Veneer (9 page)

At some point, Deron realized that the guy kneeling on the ground behind the bleachers wasn’t Sebo. It was in the shoes; Sebo always wore reconciled throwback Skechers. Though nothing in Easton was constant, Deron had never known him to wear the heavy boots that the person in front of him was sporting. Then there was the general shape: broad shoulders that didn’t match up with Deron’s memory, hair that peeked out from under a baseball cap, and finally, the design on the back of the jacket. Up close, there was no mistaking the imitation.

Of course, all of this became clear a moment too late. By the time Deron had processed this new information, a blunt object was already moving swiftly through the air.

It made contact with Deron’s head just above his right ear and sent tremors through his vision. He watched half of the world sizzle, as if the outlines of every object suddenly had a million volts passing through them. His body leaned dangerously, threatening to fall over. Stumbling, Deron managed to raise his eyes to see Russo standing there, a twisted smile on top of his normal veneer. He held a metal pipe in his hand. It looked dull and out of place in the shimmering world.

“I told you we had business.”

Despite the pain, a knot of worry began to tighten in Deron’s chest. He knew this wasn’t going to be like Destined 4 Death or even the kung fu movies he watched late at night. No part of what was about to happen would be choreographed for the safety of the actors.

It would be brutal and it was going to hurt. A lot.

Deron opened his mouth to respond, but Russo had already closed the distance. Putting his hands up to protect his face, Deron felt the pipe strike his forearms, making them tingle at first and then burn a moment later as the signals reached his brain. It came from the left, from the right, and sometimes glanced off his arms and connected with his head. He leaned backwards, tried to escape the barrage, but couldn’t hold his balance. The next moment, he was falling, collapsing onto the worn grass.

His right eye felt funny, as if someone had their thumb pressed to it. There was too much of a blur to even tell which way was up.

The taste of blood distracted Deron long enough to miss the pipe flying through the air; it caught him on the left side of his temple. Stars erupted all around him in little golden explosions, as if reality were just a palette and some first-grader learning to reconcile had suddenly decided that what it needed most were twinkling decorations. He knew the pipe was nearby, even reached out for it, but before his fingers could locate it in the grass, Russo’s boot came crashing down on his elbow.

Russo pulled Deron to his feet and shoved him towards the bleachers. The metal scaffolding was rounded but solid—so much of his body had already gone numb that he barely registered the impact. A few feet away, Russo stood alternating from one foot to the other, jacked with adrenaline, concentration in his eyes.

It was time to
rage quit
, as Sebo put it. Had this been a session of D4D, the frustration of losing would have already taken over and he would have jacked out and punched Sebo in the chest for cheating.

Deron groaned, tried to spit out the excess blood but ended up with most of it on his chest and hanging from his chin. Something felt weird in his head, like a fluctuating headache. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, not even the fleeting hope of being able to fight. He flashed on Rosalia and her misguided attempt to help him. There was anger there, a desire to punish, but that only made him furious. She loved him more than any girl before her. She wasn’t to blame for the beating.

Russo was.

Summoning his last bit of strength, Deron shot forward and began swinging. He felt his fists land a few times, but mostly they caught the wind. Russo moved around them with ease and the smile on his face was so bright that it broke through the blur in his vision. The momentary adrenaline rush waned, and Deron felt the twinge in all his joints. His lungs burned and his lips tasted tears. Closing his eyes for an instant, he retreated to the eternal darkness, only to be pulled back by something bony catching him on his jaw.

All the grass in Easton was engineered to be soft and pleasing to the eye, but nowhere was it more comforting than the patch behind the bleachers at Easton Central. It reached up to support Deron as he fell, cradling him as best it could. He ended up face down in a heap and in a moment of perverse humor, he imagined what the chalk outline would look like when the police discovered the body. Not that they would need to chalk up the grass when they could just reconcile the scene on their palettes, but still.

He shook his head to clear the insanity, to inventory his situation.

