“Oh, so what did you do?”

“Do your parents hate you?”

“Or you, umm, different?”

“What will you do for fun?”

“You’re a bad kid, aren’t you?”

“No, no. It’s not like that in the slightest.”

What happens when teenagers are given their first breath of freedom, choice and chance at power? What happens when they are given a real chance to do something, and be asked for more than just an A+ on a test? Or more importantly, what happens when you ask them to do their own laundry for the first time?

Some good things and some bad.

Weston Bennett and his fellow new students are trading in the normal American high school experience for an uncomfortable twin sized bed and waffles on Saturdays at the Grey Shoals Academy for Young Adults. They’ll soon come to find out that even though they’ve left most of their friends back home at "normal high school" that some things never change and the road to success sometimes isn’t measured by your own actions, but the ones other choose for you.

Yes, it’s true that Chemistry and History are on the curriculum, but so is wading the waters of an over-powerful Student Government, learning how far rules can be bent when you don’t have parents looking over your shoulder ever minute and most importantly, how do you honestly and truly do your laundry?

It’s going to be a busy year.

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Grey Shoals (Year 1) is a fictionalized auto-biography of my own time at boarding school. It would be fitting to say that they are based on my time, not an exact retelling. Honestly you’d be bored with my "goody-two-shoes" attitude and my knack of NOT getting into trouble. Some characters are based on people I knew at school, but are not exact representations of them.

Please enjoy the chapter below!

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Email: winstongray93@gmail.com