“Dry!” Kurt exclaims, offended by this critique of his work to the depths of his soul. He yanks back his portfolio, closes it, and clutches it protectively to his chest. “What do you mean it's dry? Every single one of my photographs is an award winner! An…award…winner!” He jabs his finger on the desk top with each word to emphasize his point.

“Yes, they are,” the woman behind the desk says, ignoring Kurt's hysterics. “And individually, they're excellent. But…”

“But?” Kurt interrupts, loathing in his eyes for this harpy intent on tearing apart his dream.

Ms. Boarish - McKinley High's career counselor - a spiteful, prudish, and bourgeois old hag as far as Kurt is concerned, even if she is only in her thirties. Where most McKinley teachers would be annoyed by Kurt's outburst to the point of giving him whatever he wanted, Ms. Boarish looks at Kurt with an amused smirk on her Rum Raisin lips. He hates that smirk. When he sees it, he feels like she's not taking him seriously. Could he take himself seriously right now? He is acting like a diva. To her benefit, she's the only teacher/authority figure in this school who will listen to him rant without automatically putting her fingers to her temples and sighing, but that's probably because she enjoys his misery too much.

She takes her overly-ornate glasses off her face and places them carefully on her desk. Kurt hates those glasses, too. She's a teacher, for Christ's sakes! She couldn't just buy herself a respectable, stylish pair of eyeglasses? No, hers are bright purple, retro cat frames, with random bling glued all over the place. On anyone else, Kurt might find those glasses cute, even a little daring. On this woman in particular, the one clawing his scholarship project to pieces with her vicious, vicious words, Kurt thinks they're ridiculous.

“But together like this,” she says, gesturing to the portfolio in his arms, causing him to shift his grasp to further protect it from her evil gaze, “they're a jumble. There's nothing cohesive about it, no theme that threads the images together.”

“They have a theme.” Kurt spits the words out of his mouth before he has a chance to fully comprehend them. Not until he hears them out loud does he realize she's right. He doesn't have a theme. They're all excellent photographs, but they weren't really meant to be together in a collection like this.

Critically speaking, they're sort of random images, mainly of his friends doing their own thing, wearing clothes he designed and made, or candid shots from choir competitions the Glee Club he's in has attended – the girls touching up their lipstick in the mirror, the guys laughing and fooling around, their choir director calling them over for some last minute practice, demonstrating the moves they needed to work on right as the clock ticked down. A few photos are of his dad working in his shop, including some industrial close-ups of engines, tools, cars torn down to just their frames, greasy hands artistically portrayed in black and white. He'll concede there are scant examples of his hand-tinting and manipulation skills. (He should really add a few more of those. Okay, so, she got him there.) The rest of his portfolio consists of the requisite scenery and landmarks – traditional sunrise and sunset shots, four seasons of the Auglaize River (the ones of it covered in cracked ice before the spring thaw are his favorites), Annie Oakley's grave (Mercedes swears she can see a woman holding a rifle standing in the background, but Kurt is convinced it's a photobombing teenaged boy carrying a stick), Allen County Memorial Hall.

“They're…uh…interpretive,” he says, speaking quicker as the perfect cover story leaps to mind. “They're meant to illustrate the plight of the modern teen, how we're expected to act like adults when we're barely done with childhood.”

“And the landscapes?”

Kurt can tell from the unwavering stare in Ms. Boarish's piercing cognac eyes that she knows he's bullshitting her, but at least she looks impressed.

“They set the scene,” he says smugly, pulling himself straight as a show of his superiority. “We live in Lima, Ohio, for crying out loud. The quintessence of rustic quasi-suburbia, a breeding ground for materialistic, white, middle-class, Republican America, and all its flaming ignorance.”

She raises a meticulously groomed eyebrow and gives his explanation some thought.

“Right. Okay,” she relents, but only about an inch, “if that's what you're going with, you might be able to get away with that…” Kurt relaxes until he sees her wait one minute finger go up. “But there's still something missing.”

Kurt's feathers ruffle. Missing? What could possibly be missing (aside from more manips, but he's already secretly given her that win)? There's over two hundred photographs in his portfolio. He's included mountains, lakes, children, antique cars – that trendy, scenic, hipster crap that he personally hates, but that the judges at seven different major county fairs went gaga over, winning him Best of Show after Best of Show. He's taken a picture of nearly everything in the state of Ohio. If it sat still for longer than thirty seconds, he's snapped a picture of it. The photographs in his portfolio span the last three years of his high school career. They represent weekends lost working at his dad's shop when he wanted to be at the mall with his friends so he could earn the money he needed to buy supplies or upgrade his equipment. These pictures are the manifestation of countless hours he labored in his mom's homemade dark room, with watered-down chemical developer turning his fingertips rough even thru the highest quality latex gloves he could find. They are the wear-and-tear on his precious baby – his Lincoln Navigator – that he's driven from one end of this God-awful state to the other, sleeping in the backseat and waking up before dawn to capture the perfect sunrise over Cedar Bogs/Goll Woods/Clear Fork Gorge/Mentor Marsh/Buzzardroost Rock, until he never wanted to see another sunrise again.

What in hell could he be missing?”

“And what is that, Ms. Boarish?” he asks, acting unaffected, with the foot of his crossed leg tapping furiously at the front skirt of her imitation honey wood desk.

