Free Sean Griswold's Head by Lindsey Leavitt

it’s Taco Boat day, but more likely it’s the sweat of teenagers lined up against the back wall, convulsively fidgeting as they await their report card doom. And for the first report card day in my life, I’m among the nervous throngs.
    This used to be my moment. Those letters declaring my educational fate sang. Not that I didn’t already know what they were. I would have already added up the percentages myself, checking that the teacher got it right, calculating the exact score I needed on each midterm to achieve an A.
    Now I have no clue how I’ve done on the tests. Ahead of me is a ticking time bomb, one I want to shove into my locker, not take home to my already-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-me parents. Except our school is all checks and balances with our grades—giving us a report card in school, sending one to our home, and posting the grades online. They do everything short of spray painting it on the parents’ bedroom wall. But maybe I can check the mailbox every day. And give our computer a virus so they can’t log on. Maybe I can escape.
    Escape is exactly what I want to do when I see Sean three people behind me in the G–L line. Curse that alphabetical connection! He thinks I’m stalking him, and even if this observation isn’t entirely off (it’s research!), I don’t want to give him any more reason to believe it now.
    I grab my report card and somehow open the sides without ripping the whole sheet, an amazing feat considering how difficult they make those stupid tear-on-this-line-fold-here-and-don’t-rip-here envelopes. I look straight down at the report card to avoid eye contact with Sean, who has retrieved his own and is just within my peripheral vision.
    But when I do look at my card, I notice a typo, not in my name where it usually is—people are always replacing the a with an e —but in the actual grades. There’s a B. I can handle that. Who wants to be valedictorian, anyway?
    But wait.
    C ? That’s just average. I can’t be average. Average is for … average people. And yet that is the letter on my report card, right next to the A from the previous quarter. I got a C. In biology.
    Breathing is suddenly a very difficult task. I’m rifling through my backpack in pursuit of my brown paper lunch sack and wondering why you breathe in a sack anyway when I hear a voice that is becoming all too familiar.
    â€œHow’d you do?” asks Sean.
    â€œUm, all right,” I say, breathing more slowly. “Just finding my happy place.”
    â€œI thought report card time is your happy place. Aren’t you the Queen of the Honor Roll?”
    I look down and when I look up again, Sean’s expression shifts, like he has X-ray vision and can see through my clenched fist, can see the grades, can see through my skull and into my mind that is crunching the numbers in a futile attempt to recalculate the unexpected, can see into my heart and knows that it’s beating just a fraction of a hair faster when he looks at me the way he’s looking. Like he can see into my soul.
    I swallow, fighting the urge to crumple up my report card and stuff it into the trash. But instead, I shove it into Sean’s hands and say, “Looks like I’ve been demoted to Duchess.”
    Sean whistles. “Marietta killed me too. I think she was drunk when she did grades. No one got an A.”
    â€œReally? How do you know what other people got?”
    â€œWell, I don’t. Not for sure.” Sean blushes. “But it seems like everyone is complaining about their scores and stuff.”
    â€œThanks for trying to make me feel better.”
    â€œOne C doesn’t mean you’re not brilliant.”
    â€œJust average,” I say, even though the use of the word brilliant does help soften the blow. “But, did you do all right? Nothing your parents would ground you for?”
    â€œGrounding? My parents don’t