Veneer (49 page)

With an angry glance backwards, she hissed, “Let me go!”

“No,” he pleaded and then motioned with his head. “That’s the agent who’s been snooping around all week. He should be stopping this but he’s not.”

“Then let
me
!”

“Something is going down,” he replied, spitting rain. “If we go out there—”

“It’s Deron for fuck’s sake!” She couldn’t stop the tears from erupting.

“And you dumped him,” he reminded her, his fingers tightening their grip.

Rosalia sank to her knees, immersing them in the standing water. Sebo first tried to hold her up, but when he realized that she wasn’t trying to escape, that the strength had simply left her body, he went down on one knee beside her. She buried her face in his chest, wanted to stay there forever in the unlikely comfort of his arms. But over the thunder, over her own sobs, she heard the continued grunting and yelling. The fight had resumed and Rosalia couldn’t stop herself from looking.

There were more than a dozen Derons standing in a loose circle around Russo. Moving as one, they rotated around a common enemy while Russo looked frantically from one apparition to the next.

A mirage, thought Rosalia. The uniforms had just been a veneer, but reconciled on what? The white raindrops flashed in her mind and suddenly she understood.

She had always considered herself a great reconciler, but it was humbling to bear witness to Deron’s power. He was doing things with the veneer that shouldn’t have been possible, things that went far beyond the reconciling he did while stoned or tired, the great compositions that came from deep in his subconscious.

Reconciliation without physical contact.

Change on a whim.

One of the Derons darted out of the crowd to kick Russo in the back. He stumbled forward before regaining his balance. Meanwhile, the real Deron slipped back into place with his reflections.

“What is this?” she heard Russo scream. The question wasn’t rhetorical; he seemed to be asking the agent directly. “How can he do this?”

Because he’s better than you, asshole!

Again, Deron struck, this time landing a right cross to the side of Russo’s face. He howled in response, swung wildly with his arm, but hit nothing. Slowly, the sea of Derons calmed down, came to a standstill. They crossed their arms and in perfect synchronicity, shook their heads.

Was that laughter she heard over the falling rain, a forced celebration coming from Deron?

He broke free and charged Russo with arms flailing, but his enemy was ready. A powerful leg came up and hit Deron in the stomach, but then slipped through falling rain, sending Russo tumbling.

Something resembling a smile slipped onto Rosalia’s veneer; she felt the tears run under it and pool beneath her lower lip. “Is he really doing this?” she asked, glancing at Sebo.

He shook his head in response, stunned with disbelief. “He’s broken,” he muttered, sounding unsure of his words. “But he’s not. The rules of reconciliation don’t apply to him anymore.”

Over and over, the Deron clones wreaked havoc on poor Russo. He was overwhelmed by sheer numbers, even though all but one were fake, conglomerations of rain that looked real enough to fool trusting eyes. Each punch took a little bit of strength out of Russo. Each kick to the legs or groin made him dip a bit closer to the ground.

“I had a life!” came the roar above the thunder.

Rosalia’s smile pulsed; she knew she was a part of the life Deron was so desperately fighting for.

A barrage of swinging arms emerged from the crowd, stood longer in front of Russo than any other attacker. All Russo could do was block, hold his arms to his face, and hope it would end soon. Or maybe something else. The possibilities came to Rosalia one by one, filling her stomach with dread.

Then it happened, appeared in Russo’s hand out of nowhere, a glinting length of pipe that Rosalia had never seen but so often imagined after Deron’s stories. His arm was slightly behind his back, hiding the weapon from view.

She wanted to scream out, warn him, but it was too late. The pipe started on its course, arcing in a wide circle, bound for Deron’s head. From everything she had seen in movies, Rosalia expected time to slow down, that the moment of Deron’s undoing would drag on. Instead, it all happened in an instant, less than the entire lifetime of a bolt of lightning.

The pipe swung, but Deron dodged.

He kicked his foot up and leaned back dangerously. Somehow, his shoe caught Russo on the chin, sending him onto his back. Stunned, he tried to bring himself to his knees.

That’s right, thought Rosalia. You pray, motherfucker.

