Dreamland Social Club Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One - THE MERMAID’S SECRET

  CHAPTER one

  CHAPTER two

  CHAPTER three

  CHAPTER four

  CHAPTER five

  CHAPTER six

  CHAPTER seven

  CHAPTER eight

  CHAPTER nine

  CHAPTER ten

  CHAPTER eleven

  Part Two - THE KEYS TO CONEY ISLAND

  CHAPTER one

  CHAPTER two

  CHAPTER three

  CHAPTER four

  CHAPTER five

  CHAPTER six

  CHAPTER seven

  CHAPTER eight

  CHAPTER nine

  CHAPTER ten

  CHAPTER eleven

  Part Three - GABBA GABBA HEY

  CHAPTER one

  CHAPTER two

  CHAPTER three

  CHAPTER four

  CHAPTER five

  CHAPTER six

  CHAPTER seven

  CHAPTER eight

  CHAPTER nine

  CHAPTER ten

  CHAPTER eleven

  CHAPTER twelve

  CHAPTER thirteen

  CHAPTER fourteen

  A NOTE ABOUT HISTORY, CONEY, AND DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB . . .

  STEP RIGHT UP . . .

  DUTTON BOOKS

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PUBLISHED BY THE PENGUIN GROUP

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.• Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Tara Altebrando

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CIP Data is available.

  Published in the United States by Dutton Books,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  www.penguin.com/youngreaders

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51505-1

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Elena June

  I’m at the beach but it’s not the real beach; it’s indoors and it’s called the Ocean Dome.

  A blue sky with some white puffy clouds is painted on the ceiling, which is closed because it’s raining outside. Maybe it’s raining on the real beach, too, wherever that is.

  Far away, I think, but I’m not sure.

  There are tall curly waves in a big pool and waterslides and even a volcano. The red-orange lava is pretty, like liquid candy. I want to touch it but my mother says, “You can’t. It’s hot.” Then she smiles and says, “Or maybe it isn’t. What do I know?” She shrugs a pale shoulder.

  She is building sand castles but they’re not castles like for princesses. She says that one of the things she’s making—a square building of sand with a slippery-looking slide smoothed out on one side—is the Helter Skelter, and another building is the Monkey Theater. Even though I have just turned six years old, I don’t know what either of those things is, but I’m going down into the fake surf with our square yellow bucket to scoop up wet sand whenever she needs more of it. Soon she’s sculpting what looks to me like a low wall and not a very good one—she’s says it’s a boardwalk—on one side of her city of sand, and I ask her what this place is called.

  “Coney,” she says.

  When she finds a broken shell in the sand, she picks it up and says, “Huh. Nice touch.” Then she starts carving twirly-whirlies and stars and moons onto her buildings with the shell’s sharp edge.

  I go to get some more wet sand as she starts to work on something she calls Shoot the Chutes, which she says is sort of like the roller coasters my dad makes but way older, way more simple, dumping its cars down one measly hill into a lake, which she’ll build with a buried bucket of water. “It was really just a primitive flume,” she says.

  “Mom,” I ask her as I watch, “what’s Coney?”

  She dumps the bucket’s wet sand out and it holds its form nicely. “Home.”

  “Can we go there?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “Not anymore.”

  “Is it gone?”

  She looks up as the roof of the Ocean Dome splits the sky in two, cutting a cloud right in half. The real sun has decided to come out after all.

  “That’s right.” She puts on her sunglasses. “It’s gone.”

  Part One

  THE MERMAID’S SECRET

  CHAPTER one

  A FLOWER, JANE THOUGHT when she glimpsed the red tower in a gap of the jagged skyline of brick buildings.

  It looks like a steel flower.

  Hundreds of metal sticks, stuck together this way and that, reached up to the sky, toward the tower’s round bloom, where a light blinked brightly even in the midday sun.

  “Dad,” Jane said, “what’s that?”

  “That,” he said from the front seat of the cab, “is the old Parachute Jump ride. But it’s been shut down for years, so don’t go getting any crazy ideas.”

  Jane couldn’t think of a time when she’d ever had a crazy idea. “Like what?”

  He turned and gave her a wink. “Like strapping on a bungee cord and jumping off it.”

  “Yeah.” Jane’s brother, Marcus—one year older and beside her in the backseat—shook his head. “That would be so like her.”

  About twenty minutes and a million degrees before, the Dryden family had stepped out of the hazy August air surrounding them at the JFK arrivals terminal and into an air-conditioned yellow cab bound for Coney Island. Jane was pretty sure that Queens, where the airport was, and then Brooklyn, where Coney Island was, were the top two most ugly places she had ever seen—and that was saying something, considering how much she had moved around over the years. Most recently, they’d done a yearlong stint in London.

