Veneer (47 page)

He could get rid of them all at once.

Letting his lungs drain slowly, he reflected on the providence of it all. Everything was coming together to achieve something he thought impossible. It even went beyond Deron’s circle. Russo could accuse anyone, fake any evidence he needed, and have that person removed, banished, or even killed.

Now
that
was power.

Spurred along by the sudden euphoria, Russo picked up the palette once more and scrolled through the remaining conversations. Finally, he came upon an unread message, from Sebo no less.

“If you see Russo,” Sebo had written, “tell him Deron wants to meet him on the football field at ten tonight. I think he wants to fight him.”

Russo laughed loudly, garnering a strange look from the waitress behind the counter. Despite her disapproving stare, he continued to chuckle. Already he was feeling stronger for knowing what most people didn’t, but this was positively magical, as if it wasn’t just the veneer that bent to his will. He could actually control people and events...

Destinies.

“You just killed your friend,” Russo reconciled into the message window. He sent it off and wiped the palette clean. Let Sebo chew on that for a while.

“You’re going to pay for that, right?” asked the overweight waitress. She had appeared at his side and was tapping a recently reconciled ticket on the table.

“Sure,” said Russo, pulling a cold french fry from his plate. He flashed his most insincere smile and thumbed the bill, sending it flittering into oblivion.

“In my day, we didn’t miss school unless we were sick.”

“Yeah, I know,” replied Russo, scooping up Jalay’s palette. “And you typed on real keyboards and watched TV with special glasses.”

Outside, he paused under the awning as the rain beat down around him. The uniform across the street looked up for a moment as if standing guard at a crime scene were a major inconvenience for him.

Get used to it, thought Russo. The day isn’t over yet.

61 - Rosalia

It wasn’t so much that Ilya had taken advantage of her, it was that somewhere deep down, Rosalia had known what was happening and didn’t do anything about it. The words, the looks, and the reconciled memories all told of a manipulative friend with ulterior motives. The veneers should have clued her in; she should have recognized them as real memories instead of just idle fantasy. A part of her had tried to argue that Ilya was bad news, but it hadn’t received any acknowledgement until Rosalia sank to the floor of the shower stall and screamed until she was hoarse. Then, the doubt came back, found purchase in her conscious mind, and took over.

Out from under the warmth of the shower, shivering against the cold tile, Rosalia tried to decide what to do next, but all she saw was the moon, growing larger in the sky, its presence felt on Earth as a disruption in gravity. Buildings crumbled, but not to the ground. Every crack let loose a section of evercrete that floated up and away until it became a speck in the black night. It was just her, standing in a field of knee-high grass, watching the city from a distance as the tips of skyscrapers disintegrated. The solitude surprised her; usually there were other spectators, confused and frightened, just like her. Then the truth became clear.

The end, whatever its form, was lonely.

That’s when the meaning of the dream finally materialized. She was alone because it was only her world that was breaking down, though now she could only refer to it as changing. There was destruction, sure, and that aspect had evoked such dread in her that she couldn’t face what came next, couldn’t imagine what horrors awaited after the Earth had crumbled. Herself broken, heaped on the shower floor, she was powerless to stop the fantasy, but the lack of resistance allowed the dream to carry to the moments after the pain. She had never considered that the universe would once again find equilibrium, that after the torment and upheaval, things would settle down into a new veneer, something random and perfect in the way only nature could reconcile.

By the time Rosalia realized that all was not lost, she had wasted away most of the school day. She came out of the haze with a newfound desire for vengeance, a desire to try her new veneer. This one, she told herself, as she simply walked out of seventh period, would be stronger than the previous revision. It would stand up for itself, exact justice where justice was due. Grand words, visions of the new Rosalia, all of it propelled her forward, through the halls, past the teachers with their stupid questions.

“To get my revenge,” she wanted to say every time they asked where she was going. No one tried to stop her, not after the years of good will she had built up as a model student.

A parting gift from the old Rosalia.

