Sweet Romance14 min read
One Zongzi, Thirty Water Bottles, and the Secret Between Us
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I am terrible at starting fights, and I am worse at finishing them with dignity.
"You stole my zongzi, didn't you?" he said, and the whole cafeteria seemed to fold into his voice.
"I did not!" I said, which was probably obvious because what kind of thief fights a basketball team over a holiday rice dumpling?
I am Gwendolyn Brewer. That morning the campus dining hall was giving away zongzi for Dragon Boat Day. Free food—who can resist? I ran there after class because Jaylin Powell had already saved my spot in line. I came up the stairs expecting two warm parcels waiting for me. Instead I found Jaylin standing to the side, looking wounded, and a cluster of tall guys, sweaty from practice, shoved between us and the window.
"Excuse me," I shouted. "You cut in line."
They looked down like a group of planets noticing a pebble. One of them sneered. "What for, little gas cylinder? Who cares?"
"Hey!" I planted my hands on my hips. "You only get one. The rule is one per person."
He laughed. "Why should you get it?"
"Because I was in line," I said, loud enough for people to turn. Some nodding faces formed a small cheering chorus behind me. That encouraged me.
I grabbed at the last zongzi before the tall guy could tuck it away. The guy who'd been holding two zongzi stiffened, then a shadow fell over us.
"That's mine," a voice said, playfully low, closer than I expected.
I froze. The voice bent toward my ear like the curl of a breeze. "You took my zongzi."
A ripple went through me that had nothing to do with the heat. Wade Kobayashi. He was famous in school for being the captain of our basketball team—tall, all angles, the kind of person people either followed or made memes about. He smiled with amusement. I blinked back at him and felt my cheeks heat.
"Just one zongzi," I said, half apology, half challenge. "It was—"
"It was mine?" he asked, raising a single brow. Then he offered it to me. "Here. Your zongzi."
I accepted it like a marionette, all hands and trembling gratitude.
"Tomorrow," he said, looking at his watch, "8 a.m. I have a game. Bring thirty bottles of water to the court."
My brain turned into static. "Thirty?"
"Thirty," he repeated, like it was obvious. "See you there, Gwendolyn."
I watched him walk away with his crew. I stood there with a sticky rice dumpling and twenty thousand people in my head texting that exact moment to the school's forum.
"OMG the zongzi girl vs Wade," someone had posted a picture an hour later—a photoshopped poster of me bowing and Wade laughing. My phone buzzed like a bell in a church. I buried under my comforter and screamed. Jaylin came in, makeup half done.
"What do you expect? You barged into a crowd, started a scene," she said, half-annoyed, half-amused.
"Who would've thought they'd send two people to cut the line like that?" I sobbed. "They're a group. They—"
"Girl, calm down," Carolina Martinez said from the mirror. "You need to think." She looked at me over mascara. "And you need a plan."
Then my phone exploded with calls and a message: "Gwendolyn, come downstairs—Wade is here." My feet moved before I collected courage. Twenty missed calls, a stream of "5...4..." messages. I ran.
They were waiting outside the dorm in a semicircle of dominance. Wade leaned against a stair railing. "You're exactly on time," he said.
I went full performance. I bowed like a comedian asking for mercy. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken your—"
He laughed and bent down with that boyish tilt. He placed the zongzi in my hands again. "Your zongzi," he whispered, a little tease behind it.
People snickered. Jaylin mouthed: 'survive' at me. I sniffed and pretended to cry just a little. "I— I'm sorry, my lord. I am a peasant."
Wade glanced at the crowd, checked his watch, and added with a kind of kingly boredom, "Tomorrow, 8 a.m. Bring thirty bottles of water. I expect to see you at the court."
"Thirty?" My voice cracked around the number.
"Yes." He smiled plainly. "And Gwendolyn—dress nice."
I left like my dignity had been auctioned off.
