Dreamland Social Club (3 page)

“Come on,” her father said, appearing with a small brown bag in his hand, and Marcus on his heels. “Let’s keep moving. And stay close.”

 

They passed a small fenced-in amusement park called WONDERLAND—its entrance marked by a big sign featuring Alice herself and the Mad Hatter. The hat-wearing troll—
Was that what he was? A troll?—
was pouring tea as if to light the letters of the sign with neon green liquid. Jane watched the whirl and twirl of lights on the rides behind them. It was a crammed array of kiddie rides (planes, trains, ladybugs, elephants) and ticket booths and bigger rides like bumper cars and pirate ships—all the sort of rides Jane knew could be folded up and rolled up onto a truck in a matter of minutes. Not real rides—permanent rides—like her dad used to build. Still, people didn’t seem to mind. She could feel the collective buzz, like a mosquito by her ear, of families having fun.

Past Wonderland, there appeared to be a gap in boardwalk amusements, but then Jane spotted the banner hanging in front of a lot splattered with paint. SHOOT THE FREAK, it read, and a few people with guns were firing paint pellets into a sort of obstacle course of trash. There, a target—a real live person wearing padded gear and mask, all of which gave him the look of an intergalactic umpire—swayed back and forth, halfheartedly moving his painty shield, which looked like the top of a trash can.

“What on earth?” her father said. And Marcus said simply, “Cool.” Which was pretty much how Marcus reacted to everything, a fact that infuriated his sister no end.

A massive blue Ferris wheel with lit pink letters reading WONDER WHEEL at its center came into view when she turned to follow her father again, its red lights blinking in a pattern extending from the heart of the wheel to its outer edges. For a second, she thought about suggesting they go on it. But they didn’t do that kind of thing anymore.

They walked on, and then Jane heard a clack and cascading screams and turned and saw an old white roller coaster.

Marcus had made her watch an old B movie,
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,
right after they’d learned about Preemie’s house. In it a frozen carnivorous dinosaur is thawed by an atomic explosion at the North Pole and starts to travel south, leaving a path of destruction along the Atlantic coast. The mayhem culminates at the fictional Manhattan Beach amusement park, a stand-in for Coney, where the beast is injected with a radioactive isotope and dies a fiery death among the hills and valleys of the Cyclone.

No, she didn’t think so.

A car started clanking up the coaster’s first climb and then went plummeting, and Jane could almost feel her own stomach drop.

They walked maybe one more block, and then her father stopped and turned around to head back in the direction from which they’d come. Jane looked farther down the boardwalk, not wanting to turn around, and saw the crowds thin out. There were no lights, no more amusements, no nothing. “That’s it?” she said with some irritation.

This was
Coney Island
.

A place that was supposedly famous.

A tourist destination.

There had to be
more
.

“Yes,” her father said. “I’m pretty sure that’s it. I was only ever here a few times with your mother, but there was never much going on. Less so, even, back then.”

“What a shithole,” Marcus said.

“Watch it,” her father said, then: “If I remember correctly, it’s this way.”

Back in the thick of the amusements again after a few minutes of walking, her father turned off the boardwalk and led them down a wide street with cars parked perpendicularly down a center aisle, past some delis and a big Coney Island Gift Shop with an assortment of Coney T-shirts in the windows. They were heading toward a sign for Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, and Jane, who was starving, thought,
Hot dogs? We’re celebrating with hot dogs?
She studied the long lines trailing out the restaurant doors, and saw people standing around eating dogs and thick crinkly fries, and desperately hoped her father had other plans.

He did. They crossed the street away from Nathan’s. Jane heard the rumbling clack of a subway train and figured they were leaving Coney for dinner. The station had big arched windows and looked newer, shinier, than everything around it, almost like it was promising you that there were nicer places at the other end of the line. But her father turned away from the station and turned down a different street and approached a creamy stucco building. The name, Mancuso’s, stretched across the threshold in tiles by their feet, and the wooden front doors featured stained glass that highlighted the letter M.

