Cacao

Lee was holding a foreign object in his hand. The object was rectangular and although it was sold he felt that he could snap it at any moment. He wondered how something so brittle could be desired by many. He studied the item with close intent. On the outside was a bright purple wrapper that had a striking font. Anybody passing by this object would stop and inspect it just as he had. He peeled away the outer paper to reveal a leaf of aluminum underneath. Why was there another layer to go through? Surely this was something special, no? Slowly, he pulled back the shiny foil to reveal a dark brown shape inside. Never had he seen this before - never had he seen a bar of chocolate.

Lee’s eyes grew large and he held up the bar of chocolate to his nose. He took a deep breath. Rich cocoa filled his nose. This smell was not as foreign as the bar itself.

On Fridays the teacher would go to their prize bag that was filled with the names of everyone in the class. Everybody had their name in there at least once, but if you got a perfect score on the weekly class spelling test, your name was entered a second time. Every week Lee would study extra hard for the spelling test knowing he could get a second name in the prize bag. Most of the time he came very close to getting a perfect out of fifteen words, but there was always the allusive silent letter or tricky diphthong that prevented him from getting the illustrious fifteen out of fifteen. 

This Friday the teacher reached into the bag and pulled out his name. Lee didn’t believe his name was called because in those weeks that he did achieve the second entry his name wasn’t called. He shot up from the floor and went to the front of the class to retrieve a prize from the treasure chest. 

He looked into the chest and saw an abundance of little toys - which of course were not allowed to be played during class time - the winner needed to take it home to open. If they disobeyed they were barred from next week’s drawing. There were also pencils, erasers, candy, but what caught Lee’s attention was a package of stickers that smelled like different food items once their surfaces were scratched. This was the prize that he took and waited until he got home to open it.

In his room, Lee opened the package to the faint suggestion of the smells it had. He looked down at the different stickers which were shaped to their corresponding smells: lemon meringue pie, cherry pie, vanilla cupcake with rainbow sprinkles, classic cola, root beer, coconuts, salted caramel, and bubble gum. One caught his eye. The one which he couldn’t begin to imagine what it smelled like - chocolate. 

He scratched at it and it smelled heavenly. Receptors which never had been activated before were firing off in his brain. He kept smelling it until he could keep detecting the scent in his nostrils long after he put the pack of stickers away for safekeeping so that he wouldn’t waste them. The oils of the sticker must have stuck to the interior of his nose. 

As Lee went to bite the bar of chocolate a hand swiftly came down and snatched it away

“What did I tell you about chocolate?” his mother scolded him. “You’re not supposed to eat this, ever!”

Lee blinked through the tears that started to form in his eye. “I don’t understand why you still won’t let me eat it mom, I’m almost fifteen and I still have never tried it!”. 

“Well you’re not missing much,” his mother said as she threw it into the trash can. 

“Okay, but I still don’t understand why you are so afraid of it? I’m not going to get acne from it, that’s been disproven,” Lee said with angst. “Or are you afraid I’m going to get fat?”. He saw his mother wrap up the bag inside the trash can that contained the chocolate and walked to the door that led to the back yard. 

“It’s just that… no, no more discussion. I’ve told you many times that it is off limits!”. She opened the back door, went outside, and disposed of the bag in the large trash bin that was collected every Tuesday. Tomorrow was Tuesday.

Lee always wondered why his mother instilled the fear of having chocolate in him. It didn’t matter which form it came in. She did not allow bars of chocolate, hot cocoa at Christmas time, chocolate chip cookies, and she even went as far as finding his scented stickers and threw away only the chocolate one. 

This aversion to chocolate was a mystery until he received a text from his father that his mother was in the hospital. Lee was finishing up his last semester in graduate school where he was studying comparative literature. He eventually found out that his mother had fallen ill due to complications from Celiac disease. Why hadn’t his mother or father told him about it before? His father explained to Lee that his mother didn’t want to worry him and that the pediatrician kept a close eye on Lee as a child in order to see if symptoms of the disease manifested. They did not, but they did not want to worry such a young person with a cross they did not have to bear. 

Lee knew his mother was vegan or vegetarian - it really depended on how fed up she was with the day. He never kept tabs on what she ate because that was none of his business. On the other hand, she watched him like a hawk. The thought of her having an eating disorder crossed his mind many times, but yet again she didn’t look thin or malnourished so it didn’t worry him. It appeared that she had adequate nutrition and she was forcefully trying to teach Lee the way to live a healthy life.

When Lee got back to his apartment he started researching the connection between Celiac disease and chocolate. Chocolate itself did not contain gluten but much of the manufacturing process did have cross contamination with gluten. Besides the preparation of said chocolate, most chocolate is used in delicious baked goods such as black forest cake or double chocolate brownies which contain high amounts of gluten. 

His parents were old school and never sought out alternative recipes. Flours of almond, oat, and buckwheat were touted as gluten free alternatives, but these were strange to his parents who were used to regular old white flour. Sorghum flour? Forget it. It may as well be from another planet - they were not going to use it.

“I guess she still had it in the back of her mind that I was going to get sick from trying just the smallest bit,” Lee said as he fruitlessly stirred stevia into his iced tea. The stevia was settling on the bottom of the glass like his thoughts were in his mind.

“Maybe she had good intentions. Maybe she thought the doctors got it wrong,” his friend Maria said as she spread some softened butter on her bread. “You know, my Tio Tony’s doctors got his prostate cancer diagnosis wrong, it was actually a kidney issue.”

