“Little miss perfect, sitting on a hornet,
Chewing on her carrots, spitting out ferrets!”
Zinnia could not believe this was happening again!! She turned red as shouts of this old song echoed all around her. There she was, plonked on her bottoms, legs spread out, cream splattered all over her and confetti of the now destroyed sponge cake lying tattered all across the floor for what seemed, miles around here. Nothing, she thought in her head, nothing can explain that even in an empty room she could here the voices that seemed to be screaming in her ears.
It was another week at the pastry school. While rest of the batch cribbed and pined, there was one girl who took the challenge in her stride. The rigorous schedule of this residential pastry camp was doing its best to give sleepless nights to its future master chefs, literally. But Zinnia, was on fire. It felt like she was waiting for these fifteen days her whole life. While the instructors threw ingredients, measurements, techniques like an impaler at a circus, Zinnia, like a skilled performer, emerged unscathed, turning in dough after dough, rising perfectly in sync with her repertoire. Lost in the pastry heaven, rosy flour dust blinded her to the shortened temper of her bench mate. Writing off the crustiness of the rest of the class to pressure of the curricullum, ignoring how cold desserts session was more cold shoulder to Zinnia time. She was not completely oblivious to the demanding schedule they were keeping, but engrossed enough to push away all the little things ordinarily any person would see as a fore-bearer of things to come.
This ending week would lead up to a very prestigious internship with the leading pastry chef of Paris and who knows where that could take her next?! Finally, the saying the world is your oyster, seemed to dawn really on Zinnia. She could very well be the next pearl in making and she definitely intended to be the picture of perfection. Oh yes! Her final presentation would leave them gasping, if she had her way, she quietly thought to herself, as she was called out in to the tasting room with the prestigious examiners. A mysterious spool of thread lodged itself in one of the cart wheels, refusing to move straight. What intended to be a push, turned into a shove and an upturned cart. Soon she was on the floor, and so was her Russian honey cake in pieces around her. The fall of doom had not yet broken in, when the sound of a cackle shattered the horrifying silence. Suddenly, she could really see through her stupor of drive. These faces around her- she has seen them before. More accurately little people in school.
“Little miss perfect, sitting on a hornet,
Chewing on her carrots, spitting out ferrets!”
They sang with malice. They hated her. again. No, they bullied her then. Not again. She ran out screaming into garden- NOT AGAIN!
