The next time my stomach growled this loudly, I was sure I was going to be damned to eternal mortification and social humiliation. As I casually hunched down in my seat and tapped my notebook with the back of my pen, I sneaked a side glance at my best friend, Olivia. She couldn't seriously be enjoying this review of the imperfect tense, could she?

Oh yes, she was. There were no doodles in the margins (not that I missed them—there was only so much that I could take of glassy eyes reminiscent of those of anime characters). Her handwriting was as neat as could be, which was, indeed, very neat. Just as I was about to poke her arm with my pen, she glanced over, rolling her eyes.

"What?" she muttered to me under her breath.

I glanced up at Madame Cartier, the French teacher, who was enthusiastically detailing the situations in which one would use the imperfect tense rather than the passé composé. Scoffing, I pushed up the bridge of my glasses and daintily pointed at the teacher with my pen. "You're seriously interested in that?"

"Shouldn't you be paying attention?" Oliva said. She scribbled down a word and highlighted it with her special blue highlighter (reserved for especially important information). "I mean, you did fail the three tests we had on this tense last year."

"Exactly!" I responded, half-heartedly copying down an example from the board just as Madame Cartier looked back at the class. All right, true—I did seriously have to pass this class. "This is all review. You should be saving your energy for seventh period. Or else you'll end up napping instead of taking more of those ridiculously colorful notes."

She raised an eyebrow at me when she saw my notebook. "Seriously?"

"What?" Yeah, my notebook was basically blank, but that didn't mean that I hadn't already absorbed the information. Or something like that.

She shook her head. "Stop distracting me."

My stomach grumbled petulantly like a grumpy old man. I pressed my lips together and pushed up my glasses.

"What?" I said again when Olivia looked at me again. "I'm hungry."

↔

Olivia and I stood off to the side of the French classroom door as all the other students streamed out. I had an urge to elbow every person who bumped into me too hard, but the sharp glance that Olivia sent me convinced me otherwise. I crossed my arms over my stomach when it growled again.

"Where's Lila coming from again?" I wondered, vehemently hoping that no one noticed that parts of my body that weren't my mouth knew how to talk as well. It was too close.

"Spanish," Olivia answered. She leaned on the wall behind her, casually holding her books in one arm.

"Right." Lila was being very ambitious, especially for the second semester of junior year. She had decided that she wanted to take two languages—French and Spanish—while juggling all of her other commitments. Nowadays, I couldn't help but laugh whenever she complained about having no social life.

Olivia and I stood there for about four more seconds before Lila crashed into me, long hair flying wildly behind her. I hurriedly adjusted my glasses. "Sorry, guys," she gasped as she took the calculus textbook she had dropped from Olivia. "Class let out late. Señor Caballero decided to give us last minute extra homework."

I muttered "overachiever" under my breath and laughed when Lila sent me a dirty look. "What?" I asked innocently.

Olivia shook her head at the two of us before heading into the stream of people heading out of the hallway. "Come on, we'll be late."

As we rushed in front of our classmates, I looked over at Lila. "Yo, you ready for the chem test?"

She scoffed, casually flipping her hair over her shoulder. "What are you talking about? I didn't even have time to finish my English Lit essay yesterday. Anyway, I tried studying on the bus; it didn't work out."

"All right." I let out a sigh. Yes. I offered her a high five, which she rejected with an indignant raise of her eyebrow. (I wasn't aware that this was so beneath her.) I pretended to pout at her. "At least I know someone's gonna fail with me."

Lila rolled her eyes at me and then nodded enthusiastically. "Luc's been going on and on about how easy it's going to be. I just wanna smack him on the head with my calculus textbook."

Before I could respond, Olivia stopped suddenly, turning around, and sent us a dirty look. "Hurry up, you slowpokes! You're taking forever and we're gonna be late!"

I shut my mouth although I did exchange a glance with Lila. And my stomach growled again.

To hell with it.

↔

As soon as I saw the first question of the chem test, my stomach murmured a little as if it knew that the test would damn my chances at having a good life forever. I gulped. I swear I remember studying this topic... The teacher was looking smugly down at his laptop as he typed away—he knew he was doing this to his students! I had totally called it from the moment I walked in the classroom and caught his shifty, glinting, devious eyes.

I looked up and exchanged a look with Lila, who shrugged. Beside her, her brother Luc was already scribbling away. He was even more of an overachiever than she was, which was really hard to accomplish. After all, he was practically fluent in French—not surprising since he himself was half French—and could probably write essays in Spanish, despite having no knowledge of the language, if he tried hard enough.

I sighed and began to write a response half-heartedly. Perhaps I could fudge my way out of this situation (although precedent had dictated that I wouldn't make it out of dilemmas like this unscathed). My hand started to hurt halfway through the sentence, for some stupid reason, and my stomach decided to announce its empty status very loudly just as that moment.

