Kathryn Renaud, Part One
Posted on June 14th, 1998 by Tempest Rainbird

Kathryn Renaud was a cheerful young woman with a fine tail of chestnut hair that ran midway down her back. She had a brilliant smile which she used unsparingly and a thoroughly disarming manner of simply sitting down and acting as though she’d known someone for years. At least, this was the Kathryn Renaud that presented herself this week.

The sullen girl who’d slumped across her chair last month and refused to allow a single word to be pried from her recalcitrant jaws was altogether different. Somehow, Tempest doubted it was four weeks of two hour therapy sessions that had made the changes. Nevertheless, she smiled and played along.

Kathryn flashed a perfect set of pearly teeth and leaned in conspiratorially, catching Tempest’s eye. “I never used to think there was anything to this therapy business. I mean, when my parents told me they wanted me to come in to, ‘see the ship’s counselor,’ I thought they were nuts. But I was wrong, ya know?” She crossed her legs, and the summerish skirt she was wearing fell fetchingly across the chair in a rainbow of folds. “I really do feel a lot better.”

Kathryn’s cheerfulness was catching, and Tempest found herself smiling. “I’m glad to hear that, Kathryn. I really am. But what do you attribute these changes to?”

“Well, ya know last week we were talkin’ about how I should tell myself how to feel? How if I thought I was happy, maybe I could be happy?” She paused and smiled a little wider so that her dimples fell in. “Well, I thought that was stupid. But I went home and I realized that I thought counseling was stupid and that it would never work, so maybe that was why it hadn’t. Then all week I kept telling myself how I should feel, and I felt that way.”

Tempest straightened her collar. One of the perks of being ship’s counselor was that she usually didn’t have to wear an actual uniform, but today she was going to a small but formal luncheon for a member of the science staff who had received a commendation for his work on a recent project. She didn’t know the man himself very well, but she had been invited, and as ship’s counselor morale and such were part and parcel with the duties. “So let me get this straight. All week you’ve been successful and happy? Hasn’t anything gone wrong?”

“Not a thing.”

“That’s wonderful, Kathryn,” Tempest agreed, nodding. “May we all have such luck. And positive thinking can be an extremely effective tool. But it isn’t all there is. I wouldn’t expect this run of good luck to extend, and I really do think we should continue our sessions.”

Kathryn shrugged. “If you say so, counselor. But I really do feel better.”

Tempest nodded again, but was loathe to simply take the girl at her word. It was not so much that she thought she might be lying, but there was a powerful tendency of the mind to create the illusion of well-being, especially when it was under a microscope. Kathryn might be feeling on top of the world today, but Tempest had the feeling the sullen teenager would walk back into her office any day now.

“I’m afraid I have to cut today’s session off a little prematurely — I have a luncheon to attend,” Tempest told her, standing and walking over to her office door. “But I would like to schedule an appointment for later this week. Would you be free Monday at 1800 hours?”

Straightening her clothing and running a hand through her calm curls, Kathryn nodded. “All I ever do on Tuesday evenings is study quantum mechanics anyway. And right now we’re doing applications to warp theory. It’s a breeze.”

“All right, Kathryn, I’ll see you then.”

Kathryn walked out of the office, and Tempest watched her stride past a young assistant tactical officer, flirtatiously smiling. There was no way the morose teenager Tempest had met a month ago would have done that, and no way she was going to believe Kathryn had gone under a complete personality shift. There was clearly something deeper going on.

It was just over a month ago, not too long after she’d come on board, that Samuel Renaud, Kathryn’s father, had come to her about his daughter. He had been terribly worried about her social ineptitude and bouts of depression. There were times, he had said, when she seemed almost normal, but then she’d be gripped by rage and lash out. Tempest had uncovered two incidents where Kathryn had physically struck her peers in school, and was beginning to suspect from certain physiological signs that the girl and her father were hiding a possible suicide attempt. It was not unheard of for such things to happen on a Starfleet ship, but generally the families of Starfleet officers were fairly stable, and the most a counselor had to deal with was alienation and feelings of neglect. Cases like this were, to say the least, disturbing.

Tempest paused to take a few notes on a padd, then checked her reflection in the mirror and neatened up the bun she’d decided to lock her rebellious hair in that morning. A single curl insisted on coming out and hanging across her forehead. Tempest tried unsuccessfully to restrain it, then gave up and headed down to the luncheon anyway. After all, in emergency situations most of the ship had seen her just after she’d woken up, and after that a single stray curl could hardly mar their image of her.