Venice (bxb)

12. Is it Really a Problem?

"Jason, you remember that dude back in high school?" Venice is standing at his cousin's door, chipping away at his nail cuticles, "the one that wore a skirt once."
Jason looks up from his iPad, setting it aside, "Rocky Roadshow? The one in Val's class?"
"Yeah."
"What about him?" His eyebrows peak.

What about him? Venice asks himself. Ideally, he wouldn't have asked Jason this question at all but he hadn't been thinking when he'd walked past his cousin's room.

"I went to apologise to um, Link yesterday and he said something," something he hadn't been able to get off his godamn mind. 

"What did he say?"

"That...That what I did was wrong. And he felt violated."

Jason scrunches his mouth to the side, nodding slowly. "Can't argue with that."

His cousin is not the absolver of Venice's conscience. Never has been. Jason, as stupid as he acts sometimes, had never played into Venice's proclivities. This one time back in school, Venice had been with his classmates, newly appropriated into a group of self-proclaimed jocks and they had been talking about this girl. Extensively.

"She needs to be put in her place."
            "Bullying a girl is not the best look, Lucas."
            "She's not exactly a girl now, is she?"

           Everly Kenneth hadn't been conventionally beautiful but in retrospect, Venice can imagine that there might have been some beauty somewhere. Dark-skinned, fat bulging in folds from her clothes, spectacles on the bridge of her nose, inelegant.

           With very minimal input and action from Venice, he'd ended up in the Sherrif's office the day after. Lucas and the others had stabbed her. There was a reason for it, not a justification though. Ven knew what they were planning to do and wanted no part in it but he didn't stop it either. It's for this kind of apathy that his mother yelled at him for 4 hours straight.

            She had hissed through her tears, "I'd rather die than you step in this house again."

           Sometimes, Venice felt like he was diluting his emotional placidity by calling Valentina crazy because then that would be genetic and Venice couldn't be categorized as clear-cut cuckoo. Jason hadn't talked to him either. His cousin held him accountable and Valentina had been the only one willing to lend him an ear, albeit reluctantly.

           In a family of drug dealers, he'd managed to be the ultimate evil.

            "His mom's a cop, Jace."
            Jason's eyes widen. "We did weed at a cop's house?"
           "I'm scared for Mom and Dad."
           Jason nods. He could empathize. He'd been scared for his father too. "What do you wanna do?"
          Venice shakes his head. "No, I'm just saying. What are the odds, you know? That we land up right in front of a cop?"
           "Yeah, weird."
           Venice sits on his bed, not quite facing him. "You believe in karma, right?"
           "It's business, Venice. They're running a business."
           "Drug cartels aren't businesses, Jason. They're a crime. We're criminals."
           "I can't do this with you today, man." He sighs, picking his iPad back up. He mumbles just, "I'm too fucking tired for this."

          He hadn't told him what he wanted to, rather he told Jason other things that had been bothering him and he felt like a little boy as he did. Ideally, he was better off talking to Valentina but he'd always ended up feeling like less of a man after a conversation with her.

          Venice walks downstairs to get water because he is starting to feel like thirst could give him a panic attack. It was late into the night, and nobody was awake, at least everybody except Aunt Elodie who was leaning against the kitchen island, whispering into the phone.

"Who are you talking to?" The question is in passing but the colour drains from her face.
           "My mother."
           "Oh, is she alright?"
            "She hasn't been for a while now." El seems battered, almost like she was wasting away but what could Venice do for his aunt, other than just acknowledge the fact that she was?

            He walks back up to his room and closes the door behind him, hot and emancipated from the feeling of belonging to this house to these people, to this family. Wondering how much suffering there is in living and whether it was worth it.

Jason, like his mother, chooses to suffer in silence. After Jason's dad died, Venice would often go over to Jason's and get him to talk and he would, just not about the death of his father. He would go on and on about Naruto, his ex-girlfriend, and school but just not his dad.

"What good would that do?" Jason would ask and Venice wouldn't push. He was right, perhaps. Why bring up the dead? Especially to appease his conscience.

Maybe he was expected to grieve in silence too. Maybe Jason didn't know how to bear the weight of his shitty emotional baggage.

Venice might've risen groggily that morning but he was a thunderstorm inside. On the way down to the kitchen, he hears his parents talking.

         "She's law enforcement, Via."
         "You're being paranoid."
         "You don't think we're under their radar? Do you think they're that stupid?" Larker is paranoid and frantic and he's hissing at his wife. "They're onto us, Via. We should do something about her."
         "Are you fucking stupid?"
         Venice flinches, stopping dead in his tracks. His mother felt like poison sometimes.
She continues, "You touch a hair on her body and they're going to swarm this house. There's no brother for you to sacrifice for your crimes anymore, Larker. I'm not going to hurt our children."

"You don't think their world is blown to bits already? They know exactly what we do. They might not talk about it, but they do. What do you think is going to happen to them when we rot in jail? Who's going to look after them?"
"We're not going anywhere, Larker. I'll make sure of it. Don't kill anyone."

In the greater expanse of things, this conversation does not work in favour of Larker's image. Although he may not look like it, he was a rather simple man, operating on a kill-or-be-killed basis. His mother usually was behind the scheming. She didn't drop out of Stanford for nothing.

All yelling halted as Venice stopped at the foot of the grand staircase. "All good?"
Via forced a smile unto him, "of course, babe. Your breakfast's in the kitchen." She walks away from her husband. Venice asks her where Aunt Elodie is. She says, "Out". He doesn't pry more. He asks her if Jason has been downstairs, and Valentina tells him that he's left for school. Via turns to her surprised. She'd thought her nephew was upstairs, doing whatever teenage boys did.

"How? With who?"

Valentina tips her head towards the Riviera house. "Link." When Venice furrows his eyebrows (because Link did not drive), she clarifies, "with his mom."