I could see him angling now, like maybe I’d pick him up a treat next time. Get him all sugared up. It was one of those rare flashes where the actual kid showed through the armor he seemed to wear day and night.
“Bronson, when you said it’s nothing you can talk about, does that mean there’s something going on?”
“You deaf? I said, Nothin’. I can. Talk about!”
His leg jerked out, and he punctuated his words with kicks at the little table between us.
Bronson was the type of boy people write psych papers about all the time — the debatably untreatable kind. As far as I’d been able to tell, he had no empathy for other people whatsoever. It’s a basic building block of what could become antisocial personality disorder — Kyle had it, too, in fact — and it made acting out his violent impulses very easy to do. Put another way, it made it very hard for him not to act on them.
But I also knew Bronson’s little secret. Inside that street-ready shell of his and behind the mental-health issues was a scared little kid who didn’t understand why he felt the way he did most of the time. Pop-Pop had been bouncing around the system since he was a baby, and I thought he deserved a better shake than life had ever given him. That was why I came to see him twice a week.
I tried again. “Bronson, you know these talks of ours are private, right?”
“ ’Less I’m a danger to myself,” he recited. “Or someone else.” The second point seemed to make him smile. I think he liked the power this conversation gave him.
“Are you a danger to someone else?” I asked. My main concern was gangs. He hadn’t shown any tats or noticeable injuries — no burns, bruises, or anything else that looked like an initiation to me. But I also knew that his new foster home was near Valley Avenue, where the Ninth Street and Yuma crews ran, pretty much right on top of each other.
“There’s nothin’ happenin’,” he said with conviction. “Just talkin’.”
“And which crew are you ‘just talking’ with these days? Ninth Street? Yuma?”
He was starting to lose patience now and trying to stare me down. I let the silence hang, to see if he might answer. Instead, he jumped up and pushed the table aside to get in my face. The change in him was almost instantaneous.
“Don’t be grittin’ on me in here, man. Get your fuckin’ eyes off me!”
Then he took a swing.
It was as if he didn’t even know how small he was. I had to block him and sit him back down by the shoulders. Even then, he tried for me again.
I pushed him onto the couch a second time. “No way, Bronson. Don’t even think about that with me.” I absolutely hated getting physical with him, given his history, but he’d crossed the line. In fact, it didn’t seem to matter to Bronson where the line was. That’s what scared me the most.
This boy was headed over a cliff, and I wasn’t sure I could do anything to stop him.
Chapter 21
“COME ON, BRONSON,” I said, and stood up. “Let’s blow this joint.”
“Where we goin’?” he wanted to know. “Juvie Hall? I didn’t hit you, man.”
“No, we’re not going to Juvie,” I said. “Not even close. Let’s go.”
I looked at my watch. We still had about thirty minutes left in the session. Bronson followed me into the hall, probably more out of curiosity than anything else. Usually when we left the room together, I escorted him out to his social worker.
When we got outside and I clicked open the doors to my car, he stopped short again.
“You a perv, Cross? You takin’ me somewhere private or something?”
“Yeah, I’m a perv, Pop-Pop,” I said. “Just get in the car.”
He shrugged and got in. I noticed him running his hand over the leather seat, and his eyes checking out the stereo, but he kept any compliments, or any digs, to himself.
“So what’s the big secret, then?” he said as I pulled out into traffic. “Where the hell we goin’?”
“No secret,” I said. “There’s a Starbucks not far from here. I’m going to buy you one of those Frappuccinos.”
Bronson turned to look out his window, but I caught a little flash of a grin before he did. It wasn’t much, but at least for a few minutes that day, he just might have thought we were on the same side.
“Venti,” he said.