts and being in a funeral home no less, but the idea of watching one of her beloved Disney movies seemed to cheer her up.
She searched through her backpack for the movie case, and I helped her set up the TV. I hadn't used it in a while, and I debated if it still worked, but I wouldn't be in 1-H if there was a machine here that I couldn't fix. Lucky for us, the DVD player wasn't a wreck. I wondered who still used DVDs anymore, and apparently, Koto did. She slid the disk into it's mechanical box like it was nothing even if it would have taken me some research to figure it out.
We each took a seat on the couch with our plates in our lap as Koto set up the subtitles for me. At the bottom of the list was a Japanese setting, and Koto silently celebrated to herself as if it was a rare find.
As the first half of the movie started, the credits rolled up the screen in cursive font. I could barely read the names themselves, barely remembering English from Dad. I decided to focus on the food until the movie started.
Koto deserved a hand for pulling the dish together with such ease. I hadn't cooked by myself in a while, and even with the ghosts over my shoulder telling me how it should be done, I wasn't a master. But our food turned out better than I expected. The flavors sent me back, flushing my mind with memories of me and my parents in the same kitchen with the same recipe.
The image of Koto dancing to herself around the room while she cooked failed to leave my head. There was something about it that reminded me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The way she moved through and through to a melody I was blind to was impressive. So much so that I was distracted enough to cut my finger while peeling vegetables. I wasn't upset though. The continuous picture of her dancing that reminded me so clearly of something I couldn't place was far more upsetting.