Only one eye still worked and he used it to search the horizon for Russo. He found him standing near the bleachers absently brushing the blood away from his shirt.

Be careful with that, thought Deron, I need that blood to live.

It only took Russo a moment to reconcile the stains away. Evidently satisfied with his handiwork, he walked over and stopped a few inches away from Deron’s face.

Deron could see his boots plainly, shiny black with thick soles. They probably weighed a few pounds each. Russo said something, but the ringing in his ears drowned it out. It was probably just another threat, something about his superiority—it didn’t really matter. All Deron cared about were those boots. They were all he could see. They were immediate. And when one of them disappeared, the insanity revved up. It began talking to the boot, asking it where it was flying away to. Was it not happy there on the grass with Deron? There was nothing better than lying face down in Easton’s finest Bermuda.

The mystery of Russo’s boot unraveled in a brief and unsatisfying way. After being gone for an eternity and Deron unable to locate it in time and space, he felt it reappear on the back of his neck. His brain registered the sudden pressure of the boot’s treads as they pushed unevenly at the base of his skull. They tore a little at first, making the skin redden in instant bruises. But that was all minor compared to the crushing weight that followed.

And just like that, the other boot disappeared too, along with the rest of the world.

Lights scrolled by overhead. It was a common scene from movies and in-game cinematics, a way to show the viewpoint of a victim whose existence had become nothing but waiting for the next light to come up and the last one to sink out of view. They should have put something over his eye, the one that worked, the one he couldn’t command to close no matter how hard he tried.

There was nothing worth seeing out there, nothing he wanted to see. But they kept showing him things. Lights, mostly, but then someone turned his head. It was an ancient nurse with bad skin and wrinkles around her eyes.

When his head went the other way, Deron saw a doctor with a mask over his face. He had large eyebrows that ran from one side to the other uninterrupted. He was squinting at Deron, looking for what?

A realization: this was no hospital.

He was in some kind of abandoned building with blank evercrete walls that looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in years. Everything was covered in dirt and grime.

The nurse pulled his head again and Deron felt something pop in his neck. He screamed a silent and horrifying scream. He saw the alarm in the nurse’s eyes, the red veins that stood out so brightly around her iris.

There were harsh words muffled by the pain.

All at once, it began to fade. The scrolling lights grew dimmer. Something passed through his field of view. It vaguely resembled a palette, except that it was blank. Cold and blank. Like the world. Like existence.

Deron took a labored breath, felt as if his lungs were filled with shards of glass.

They couldn’t keep him there, no matter how loudly they yelled at each other, no matter how fast they pushed the gurney. He was going to a place beyond the confines of his mortal body.

He couldn’t see it, but he believed it was there.

Three weeks.

Three weeks to the day of not being able to see Deron, of curt updates from his mom that merely confirmed he wasn’t dead yet. It was time spent sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs in the hallway, of being hassled by the nurses, and being told that his girlfriend had no legal visitation rights. That’s what hurt Rosalia the most, the idea that their relationship meant nothing in the adult world. She cared for him with all her soul, but because they weren’t married, because they were minors, she couldn’t walk through the door to his room and hold his hand.

So she waited—in the hallway, in her room, and in the private bubble she adopted while at school. There were rumors flying around, about Deron, about the list of suspects, though she knew without asking that it had been Russo. The looks from her classmates varied, but they never spoke to her. Only Ilya dared mention Deron and in desperation, Rosalia found herself spending more time with her new friend.

Three weeks was a long time any way it was counted. The walks home were lonelier, the evenings seemed to drag on a bit longer than usual, and the dreams were not as vibrant as they used to be. Something about the nightly ritual of subconscious reconciliation needed fresh images of Deron, reminders of the feelings she experienced while in his company. So her dreams remained empty, mirroring her life. Ilya tried to convince her that Deron wasn’t gone yet, that he was just resting up for his triumphant return.

It was kind of her to say.

