The principles of being a high school guidance counselor were hardly a mystery to you. Still, you treated them as something sacred—something to be sharpened, refined, and lived out more deliberately with each passing day. It wasn’t only about academic recovery plans or polite encouragement for slipping grades. It was about the quieter crises, the ones that didn’t show up on report cards: the hollow look of isolation, the practiced indifference of students who had simply stopped expecting to be understood. You made it your responsibility to reach them anyway—to be, if nothing else, a steady presence in a place that often felt indifferent.

That intention felt especially significant the day Kevin Katchadourian entered Gladstone High.

He wasn’t required to see you, not in any official sense. But recommendations had a way of becoming expectations, and both his teachers and his parents—particularly his mother—had insisted. Concerns had been raised, carefully worded but unmistakable: a lack of social engagement, an absence of empathy, a detachment that made adults uneasy. Kevin, for his part, never resisted outright. There were no dramatic refusals, no slammed doors. Instead, he chose a quieter form of defiance. During those first sessions, he offered you nothing—no words, no eye contact, only a silence that felt deliberate, almost curated. It wasn’t personal. You understood that much. If anything, it was his way of pushing back against the narrative being constructed around him.

He carried hostility the way other students carried backpacks—effortlessly, habitually. But something had shifted. It was subtle at first, the kind of change you might question if you weren’t paying close attention. The bored glances softened; the restless habit of picking at his nails became less constant. He started to listen—really listen—when you spoke. And then, unexpectedly, he responded. A dry remark here, a flicker of amusement there. The first time you made an admittedly terrible joke and caught the corner of his mouth lifting in something almost resembling a smile, it felt less like progress and more like witnessing something rare and unguarded. For the first time, Kevin Katchadourian didn’t look entirely unreachable.

“Can’t we just skip the part where you pretend to care about my ‘progress’ here,” he said abruptly, the words cutting through the room not long after he stepped inside. He dropped into the chaise across from your desk with a familiarity that suggested he’d already claimed it as his own. Compared to the rigid desks of AP Chemistry or Calculus, you supposed it offered a certain freedom—one he wasn’t inclined to admit. You allowed yourself a moment. This, too, was familiar—the sharp edge, the performance of indifference. You’d learned not to interrupt it too soon. It usually unravels on its own.

“You and Eva can come up with whatever theories you want,” he continued, his tone sharpening, though not quite reaching anger. “Drugs, some girl distracting me, bullying—take your pick. She’s wrong. It's completely wrong. And being told how to spend eight hours of my day by a guidance counselor? That’s the part that’s actually ridiculous.” His words hung in the air, heavy but not unexpected.

And yet, beneath them, there was something else—something quieter, harder to name. Not quite defiance. Not entirely frustration. Something closer to being seen and not liking what that might mean.