Dreamland Social Club Read online

  She stood at the window for countless silent minutes, studying the view. Raindrops clung like white pearls to the black electrical wire strung between the house and a wooden pole at the end of the yard. Other buildings loomed there, with their fire escapes zigzagging between windows, and Jane thought of the countless Brooklynites who lived there, unaware that there was a new kid on the block. She could see the Parachute Jump in a sliver of sky between buildings and kept returning to the window to peek at it as she dusted.

  Leathery wallpaper with bubblegum pink roses and army green vines covered the walls. Even though Jane couldn’t imagine her mother had a hand in picking such a pattern, she had done a quick check of the other rooms in the house and knew that she’d chosen her mother’s childhood room. The only actual evidence she found, however, was tucked away at the back of a high shelf in the closet with some old pillows and blankets—a small mermaid doll. Jane took it down and blew the dust out of its curly red hair and its crown of pearls, and off the orange-and-white-striped tiger fish it held in its tiny hands. She still had a book of mermaid pictures, The Mermaid’s Secret, her mother had given her. A note inside said: 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.

  The doll had to have been her mother’s. She was sure of it.

  Further examination revealed a silky tag that read “Plays ‘By the Beautiful Sea,’ ” hanging from the mermaid’s sparkly green bottom. Jane wound the small metal handle next to the tag and released it but nothing happened, no music, and she set the doll down on the dresser.

  Marcus ended up across the hall in a room that looked like it had most recently been used as a study or guest room: a desk, a bed, some old books. Her father took over the second floor, claiming the master suite and the room across the hall as his office.

  Without conspiring, they’d all three unpacked—Jane had only really brought clothes and books, including that old mermaid book—then lay down and napped on dusty bed linens. She drifted off easily, into a memory of a day at the Ocean Dome, a memory that had long been locked away....

  CHAPTER two

  GO GET SPIFFED UP A BIT,” Jane’s father said when they all had woken up and reconvened in the kitchen. “We’ll go for a walk up to the boardwalk and then we’ll have dinner someplace nice. As a treat. A celebration.”

  “Of what?” Marcus asked with a stifled snort. “Our year of slumming it?”

  Jane looked at her father, to see if he’d take offense, but he didn’t. He just said, “If you want to think of it as ‘slumming it,’ sure!”

  “It’s only for a year” had become her father’s mantra in the previous few weeks, and now Jane sensed that her father, at least, hadn’t been surprised by the state of their new home. She got the distinct impression that he’d known it was going to be sort of a dump. Still, it was probably a better home than he himself could provide for them right now. He’d had a bunch of small structural engineering jobs in Europe and Asia for the last ten years—they’d even done time in Michigan and California—but nothing that amounted to the career he used to have, designing world-class roller coasters. His job in London had recently ended and he had no other prospects.

  Another mantra: “We’ll just move in, clear it out, clean it up, sell it, and move on.”

  And: “It’s just until I get back on my feet.”

  They changed clothes and went out on foot as the setting sun cast long shadows on their street. They walked toward the beach—their block appeared to dead-end into sky—and past a series of abandoned lots, one of which was decorated with banners that said THE FUTURE OF CONEY ISLAND HAS ARRIVED.

  “What do you think that means?” she asked.

  “Just some snazzy builder talk,” her father said.

  He laced his fingers through the fence around the lot, and Jane and her brother exchanged a look. A look that said, He used to be the one talking the snazzy builder talk. Before Mom died and everything fell apart. But Jane looked away. She was afraid to hope that things could be different this time, that something about being here, where her mother was born, could change the way things were and get her father’s career back on track.

  When they reached the boardwalk and she saw the ocean’s dark blue blanket stretching to the horizon, she felt a lump in her throat—some combination of hope and sadness and fear caught up in a sticky ball.

  And the crowds.

  The crowds!

  They were the sorts of people Jane had expected to see in Brooklyn: black, white, everything, loud, laughing, terrifying. She just hadn’t expected—and this was silly, she now knew—quite so many of them to be right there on the beach and on the boardwalk all at once.

  Hundreds upon hundreds.

  Thousands, even.

  Then she saw that the Parachute Jump was lit by thousands of tiny lights, and their twinkle made her giddy. Giddy, and something else, too. She pushed the lump back down and looked out at the beach and promised herself she’d go down onto the sand one day and build a small Coney in her mother’s memory. She would wait and watch and watch and wait until the tide came in and washed it all away.

  What had she even meant, It’s gone?

  It’s right here.

  There was a rowdy crowd outside an open-front bar, where some white plastic furniture sat wobbly on the uneven planks of the boardwalk. The sign on the front spelled out The Anchor in dirty pink fluorescent script, and a long bar on the left stretched way back into darkness, high stools lined up all the way. Everyone outside was watching a guy do one-handed push-ups. He counted them off in a thick Brooklyn accent—“. . . faw, five”—and when he got to ten, he got up and wiped his hands together and said, “Yeah, baby, told you so.” Jane wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a stranger scene, a dumpier bar.

  Then she saw him.

  A tattooed boy.

  A beautiful tattooed boy.

  He was standing on the boardwalk in front of the bar, pointing out elaborate tattoos on his forearms. A particularly terrifying crowd—in part because they looked to be around Jane’s age, her peers—surrounded him. One of the boys must have been seven feet tall; one girl was a dwarf who also looked like a goth; another girl, a brunette, had a faint mustache and beard; and Jane would have sworn the brown-skinned girl with curly hair bent her knee the wrong way to scratch her calf. Through a parting between their bodies, Jane saw serpents on Tattoo Boy’s skin, and mermaids and a seahorse and the same clown face she’d seen in those dreams about burning Ferris wheels, drowning roller coasters, and her mother still alive. His hair was black and soft-looking, and his eyes were marbles of blue. She’d never seen a more beautiful boy in her life.

  “I like it,” the giant said, and the dwarf in black said, “Bend down, let’s see what you’ve had done to yourself now.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a beer,” Jane’s father said, and Marcus said, “I’m starving, Dad.”

  “Well, then I’ll get it to go.” He ducked into the bar, and Marcus shrugged and followed. Jane turned to follow him but not before taking one more look at Tattoo Boy. The crowd had dispersed, but he was still there, looking at her looking at him, and his tattoos felt familiar in a way that filled Jane with a sort of excited dread. He was rolling down the sleeves of his night-black shirt and he was still staring at her and smiling, too. “Whatsa matter?” he said. “Never seen tattoos like these?”

  “No, actually,” she said, studying the curves of the seahorse again and feeling a kind of vertigo in her heart. “I have.”

  “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.

  The Cyclone.

  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.

  Had there maybe been a seahorse in that movie?

  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.

  Would Tattoo Boy be there?

  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.

  CHAPTER three

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

  Jane turned from he
r 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.