Dreamland Social Club (33 page)

“No,” Minnie said. “That was the Claveracks.”

“Okay,” Jane said. “Well, apology accepted.”

Babette said, “Venus, anything you want to say?”

“No,” Venus said. “I’m cool.”

“Fine,” Babette said. “Adjourned!”

 

“I’m proud of you,” Jane said to Babette when they were alone.

Babette huffed. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m jealous and all.” Her eyes pooled up. “I mean, who is ever going to like me?”

Jane squeezed her shoulder. “Somebody will!”

Babette blew her breath out through circular lips, pushing tears away. “I mean, look at me, Jane!” She almost laughed.

Jane laughed, too, and said, “I’m looking!”

 

There was a van parked in Preemie’s driveway when Jane got home that day, its back doors open to face the porch. Four huge men wearing thick gloves were trying to coax the Claverack horse off the porch.

Jane’s father saw her and waved. “They called and wanted to come right over. I thought it’d be okay.”

“Yeah,” Jane said. “Of course.”

She climbed the steps and stood next to her dad and watched as the horse disappeared into the van amidst a grunted chorus of “Easy”s and “Hold it”s and “Okay now”s. She’d boxed up the rest of the stuff—except for the demon, which she’d just covered in protective paper—and saw that it had all already been moved to the porch. Once the horse was done, the men took the demon, then slid the boxes into the van and soon they were gone.

Her father squeezed her shoulder. “You good?”

The van was backing out of the driveway.

“Yeah,” Jane said. “I’m good.”

“Any word yet?” she asked him after a moment. They had no idea when the verdict about the new Loki plan would come down.

“Nope,” he said. “Not yet.”

After the van pulled away, she got a black marker out of her bag and went down to the sign on the driveway and added the missing apostrophe.

 

Upstairs, she sat down to do some reading for Mr. Simmons’s class and found the postcard she’d taken from the Anchor on her desk. After studying the photo on it—a black-and-white shot of the bar’s exterior—she turned it over and started to write.

She stepped out into the hall and called out, “Dad!”

His “Yeah?” came from far away.

“Do you have a stamp?”

F
RIDAY BLEW BY in a whir—all anyone was doing was counting the hours to meeting up for Wonderland’s last night—and Jane found herself bolting out of school at day’s end so she could go home and get ready. Not that there was even anything to do to get ready, but everything felt urgent.

Since there was no way to make time go faster, Jane had to find a way to fill it. Sitting in her room, surrounded by that hideous green-and-pink wallpaper, she decided she needed to look no further for something to do. She moved her bed away from the longest wall in the room and then found a loose corner by the bottom edge of the wall and grabbed and started to pull it up and off. Two strips later, she was certain that she was uncovering something significant. There was definitely something underneath, a pattern of some kind. Whatever it was was covered in glue that made it sort of hard to figure out at first, but eventually the mural’s scene started to take shape. It was one big oversize doodle of Coney Island as it must have been when her mother had lived in this house.

The Parachute Jump was there, with a picture of a key at its base. The Thunderbolt was there—all overgrown with vines and plants and with a small house underneath—also with a key icon by a gate. Looking for Wonderland, Jane found it—replete with Mad Hatter, and
this
Mad Hatter had a key dangling from one of his fingers.

So Leo had been right about the “Wonder” key after all.

Which left “Bath.”

When she saw the key drawn next to the picture of the round sea vessel sitting underneath the Cyclone’s tracks, she sat and thought hard for a second, about
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
—didn’t the scientist who went down to find the sea creature get eaten up in one of these little vessels?—and of the postcard her mother had sent Beth—with the mermaid smoking a cigarette on a little round sub. She closed her eyes and let her mind go. In the movie they’d called it a “bell,” but there was another word, and she could hear her mother’s voice say . . .

And here was the map of where to find it.

She got changed for Wonderland and walked out onto Steeplechase Pier and inhaled.

She exhaled and took another drag of salty air and closed her eyes as her hair whipped across her face in the wind. She pushed some strands away and thought about screaming into the wind again. It had felt good that one time. It had been cathartic and almost fun. But what would she even say this time?

She was actually starting to think she knew.

Was it so that Jane would have to come back? To find Leo? To find the bathysphere?

It was there, right where her mother had drawn it; she just knew it. The journal, too. All of her questions would be answered.

