Grace

Chapter 1

Hey! New story!! :D Ok, before we start just a few things *ahem*: 

1) I've never been to Eton College (being a girl and all) so whilst I've googled the place and know what some of the buildings look like, I'm making the layout up as I go. If by chance someone reading this has visited/went to/is going to Eton some insight would be great! 

2) If someone wants to rewrite my really bad blurb/summery that is fine. I hate writing them and always make a hash of it.   

3) Sorta thinking I might change the title to "Octopi Out Of Water" - you'll find out why in just a few moments. If you wanna vote for that let me know and I'll totally do it if there's enough of you.   

4) I haven't edited any of this yet, so please excuse the mistakes. Hopefully there aren't too many. 

That being said, please read and enjoy. 

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A chameleon doesn't choose it's colour to match its surroundings. If it matches it's purely coincidental. If you want to be impressed by animals that have a biological paint pallet for a skin, look to octopi, squid and bottom feeding fish.

Now, at sixteen years old you'd think my position as an octopus would be stable, unshakable and the pattern by which I was going to live my life. My groove if you like. Well, being sixteen means a few things. One of them being A levels. The exams you took before university. And I wasn't just taking them anywhere. Oh no. No, that would be too common and easy for my parents. No. I'd been forced to take an entrance exam for Private School. Something else to shake the foundations of my life.

Granny and Granddad had died and Mum and Dad had finally managed to win the legal battle over who the money from selling their business belonged to. It had always been Mum and Dad's, but a distant relative decided he had a pretty good claim over it. They'd laughed it off to begin with, but then the lawyer said he did have a really good claim on it. The battle had been ten years long, more of a war than a battle really. There had been underhand tac-tics from him, fast and powerful rebuttals from us and a whole heaven load of patience.

Then, finally, our lawyer, who almost felt like family now, won the case.

Mum and Dad had money to send me to private school, we could all retire now if we really wanted to and life was suddenly good again. Until the entrance exams anyway. They'd been in maths, the three sciences, English literature and language, a modern foreign language of your choice – German for me – humanities, history, R.E., art and music. I'd pretty glibly told the headmaster that if he wanted to know how good I was at all those subjects to look at my G.C.S.E results, they'd just been announced anyway so what was the point in making me do them all again.

Mum and Dad were still lecturing me about that three days later.

"It's not just any old private boarding school, is it?" Mum asked.

"No, Mum," I mumbled over my spaghetti. She'd only just got in from work and already she was on at me.

"And you do want to go, don't you?" Dad asked.

"Yes, Dad," I answered blandly. I didn't want to go at all.

"Good. Because this is Eton you know."

"How could I forget?"

The whole world had been in shock when Eton announced that for the first time the school was going to open its prestigious doors to the other half of the population. I'd thought about it a lot. It was about time the place pulled the stick out of its arse and caught up with the rest of the world. Most of my thinking had been not what it would be like to go there, but how epic it would be if it was turned into a film.