Prologue

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Being the new kid was never easy. Or so I’ve heard. I lived in Otis, Massachusetts for as long as I can remember, but my parents and I all decided it was acceptable for me to move on in the middle of my sophomore year in high school.

That’s when I discovered the Clearwater Valley Co-ed Boarding School in Brownsville, Vermont as we drove passed it one morning on the way to my great aunt’s house that Thanksgiving. I did my research online and ended up touring and applying, since I generally liked what I saw, especially compared to what I was attending in Otis.

I was always known as “the quiet one” back home. That didn’t necessarily mean I was an outcast or a nerd (okay…maybe I was kind of a nerd), but I was mostly just shy. Even though I knew most of the people that went to my high school from elementary and middle school, I never really made the effort to get close to any of them. My best friends weren’t even genuine best friends. They weren’t the type of people who counted on hosting sleepovers religiously or gossiped to you about every little detail in their life or even planned on being friends with you forever, like most best friends would. No, they were much different than what I just described. We were basically just a group of overly intellectual kids who didn’t really get along with anybody else in the whole damn school, which, by the way, only had a total population of about 452. We didn’t have anybody besides each other, so we took the opportunity to force ourselves into each other’s lives just so we had somebody to sit next to at lunch.

To be honest, I got tired of it, of them, of everything. So I read books. Reading gave me a life outside of my own; it gave me something to do and something to look forward to when I was finished with homework and school and sports. God knows my life wasn’t exciting enough to please me. So, I read, and that’s what made me want to take the next step. I wanted to live my own story; not just dream it or read it, I wanted to live it, and to do that I needed some sort of drastic change. That’s why I applied to boarding school.

And that is where I met Zachary O’Connor.

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