Dreamland Social Club (9 page)

Something about biology labs had always made Jane a little nauseated, and this lab at Coney Island High certainly wasn’t going to help matters. It had that smell she hated—of something antiseptic and half dead—and there were jars along the far wall that she dared not look at too closely. The cow’s eye was bad enough. But when Jane’s partner showed up and it turned out to be Venus Anders—a walking, talking tangle of red dreads and rose tattoos, the girl equivalent of Tattoo Boy (who was not, to Jane’s disappointment, in this class)—Jane felt like the cow’s eye might be the least of her problems. At least she only had lab once a week.

“So, what’s your deal anyway?” Venus said as they started to line up a bunch of equipment they needed, though Jane had dared not read the full instructions on the handout in front of her: scalpel, magnifying glass, petri dish.

“No deal.”

“Where are you from?” An ink vine with black roses on it climbed up her neck. More roses peeked out from under her black long-sleeved shirt, touching the knuckles on her hands.

“Nowhere, really,” which was how it felt. “I mean, sort of all over.”

“Your grandfather cheated me out of a stuffed animal once.” In between words, she was chewing on a fingernail that had been painted black. “When I was little. He used to tell me to go play in traffic.”

Jane knew she had to stand her ground. She’d been confronted by the alpha female in pretty much every school she’d ever transferred into, which had always seemed strange to her, as if she were any kind of threat at all. She said, “You don’t seem like the stuffed-animal type.”

Venus studied her, not sure how to react. After a moment, she said, “Not the point.”

Jane was about to say, “What is?” but got distracted by the ink on Venus’s skin, wondering how deep it went. Venus said, “So you think you’ve seen Leo’s seahorse before?”

Jane fought to hide the sting of what felt like a betrayal. “That’s right.”

“What about
my
tattoos?” Venus rolled up her sleeves. “Have you seen mine before?”

“No,” Jane said. “I don’t think so.”

All at once a dream she’d had the night before—a nightmare, really—came back. She’d been struggling to breathe underwater. The seahorse had been there, staring her down. For a second she had thought she’d be able to ride it up out of the water to safety, so she’d grabbed onto it, only to find out it wasn’t real but was made of plastic, a toy. It wouldn’t save her, couldn’t save her, and she awoke as if gasping when breaking through to the surface of the sea.

“What about these?” Venus turned around and lifted up the back of her shirt, revealing a whole garden of ink. Wildflowers reached up toward her shoulder blades; lilies floated on what seemed to be a small pond. If you blocked out the red, shiny bra straps cutting across it, it was beautiful in a shocking sort of way. Jane couldn’t help but think that you just shouldn’t do that to skin. “Familiar?”

Jane, suddenly self-conscious about staring at Venus’s bare skin and bra strap, said, “No, pull your shirt down.”

“Yeah,” Venus smacked her gum and fixed her top. “I didn’t think so. Just Leo’s.”

“Right,” Jane said. “Just Leo’s.”

Then Venus said, “Go figure,” and the teacher, whom Jane had just met and had already forgotten, probably for good, called the class to attention as Jane reconsidered her dream. The seahorse wasn’t going to save her, and if Leo was already blabbing about her questions, he was unreliable at best.

Only she could save herself. She’d have to go back to the yearbook, to the original plan of finding the names of other people who were in her mother’s club. Of seeing if she could track any of them down.

 

Walking out onto the beach at day’s end, after a quick stop at the library, where she had slipped her mother’s yearbook into her bag undetected, Jane sat down on the sand. She thought about looking through the yearbook right then, but didn’t want to get caught now, not after she’d successfully gotten it out of the building. So she took out some of the required reading for English Lit. Opening her book to a Wordsworth poem, she read,

But it was way too nice out for homework and besides, she’d already read that poem at least three gazillion times before, at three different schools. She pretty much felt like that cloud. But without the daffodils. The good news, she realized then, was that tomorrow was Friday. It appeared she would survive the week.

She put down the book and watched a group of older girls and guys—like in their twenties—sitting nearby on the sand. The girls wore pigtails and sunglasses half the size of their faces; one of the guys wore a T-shirt that said “Ithaca is GORGES.” The boys were building sand castles while the girls read glossy magazines.

What
would
Jane wear to a party? She
did
look like she’d been dipped in gray paint—day after day after day—and for a second, she closed her eyes and dreamed that if she dove into the ocean, her gray clothes would all fall off and fade away and she’d resurface in lavish new garments in coral colors. What
had
her mother meant when she’d said she’d been a mermaid once? Probably nothing at all.

Spying Babette’s newspaper in her bag, Jane pulled it out and scanned the page it was folded to. Her eyes landed on a headline that read NO MORE GO FOR CONEY’S GO KARTS.

She read that last bit again and thought she might burst.

Leo was suddenly sitting next to her. “What’s up, Looky Lou?”

She looked at him askance as she put the paper back in her bag so she could show it to her father later. Who
was
this guy?

He nodded toward the sand castles. “You going to join the fun?”

Jane watched a bucket full of upturned sand crumble in a series of small landslides. “Wouldn’t be a very good Looky Lou if I did.”