*
The next morning I overslept because my phone didn't save me from my own weakness—seven alarms set and I turned them all off in a dream. I woke at 7:50 with messages from a contact labeled "Plague"—someone who loved texting mockery. "Where are you?" it read.
I found a cart, bought thirty bottles. It felt like a small mountain under my arms. I wheeled it to the gym and collapsed in the shade, half-dead and dizzy. The game was already in full swing. Wade was on the court like a sculpture moving—white jersey, dark hair wet with sweat, number 24. People were chanting. He was precise, like a machine, and the crowd loved him.
He finished a sharp three-pointer and headed right toward me.
"You selling water here?" he asked, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
"Yeah," I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking.
He untied one bottle, popped the cap with his teeth, and gulped. He offered the bottle away and the fans descended looter-like. "Drink," he called. "Take one."
They mobbed him. He always gave and people hailed him. I watched the money I'd earned from my small sales dissolve into the crowd. Someone elbowed me—one of his crew—mocking. "Isn't it this chick who was making trouble yesterday?" someone else said.
"Go buy ten more," Wade said eventually, turning back to me. The crowd laughed; jokes flew. I bit the inside of my cheek and fled. I bought ten more. I came back. My legs wanted to fail.
"You're a piece of work," someone jeered. "Why are you following him, little girl?"
"I'm not following," I said, and it came out squeaky.
Wade turned. He watched me a long moment like someone checking a manuscript. "Come tomorrow, 5 a.m. Wear something pretty."
I wanted to shout that no way I would stand for such orders, but everything inside me knotted. I agreed.
That night I did something ridiculous: I did smoky eye makeup, the theatrical kind that makes a small face look daring. I practiced my most daring expressions in the mirror. "I'm going to make him regret using me like a messenger," I told myself. "Revenge in style."
Jaylin laughed at me. "Gwen, wear that? You'll blind the sun."
"I'll be the sun," I said and left anyway.
At 5 a.m., waiting at the dorm door, I felt like a planted actor. Wade's friends arrived first. They stared as if I was a billboard ad. Then Wade walked up. He studied me and said bluntly, "This outfit suits you."
"You didn't answer when I asked," I said. "Are you doing this on purpose?"
His smile went crooked. "I like it. Come." He stood in a car and drove us up the mountain where the team had planned a hike. He and another guy carried the heavy backpacks. I puffed but later it would become a joke in our group: Wade grunted more than anyone on the climb.
At a campsite, we grilled meat and sat in a circle of half-friends and lovers. Wade checked his phone, face vanishing for a second. "My phone's gone," he muttered. He went off to search, and I, delighted at last to eat, took the meat he'd left and pretended it was mine. We were playful rivals over the grill—mostly me losing. At one point he jabbed someone's hand lightly and, later, when I reached for meat I thought was fair game, I caught the look: he had guided it subtly into my hands. My heart did a ridiculous thump.
"You're bold," he said later, watching me pocket the last skewers.
"Of course," I said. "Someone has to be."
Later, as rain threatened, we ran back and ended on a bus, wet and absurd. Wade walked me back to the dorm.
That week my day-to-day life shifted. Mornings came with steaming buns and a to-go glass of soy milk because he liked making my breakfast appear at my desk. He'd text, "Breakfast sent," and sometimes, "Are you awake?" He never failed. People noticed.
"You're his girlfriend now?" someone whispered. I flushed. "No, not at all," I replied, but the truth was not simple.
"Are you okay?" Carolina asked. "This is like a movie."
"I'm not sure," I said. "He asked me if I was okay, but then changed his contact name from 'Plague' to 'God' in my phone. I put it back to 'Plague.'"
His messages shifted tone. He apologized for the zongzi incident in a long text. "I didn't mean to humiliate you," he wrote. "I thought you were brave and interesting. Let me make up for it."
"How do you make up for thirty bottles of water and a ruined morning?" I typed back.
"By being your guard," he wrote. "I'll be your bodyguard until you're satisfied."
I laughed. "A basketball player as a bodyguard? Okay."