Mr. Randall’s Biology class was filled with a dense fog, a white haze of anger that didn’t clear up until she was sitting in Principal Ficcone’s office listening to him prattle on about his disappointment, each sentiment echoed annoyingly by her step-mother. Rosalia accepted her suspension with pleasure, but the ride home with Lynn was nothing short of torture. She complained nonstop about being embarrassed at work and having to pick up her delinquent daughter at school.

Not
your
daughter, Rosalia reminded her.

Just wait ‘til Michael hears about this.

The threat made Rosalia wonder what her dad would think, how he would react to his daughter’s sudden interest in violence. It was only an hour after they got home that he walked through the door, a stern look on his veneer that broke when he saw Rosalia sitting on the couch in the living room. His desire was to comfort her; she could see that plainly. But then the bitch started talking and her dad sighed, communicating his reluctance in a way only Rosalia understood. He sat down in the recliner opposite her and waited for an explanation.

“I’m not telling you with
her
here,” she had decreed, but Lynn remained unmovable on the loveseat. Crossing her arms tightly, Rosalia leaned back on the couch and looked away.

Michael pleaded with her, made several efforts to coax the information out of her. And to his credit, she found herself wanting to spill the whole story, tell him about the seduction and the betrayal, things she couldn’t imagine telling anyone, even Deron.

What felt like five seconds of silence to her must have been several minutes, because eventually her dad gave up, stood, and walked to the foot of the stairs before telling her she was grounded for two weeks. As he started upstairs, Lynn rose and trailed behind him, also pausing next to the handrail to dramatically deliver her
hope it was worth it
line.

Yeah, thought Rosalia, nodding once they were gone. It was worth it.

Relieved, Rosalia headed up to her room and shut the door softly behind her. The previous anxiety was gone and she was surprised to find herself smiling a little. She knew that a broken nose didn’t change anything, didn’t undo Ilya’s trespass, but the memories from that time were just veneers, just images and sounds and smells that could be reconciled over, replaced with something more pleasing to the soul.

On the wall by her desk, she reconciled a large portal. One by one, she brought up the pictures she had made that contained Ilya. And one by one, she deleted them forever, wiping out the person, the moment, and the memory. As the hours slipped by, she saw three weeks of constant worry reduced to a photo stream. Occasionally, a flash of skin caught her eye.

Ilya pretending to drop her towel.

Ilya offering to straighten Rosalia’s shirt.

So many excuses for two girls to touch.

A reconciled memory showed the two of them standing in separate stalls, talking over the tile wall about Deron, about how far she had gone with him sexually. Not that it was any of her business.

“Never happened,” said Rosalia, reducing the picture to a dark mess.

The next one showed the two of them on a tram, Rosalia slumping under the effects of Mellow. Ilya had her arm around her shoulder, her hand hanging to the side of Rosalia’s chest, brushing up against her every time the tram rocked.

Never happened.

Then it appeared, a shadowy still from an unremembered night.

Rosalia was reclining on the bean bag chair in the center of the room, her head flung backward at an odd angle, moving with the heaving of her exposed chest. Someone had unbuttoned her shirt, unhooked her bra, and pushed it out of the way. Next to her, Ilya was on her side, using her head to pin down one of Rosalia’s arms. One hand held her under the shoulder while the other rested above the unfastened buttons of her jeans.

It wasn’t so much the appearance of her underwear that startled her, nor was it the proximity of Ilya’s fingers. What made her stomach ache was the fact that she had reconciled the image at all, that part of her had been awake and evidently willing to participate. There were no cameras in the room, no way to see this event except from the inside. In a way, it wasn’t how the moment looked, but how it felt.

Rosalia forced herself to look at the scene, to stare and wonder if she could ever forget something so horrible.

Then she remembered—it never happened.

After that, the deletions went quicker. All that remained were little candids, easily discarded moments that meant nothing to her. Time passed, the sun set beyond the windows, and soon she had banished every last picture of Ilya from her portal. True, the memories remained, but those would fade with time. It wouldn’t be as difficult as trying to forget Deron, a fact that became all too clear the moment she brought up his pictures.