They were quiet for a moment; a seagull walked closer, presumably to see if they had any food.

“What does that even mean?” she said.

“What?” Leo smiled. “Looky Lou?”

“No,” she said. “Ithaca is GORGES.”

“Not worth explaining,” Leo said. “But suffice it to say, the hipster influx is not a good sign. It means the gentrification of Coney has begun.”

Jane had never heard the word
gentrification
before. “What’s that?”

“It’s a good thing you’ve never lived here before and have a reason for not knowing this stuff,” Leo said. “Otherwise I’d be starting to wonder right about now, whether you were sort of, I don’t know”—he rooted around for a word—“daft.”

Daft?
It was one thing she most certainly wasn’t. “Are you going to explain or not?”

“You’re cute when you’re pissed off.” He smiled, then leaned back to rest on his elbows; Jane thought she might die from the
cute
. “It
means
that the hipsters and yuppies and rich people seem to have recently woken up and said, Hey, wait a second, Coney’s
awesome
. Why is it so
working class
?”

“And that’s bad?”

“Yes, that’s bad.” Leo was exasperated. “Because it means the price of everything is going to go up and the little businesses that have kept Coney alive all this time are going to get pushed out or bought out. It’s the beginning of the end. The Go Karts were only the start of it.”

Jane just looked out at the sun’s white reflection on the waves and thought about telling him about her idea, how her father could maybe help turn things around by bringing more business to the area if the city bought one of his coasters—maybe even a whole theme park. But then Leo said, “Now that you’re landed gentry you probably don’t even care.”

“It was just a dopey puzzle piece,” she said, and Leo shook his head and said, “I’m talking about the house. Preemie’s house.”

“Oh.” Of course. Maybe she
was
daft. “I don’t technically own it yet.”

“Ah, but you will. And when you do, someone will come along and offer you more money than you can refuse so they can make way for some big-box store or some other crap, and you’ll take it.”

Her head hurt. “Isn’t that sort of how it works?”

“Doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Jane couldn’t argue with that, not on the spot anyway, so she said, “I’m sorry for what I said about the boardwalk today.”

“What, you mean, how the Anchor should be knocked down?” He was smiling.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jane dared. “But the Anchor sort of looks like it’s going to fall down on its own.”

He smiled and elbowed her. “I could say the same thing about your house.”

“Touché,” Jane said. But it was different. She didn’t love the idea of Leo’s father owning such a dump. She felt like it said something about the kind of guy Leo was, or would end up being, though she wasn’t sure what.

Leo wiped sand off his hands. “Have you even
been
to the Anchor?”

Jane shook her head. “Of course not.”

“We’re going to have to remedy that situation one of these days.”

“If you say so,” she said with an edge of sarcasm.

“I say so.” He ran a hand through his hair. “And shit, I have to find that postcard for you. Sorry. I looked around the house. I swear I’ve seen it recently, but I can’t think of where.”

“It’s no big deal,” she felt the need to say, then wanted to take it back. She felt like she wanted to ask him to ask his parents if they’d known her mother, but then she felt like she was already asking too much. The guy barely knew her. Finding the postcard was good enough for now.

“Either way.” Leo stood up and wiped sand off his jeans, and said, “So I guess I’ll see ya.”

“Yeah.”

He turned to go but then stopped and said, “Actually, Jane?”

She looked up.

“Do you think maybe I could see it sometime, Preemie’s old Coney stuff?”

“Of course.” She looked at her watch, wondered whether anyone was home, whether it mattered.

Leo laughed and said, “I don’t mean right this second, but you know. Just say when.”

He backed away a few steps before turning away, before Jane had a chance to whisper
when
.

Like
Orphans
, this film—labeled
‘King’ & ‘Queen’ the Great Diving Horses, 1899
—was grainy and black-and-white, and when the projector whirred to life in the quiet attic, it was hard to believe, somehow, that the images were real.

Jane sat on the dusty floor in her pajamas and watched one horse and then a second one plunge off a high platform into a pool below, making a huge black-and-white splash. She tried to imagine what it felt like for an animal of that size to hit the water with so much velocity, and imagined it hurt. Maybe even a lot.

She watched the reel again, this time looking for a trainer with a prod, maybe something electrical and sharp. But the horses had jumped on their own. Seemingly, no one had forced them.

Jane felt like maybe she knew what King and Queen had been thinking, if they’d been
thinking
at all. Because Leo—who wanted to take her to a bar, who wanted to come up to the attic, who made her feel like
staying
—seemed dangerous, but all she wanted to do was dive in.

S
MOKY AIR DREW JANE TOWARD the back window of her room on Saturday around lunchtime, and she saw her brother out in the yard, manning a small charcoal grill. Since she was up to the letter R in the yearbook and still hadn’t found any more members of the school’s original Dreamland Social Club, she set the task aside and went downstairs and out the back door—swirls of wrought iron with a screen that let cool air pass—and stepped over all sorts of old, dead foliage, then sat in a black metal chair near the grill. She stretched out her legs and said, “What’s the most fun you’ve ever had?”