Seedlings (Spanking One Shots)

Penny the Procrastinator (Penny's POV - Penny, age 12)

If there was one thing I hated about school, it was homework. Having lived under the same roof with more than one teacher, I'd been told time and time against that it was supposed to "make sure I understood the material that was taught to me." In that case, there was no need for tests and quizzes—they did the same thing. Ben, Dana, and Cooper could it explain it to me until they were blue in the face (and in some instances, they had), but I'd made up my mind. Teachers like to see their students suffer.

That didn't mean I was ready to pull an Owen and skip doing homework completely. It did mean, however, that more often than not I found myself getting ... distracted while finishing an assignment.

Case and point: my research paper for my history class. Mrs. Haggerton wanted us to write a 5-page paper about someone involved with the Civil War. Picking someone to write about—Ulysses Grant—was easy. Actually taking the time to research information about him and write it all down was not.

Ben said he'd be happy to read my paper over once it was done, mostly for grammar and use of references. But that sounded like more work to me. I shouldn't have told him about the paper in the first place.

We had a month to finish this paper, so I shouldn't have been complaining. Except I chose to wait until two days before it was due to start writing it. It wasn't that bad—plenty of kids in my class hadn't even chosen a topic yet, and I knew a bunch of them would wait until the night before to get it done. They were lucky; they probably didn't have a nosy brother to report to with their report.

There was a silver lining to all of this though: in order to do my research, I had to use a computer. And that meant I was allowed to spend a lot more than half-an-hour on the computer. So naturally I found myself browsing twitter instead of online encyclopedias (but not Wikipedia, because according to Mrs. Haggerton and Ben, it was an "unreliable source"). Just because I wasn't allowed to have any social media accounts, didn't mean I was totally unplugged from the world wide web.

But that was the reason I was in this predicament now. Ben would ask every so often how much of my paper I had done, and I'd always have to lie.

"I've jotted down some ideas."

"I wrote the first paragraph."

"I finished the first page."

"I went back and fixed from stuff I wrote before."

"I'm halfway done."

"I'm almost done."

I hated lying to Ben, but it was the only way I could buy myself more time.

That was part of the reason I felt less guilty about screwing around on the computer yet again. I'd finished all of my other homework, and I planned on getting all of my paper done tonight ... after I decrypted Harry Styles' latest tweet.

But before I could figure out whether Harry was in fact talking about a secret girlfriend, the door to the study opened.

"Dinner will be ready in five, Penny," Cooper said as he peered inside.

"Okay," I said, moving my mouse towards the exit button, even though the computer screen was facing away from the door.

"What are you working on?"

"My history paper."

"Still?" As Cooper came into the room, I clicked the mouse. "I thought you said at dinner last night you were almost done."

"I was ... but then I decided to start over."

Cooper looked puzzled. "Why?"

"I didn't like what I wrote."