WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER?

Ears ringing, he stared back at the social worker sitting across from him, focusing on the abstract mess of brush strokes on the canvas behind him.

“It’s okay, take your time,” the middle-aged therapist smiled softly with a knowing patience in his eyes.

Dr. Marcus Thompson appeared as though he were modeled and generated in a Pixar studio, from his pristinely tailored monochromatic suit to the large black square glasses that framed his face. The rich, sunny warmth in the man’s skin was a contrast to the lifelessness of his suit. His smooth bronze complexion was a refreshing brightness to the clinical room around them.

The case worker bore a warm, crafted smile that reached the corners of his eyes- though it never revealed his teeth. If he fully smiled, it might have revealed jovial dimples that rounded his cheeks into a youthful glow. Whenever he studied his clients, those umber eyes flickered with ideas and compassion. It only softened his longer, more awkward features.

Santiago glowered through the throbbing pain in his head at the chipper, organized man before him. The teen wanted nothing to do with his upbeat curiosity or his suffocatingly cerulean office. He winced, bending over to hold his head. The words kept coming and none of them were sticking.

“Most people who experience something like this have a variety of reactions, none of them wrong. You might be feeling some residual pain and dizziness. Being in a physical assault is a pretty traumatic experience.”

Traumatic. That was a word for people with put-together lives to describe disorder in their sheltered bubbles. Getting laid out was the consequence of going head first into a brawl. Blacking out in a fight wasn’t unusual, though waking up with burning stiffness was.

Bright light from the afternoon sun filtered in through the plastic slatting of partially opened blinds. The way it illuminated Thompson’s eyes reminded Santiago of a stray dog he’d once fed extra tortillas to for a month. The entire time it had followed him too and from school, always wagging his mangy tail as if the thin flatbread were the spice of life.

However, this office was not anything like home. Barely any outside sound filtered in, aside from the muffled conversation of a receptionist. Instead of graffiti, these walls were a singular sky blue, painted to bounce the sun around them like a disco ball. Where there would have been garbage were stacks of magazines meticulously piled into a neat alphabetical fashion.

Santiago let out a breath as he leaned back against the sofa cushions. It seemed that blue was the seasonal shade for Thompson. Obviously a favored color. In the corner stood an enormous Monstera, no doubt some attempt to bring more life into this clinical setting. The room was suffocating with over simplistic modernism.

“I know there was a lot of miscommunication at the hospital about your situation,” Thompson sighed, leaning back in his chair as he balanced a clipboard on the knee crossed atop his leg. “Your discharge nurse had mentioned an electrical blackout on the phone.”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?” Santiago vollied back, eyebrow cocked.

Thompson nodded in agreement.

“Either way,” the specialist nodded sagely, “we can work to fill in the blanks.”

Frankly, the late teen did not feel like chatting with the cartoonishly professional case manager or his mountain of questions. His skull felt heavy and throbbed like an anvil strike with each pulse. His shoulder was swollen and tighter than a suspension bridge. Any pathetic attempt at mustering decorum was shot by the sheer distraction of his pain. The glare wasn’t even at Thompson. Santiago’s gaze was simply boring into the wall past his head.

“Take your time, if it’s too much we can move on to something else and revisit this later.” A weighted pause hung in the air as the exhausted young man considered how much more time he could take up. Unfortunately, Santiago knew a lack of cooperation meant spinning his wheels. He would be coming back over and over until he was shuffled through the deck of files.

“No, I’m good.” Santiago grasped the phantom pain on his right arm, rubbing tentatively. “They shot me. I thought— nevermind.”

Silently, he chided himself. Never give too much away. He had learned that all the niceness in the world couldn’t stop the person across from him from reporting the truth. He had only one goal: go home. Fear sat heavily in his gut. He wasn’t sure what happened to his mother or if she even survived .

“It’s alright. Whatever you say never leaves this room. There are no wrong answers.”

“Christ, they give you all the same bullshit script with that degree?”

“How would you like me to respond?” Thompson offered open palms, gesturing to the space around them. Santiago stuck his tongue deep in the pocket of his cheek. “I’m only telling the truth.”

“Sure.”

“Unless you tell me you want to hurt yourself or others, or disclose active abuse to me,” Thompson spoke gently, “I’m here to give you the space to say whatever you need to. Besides, I can’t force you to tell me those things, even if I wanted to.”

Easy for them to tell someone to spill their guts. For all the nonsense they talk about, things staying between them were lies and Santiago knew it. He made that mistake once. Then he learned what a mandated reporter was. The little spiel was hardly necessary.

The last time he was honest Lupe didn’t come home for nearly two weeks. Sobriety was a yoke of suffering and physical agony, shaking their world up in the name of keeping Santiago safe. Her sentence was as long as the time it took her to collapse back into the ease of her pattern, aid out, arm tied, needle still stuck in the crook of her arm.

