The Counsellor Who Is Actually Paid Attention
Mr. Hawes's office is in the D hallway, which is the wing of the school where they put everything they don't know what else to do with — the speech pathologist, the part-time band director, the room that says TESTING/DO NOT ENTER on a sign that's been there since the summer. His door is half-open when I find him, and there is a card on it that says MR. HAWES, COUNSELLING, 9–10, in the font the district uses for everything and which I have started to find oddly comforting.
He's eating a sandwich. Not in a sad way, exactly, but not in a happy way either. Just — eating. There's a paperback on his desk, face down, and I can see from the spine it's one of those library-bound paperbacks that have been read a thousand times. *All the King's Men*, it says. Robert Penn Warren.
"Miss Alvarez," he says, without looking up. "Come in."
I hadn't knocked.
"How did you —"
"Your footsteps are very distinctive," he says, and now he does look up, and his face is the face of a man who is tired but not unkindly so. Mr. Hawes is somewhere between forty and sixty — I genuinely can't tell. He's got the kind of moustache that doesn't commit to any particular decade. He is wearing a tie with small birds on it.
"My footsteps are distinctive."
"You walk like somebody with a plan," he says. "I teach three hundred ninth-graders. Most of them walk like they lost something. You walk like you found