So it began: breakfast, a constant supply of drinks, and a presence that stopped being hostile and started being strange—gentle, sometimes painful. He had weight in his silences that I couldn't name.
He told me about a girl from his past, a secret mark I couldn't reach at first. One afternoon he took me to a patch of high wall covered in ivy and pulled aside the leaves to reveal a hidden clearing—two chairs and a small wooden table, his private place.
"This was my hideout in high school," he said. "We used to play music here. One of them stopped coming."
He told me, haltingly, about a girl in his class—someone who had been close, who had been under pressure to get top marks. "I was childish. We argued over an eraser," he said. "I pushed, said words. She left that city and was gone. Later she... she jumped. She left me an eraser in her last message. I blamed myself."
I listened and my own memories woke—bits of something sharp and loud. He didn't look for sympathy so much as air, a place to put the fact down.
"Is that why people say you hurt people?" I asked, fearing their nastiest rumor.
He flinched. "Rumors are stupid. I didn't kill anyone," he said. "But I felt like I had murdered a future, once."
The truth pulled us closer, like gravity. Around us friends became quieter, protective. I learned he had a complicated family, that his aunt Wilma Petersen was like a second mother. He had grown up near the campus and had the freedom to keep hidden places.
We found that we liked the same silly things—he'd noticed the Miyazaki art book on my phone during a moment he used it. I had an extra sticker where Haku and Chihiro fall together—an almost impossible piece to collect. He loved Miyazaki too, and suddenly the sticker was a small currency between us.
"I'd like that one," he said.
"It's not money," I teased, proud and a little sharp. "It's faith."
He laughed and then insisted, with perfect seriousness, "What would convince you?"
"Prove you're honest," I said.
So he showed up each morning with breakfasts, and our clumsy romance started to kind of make sense. He apologized sometimes with awkward, heavy phrases. I realized he was not the villain I had feared: he was someone carrying guilt like armor.
We laughed, too. We went on terrible amusement park rides to watch him scream. He'd call me a drama queen and I called him an overgrown child. Once, he stole a plate of my food, and I stole a kiss. It was ridiculous and quiet and loud all at once.
But the world outside our bubble had teeth. There were those who had posted that poster—the kids who loved a scandal. They'd fanned a rumor that I'd lied about the "murder" and that our relationship was a stunt. Someone had even created a thread accusing him of dangerous behavior. The forum filled with venom. Then one morning a video surfaced—someone had filmed the zongzi incident and mocked how I had fallen on my knees. I woke to texts calling me an attention-seeker.
"Let's get it down," Wade said. "Let me handle it."
"Let you? You posted something?" I demanded.
"No," he answered softly. "But I can make things right publicly."
He sat me down one evening and told me his plan: we would go to the student assembly and expose the students who'd staged the poster and the group that had posted the photos. He wanted to clear our names and shut down the rumor mill.
I hesitated. "Do you want revenge?"
"Not revenge. Truth." He looked at me with a calm that was almost frightening. "And if someone dared to lie where people could damage others' lives, they should see a crowd that knows the truth."
I agreed. He coordinated. He asked Cruz Meier to bring proof—messages and screenshots he'd collected. Cruz said he'd been tracking the threads and ad posters. We prepared witnesses: Jaylin, who had saved me in line; Ruben Dean, who'd been asked to "cover" and had refused; and a couple of bystanders who would step forward.
On the day of the assembly a storm of students packed into the hall. The principal had agreed to give five minutes to "student concern." When I walked up to the microphone my stomach did loop-de-loops. There were phone cameras everywhere. I could feel the electric burn of expectation that follows any public drama.
"Good afternoon," I said. "I'm Gwendolyn Brewer. I want to speak about something that happened in the dining hall and the videos and posts that followed."
"She stole his food!" someone yelled. "She staged it!"
"She lied!" cried another voice.
"One at a time." Wade lifted his hand. "Listen."
