Cross Fire

on, ready or not.
    Once I got the kids to school, I made it over to St. Anthony’s in time for my second appointment of the morning, after missing the first. I’d been doing pro bono counseling for the hospital ever since I shut my private practice. These were high-need folks who couldn’t afford even basic mental-health care, so I was glad to do my part. It also helped keep me sharp and on my toes.
    Bronson “Pop-Pop” James pimp-walked into my dank little office with the same too-cool-for-school attitude as always. I’d met him when he was eleven; now he was a little older, and more confident in his cynical assessment of the world than ever.
    Two of his friends had died since I’d started seeing him, and most of his heroes — street thugs barely older than he was — were already dead, too.
    Sometimes I felt as if I were the only one in the world who cared about Bronson, which is not to say he was easy to work with, because he wasn’t.
    He sat on the vinyl couch across from me, with his jaw pointed at the ceiling, looking at something up there, or probably just ignoring me.
    “Anything new since the last time?” I asked.
    “Nothin’ I can talk about,” he said. “Man, why you always bringin’ that Starbucks in here?”
    I looked at the cup of Tall in my hand. “Why? Do you like coffee?”
    “Nah, never touch the stuff. It’s nasty. I like them Frappuccino shits they sell, though.”
    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