Vanilla

Six

[Vanilla]

"I don't have a specific recommendation," the voice was strangely familiar. "But you can tell if a parlour's good from their vanilla."

What an unbelievably strange but effective marketing strategy, was the very first thought that entered my mind. Still, no one would be in the right mind to believe such an incredibly plain recommendation—

"That's so clever of you to notice!" The girl blinked in surprise. "I never thought of it that way but you have a point. We'll get three medium-sized vanillas." Her friends began digging for notes in their wallets, snapping pictures of whoever was serving them whilst doing so. Stunned by both their ability to multitask and the fact that they'd pounced on the bait dangling before their eyes, I wiped out all thoughts of settling on anything on the menu.

A single glance at the display freezer of ice cream flavours marked out a flavour right beside the payment counter as the store's best-seller. I blinked. Naturally, I couldn't bring myself to believe that any ice-cream parlour's best-seller would be the plainest, most boring flavour ever invented. Needless to say, I was expecting an extravagant house specialty—so much so that I considered asking another member of the staff if they did have a house specialty that wasn't vanilla.

But by the time I'd moved up in the line and accepted that I hadn't enough knowledge to make the most well-informed order (which was within seconds of my previous thought), I was freezing up before the counter. The staff behind it, clad in a white dress shirt and a barista's apron, paused midsentence; whatever the sentence was in the first place. His hand hovered over the screen of an iPad they used in place of a cash register, eyes fixed on mine before I started to feel my ears burn.

The name tag attached to his apron said it all.

Neither of us seemed to realize the length of our abrupt pause that was a tad too long to pass as a harmless stare until a staff member behind the ice-cream display peered over Leroy's shoulder to ask what the next order was. Even then, I wasn't paying full attention to nearly anything that was happening.

"Your order?" He said first, waiting for a response.

Embarrassed and afraid that I'd been staring indiscriminately for the past couple of seconds, I stammered a preliminary answer from the top of my head in hopes of buying some time.

"Yes. Um, well... I'd like—"

"Rum and raisin?" He finished, seemingly confident that he was correct. I on the other hand, didn't even know what I was getting.

"Um. No," I picked up where I left, trying my best to recall if I'd ever told Leroy my favourite ice-cream flavour back then. "A café latte please." It was at the top of the beverage menu and there was nothing else I could think of.

He paused, looking up from the screen with an expression I couldn't quite read. "To go?"

"Um. No," I repeated, wondering if my voice sounded awfully strange by now. May the Gods of awkward conversations bless my soul. "Having here please."

Leroy nodded, tapping across the screen. He seemed far less fazed by the coincidence than I was. "Hot or cold?"

"Hot please."

Again, he paused, "With that tongue?" raising a brow.

Naturally, I wasn't expecting him to pull that card and catch me completely off-guard. His words easily disarmed all that I had in my mind (which definitely consisted of as many words in every scholarly dictionary there was) and I found myself bending to his will. Whatever his will was.