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“Shitty Hair, what is this supposed to be?” Bakugou held a piece of paper in front of Kirishima’s face. It was his English assessment, an essay that was worth 80% of their grade. The paper was marked with an F. So. Now because of this essay, Kirishima was failing English.
“I mean- fuck! You studied with me, didn’t you? I was right there with you when you were writing the damn thing!” Bakugou continued. Kirishima was only half-paying attention to him. He was more focused on the fact that he was now failing a class, and the semester ended in three days, and if he couldn’t get the grade up in time he wouldn’t get the credit, and then he wouldn’t be able to graduate in time, even though it was only his second year of high school this semester would fuck him over for basically the rest of his life-
“Oi!” Bakugou snapped his fingers in front of Kirishima’s face. “You still with me, Shitty Hair?”
“Y-yeah, sorry.”
“Good.” Bakugou looked back at Kirishima’s essay. “I don’t know what the fuck happened. I mean, you wrote a full essay. It’s almost 2 pages. Mine was shorter and I got full points.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” Kirishima asked, partially to Bakugou, partially to himself, and partially to whatever kind of god would let this happen. A bit overdramatic, but whatever.
“Well, I would guess that you didn’t fit some of the writing requirements Mic wants. Structure and citations and all that.” Bakugou shoved the paper back into Kirishima’s hands. “You should go talk to him, see if he’ll take revisions.”
“...Ok.” Bakugou held eye contact with him for a second longer than he had to. Kirishima could see in his eyes that he was worried about him. Bakugou seemed to realize that he probably shouldn’t just stand there staring deeply into his friend’s eyes and stomped away with a huff.
Kirishima sighed, anxiety building in the pit of his stomach. He tried to calm himself down as he walked to Present Mic’s classroom. Standing in front of the door, he took a deep breath and pushed it open.
Mic was sitting on top of his desk, his chair serving as a footrest. His long blonde hair was down around his shoulders as opposed to its traditional spike. Seeing Kirishima, he lifted his head up from the book he was reading. “What can I do for you, little listener?”
“Um. I wanted to talk about my essay?” Kirishima nervously held the paper out to his teacher.
“Ah, yes.” Mic took the essay from him. “So, the issue here is your thesis statement. You provided a lovely analysis of the theme of the story, but this assignment is about character.”
“Character.” Kirishima repeated. He’d thought that his analysis of the theme was about the characters, after all, the story was about the characters, right? “Wait, if my thesis statement is bad, that means I have to rewrite the whole essay!” His heart dropped. There went all his free time.
“No, no. You’ve got a lot of good character analysis in here to begin with, but it’s not supporting your thesis statement. To start, all you really need is a thesis statement that your evidence can actually support.”
“Um… okay?”
“Do you want to see what you can come up with right now? I’ll give you a few minutes and then I can grade your revisions.”
“S-sure.” Kirishima sat down at a desk and looked over his essay, while Mic went back to the book he was reading. A bit later, Kirishima had something that he thought was a little closer to what Mic wanted. “Sensei?”
He looked up from his book. “Oh! Are you done?”
“I think so?” He stood up and brought the essay to his teacher.
“Oh, this is a much better thesis. You see how it really ties all the evidence together?”
“Yeah…” Mic read through the rest of his essay quickly.
“There’s a couple of grammatical errors, and you should make sure you’ve cited your sources, but other than that this looks very good, little listener.” He got out a pen and circled a couple of misspelled words, then handed it back to Kirishima. “Fix those and then I can grade this for you.”
Kirishima smiled at him. “Thank you, sir.” He sat down at the desk and quickly fixed his mistakes and added citations.
“Will this bring my grade back to passing?” He asked nervously. Mic took the paper and looked it over.
“Yes, I’d say it definitely will. Do you understand why you failed the first time?”
“Yeah, I think I do.”
“Good. If you have trouble understanding an assignment like that again, come ask me right away, ok?”
“...Alright.”
“Have a nice night, little listener!” Mic called to him as he walked out the door of the classroom.
Kirishima exhaled a sigh of relief. The failing grade was like a weight on his shoulders that had just been lifted off. He smiled and ran off to find Bakugou.