The pipe sloshed through wet grass and came to rest at Deron’s feet. He considered it for a moment.

Sirens broke over the constant beat of the rain, their headlights peeking out from behind houses, from behind the school, until they squared on the football field. Judging by their proximity, Rosalia guessed they had driven right up on the school grounds, ruining the expansive mall that separated the field from the main building. It wasn’t until they dimmed the beams that she realized their flashing blue and red lights weren’t like those of the Easton PD. All the cars were dark, with a single stripe that alternated the alerting colors.

“Agents!” whispered Sebo, as the car doors opened and three men in trench coats emerged. He pulled Rosalia further into the shadows of the bleachers, his heart beating hard against her back.

“Look at me!” she heard Deron yell. He was standing over the exhausted Russo, pipe in hand. A pulse of white shot out from his feet in a tangle of ribbons before fading away.

Poor Russo—he couldn’t even lift his head.

Rosalia didn’t know where to look. The newcomers were approaching, heading for the suddenly restless Agent Ruiz, but Deron had the pipe raised in the air, threatening to strike at any moment.

“LOOK AT ME!” screamed Deron, his voice breaking on the last word.

A flash of lightning illuminated the field and when it faded, it took the rest of Easton along with it. The grass lost color, along with the bleachers and the school and downtown beyond. The agents that had been so confident the moment before stopped in their tracks. All around them, the veneer crumbled, broke free of the surfaces it was supposed to enhance, falling to the ground like bits of paint, until they absorbed enough water and became transparent, then invisible.

Silence. Except for the rain. Except for the thunder.

This is how Deron sees the world, Rosalia told herself. This is what drove him away. For a fleeting moment, she understood why he had gone. They both had the same choice to make: accept a world without color, an empty, cold facsimile of reality, or break free for a place that still had some vibrancy. And while he had let her decide, chance had decided for him. Russo had decided for him. But now everyone in the city could share his handicap. The towers of downtown were dark, a shapeless gray lit only by the storm.

One boy had seen the truth and run away.

How would the whole city react now?

“That’s enough, Memo!” barked one of the agents.

The voice drew Rosalia’s attention back to the field, just in time to hear the gunshot ring out, just in time to see Deron’s body flailing about unnaturally. He was spinning in the air, his screams not reaching her until he was halfway to the ground.

“Oh, fuck me!” said Sebo, scrambling to his feet. “Come on, we’ve gotta go!”

Rosalia sat there, dazed. There was no denying what had happened, not with the extended arm of Agent Ruiz pointing to where Deron had once stood, not with the gun’s barrel still glowing.

“Der—” she tried to say, but all the air had gone. When Sebo began pulling her away, she protested by latching onto the bleachers. “He shot...” The words barely trickled out.

“And they’ll do the same to us just for seeing it.” He grabbed her face to get her attention. “There’s nothing we can do now.”

Rosalia slapped him as hard as she could with her open palm. Turning to run, she felt his arms grip her waist and then a feeling of weightlessness. Sebo stumbled under the added weight, but the football field receded nonetheless. She called out to Deron, her cries muffled by the wind.

The four agents approached midfield, came to stand near the fallen Deron and fatigued Russo. Agent Ruiz raised his gun in one slow and agonizing movement.

As Rosalia screamed her protest, beating her hands against Sebo’s back, a rolling thunder boomed over Easton, drowning out the gunshot, drowning out the end to the boy she had known and loved.

The moon burst through the clouds and crashed into the Earth, erasing the possibility of reconciling with Deron.

There would be no reunion.

There wouldn’t even be a goodbye.

The petite fist came flying out of the darkness, but Ilya was able to get a hand up and deflect it, sending Rosalia stumbling to her left. She regained her balance and reached out with razorblade fingernails, trying to rip the flesh from Ilya’s bones. The only option was to retreat while the blood-tipped claws flailed about in front of her. Ilya took a deep breath and waited for Rosalia to press forward again.

