Tiger's Circus

Chapter 11: New Schedule

After my talk with Mr. Maurizio, I tried to attack cooking the same way I did animal training: with absolute focus. 

It wasn't that easy. Even when I watched my food like a hawk I still sucked at cooking, as Ruth was more than happy to remind me of. Cutting up vegetables and the like was ok when I didn't cut myself and I could read recipes just fine. But sometimes, I just remembered the instructions wrong or I mis-measured the ingredients or misunderstood some random cooking jargon or something else happened.

There were a lot of something elses.

Which meant I kept burning myself and the food along with undercooking things, over-seasoning things, under-seasoning things, and generally making inedibles. It drove Ruth crazy. She seemed to yell at me for even the tiniest mistake and she barked all sorts of things at me like how useless I was and how ashamed my parents would be.

"If Madi were here, she'd be crying over what a failure you are," Ruth had said more than once.

Then there was Chris, who I swear only came to see me fail. He laughed at all my attempts and when he and Nick came it was double the mockery. Other people came and watched me too. On Wednesdays, when Ruth gave cooking lessons, there were an awful lot of new faces. I swear that Kevin, Bob, and Bradley showed up one day just to see what a disgrace I was. 

All of the attention on my lack of cooking skills made all of Ruth's insults worse. I could feel people's eyes on me even when they didn't laugh. It was humiliating.

Sometimes I thought Ruth believed I was faking being bad. She'd say, "If a person was as good at cooking as you are bad, I would never have to lift a finger in this kitchen again. I don't know why I didn't get that miracle instead of you."

And things like "How do you even make mistakes like this, Kelsey! Do you have hot dogs for brains?"

I wish I was faking, but I was doing my best. My best was just really, really bad. I tried to defend myself a few times, but life would just get worse. Ruth would get meaner and harsher. She'd start saying how lucky I was to be at the circus and how I would do best to not be uppity with her. It would end in a breakdown of why my current cooking sucked.

It was horrible. 

Even the nights were bad. Mrs. Gailon and I had lost whatever good thing we had. She was upset with me about this and the Cathleen thing I think, but I wasn't in a hurry to make up. Cathleen, Matt, and Mr. Davis had cured me of that desire.

For now, I tried to keep my head down and mouth shut with varying degrees of success while I attempted to learn. I hoped that I was somehow improving because it became clear I would not receive Mr. Maurizio's intervention anytime soon.

Once I realized how long I would be stuck in this new schedule, I did my best to squeeze some time out for me and Lisa to practice. I tried to see how quickly I could finish sanitation duty. I limited my talks with Dhiren and rushed through it as fast as I could without leaving anything behind. But all that swift work got me less than a half hour with Lisa each day.

As much as I was itching to do some new tricks, I was forced to focus on going through old routines and making sure Lisa was in good shape. It didn't feel like enough, but I wasn't sure what else I could do with me struggling in the kitchen every day. 

I was just so tired. 

I didn't have the energy to think.

Every sanitation duty, Dhiren reminded me what a poor job I was doing with keeping the balance. I could tell he was not pleased with my new behavior. Each day he seemed to hope that I would stay longer and was more and more upset when I left early. He kept making whining sounds, following me around, and pawing the cage walls when I left.