Veneer

by Daniel Verastiqui

  “Please have a seat, Mr. Bishop.” The principal moved behind his desk and sat down in the cushy, high-backed chair. He sighed as he swiped his hand across the dormant portal in front of him.

  Russo looked at Deron out of the corner of his eye, daring the bastard to look over for just one second. “Do it,” he commanded mentally, “turn your fucking face so I can put my fist into it.”

  “Gentlemen, you know why we are here.” He had that look on his veneer, that I’m gonna fuck you sideways whether you cooperate or not kind of expression.

  Of course, he only looked at Russo like that. When his gaze fell on Deron, suddenly he was all flowers and rainbows. Well, it wouldn’t last, not when he found out what Deron had done.

  “This is the reason,” said the principal, lifting a palette containing the shop of Russo and Jalay standing over the photos of Deron. Someone had censored it with black bars before entering it in the school’s database. “I would like to know why you felt the entire student body should be exposed to this filth.”

  “Don’t look at me,” sneered Russo. “Ask him!”

  “You two have been at each other’s throats since you first stepped foot on my campus and I want to know why. This feud has to end.”

  Russo bit his lip at the sight of Deron smiling. It’d be a lot harder for him to smile if he were missing all of his teeth.

  Ficcone sighed and leaned back in his chair. He eyed his charges one at a time. “What am I going to do with you two? It’s my job to keep the peace around here, which is why I can’t let this go on any longer. From now on, there will be no unauthorized reconciliation outside of normal classroom activities. That goes for the both of you.”

  “Or what?” asked Russo.

  “Excuse me?”

  Fuck it—might as well go for broke. “Or what? How are you going to punish Deron when he puts up another picture of me?”

  “I didn’t make that picture,” whined Deron.

  “Who did what makes no difference now. And to answer your question, Mr. Rivera, the punishment will become clear to you at the appropriate time. I will tell you that this’ll be the last time we discuss this issue. From now on, I’ll have no choice to include the authorities and your parents.”

  Deron winced—probably scared of what his mom would do to him, something extreme like take away his video games.

  Russo looked down at his hands in his lap. He clenched them into fists and released them slowly. When he looked up, he saw Principal Ficcone shaking his head.

  “Sometimes I don’t know if you young people understand the gift you’ve been given.” He stood and walked towards the window. With a quick tap of his finger on the glass, the principal reconciled an ornate floral design that spread out in waves and covered the entire window. “To reconcile is to change the world to your liking. You can create beauty or you can bastardize reality.” He motioned to the palette on his desk. “Right now, you take this ability for granted. You think you have the right to reconcile anything you want, anywhere you want. But you forget this is a society of people who can do the same thing you can. Reconciliation is a privilege of living here, not a right.”

  The hell it wasn’t. Reconciliation was a part of human evolution, a magic usable by age six, earlier if you could get into Dahlstrom Academy. It could no more be taken away than... His mind jumped back to the morning’s events. It was also impossible to see past the veneer, but some jackhole in a fitted suit had done just that and with considerable ease.

  “I see that bothers you, Mr. Rivera. You never considered someone could take your ability away? You don’t even want to know what they do after that. Do you think Easton has any use for someone who can’t reconcile?”

  “If it was true—” he replied.

  “Were true,” corrected the principal. “Is true.” He turned again towards the window. “If you asked someone a hundred years ago whether what we do would ever be possible, they would laugh at you. But here we are, using innate abilities to effect change. Think about what that means for just one minute and you’ll realize your petty squabbles aren’t worth the effort. We do something now that people couldn’t do before. Think of what we’ll be able to do as our power grows.”

  “How do you stop someone from reconciling?”

  Ficcone shrugged. “That I don’t know, Mr. Bishop. I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t reconcile. No one has.”

  “Because it’s crap,” said Russo.

  “No,” replied the principal, his voice somber. “Those who can’t share in the veneer have no place here.” His lips moved to say something else, but he changed his mind. “Just trust that you don’t want to know what happens to people who keep making pictures—”

  “I haven’t made a goddamn thing since you told me to stop last year! Check my palette, you won’t find anything.”