He was in everything stretching back for months. Deleting him would be like deleting a whole chunk of her life.

A photo flashed from the first few weeks of their relationship. It was easier then, with no soul-crushing emotions to deal with, no looming sexual tension to muddle their thinking. Minutes went by and the command to delete the picture went unheeded by the portal.

It wouldn’t respond, she realized, because she didn’t believe in what she was asking it to do. There was no deleting Deron. Then, more to the point, there was no leaving him.

She had made a mistake.

Panic rose in her chest as she pulled her messenger from the sidebar and brought up her contact list. She found Sebo’s name and opened a window. A few seconds later, his reddened face appeared on the screen.

“Rosa,” he said, wiping at the sweat on his forehead. “How’s the right hook?”

She blushed, recalling the satisfaction of hitting Ilya.

“Everyone’s talking about it,” Sebo continued. His frame went dark for a moment and when it returned, he was sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling a shirt on.

“I forgot to tell you something today, but you can’t be mad.”

“Is it about Deron?” he asked, a knowing smile on his face.

“Yeah, he—”

“I know, he’s back.” His eyes drifted off to the left for a moment. Then, in mock accusation, he said, “I heard you guys had a
cli-mac-tic
reunion.”

Rosalia groaned. It was too soon after the deed for Deron to be spreading stories. “For him, maybe,” she offered, hoping her words didn’t sound too bitter.

“Burn,” said Sebo, scrunching up his face. “Is that why you dumped him?” He shook his head dismissively. “You owe him another chance. No one hits a home run their first time at bat.”

“I didn’t dump him,” Rosalia asserted. “We separated for mutual reasons.”

“Not likely. I’ve never known that boy to love anything more than he loves you. Twenty bucks says you saw something you didn’t want to see and bailed. Or you saw that he couldn’t see...”

“What does it matter? He’s leaving and never coming back. It was either go with him or stay here. What would you have done?”

“No, no,” said Sebo, putting up his hands. “I’ve never touched his cock. The same rules don’t apply.”

“Asshole! It wasn’t easy!”

“He loves you.” There was a strange tenderness to his voice as his eyes drifted away again. He seemed to nod approvingly at something off screen. Then he growled, “You could have at least said goodbye to him.”

“I wanted to,” she whispered, defeated. Wanted to, but not anymore. Now she wanted him back, wanted him to ask the question again so that she might say yes.

“I just can’t believe he went to you first.”

“You’ve never...” She choked on the words.

“Yeah, his cock, I remember,” said Sebo, chuckling. “He told me he was coming back to school. After tonight... Oh, fuck!” He stood and pulled his jacket from a chair.

“What, Sebo?”

“He’s going to be at the football field tonight. He’s going to fight Russo.”

The memory of her fingers on Deron’s face flashed in Rosalia’s head. Russo had beaten him to the brink of death. And now he was going back for more.

“At ten,” added Sebo, looking around for something.

Rosalia glanced at the time along the top of the portal. It was already five ’til.

“Why is he fighting Russo?”

Sebo shrugged, started to fidget. “He wouldn’t say, just that it was the only way back. He says he’s doing it so he can be with you.”

Son of a bitch.

Standing quickly, she looked at her bedroom door and wondered if she could just walk out of the house without anyone noticing. Then she realized Sebo was doing the same. “That’s where you’re going, aren’t you?”

“Fuck yes it is,” said Sebo. “I’m not going to let Russo kill him.”

Rosalia didn’t even bother to close the portal. As she rushed down the stairs, she heard Sebo’s voice, very far away, calling her name.

62 - Deron

The concession stand next to the football field was open to the elements, but Deron managed to find a spot in the back where the rain couldn’t reach. The little shack couldn’t keep the breezes from coming in or do anything to muffle the thunder booming overhead, but at least it was dry. He had slipped in just after dark, at what time he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that the thick clouds had brought nightfall a little sooner than normal, leading him to estimate he would spend a good three or four hours curled up on the prep counter.