Dreamland Social Club (14 page)
Read Dreamland Social Club Online
Authors: Tara Altebrando
Tags: #Young Adult Fiction, #Family, #Siblings, #Social Themes, #New Experience, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Love & Romance
“What kind of crazy things?”
“We used to break into the amusement parks at like two, three in the morning.”
“You
did
?” Leo said. It was the first he’d spoken the whole time.
did
?” Leo said. It was the first he’d spoken the whole time.
“Sure. We used to climb to the top of the Thunderbolt after dark and smoke cigarettes.”
“What?” Leo said. “You’re kidding me.”
“What’s the Thunderbolt?” Jane asked.
“An old roller coaster that got knocked down.” Beth seemed to be enjoying the memories now. “And we’d try to climb the Parachute Jump, but we never got very far before we either got scared or got caught.”
Leo was shaking his head and smiling.
“Your mother was a bad influence.” Beth smiled. “In the best possible way. Sneaking beers onto the Wonder Wheel. She had keys to everything. I don’t even know how.” She turned to Leo. “But don’t go getting any ideas.”
Then sadness tugged at the corners of her eyes. She took the postcard into her hands and studied the little drawings. “She used to doodle all the time. She had this crazy journal she carried everywhere and she was always writing stuff down. Lyrics and quotes from poems, but mostly doodling. My God, the doodling.”
A deliveryman had come in, carrying some boxes. “I have to take this,” Beth said, and got up. Leo and Jane got up, too. “But please. Come and see me again. We’ll talk more. Okay?”
Jane nodded, and Beth went to sign for the delivery.
Stepping up close to the aquarium now, Jane looked up at the tallest kelp plant, a deep orange underwater tree that stretched high to the top of the tank. Just above her head she noticed a starfish clinging to the glass and she put her hand up, pressed it against the glass, against the five points. She thought she saw one of them twitch.
Jane looked under the mattress and up on that high shelf of the closet and behind all the drawers in the dresser and then under the bed, by the springs, but didn’t find a journal anywhere. She went down to Birdie’s Bavarian Bar and looked in the chest of clothes, and still nothing. No journal.
She brought her mermaid book into bed that night and reread the inscription.
My dear daughter, I used to be a mermaid once so I know that mermaids are good at a lot of things, like keeping secrets. I hope your life is full of them. Love, Mom.
My dear daughter, I used to be a mermaid once so I know that mermaids are good at a lot of things, like keeping secrets. I hope your life is full of them. Love, Mom.
It was such a weird inscription. But mostly, it was a ridiculously weird book. A book full of pictures of mermaids.
The Mermaid’s Secret.
Who
publishes
that?
publishes
that?
Who, besides her kooky mother, would actually buy it?
The pages were mostly filled with illustrations, of course. Mermaids didn’t really exist. And some of them were ridiculously over the top. Because would mermaids really find it practical to have hair that long? Would they really wear makeup? For the first time Jane regretted that this was the one book her mother had left her, the one book she’d come to cherish above all others. It was possible mermaids were good at keeping secrets, but this book held none. There were no life lessons to be learned in its pages, no inspiration to be found. It was story-less.
She flipped and flipped until she found what she suddenly knew she’d find: the same photo that appeared on the postcard her mother had sent Leo’s mother.
The seahorse.
Being kissed by a mermaid.
Right there on page 45.
She remembered, when she was younger, not understanding why there were regular women in old-fashioned bathing suits pictured in a book about mermaids, but she’d never bothered to read the captions before. This one said “Mermaids at Weeki Wachee, 1959.”
Setting the book aside, Jane picked up the mermaid doll and wound it and still no music came out.
Song-less.
Only then did she study the underside of the doll and discover the stitches—a rip that had been repaired. Thinking that odd, she got out a pair of scissors and snipped the thread away. Because maybe the doll could be fixed, made to sing, after all.
Reaching into the mermaid’s innards, she felt something hard and was able to hook her finger on it. The keys she pulled out hung on a small silver hoop, and each one was labeled with a small taped-on piece of paper. One said “Jump,” one said “Thunder,” a third said “Wonder,” and another “Bath.”
We used to climb the Parachute Jump.
We used to smoke on the Thunderbolt.
She held them in her hand and felt a sort of completion in her heart, like her body had been trying to draw a circle for years and had finally connected two points.
Thunder. Jump. Wonder. Bath.
Mermaids were good at keeping secrets after all.
