Dreamland Social Club (19 page)

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Jane had never climbed a fence or trespassed before, but she took one look at the moon—and saw the outline of the whole of it, lit by the crescent—and felt that gravitational pull again, this time like a tug in her Achilles’ heel. And then there was her foot in Leo’s cupped hands. And then there was her body going up, up, up. And then there were her hands grabbing fence, and then her belly was scraping wire, and then her feet were finding footing, and then moving down, down, down, and then with a jump backwards she was in.

In no time, Leo hooked his backpack over the fence to her, then scaled its rungs. Soon they were taking crunchy steps through tall grass toward the tower, which looked so much larger now, like it couldn’t possibly be that same steel flower she’d first spied from the cab. Jane followed Leo right up to its base—the beams were so much thicker, wider, redder—where he stopped and unzipped his backpack and spread out his small blanket. He lay down, looking up, and patted the spot next to him.

“Best view in the world,” he said, and Jane realized something. She said, “Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this all before?”

When he just smiled, she took her place beside him, looking up at the steel tower. From here, lit just so, it took on the shape of a roulette wheel in the sky, and that felt somehow fitting. She closed her eyes and imagined it spinning and spinning and spinning. Jumping off it had been a gamble, just like being here tonight. It was time to go for broke.

“I’ve been remembering things,” she said quietly. “About my mom.”

“What kind of things?”

“All these games we used to play when I was little.”

Leo looked over at her and raised his eyebrows.

“We moved around so much so we didn’t have a lot of toys, I guess.” She looked up at the shadow moon as she spoke but felt Leo watching her. “So she’d always make up games using stuff we had around the apartment, like Trip to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Like inspired by Luna Park.”

When he said nothing, she just kept talking.

“Like she’d turn a box into a spaceship or pretend that green string was seaweed, or she’d dress up as an Eskimo or pretend to be the captain of a ship going to the moon.” Jane put on a deep voice. “This is your captain. We are traveling through a storm. We are quite safe.” She added, “That was from Trip to the Moon.”

Leo spoke very slowly when he said, “That. Is. Awesome.”

Jane had to keep talking to keep from crying. “One of my favorites was playing Elephant Hotel. One time she actually made a bed of peanuts for us to sleep on. I’d never seen so many peanuts.”

Leo laughed.

“We had a game about living under a roller coaster, too. She must’ve been thinking of the Thunderbolt.”

“How old were you when she died?” Leo asked tentatively, sadly.

“Six,” Jane said. “So I don’t remember a lot. Or didn’t. Until lately. And I mean, I didn’t even know she’d ever been to a mermaid camp or kept a journal or anything, really.”

In the silence that followed, Jane felt a magnetic pull between their hands, their bodies, and knew she wasn’t making it up. “I just found out, from your mom, actually, that my mother actually dated one of the Claveracks.”

“Oh, snap.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Exactly. I mean, how is that even possible? Nothing makes sense.” She shook her head. “I really wish I could find that journal.”

“It’s been a really long time, Jane,” he said, sort of sadly, and Jane said, “I know. But we used to play this game, hiding this little journal I kept when I was little. I feel like she must’ve hidden hers, too. And like maybe I could find it.”

“Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t sound convinced, and Jane couldn’t blame him. She wasn’t entirely convinced either.

“So what was the deal anyway?” He pulled a blade of a grassy weed up out of the ground and played with it. “How come your mother never came back to visit or anything? My mom said she hasn’t—hadn’t—seen her in like twenty years.”

“I don’t know.”
Should she know?
“I guess she never really got along with Preemie, and then she met my dad and they just started traveling and stuff and it sounds like Coney Island was pretty awful back then, too. But we were all going to come back together, apparently, when I was little. To meet my grandparents, probably even your mom, when I was six, but then she died and we never did.”

“That’s sort of wild to think about.” Leo tossed his grass blade. “We could’ve met when we were six.”

