Half Baked by Edie Bryant

Author:Edie Bryant [Bryant, Edie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-07-26T22:00:00+00:00

9

Audrey

I tried to stay optimistic about the bakery for Madison’s sake. I knew she felt guilty about everything that happened. I didn’t want to exacerbate that for her.

Over the next couple months, I even stooped as low as lying to her. I told her everything was going great, that my customer base hadn’t disappeared.

But it had. Okay, maybe not disappeared, but it had shrunk a lot. Right after the article, I got tons of calls from people requesting cancellations on their future wedding cakes. And it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Some of them even told me as much.

I still had some orders come in here and there but it wasn’t enough to stay afloat. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do anymore. At the rate things were going, I was not going to be able to keep this business open for very long.

I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t hard. It was, this was all I’d ever done. I didn’t know how to be anything other than a baker.

Not to mention, it was difficult to lose my grandparents’ business. Even worse, I know if they were alive, they’d be very disappointed in specifically the way they lost it. They were very Christian themselves and I couldn’t imagine they’d be proud of me ruining the bakery’s reputation with my homosexuality.

But fuck that. This town was so god damn backward. It really made no sense. Like Madison had told me often, my personal life did not affect my business life. It should have been of no interest to my customers.

I mean, how many times do you go to the grocery store and then start asking the cashier about their personal life? When does the cashier volunteer their sexual orientation? And would you really not allow them to ring up your groceries just because they weren’t straight? What effect would that have on your food?

I guessed in my situation, it felt more personal. Since I was doing cakes that had a strong religious meaning.

But it was still bullshit. And fuck these people that judged me for this. I didn’t think God himself was. I didn’t think God himself would be too proud of the way they were acting toward me.

I always knew this town was conservative but it was fucked up how persecuted I felt. Even people just walking by on the sidewalk, they’d give me dirty looks as they passed the bakery window.

I felt so lonely. Like I was completely isolated from my own community. And the thing was, I wasn’t even alone. I still had my friends who I saw every other week or so. Even more importantly, I had Madison, who made my life feel complete.

And even with all of them, the isolation was grating on me. I felt like an outcast.

I knew that Madison was technically in this with me but it didn’t usually feel like that. She didn’t have to deal with the direct discrimination that I did. All anyone in the town knew was that I was a lesbian; they didn’t know who my girlfriend was.

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