Dreamland Social Club (4 page)

She watched the guy with no legs slide on his skateboard away from Babette’s table across the room, where he joined a large table of other black kids. Climbing up onto the seat bench, he shook hands with the guy next to him, then they laughed about something and he did a sort of weird pop-and-lock move with his arms. Jane couldn’t help but think he looked like he was sinking in quicksand, and had to resist the urge to run over and pull him up. Watching him and his friends, she wondered again: What would it mean if she walked over to
his
table? Or Babette’s?

There were only a few minutes before the first bell anyway, so she went back out to explore the hallways, to see if there were any old trophies or photos in glass cases. When she found none, she studied a bulletin board on one of the walls. There were signs for a math club and a science club, which had been her extracurricular staples all along the way. But there were some signs for clubs she’d never heard of before. One advertising the meeting of TEENS FOR THE REDEVELOPMENT OF CONEY ISLAND had been vandalized with a black marker; someone had scrawled CAPITALIST PIGS across the printed type. Another sign read, simply,

Whatever that meant.

 

Jane was barely in her seat, way in the back of classroom 231, behind the giant she’d seen in homeroom, before a hip-looking older guy wearing jeans, a boiler hat, and suspenders got up from one of the student desks, walked to the front of the room, and said, “Okay, field trip! Let’s go.”

The writing on the blackboard said “Topics in Coney Island History with Mr. Simmons,” and Jane thought it strange. She’d never been to a high school with a local history class before, but then she’d also never been to school with a giant and a goth dwarf and a kid with no legs. The room was decorated with old postcards and photos having to do with Coney Island—some news clippings, too—but now was clearly not the time to try to explore it.

Feet shuffled and squeaked as everyone got up to follow Mr. Simmons out the door. Jane spotted Tattoo Boy in the chaos and her heart pounded harder. He was in her first class, a junior like her. And the seahorse tattoo was just as familiar today as it had been yesterday. It was more car-toonish than his other tattoos, like it was based on something fake, but that didn’t help Jane to place it.

Babette was there, too, and Jane wasn’t sure yet how she felt about that. Her assigned escort seemed sort of like a know-it-all, but then maybe that was exactly the kind of person Jane needed to befriend.

It was early, barely 8:00 a.m., and fine mist clung to the air as they walked along the boardwalk past shuttered amusements and closed-up clam shacks. Mostly, Jane just kept her head down, watching the warped and splintered boards under her feet, until they arrived at a building marked CONEY ISLAND MUSEUM. She trailed her classmates up a narrow staircase and then into the reception area.

Mr. Simmons led them into the main room—past walls of old posters for something called the “Mermaid Parade” and photos of human oddities who’d performed in Coney’s famous sideshows over the years and of beachgoers in different eras. In a far corner, some old beach chairs and metal lockers sat below a bunch of old signs for different bathhouses. Jane wanted to linger on every item, every detail, sit in every chair—maybe even look for her mother in the pictures on those parade posters, because maybe that had been what she’d meant in her note about having been a mermaid once—but Jane didn’t want to get left behind.

Finally, people started to gather around Mr. Simmons, who had stopped near a large television.

“We came here today to talk about Topsy,” he said. “She was an elephant that worked at Luna Park, one of the great amusement parks of the turn of the century here on Coney, where she killed three men before she was sentenced to execution. That third victim, mind you, tried to feed dear Topsy a lit cigarette.”

Tattoo Boy said, “Ouch,” and some of the boys around him laughed. Jane closed her eyes and saw his tattoo in her mind’s eye.

“Ouch indeed.” Mr. Simmons stroked a goatee that didn’t look like it had the nerve to be a beard. “Now, the death penalty for men had very recently been changed from hanging to the electric chair, so hanging Topsy was deemed cruel and unusual.”

Mr. Simmons started to walk among his students. “Enter Thomas Edison, who was competing with George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla for the contract to build the nation’s electric grid. He decided to use his competitor’s alternating current to execute Topsy, in order to show how deadly AC electricity could be.

“And”
—Mr. Simmons paused dramatically here—“he decided to film it so he could show it to audiences around the country.”

“Now”—he waved an arm toward a bunch of chairs set up in the middle of the room, facing the TV—“those of you who would like to can take a seat and view Edison’s film. Those of you who don’t want to watch such a disturbing thing—again, we’re talking about
the electrocution of an elephant
—can step back out into the hall.”

Jane had never been on a field trip this odd and thought she should probably bolt, but then Tattoo Boy said, “I’ve seen it before; I’ll bite.” He sat beside Mr. Simmons, and then his disciples moved to fill in seats around him.

A bunch of kids walked out into the hall and a bunch of others sat down and then Babette took a seat beside Tattoo Boy. Under the glare of the museum’s overhead spotlights her black hair took on a bluish sheen, while her skin looked so white that Jane wondered whether she had somehow bleached it. She looked extraordinary right then—like a rare orchid or endangered bird. Jane only realized she was the only person left in the room standing when Babette shook her head, leaned toward Tattoo Boy, and said, “Five bucks says she won’t do it.”

There was something
wrong
with wanting to see such a thing.

Wasn’t there?

Tattoo Boy looked up at Jane, took a moment to study her, and said, “I’m not so sure I’d take that bet.”

 

The words “ELECTROCUTING AN ELEPHANT, A film by Thomas A. Edison” appeared, white letters on black, along with the year, 1903, and some kind of reference code: H26890. The type itself seemed to shiver on-screen, but Jane wondered if it was actually she who was shaking. Then Topsy—an elephant-shaped shadow in a mostly white shot—appeared, but the quality of the film was so bad that it was hard to know what was even going on. It looked like footage of an elephant in a blizzard, all whitewashed and chilling.

