Dreamland Social Club

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DUTTON BOOKS

 

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Tara Altebrando

 

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Published in the United States by Dutton Books,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
www.penguin.com/youngreaders

 

 

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-51505-1

A
FLOWER,
JANE THOUGHT when she glimpsed the red tower in a gap of the jagged skyline of brick buildings.

Hundreds of metal sticks, stuck together this way and that, reached up to the sky, toward the tower’s round bloom, where a light blinked brightly even in the midday sun.

“Dad,” Jane said, “what’s that?”

“That,” he said from the front seat of the cab, “is the old Parachute Jump ride. But it’s been shut down for years, so don’t go getting any crazy ideas.”

Jane couldn’t think of a time when she’d ever had a crazy idea. “Like what?”

He turned and gave her a wink. “Like strapping on a bungee cord and jumping off it.”

“Yeah.” Jane’s brother, Marcus—one year older and beside her in the backseat—shook his head. “That would be so like her.”

About twenty minutes and a million degrees before, the Dryden family had stepped out of the hazy August air surrounding them at the JFK arrivals terminal and into an air-conditioned yellow cab bound for Coney Island. Jane was pretty sure that Queens, where the airport was, and then Brooklyn, where Coney Island was, were the top two most ugly places she had ever seen—and that was saying something, considering how much she had moved around over the years. Most recently, they’d done a yearlong stint in London.

Jane had hoped the scenery would improve when they left behind the highways and warehouses and marshland by the airport, but it only got worse as they followed signs that announced Coney Island, signs that said AMUSEMENTS and BEACH.

Then she’d seen the tower—so pretty—and dared to hope.

“Why was it shut down?” she asked.

Her father shrugged, then said, “Parachutes on strings. Ocean winds. It just couldn’t have been safe.”

Jane closed her eyes and tried to imagine what the ride would have looked like with parachutes falling like petals in the wind and people dangling from them like long-legged spiders.

Probably not safe at all, no.

But fun?

Maybe.

Either that or completely terrifying.

When a building in the foreground blocked her view of the Parachute Jump, Jane’s eyes finally returned to ground level. The cab wound its way through a maze of local streets where the gas stations and car washes and run-down shops seemed endless. The buildings were mostly high-rise brick apartments and, on a more commercial street, small white row houses with green bars on the doors and windows, even the second-floor windows. It probably didn’t help Jane’s first impression of Coney that the sky was dingy, threatening. Eventually the driver gave up on the AC and opened a few windows; Jane could almost smell the gathering thunderstorm.

The cab turned down Siren Street, and she felt her gut tighten at the blur of graffiti and soot stains on the brick of a row of abandoned houses. Dingy curtains still hung where there had once been windows; old rocking chairs sat eerily still on porches. Clearly, this was the wrong side of town.

The cab stopped.

They were right in front of a big old house that looked entirely out of place, like some tornado in Kansas had gotten carried away with itself. Jane’s father looked at a piece of paper in his hand—“It’s number two-thirteen”—and Jane found the crooked gold numbers near the door and confirmed that they’d found it.

Wedged between an ancient-looking bait-and-tackle shop and a fenced-in lot overgrown with weeds, the house was shingled and beige with weird peaks and small windows. An air conditioner in the second floor’s right window was like a lone bucktooth; the uppermost window wore a top hat of black roof tiles. The front porch looked like it might fall off at any moment, and a gang of demented woodpeckers had apparently had their way with the glossy red paint on the front door. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded the front yard, where two cement strips indicated a driveway that dead-ended at the porch. On the gate to the drive hung three metal signs—NO PARKING, DON’T EVEN
THINK
ABOUT PARKING HERE, and NEVER BLOCK DRIVEWAY. Next to
them
dangled a handmade wood sign that read, YES, ITS A DRIVEWAY. Jane had to fight the urge to add the apostrophe.

“This isn’t exactly what I was picturing,” Marcus said, and Jane would have laughed if she wasn’t about to cry. It wasn’t that she’d thought they’d be living in an amusement park, exactly, but her mother had
loved
Coney Island—
hadn’t she?—
and Jane simply didn’t see anything around to love.

“Your grandfather was what polite people called an eccentric,” Jane’s father said when he joined her on the sidewalk by the driveway signs, having paid the cab fare and gotten their luggage. “He went by the name Preemie.”

“What?”
Marcus laughed. “Why?”

“There was an amusement park here in the early nineteen hundreds. Dreamland. Incubators had just been invented.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Your grandfather was part of a premature baby display when he was born.”

Jane took a minute to process that:
a premature baby display.

She had only had two weeks to process the fact that she and Marcus had inherited a house from a grandfather they had never known, that they were leaving England and moving to the place where their mother had grown up.

“That’s pretty sick,” Marcus said, and a thick drop of rain landed on his nose. Another one left a dark slash on his light blue shirt.

“Dreamland burned down, and your grandfather was rescued by nurses and the whole thing made him sort of famous.” Their dad picked up a suitcase as the drops became increasingly, alarmingly abundant.