On Friday evening, the Williams family sat around the dinner table.
Richard had used his tutoring income to buy plenty of meat for the family again.
Margaret had made a small pot of stew with potatoes and onions, and she’d made a soup from the bones, letting nothing go to waste.
There was also a letter on the table, its front bearing the Greenwood school crest: an open book and an Oil Lamp.
Richard recognized the emblem. He walked under it every day when he entered the main school building.
He already had a general idea of its contents.
Students needed to decide before the end of the current school year which path to take: the university preparatory track or the technical college track.
The preparatory track involved two more years of study after graduation, followed by the university entrance exams. If students passed, they could enter a High-level Academy for advanced studies.
The technical college track, on the other hand, was a two-year practical Skill training program that began after the final school year, leading directly to employment after graduation.
Richard was in his final year now, and he had chosen the preparatory track last year.
Back when his souls hadn’t fused, however, he figured he would have struggled just to get into a local college.
Now, however, his sights were set on the highest seat of learning, Imperial University.
This letter was for his younger sister, Evelyn.
After the summer break, Evelyn would be entering her final year of middle school.
Their father, Rogers, finished reading the letter, folded it neatly along its creases, and placed it beside his plate.
After dinner, Richard was in his room, flipping through a book.
Downstairs, his father called Evelyn’s name.
Richard placed his book face down on the desk and tilted his head to listen.
With the boost from his [Perception], he could make out the gist of the conversation, even though the sound was distant.
His father was constantly persuading, or rather, dictating.
Evelyn’s voice was low at first, almost inaudible.
After about three or four minutes, her volume suddenly shot up.
It wasn’t shouting, but it was clearly emotional.
A few words jumped out from the murmur, and Richard caught "don’t want to" and "it’s useless."
His father’s voice also rose half a notch, but he quickly suppressed it.
Rogers wouldn’t argue with his children.
His way of handling things was to repeat his own point of view until the other person either accepted it or gave up arguing.
Sometimes, that method was more suffocating than being yelled at directly.
About ten minutes later, the study door opened.
As Evelyn came upstairs, she took her anger out on the steps, making the wooden boards CREAK and GROAN.
Richard turned the face-down book back over and stared at two lines of text, not a single word registering.
He got up and walked to his door.
Light seeped from under the crack of his sister’s door, and he could faintly hear the sound of sniffling from inside.
He raised his hand and knocked twice.
"What?" Her voice was muffled, as if her face was buried in a pillow.
"Open up. I want to talk to you."
After a few seconds of silence, the door opened a crack from the inside.
Evelyn stood behind the door, her eyes and the tip of her nose red, but she hadn’t cried.
She was very stubborn; the more upset she was, the less she’d let anyone see her cry.
Once, she’d scraped her knee after a fall and bit her lip until it turned white from the pain, but she held back her tears the entire time.
"What are you doing here?"
"Just wanted to chat a bit."
Evelyn hesitated for a moment, then pulled the door open.
Her room was a size smaller than Richard’s, but it was tidy.
Textbooks and stationery were arranged on her desk, and two fashion illustrations cut from a magazine were taped to the wall.
On her nightstand sat a glass jar filled with the various buttons and bottle caps she had collected.
Evelyn sat on the edge of her bed, hugging a pillow.
Richard pulled over the chair from the desk and sat down across from her.
"I have a pretty good idea what Dad was saying."
"Then why are you asking!"
"I want to hear it from you."
Evelyn rested her chin on the pillow and began to speak in a sullen voice:
"He went through his whole spiel—how a diploma is important, how it’s easier to find a job after graduating from university, how people without an education can’t get by.
Then he asked if I wanted to spend my whole life kneading dough in a bakery."
She hugged the pillow tighter.
"I told him I don’t want to knead dough for the rest of my life. I want to learn how to bake, and then I can open my own shop.
He said opening a shop requires capital, and where was that capital supposed to come from?