  “What about you, Mr. Bishop?”

  Deron answered meekly, “I don’t have the skills to shop like Russo.”

  Fucking right you don’t.

  “So this is no longer about you two, is it? Your quarrel has spread to the masses, become a hobby for the great reconcilers to prove their worth.” Anger flashed across his face. “You two sit back and watch the mayhem while I have to explain to parents why their children are being exposed to obscene images. Or to the police why my halls are filled with kiddie porn! You are putting my job in jeopardy and I can’t allow that.” He squared his eyes at Russo. “So maybe they won’t take away your power for this, maybe you just pay a fine or spend some time behind bars, but you’re establishing a pattern. It all starts here.” He pointed emphatically to the floor.

  It was all just posturing, Russo decided, all empty threats meant to keep him in line. But it wasn’t enough. The principal might have been the Big Shit when it came to Easton Central High School, but off campus he was just another clueless adult that needed to grow old and die so that the younger people like Russo could take over.

  “Detention,” proclaimed the principal in his official voice, “both of you, two weeks.”

  “The hell?!” Russo almost rushed the desk, but only his feet moved, shuffling backwards slightly.

  “Language, Mr. Rivera.” Then to Deron, “You will serve your detention with the sophomore class. I won’t have you two antagonizing each other. Now, that is all, gentlemen. Mrs. Rhodes has your write-ups.”

  Deron stood and left immediately, but Russo approached the desk.

  “What do you want, Russo?”

  He leaned over slightly. “If you ever threaten to take my power away—”

  “Three weeks detention.”

  “Fuck this,” said Russo. He turned and left the room, ignoring the principal’s extension of his sentence to four weeks. It didn’t matter; he had no intention of serving it anyway. Ignoring the note in Mrs. Rhodes’ outstretched hand, he headed into the hall. To his left, Deron was just turning the corner towards the cafeteria. He ran to catch up with him, but when he made the turn, he saw Deron talking to the lunch monitor at the cafeteria doors. When he looked back, Russo pointed a finger at him.

  “We have business,” he warned, then turned and stalked angrily back to class.

  9 - Rosalia

  Deron told her about it between classes, but it wasn’t until the news got around during last period that Rosalia discovered it was because of her shop that he now had to spend two weeks in detention. He didn’t seem angry when last they spoke, just the same kind of blissful indifferent that he had always been on the outside. But then he didn’t show up at her locker after school, didn’t give her the opportunity to apologize for her lapse in judgment. She even walked by the detention room, saw him sitting alone in the back, but he never looked up.

  Rosalia lingered in the hallway, wondering if she should knock on the door or just barge in and deliver her apology by way of a kiss. Ultimately, she settled for an instant message, a simple sorry with no punctuation or clichéd emoticons. She waited the requisite few minutes for a response, but nothing came thro
ugh. He was probably busy copying words out of the dictionary.

  By hand, she thought, and shuddered.

  Outside, small groups of students were still milling around, sharing one last story before hurrying home to their rooms so they could talk to each other on IM. Rosalia walked through them undisturbed, though at times she did feel their eyes on her back. They were staring at her because of Deron, because of the threats Russo had made, threats that rumors had exaggerated. He was either going to punch Deron, beat him up, or just plain kill him. Nobody knew for sure, but that didn’t stop them from adding their own flair as the story passed from student to student.

  She passed a line of waiting busses, all of them humming in their idle states. A knock on a window made her look up, and there she saw a concerned Ilya looking down at her. The Ukrainian raised her too-perfect eyebrows as if to ask, “What do we do now?” Rosalia could only manage a weak smile and an undecided shrug in return. What does it matter to her anyway, she wondered. It wasn’t as if Deron were her boyfriend, her sole reason for existing.

