My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, As I Expected

Yuihama-san was completely unable to accept my argument.

"Waaah! The shut-in guy is a total idiot!"

She finally burst into tears and ran out of the Home Economics Classroom.

It felt like she was running toward the setting sun. I hoped she would just keep going all the way to Brazil and live a happy life there.

And so, the Yuihama Kitchen—no, the Hachiman Kitchen—quietly came to an end.

—This time, we really were out of options.

Zaimokuza, Hiratsuka-sensei, and I had all been useless, and the three-day secret cooking boot camp was declared a failure.

"...In that case, we can only work at it slowly, one step at a time."

Yuihama's voice was filled with anxiety.

Working at it slowly meant taking the direct approach. It sounded simple enough, but it went without saying that it was the most exhausting path. The proper road was often difficult to travel.

From that day onward, it became a true hell.

Yuihama tried every bento dish that even beginners were supposedly able to make easily. I racked my brains for ways to help and practiced with her, but the result was a field of corpses.

Only now did we understand how difficult this thing called a "bento" was.

To fill that little box, you needed at least several side dishes.

Even if we followed my suggestion and relied on frozen foods for one or two items, it was still not easy to fill that tiny square box barely a dozen centimeters across. Forget several dishes—for people like us, who could not even make a single dish properly, that cute Lunch Box was like a fifty-meter swimming pool. It was an ordeal that let me deeply appreciate how hard homemakers across the country worked every day.

That ordeal continued for a week.

"Sigh...