Inside they waited as a hostess seated another party: a laughing family of four. It was a busy restaurant and sort of fancy—high ceilings, big windows with rich-looking drapes, linen tablecloths, fancy dishes—but all Jane could see was a huge octopus clinging to the ceiling beams. When it was their turn to be led to a table, Jane had to be careful not to trip and fall.
What was it made of? Had it ever actually been alive?

“This place is sort of famous,” her father said, and Jane looked away from the octopus and said, “What for?”

“I don’t know.” The hostess handed them menus as they sat down. “Just being here, maybe. And surviving.”

“Surviving what?” Jane asked, and her dad said, “So much time. So much change.”

He turned his eyes down to look at his menu, but Jane just looked at her brother, wondering whether he wanted to say what she did:
What about us? Are
we
going to survive?

“God, it’s weird to be here.” Her father put his menu down and sighed. “Your mother was planning on bringing you two here—we both were—right after the coaster opening in Tokyo. She hadn’t wanted to come back for a long time but finally decided you should meet your grandfather, at least, and get to know Coney Island, and her friends and all.”

He shook his head and said, “We had the plane tickets booked and everything.”

Jane looked at him with raised eyebrows. This was the first she’d ever heard of this supposed big family vacation, and she absorbed the news as a sort of loss. Her mother had wanted to bring her here to show her around—maybe even show her off—and now that would never happen. Her grandparents were dead and her mother’s friends—well, who even knew who they were or if any of them were still here.

“Do you remember any of her friends’ names?” Jane asked, afraid that at any moment the portal would close again. “Anything?”

“I don’t.” He shook his head. “I wish I did.” Then he said, “I wish I’d known your grandparents better, too—at least I think I do. But there was never any time.”

Jane’s parents had met when her mother was in art school in Manhattan, and they’d eloped to Paris just a few weeks after she graduated. They’d honeymooned in the French countryside, and her mother had fallen in love with France and they’d decided not to go back to New York right away. So they traveled for a while and then Jane’s father, who already had his engineering degree and a few ride designs under his belt, got a job at the company that was designing the rides for Euro Disney. Her mother got hired as a caricature artist at the park, and then after that they’d jumped around the world for ten years before deciding—finally, in their mid-thirties—to have kids. At which point, they
all
followed her father’s coaster design work wherever it took them, until it didn’t anymore.

“Anyway,” her father said. “It’s just for one year.”

Jane’s eyes found the octopus on the ceiling again, and she felt a sort of empathy. She’d read somewhere that the average life span of an octopus was only one year. With the way her family moved around so much, she felt like she’d lived her own life in octopus years—each of her own sixteen years so distinct from the others that they might as well have each been lived by different people entirely. She’d be spending this one in her mother’s childhood home, though—and starting school at her mother’s high school the very next day.

It dawned on her that this was the chance she’d always hoped for without even realizing it, to get to know her mother better. Maybe there’d be old photos in glass cases and old yearbooks to flip through, maybe even some that would lead to friends, people who knew her. The very prospect made her so giddy she knew she wouldn’t sleep.

A
RE YOU ONE OF THE TRANSFERS I’m supposed to hand-hold?”

Jane turned from her new locker, where she was struggling with her combination lock, and saw swarms of kids milling in the hall but no one who was speaking to her. She’d been to the office to meet Principal Jackson—a tall, all-business African-American woman wearing a red suit—and to get her schedule and locker assignment, but no one had said anything about hand-holding.

“Down here.”

The goth dwarf came up to Jane’s waist. Her ears were pierced more times than it seemed an earlobe could sustain. Her charcoal-lined eyes were a fierce turquoise, the color of the ocean near the equator. This girl had been there, outside the bar, with Tattoo Boy the night before. Unless there were two goth dwarfs kicking around Coney Island, which, at this point, Jane realized wasn’t entirely unlikely. The goth’s tiny black T-shirt had a white silhouette of a girl’s profile, with teardrops falling from her eyes. For a second Jane felt like that girl; she wanted to jump into the shadows of the shirt.

