Hi, hello and welcome! This is my first ever shot at fanfiction so forgive me if it's a little meehhh.. trust me I know it is. But feedback is always great and I really appreciate constructive criticism.

Basically: set in Dalton!verse (a.k.a. based off the fanficiton Dalton by CPCoulter, if you haven't read it you neeeeed to), AU, a girl named Etty Poulter infiltrates Dalton to keep an eye on Kurt, whom she has known since they were in diapers together. Hilarity and hijinks at Windsor House ensue!

I do not own Glee, I do not own Dalton

My name is Etty Poulter and I'm Kurt Hummel's best friend. Yeah, that's right, I said it.

Look, I know what you're thinking. What about Mercedes and all that blah blah blah... Well, sorry to let you down sweetcheeks but nopedy nopedy no. I am and always will be the official best friend of Kurt Hummel. I have a signed document from when we were five to prove it. See, Kurt's dad is one of those rare men who work as a mechanic, total grease monkeys, yet manage not to be ridiculous, over-masculine asshats. Remarkable, I know. My dad, the owner of the garage where Burt worked, recognised that, thank god or we wouldn't be here, and struck up a friendship. They worked at that dingy garage together in Lima for years, our mothers became close too. And naturally they fell pregnant around the same time and we were born a few days apart from each other, isn't that always the way? So you see, Kurt and I were pretty much destined to be best friends. Not that we needed that. There was a crazy, frenetic chemistry between Kurt and me – not romantic, obviously – that simply removed awkward from our shared vocabulary. He was like the sister I'd never had and I was like the brother he'd never had. I was at his third birthday party, when he received those 'sensible heels' he'd asked for and a few days later, I got the miniature tool kit I'd wanted. We swapped gender roles, we were allowed to pretend for those delicate, precious years of our early childhood, basking in the glow of naivety.

And then Kurt's mum passed when we were eight and we had to stop pretending. The days of aching bliss were finished, shadows pouring into our seemingly endless summer. Mum and Dad became angry, they shouted, they swore, Mum and I moved into a little flat to "give your father some space". I barely saw Kurt and his influence was sorely missed. I became rude and bitter, an eight-year-old teenager. And then, as quickly as it began, it was over. My parents got a neat little divorce, signing away their promises of 'until death do us part' on a couple of dotted lines. Dad wanted to stay in Ohio, Mum had different ideas as usual. She wanted to set up a restaurant in the Big Apple, but that being said she was so erratic in her ambitions, she wanted to do nearly everything. Even so, when she got custody, we packed up and left to New York.

So you think it's at this stage I tell you that I invited Kurt over to visit and he became a Broadway star. Or maybe that Mum won the lottery and suddenly we were rolling in cash. Well sorry, but no. Shit doesn't happen like that for me.

Life was hard those first few years in Brooklyn. Mum ran around the city, trying to find herself work. She'd never exactly had to find any before – she'd married young – so she wasn't quite qualified for anything too serious, or with too big of a pay check. But we scraped by on a waitress' income, put together with any cleaning jobs she could land. Meanwhile, I learned to cover up the brazenly masculine way I was. I wore lighter shades of colour, sometimes even the dreaded pink, and tried to plait my hair. It worked well enough and I was vaguely accepted into the social world of the third graders, even just to be shunted into the corner. I wasn't exactly cool, I spent most of my lunchtimes in the library, reading books that I probably shouldn't have been reading and mentally aging by leaps and bounds each day. The isolation hardened me to the world.

By the age of thirteen, I was pretty clued up, probably more so than the pre-pubescent boys at school who took it on themselves to ogle anything that looked vaguely like boobs. I'd also given up trying to escape the tomboy that I really was, it was too tiring to keep up such an image at an age where everything about you is being constantly questioned by children and adults alike. I ripped up my jeans, I wore leather jackets, I listened to The Ramones. There were still little pockets of showtunes and cheesy pop anthems on my iPod and the odd party dress in my wardrobe, leftovers of what had eaten me for years. But however much I didn't like to admit it, I kind of liked this girly side of me. It reminded me of a time when things were simpler and just the sight of sunshine on the garden could make a day the best of the week. In short, it reminded me of Kurt.