  Detention was as much her punishment as his. That hour after school, before their parents got home from work, was theirs to spend together. They would take the long way home, window-shopping at all the boutiques on Parker Avenue, her for the clothes, him for the latest video games. What they did wasn’t important; it had become a ritual, their way of maintaining what little companionship they could afford. They could chat in the evening and throughout the night, see each other briefly between classes, but nothing rivaled the simplicity of just being together, of being walked home by her protector and confidant.

  The further Rosalia got from campus, the less the noise of the student rabble affected her. It was quiet in the adjoining neighborhood; the empty driveways meant the worker bees were still away. The houses eventually faded away, replaced by condos with reconciled walls that displayed advertisements stretching ten stories high. Beyond that was Parker Avenue, a long, four-lane thoroughfare that almost bisected the city, growing out from downtown in a vine of commerce. It was a strange break to go from homes to condos to businesses and back again in the space of six blocks, but that was what they called progress.

  Rosalia didn’t mind the artificial border between home and school. It was, after all, a welcome rest stop, a place to hang out with her friends and feel like a part of downtown without having to suffer the homeless or the crowded streets. Parker was a never-ending Main Street feeding the suburbs, full of restaurants and cafés, dress shops and sim parlors—everything an attention deficit disorder kid needed to get by in the world.

  Their favorite place was Café Perrault, a blend of coffee and smoothie shop. The portals on the walls were always alive with some new distraction, programming geared towards the afternoon student crowd. It was the kind of place she could sit with Deron for an hour, ordering perhaps only one drink, without being pestered or told to leave.

  “What’ll you have?” asked the barista in a sickeningly cheery tone. She had a smile on her veneer so artificial that it looked like her boss had reconciled it for her, one of six variations from the Café Perrault Customer Service Manual.

  “Fountain of Youth smoothie,” said Rosalia, realizing she had entered Perrault’s out of habit and a subconscious desire to avoid going home.

  Finding her usual table near the front windows, she sat down and set her bag on Deron’s seat. Her palette glowed when she pulled it out of her bag, making her hopeful for a message, but it turned out to be from Ilya.

  “Fun game I found,” wrote Ilya, with a resource locator following.

  The barista reappeared as the game was beginning to load and she slipped a napkin and the tall drink onto the table next to Rosalia’s palette.

  “Enjoy,” she bubbled.

  Rosalia smiled politely even though she was aware that everything the barista did was for the sake of business and had nothing to do with being a nice person, inside or out. But that was the way with everyone. She could spend a lifetime trying to guess what was under the veneer of people she passed on the street, but even on her deathbed she wouldn’t be one inch closer to the truth. Returning her attention to the palette, she watched the game’s menu fill the screen.

  It was called Canvas and was evidently some kind of massively multiplayer art game. A small avatar representing Rosalia appeared on the screen, nothing more than a collection of white spheres that begged to be reconciled. Rosalia put in the necessary effort, taking care to sculpt her in-game character into something approaching reality, or at least, veneered reality. Once dressed, the avatar moved out of the small entry room and into a larger gallery. There, the pentagonal shape gave her five expansive walls. She approached one of them, feeling the blankness as a dull ache for color and shape. After staring at it for a moment, a dialogue bubble appeared in the air beside her. Blue letters exploded from a jumble to form a message.

  “Reconcile your dream,” it said, and then popped out of existence.

  How it qualified as a game wasn’t exactly clear to Rosalia, but she played along, reconciling an expansive vista from a viewpoint high atop a mountain. Her avatar stood on the precipice of a waterfall, surrounded on both sides by lush overgrowth that encroached on two stone statues. Only their overall shape was discernable, giving the impression of two men standing guard over the water’s escape. Where the land fell away, Rosalia brought up distant terrain, alive with animals and birds, their cries and calls filling the gallery with the music of the rain forest.

  In the distance, the horizon sizzled under the heat of an orange sun. Above, the clouds cycled through various pastels before settling into a pleasing pattern. Rosalia drew her avatar back to examine the masterpiece. It wasn’t her best work, but it had killed half an hour. She sat back, sipped the last of her smoothie, and waited for another prompt.

