Venice (bxb)

5. Jean

             "Who is that?" Commissioner Rivera asked, tipping her head towards the kid in the convertible. His head was a mop of curls and he had been staring ahead.

"Venice. He's new."

"Does he have a last name?" She asked, handing him a hundred dollar bill.

"Conigrave, mom. His cousin and his sister also go to our school now."

"Tell him to leave, I'll drop you back."

Link glanced back at the car, "it's fine, mom. He'll wait."

Commissioner Rivera was vehement, "no, tell him to leave."

"I'm literally done here," he insisted with an increased sense of indignation, quite uncharacteristic for him, "I have to go."

She does not bid him farewell or tell him that she loves him as she routinely did. Instead, Link felt her piercing glare on the back of his head and wondered why he'd just fought her on who got to take him back to school.

Link sat back in the passenger seat."Everything alright?"

"Yeah, thank you. We can go now." Venice didn't initiate a conversation and Link didn't feel like talking either.

Later, they ignored each other during the two biology periods they had together. Link wondered whether Venice would want to sit with him and his friends but Venice and Jason had already found each other in the cafeteria and it didn't make sense to ask anymore.

He took his usual route back home with Chris whose mother carpooled him from school. Lugging his backpack up the stairs, he disappeared into the washroom until his mother was home after a while, pounding at his door.

He jumped from the cold floor, stashing a cold metal item in his medicine drawer. Link couldn't tell if he had fallen asleep.The doorknob was clicked open and Commissioner Rivera burst in as if she'd had been trying to listen at the door.

"What are you doing, Mom?"

She straightened herself, "nothing, what were you doing?" Her tone wasn't accusative surprisingly.

"I fell asleep in the bathtub."

Rivera scoffed at that, giving her son a pointed look, "what a housewife with alcoholism sorta thing to do."

"It do be like that sometimes."

"That it do, son, that it do," she smiled at him and it was a soft smile, one that made Link feel like his mother liked him.

"Come down, I'll make you a burrito." Over lukewarm guacamole burritos, Jean Rivera asked her son about school, about the boy who brought him into the office that morning, about the boy's cousin and about the occupations of their parents.

         A suspicious line of questioning, Link thought but he was acclimatized to the nosy nature of his mother's personality.

"Well, they're not the best people for you, Link."

"Who? Venice?"

Jean nodded, "and his cousin. You're better off sticking to your old friends, yeah? Chris, Beckett and oh,-do you still talk to Zaki?"

"No, I don't but why can't I be friends with Venice? He seems cool."

"He's not, okay? Trust me, you don't wanna be involved with them."

Link set his burrito down, "wait, you know the Conigraves?"

Jean ran through all the possible lies she could tell her son. If they were plausible even. "No," outside the window, she saw Venice and Jace, leaning on their Conigrave house's compound wall. "Their parents are not good people, Link. They're from a different world."

Link swallowed his bite of burrito without really chewing, nodding at his mother with no intention to really follow-through on her ask but still weirded out by the request.

         His mother was home for the rest of the evening so there was no running down to the Conigraves that day. His room's window overlooked the sister's. Valentina's.

They'd only caught a fluttering glance of each other in the hallway at school yesterday so now he really let himself look.

            She was immersed in whatever was playing on the laptop screen. Her body inched forward as if in anticipation. They looked like twins, Venice and Valentina. The same hair, only hers longer. The same arched cheekbones and both of their expressions eternally placid as if anything else were a facial deadlift.

You couldn't tell, without a tiny amount of convincing, that Jason was their cousin. He was different. Valentina was aware of this too. She suspected some stark difference in parenting dynamics. Jace could've inherited the larger-than-life-ness from their Uncle Tim, Jason's father, or it could've easily been the non-stifling environment he grew up in.

A couple of days ago, Aunt Elodie had borrowed Val's laptop. To do what? Send an email. What happened to your laptop? It's being repaired. Elodie had returned it almost immediately and that was that. Valentina had been looking for an essay she wrote last year. Scrubbing every file in existence for the keywords of that essay but still no trace.

She loaded up the OS recovery on her Mac, just to make sure she hadn't deleted it. She'd caught a glance of 6788ydls90msl. She would never, not in a million years, name a file that terribly. Also, she couldn't remember deleting something like that.

The icon expanded on her screen and it was an exported file from an email. Her mother's email. Code, just a page full of code emailed to jplang@gmail.com. Confused, she dragged it to her desktop. Probably to ask her mother about it later.

They'd renovated the house before they moved in and Valentina all but wished that the terracotta panes turned into a person she could strangle. Her eyes fluttered towards the window, and even though it was just for a second, she'd caught Link's gaze on her.

They were in their bedrooms, in their own worlds but momentarily, they were in each other's. Valentina's eyes screamed in a certain alarm and Link felt that glare at the back of is head.

           He didn't need to be convinced that the Conigraves were involved in deep shit. Not after that.