“Are you done yet?” the small girl said, and Jane shook it off and said, “I’m Jane Dryden, if that’s who you’re looking for.”

“I wasn’t really paying attention but yeah, Dryden sounds right.” She put on a fake smile and said, faux-cheery, “Welcome to Coney Island High!”

Jane turned to her brother for saving, but Marcus had already struck up a conversation with a kid who looked a lot like him: floppy hair, broody eyes behind geeky-cool glasses. They were leaning against a row of lockers, deep in conversation. That quickly, that easily.

“
Yoo-hoo
. I’m Babette.”

Jane snapped to attention.

“And it was my understanding that you had a brother.”

It was a simple statement of fact, but it made Jane sad. That had been her understanding, too—for her whole life—but her brother had never been particularly brotherly.

Jane looked at Marcus again, and this time he looked back. He raised his eyebrows, and Jane gestured at Babette and he turned to his new friend, shook hands, and said, “See you later, man.” He came over to his sister’s side.

“I’m Babette and I’m supposed to show you to homeroom.”

Marcus said, “Excellent. I’m Marcus.” He had spent two seconds deciding what to wear on this, their first day at their new school, while Jane had been obsessing over her own outfit—namely which gray skirt to wear—for days.

Babette said, “Well, come on then,” and led Jane and Marcus down the hall and around a few corners to a pair of double doors. She threw them open with small arms and shouted over the din of the crowd inside the cafeteria: “It’s an experimental new homeroom approach. Based on some Quaker thing, or so they say. It’s supposed to teach us about community or how to be accountable for our own actions or something. You just sign in over there”—she pointed to a long table—“and sit wherever you belong.” She studied the Drydens and said, “Honestly, I have no idea where that could possibly be.”

Hundreds of students were talking in clusters, sitting at long tables. Marcus waved across the room and said, “I’m good,” and took off toward the guy he’d met in the hall. Babette jolted a bit, then said, “I guess that just leaves you.”

Story of my life
.

Babette took a deep breath and surveyed the room. “Here’s my parting advice. That table over there?” She pointed to a table of big, loud guys with shaved heads and, in some cases, big holes in their earlobes. Jane didn’t even want to imagine what they had those holes for, or how they’d been made.

“Those are the wannabe geeks, and not
geek
-geeks like smart. But geeks like
sideshow
geeks. Total wasters. They won’t give someone normal, like
you
”—she looked Jane over again—“the time of day if you’re lucky. In other words, stay off their radar.”

“Okay,” Jane said. “Thanks.”

Babette nodded solemnly and went to a table near the windows where she was greeted excitedly by a few of the other kids Jane had seen the night before, like the girl who could bend this way and that. Tattoo Boy, again in jeans and a black shirt, was sitting at the table in front of a large doll dressed in a tiny T-shirt and jeans, which seemed odd for all the obvious reasons, but then the doll turned around and started talking to Babette, and flipped her long curly blond hair. Was she some kind of genius toddler?

They were like something out of a movie—a special effects extravaganza—and the way they laughed so easily made Jane wish she had a second head, or a tail, or claws for hands.

Right then a black boy who had no legs slid past her on a skateboard. Dizziness swelled inside Jane’s head as she watched him give the crowd at Babette’s table a quick salute—a tap of the finger to the forehead—and stop to chat. It had to be some kind of optical illusion, a trick of the eye.

His body just . . .
ended
.

Having never really fit in anywhere, Jane had hoped she might here, in Brooklyn, a place known around the world for its diversity, its lack of pretense. And if she wasn’t destined to suddenly morph into a cheerleader or class president, it’d be nice to fit in among the misfits.

But she’d never seen misfits like
this
before.

Looking around the room for a potential in, a place to sit, Jane was as stumped as Babette. Frankly, there weren’t that many white kids; maybe three tables of them, all clustered near one another, a fact that Jane found sort of sadly predictable. From the Indian kids in London, the black kids in Ireland, and the white kids in Bahrain, Jane knew that minorities usually stuck together. She’d often been among them. But what would it mean if she just strolled over to the white kids here, assuming they’d accept her?