I kept my head down as everyone else stopped writing and looked up.

Damn it, I thought as I wrote in a word in the short answer section. It was way past lunchtime. What the hell did my stomach think it was doing? To compensate, I pushed up my glasses. Better vision would surely lead to better test scores. And it would surely distract me from the fact that snack time at home was only a couple hours away...

Eventually, I convinced my stomach that it was seriously time to stay silent (by clenching down on it and staring intently at the long answer question), and the rest of the test went by uneventfully as could be. At the bell, which signaled the end of the day for all students except for athletes, my stomach let out a whimper, as if it was saying, "There, aren't you proud of me? I stayed quiet for an entire hour, and then some!"

I looked around at everyone else in the room to make sure no one was –and no one did since everyone had hightailed it to the door the moment they heard the bell—before patting my stomach and telling it, "Congratulations."

I met Lila and Olivia at the door. We walked out slowly. Tossing my hair over my shoulder, I tried to block out all the conversations around me about the answers to the test—I couldn't stand being wrong, and having my wrong answers confirmed as incorrect felt horrid. Nevertheless, Lila began talking about question thirty-two the moment we turned the corner into a new hallway.

"I wasn't sure what to put, so I was, like, debating between—" she started to say.

"It was choice A," Luc interrupted smoothly as he walked up next to Olivia. "B and C were completely random, so it was a pick between A and D."

Olivia smiled and elbowed him, her cheeks turning a little red. "Stop being a show-off. We all know you're, like, super smart."

Yeah, Olivia definitely knew that he was super smart. She'd never admit it, but we all knew that she'd had a little puppy crush on Luc since freshman year. It was really cute. For all I knew, the obsession could have turned into love...I shook my head. Nothing would be of use if she wouldn't just admit it to herself, which wouldn't happen any time soon.

Luc shrugged, hitching his backpack over his shoulder casually. "I'm failing European History. Never quite memorized the names of Henry the Eighth's wives and their specific histories."

I turned my head, and, rolling my eyes, scoffed. "Since when did anyone give a shit about history?"

He coolly met my eyes and responded, "Since when your GPA determined entrance into college."

I couldn't argue against that, so I clamped my mouth shut.

Lila answered for me by giving him a dirty look. "Smartass."

↔

I pulled into the driveway of my house with my radio blasting, slamming onto the brakes to avoid smashing a poorly positioned flower pot. I groaned. I'd have to remind my mother later; the gardening crew always put the pot in that place. It was rather annoying.

Gathering all my books and phone, I turned off the car radio and hopped outside. My English Lit textbook hung out of my bag precariously, and it took everything in me not to curse loudly when it fell out and landed on my toe. Honestly, it was the most difficult thing I'd ever attempted to do in my life.

Remember, Audrey, I told myself, there are innocent children playing in their front yards.

I picked up my textbook sulkily, cracking my back at the same time. The ten-year-olds playing on their devices in their front yard probably had a better working vocabulary of curse words than I did.

Muttering to myself, I sauntered up the pathway to the front door of my house and fiddled with the keychain in my pocket. It was just after then, as I opened the front door with my key, that I noticed that my parents were already inside—which was not good. I stuffed the textbook into my backpack and jammed the key in the lock, slipping inside as quietly as I could.

That being done, I dropped my backpack immediately.

Some footsteps came, and I crossed my arms grouchily. "Audrey?" My mom peeked out of the kitchen.

"Hey, mom," I said, putting on a smile and casually walking inside. "What's up?"

Only this could happen to me.

My dad was sitting at the kitchen counter inside, his reading glasses on and arms crossed as he read an official-looking report with my school logo on top. I gulped and placed my backpack on the couch. Mom threw me a dirty look, to which I smiled as innocently as I could (it probably looked more like a grimace).

"Your third quarter grades don't look too great, Audrey," Dad said, looking up at me. He frowned.

My mouth twisted into an automatic wince, and I sat down heavily on the kitchen chair across from him. "Well, um, Dad, see here—"

"Two B's?" My mom was peeking over my dad's shoulder. "Your GPA—"

"Yeah, no more 4.5." I let out a long sigh, leaning on my palm. "Sorry."

My dad put down the report. His worried eyes met mine, and he said quietly, "Audrey, have you started thinking about college yet?"

"I—" I started to say, holding up a finger.

Mom sat down next to Dad, her eyes watching me closely. "I know it might seem far away, but we'll be sending in college applications this fall."

"Yeah, I'm aware." I reached for my backpack, but then I realized it was too far away for me to reach. "I've been swamped with so many things this year with all the clubs, and I'm not sure what to prioritize."

