CH 1

1st Meal 

A Man Who Cooks For Himself And A High School Girl 1

—I believe that cooking for yourself is a chore.

You have to go shopping at a high frequency, and there are more dishes to wash. Unless you are a good cook, the number of items in your repertoire is limited, and you may end up eating similar foods all the time.

The advantage is that it is less expensive and wasteful than eating out, and you can also pay more attention to your nutritional balance. But, since I drink commercial vegetable juice on occasion, I don't think it makes much of a difference.

A certain percentage of college boys live alone and never cook for themselves. They'd rather eat a hamburger steak at a family restaurant, even if it's a little more expensive, than eat tasteless fried rice they made themselves, and I generally agreed with them.

But the fact that I am still walking up the stairs of my cheap reinforced concrete apartment with heavy shopping bags in my hands is a sign of my tearful efforts to cut down on my food expenses, even if only a little.

(I'm having a pretty tough month too…that drinking session at the beginning of the month really hurts me financially…)

I shrug my shoulders as I think of the contents of my wallet, which have shrunk in inverse proportion to the weight of a week's worth of food. Although it is true that cooking for oneself is less expensive than eating out, it is not so if you ask whether it is dramatically cost-effective.

Basically, as the quantity of food increases, the cheaper the price per unit becomes, but there is no way I can use up all of it when I buy it as a single person. I would end up with a surplus and let it rot in the fridge.

Some of my college friends are sharing a room with their couple, and I hear that their per-person food costs are considerably lower than mine. It seems that just one person sharing a room with two other people is a considerable bargain. Needless to say, I don't have such a partner...In fact, my apartment is only for one person, so there is no such thing as sharing a room.

I went up to the second-floor corridor where my room was located, regretting that it was too late, thinking that I should have declined the drinking party and used the money for food...

I was about to rush to my apartment—Utatane Heights, room 206, to unload my heavy luggage, but my feet stopped right there.

(...What’s that…?)

I turned my eyes to the door of room 205, my next-door neighbor. In that place, which I had to pass through due to the structure of the apartment, there was a girl sitting on the floor while hugging both of her knees.

(Eh…? What? Who’s that…?)

I'm a sophomore in college this year, and it's been over a year since I moved into Utatane Heights, but unfortunately, I still haven't seen my neighbor's face. This is not because there was no one living next door, but simply because I neglected to greet my neighbors.

In other words, it is extremely likely that the person curled up there is a neighbor I have yet to see. She is probably a high school student, as she is wearing the uniform of a high school located not far from this apartment.

“...Uhm, can I help you…?”

After a few moments of hesitation, I chose to call out to her. If I were on our college campus, I'd probably ignore it, but seeing what appears to be a neighbor cowering in front of my door, I can't just ignore her.

Besides, it was just before seven o'clock at night. It is not a good time for a high school girl, or in other words, a minor, to be outside.

“...?”

The girl who raised her face, which was buried in her lap, had a rather pretty-looking face. I groaned inwardly when I noticed her looking up at me curiously, despite the fact that I rarely talked to the opposite sex in college except in seminars and foreign language classes.

This is bad. My brain, poisoned by the recent news of the world, is sending out dangerous signals because there was recent news about an adult male, even a college student, carelessly talking to a high school girl he had never met before…

Then, whether she knew I was worried or not, the high school girl in front of me muttered something to me.

“I lost my keys and I can’t get in…”

That was the first conversation between Yamori Yu and Asahi Mahiru—A man who cooks for himself and a high school girl