Veneer (19 page)

“We put chips in pets,” offered Ilya, though she didn’t sound sure of her supporting evidence.

“Yeah, so we can find their owners if they get lost. I know where I live.” Rosalia sighed. There was no use arguing; she needed to speak with someone knowledgeable.

Add it to the pile, she thought. Add it to the millions of other things she had to do to get the world back on track. Getting an audience with Nurse Hendricks would be the easiest, but would a school nurse know enough? There was also Mr. Randall, the biology teacher. Maybe he knew why humans needed to have implants in their necks.

“What are we doing in P.E. today?” asked Ilya.

Inside, Rosalia recoiled, amazed at how easily Ilya moved between topics of grave importance to those that meant nothing to anyone except the lacrosse coach. It didn’t matter one bit what they did to meet their daily physical education requirement. They could run ten miles, take a fitness test, or play volleyball. Either way, it wouldn’t change the fact that...

Groaning, Rosalia put her face in her hands, tried to take a deep breath through her palms. A moment later, she felt Ilya’s hand on her back.

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. Before... before it happened, I told Deron that I was going to kill Russo. But I made that shop instead. I should have gone with my original plan.”

Ilya’s fingers stroked her gently. “We could still do that.”

“We?” Rosalia stole a look sideways.

The way her face changed made Rosalia see her in another light. Up until that moment, Ilya had always seemed harmless, a girl whose words and actions often didn’t match the intensity in her eyes. But did that make her a killer?

Not waiting for an answer, Rosalia added, “I was joking.”

“Then so was I,” replied Ilya. Her voice was cheerful, but Rosalia read disappointment in the way she removed her hand, tracing her fingertips before withdrawing completely. “At least killing Russo would solve one of your problems. Then no one would have to see you sad anymore.”

“I thought I was hiding it,” she said, adjusting her veneer.

“Some things are more than just appearance. When you—”

“No,” Rosalia interrupted. “We can’t just murder someone.” It was absurd, the idea of actually taking someone’s life, even a person as vile as Russo.

“We
can
. The question is do we want to.”

In another life, thought Rosalia. It would only work in another world where she wasn’t the sum of seventeen years of civilized development, but rather some reconciled version of herself, one free from morals and consequence. That only happened in movies, in video games. This was real life.

“There has to be something in the middle,” said Rosalia, glancing at the clock above the front doors. It was getting close to eight and Principal Ficcone was already staring down the stragglers in the courtyard. “Some way we can score one back for Deron without more backlash.”

“I have some ideas.”

“Ilya,” she said, the name still sounding foreign on her tongue, “can you promise me something?” She extended her pinky, slightly curved. “Promise me you won’t kill Russo.”

Ilya took her entire hand, cupping it gently. “I promise not to kill Russo until you tell me it’s alright.”

“Thank you.” Rosalia stood and slung her backpack over her shoulder. She was about to take a step when she realized Ilya hadn’t moved, was still sitting there with a grin on her face. “What?”

“It’s too funny,” Ilya replied. Standing, she looked Rosalia up and down before saying, “You think I’m a lesbian and now a killer. You don’t know me very well, do you?”

The ringing of the first bell saved Rosalia from having to reply.

23 - Jalay

The smell of reheated fish product pervaded the air as Jalay stood at the cafeteria doors that led out to the plaza. Sebo was out there, sitting on the low wall with a palette in his hand and a smug veneer on his face. Jalay tried to think of what he would say to him, how he could convince him that he was no longer his enemy, but the words wouldn’t come. He went through dozens of false starts in his head before taking a sharp breath to calm himself. It was just Sebo, friend to the pansy Deron; there was no reason to be afraid of him. Bolstered by the momentary confidence, Jalay barged through the cafeteria doors, crossed the plaza, and sat down next to his enemy by association.

“Those who have knowledge do not predict. Those who predict do not have knowledge,” said Sebo, without looking up from his palette. “Lao Tzu said that, six hundred years before Christ.”

“Jesus,” said Jalay.

