Delicious Pizza
I set down the crayon I'd been scribbling across the paper. This body was good at drawing, too. It really did seem to have a natural gift for everything—a body that couldn't do a single thing poorly.
"Hana! I bought pizza!"
The moment I saw the enormous pizza box in Haru's arms, I couldn't tear my eyes away. The smell alone had already bewitched me. A delicious aroma drifted up in soft wisps through the gaps in the box. Maybe it was because the body was young, but my sense of smell seemed to have grown sharper as well.
Scents I once would have let pass me by, this body caught without missing a single one. It had its good points, and its bad.
"Hana! What are you drawing today?"
Haru always greeted me with that bright face of hers. I couldn't return the greeting. Every last nerve I had was fixed on the pizza. I wanted to eat that delicious thing right away. I barely managed to pull myself together enough to answer.
"I'm drawing a dinosaur!"
I had no choice but to swallow the urge to eat immediately. After all, there was something Bora had said last time.
"Hana, aren't you eating a little too much?"
"Bora, I'm a growing kid. I have to eat a lot."
"Even taking that into account, I think you eat way too much. You need to pace yourself."
"Hnn..."
Having been caught overeating by Bora before, I'd grown a little self-conscious around food. They say you don't even bother a dog while it's eating... Still, even I was aware, to some degree, that I ate a lot, so Bora wasn't wrong. If anything, she was only worrying about my health.
"Tonight's dinner is pizza! I already told Miss Bora, so you can just eat, Hana."
"Waaah!"
At Haru's words I threw both arms wide and cheered with everything I had. If Bora had given permission, there was nothing left to hesitate over. Haru really was the best. I got up and plopped myself down at the table with a thump.
When the lid came off, a pizza sending up lazy curls of steam welcomed me, and I couldn't look away. To tempt me with a figure this indecent... This wicked pizza needed to be punished. I was just reaching for it when Haru caught my hand.
"Hana, you have to wash your hands first."
With that, she scooped me up and headed for the bathroom. Just as she'd said, I'd been drawing hard with crayons until a moment ago, and my hands were a riot of color. And I'd been about to eat pizza with hands like these...
I did as Haru said, stepped up onto the stool, and scrubbed at the sink until my skin squeaked. The rainbow-stained hands went back to being white.
Seated at the table once more, I reached out and took hold of a slice. Thick steam curled off the hot pizza, and the cheese stretched in a long strand. It was the kind of sight that stirred an appetite all on its own.
I waited for the happiness to come. Instinct told me that pizza was about to toy with the inside of my mouth.
"Ahm!"
I bit deep into the enormous slice. The moment I chewed, the flavor hit all at once. Inside my mouth, the pizza was dancing.
I opened my eyes wide and savored it. I'd taken only a single bite, and it tasted like this? It was a flavor I wanted to press on other people. Whatever magic they'd worked, the temperature hadn't dropped. If they'd bought it downtown, shouldn't it have cooled at least a little? That was only normal, wasn't it?
I was smiling in pure happiness, mumbling my way through the slice, when Haru wiped the corner of my mouth with a tissue. Haru really was the best. I wasn't the sort of little kid who could be won over by a single piece of food. But if someone brought me food this delicious, I could stand to be won over just this once.
"Nom, nom!"
I was eating like that when Bora came into my room as well. I greeted her with my cheeks puffed full. She seemed to sigh a little at the sight of me eating pizza, but the moment she took in how I looked, she smiled and came over to my side.
"Hana, is it that good? You're eating until your cheeks puff out."
"It's so good! I could eat nothing but this!"
At my honest review, Bora smacked her lips and lifted a slice of her own. Well, I had put on quite a show. Watching me eat that deliciously, there was no way her appetite could stay asleep. Soon she was eating a slice too.
There was plenty of pizza, so sharing it wasn't anything to regret. I couldn't possibly have finished it alone anyway. It was big enough that it took three people just to get through the thing.
"I'm full!"
Having demolished an entire pizza, I patted my swollen belly and, as if by habit, climbed up onto the bed. I was thinking of watching an episode of Little Magician Rumi while I digested. Bora's words forced me back down.
"Hana, you need to brush your teeth."
"Hnn..."
Brushing my teeth was a nuisance no matter when I did it. They were baby teeth that were going to fall out anyway—couldn't I just skip it? Even if I said so, though, Bora would tell me that if I built the habit now, I'd brush by instinct later on. She was right, so I went into the bathroom.
Somewhere on the internet I'd heard of a machine that brushed your teeth automatically if you just held it in your mouth, and I couldn't understand why things like that only ever survived as rumors. If one actually existed, buying it would make life so much easier.
"Hmm..."
In the drawer sat chocolate, strawberry, and melon toothpaste. Agonizing over which of the three to choose, I settled on strawberry. I took out my toothbrush and squeezed a long line of the pink paste onto it.
I glanced outside. Bora and Haru were talking to each other and weren't looking this way. I lifted the brush and sneakily licked the toothpaste.
The sweet strawberry flavor was genuinely delicious. If it hadn't been toothpaste, I could have just eaten it. The truth was, I'd eaten some last time, gotten caught by Bora, and been scolded within an inch of my life, so I didn't eat it. I was an adult, after all. Doing something like eating toothpaste once was more than enough.
Scrub, scrub.
The moment I started brushing in earnest, my mouth filled with strawberry scent. I held back the urge to swallow the foam with superhuman patience. If I hadn't eaten pizza until my belly was stuffed tight, there was no telling what might have happened.
"This is... rather lacking."
Kim Sehee set aside the test coffee placed before her as she spoke.
Having conquered the green tea market, she had set her sights on the coffee market next. That was proving harder than expected. The foundation from their earlier attempt was still in place, so actually making the coffee wasn't particularly difficult. The result, however, was the problem.
"This is... we added the hair, and this is all the flavor it can manage?"
From where Kim Sehee stood, the coffee Starlight Food had produced fell short of expectations. Of course, perhaps because they'd added a single strand of Hana's hair, the depth and aroma were good. It simply wasn't on the level of the green tea. The quality of the original coffee was far too poor, so even the hair hadn't changed the taste and fragrance all that much.
"We gave it everything we had, but we hit a limit, ma'am."
Then again, it had been less than a month. Producing a result of even this caliber was a miracle. If Starlight Food had never made coffee beverages before, production alone would have taken more than half a year.
Because the foundation was there, they'd managed at least this much in the short span of a month.
"At this quality, we'd be better off not releasing it at all."
They had all but seized the green tea market, but coffee was far larger, and Kim Sehee was hungry to enter it. She meant to take the food market one sector at a time.
If this was the quality even after adding one of Hana's hairs, she couldn't bring herself to expect anything. Even in its current state it had the strength to compete with the very best coffees—but it lacked a hidden trump card.
The coffee market was a red ocean. No matter how well Starlight Food was doing in green tea, coffee was someone else's turf. There was no guarantee that releasing this as it stood would be an explosive success.
Of course, if word of mouth and the reviews began to spread, they could achieve a certain level of results... But no matter how she turned it over, it made no sense to be holding a cheat item like this and still manage only that much.
Just then, someone knocked hard and opened the door. Whoever it was must have been in a terrible hurry: their face was plastered with sweat, and they were breathing hard.
"Ma'am! I have news to report!"
With that, the employee handed Kim Sehee a sheet of paper with something drawn on it. She looked at it, and her eyes went wide. In the present situation, it was news worth welcoming.