The Orange House | Teen Ink

The Orange House

January 14, 2020
By Anonymous

6:00 AM, the alarm rings. Julia wakes up and quickly snoozes it, trying to get some more shut eye before her first day of work. Five minutes later, BRGGGG BRGGG, the alarm goes again. This time, she reluctantly gets up, gets dressed, and heads toward the bathroom.

 The sky was still dark and everyone in her house was sound asleep. Her father had just fallen asleep after a long night at the bar and Julia’s sister Patrice was sleeping peacefully in the her room.

Julia turns on her automatic toothbrush and walks down the hallway into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. She uses the kitchen sink to rinse her mouth and she sets her toothbrush down next to the coffeemaker. She pops two slices on bread in the toaster and splashes some water on her face to freshen up. Julia has been looking for jobs on craigslist since school ended and after a week, she finally found this job at a bakery on the other side of town.

Julia sips from her coffee as she ponders what she’ll do at bakery. She takes the orange jelly out of the fridge and spreads it on her toast. She thinks that she’s probably going to work the cashier or help prepare the bread at the bakery. The listing was not specific, and Julia was hired after a couple of emails, so Julia had nothing to expect. She was just hoping that this job would be better than her last one at the diner.

She finishes the toast and grabs her phone, wallet, and keys and heads out. The sun was starting to rise as Julia walked down the block to the bus stop. The vibrant light illuminated Julia’s bright green eyes. Her long legs got her to the bus stop in no time and she caught to the 6:30 bus.

She walks two more blocks and reaches Arnie’s bakery. The bakery appeared to be well cleaned and organized. Arnie hears the bell of the door and comes out the back to see who was at the door. “Hey, I’m Arnie and you must be Julia!”, Arnie said energetically.

“Good morning Mr. Arnie, It is a pleasure to meet you. I am very excited to work here”, Julia said back to Arnie.

“Please, Arnie is just fine. Okay, so your job here will just be to help Rick in the back make bread and deliver it to our customers.”, Arnie tells Julia.

“Deliver?”, Julia asks Arnie. “Yes, we provide a delivery service to our customers in the morning. That makes us different from the other bakeries around.” Arnie explains.

“Here, let me show you around.” Arnie says to Julia as he gives her a list of addresses. “These twelve houses are the only places you need to worry about. We have bikes you can use in the back. A couple days and you’ll know your way to these houses easy” Arnie continued.

“Gotcha Arnie”, Julia says receiving the list. Arnie then takes Julia to the kitchen to meet Rick. “Hey, I’m excited to work with you”, Rick says as he mixes the flour. Julia loved the friendly environment and thinks that this summer is going to be an interesting one. She never thought that she’d be delivering bread out of all things.

Arnie passes Julia off to Rick and goes back to front the bakery. “It a pretty chill job”, Rick murmurs as he puts the bread into the oven. “Let me show you how we make bread here”, he tells Julia as he gets more flour from the cabinet next to the oven. “The secret to our bread is this powder”, he shows Julia a jar of orange colored powder. “I don’t know what it is, but our customers seem to enjoy it” Rick continues.

“It looks very orange. Are you sure that is meant to be eaten?” Julia questioned

“It should be, since we use it here, I dunno”, Rick says back to Julia.

After thirty minutes, Rick takes the bread out of the oven and starts to slice it up. He tells Julia that he’d show her where the houses today and packs all the bread into brown paper bags. Rick takes the bags of bread and brings Julia to the back to show her the bikes. “Let’s go”, he says as he loads the bread into the baskets in front of the two bikes. “Yay, I’m ready”, Julia gushed back to Rick. Rick unlocks the bikes from the rail connected to the bakery and they head out to addresses listed on the list.



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