TO BE FRANK

CHAPTER ONE, on joining the circus

She knows she will need it.

"I hope we didn't wake you up too early," Dean says, "I know you can be a bit grouchy in the morning."

"I did consider throwing this phone off my nightstand and possibly out the window, but I mustered up some self-control." Juliette jokes coolly as her fingers comb through the ends of her hair. Her adorable cat, Bonbon, mews gently as she jumps onto her bed and curls into her lap.

"Amazing." Dean mutters.

"You're a changed woman," says Laurie.

"I know, proud of me?"

"Absolutely," they said that in unison this time.

It makes Juliette smile, the feeling of something missing from her ran strong through her heavy beating heart. Her best friends in this case. She swears she could feel Dean and Laurie's vice-like hug around her the day she left still imprinted onto her skin.

"Are you not nervous about your first day?" Laurie asks.

A sigh escapes her lips, "It's hard to tell, honestly. When our school became mixed gender three years ago, the ratio of girls and boys were pretty even, but over here I heard there is only twelve of us."

"Twelve?" Dean exclaims, "out of what? A couple hundred boys?"

"Something like that..."

The answer in and of itself was pretty self-explanatory. She was comparing a large city school to a smaller one in the countryside. Wherein a large metropolitan area where classroom sizes of near forty students is a considerable amount of bodies where over here it was unheard of. Was the reaction of girls entering her old school a bit overbearing and difficult? Yes, change was always the most difficult to get used to, but it was certainly better getting used to female counterparts in larger numbers than a meek dozen.

They always say that there's safety in numbers.

"I pray for your sanity, Juliette. Maybe you can befriend a few girls and just stick with them the rest of the school year," Laurie suggests.

"That's the plan. I am trying to keep a low profile this year." Juliette mutters with a hint of melancholy coating her words. Despite the slight difference in her tone, her feelings were clear as day to her friends.

"I'm sorry you had to drop your acceptance at the grammar school," says Drew, "I know how much it meant to you considering the program could have gotten you into Oxford once you graduate."

Juliette had gotten into St Paul's Grammar School with the same reason Lycée Voltaire decided to accept girls into their school—a more progressive and liberal means of diversifying and expanding their resources for the youth, which in turn for the betterment of the country. And yet, her parents did not seem to hesitate to pull her out of the program in the means of her being a girl.

Her education wasn't nearly as important enough apparently. With her two parents currently in well-paying careers and Marc already on track to graduate come spring, the youngest Bellemare was the easiest option to ship back to the countryside of France with nothing to risk besides an even lower chance of getting into her dream school. Do not get her wrong, though, Juliette would have done anything for her grandparents, but all decisions that has been done up to this point was at the expense of her life.

Being a woman meant you had to work ten times harder in order to meet anything close to any male counterpart. And Juliette would do everything in her power to change that.