“I hope you’ll call me good things, J.J.,” Nick joked.
“I mean, Dr. Logan, Mr. Logan, Nick?”
“Either of the last two. Though I’d prefer Nick.”
“What about you?” Hector’s sister Carla asked Maddie. The twins shared the same dark curly hair and big, almost-black eyes. “When we met that day we signed up, we called you Dr. Walsh.”
“That or Madelyn’s fine, Carla.” Maddie’s smile was forced. Too bad. If she’d let Nick know she’d be joining them, he and she could have discussed how she wanted to be addressed.
“Now that that’s settled, let me tell you about the schedule.” He was giving them time to acclimate before he asked them to introduce themselves. He held up the paper again. “The schedule for the group sessions is on here; we’ll meet in this room. I’m offering them Tuesday after school, Thursday nights and Saturday mornings.”
Hector shook his head. “I gotta work on Saturday.”
His sister said, “And I got softball practice most days at three.”
“That’s why there are three sessions. I’m trying to make this easy on you. You’re welcome to come to all of them, but I do want a firm commitment from you that you’ll attend at least two. This support group isn’t meant to be a drop-in thing.” Since they’d all agreed to come—either by choice or coercion from their guardians or parents—he expected their cooperation. “For individual counseling appointments, we can meet here at the Center, at your school if we can find some place inconspicuous or even at a coffee shop. I hear the Spot is still hopping in Rockford.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Maddie shift in her seat. One of the differences in their style was his informality. She played by the rules. In the past, he’d liked to tease her out of that box.
Kara leaned over and her light brown hair obscured her face as she whispered something to Maddie, who responded to her privately, then said aloud, “I won’t be doing any individual counseling with you. But I promise to be at all these group sessions. And as Nick told you, he’s very experienced.”
Nick rose and picked up one of the brand-new notebooks. “First off, I’m suggesting we write in these at each session. If the activity doesn’t work for us, we can stop, but I’d like to try this because it has worked with kids in the past. The entry today should be one you can share with us.”
Anne Nguyen raised her hand and Nick nodded for her to ask her question. A fourteen-year-old Asian girl, she’d been traumatized by a break-in at her house. Her father had been severely injured when he’d tried to stop the intruder, who’d been caught, tried and put behind bars. “What about other entries?”
“I thought we’d have several types.” He moved to the whiteboard he’d set up. “One will be a communication between you and us.” He wrote down, types of journals, then you, Nick and Madelyn. “Or you can choose one of us to read it. The second will be for teen eyes only.”
“Sounds like a song.” From his wheelchair, Tommy Danzer looked up for the first time. His curly blond hair fell over big and distrusting blue eyes. The victim of a drive-by shooting, the boy had a spinal cord injury and would never recover. He was only fifteen years old.
“Yeah, but don’t expect me to sing. I’d only do that to punish you.” Nick smiled. “Some entries you can record and plan to share at a later date.”
Slouched in a chair far away from the group, Nato Keyes called out, “Yo, man. I don’t do writing.” The young black boy had been assaulted on the street and his assailant was awaiting arraignment. In the intake notes, Madelyn had indicated his anger seemed to be seething inside him. Nick hoped to bring it to the surface.
Nick picked up a different notebook from the stack and brought it to Nato. “I happen to have a journal without lines.” He also knew from the intake interview Nato was an artist. “You can draw or doodle entries. But you have to discuss some of them.”
“No shit?”
“Speaking of that, I’d prefer we keep the language clean in here. Even if it’s not your or my style.” He hoped including himself would ease the caveat.
“What about language in the journals?” Hector asked.
Since she needed to be included, Nick looked to Maddie. She said, “Anything’s fine by me in the journal, but I’d prefer you didn’t read aloud language that might make somebody else uncomfortable.”
“Can you guys live with that?” Nick asked.
“What if we can’t?” Hector’s mutinous expression was one Nick was familiar with. When he was the boy’s age, he’d perfected it.
“Por favor, el hermano,” Carla said softly.
So Hector was here for his sister. She might be his Achilles’ heel and Nick’s entry into his life.
Hector shrugged. “Sí, bien.”
Nick made eye contact with everybody but Kara, who wouldn’t look at him. Her file stated that she’d been beaten up by some girls in the school parking lot, but Madelyn had commented in her folder that something about her story didn’t ring quite true. Counselors paid attention to gut instincts.
Maddie asked, “Kara, this okay with you?”
“I guess.”
“Shamika?” Nick addressed the one girl who hadn’t yet spoken and was still fiddling with her cell phone. Overweight, with cornrows gracing her dark head, she was quiet, reports said. Which might explain why she spent most of her time on the computer and had become the victim of an online predator. He’d ended up being a level-three sex offender and had taken her halfway across the country before he was apprehended. He was back in jail now, as Shamika was under seventeen, the legal age of consent in New York.
Her face was impassive. “Yeah, no worries.”
“First entry, then. Write down what you’d like to get out of this group. Why you’re here. Anything specific you might want to do. You can read all or parts of it today to us. Any portion can be marked private, which means neither Madelyn nor I will read it. But you’ve got to share at least one thing. Also, put in what snacks you want to have this week.” He glanced at the clock. “Ten minutes. Madelyn and I will write, too, of course. We’ll never ask you to do something we wouldn’t do.”
“That’s a switch,” J.J. said.
“Not for me. It’s the way I operate.” Nick passed around the books. “I hope you’ll come to see that.”
“What about you, Dr. Walsh?” Tommy asked. “You gonna do what you ask us to?”
“Yes. I fully agree with everything Nick has said.”
Hmm. Now that was a switch.
J.J. WROTE FURIOUSLY in his journal.
Duh!! Like hell this is gonna be our group. Adults always say crap they don’t mean, like those assholes at school. My aunt’s okay, even though she looks at me like I walked off some Martian space craft. This guy’ll probably be like the ones at school. We’ll play some freaking games for a while, then he’ll make us do whatever he wants. The chick, too. She seemed cool at the intake interview, but that didn’t mean anything.
J.J. glanced up and saw the other kids writing. He looked at the posters on the wall. They were printed from the computer. The first showed statistics on teen victimization. It read:
Teens are twice as likely as adults to become victims of crimes.
58 per thousand of 16-to 19-year-olds are victimized.
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