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?”