I said I could work and save up first, and he asked how long that would take—forever?"
"And then?"
"Then he did the math for me." Evelyn’s voice turned a little caustic.
"How much the tuition is for two years at a technical college, how you basically earn nothing as an apprentice in a bakery after graduation, how you probably couldn’t save enough to open a shop even if you worked your whole life.
After calculating it all, he told me that in the same amount of time, if I graduated from university and became a clerk or a teacher, the income would be higher and the work would be much easier."
She buried her face back in the pillow. "He’s always like this. He has to calculate everything."
Richard didn’t rush to reply.
’His father’s logic was sound, to be fair.’
’Engineers make more than bakers annually, and university graduates have broader job prospects than those from technical colleges. These were all verifiable statistics.’
’But data doesn’t cover every dimension.’
’Evelyn’s math and science grades had always hovered near the bottom of her class. Forcing her down the preparatory track—two years of prep school plus three years of university—would make every exam an ordeal.’
’Besides, getting into a university wasn’t a sure thing to begin with.’
’Less than half of the Greenwood students who took the preparatory track each year ultimately passed the university entrance exams.’
’The other half spent five years and a large sum on tuition only to end up with a prep school completion certificate, which was worth even less than a diploma from a technical college.’
’When his father did his calculations, he’d assumed Evelyn would get into a university.’
’But that assumption itself was the biggest variable.’
"Have you told Dad that you want to learn baking?" Richard asked.
"I have." Evelyn lifted her face from the pillow.
"I mentioned it once last semester. He didn’t take it seriously back then, said it was just a kid’s fleeting interest."
"So, do you still want to learn now?"
"Of course I do."
Her eyes lit up when she said it, making her seem like a completely different person from the red-eyed girl of a moment ago.
"The cookies I made in home economics class, the teacher said they were the best in the whole class."
"They were really good."
"This isn’t just a fleeting interest." Evelyn put the pillow aside and sat up straight.
"I started looking into it myself last year. I’ve gone through all of Mom’s recipes, and I’ve read several baking books from the library."
She pulled a notebook from her nightstand drawer and handed it to Richard.
It was a standard lined exercise book, with a cake she had drawn in colored pencil on the cover.
Flipping it open, he saw it was densely filled with all sorts of recipes and notes.
The types and differences of flour, the softening temperature for butter, the effects of different sugars on texture, a conversion chart for oven temperatures and times...
The handwriting was neat, the entries were clear, and some sections even had simple stick-figure illustrations to mark the steps.
Richard flipped through a few pages and noticed that some recipes were crossed out, with the reasons for failure written beside them.
"Egg whites weren’t beaten enough, it collapsed."
"Butter temperature was too high, dough was too soft, couldn’t hold its shape."
’This wasn’t the work of someone with a fleeting interest.’
Richard closed the notebook and handed it back to her.
"Have you shown this notebook to Dad?"
"No." Evelyn stuffed the notebook back into the drawer. "It’s no use showing him. He only looks at report cards."
The light in the study downstairs went out; their father had gone to bed as well.
He had to work overtime tomorrow, Saturday, to save up for his children’s future tuition.
Richard leaned back in his chair and looked at his sister.
The girl was curled up on the edge of the bed, hugging her knees, her hair loose and the tip of her nose still a little red.
He suddenly remembered something:
"Evelyn, do you remember that day we took the carriage to Grandfather’s house in the Imperial Capital?"
"I remember. Why?"
"On the way, you told me you wanted to open your own bakery workshop someday."
Evelyn looked a little embarrassed. "I was just saying that..."
"Someone who’s ’just saying that’ wouldn’t fill half a notebook with recipes."
Richard shifted his posture. "Do you know how much the top chefs in the Imperial Capital make in a year?"
"No."
"More than engineers."
Evelyn turned to look at him, her gray eyes full of doubt. "For real?"