U
nder the too-white lights of the Rite Aid, it’s hard to know what time it is, let alone what kind of makeup will look good on me. At a party. Tonight. If tonight ever gets here. A check of my watch reveals that only a minute has passed since I last checked.
nder the too-white lights of the Rite Aid, it’s hard to know what time it is, let alone what kind of makeup will look good on me. At a party. Tonight. If tonight ever gets here. A check of my watch reveals that only a minute has passed since I last checked.
Time can be a trickster.
Memory, too.
Can I remember, for example, anyone ever teaching me how to apply makeup?
No.
Of course not.
But my mother. Now there was a woman who knew how to wear makeup. Though why I think that I’m not even sure. Except that I remember jars of goo, cases of tiny squares of shimmering colors, and soft brushes—big and small—wherever we lived. I remember her brushing makeup onto my cheeks and onto my eyelids when I begged. I remember looking in the mirror then and seeing nothing there and being a little bit confused but still feeling pretty. Like her, with her silver-dusted eyelids and ruby red lips. Now I know she was faking.
I pick up a pale shade of fleshy cover-up, some rosy blush, and a lip gloss that looks sort of like the color of my lips but with a bit of sparkle. I grab mascara but skip the rest of the eye stuff, since I don’t know what to do with it anyway, and honestly have no idea how any person can pull off silver eyelids.
I swing by hair products and grab some of those: a pomade that claims to “Energize,” a gel that smooths, a mousse that adds body. I’ve got all my bases covered.
Hands full, I head toward the register, surprised to see Halloween candy, since it’s still only September. I consider buying decorations for the house—paper cutouts of pumpkins with demonic faces carved out of them and of witches with gap teeth on broomsticks—but decide not to. It’s pretty much fright night at Preemie’s house every night. I’ve all but stopped going downstairs after dark to get water lest my eyes fall on that horse, with its glassy eyes and bared teeth.
Shivers.
But the question of the horse is no longer the priority.
Thunder. Jump. Wonder. Bath.
These are the new priorities, as is not making a complete fool of myself at this party.
I recognize a guy from school a few spots ahead of me, already at the checkout counter, and I make the mistake of noticing that he is buying condoms. The thought that some of my classmates are having sex, will maybe be having sex tonight, fills me with dread and makes me a little queasy. I’ve only ever kissed a boy once. In London. So it wasn’t even that long ago but it feels that way, and I have to work to remember his name, the way I’ve been working so hard to remember so many other things.
Martin.
Martin Booth.
It wasn’t an especially good kiss and I didn’t really care that much at the time; I just thought it would be nice to get that out of the way. The first. It was, after all, past due. But now I sort of wish it had been better. Or that I’d waited for someone else.
For, let’s face it, Leo.
There is a problem with the line. An old lady is arguing about the price of a certain kind of toilet paper and the cashier is patiently explaining that the circular the old lady is holding is not the current one and that the sale was for the four-pack not the six-pack of rolls anyway. Nothing in the whole store seems to be moving except for their lips and even those seem so . . . very . . . slow. I hope I never become the kind of person who will keep a girl from party prep on account of the price of t.p.
Because I can’t bear to just wait—it makes time go even more slowly—I double back to the hair products and put back the tub called “Energize,” now that I’ve had ample opportunity to actually notice its exorbitant price. After that, I swing down the aisle that holds stomach remedies, but the queasiness has passed now that the guy from school and his condoms are no longer in the store.
I keep moving.
Movement makes time go faster.
The cashier calls for a manager through the store intercom, so I decide to wander a few more aisles. Maybe I’m forgetting something.
Toothpaste. Check.
Razors. Check.
Shampoo. Conditioner. A-okay.
On my way back to the cashier, eventually, I pass through the Halloween section again, this time noticing the costumes. A pirate. Mickey Mouse. Tinker Bell. And a mermaid. And then I am remembering that I am lying on my big, blue beanbag chair as my mother wraps a sheet around my legs.
We are playing mermaids, and the beanbag is supposed to be a seashell, my favorite place to lounge and watch the ocean go by. When my legs are wrapped and the sheet tied with some kind of scarf to help make a fin at the bottom, my mother wraps her own legs up, too, and lies down on the floor in front of me.
“We’re not like other women,” she sings as she starts to fan herself with a folding fan. “We don’t have to clean an oven.”
I’m giggling and pretending to fan myself, too.
“And we nev-er will grow old. . . .” she sings. “We’ve got the world by the tail!”
