Free Veneer by Daniel Verastiqui Page 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 right 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