Welcome to the Bakery!

(Cleaning out years of belongings means finding old snippets of stories in abandoned notebooks. Enjoy one that is without a date, but my best judgment has me placing it sometime in undergrad and prior to my scriptwriting class, so best estimate is 2010.)

She was like a hangover in human form. Whenever her mouth opened, I felt a migraine pulsating just below my left eye socket, much like how you feel after a root canal and before the pain medication has completely worn off. That or the sensation you get when someone let’s their car alarm ring until kingdom come. At any rate, conversing with her for any length of time made me long for someone to lob a brick at the back of my head. Drastic maybe, but it would give me a good excuse to exit stage right. Besides only family were allowed to visit you in the intensive care unit, which she is not…yet.

To add insult to injury this little ball of nuclear radiation is currently dating my sister. Of course, they’re wildly in love and since the prehistoric era is thankfully coming to an end, gay marriage is now legalized. To be clear, I love my sister to death, but I knew she could do better. In the off chance you’ve not met her, she’s tall with honey blonde hair and eyes that vacillate between grey or blue depending on certain extraneous factors such as what she’s wearing and if the sun is shining. People used words like “willowy”, “lithe” and “ethereal” to describe Amelia. Rebecca-call-me-Bex-God-damn-it was anything but. Throw dirt, rocks, broken glass, safety pins, Minor Threat’s debut album, and leather in a blender, hit puree, and you’ve got the picture. Can you recall the song “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch?” I would swear upon your deity of choice that Bex was the inspiration for this song.

All jokes aside, even though Bex made me want to crawl into the nearest deep fryer and close the lid, she wasn’t my girlfriend. And Amelia? She lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve whenever Bex was so much as mentioned in passing. And when Bex entered the room, Amelia may as well have been a star going into super nova. The pair of them would make excellent fodder for a romantic comedy in which someone infinitely better looking and three times as charming would play me.

And even though being within a forty-foot radius of Bex felt akin to having a railroad spike driven through my skull slowly with an inflatable hammer, she didn’t deserve what happened to her. No one does…. except a few select historical figures. So, the story goes…

About two weeks ago Amelia and Bex had a massive fight regarding, you guessed it, wedding plans. Amelia wanted the dream wedding complete with fourteen tiers of cake dripping in edible lace and flowers, topped with plastic figures portrayed in marital bliss, groom not included. Bex, the more traditionally masculine of the two, naturally didn’t understand bridal hysteria and the two had been at each other’s throats for weeks.

The early moments of that day remain hazy at best, but I think the disagreement stemmed from a debate over flowers and Bex pulled her usual stunt, storming out of the house belting out expletives a mile a minute. Her reactions could be relied on like clockwork and as Amelia broke down into tears Bex pulled on her worn Doc Martens and bellowed a very mature, “God, what a psychotic bitch,”, before slamming the front door and speeding off in the shitbox she called motorized transportation. But when she didn’t come back that night without so much as a phone call, text, tweet, or status update to indicate her continual existence on our fair planet, we all knew something wasn’t copacetic.

The cogs turning in Amelia’s head screamed “cold feet”, but we knew better. Saying Bex could be a little overdramatic was an understatement to end them all, but we all knew better. Despite my personal feelings towards her, she would never leave my sister high and dry. Our minds could only scream foul play.