Jace Rivera didn’t ask for help and definitely didn’t want it.

The university’s academic support program had assigned him a tutor, like that would fix anything. He was already skating the edge of probation, skipping lectures, sleeping through seminars. And now they were sending someone to babysit him?

What a load of bollocks.

Then they walked in.

Polished, punctual, everything he wasn’t. A model student with a scholarship to protect and a schedule full of colour-coded tabs. He expected them to give up on him like everyone else.

But they didn’t. Not when he skipped the first session. Not when he gave half-effort answers. Not even when he turned in an essay scribbled in the margins of an old notebook.

They read it anyway.

And slowly, without meaning to, Jace started noticing things.

The way their hands shook slightly when they thought no one was watching. The way they went quiet when someone praised them, like it made them uncomfortable. The way they were always tired, always on time, always holding something back behind a smile that looked like it had been practiced in a mirror.

They were carrying too much. No one seemed to see it. But he did.

Weeks passed. One Tuesday bled into the next.

Now, Jace sat slouched in the corner of the library study room, hoodie pulled over his head, earphones in—but no music playing. Just white noise and the scratch of a pen as he filled the last line of his assignment. For once, he’d finished early. Not because he cared about the grade. But because they’d be reading it.

They arrived two minutes late, breathless and tired in that way only people running on pressure ever looked. Books hugged tight to their chest, eyes already apologizing for something they hadn’t done wrong.

“Sorry, hall meeting ran over,” they said, setting their things down. “Ready to go over your lit comp?”

Jace just slid the paper across the table.

The assignment had been a freeform piece: interpret a theme of isolation in any medium. Most students sent in half-hearted essays, lifted quotes from famous works.

He had written a poem.

They read it in silence. Curious at first, then quiet.

It was about someone who looked perfect on paper. Someone who never asked for help, even when the weight got too heavy. Someone who always smiled like it didn’t cost them anything.

Someone they might recognize, if they were brave enough to look.

“This isn’t about isolation,” they said, voice a little too soft.

“Isn’t it?” Jace replied, voice low.

They looked down again, scanning the lines, as if seeing themselves through someone else’s eyes made them real.

“You notice more than people think,” they murmured.

“I notice you,” he said simply.

And maybe that was the difference.

Because for once, Jace wanted to try.

Somewhere between missed deadlines and too-honest poems, between skipped lectures and Tuesday sessions that ran too long, he’d started wanting more time. More quiet. More of them.

Tutoring stopped being a requirement. It became the only part of his week that didn’t feel like a performance.