The wholesale store on the corner of the avenue was open twenty-four hours, its fluorescent lights humming with a high-pitched, buzzing vibration that felt like a drill against the skull. It was empty except for an sleepy clerk behind the register and the three of them, sitting directly on the ice-cold tile floor in the freezer aisle.
Between Phuwin's legs sat a massive, tub-sized container of cheap vanilla ice cream—the kind that came in a flimsy plastic bucket with a handle and tasted sixty percent like sugar and forty percent like freezer frost.
"If my dad sees these shorts, he's going to ask why there's grease on the knee," Krit said, his back pressed against the glass door of the frozen dumpling section. He was holding a plastic spoon he'd stolen from the coffee counter, using it to slice off thin ribbons of ice cream from the edge of the bucket. "I'm going to tell him I was rescued from a ditch by a rescue squad."
"He won't believe you," Mali said. She was leaning her head back against a stack of crates containing condensed milk, her eyes half-closed. "Your dad knows you don't do community service."
"He knows I'm a hero," Krit corrected softly, shoving a spoonful into his mouth and making a face as the cold hit his back teeth. "Agh. Brain freeze. Phuwin, eat. Stop staring into the tub like it's a fortune-teller's crystal ball."
Phuwin didn't move his spoon. He was sitting cross-legged, his knees sticking out of Krit's basketball shorts, looking at the smooth, pale surface of the ice cream where Krit had carved out a crater.
The heat of the festival felt a million miles away now. The noise, the smell of burnt oil, the white-hot flash of seeing the red-and-white jersey under the paper lanterns—it had all shrunk down into this small, freezing aisle under the white lights.
"He looked smaller," Phuwin said.
Mali opened one eye. Krit paused his spoon halfway back to the bucket.
"Who?" Mali asked, though she already knew.
"Him," Phuwin said quietly, his voice flat and steady, without any of the dramatic cadence that usually carried his sentences. "In my head, for the last three weeks, he was like this giant thing. Every time I thought about him, I felt small. Like he had this huge secret power over my entire day because he clicked a button on a phone."
He scraped the wooden edge of his spoon against the side of the plastic tub, making a small, clean groove in the frost.
"And then tonight, when he was standing there with the megaphone…" Phuwin looked up, looking first at Mali, then at Krit. "He was just a guy in a stained hoodie who didn't know what to do with his hands. He looked uncomfortable. He looked like he was afraid I was going to make a scene."
"I made the scene for you," Krit reminded him, tapping his chest with his plastic spoon. "The tin cans were a tactical masterpiece."
"I know," Phuwin smiled faintly. "Thank you for the tin cans. But… I didn't even want to make one. That's the weird part. I thought if I ever saw him, I'd want to yell. I thought I'd want to make him feel as small as I felt in the chicken shop on Thursday."
"And now?" Mali asked, her voice gentle as she reached out to pull the tub an inch closer to herself.
"Now I just feel like I'm tired," Phuwin sighed, leaning forward until his forehead almost touched the rim of the plastic bucket. "Not sad tired. Just… like when you finish a long gym class and you just want to sit on the bleachers and drink water."
Krit stared at him for three long seconds. The silence in the freezer aisle was total, broken only by the low hum of the ice cream display compressors.
Then, without a word, Krit reached out, took his own plastic spoon, and aggressively scooped up a huge, mound-sized heap of vanilla ice cream—far too big for a single bite—and thrust it directly in front of Phuwin's mouth.
"Eat the ice cream, ghost boy," Krit said, his tone entirely devoid of romantic poetry. "You're overthinking again. The brain cannot hold philosophical realizations and freezer burn at the same time."
Phuwin blinked at the giant lump of white frost hovering an inch from his nose. "Krit, that's going to give me an aneurysm."
"Eat it or I'm dropping it on your leg."
Phuwin let out a breathless, half-choked laugh, leaned forward, and took the bite. The cold hit his tongue like an electric shock, radiating straight up into his temples until his eyes squeezed shut and he clutched his forehead with both hands.
"Agh! My brain!" Phuwin gasped, collapsing sideways against Mali's shoulder.
"Told you," Krit said, completely satisfied, as he took a normal-sized bite for himself. "Problem solved. Medicine administered."
Mali laughed, her shoulder shaking under Phuwin's head as she reached for her own spoon. "You're a terrible doctor, Krit."
"I get results," Krit grinned, adjusting his crooked light-up star sunglasses, which were still sitting triumphantly atop his messy hair. "Now, who is paying for this bucket? Because I currently have four baht and a wet bus ticket in my pocket."
Phuwin kept his eyes closed, his forehead resting against Mali's denim jacket, the sharp, freezing ache in his temples slowly fading into a quiet, dull throb.
Outside the glass doors of the wholesale store, the Bangkok night was warm, humid, and loud with the sound of distant traffic. But inside the freezer aisle, sitting on the cold tiles with his clothes smelling like rain and fried chive cakes, Phuwin finally let out a long, full breath—and for the first time in a very long time, he didn't care what was happening on anyone else's screen.