Vanilla

Saw: 15 Years

A/N: Ahh!! I'm so sorry I'm late ;-; what is with me and sleeping the night before updates. I was so close to being done with the last couple of paragraphs.

I will be moving the see-saw chapters up earlier in the book so that it is better spaced out and might be adding some from time to time even after finishing the book before then moving them to the appropriate chapters in the front! I realize that I'm not exactly following the timeline I'd set out to do (Vanilla's high school experience as a ten-year-old and then Leroy's first couple of non-serious girlfriends back when he was twelve and thirteen) but I was somewhat dying to write this one so I decided to skip right to it ;-;

I'm sorry if you'd have preferred I went by the timeline but I really do think some readers have been really intrigued/curious to hear about this ever since the first couple of chapters where Vanilla learns that Leroy was the one who changed the recipe for the vanilla ice cream flavour in the parlour he now works at. This is the story of how he got hired. 

Enjoy.

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How six mere hours could feel like an entire year's worth of brain juice and social battery, Leroy did not know. He'd upped and left the campus at the dismissal bell on his first day of culinary school with the heaviest limbs and the worst headache that couldn't even rival how he felt after a nine to ten o'clock shift in his father's production kitchen.

The bell was shrill and unholy; the last time he'd heard anything similar was back in second grade of elementary school, eight years ago. Of which six, he'd spent with Siegfried in New York and California and Shanghai and London and Seoul and Singapore and Manila—cities he could see himself falling for in the absence of everything that wasn't within his control. As a child, that all had been severely limited.

Where the little lion had acquired a set of well-trained, polished culinary skills under his belt full of kitchen knives, meat forks, spatulas and ladles, he'd left little to no room for hand-raising and textbook-reading in an environment that was without the whir of commercial exhaust hoods, the spit and crackle of oil, the punch of profanities, the heat, the fire of the kitchen.

Classrooms were quiet. At least compared to a production kitchen, they were. He'd forgotten how structured they were supposed to be with one-hour periods ending on the dot and having bells and people speaking without raised voices and clocking in but for the sake of attendance or even things like standing up when picked on to answer a question in the middle of class all because he'd had, so coincidentally, chanced a glimpse up at the sky past the windows.

Minding his own business without spending too much time associating himself with the individuals coming up to him for a quick chat made for a grand total of zero friends on his first day of school. This had been the complete opposite of what his father had encouraged—having expounded the wonders of what he called 'social networking' and establishing of connections with those who had the potential of going farther than the rest. Leroy had been so against this that he considered having made no contact with anyone else on his first day of school to be a stunning achievement. Obedience did not exist. He'd never heard of such a complicated word. R-e-b-e-l on the other hand, five letters. Easy.

He'd found himself seated beside a noisy Italian over the hour-long welcome speech by the school's headmaster first thing in the morning, senses dulled by the sheer number of people (all freshmen) gathered in the auditorium. Naturally, he hadn't the slightest will to converse; nor did he possess the relevant skills to do so. The noisy Italian, who had insisted on going by Raul, turned out to be a classmate of his with a stunning ability to come up with conversational topics at every turn of Roth hall on their way to the commons for lunch.