He handed the mic to Cruz first. Cruz played messages from a group chat where the poster had been coordinated—someone had filmed deliberately to create a spectacle. Jaylin told the story of how she'd been in line and that she had arranged my place legally. Ruben described seeing the tall guys cut in line and how one of them had insistently tucked the second zongzi into another friend's bag.
Then my moment came. I told what I remembered—how the heat smelled, how I wanted justice for a tiny rule, how I had spoken up. I told the hall about how the photos had been edited and how the poster had been shared with captions that weren't true. I felt my voice sharpen into a blade. "You may enjoy a joke, but jokes become knives when they cut lives."
Then Wade stepped forward. He revealed how his account had been altered to make it look like he was laughing at me, and he showed the original video that a friend had taken from the side—the way he had actually handed me the zongzi first, the way he had paused to tease later. Silence went through the auditorium like wind through empty seats.
"Who produced the poster?" he asked quietly.
Several heads turned; a group of the very players who had cut the line shifted uncomfortably.
"It's you," Wade said, naming a tall boy by his school ID. The boy stammered. "Why did you post it?"
"So we could get views," the boy admitted, and the room reacted with a chorus of disgust. "We thought it'd be funny."
"Do you realize what you did?" Wade asked. "You made a private moment public. You called a stranger a liar and made her life harder."
The boy's bravado cracked. He tried to laugh it off. "It was a joke."
"That's privilege," Wade said. "When you don't consider the person you hurt, it shows how you think you can get away with anything."
Then came the part the rules demanded—the punishment. Wade didn't want to destroy any of them. He wanted them to face the school and understand how rumor damages. He asked the principal to require the boys to stand on stage and list every place they'd posted and explain their motive. Each had to write a public apology on a board posted at the front entrance for two weeks and attend a school workshop on online conduct and empathy. They were to organize a public campus service: cleaning up graffiti, organizing a bake sale to raise funds for counseling, and publicly untagging and deleting every edited image. Finally, each had to perform three hours of supervised community service at the dining hall during busy hours, serving meals and taking questions from students about digital responsibility.
When the first boy tried to backpedal, he broke. "I didn't mean it to hurt her that much," he said, voice small, eyes darting. "I wasn't thinking."
Faces in the crowd shifted from curiosity to discomfort to quiet shame. Some filmed; most watched. The punishment unfolded like a lesson. The boys who'd called me names saw people they respected—teachers, friends—turn their heads. The tallest one had to stand and speak about how jokes can be poisonous. He started with denial, then moved to anger, then to silence, then to guilt. Someone in the back snapped a photo; another student whispered, "Good. They needed to see this."
The onlookers reacted, first with gasps, then with murmurs that grew into applause when the principal announced the actions. Some clapped for the moral of it; some clapped for us; some clapped because the small injustice they'd turned into gossip was finally being leveled. For the boys, the reaction changed them. That was the point: their power was public opinion, and public opinion turned on them.
The tallest boy began with a stiff laugh that cracked, then a defensive, "I didn't—", then a shaky "I'm sorry," then a collapse into a hand over his face. His friends looked away. People whispered, took videos, some muttered, "Pathetic." A few students brought flowers and handed them to me afterward, not for me, but for the idea that someone could be called to account.
That day the rumor shrank. The poster was taken down. The thread was closed. The boys kept their punishment but learned a new measure of consequence.
Afterwards, in the hallway, Wade took my hand. "You didn't deserve that," he said.
"You orchestrated my humiliation and then saved me," I said, and somehow that was the perfect summary of how messy he was.
He laughed softly. "Guilty. But I will also be guilty of making it up to you."
We moved forward—stumbling, earnest, and loud. He became a steady presence: breakfasts, hospital visits when he was sick, and quiet conversations in his ivy room where he told me the story of the rubber eraser that someone refused to return. He told me that the girl who had died had been his childhood friend—her name came up like a hush—but he didn't want blame. "I carry it," he said, "and sometimes that heavy thing makes me clumsy. But you make the weight light."