“I know, but now I’m afraid of many things and I’m just like well what else did she hide from me?”

Maria bit off a hunk of bread and began talking through half chewed food. “Come on, stop dwelling on it. The important thing is now she’s at home out of the hospital and doing better than she was before! Besides, we didn’t come to lunch to talk about that, we came to talk about why you haven’t asked out Brad.”

It was true. Maria and Lee always talked about their love life over food. It could be a bowl of Hot Cheetos accompanying discussion over a break up, or eating cheesecake talking about the previous night’s escapades. Whether or not the topic at hand ended in heartbreak or discussing how bad the sex was - food was always there as a panacea to the situation. 

“Why would he go out with a nerd like me?” Lee said while wiping his hands with the napkin at the table. “I’m just some literature dork and he’s well, dreamy and lovely and nice and smells nice and…” 

“Totally fucking hot!” Maria interrupted. “I’ve seen him look at you while we were at the graduate student summit. He seemed to take a liking to you dude.” Maria finally finished swallowing her bread. “Besides you’re single now, even if he says no, you’ll be single afterwards regardless. Just try!”

Maria had made a good point. Lee was not well versed in courting other men. At least none that were tangible.

“I mean, I guess. We did talk about what we were studying a couple of weeks ago,” Lee said. 

“Wait, when did this happen, I never knew about this!”

“It was when you were out of town visiting your Tio Tony. Brad asked me to grab a cup of coffee and we got on the topic of why we were at the university. Trust me, I feigned interest in voltage gated ion channels for longer than I wanted.”

Maria and Lee went back and forth during their meal. Should he or should he not? Would he or would he not? Could he or could he not? 

Their dessert finally came and Maria threw down the ax. 

“Okay, dude. Lee. You’re going to ask him today on a date. Nothing too fancy, just you know a little movie and coffee sort of thing,” Maria said as she played with the raspberry coulis on her plate. She drew a heart on her plate with the crimson syrup.

“I don’t know, I’ll let you know.” Lee said while looking down at his phone. “I’m so nervous I don’t want to eat any dessert today.”

“I know you’re not one to pass up dessert,” Maria said then shoved a spoonful of cheesecake into her mouth.

“Oh so you essentially called me fat. So I’m a fat fuck now?” Lee said. He tried to be serious but broke out into laughter in the middle of the sentence. 

“Lee, you’re a catch. You’re handsome, smart, and you always listen. If you were a girl we’d already be living together and I’d be thinking about getting you a ring.” 

The two finished their lunch. Lee didn’t make any promises to Maria about asking Brad out. It had been in the back of his mind for the past couple of weeks. Brad was one of those jocks who played baseball during his undergraduate career, but an injury prevented him from ever going professional. Instead, Brad turned to chemical biology for his future. Lee ran into him at the graduate student summit and instantly fell for him. Lee assumed he was straight until Brad approached Lee to introduce himself and as he reached for Lee’s hand, Lee noticed a bracelet made up of beads invoking the colors of the bisexual flag. There was a chance Lee thought. Now he had to work up the nerve to ask him out. 

Lee started walking toward campus. He needed to study for his qualification exams that were slowly creeping towards him on the calendar. Lee needed caffeine - he went into the campus coffee shop to grab the largest Americano he could with two extra shots of espresso.

He was investigating the snack stand when he happened across a familiar, yet alluding shape. Rectangular and it was easily held in one’s hand. It was a bar of chocolate. 

Lee picked it up and began to examine the package. The advertisement on the wrapper of the chocolate stated it was made with cacao from Papua New Guinea. What an exotic place for chocolate. He was only familiar with chocolate that was manufactured from Pennsylvania. 

He still held it as he approached the cash register. The barista rang him up for the drink and for the chocolate bar. Lee didn’t notice he was still holding it as he went up to pay, but took that as a sign to purchase it.

Lee went out to the nearest bench and sat his drink down. He held the chocolate bar up. Kind of like Charlie Bucket did in the “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” movie he watched once with his class on a rainy day in elementary school. He was deciding whether or not to eat it, or save it for Maria. 

“What the hell, it’s now or never right?” Lee said as he tore the wrappers off the bar. He took a huge bite into it - a bite that a child might on their birthday to celebrate turning a year older. The chocolate felt cool in his mouth and cloyingly sweet. His eyes rolled in the back of his head and a state of ecstasy was brought on as the chocolate began to melt in his mouth. He breathed in deeply which heightened the chocolates flavors in the back of his throat as the melted chocolate made its way slowly into his stomach. It was at this moment Lee finally understood why some people touted chocolate as “better than sex”. 

After he was finished he looked down at his hands. They were covered in brown streaks due to the fact that he had never held chocolate. He realized the aluminum wrapper was there to hold as you ate the chocolate so as to not have it melt on your hands.

His fear of chocolate had subsided and disappeared. Lee felt an energy of renewal within his body as if he could conquer anything. He didn’t feel nervous about his doctoral qualification exams coming up anymore. He knew his topic inside and out. Now he wouldn’t have a problem telling his parents that he went against his mother's life long ban and tried chocolate. 

Lee knew what he had to do now that he had this energy flowing in his veins. He took out his cell phone and called Brad. The phone rang a couple of times and then Brad answered.

Lee was quiet, took a deep breath, and spoke.

“Hi Brad, I was wondering if you’d like to go out with me?”