By this time, Mum had moved up too. She was now running a restaurant in a flashy part of the Upper West Side. We had moved out of our cramped flat and into a cool loft apartment, buying a range of sleek new furniture to go with it. I did the washing up some nights at the restaurant, there wasn't anything else for me to be doing, and for that I earned a little money to spend on my growing interest in mayhem. I had decided that I would never properly fit in at school, so why not make things as crazy as possible? I planted smoke bombs at the school dance, hovered buckets of paint over the prinicpal's door, swapped the SIM cards of the bratty popular girls' phones. I was addicted to the adrenaline rush of pulling pranks and not getting caught. That was why I operated solo, no-one ever suspects the shy loner girl, right? But still something was missing; there was always an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. Eventually, I realised it was Kurt. I hadn't talked to him for a good four or five years and I missed my best friend desperately. So I wrote him a letter, I wouldn't put it past Burt to move from the same house they'd lived in when I was three, and we swapped e-mail addresses and then MSNs and then added each other on Facebook and soon enough we got back to talking at least three times a week. Sometimes it was over the phone, sometimes just e-mailing or internet chat, but our friendship was definitely back and just as strong.

He told me everything, and I mean everything. I knew about Artie, poor guy in that wheelchair, and Rachel, she just seemed like a self-obsessed drama mama. I knew the ins and outs of the Finn Quinn Puck baby fiasco and that one time he'd tried to be straight with some endearingly dim girl named Brittany. I was the one who got him through Finn rejecting him, the one who listened to his gay theories about the new kid, Sam, the one who helped him accept that Finn's mum was dating his dad, and even marrying him, and the one who damn near caught the next plane to Lima when I heard about the Karofsky incident. But there was one thing that pushed me over the edge, one thing that I couldn't just leave be.

It was a lazy Friday afternoon after school, and traffic screamed with the evening rush from the streets below. I was roaming the internet, as per usual, trying to find anything to distract me from the 2000 word History essay due in a few days. I never went out on Friday nights, where would I go? With no friends in New York the world was pretty grey, so I lived much of my life online. I was checking my facebook quickly when New message from Kurt Hummel! popped up. I clicked open the window, I hadn't heard from Kurt in months.

OMG NEWS! Can I call you?

I grinned, I loved hearing updates from my boy in Lima.

Go right ahead man :)

Soon enough, my phone was buzzing beside me on my desk. I decided to tease him for a while, letting it ring a few time before I caved in from curiosity and picked up.

"Yelloha?" It was our signature greeting.

"Oh. My. God. Etty, you are not going to believe this." I could hear Kurt was excited, I could practically hear the smile on his face. What was getting him so happy? The last I heard, which had been a while ago, that douche Karofsky had given him a death threat but the school didn't expel him and there was some guy Blaine hovering around in the background. I needed an update, pronto.

"Dude, spill it!"

"So I'm sorry I haven't called you for like the past millennium," I rolled my eyes at this, it was kind of true. "But I've been settling into boarding school."

"Wait… what?"

"Elizabeth Poulter, you are officially talking to a Dalton Academy boy!" I flopped backwards onto my bed. When had this happened? How had he even found this school? And most importantly, how were Burt and Carole paying for this? Kurt knew me too well. "I know exactly what you're thinking right now. Who, what, when, where, how, why, right? Well after the Karofsky threats, Dad just said enough was enough and used his and Carole's honeymoon money on the extra fees."

"Their honeymoon money?" I asked, incredulously. "You're paying for your school fees with your father and step-mother's honeymoon money?"

"Please don't, Etty," Kurt's voice became tense, there was obviously an immense moral struggle there and I wasn't going to push it, "I hate myself for it, but I didn't feel safe at McKinley anymore."

"I know, I know, I'm just winding you up." I sighed, I felt so left out of his life. "So what are the guys in your dorm like?"

"Oh my god Ett, they're fucking mental!" I had never heard Kurt swear like that before and an embarrassing giggle left my lips. "Like there are these twins Evan and Ethan, right? They remind me of you so much, causing as much chaos as possible and then magically walking free every time, and they've given everyone Alice in Wonderland nicknames and I've been dubbed Alice and they had this ridiculous New Year's party in New York with all of us and sorry I didn't visit I was so busy and then there's Dwight, who is this crazy guy obsessed with magic and demons, and David, who is totally in love with his girlfriend Katherine who is so sick right now, and my roommate Reed, who is this adorable klutzy painter boy, and Han, who has pretty much bugged the entirety of the campus, and Wes, who is just such a stereotypical jock sometimes, except that's the thing!" Kurt heaved a huge breath; he needed one after that rant. "They're not jocks, they all sing instead. We sing in this group called The Warblers and it's so much fun and you audition for solos in front of everyone and I have been freaking sung to Etty!" I all out laughed at this. My little Kurt sounded like an excited toddler on Christmas day.

"And what about that Blaine guy you mentioned once?" For once, there was dead silence from the other end of the phone. "… Kurt?"

"Um, we're dating."