"For real. The head chefs at the top ten restaurants in the Imperial Capital make several times more than an engineer.
Of course, people who can reach that level are few and far between, but it at least shows that the ceiling for this career path isn’t low."
He smiled, steering the conversation toward a topic he’d already prepared in his head.
"Speaking of which, do you know how ridiculous the names of the dishes at those fancy restaurants are?"
"Ridiculous? How ridiculous?" Evelyn’s interest was piqued.
"I was flipping through a menu at Grandfather’s house."
Richard cleared his throat and recited in the serious tone of a news anchor:
"First course: ’Slow-braised Beef Brisket with Herbs de Provence, Topped with a Parmesan Crisp’."
The name wasn’t something he just made up; his [Scholarship] allowed him to memorize these dish names with a single glance.
Evelyn blinked. "...That’s the name of one dish?"
"The name of one dish." Richard held up a finger. "There’s an even longer one."
He cleared his throat again, this time deliberately speeding up his speech:
"Main course: ’Brandy-flambéed Highland Red Deer Tenderloin, with a Black Truffle and Potato Mille-Feuille Tower’."
Evelyn’s lips parted slightly. "Say that again?"
"Brandy-flambéed..."
"Wait, wait, wait." She held up a hand to stop him. "Translated into normal people talk, that’s just roast venison with potato slices, right?"
"More or less."
"Then why not just write ’Roast Venison with Potato Slices’?"
"Because if they wrote it like that, the dish would only sell for two shillings. Add that long name, and it can sell for five pounds."
Evelyn was stunned for a moment, then she suddenly burst out laughing.
"And there’s dessert," Richard said, striking while the iron was hot.
"What’s the dessert called?"
In the tone of an auctioneer calling out a price, he rattled it off in one breath: "Madagascar Vanilla Bean Crème Brûlée."
Evelyn completely lost it, laughing so hard that a snot bubble almost came out of her nose.
"You... say that again. That... Madagascar whatchamacallit..."
"Madagascar Vanilla Bean. When you open your workshop in the future, you can write your menu like this too."
Richard started making things up, ticking them off on his fingers:
"’Artisanal Butter Cookies, Kneaded According to an Ancient Williams Family Recipe, with... Hand-picked by Miss Evelyn...’"
"Stop, stop, stop!" Evelyn held up a hand to stop him. "What you’re making up is even more ridiculous than the real thing!"
"That’s how the fancy hotels do it. The longer the name, the more expensive it is."
"Then I’ll make every dessert name a hundred words long and sell them for a hundred pounds a piece."
After this diversion, Evelyn was clearly in a better mood.
Though her anger hadn’t completely subsided.
She hugged the pillow, resting her chin on top of it. "I get everything you’re saying, big brother."
Her voice had returned to its usual tone, with a hint of stubbornness.
"But Dad won’t listen. In his mind, there’s only one path: university, a diploma, a good job. Any other path is a detour in his eyes."
Richard didn’t argue, because she was right.
"Don’t rush things." He stood up and pushed the chair back to the desk.
"You can’t rush this kind of thing. Let Dad cool down for a few days."
"He won’t change his mind even if he cools down for a few days."
"Then let him cool down for more days."
Evelyn shot him a glare. "Easy for you to say."
"It’s easy for me to say because I’m on your side."
Richard was already at the door. "I’m heading back. I have to go to the Dawn family for tutoring tomorrow morning."
"Big brother... thank you."
"For what?"
"For making up those long dish names to cheer me up."
"I didn’t make them up. They’re real."
"Liar. There’s no way there’s a dessert called ’Crème Brûlée Infused with Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla Beans’."
"It’s written in black and white on the Royal Hotel’s menu. If you don’t believe me, you can go see for yourself one day."
Evelyn huffed, pulling the blanket up to cover half her face.
Richard closed the door and stepped into the hallway.
Although he had managed to make his sister laugh, he knew that laughter aside, the problem was still there.

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