Read Between the Sheets for Free Online Page B

Stuff . Why do you have to go slapping labels on him? You barely know him!”
    “Because that’s how we can best help him.” Mr. Root crossed his arms over his chest. “We get him assessed, identified, perhaps medicated—”
    “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Ty couldn’t sit for this. He stood up but there was no room to pace. He felt like the kid in the cage in Casey’s picture.
    “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Shelby finally spoke up. “Mrs. Jordal says he’s a very bright kid, a smart aleck but for the most part engaged in the class.”
    “He’s not stupid,” Ty said. “Don’t you have to be smart to be a smart-ass?”
    “Yes. But … there’s something wrong right now, isn’t there, Mr. Svenson?” she asked.
    He nearly laughed. Something wrong? Try everything. Every damn thing .
    “Perhaps if he saw the school counselor?” she asked.
    “We’ve done that.” For three months they did that. A month of weekly counseling meetings. All part of getting custody. Of getting Casey out of the foster system.
    “We can get a state psychologist here to test him,” Mr. Root continued and opened a calendar. “Next month, probably.”
    Ty sat back down, bracing his head in his hands. He didn’t know much, he was totally new at this, but his gut was telling him that what was wrong with Casey wasn’t chemical. It was partly Vanessa’s fault, partly Ty’s fault. Once the kid had something steady in his life, things would get better for Casey. “He doesn’t need testing. He doesn’t need medicine. He doesn’t need a label.”
    He needed a swift kick in the pants, but Ty had far too much experience being on the other end of that particular parenting tactic and had no interest in visiting that on his son.
    “Do you have any other ideas?” Mr. Root asked.
    Staring at his shoes, he shook his head. “I kind of hoped that was your job,” he said.
    “You’ve heard my recommendation.”
    He swiveled to look at Shelby. “What about you?”
    “My ideas?”
    “I’m guessing you probably have a few.”
    “I do,” Shelby said. She folded her hands in her lap and lifted her chin. “Casey’s been in counseling before, hasn’t he?”
    “Yes. A lot of it.” He sat back in his chair, his legs outin front of him. He was aware that he was taking up all the space, crowding her into a corner, and he was okay with that. Even took a little vindictive glee in it. “We talked to a very nice overworked woman once a week for months.”
    “You just talked.”
    “Well, I talked. Casey didn’t say a whole lot.”
    “Traditional talk therapy isn’t always effective for kids. They don’t know how to process what they’re feeling, much less tell someone. And if it seems like punishment or something scary, they’re even less likely to talk.”
    Ty remembered those weekly appointments in the Department of Child and Family Services building in West Memphis all too clearly. There had been a grief counseling session for women who had lost babies in the room next door and they could hear the crying through the walls. Casey had stared at the wall, the water-color paintings of boats on their side, as though he could see through it to the weeping women. “The counseling we went to was pretty scary.”
    “I think you should try art therapy.”
    Mr. Root made a throttled laughing sound in his throat, which made Shelby bristle up like a hedgehog.
    “It’s a pretty good tool to get kids to open up. Especially if he’s already done traditional therapy.”
    This was a turn Ty never would have expected. That Shelby Monroe would be going out on a limb for his sake. After last night, he would have guessed that they would be in a standoff for however long they lived across the street from each other.
    But now she was offering him a huge olive branch.
    “Okay. Let’s give it a try.”
    She smiled as if she were relieved, and he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t setting out to fuck up his kid, hewas trying to make