And that was when I decided. I didn't even know I decided it then, it was completely subconscious. I heard his tone of voice. That raw, fragile, simply emotional tone that always lingered in his voice whenever he talked about someone he loved. I heard it when he talked about Burt, his mother, sometimes even me, and now this new guy, Blaine. So in that moment I knew what I had to do. I had to protect Kurt. My Kurt. My brother, my sister, my best friend. He couldn't be hurt, he was too delicate, it would shatter him. He couldn't date someone after what happened with Karofsky, he needed time, he just didn't know he needed time. And I couldn't let this happen! He was practically family and I was just sitting around and letting him have his heart broken by some stupid choir boy? But what if he really wants this? a little voice questioned in my head. It didn't matter, I still needed to keep an eye on him, to know what was going on at all times.

Maybe it was that dumb Friday night feeling, maybe it was just because I was through being so utterly bored with my life, but whatever it was, after I said my goodbyes to Kurt, it made me grab my suitcase and start packing for the greatest prank I would ever pull. I was going to go to Dalton.

I threw in everything boyish from my wardrobe that I kept for out of school hours. They were fashionably boyish, that was my style, and so was my haircut. This was going to work, I was sure of it. I continued flinging in clothes, my mind racing at a hundred thoughts a minute. I would write Mum a note, she was always out anyway, telling her I'd gone to visit Dad, that I needed some time to think about my life and that I'd let the school know I wouldn't be returning. We'd been having some arguments recently so this was kind of logical even though I'd last visited my father when I was eleven, more than five years ago now. But still, my mum knew how emotionally turbulent I could be, just as she was. She poured her heart and soul into the restaurant, barely seeing me most of the time. She knew that I didn't fit in at school, that I was having troubles with my identity, I just prayed that she understood this whole 'leaving' thing to be about that.

I called the school, easily using my mother's airy voice to fool the lady at administrations into thinking that we were moving back to Ohio and therefore I would no longer be attending class there. This was proving to be way too easy. Of course, that feeling died away when I pondered the challenge of actually getting into Dalton in the first place.

And then…

Hadn't my grandfather gone to Dalton? I seemed to recall times when he'd spoken of the times he'd had at boarding school in Westerville. Were there really any other boarding schools in Westerville? I googled 'James Poulter Dalton' and my eyes widened at the results.

"No freaking way," I whispered to myself, my voice harsh in the quiet room. The results were all from the Dalton website, page after page of them, and they all involved the James Poulter Library. I clicked on one of the pages to find that my grandfather had been a model student at Dalton and the Head Prefect of the Windsor boarding house, growing up to take over his father's chain of garages. He felt so strongly connected to Dalton that he had donated the library with much of the money he had made from the business. Oh my god, I was so in right now. I grinned maniacally at the screen, this was my ticket in to that place.

I stepped out of the taxi and into the bright winter afternoon, turning around to thank the driver and pay him. No tip of course, money was going to be crazy tight if I didn't have the shifts at the restaurant to support me. I still had my bank account, but I was just going to have to make do without any new clothes for a while. Lifting my bags out of the trunk, I thumped them onto the ground. A bit heavier than I was expecting then, but I couldn't look weak in front of any of the guys. Guys were strong and manly and they carried things and didn't get dragged to the ground by a bit of a heavy suitcase, right?. I took a deep breath in, which was hard given the binding tape crushing my boobs. Come on, Etty you can do this.

I looked to the sprawling building in front of me. This had to be Windsor House, the breathtaking medieval-style architecture, complete with turrets and stained-glass windows, told me that. I smiled, so far the mission was going to plan. I began walking along the path to the house, wheeling my bag behind me. There were two other houses in the distance which I presumed to be Stuart and Hanover. Suddenly, I started panicking. The school was so big, the opportunity to mess up was enormous. I silenced this internal monologue and kept up the deep breathing. Ok, come on girl, let's do this. I put my hand on the ornate doorhandle, hesitating for one jarring instant as I doubted myself momentarily, before pushing with all my might and stepping onto the marble floor of the decadent foyer.

The door slammed behind me and I winced a little, not exactly how I planned to make my entrance. The foyer was colossal, almost ridiculously so, with two curved staircases on each wall joining at a balcony in the centre. A chandelier hung majestically from the roof and tall, comfortable-looking chairs were placed in clumps around a fire place just beyond the main entrance area. A few boys gathered in a group on the balcony turned around to look at me, not angrily, simply out of curiosity. Two of them, heart-meltingly gorgeous blonde twins, began to smile in an almost creepy Cheshire Cat fashion, their eyes practically flashing their excitement at the prospect of new meat. And who should step out from behind them but Mr Kurt Hummel himself.

Shit.