Ms. Boarish folds her hands under her chin the way teachers do when they feel the next words out of their mouth are going to be life-changing, but at the last moment, she drops them to her desk and closes her eyes. She looks frustrated, struggling between continuing this argument with Kurt, and moving on to another student who might listen to what she has to say with a little less attitude.

“You,” she says. “I don't see any of you in those pictures.”

Kurt's jaw drops. He's about to laugh, but Ms. Boarish's closed eyelids pinch together, and he can't. Whether he hates it or not, Ms. Boarish thinks she's looking out for him. That's more than any of the other teachers in this school have ever done.

He's not going to laugh, but he's still going to argue.

“There's me all over these pictures!” he says. “I took them, I decided on the subjects, I developed a lot of them by hand. This is my work. I did all of his. How can there not be me in them?”

“Kurt,” she says (and there's the sigh), “you don't understand…”

“No, you don't understand. I have been putting this collection together for over three years, and now you expect me to scrap the whole thing and start over?”

“You have to do something,” she says, her voice rising a hair, but she squashes it before she continues, “because this portfolio is not getting you into NYA, and it's not winning you the Eames Scholarship. And you need that scholarship, Kurt.”

Need. Not want; she said need. She's right – he needs that scholarship, and the accolades that go along with it. If he's getting anywhere near NYA, he needs to win. Without it, he can't even eat lunch on the outside steps.

There. She got his attention. Dammit! He hates that she knew how to get to him.

But even if there is an issue with his photographs, and he's not admitting that there is, how is he supposed to rectify it?

Him. She wants to see him in his photographs. What about him does she expect to see? The him whose existence kept his mother from fulfilling her dream before she died? The him that gets tossed into a dumpster every day? That gets slammed into lockers? That gets ice cold drinks thrown in his face?

The him that will do just about anything to get out of this stereotypical bigoted town and never take a second glance back?

He must have said that Dammit! out loud because she answers with, “Well, if you didn't like that, you're not going to like this. It's not just the photographs. If you want to make an impression, you might want to consider making a mixed-media presentation – a printed book, a video, a collage, something that not only showcases your work, but shows your connection to the subject matter.”

Kurt falls back into his chair. It's overdramatic, but it's not intentional. It's the effect of gravity dragging his body down when he blacks out for a millisecond.

“You've got to be kidding me!” he says. “So now you're telling me the pictures aren't enough? When did that happen? I read the rules. They said pictures are fine, and my pictures…”

“Are exceptional. But that's because they were being graded solely on composition, subject matter, and relevance, and for any other college, that would be fine. Heck, for Tisch, you could get away with the pictures and that crap you tried to feed me earlier.” Kurt frowns, but she doesn't drop a pause. “But The New York Academy for Photography and the Visual Arts, they're the upper echelon, and they want to see something more.”

Kurt's defiant gaze drops to the floor. He can't look at her anymore. As his eyes trace the intersecting lines in the travertine-colored carpet, he sees his entire life flash before his eyes, except where it used to be him jet-setting around the world with a camera in one hand and a press pass in the other, it's him at the ripe old age of thirty, wearing an apron, and serving coffee to teenagers who he'll bitterly think remind him of himself, back when he had a future, when he had promise.

“Look, we all know you can take pretty pictures,” Ms. Boarish says, not giving him a second's rest from this torture. “But so can thousands of other kids in this country. And not just those kids, but what about the ones coming from other continents? Kids who live in warzones, who manage to snap pictures of bombings in their own towns? Kids who've traveled the world? Kids in remote areas, who live off the land, whose cameras are the only way they're going to lift themselves and their communities from poverty? Pretty pictures aren't going to win you a spot in the highly competitive and renowned program you've chosen, Kurt.”

“Well, when you put it that way, why should I even bother?” Kurt grumbles, plopping his portfolio in his lap and angrily flipping through the acid-free protective pages. He scowls at the photos encased in each, which he can see now are probably more suited for sale to the hospitality industry than for exhibition in a gallery. He stops on his photograph of the Dysart Woods. He always thought this was one of his best photographs composition-wise: the trees peeking through the early morning fog, leaves freshly dressed in fall colors popping out from the misty gloom, the subtle reflection in the river that winds underneath, a slightly blurred silhouette of a hazy reality. But with this new information settling in the cracks of his skull, he'll probably upload it to a stock website, where it can be bought anonymously and used royalty-free, enlarged beyond its pixel size, slapped into a cheap wood frame, and hung above the bed of some no-name, mid-rate hotel. Maybe he can use the money he makes to pay for a semester at Northwestern – provided he can swing an acceptance at this late date.

He can bunk with Puck. It'll be fun.

Oh God…  

Ms. Boarish reaches out a hand to gently touch his.

“Because Kurt Hummel has the ability to blow the competition away,” she says. “You just need to show them.”

Kurt flips the portfolio shut, looking at the photographs he worked so hard on for possibly the last time. What a waste. All that time, all that work, worthless. When he raises his eyes, he's on the brink of tears. He doesn't want to, but he can't help it. Only one other thing in his life has hurt worse than this.

“I have less than a month till the deadline!” Kurt says. “What do you expect me to do?”

Ms. Boarish gives Kurt's hand a little squeeze, meant to be comforting.

“I expect you to take this month and put together something new, something fresh, something entirely you. And I expect you to get your scholarship.”