  Again, the bubble appeared next to her and when the letters fell into place, it read, “As you dream, others dream.”

  Rosalia watched as her avatar’s hand came up and touched the wall. The canvas gave way and there was a rippling effect as she moved through her image and ended up in another gallery. This one already had two walls painted and when she examined the one behind her, she found a scene similar to what she had reconciled. The water ran a little faster and the trees were in a different stage of bloom, but overall, they were undeniably alike. All those little choices could have gone another way, she realized. Maybe if she had ordered a Blueberry Swirl, she would have been more inclined to make the statues more visible, as in this version, where the one on the left was clearly a woman and the other a man.

  On the very edge of the cliff, Rosalia noticed a young girl with a folded piece of paper in her hand. It felt familiar and after a few seconds, she realized that it was a scene from the story she had read for English. That was why the veneers were so similar; another student at Central had interpreted the words in the same way.

  Amused, she turned her attention to the other wall and saw a painting of a sandy beach that featured crystallized grains at the forefront. The rest of the beach expanded beyond it, folding into a horizon, into a starry sky, into galaxies. It made her think of nighttime, of the moon that wasn’t shown but that was clearly reflecting light onto the sparkling sand.

  So that was the game. Person A drew a picture and through it, could access the pictures of Person B. It made sense as a social process, lending at least some credibility to the idea that people with alike dreams would also be alike. But who among her classmates had drawn this picture? Had she already stepped away to another beach?

  Whoever she was, she shared something with Rosalia and that meant reciprocation. Approaching a bare wall, she began reconciling her strongest dream, a nightmare made fresh in her memory at Deron’s insistence. The moon stretched from floor to ceiling, sitting regally above a surge of water and a beach that revealed itself as the ocean drew away. A familiar sense of dread crept over her skin as she finished the detail on the moon’s surface. Cracks and craters, all with the ri
ght shadows, were as real as anything she would ever see in her lifetime.

  Now, she wondered, who shares this dream with me?

  The avatar stepped up to the wall and put its hand on it, but nothing happened. The image did not ripple as before and there was no way to move forward. Off to the right, the bubble appeared.

  “The unique dream uniquely,” it said, accompanied by a short melody on a violin.

  Great, she thought. Even games knew that she was alone, that some nightmares existed just for her.

  “But I knew that already,” said Rosalia, surprised she had said it out loud. She wiped her palette clean and brought up her portal again. The time in the corner said it was now four-thirty. Detention would have let out fifteen minutes ago, so Deron should have been on his way home. Turning in her seat, Rosalia put her feet up on the low windowsill and scanned the pedestrian traffic. It didn’t take more than ten minutes to get from the school to Parker, and whether he went to her house or straight home to his, he would have to pass right in front of Perrault’s.

  Her thoughts turned to forgiveness, hoping he wouldn’t be too angry to continue their relationship. Plastering the entire school with her shop had been a bad idea and she cursed herself again and again. It wasn’t her fight, wasn’t her place to be inciting more hostility in what Deron considered a nothing war. He did his best not to let it bother him and she should have respected that.

  If he showed up angry, it would be justified.

  A flash of something tall and lanky caught her attention outside, but it was just a random teenager kicking a skateboard along the sidewalk. Where is he, she wondered. Part of her started to worry, but she tuned it out.

  Believing is seeing, she reminded herself. Just believe that Deron will walk around the corner and he will.

  Any minute now.

  10 - Deron

  The cramp started in his palm, concentrated around his pinky, but soon it spread to Deron’s entire hand, making it ache in protest against the archaic activity. Copying words from a dictionary wasn’t just boring; it was a form of physical punishment. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually written something down instead of typing on a virtual keyboard, or easier still, just reconciling the text onto a palette. It was kind of brilliant when he thought about it, giving the students something to remember their detention by. It was much more of a deterrent than the impotent paddles that hung in Principal Ficcone’s office.