LESSON HIGHLIGHTS:

How to Discreetly Check Out Fellow Men
How Not to Cook (aka Science Experiment 101)
Half-Understanding English Insults

The scream was embedded into Luhan’s brain, even as he was seated beside Yixing at the back of the demonstration room in broad daylight.

MUDAN!

That big one should’ve given him a hoarse throat today, thought Luhan in a weak attempt for humor. The scream was anguished, desperate, hell, almost primal, come to think of it—looking at Sehun today, with his face serene and indifferent, you’d think that it was a different man that was having a nightmare last night—well, this morning. When Luhan woke him up, he looked like he was a few notches away from insane, like he could lash out and attack at the slightest provocation, like he could fight with his teeth and tear out skin with his nails.

But those weren’t the facts that really bothered Luhan.

Sehun had been speaking in fluent Mandarin.

Luhan had been lying when he said that he barged in the room when Sehun screamed the name, because he had been in the room even before that—what got into Luhan, he didn’t know, but the urge to check on his new flatmate was so overwhelming that he, well, trespassed into the room even though it made him feel like a creeper. Like somebody was prodding him in the back to just poke his head in, just make sure everything’s chill, then pushed him into the room with a cackle and locked the door.

Please don’t go, don’t go, he had been muttering, with this vulnerable, almost childlike murmur, and he relaxed for a bit. Then his head twisted from side to side with a violent, spasmodic quality, his body pressed against the bare bed like someone was pinning him down, and then, the screaming started, him yelling out, Mudan, what are you doing?

Then, his guttural, insane cry of Mudan, whoever she was.

Luhan had been turning over those words in his mind all morning, about how his Korean had an inflection of something foreign, but his Mandarin had a flawless accent of a native. Everything just doesn’t add up. His name was Korean, and it looked like he had been in South Korea all his life, so how the hell could he just spew out those words like he was a Chinese man?

“Earth to Luhan, Earth to Luhan, hello?”

Yixing’s voice snapped Luhan out of his reverie, making him look at his best friend with a face akin to a bamboozled owl. “Wh-what?”

“Wow, what happened to you, man? You were spacing out big time. You’ve been spending way too much time with Eunice, bro,” Yixing said, wrinkling his nose at Luhan in disdain.

“No, I have not,” replied Luhan indignantly, giving Yixing a dirty look. “Look, we mess around, but every minute I spend with her feels like a sneak peek to hell.”

“You say that with every girlfriend you’ve had for the past ten years I knew you,” commented Yixing offhandedly, shaking his head. “I don’t even think you like the idea of a girlfriend, you know, it’s more like you want a blow-up doll instead of a real woman. You’re just there for the lips, not the female attached.”

“Isn’t that what 90% of men are after? The straight guys, I mean.”

“No, not after they get whipped by their ladies, not really.”

Luhan rolled his eyes and directed his eys to the front of the demo room, where Chef Bertrand was chatting animatedly in French, translated by Chef Kim. “What did I miss?”

“Just the instructions for the placement test. Chef said that we get a set of ingredients, and it’s up to us to prepare a dish out of them, and plate all of it, whatever that means. Kinda like Iron Chef. The we get separated according to our abilities, starting from Class A to Class, well, F. Then tomorrow the actual classes begin.” Yixing in a sharp gust of air. “Looks like I’d be in Class F, alright.”

Luhan was fretting about the classes.

No way in hell that I’d get Class F. Oh no. I’m always in the top ranks, always the cream of the crop, dear Jesus, I can’t land in Class F, he thought in a flash of panicked words. An F is unthinkable! He had never worried about not getting into the top ranks before Pierre’s happened, but well, he didn’t know how to cook. Worse, he destroyed everything related to cooking.

Yixing noticed the dark, brooding look on Luhan’s face, and snickered. “Well, at least there’s a damned good chance of us being into the same class,” he said, and struggled to keep his laughter in. He’d never seen Luhan look so nervous before, holy , his best friend looked like he was a sixth grader about to ask his crush out for a school dance. What happened to the confident, snotty Cool Hand Luhan, the guy who rolled his eyes at AP class exams at high school, the one who snorted at soccer regional championships?

Well, turns out that cooking’s the one who’s snorting at him now.

But Yixing understood the situation. Luhan had an irrational fear of failing, and by failing, he meant getting second place or lower. It was something inbred in him, which Yixing sure as hell didn’t understand, that told—no, commanded him to be the overachiever he was. Yixing’s guess was that it was his Papa that whacked that instinct into him, the old bastard.

They were ten minutes away from the placement test, and Luhan had no idea what he was going to do. He couldn’t even cook an egg, dear Jesus. Iron Chef, my , more like Hell’s Kitchen! Luhan thought as he tried to think of ways out of the situation. He could ask Yixing to break his arms, so he couldn’t cook. Or he could pretend to have some kind of contagious disease that would spread on the food and infect whoever eats it. Or he could act like he suddenly developed schizophrenia and tell Chef Kim that Buddha told him that cooking is not the way to nirvana.

“Oh my God,” groaned Luhan, the memories of this morning’s nightmare episode pushed into the back of his mind. “I am so dead.”

“Look, it’s not as if your dad expects you to be good at something you’ve never done before—“

“He does, Yixing, he does,” snapped Luhan irritably. “I have to be good at everything. Just the mere fact that he enrolled me here’s like he actually wants to see me fail and lecture me about it,” he added quite absently, a frustrated crease forming in the middle of his eyebrows.

Yixing snorted. “Then show him how good you’d be when you graduate,” he retorted, like Luhan had lost three-quarters of his brain cells overnight. “You know, it’ll look better to see you be the underdog the first year then graduate cooking like you’re Guy Fieri or something, rather than try being a pro all year and failing hard. You’re in a school, so relax, you’re here to learn stuff.”

