There was a tingle of festivity in the air. Laughter. Singing. Cheerful shouts. Loud music. It was all over the campus of the large Bunbun College in the huge city of Bunny Meadows. Students milling about, talking loudly and cheerfully with one another, shouting greetings and grades at one another. It was a usual scene near the end of the school year.
Bunbun College worked in a conventional manner that was relatively unconventional for a college. In a flow similar to that of schools preceding the college level, they had actual school years, even if those were broken up into irregular semesters. They ran for almost an entire year; from the second week of January to the first week of April, from the last week of April to the second week of June, from the last week of August to the last week of October, and from the first week of November to the third week of December. That final, short semester usually only contained about a month of actual teaching, and a bit under two weeks of revising the material of the past year, with the final week being a whole week of exams in the different topics and subjects that were chosen by the students - which meant that some students had a jam-packed week full of exams, sometimes even several per day, and some students had a very light week with only a handful of exams, depending on the subjects in their study packages. And the progression of the students also depended on how they did in the exams; were their overall combined grades too low, they could actually be faced with having to redo the year; just as it was done in grade schools and high schools, so as to give the students a rhythm and procedure they already were familiar with, allowing them to concentrate on the subjects they had chosen to study rather than to also have to adapt to a whole new procedure and scheduling and way of doing things.
It always made December an extra festive month. Added onto the usual festivities that occurred in the final month of the year, there were also the celebrations when the exam results were published and the students could see how they had done. Usually it were celebrations; of course there were always several students who didn't make it and had to re-sit a year, but overall, in the week after the week of exams, a wave of celebrations rolled through the campus, and the large buildings holding the student apartments erupted with parties.
Rather significantly, one specific pair of students did not join in with all the wild partying that went on in building 2B. A pair of felines, housecats, with beige and light brown fur, one with long brown hair and blue eyes, the other with short red hair and green eyes. Sisters, twin sisters; the Baumgarten sisters. Of course they went to some parties thrown by their friends and classmates. Of course they participated in the dancing and partook in the imbibing of alcoholic beverages. Of course they had fun. But they restrained themselves. They remained a lot calmer than their peers. They drank a lot less than the others, and often went back home to their small student apartment early, to quietly and contently and nakedly cuddle after a shower. They had a different kind of relationship, they had had their share of wild partying in the first two years of their college life, and they had a plan.
By the end of the week, the campus looked like a tornado had gone through it. Paths, plazas, planters, parks, all were filled with streamers, confetti, empty bottles and crumpled cans, boxes, wrappers, shreds of papers, and here and there a student collapsed in sleep between the bushes. Benches were covered with sticky sheens of a variety of bodily fluids. Many of the ornamental lamp posts had underpants hanging from them. From some windows of the apartment buildings still sounded music, but overall, an exhausted silence had descended over the campus. The mess was left as it was; Bunbun College also had a program in place where students earned extra credits and bonuses for cleaning everything back up, which had the benefits of both the students learning to clean up their own darn mess, and significantly lightening the workload of the college cleaning crew.
The Baumgarten twins did participate in that program. Being felines, they even were playfully devious about it. Usually they merely collected all the pairs of panties and bras from the lamp posts and brought them to their small apartment, posting a notice that their female owners could come pick them up - with the provision that they had to fully undress to put the collected underwear right back on right there in the apartment under the watchful eyes of the feline sisters. Over the past three years of their college life, it had provided them with a good number of playful and intimate dates with many of their fellow female students - and an impressively extensive collection of underwear, which they meticulously washed and brought to a charity shop every year because they never bothered with wearing underwear themselves anyway.
Halfway through the morning of the quiet, moaning, hungover Saturday following the week of celebrations, the twin sisters made their way off the campus and into one of the residential districts of the huge city in Melissa's sun-baked old red BMW 324d sedan. Smiling and grinning at one another every now and then when they looked aside and caught each other's eye. Wiggling a bit in anticipation when they turned into Memory Lane in the Forepaw District. Slouching a bit in their seats and drooping their expressions when they were more than halfway down the street and pulled into the left-side driveway of the couple of semi-detached houses bearing the numbers 70 and 72.
In the front garden of number 72 was a ruddy-furred housecat woman, the twin sisters' mother Martha, tending to a buddleia bush, cutting the last wilted plumes of flowers from it while dressed in a short skirt and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, as in the south of Minnaluna, even in mid-December the temperatures still hovered around the mid-70's. She looked up and smiled at the sun-baked red car pulling into her driveway and waved, stepping over to the car when it had come to a stop. Her head tilted a bit with one ear dipping when she watched her daughters step out of the car slowly and quietly, with their paws in the pockets of their shorts.
"Hello my darlings. Did you get your results in already? How, uh... how did it go?"
The twin sisters remained silent. Melissa walked around the front of the car and stood next to her sister Lillian. They both lowered their heads. Turned them ever so slightly to catch each other's eye. Slowly, the corners of their lips lifted into small grins.
All of a sudden, they both pulled their paws out of their pockets, both waving a crumpled paper as they covered the three steps separating them from their mother in a single bound and lifted the mature housecat woman clear off the ground in a huge embrace while pressing the papers into Martha's face with a cheer.
"We passed!"
Those two devious little brats.