There was no amusement in Sebo’s veneer. “It means that you shouldn’t try to predict the future because by its very nature, it’s unpredictable. And when you hear a quote like that, you start to ask yourself, do I live that way? Do I avoid making bold predictions about the future because I know that I can never be certain what will happen? I thought yes.” He ran his hand down his palette, cleared away what looked like a trailer for a video game. “Until now, that is.”

Jalay squeezed one hand in the other, convinced that the words were some kind of weapon meant to confuse him. Russo had played the stupidity card with him all the time, making Jalay out to be some kind of retard, but it wasn’t true. He could understand a lot, even the ramblings of a pretentious student.

“If someone would have asked me just five minutes ago whether Russo’s boyfriend would be joining me for lunch, I would have laughed in their monkey faces. I would have told them with one hundred percent certainty that no such thing would or
could
ever happen.” He scratched his cheek. “Yet here we are. So tell me, my bovine friend, when Russo is pounding you from behind, do you ever look over your shoulder and catch eyes with him? And if so, do you honor him by keeping eye contact while he rams you?”

“No,” admitted Jalay, refusing to reconcile the image in his head. “Russo isn’t caring like Deron.” He made his eyes go wistful. “What’s it like to have such a gentle lover?”

That got a smile that morphed into a smirk. “Fair enough. So what’s your deal? Are you supposed to distract me long enough so Russo can sneak up and pipe me like he did Deron?”

“So you know it was him?”

Sebo laughed. “Seriously? The entire student body knows it was Russo. If the uniforms weren’t so fucking incompetent—”

“They can’t do anything anyway,” said Jalay, pulling his palette from his bag. “They don’t have any witnesses. Without witnesses...” he began, but thought the better of trying to explain how courts worked to Sebo.

“There were no witnesses. And if there were, no one at this school has the fortitude to come forward. Not that I blame them.”

“We don’t need
real
witnesses.” Jalay reconciled a portal and brought up a folder of images. “I worked on these yesterday.” He enlarged a picture of the football field. There was a shadowy figure on the left, barely recognizable as Deron. He was walking towards the bleachers where another figure sat. “Notice the low angles, the blur at extreme distances, the slight glare from the sun.”

“Who reconciled this?”

“I did.”

Sebo’s face flashed an angry veneer. “You saw it happen?! Why haven’t you said anything?”

Jalay groaned. “I didn’t see it. No one did.” He minimized the image and brought up another one. “But it doesn’t matter.
I
reconciled this, all of these. I’ve been making shops of Deron for years and hanging out with Russo for even longer. I’m the only one who can reconcile what might have happened.”

“These are fake?”

“Yes,” replied Jalay. “I did five different angles. Two of them actually show the fight taking place.” He scrolled through the pictures, found one of Russo standing over a fallen and bloodied Deron.

Sebo cringed.

“That’s why I had to tell you first,” he continued. “When I start posting these on all the boards, I didn’t want you to think they were real.”

“I don’t get you, Jolly. What’s your angle on this? Why would Russo tell you to incriminate him?”

“Fuck Russo.” Jalay cleared out the palette and for a moment, couldn’t think of anything else to say. In the lull, he reconciled idly, bringing a random collection of color and shape to his portal, a piece of art that meant nothing but seemed to express how he felt. “I like to reconcile,” he muttered. “Some people are good at math or piano, but all I can do is draw.”

“No,” said Sebo, trying to correct him. “What you do is play lackey to a psychopath who has no qualms about dragging someone to the blood-slicked precipice of death and just leaving them there. When you think about it, you two are a classic pairing: the brute and the buffoon. And historically, the buffoon doesn’t realize it’s too late until he’s turned on or killed. So this whole pretext of you having a lover’s quarrel with Russo just comes off a little dubious. People like you... People like you and Russo just can’t be trusted.”

“You don’t need to do anything yet.”

Sebo raised his hand. “Don’t even bother. The day I help you is the day...” Again, he fell silent, looked away. “I can’t conceive a situation in which I would ever help you. You’ve humiliated Deron for years. You’ve
tormented
him. What kind of person are you anyway? How do you get off reconciling all that gay shit? Honestly, you must have gotten hard a few times right? Nobody reconciles naked guys for that long and doesn’t start getting some kind of perverted sexual joy out of it. So come on, fess up now, no judgments.”