Synapses that had been well-trained but seldom used sprung into action, directing her defensive parries in a delicate ballet that spread Rosalia’s arms wide and opened her torso for attack. She brought a knee up and it landed with a dull thud between Rosalia’s legs. The shock gave Ilya enough time to twist her body and catch her assailant on the chin with a right elbow cross. Blood splattered into the air and hung there for an eternity, Rosalia’s cries echoing all the while.

Ilya opened her eyes to find moonlight filling her bedroom. In the shadows it created, she saw Rosalia’s face, saw the anger and fire she remembered so clearly.

It was called a rage fantasy. They were considered a type of therapy at Dahlstrom Academy.

In all, there were seven psychiatric counselors at Easton’s most prestigious and secretive school; Ilya went through three of them before being paired with a woman who gave her name only as Roberta. She had a refined veneer that exuded confidence, and unlike others in her field, she didn’t take any of Ilya’s bullshit. Roberta was brutally honest at times but could also be empathic. She taught Ilya not to deny her inner fury, but rather to channel it in another way, one suitable for the civilized world. Between those weekly sessions and Practical Applications of Eastern Philosophy, Ilya wasn’t sure what she hated most about sixth grade.

Dahlstrom had taught her so much, but it was only useful as a student. As a normal person, the rage fantasy technique led nowhere, only served to fuel an anger that would just find some other way to come out. It didn’t take long after getting kicked out to realize how different the worlds were, how the children of the academy were being trained for something else entirely.

Ilya sighed and winced.

Rosalia had broken her nose and shattered it so completely that the doctors were forced to put her under while they reconstructed it. Ilya awoke to the same face, the same flawless veneer hiding her true identity, but she could feel the change underneath. It was the throbbing that gave it away. Where she saw clear skin in the reflective portal, there were really bruises. Where the light bent awkwardly, there were scars, gashes from fingernails that had drawn blood. It had taken time to adjust her veneer and had it not been for the lingering pain, she might have considered going to school. No one would have known how bad the damage was, not unless they got in close and listened to her breathing.

She told her grandmother that she deserved a day off and got no argument. What she really wanted was time to think. To plot.

It wasn’t the first night she had medicated herself into sleepy submission, but this time there were a couple of Oxycodones chasing half of a Mellow tab. The combination gave her strange dreams that alternated between past transgressions and future retributions—mostly drug-fueled rage fantasies. Rosalia was there, sometimes playing the victim, sometimes the aggressor. She went from swinging her fists to cowering nude in the corner of the shower in the blink of an eye. The alternating fear and contempt roused Ilya from her sleep throughout the night. Between the dreams and the pain, there was little rest to be had. Sometime in the early morning, the pills wore off and Ilya got up in the dark to find more.

Babushka had left the bottles on the dresser along with a glass of water. It was warm, but the pills went down just the same. On the second dose, Ilya grazed her nose with her hand and it felt like someone had pressed a mask of hot pins into her face. She recoiled and tried to crinkle her nose, but that only brought more agony.

A sort of laugh escaped her lips.

Somewhere on her desk was half a tab of Mellow just waiting to be placed under her tongue. Ilya crossed the room, confident no one could see her walking around in her underwear through the open window. Though the desk was bathed in soft light, she could not find the tab amongst the clutter. More illumination would help, so she placed her hand on the wooden surface. In her mind, she thought about a thin veneer of Birch wrapped around a glowing orb with just enough yellow light bleeding through to bring out the grain in the wood. Then, like a song changing key, the orb broke apart, spread across a single plane. Through it rose a desk just like the one in her room. It took only a second to visualize the desk with its new color, but it would take the veneer even less to translate the command.

Ilya waited. Nothing happened.

She took a step back and then reached for the wall. The alternating stripes of white and red she imagined failed to materialize. It was then that she realized all the little touches were gone from the room. The soft glow of the baseboards for navigating the house at night, the dim amber of the analog clock on the wall by her bed, and the blue ambiance of the bathroom: all gone. Ilya looked from one surface to the other, searching out any sign of life. When her gaze fell on the window, she hurried towards it and scanned the outside world.

Everything was dark, even the porch lights on the houses across the street. No path guides glowed on the sidewalks. It was just the moon and the stars and a spark of red at the end of the street.