Vanilla

Fifty Three

Indeed, my writing was made public for all to see but with my, well, relatively low profile, I hadn't quite thought of traffic going beyond two per hour. At present, the number was hovering at seventy-five.

Some of them had bothered to leave irrelevant remarks on every blog post about my apparently lackluster appearance, which were the easiest to ignore. The bulk of it had turned out to be a massive disapproval of me having 'displaced' Violet for the entirety of the third round and landed myself the idealized position of 'head chef' when I clearly did not 'deserve it'.

Well, anonymous human being, I find no fault in your opinion! In fact, I'd found this so terribly amusing after scrolling through a bunch of vulgar indecencies narrowing in on my lack of experience and 'scheming ass', that I was snorting the entire way down the filtered comments. Then came the longer ones speculating my supposed involvement in blackmailing Violet for a spot in the third round, essentially stealing her place, and then somehow threatening the student from L'assiette to appoint myself as head chef and then have 'karma shoved up' my behind by messing up and needing Leroy to save myself from embarrassment.

They were grand, really. Such comments were. To think they thought so highly of my social capabilities and came up with such elaborate strategies I myself couldn't even have possibly founded.

And there were those who laughed. Others that had things to say regarding my writing and my personal enjoyment of tasting and writing about the culinary world; well, to put things simply, they weren't being very encouraging.

Thinking back, Uncle Al did say he hadn't the easiest time starting out as one. For some reason, everyone liked chefs. But no one seemed to bear the same kind of revere; hold the same kind of respect; give the same sort of attention to critics.

I had to search up some of the derogatory terms they'd used. 'Clout' was one of them. What odd vocabulary people these days resort to using and how strangely emotional they can get behind their screens, with anonymity as shields and their keyboards as weapons into the heart of someone they barely understood.

But it was reading about what strangers thought about my personality that, oddly, had the greatest effect. They were a bunch of roundabout sentences claiming they knew the reason I was writing at all and even going as far as to conclude that I'd joined the interschool (as though it was a choice) to 'stay relevant'.

Essentially, I was not needed. Fundamentally, I was, to these people... boring.

Needless to say, I knew perfectly well the futility of such words. That these were digital receipts I shouldn't be spending the time and energy brooding over or caring about since, strictly speaking, none of them were logical, reasonable criticisms that had the intellectual power to break the protective layer of ice.

But to be misunderstood in such a manner had no doubt, chiseled cracks in the surface. I was, quite frankly, a fair bit more exhausted than I would have usually been on a day like this.

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Leroy had fallen asleep on the armchair waiting for me while I was in the shower and if that wasn't enough to show what exactly it was we needed in that instant, I wasn't sure what else would have. I'd forgone all thoughts of confiding in him about the miniscule issue I had the moment I emerged from the bathroom and saw that the lights were low; him, unmistakably knocked out on the chair, seated upright without a stir.

Admittedly, I wasn't all-too-eager to be sharing what seemed, against the comparative extent of worldly problems, to be petty concerns regarding anonymous human beings who clearly had no logic whatsoever in their actions. The idea was to fill him in on the truth since, well, should I decide not to tell him, that would be obscuring it and leaving a partner out of a whole in which I was experiencing did not seem like the best thing to do. Regardless, even a fool without an ounce of emotional intelligence would have the conscience to comprehend the extent of Leroy's exhaustion and hence refrained from adding to that burden in which he had been shouldering all morning.