Jalay couldn’t find the strength to laugh. His stomach was starting to complain about lunch and the fishy aroma that had been so stifling before now seemed enticing in his memory. Only after downing five or six square fillets would he be ready to argue his sexual orientation with Sebo. Still, there was a way that didn’t require him to go toe to toe with the Dahlstrom dropout.

The portal under his hand came back to life, filling the screen with folders that shrunk the more their numbers grew. It settled into a yellow field with little black dots, held for a moment, and then exploded into a slideshow of various folder icons, each with three representative pictures of its contents.

“I don’t think I’ve shared this with anyone, ever,” said Jalay, holding the palette at an angle.

Sebo leaned in and clucked his tongue. “I think you may have an unhealthy obsession with pornography.” Suddenly, his finger shot out, tapped one of the folders as it scrolled by. It expanded into the forefront and a caption faded in. “You have stuff from Natural Designs?”

“These are just the stills,” replied Jalay, browsing into the folder and pulling up the profile pages of the most recent girls, a newly eighteen model by the name of Jordan.

“Do you have their Roommate software?”

Jalay managed a weak smile, could almost smell the desperation coming off Sebo. Old allegiances died easily in the face of free jackware.

“I do,” he replied at last, amused by the sudden excitement on Sebo’s face. Then, mocking Sebo’s style, he asked, “Is that something you would be interested in?”

“Something in which I would be interested,” replied Sebo, who then put his hand over his heart. “If you let me copy that program, I swear I will never question your sexuality again. Not in public for the amusement of the student body, nor in private with Deron and Rosa. Furthermore, if a third party were to ever question your sexuality, I will make a passive effort to refute such accusations, but only to the extent that my standing relationships allow. Do we have a gentlemen’s agreement?” He removed his hand from his chest and held it out.

Jalay looked around; there were a few curious faces in the crowd. “I’d rather not shake,” he said. “But it’s a deal.”

“Well that’s just balls,” declared Sebo. He brought up his instant messenger on his palette. “What’s your handle?”

“Jalay, with six L’s.” When Sebo’s message popped up on his screen, he dragged Jordan’s Roommate files onto the chat window. Together, they watched the transfer bar grow.

“This doesn’t make us friends.”

Jalay nodded in reply. “Of course not. I’m not friends with queers.”

“Coming from a stolid heterosexual like you, I completely understand.”

When the file finished, Jalay noticed that Sebo deleted him from his contact list. It was such an insignificant act, but it reminded him that nothing had really changed. Trading some porn at lunch wasn’t going to undo years of antagonism. It would take a grand gesture, something like putting Russo behind bars, to even start down the road to earning their trust.

He
needed
to befriend Sebo because he
needed
to befriend Deron. Once he had those two on his side, Rosalia would have to give him a chance. She might resist, which was understandable after the hell he had put her boyfriend through, but eventually she would come around. A couple of years from now, they would all be sitting around some bar, talking about their classes and how boring their professors were. Then Deron would have to piss and Sebo would go with him to hold it and they would be alone.

Jalay flashed on the fantasy, felt the awkward pall as Rosalia realized she was sitting with a man who was once her enemy. She wouldn’t know what to say, wouldn’t need to say anything. He would just put his hand on the table, start reconciling it, changing the wood into water, bordered on the sides by lush banks of grass, ending in a waterfall. And if she didn’t recognize the scene, he would wipe it clean and replace it with the terrifying moon. That would get her attention.

She’d look at him in wonder and ask, “How do you know about that?”

And he’d say nothing, would simply wipe the table clean once more and show a beach with sparkling sand leading off into the distance. The stars beyond it. The galaxies. She would understand.

“When are you going to post the shops?”

Jalay barely heard the question, but he still managed to answer. “Soon, now that you know. If you want, you can tell Rosalia to make a few of her own.” Even as he said the words, he realized how it sounded. “You don’t have to though. Or at least wait until mine.” Not that it mattered. His own work would be enough to stir up some activity. If Rosalia chose to join in the fun, so be it.