My journal is in the next room—the kitchen—and I get up and shuffle over to get it because I want to draw a mermaid in it, but as soon as I turn to bring it back to my shell, my mother says, “Eh-eh-eh. It’ll get wet.”
“But I want to draw a mermaid,” I say. I can’t write a lot of letters yet, only the four that spell my name. So my journal is full of pictures, and I only keep it at all because my mother keeps one and it makes me feel grown-up.
“A self-portrait,” my mother says with a laugh. “Great idea. But you’ll have to do it when you’re above water.” She’s still fanning herself and smiling.
“But we live down here.”
She gets up and shimmies into the kitchen and comes back with a clear plastic Ziploc bag. “Keep it in here to keep it dry,” she says. “And we’ll find a good place to hide it.”
“What about behind that shell?” I say, pointing to an ashtray on the coffee table.
“Let’s look around,” she says, and she uses her arms to pretend to swim around the room. “I bet there’s a submarine around here somewhere or a shipwreck or a . . .”
I am struggling again in Rite Aid now.
With a word.
The word at the end of the memory that is missing.
And in a moment I am on line again and I am afraid to look at my watch.
Part Two
THE KEYS TO CONEY ISLAND
CHAPTER one
I
N HER ROOM JANE PUT ON some cover-up, blush, and lip gloss. She put a little goop on her fingers and ran it through her hair, then slipped into Birdie’s burgundy dress. She put some money, her keys, and her lip gloss into a beaded purse she’d found in Birdie’s Bavarian Bar and looked for her father to tell him she was going out. When she couldn’t find him or Marcus, she left a note on the kitchen table, then headed out to meet Babette.
N HER ROOM JANE PUT ON some cover-up, blush, and lip gloss. She put a little goop on her fingers and ran it through her hair, then slipped into Birdie’s burgundy dress. She put some money, her keys, and her lip gloss into a beaded purse she’d found in Birdie’s Bavarian Bar and looked for her father to tell him she was going out. When she couldn’t find him or Marcus, she left a note on the kitchen table, then headed out to meet Babette.
Jane walked away from the boardwalk toward Surf Avenue and turned right, then walked past Nathan’s and the Coney Island Museum and a bunch of stores. She stopped in front of Luna Park Furniture with a seed of excitement, but then all she saw inside were leather couches and ornate end tables and kitchen tables made of something mirrored and something black. It didn’t seem fair that such an ordinary store could bear the name of Luna Park. Then again, she was named Luna, and she wasn’t exactly a dazzling specimen either. She felt more like one than she had in years, though—only wished that it were a different night, a different era, that she were on her way to Luna Park—
Electric Eden
—and not the projects. She passed a few creepy-looking men and tried to push down her fear by imagining a dazzling world of lights, and shimmering lakes, and ladies in gowns and men with top hats, all on their way to Trip to the Moon or Shoot the Chutes, and suddenly wished her brother had come with her.
Electric Eden
—and not the projects. She passed a few creepy-looking men and tried to push down her fear by imagining a dazzling world of lights, and shimmering lakes, and ladies in gowns and men with top hats, all on their way to Trip to the Moon or Shoot the Chutes, and suddenly wished her brother had come with her.
There was no sign of Babette in front of the McDonald’s where they’d planned to meet. Big double arches came up out of the ground in front and then disappeared into the building’s roof, and Jane peeked inside to see if the yellow structures, like huge, B-movie spider legs, continued there. The McDonald’s definitely seemed like it was out of another era, just not the right one. Maybe built in the fifties. Babette pulled on her arm.
“Okay. I think I like.” She twirled a finger. “Turn around.”
Jane complied and Babette said, “A lot of people couldn’t really pull if off, the vintage thing. But for you, it sort of works. It turns you from sort of boring into sort of, I don’t know, edgy.”
Now that was a compliment Jane could get behind. She knew she wasn’t beautiful or pretty or, despite Leo’s claim to the contrary,
cute
. But edgy had a ring to it. It was how she felt inside, too.
cute
. But edgy had a ring to it. It was how she felt inside, too.
The projects didn’t seem all that different from the other apartment complexes around Coney. All the faces they passed as they wound their way down a few paths between buildings were black, but that was the only difference Jane could see, and she still didn’t really get it. What a “project” even was.
They got in an elevator, then came out an outdoor corridor where Babette rang the doorbell of Apartment 12-09. A gorgeous guy—Babette had been right about that, at least—answered the door and looked at Jane in confusion.
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