Free Veneer by Daniel Verastiqui

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