For a moment she imagined what that trip would have been like, what Coney would have been like all those years ago, what it would’ve been like to see this all as a kid, with her mom walking her down the boardwalk, holding her hand and playing tour guide, and not as who she was now, older, more alone, adrift. What it would’ve been like to meet some weird boy her age, with a weird accent, and what it would’ve been like to pretend to be interested in whatever he was interested in then, like comic books or guitars.

They sat quietly a while longer and finally she said, “Did you ever hear that story about the elephant that swam to Staten Island?”

“Sure!” Leo shook his head. “Poor bastard.”

Jane knew it as a happy story, one of escape. “But he made it!”

“He did. But, I mean, it’s Staten Island!”

Jane looked at him blankly.

“Never mind.” He shook his head. “But anyway, they charged the elephant with vagrancy and put him in jail.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Then people from Luna went to get him and brought him back.”

“Oh.” Jane hadn’t remembered reading that part. It made the story entirely different.

“I’m not really sure my mom would want us to be back here,” she said finally, the thought having occurred to her right then for the first time. “I mean, she made such a point of leaving.”

Leo shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters.”

After another moment, he sat up and said, “All right. Time to climb.”

“No,” Jane said, looking at the thick base of the Jump.

“Yes,” he said, and then he waited for her to come to his side. He put two fingers into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

“What are you doing?” Jane said, confused and a little panicked, and then she saw the lights coming their way. Two security guards. “Why did you do that?” she snapped, but Leo wasn’t moving, wasn’t running.

“It’s cool,” he said. “I know these guys.”

“You sure about this, Leo?” one of the men said as they stopped in front of Leo and Jane and turned off their flashlights.

“I’m sure.”

One of the guards went to the structure surrounding the base of the Jump and found a key on his waistband keychain and opened a door. He pushed it open—nothing but darkness in there—and stepped back, looked at his watch, and said, “I’m giving you fifteen minutes. Not a second more.”

“Appreciate it,” Leo said, shaking his hand and accepting the flashlight being offered. He nodded at Jane to follow him inside.

The ladder in the center of the room led them up to a hatch that opened with a good hard shove from Leo. Jane stood on the ground, waiting for him to abandon the ladder. It took a minute—he looked around a bit—but then he lifted his legs out, scurried around, then stuck his head back down and shined the flashlight in her face. “Come on up,” he said.

“You didn’t have to pay them, did you?” she asked.

“Nah,” Leo said. “They both have unpaid bar tabs.”

“Well, thanks,” she said.

She climbed, the metal dusty and cold on her hands, and then took Leo’s hand at the top and stepped up onto the roof of the base.

“You ready?” he said, and Jane nodded. She wasn’t sure what the point of any of this was, the re-creating, but she felt good—different—doing it, being out on nights like this. Jane was not the kind of girl who would scale the Parachute Jump with a boy at two in the morning. Or at least she hadn’t been until now.

So they climbed, on the inner side of the tower, and Jane tried to imagine that she wasn’t climbing but instead was sitting in some kind of harness, being hauled to the top by cables. When she finally caught up with Leo, she said, “I think this is high enough.”

He said, “Okay,” and hung his elbows on a rung and Jane did the same, to give her hands a break, and they just perched there for a minute with the wind blowing and the ocean right there crashing and churning, and Leo said, “Your mother was one crazy chick.”

“Her mother used to pretend she was half-bird, and her father called himself Preemie,” Jane said.

Leo said, “Good point.”

“The Anchor actually looks kind of nice from here,” she said. It was true.

“Well, take a mental picture, since it’ll probably be gone come spring.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I mean, if they build new rides and stuff, won’t that mean more people? People who would drink at the Anchor?”

“Loki owns the Anchor.”

“I thought your dad owned—”

“My dad owns the bar. The business. But Loki owns the property.”

“And they keep jacking up my dad’s rent. It’s ridiculous. Probably illegal.”

Jane said, “But if more people spent money there, and it made more money, then the rent wouldn’t be a big deal, right?”