There seemed to be a cut then to another shot of Topsy, walking up closer to the camera. Then puffs of what could only be smoke—
yes, smoke
—appeared under Topsy’s feet and started rising to engulf her. She fell—forward, toward her right eye—as the smoke started to dissipate. A dark figure of a man rushed through the front of the frame as if in a panic and then it went to black.

It was over before Jane had even realized what was happening, before she could even work up the cry that had started to form deep in her gut.

“That’s it?” someone in class protested.

The lights came up and Tattoo Boy said, “That is some fucked-up shit.”

“Watch it, Mr. LaRocca,” Mr. Simmons said.

So his last name, at least, was LaRocca.

Mr. Simmons looked at his watch, then led everyone out into the hallway where the rest of the class was waiting. “Tonight I want you all to write two hundred words about why you felt compelled to watch—or not watch—what you had to know would be a disturbing film. If you hesitated in your choice, and I know who you are”—Jane averted her eyes from his gaze—“I want to know why you did that, too.”

The mist had lifted, unveiling a clear, hot morning. The ocean was churning up some white breakers right near the shore, and Jane stopped for a moment to watch and took a deep breath of salty air. It felt weird to be so close to the sea on a school day; putting a high school barely half a block from the beach seemed somehow cruel.

There was a fake palm tree on the beach right in front of her and it turned on: water sprayed from it, scattering a few startled birds. Jane tried to imagine wearing a swimsuit, dancing under the palm’s spray, but couldn’t yet wrap her head around it. She hadn’t been swimming in what felt like a lifetime—not since the Ocean Dome, not since her had mother died—and she wondered whether and when she’d ever do it again. Noting the cigarette butts and soda cans in the sand, she thought that this hardly seemed the place.

Jane trailed behind everyone else, looking for Tattoo Boy and thinking it wouldn’t be that big a deal to just ask him about his seahorse tattoo.

But there was no sign of him, so she just watched some of the other kids joking around and felt a strange sort of longing. Then one of them said, “Check out the new chick,” and nodded his head toward Jane. A few people turned, and Jane froze. A seagull landed on the railing a few feet away and seemed to study her to determine whether she was edible, peck-able.

“She looks like she’s been dipped in gray paint.”

A guy with a skull tattooed on his neck stepped out of a crowd, and Jane recognized him from the table of geeks that morning. He had piercings in his nose and eyebrows and huge, draping holes in his earlobes. Jane still wasn’t sure what a geek was, exactly, but figured she’d find out eventually. He said, “What were you doing at Preemie Porcelli’s house this morning?”

“I live there,” she said, and the geek started to circle her. Her legs had begun to vibrate but she didn’t think her fear was showing. Yet. She could see a few people in her peripheral vision, coming closer and listening in.

“You gotta be kidding me.” The geek turned and snorted at one of his friends. He smiled.

In that second, Jane dared to hope that maybe she was about to find a lead. Because if this guy knew Preemie, maybe someone he knew—someone older—knew her mother. Heck, for all she knew Coney Island High had a Preemie Porcelli Appreciation Association and she just hadn’t seen their sign on that bulletin board. Standing tall, with eyes clear and open, she said, “He was my grandfather.”

The geek looked at Jane, then spat not at her but in her general direction and said, “Your grandfather was a piece of shit.”

Tattoo Boy pushed his way up to the center of the action and said, to no one in particular, “What’d I miss?”

Jane had read a story the night before—in an old book in the living room—about an elephant that swam five miles from Coney Island to Staten Island, escaping from Luna Park, where he’d been part of some kind of circus-sideshow attraction. It had given her the creeps, that story, because what on earth would be so bad about a place that an
elephant
would swim five miles to escape it? But that had been before she’d seen Edison’s film. That had been before she’d started school. After barely an hour at Coney Island High, she looked out at the shimmering water and at the lump of land across the bay to the right. She wondered whether she could survive the swim herself.

 

“Come on,” Marcus said at day’s end. “I’ll take you on the Wonder Wheel.”

Jane had been fighting a sick feeling all day, but this brightened her mood considerably. So they headed out into a sweltering afternoon and over toward the Ferris wheel’s entrance and wound their way through a short series of metal barriers—like a corral for cows—and then a man working the ride said, “Swinging or stationary?”

Marcus looked at Jane, shrugged, then said, “Swinging” just before Jane got to say, “Stationary.”

The guy working the ride opened up the door of a big yellow-and-blue metal cage for them and they got in, sitting facing each other on hard benches, also painted yellow. They were locked in from the outside and soon floated way up high over Brooklyn. Jane saw the big brick buildings her father had warned them to stay away from— “Those are the projects,” he’d said, and Jane had nodded understanding though she’d never really understood that usage of the word—and she saw the Manhattan skyline—a small gray silhouette on the far horizon. She’d read in that book the night before that people used to say that you could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris from the top of the Wonder Wheel. You couldn’t, she saw now, and she felt foolish for being slightly disappointed.

“I don’t remember much,” she said finally. “But I remember her talking about this place like she loved it. Do you know what I mean?” She looked out at the water again and thought about life back in Tokyo so very long ago—the Ocean Dome, the funeral, the rest—and how it all seemed like a dream, too. But not even her dream, somebody else’s.

Marcus shrugged. “Sort of. I guess.”

In that moment Coney didn’t look as awful as it did from street level. From way up high in the sky, you could almost imagine it was cleaner, better.

Jane said softly, “I was thinking of trying to, you know, find some of her friends or something.”