Those were the consequences of honesty.

Santiago’s leg bounced rapidly as he leaned against the sofa backing. Equal parts irritation and anxiety bubbled to the surface from predictable approaches towards the subject he found increasingly creative ways to avoid. “It doesn't matter anymore. I’m fine now.”

“Traumatic physical wounds down to the muscle tissue in your shoulder, major head trauma and lacerations,” Thompson listed, flipping a page up on the clipboard to read through his intake sheet. “I’d hardly call that fine.”

“What do you want to know? I’d like to go home but apparently minding your business is out of fuckin’ fashion these days,” Santiago barked, leaning up from the couch that threatened to swallow him.

“It’s sort of my job to not mind my business,” he smiled softly, eyes unmoving.

“Who even signed off on this group home shit? I don’t need to be here! I have a home.” He snapped, gripping the edge of the couch as he leaned forward.

“Do you?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Address? Phone number? They’re all things we can check off this list, Santiago. What I know is you were in an accident you-”

“Accident?” The young man scoffed, rolling his eyes like a dead man’s hand of dice. “Those fuckin’ pigs.”

“So the police.”

“That’s what I said,” he spat back. A heavy steam-engine sigh escaped the young man as he folded his arms over his chest and leaned back into the couch. He tucked his chin down, glowering down directly into the brown eyes of the case manager.

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Santiago frowned; the man was nosy and a little too good at getting him to talk too much.

“What were the police there for?” Thompson pried, head tilted.

“Same shit as always,” he grumbled. “Oscar up to his fuckin’ shit…”

“Who’s Oscar?”

Looking back over at the man haloed by a wall of academic decorations, Santiago felt his body tense tighten. He only wanted that piece of shit out of their home. Yet a part of him wondered if Lupe would hold that space for him when he turned eighteen.

“He’s a punk ass bitch,” the young man finally said with a steep frown, eyes cast to the shaded window casting a glow across them.

“Sounds like you’re not a fan.”

“That’s an understatement,” Santiago quipped. “He’d be fuckin dead if I–” No, he chided himself that was too much.

“Is that how you got into this state?”

The silence answered Thompson’s question plenty. He nodded, scribbling nothing in particular but watching the teen’s reactions over his glasses. His body wound like a coil of heat and frustration. The therapist laying the pen down to break the tension.

“Did Oscar shoot you?”

“Oscar couldn’t shoot me if he had his arm in a splint strapped to a scope,” Santiago laughed, a refreshing sign of life from the teen. “I told you already. Pinche huras.”

“For confronting Oscar?” Thompson asked, hoping to bring Santiago out into the conversational clearing.

The teen sighed, chortling softly as he squeezed the bridge of his nose. He shook his head.

“Somebody’s gotta do it,” the teen muttered.

“What was he doing that was worth your life?”

The sharpness in the young man’s eyes told the therapist more than his words ever could. For all Santiago was unwilling to say, his body told the tapestry of his life woven in perfect order.

The tension, the tapping, the impatience. He was a war child surviving overhead fire in his own home.

“I’m sick of that bastard bringing that shit back into our house. You call for help and it takes hours to show up if they ever do at all. Do something about it and you’re target practice.” Santiago yelled, a fire finally bursting out of the young man that Thompson had yet to see. “Not like any of that shit matters now.”

“You were shot, Santiago. You were shot by police while trying to protect your mother from her abuser. That matters.” His expression softened as he leaned closer. Thompson knew he had to carefully craft his responses. Every word needed to be humble, non-judgemental, no leading statements, and absolutely no promises he could not keep. Santiago’s mental state clung by a fraying thread, and one poorly worded response could destroy the modicum of progress they made.

Thompson was newly appointed to the boy’s case. His supervisor warned him this would be a tough nut to crack. Santiago’s case was miles long: expelled from one school district, kicked out of seven schools total, and multiple prior offenses from breaking and entering to aggravated assault.

As far as he could tell the boy never had a decent father figure in his life. Santiago’s father had died before he could form sentences and the man who replaced him was the farthest thing from good.

Part of the case worker wondered why his supervisor assigned him to the case. With a long history of disdaining male authority he did not feel as though he was the best choice for the boy. Then again, the only person with the training and background for empathetically reaching boys like Santiago was him.

Much of this session felt like dancing on thin ice with dull skates. How one attempted to miss where it thinned to avoid crashing into the frigid abyss.

Thompson knew he needed to border between authentic and compassionate without appearing like a pushover. Yet, he needed to command enough respect in his posture and decorum to be taken seriously without triggering the boy.

Cadence and courtesy, firmness and patience.

Guiding a child such as him was a trapeze walk.

Another glance over the file and much of the unspoken facts fell into place for Thompson. No wonder the boy had issues with authority.