“You’re missing the point.” Leo shook his head. “They’ll knock the building down before they let the Anchor stay there. They’re even making anonymous calls to the health department about violations that totally don’t exist. Because that right there”—he nodded at the bar—“is where they want to put a big indoor water park or roller coaster or some bullshit, so they might not even renew my dad’s lease.”

“Oh, no.” She said it out loud this time.

“Oh, no is right,” he said. “They are seriously evil.”

“My arms hurt,” she said, because it was the only thought she was having that she felt she could share, and Leo said, “Mine, too,” and so they went back the way they’d come—down the rungs and through the hatch, and down the ladder and out the door and then through the proper gate this time—with a thank-you for the guards—and then back out onto the boardwalk. And the whole time, all Jane could think was that she had to tell her father about Loki. About how awful a company it really was—
fake health code violations?
—and how he could not sell them the Tsunami.

“Two down, two to do,” Leo said, and Jane pushed everything else aside but the keys and said, “I guess Wonder is next, since I still have no idea what ‘Bath’ means. But I still don’t know if it’s the Wonder Wheel or Wonderland.”

“It sounds to me like a reconnaissance mission is in order.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t after school tomorrow—”

Jane had seen new signs for the Dreamland Social Club meeting. Was that why? Or was it Venus? Or both?

“But after school the next day, we’ll scope out the ‘Wonder’ stuff.”

 

Sneaking back in was as hard as sneaking out. Either way you were caught. But just knowing that Leo was watching from beside that lamppost made her feel stealthy and calm and confident. She wondered what he thought while he watched her, what parts of her, specifically, he kept his eyes on, and whether he wondered those kinds of things, too, about her, when she was the one doing the looking. Then inside she wondered whether she’d ever find out what the deal was with him and Venus, and then up in her room she wondered whether he’d ever touch her or kiss her or want to. With Leo in her life, there were endless things to wonder about—not just the keys.

I
T WAS A NIAGARA OF CONDOMS when Jane opened her locker before Pre-Calc. Hundreds upon hundreds of XXLs in square packets cascaded into the hall and formed a river of jagged rapids on the floor. She slammed the door shut, disappeared into the girls’ bathroom, and started to cry. The temptation to scratch something awful into the stall’s thick pink paint was enormous, but Jane wasn’t sure what she’d even write.

She hadn’t been in there more than ten minutes before she heard a voice.

“Jane. It’s Principal Jackson. Collect yourself and come to my office.”

She took some toilet paper and blew her nose, then came out of the stall and went to the mirrors. She wiped the tears off her cheeks, took a deep breath, and headed out.

Harvey Claverack was already in Jackson’s office. Cliff was there, too. “I’m telling you,” Harvey said, “I didn’t do it!”

Cliff said, “Me neither.”

“And I’m telling you that I don’t believe you.” Principal Jackson was twirling back and forth on her rotating desk chair. “You’ve been orchestrating a campaign of intimidation based on this nonsense about your grandfather and that dumb carousel horse and I want it to stop.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Harvey said, and the principal snapped, “I know what goes on in my school, Harvey.” Which was a surprise to Jane. Why did the principal even know or care? And how?

Principal Jackson opened a desk drawer and pulled out the naked baby doll that Jane had dumped in the trash.

“But it wasn’t us,” Cliff said.

“This is your first and only warning,” the principal said. “One more misstep and you’re both suspended. Now apologize to Jane and go.”

“Sorry, Jane,” Harvey said, in a sort of fake singsong.

“Yeah,” Cliff said. “Sorry.”

The whole scene was pathetic. It wasn’t like they meant it. Though their denials had been rather convincing, even Jane had to admit.

“Now go!” Principal Jackson pointed to the door. “All of you!”

“I want to meet with your father or your grandfather,” Jane said to Harvey’s and Cliff’s backs in the hallway, and they both turned. “I want to talk to someone else. Someone other than the two of you.”

“And why should we let you do that?” Cliff said.