Flounder

Seventeen-year-old Alex Ryback has made up his mind that he will not follow his older brother Gerry down the same path. He is finishing high school with decent results, but his parents have attached a condition to his college years: he must keep a 3.0 grade point average or lose all financial support. Once he is on campus, Alex finds that balancing his coursework with an active social life is harder than he expected. A professor with no sympathy for struggling students pushes that 3.0 out of reach, and Alex starts to wonder whether trying is worth it, or whether he should simply party for as long as the good times last.

The year that follows is chaotic. Alex sits through classes that seem to go nowhere, juggles girlfriends, smokes far too much marijuana, collects a yearbook superlative he never earned, has a weapon turn up at a house party, gets into a confrontation in a laundry room, and takes part in a campus-wide scavenger hunt built around drinking. Each stumble brings the same question to the surface: will a handful of bad decisions define him permanently, or can he keep going and recover from his mistakes?