Thompson had looked over what little SPD had relinquished: non-cooperation, assault, detainment. If it was not excessive force and overt racial targeting, the kid was treated like an adult before he ever understood the innocence of childhood.

Each intake was a heavy-penned analysis dripping with bias and impatience. Even a previous case worker had double red underlined UNCOOPERATIVE at the top of one of his intake sheets. If there was anything Thompson knew it was that if you went looking for problems you were bound to find them.

“Was I?” He threw up his hands, “I remember them shooting me. I felt that shit. But nothing. Not a cut, bruise, scar. They shot me in the fucking head—! No. No it felt like—” Santiago groaned, unable to articulate the sensation of bullets as they littered his body. There was no way to convey the exact sensation of his bones coming apart and his organs flooding with blood until they were fit to burst.

Dr. Thompson leaned in, extending his hand to halt the anxious rambling. “You’re fine. I don’t want you to tell me what you think I want to hear. I want to know what happened to you, Santiago.”

From what he was told, he should have been dead. Santiago had been on his way to the morgue when he fumbled out from under the gray tarp. Scared the morgue tech so badly he nearly ended up in a steel bin himself.

The administrators claimed it was a clerical error. After all, the hospital had experienced a freak black out around the time he had been admitted.

The doctors were overwhelmed.

Someone made a bad call.

Santiago had little recourse to deny it. He didn’t remember anything. Not waking up. Not clambering out of the steel coffin. He barely remembered who he was when he finally regained some semblance of consciousness.

“I’m not crazy.” Santiago snapped.

“I know.” Thompson replied sympathetically, “I know that a lot of people have told you a lot of different things about what they think happened to you. I want to know what you remember.”

Thompson’s voice was measured and maintained the warmth of real concern as he spoke. In another setting Santiago might have mistaken him for a weatherman or news anchor. Apparently being a professional meant wearing a tie. The same striped tie that might come in colors other than black and gray, if Thompson felt dangerous.

At least it wasn’t blue, Santiago was starting to feel like a terrible 90’s pop-hit.

He sat for a long moment until the tick of the clock behind him echoed in his head like a church bell.

Santiago needed to get out of this room.

Glancing up at the ceiling tiles, attempting to distract himself by mentally drawing pictures with the array of speckles. Part of him wondered how old the ceilings were, they looked old enough to have asbestos. They did not seem to have any mystery stains like the ones his schools always had.

“They shot me. They killed me. I remember what it felt like when my fucking skull came apart. Now I’m here and I don’t know why.” He stared up at the ceiling, thumb quickly brushing the moisture pooling in his eye.

There was no way the man across from him understood what any of this was like. Thompson did not have to worry about putting food on the table for his mother. Or where he might find a winter coat before it snowed. Nor what it meant to work from the moment he entered high school.

Santagio knew what it looked like when someone lived the way he had. Thompson did not have that look.

The man’s skin was flawless, not a single callous or scar on his hands. He probably had the good fortune to go to college right out of high school.

“I don’t think you’re lying, Santiago.” Thompson steepled his hands in front of him. “We both know there are supernatural alternatives to consider. People can move from one place to the next in a blink of an eye. Conjure up fires. Move things with their mind.”

“It doesn’t bring people back from the dead.”

“Doesn’t it?” He gave a pointed nod at the boy, “You wear that chain but don’t believe in resurrection.”

Reflexively his hand clamped around the pendant embellished with a crucifix. “I don’t wear it because I believe in God or whatever.”

“Yet you feel the need to tell others of your belief. Did you choose God or did God choose you?”

Santiago talked to enough of these therapists to know that they were as nutty as their clients.

Thompson had angel paintings hanging from the pale walls that one could find at any dollar store. Small placards with encouraging prayers sat atop the small coffee table that separated them. Over the man’s shoulder a quick skim of the book titles: “The Confessions of St. Augustine”, “The Imitation of Christ”, “The Story of Soul”.

It must’ve been his lucky day because he managed to net his favorite kind: a religious nut. The only thing worse than a social worker was a called-by Christ social worker. They were either holier-than-thou and staring down at him from the end of their noses or there were the ones who believed everything was God’s plan.

Was it God’s plan for the cops to litter a seventeen year old kid with bullets?

Was it God’s plan for his mother to constantly let that animal back into their house?

He supposed it must also be in God’s plan for his mother to spend his entire childhood an addict. Of course it was. He and everyone like him were meant to suffer.

“Is that your clinical diagnosis?” Santiago scoffed, “God chose me?“

Santiago did not know what happened. He could not explain it any better than anyone else. Not that it mattered. None of it did, because it did not change the fact that he was stuck here.

“Is that so unbelievable? Miracles happen,” said Thompson.

“Not for people like me.”