  Jane had hoped the scenery would improve when they left behind the highways and warehouses and marshland by the airport, but it only got worse as they followed signs that announced Coney Island, signs that said AMUSEMENTS and BEACH.

  Then she’d seen the tower—so pretty—and dared to hope.

  “Why was it shut down?” she asked.

  Her father shrugged, then said, “Parachutes on strings. Ocean winds. It just coul
dn’t have been safe.”

  Jane closed her eyes and tried to imagine what the ride would have looked like with parachutes falling like petals in the wind and people dangling from them like long-legged spiders.

  Probably not safe at all, no.

  But fun?

  Maybe.

  Either that or completely terrifying.

  When a building in the foreground blocked her view of the Parachute Jump, Jane’s eyes finally returned to ground level. The cab wound its way through a maze of local streets where the gas stations and car washes and run-down shops seemed endless. The buildings were mostly high-rise brick apartments and, on a more commercial street, small white row houses with green bars on the doors and windows, even the second-floor windows. It probably didn’t help Jane’s first impression of Coney that the sky was dingy, threatening. Eventually the driver gave up on the AC and opened a few windows; Jane could almost smell the gathering thunderstorm.

  The cab turned down Siren Street, and she felt her gut tighten at the blur of graffiti and soot stains on the brick of a row of abandoned houses. Dingy curtains still hung where there had once been windows; old rocking chairs sat eerily still on porches. Clearly, this was the wrong side of town.

  The cab stopped.

  They were right in front of a big old house that looked entirely out of place, like some tornado in Kansas had gotten carried away with itself. Jane’s father looked at a piece of paper in his hand—“It’s number two-thirteen”—and Jane found the crooked gold numbers near the door and confirmed that they’d found it.

  Wedged between an ancient-looking bait-and-tackle shop and a fenced-in lot overgrown with weeds, the house was shingled and beige with weird peaks and small windows. An air conditioner in the second floor’s right window was like a lone bucktooth; the uppermost window wore a top hat of black roof tiles. The front porch looked like it might fall off at any moment, and a gang of demented woodpeckers had apparently had their way with the glossy red paint on the front door. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded the front yard, where two cement strips indicated a driveway that dead-ended at the porch. On the gate to the drive hung three metal signs—NO PARKING, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE, and NEVER BLOCK DRIVEWAY. Next to them dangled a handmade wood sign that read, YES, ITS A DRIVEWAY. Jane had to fight the urge to add the apostrophe.

  “This isn’t exactly what I was picturing,” Marcus said, and Jane would have laughed if she wasn’t about to cry. It wasn’t that she’d thought they’d be living in an amusement park, exactly, but her mother had loved Coney Island—hadn’t she?—and Jane simply didn’t see anything around to love.

  “Your grandfather was what polite people called an eccentric,” Jane’s father said when he joined her on the sidewalk by the driveway signs, having paid the cab fare and gotten their luggage. “He went by the name Preemie.”

  “What?” Marcus laughed. “Why?”

  “There was an amusement park here in the early nineteen hundreds. Dreamland. Incubators had just been invented.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Your grandfather was part of a premature baby display when he was born.”

  Jane took a minute to process that: a premature baby display.

  She had only had two weeks to process the fact that she and Marcus had inherited a house from a grandfather they had never known, that they were leaving England and moving to the place where their mother had grown up.

  “That’s pretty sick,” Marcus said, and a thick drop of rain landed on his nose. Another one left a dark slash on his light blue shirt.

  “Dreamland burned down, and your grandfather was rescued by nurses and the whole thing made him sort of famous.” Their dad picked up a suitcase as the drops became increasingly, alarmingly abundant.

  “What was his real name?” Jane asked. Her father so rarely—like ever—talked about her mom or her mom’s family, and she wanted to keep him going.

  He took a moment to think and then said, “No idea.”

  The heavens opened up then, and they all got soaked by heavy pellets of warm water in the short distance between the curb and the front door. Her father’s wet hands struggled with the keys Preemie’s estate lawyer had sent, until finally the front door surrendered with a click. Dust clung to every surface and the air felt thick; the grime on the floors muted Jane’s footfalls as she stepped into the front hallway and put her dripping suitcase down. She swept water off her face with a wet hand and then wiped it off on her wet shirt. In the heat, her clothes had started to cling to her like a second skin.

  “Crack some windows, but don’t let the rain in,” her father said, coughing and swatting at the air.

