Eponine Thenardier was a girl.

But she dressed like a boy, because she wanted to.

Eponine Thenardier was an ordinary girl in an extraordinary school.

This school's name was Musain Academy, and it was a prestigious private school located in Paris, France. Those who attended the academy were primarily from prominent families, or were celebrities, and were in the higher class of society. The students were very accustomed to wealth. The Academy itself was gloriously furnished, and was built like a shining palace with polished marble floors, and soaring ceilings with crystal chandeliers hanging like stars, grand staircases and dining rooms and flowering gardens and glistening fountains. The Academy seemed to be principally focused on being aesthetically pleasing.

Musain Academy, of course, put those with stellar family backgrounds as the first priority for enrollment, regardless of academic skills. There definitely still was a chance of a lower-class citizen to be enrolled, however it was a very slim opportunity. A full scholarship would be offered to one French student per high school grade level every year, who has met the accepted score on a notoriously challenging entrance exam. These students were expected to be Top of the Class each trimester to remain at Musain.

Eponine was not at all in the higher class, nor was she from a prominent family, nor was she a celebrity. She was just one of those extremely intellectually advanced French students. She had done all of the enrollment applications and paperwork herself, because she insisted that she was mature enough, and also was awfully ashamed of her parents and didn't wish for them to come along.

Her parents, Madame and Monsieur Thenardier, used to care for her very much. In fact, Eponine and her younger sister Azelma were spoiled rotten by their mother when they were children. Their family was not rich, but Eponine and Azelma always had the finest dolls, the prettiest dresses, and everything else they could have wanted at the time. Now that the economy had become unstable, Eponine and her family had been afflicted by poverty. Less and less customers came to their restaurant, in which her father had named the Waterloo Restaurant, and her parents were constantly distressed by money. Meals became more and more infrequent, and soon her father reunited with his gang, the Patron-Minette, and they began committing small crimes like mugging scroungers or casual onlookers in the streets. Eponine's father would send her and Azelma begging for money around town, every now and then.

Eponine's mother seemingly had stopped spoiling her and Azelma as they got older. Instead she had become the roughened, harsh, punishing mother Eponine always feared to have. Madame Thenardier would often be found scolding 'Ponine and 'Zelma about anything that anyone could possibly be scolded about. The girls were hit, bruised, punished, and howled at. Azlema always remained quiet about the matter, but Eponine felt defiant and stubborn about it, and would every so often dress like a boy, much to the Madame's frustration. "Every so often" turned into often, and "often" soon became every day. She was almost unrecognizable as the pretty and proper girl she was at her youth.

The new Eponine was a skinny fifteen-year-old girl that never smiled. She was a girl with a snarky attitude and quick wit that had no friends and was pitied by everyone. She was a girl that tucked her long hair into a cap and wore boy's clothes.

She dressed like a boy because she wanted to be free.

Eponine was always frequent in her studies, despite the troubling situations that she found herself in. Her parents were never very smart, but she was.

And here she found herself in the elite Musain Academy.