Darius shrugged again.
“Your dad’s paying me good money to shrink your head,” Bruno said carelessly. “We’ve got a whole hour to kill. Is there something youdowant to talk about? How’s school going?”
“School’s great. Dad’s worried about nothing.” Darius could not have said it more sullenly if he tried. “Are you going to ask me what my favorite subject is?”
“Nah,” Bruno said, just the way Darius had. “That’s rookie stuff. I want to know what you hate about school.”
“Math.”
“You’re just saying that because it’s the easy answer,” Bruno scoffed. “What do you really hate about school?”
Darius hesitated just long enough that Bruno knew he had something in mind. “Nothing. It’s fine.”
“Do you get good grades?” Bruno pressed.
“I guess.”
Bruno’s frank talk with Darius’s dad, Theo, had revealed that despite the tell-tale signs from instinct, Darius wasn’t a shifter. The boy hung out with other shifters his age but kept his true nature a secret, and Bruno was frankly dying to dissect that. But he wanted Darius to volunteer the information.
“What do you do for fun?” Bruno tried.
“Get therapy,” Darius quipped.
Bruno snorted a surprised laugh. “Yeah, fine, I’m not going to claim this is super fun. But let’s talk a little bit about how your brain works. You’re going through your day, and you’ve got all this stimulus and input flooding you—more now than people have ever had to handle because of technology, right? When you sleep and dream, little librarians in your brain sort through everything and shelve the stuff they think you don’t need in the front of your brain. Trauma is a little different, though. It doesn’t get put away, it’s constantly running, so you find yourself feeling worry and actively reliving experiences that you don’t want to. What other people think about you is more important than you consciously know it should be. You think more about what could go wrong than what could go right. You feel like you’re in a flight or fight status all the time, and it’s exhausting and wears you out. Parts of your brain that should be working might be too busy being afraid.”
Darius didn’t quite roll his eyes, but it was close. Bruno wasn’t getting to him. “Sure.”
“Do you play computer games?”
“Yeah.”
“You know when the whole system sounds like a jet engine and you’ve got seven other programs running in the background and if you can just shut everything else down, it would be fine and nothing would lag? Trauma is like all those background programs refusing to shut down. You gotta find them in the program manager and force quit the ones that you don’t need. I’m the program manager. I’m here to help you find what’s eating your CPU and making your whole operating system act buggy, while making sure you don’t shut down a critical subroutine. You ever have to take your computer to a shop?”
“Once.”
“It’s pretty hard. I bet your computer is a big part of your life. There’s a lot of stuff on there that you don’t want to lose, and there’s probably some things on your hard drive you don’t want the repair guy to see.”
Darius probably didn’t even recognize how stiff and uncomfortable he got. He played with the zipper on his hoodie and didn’t meet Bruno’s eyes.
“I don’t have to go snooping in the folders you don’t want me in,” Bruno said kindly. “You get to set the boundaries in this room. But I’m here to help you run the way you want to run, to help you figure out what parts might be dragging you down and keeping you from being your best self.”
“I don’t have trauma,” Darius protested.
“Is that because you’re trying to compare your trauma with someone else’s?” Bruno asked. “Do you think trauma has to be a certain level of pain or suffering before it’s important enough to address? Maybe you have fifteen tiny programs sucking up your CPU instead of one big one. Or maybe you really have been through something kind of major in your life, and that’s okay. It’s hard to realize thatyou aren’t always in control. That maybe you can’t always protect your little brother. That maybe your parentscanget hurt. And maybe you can’t always trust grown ups to do the right thing.”
Darius’s careless slouch had slowly turned into a full body retreat, his shoulder hunched and his hands in tight fists pulling down the sleeves of his sweatshirt. His knees were locked together.
“I’m just the application,” Bruno said kindly. “You get to choose from the menu options.”
He let Darius sit in silence as long as he needed.
“I was home alone with Jackson…” Darius said at last.
17
CLARICE
DATE.
