Down and Across

Sixteen-year-old Saaket Ferdowsi—but please call him Scott—lacks grit. So while his parents are visiting family in Iran, he hops on a bus to Washington, D.C., in order to visit a Georgetown professor who’s just won the MacArthur Genius Grant for her research on grit. But the friends he makes along the way—Trent, an aspiring U.S.…