The hardest part was seeing Russo in the hallways those first few days and not being able to do anything about it. If he had been his normal asshole self, treated her with the same contempt that he held for everyone else, she might not have suspected him. But there was the way he averted his gaze, subtly avoided coming into contact with her, as if his secret would be revealed just by looking closely at his face. He wasn’t being nice to her; he just wasn’t going out of his way to be a dick.

It was a text message from Deron that had brought her to the micro-park a few blocks away from her house. This one was aimed at an older crowd and eschewed the normal playscapes for benches set apart at a respectful distance around a large pond. A flat rock at its center was caged by the water, giving the turtles a safe place to sun themselves. At night, it was empty. The pond contained nothing but a reflection of the universe, an alternate world where maybe things like this never happened.

Rosalia had wanted to be there when he got out of the hospital, but Deron was discharged during fifth period, and she didn’t find out until well after school when he messaged her asking to meet at Gillock Pond. And although she had been waiting for that moment for three weeks, she was surprised to find herself overcome with apprehension. She tried to push it down, bury it amongst the other unnecessary emotions, but it kept bubbling up. There would be time for apologies later. For now, she just wanted to see him, just wanted to put her arms around him and hold him forever.

He appeared like a ghost in the night, a hazy form moving beyond the manicured hedges. It was the slight limp that gave him away, the kind of awkward locomotion that a free-floating spirit wouldn’t have bothered with. Rosalia could only stand and watch him approach. She felt his eyes on her, saw the determination and frustration flash like ripples in his veneer. At ten paces, he stopped.

Rosalia tried to smile, but she felt the tears coming and had to look away into the infinity of the pond. It had been forever, but it still felt too soon to look into his eyes. She listened to his footsteps and then the rustle of his jacket as he sat down on the bench. He was so close, yet he hadn’t touched her yet.

“Rosie,” he said, his voice as perfect and as soft as ever.

“Deron,” she replied, barely getting the second syllable out before her voice cracked. She wanted to turn to him, throw her arms around him, and beg forgiveness. Her body felt rigid, immovable, locked in the hunched-over sadness that had gripped her since she heard the news that Deron was in the ICU at Easton General, that a group of wandering gypsies had beaten him to a pulp and left him for dead on the football field.

“My mom says you tried to come see me in the hospital.”

“They wouldn’t let me in.” It felt good to tell that to someone who would care. “They said ‘family only.’”

Silence again, only the insects chirping in the distance. It was barely after eight but the entire city seemed to be asleep. There was something special about the park that dimmed the faraway neons of downtown, muffled the noise to afford its occupants some peace. From her pocket, Rosalia extracted a worn tissue and wiped at her nose. If Deron hadn’t picked up on the sadness in her voice, he was sure to know her feelings now.

“The first time I opened my eyes, I couldn’t move,” he began. There was a drowsy quality to his voice, as if the memories could only be replayed in slow motion.

Rosalia felt her throat tighten.

“But I got better. They put me under a few times and each time I came back better.” He reached for her wrist and pulled her into the seat next to him. “I never stopped breathing. I didn’t die.”

“Almost.”

“Almost doesn’t count. I’ve got a few scars, but nothing a little reconciliation can’t fix.”

He was right; she couldn’t see anything through his veneer. His face was still the same shape, still looked the same as it had for the past few years. The damage was completely obscured, which meant it wasn’t real. When he smiled, she almost believed him.

Slipping her wrist from his fingers, Rosalia swallowed hard. It was time to do the thing she had come to do. Her fists balled up, pressing her fingernails into her palms. It shouldn’t have been that hard to tell him how she felt. Moreover, it was the right thing to do, but admitting guilt meant admitting she had put her own desires before his when she had no right to do so. How could two words be so difficult?

“Rosie, I—”

“I’m sorry,” she interrupted, blurting it out before she could change her mind. It hung in the air for a few moments, answered only by the crickets around the pond.