The Howling

Chapter One

        Villette leafed through the college brochures on the counter.  There were some from nearly every state, all with pictures of beautiful buildings that practically screamed scholastic achievement.  Most of the campuses boasted age and reputation.  Students laughed in the pictures or studied on vibrant picnic blankets in front of elegantly designed buildings.  Captions bragged of exciting college life, diverse social climates, and numerous organizations geared for any interest.

        It was only ever on the last page of the brochure when they mentioned financing.  Almost like an afterthought.  They strolled in and schmoozed readers with the ease of an experienced salesman.  Oh yeah, there's just this one little catch...

        Each brochure had an estimate of overall expenses, including tuition, living costs, textbooks, and so forth.  Villette guessed that if each university in America transferred the tuition from a single semester into something else, say car technologies, they could all be driving hover cars within two months, tops.

        Sighing, she pushed the brochures away.  All of them sounded magnificent, but that was the point. There were meant to entice, to draw in new students and new money.  And the stack was nearly twenty thick.  How on earth was he going to choose just one?

        She stood up from the counter and stared out at her parents' bakery.  No, she quickly corrected herself, it was her bakery now.  Hers and Emil's and Uncle John's too, though he hardly ever came by to work it.

        The past year had involved quite a bit of penny pinching.  She had put aside everything she could manage and had mustered up tuition for one year, if he picked a more moderate university.  Including living expenses, if they were lucky.  By the time Emil finished with that year, she would have enough money for the following year, the cycle continuing until he earned his diploma.

        Wherever that was.  The stack drew her eye again.  None of those universities were even remotely close.

        It would be strange, not seeing her younger brother down in the bakery every day.  Between the two of them and the few part-timers, they kept this place afloat.  They baked, they dealt with their suppliers, they handled the transactions.  It would be odd without Emil at her side.  Almost like losing half of herself.

        But this was the decision she had made last year while going over her parernt's finances, coming out with some sort of plan after their accident.  Emil wanted to go to college and he would.  She would make certain of that.

        Her eyes roamed over the bakery.  They had been raised in this shop.  She had picked out the baby blue awning that hung over the door, heavily bleached now from sunlight and with a small tear near one of the corners.  Her mother had been the one to paint 'The Baker's Bakery' in the fluid, golden script on the glass of the door.  The doorway that led from the kitchen into the shop bore the pencil marks of their heights over the years: hers on one side and Emil's on the other.

        When she was younger, she had played around the mismatched tables, ducking underneath them and pretending they were castles or mountains.  She remembered her brother tagging along behind her, crying to play with her, and sometimes she even let him before her mother told her that she had to.  She recalled where they had nicked the counter at one end by dropping a pan that one of them had been using as a shield, though each of them claimed the other did it.  She had memorized the shape of the splotch of paint that had fallen on the tile while she and her brother painted crafts in one corner.

        Her parents had bought the bakery as a joke.  They had met while traveling, falling in love in Vienna and then spending a few years traveling the world together, visiting exotic places and meeting interesting people.  They sustained themselves on charm and friends, crashing on one person's couch or in another's spare bedroom.