Time, the goofy bus rides, and the stupid arguments about who loved Miyazaki more—those rebuilt a scaffold for us.
One night in the hospital, he took my hand while Wilma Petersen, his aunt, fussed over a tray of food. "She said you were helpful here," Wilma told me. "Thank you."
"You don't have to thank me," I said.
Wade looked at me like he was practicing something delicate. "Gwen, I have to tell you more. There's something about before that... I wanted to be better."
He pressed his forehead against mine for a second. "I like you," he said simply.
"You took a lot to get here," I muttered.
"You taught me to be brave," he said. "You didn't know it, but watching you that day—standing up for a rule—it inspired me."
So many small things followed: a secret base where we'd bring pizza because the bench smelled like rain; conspiracy-like notes left on my desk from him saying, "You are not a joke." We argued over little things—movie snacks, whether to take raincoats—but always came back. He apologized for being cruel in small moments. I forgave him because a person who takes responsibility is rare.
Gabrielle Bennett—Wade's ex—came and left like a storm that taught us little. Once she confronted him publicly, claiming she had waited for years and that I had "stolen" something that belonged to her. She spoke at our table, her voice sharp and practiced. "You think you can just be with him?" she said. "I've been his anchor." She smiled at me with a condescension I will not forget.
People gathered. Wade stood between us. "Gabrielle," he said, calm now in a way I'd never seen. "You and I had history, but people change. This is not about you, and it's not about a debt. It's about me being honest."
Gabrielle tried to rise; her face showed a flicker of victory, then shock, then denial, then collapse. She demanded attention, then lost it. The crowd's reaction was a slow burn—first curiosity, then pity, then clear rejection. She tried to claim manipulation, but our friends produced messages she had sent demanding things and reminding him of obligations. There was no theatrical kneeling; instead it was a quiet unmasking. "You asked me to be your anchor," Wade said. "And then you tried to sign my life like a contract. I want something real, not a ledger."
Gabrielle's smile broke into trembling. "You can't just—"
"I can," Wade said. "And I will. You deserve someone who accepts the whole of you, not someone who keeps score."
People recorded, whispered, and some turned away, disgusted. She left like a shadow from a room with broken glass: haunted, angry, hollow.
"Good," Jaylin said later, squeezing my shoulder. "That was public enough."
"I didn't like how she cried," I said.
"She got to see her own hand," Wade said softly. "I think she needed that."
Afterward, we built our small rituals: he would bring tea when I pulled an all-nighter, and I would hide stickers in his bag. He brought a bouquet of roses once, dramatic and ridiculous. As semesters rolled by, we kept our messy human pieces in a box together.
"I owe you nothing but breakfast," he said one evening, flipping a pancake with theatrical skill. "And a thousand mornings."
"Keep it to 365," I said.
He grinned. "Deal."
That is how I go from a girl who yelled about a rice dumpling to someone who learned how to say, "I love you," with both frightening honesty and ridiculous humor. We had fights still—about privacy and his past—but in the middle of the school year, when my badge said Gwendolyn Brewer and his said Wade Kobayashi, we learned not just to survive each other but to choose each other.
Sometimes I think of who I was that day in the food line: noisy, a little desperate, and ridiculously brave for asking for what was mine. This life, with him passing me breakfast and then holding my hand at the base of a school that loves spectacle, is better than the script I imagined. We are imperfect, loud, and often ridiculous. But when someone tries to make our private life public and cruel, we stand in a hall and tell truth like a clean, loud bell.
"Remember the zongzi?" Wade murmured once, as we sat on the ivy bench.
"I never forgot," I said.
He smiled. "Good, because I'm never giving up your midnight snacks again."
I leaned my head against him. "Then keep them safe," I whispered.
He tightened his arm around me like a promise. "Always," he said—then, as if correcting himself, "Well, often. But I'll try."
We laughed, and it was loud and honest, like two people practicing the future.
The End
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