Whoever the Guy Fieri is, Luhan did not know, but Yixing made sense. He turned out to be smarter than he appeared to be in moments like this. Luhan was proud of his best friend.

“You know,” Luhan said thoughtfully after a while. “You could be, like, a guidance counselor if your family disowns you.”

“You have this special talent of making compliments sound like insults. If that was compliment right there,” replied Yixing.

The demo room, which can house up to 700 people at once, is more or less set up like a cross between a lecture hall and a theater, except there’s a kitchen installed on the stage. When lessons actually start, they would enter the demo room first thing in the morning to see the dish being prepared by the Chef for the day. The dish would involve tricks and processes that they would need to learn, and at the practical rooms—or referred to by Chef Kim as simply the practicals—the students must try to recreate it. The upholstered seats were comfortable, but there were no desks to write on, and its absence will prove a hurdle for Luhan later in the year. He could feel it.

Finally, Chef Bertrand concluded his speech with a cheerful “Good luck!” in French, giving way to Chef Wu, who laid down the instructions. He wasn’t as strict with everything as the day before, and actually would let the students to take the test beside their friends, if they want to, in the practicals, but he was still the type of guy you wouldn’t want to mess around with. Packets were being passed to the students by the aids, as Chef Wu barked out his usual no-nonsense instructions, explaining that in the packets were the uniform that must be worn before going to class.

Luhan received the thick, bulky packet before Yixing did, because Lu comes before Zhang in the roll call, and studied the white cotton jacket and black pants. The black pants were, well, black pants, nondescript and just there to make things formal. The chef’s jacket was white, which has large, black buttons up front, like those jackets the professional chefs in the Pearl Dragon wear. There was a little pocket at the chest, which was embroidered with his name and the logo of St. Pierre’s. It was piped along the edges with red, the school color.

They were to change into this uniform in the locker room, because in the kitchen, lots of things can happen. For Level I’s, they were allowed to wear any kinds of shoes they wanted, but it would change in Level II, according to Chef Wu. That being said, all of them would pick any locker available, because the current Level II students and the ones in Advanced classes were still occupying some.

Yixing audibly snickered when he saw the chef’s whites from his packet.

As they climbed up to the second floor, where the Cuisine de Base practicals are, along with the locker room, Luhan still felt his heart beating against his chest with a heavy throb. He’d never imagined being in the kitchen, cooking, because he had been trained only on the administrative side of things. He wasn’t going to wear chef’s whites once he was through with St. Pierre’s. Luhan was going to wear a suit and tie, and God knows what he’d do if he got a kitchen spill on that.

As they entered the practicals, Luhan caught himself unknowingly looking for Oh Sehun. He had very little of that guy since the nightmare episode, and had only caught little glimpses of him. Luhan had actually expected to see Sehun get a locker near to Luhan’s, but apparently, it wasn’t the case.

Even in the morning, as Luhan walked around the flat to get a good look of his new home, Sehun had already left, but to where, Luhan had no idea. Luhan had also peeked (okay, screw that, he’d trespassed, alright) into Sehun’s room, and the quarters seemed like the bedroom equivalent of an office. The bed was neatly made, the desk without any clutter, the shades pulled up but the windows were closed. There weren’t any signs of personal influence, like picture frames, posters, bedsheets that were in any other color other than white—not even a bag was in sight.

There had been a large mirror near the entrance of the locker room, as Luhan noticed just after he had changed out of his regular clothes, extending all the way from the ceiling to the floor, and Luhan caught a glimpse of himself in it, making him stop for a moment to observe the stranger looking back at him.

The Luhan in the mirror had his features, but it wasn’t quite the same. He was wearing a face that seemed humbler and plainer than the usual Luhan—son of one of the richest men in Asia, hell, even the world—has, without that bored indifference, without that know-it-all gleam in his eyes. He seemed so much like a regular person, being clad in a uniform that was probably less than 10 dollars worth and made to be in the same level as any other student in the school, may he be rich kid or a poor kid with a scholarship.

This Luhan, for some or no reason at all, the one staring back into the real world with kind, modest eyes, looks more likeable.

“You seem like a really nice person, huh?” Luhan caught himself murmuring to his reflection. Like a stranger that gives you free advice when you obviously looked lost, like that random person that treats a kid whose ice cream plopped on the sidewalk for another cone of it. Nice, but so, so alien.

As Luhan walked away from the mirror to the practicals, walking along with Yixing who apparently had some size issues with his jacket, he did not notice his new roommate noticing him. Oh Sehun, barista and bellboy extraordinaire, watches from a distance to keep his ward safe from the brewing danger not so far from them, although Sehun himself doesn’t know of its coming presence. He senses it the way children can feel a monster lurking under their beds, the way cats sense the presence of evil.

There were five ingredients that they were supposed to include in their dish, and a time limit of two hours to do it. Gigantic baskets of plump tomatoes, big, orange-hued lemons, and packs of what looked like the lovechild of dry spaghetti and vermicelli noodles were all over the place, plus bins of packs of raw prawn and chicken. There were also heaps of odd-shaped leaves in plastics bowls, but what it was exactly, Luhan had no idea. Along with those five ingredients, basic supplies were also provided, such as flour, salt, pepper, rice, and more pantry-stock items than Luhan can name.

Okay, he breathed to himself as he settled on a kitchen station beside Yixing. Tomatoes, lemons, noodles, shrimp, chicken, and a mystery leaf. I just have to make an edible dish out of those, plus any more ingredients. It should be easy enough. <