  Fortunately, the squall had already blown past and the sun blared through a parting in the clouds. As light entered the living room, the air sprang to life with dancing dust, and items came out of shadow to reveal themselves. Faded black-and-white framed photographs lined the wall along the main staircase; a man whom Jane could only assume was her grandfather posed with famous people like Frank Sinatra, President Gerald Ford, Marilyn Monroe. Every end table and bookshelf—the fireplace mantel, too—boasted weird figurines, like a small Siamese totem pole in a glass case and a pewter statue of a two-headed squirrel.

  There was a wooden horse, like from a carousel, in one corner of the living room. Jane went for a closer look. It was white and shiny, with a fiery red mane, pale pink gums, white teeth, and a gold-and-orange muzzle. A piece of purple armor shielded its chest, while red tassels dangling from its pink-and-green saddle seemed to have been frozen in mid-leap. Its glassy brown eyes were so lifelike they gave Jane the creeps, but she soon found herself distracted, instead, by the thick metal chain that was wrapped multiple times around one of the horse’s legs and then looped over and under its red tail before snaking across the floor to twist around a radiator. It locked onto itself with a rusty padlock.

  “My word,” her father said from across the room, “it’s like a museum.”

  “Yeah,” Marcus said. “A crap museum.”

  “Why do you think this carousel horse is chained to the radiator?” Jane asked.

  Her father shook his head. “I can’t even begin to imagine.”

  As they uncovered old sofas and chairs, Jane’s father told stories about Preemie, whom he had only met a few times. Like how his skin looked like worn brown leather from sun exposure; how he had famously never left Brooklyn —not even to go into Manhattan—and how he made his living harassing people on the boardwalk into playing a carnival game where you shot into clown mouths with water guns, trying to explode balloons to win inbredlooking stuffed animals.

  “Trust me,” her dad said, “he made an impression.”

  Jane felt like a portal had opened in a formerly impenetrable wall. She’d never heard any of this before.

  “He actually harassed me into dessert once.” He attempted a Brooklyn accent: “Go on and eat it, whatsa matter? We got a Looky Lou here. Doesn’t know what to do with a piece of tiramisu.”

  “What’s a Looky Lou?” Jane asked.

  “Oh, it’s somebody who basically just sits on the sidelines and stares. Though usually not just at a piece of cake. Your mother thought it was the worst thing a person could be.” He opened a window shade and released a new cloud of dust. “If she saw me rubbernecking when we passed an accident, or staring at someone with a big birthmark, she’d tell me that there was nothing worse in life than being a Looky Lou.”

  Jane was fairly certain she was a Looky Lou through and through.

  She stepped up close to the wall by the stairs to look at more photos as her father moved on to his next topic: her grandmother.

  “Her stage name was Birdie Cusack,” he said. “That was her sideshow act, pretending she was part bird.”

  Jane studied a picture of a woman in a feather headpiece and a bodice that gave her a pear-shaped, birdlike body as her father went on. “She was in a famous movie about freaks in the nineteen fifties. Totally weird stuff.”

  Jane s
potted a framed poster for Is it Human? and moved over to study the ghoulish cartoon drawings of the cast, which included a pair of female twins joined at the hip and a man who had hands coming out of his shoulder sockets. She found a drawing of a woman with a feather on her head, wearing a bird bodysuit, and whispered softly, “Grandma.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell us about them?” she dared, turning to her father. She’d had grandparents. Her grandfather, at least, had been alive until recently. She could have met him.

  “Yeah.” Marcus looked up. “Did you contact them after Mom . . . ?” He trailed off.

  They’d all spent ten years trailing off....

  “Of course. I mean, someone notified them. So it must have been me.” He shrugged. “But as for talking about them, well, you know how she was about the whole carny thing.”

  But Jane didn’t know. This was the first she’d even heard of “the whole carny thing.” “What does that even mean?” she asked. “Carny?”

  “You know,” her dad said again. “Carnival people. Sideshow types. Like Preemie and Birdie. They’re like their own community. Like a different ethnic group, practically. And they’ve always been drawn to Coney Island.”

  “And Mom didn’t like being raised that way?”

  He shrugged. “I think your mother struggled to belong.”

  All Jane could think was, Who doesn’t?

  Jane claimed a third-story bedroom that looked out on a death’s-door garden. Sun-bleached pink and purple blooms hung on browning hydrangeas, and some overgrown rosebushes held a few wan, yellow buds. Jane was no expert, but the yard desperately needed a trim, a drink; that freakishly short thunderstorm had clearly been no help at all. A small patch of grass was long and speckled with dry, brown blades, and a few white statues—Were they ducks? Gnomes?—needed to be saved from imminent weed suffocation.