Seedlings (Spanking One Shots)

Hiding His Failures (Owen's POV - Owen age 13)

I'd never been a good student, and I had absolutely no problem admitting that. Mediocrity in everything but soccer just happened to be my forte. However, I'd never really had bad enough grades to be classified as a poor student... until now.

I tried convincing myself that the 3 F's glaring at me were short for fantastic, and not for failure. It wasn't exactly working all that well.

Why, of all the millions of professions in the world, had all THREE of my brothers chosen to be teachers? That wasn't even a coincidence; it was karma!

In my eyes, this could be seen as a learning experience, something to look back on and think, "Hmm, maybe X-Box at midnight shouldn't have been my top priority". Everybody made mistakes, and the important thing was learning from them, right?

Wrong. So, so wrong.

My brothers, being teachers, always expected—at the very least—decent grades. How could Penny and I possibly come close to failing when we had 24-hour free tutors?

Well, if there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that everything's possible. Think that'll get me out of trouble? Yeah, probably not.

The walk home was kind of unbearable, especially with my stupid little sister bragging about her straight A's and B's in my bleeding ear. I was still trying to come up with a way to avoid showing my brothers that disaster of a report card, and her rambling was making it hard to concentrate.

"So Mrs. Hart said if I keep up the good work, I could qualify for NJHS!" she gushed, skipping slightly in happiness. I found it hard to be too frustrated with Penny, seeing as she wasn't trying to brag, but was just genuinely happy with her grades. I was too; she worked hard. It's just hard to be happy for someone else when you're so busy feeling sorry for yourself.

"That's great, Penny," I mumbled, scuffing my trainer against the sidewalk. Why couldn't the walk be ten miles instead of just under one? I needed more time!

What the hell was I gonna do?

"How were your grades? Did you get your report card today, or does it come out with the high schoolers'?"

What a dumb question. Why would eight grade report cards come out at the same time as the high schoolers', nearly a week later—

Oh. My. Gosh.

"Penny, you're a genius!" I cried, lifting her up in a bear hug right there on the sidewalk.

"What for?" she asked, bewildered and wriggling to be put down.

"For," I began, stopping myself. "For almost making it into NJHS! That's so great! We should tell Ben as soon as we get home so we can celebrate!"

Anything to distract them from the fact that I'm so obviously lying about my report card.

"Thanks, Owen!" she trilled happily. "You're the best brother ever!"

"Don't let the others hear you, or we might not be doing any kind of celebrating tonight," I mock-warned, elbowing her side lightly.

"Let's hurry up and get home before Dana decides that whatever we want to eat is unhealthy or something!" And with that, my sister took of sprinting down the sidewalk. Wow, she must have really been desperate for some junk food.

We made it to the house in record time, Penny only pausing to wrench open our front door. While she went to find Ben or Cooper—the softies—I snuck away upstairs to eradicate the very big problem lying crumpled at the bottom of my backpack.

I pulled the ball of paper out of my backpack. I couldn't keep myself from un-crumpling it—there was a part of me that thought, prayed that the F's had somehow changed into A's or even B's on the way home.