"Your academics, of course," Dad said.

I shrugged. "I've been trying." Of course I tried—I studied for hours every day! However, since my name wasn't Luc Mercier, I was always dreadfully distracted for whatever reason.

My mom stood up and walked to me, sitting down next to me. "Audrey, I know it may seem hard."

"It is." I nodded knowingly, resisting the urge to wiggle my eyebrows. Why could I make so many sexual innuendos out of this? This was a serious matter, I reminded myself. Seriously.

My lips twitched anyway.

I flattened out my expression when I caught my mom's eyes, which did not see the humor in the situation at all.

"If your grades don't improve in the next couple of weeks, we're going to postpone our trip to Cancún this summer and get you a tutor who can get you ahead of next year's curriculum," Dad said quietly, hands still on the report card. "This is no laughing matter, Audrey."

My mood dropped, and I made an attempt to get up, which only resulted in a bang on my knee. I hissed, held myself back from saying anything I'd regret later, and tried to respond as calmly as I could, "But Dad! Lila and Olivia are expecting pictures!"

Of my beautiful behind on the beach, I failed to mention.

"Audrey, you have to put your friends on hold for the time being," my mom said slowly. "A good academic record will get you to college, not your friends."

Dad leaned forward, his dark eyes scrutinizing me sharply. "I plan to carry through, Audrey."

I leaned back in my chair, rolling my eyes and staring at the ceiling instead. "Whatever, I'll do that."

There was a pause. Then, lowly, my mom said, "Go finish your homework in your room." I still sat in my chair, now looking at her with raised eyebrows. She added, her nostrils flaring, "Now."

The interrogation was over! I wanted to whoop, but when I took a last glance back at my parents, who were watching me with their eagle eyes, I held it in and grabbed my backpack from the couch.

My trip up the stairs, through which I skipped, felt strangely triumphant, like I had defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo or something (which would be rather cool albeit bloody). I nearly ran into the hallway wall after tripping on the last step—that basically ruined the mood. So I proceeded through the hallway with a little more forbearance, clutching my bookbag to myself.

But as soon as I made it into my room, the guilt started to hit me. It felt a lot like an intense wave of puppy dog sadness, which I really didn't feel often. I pouted down at the ground. "You know I really didn't mean to sound that flippant," I said to no one in particular.

So I stood up and walked out of my room, tiptoeing toward my dad's office room to see if he was in there. I really owed him an apology. After all, he was paying tens of thousands to send me to a private prep school. And like a typical entitled rich kid, I'd never really thought about things that way before.

As I walked down the hallway with hands on my hips, I peeked out the skylight window and saw that his car wasn't in the driveway. (The damned flower pot was knocked over, so I assumed that something must have happened.)

I sighed. I should have remembered that he was on his afternoon break and that I had practically driven him away from it. I bit my lip. The guilt felt horrid.

I went in his office anyway. Then, immediately, my eyes were drawn to his law school diplomas above his desk. Luckily, I was able to look past them (or else I would have started despairing about my surely fruitless future). As usual, his desk was a horror. I wasn't sure how he was able to sit there and actually work without getting distracted. On the other side of the room were his much more organized bookshelves. I gravitated toward those.

I should have been writing an apology note or something with the post-it notes and pens strewn on Dad's desk, but there was one book in the midst of them all that was so old, dusty, and yellow that I had to retrieve out of pity.

"Madame Bovary," I read out loud.

Its cover had one of the ugliest illustrations I had ever seen. At some point in time, the illustration must have been of a dark-haired woman, but now, it looked more like a huge, discolored smudge with creepily staring yellow-green eyes. Furthermore, the title font was barely legible, and it took everything in me to decipher the author's name.

I leaned in closer to the book and squinted.

"Gustave Flaubert," I read. I opened the book.

Oh God. It was all in French. I recognized one word, to my delight—Paris. And, to my greater delight, I realized something else: this could be it. If I could prove to my dad that I could read an entire French book in its original form, I could show my parents (and Luc, while I was at it, since he still wasn't convinced that I was smarter than a fifth grader) that I wasn't a complete airhead.

Plus, it was in French. My dad loved the way it sounded even though he didn't understand a single word of it.

I looked up and smiled at my dad's diplomas, feeling just a little warm inside from my own brilliance. Since these moments didn't come too often, they practically lit me up. I was a fucking genius.

And of course, I still owed my mom and dad an apology.

See, I was smart sometimes.

→

Hey guys!

Welcome to the first chapter of the slightly more revised version of Excuse my French. Audrey is as Audrey-like as usual, and of course, we can't forget about our very snarky Luc and the rest of the gang in Olivia and Lila.

The lovely banner at the top is by @Diagonas. A huge thank you to her!