“This is your captain!” she finally screamed, and the words seemed to catch the wind and fly. “We are passing through a storm!”

She needed to stop to take another deep breath before she could yell, “We are quite safe!”

A smile had crept into her features, she could feel it. She couldn’t shake it the whole way to Wonderland.

T
HE GOAL WAS TO GO ON EVERY RIDE and to play every game before closing time. Or at least that was Babette’s goal—and that included all the kiddie rides. So Jane played the part of proud parent as Babette went on silly rides with names like the Frog Hop and Hippo Hat, scaring wailing toddlers and their parents alike with her head-to-toe black clothes and dark eyeliner.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Babette said, upon exiting a miniature flying elephant ride.

Jane finally had the nerve to say, “What’s up with the goth thing anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

They started to walk toward the grown-up rides, some of which Babette would be too small to go on. “I just mean, you’re not a very good goth.”

Babette stopped by a bench and climbed up on it to stand so she could see Jane better. “Honestly, I think I did it because I thought it’d be a distraction, you know? Like people couldn’t just say ‘Hey look, there’s a dwarf.’ I thought that if I did the goth thing, I don’t know, the dwarf thing wouldn’t be my whole identity.”

It made sense. Somehow.

“I don’t know”—she held out a hand and Jane helped her down—“I think maybe it backfired. And we’re all in therapy now and I somehow can’t bring myself to go to the sessions as a goth. Analyze that!”

“It just doesn’t seem very
you
is all.” They were nearing the bumper cars. “But that’s good, about your parents and therapy, right?”

“Come on.” Babette pinched Jane’s leg. “I’m going to bump you so hard that your clothes will come back to life.”

Rita and Marcus were already in bumper cars. Legs and H.T. and Leo and Debbie and Minnie, too. Even the Claveracks were squeezing themselves into small seats and then someone threw a switch and the bumper course came to life. Jane hit her pedal hard and barreled across the course to hit Harvey Claverack sideways, and hard, and then backed up, turned, and moved on. She made a straight line for Leo and hit him hard on the side.

“Hey!” she said. He spun around and shot off and then came back and hit her hard head-on.

She had to shout. “I need to tell you something.”

But he just rammed her again and said, “Later, gator,” and was gone.

 

She and Babette and Rita hit the Teacup Ride together after walking off the bumper cars, tilting their stiff necks this way and that, shaking out their legs. Jane did most of the spinning of the turntable at the center of the cup when the ride started. She grew tired quickly.

“I could use a little help here, guys.” She looked up.

But Rita and Babette just exchanged a look and laughed, so they just let the car spin until it stopped and that was okay. The whole cup was also spinning on a disc and rotating on a larger turntable, so there was still plenty of spinning even without Jane’s help. The effect was dizzying. Jane wasn’t sure if it qualified as fun.

They went on a Tilt-A-Whirl after that and then took a break from rides to try to knock down three milk bottles with a baseball and shoot out paper stars with BB guns. When they shot water guns into clown faces to explode balloons, Jane thought of Preemie and how very much she felt indebted to him and his attic for making her year what it was. She’d spent enough time looking at enough pictures of him by now that he no longer looked like a clown in her mind’s eye.

Finally, as the park’s closing neared, Jane found herself sharing a car with Leo—just Leo—on the Polar Express. She wanted to just give her body over to the centrifugal force that was pushing her down the bench seat and into Leo as the ride gained speed, shooting them around in circles. She’d felt this way pretty much since the second she’d seen him outside the bar that first day—like some invisible force was pulling her toward him, pushing her toward him—so it was nice to not have to fight it for once.

She was watching paintings of polar bears and ice caps whir by in a white blur.
Are you sure I’m not a brown bear?
that baby polar bear had asked, and for the first time, Jane found the joke sort of sad. She herself had been behaving like that baby bear, trying desperately to find a place to fit in.

“I’m sorry I’m crushing you!” she screamed as the ride reached peak speed and her and Leo’s hip bones banged up against each other.

“It’s okay,” he said. Their arms had gotten tangled as they both clung to the bar in front of them, whiteknuckled and tense.

“I found some crumbs!” she shouted over the music.

“You did?” he shouted back.

She nodded and screamed, “Do you know what a bathysphere is?”

“Of course!” he screamed back.

“The Bath key,” she said, and then she waited for the realization to dawn.

“Seriously?”
Leo shouted. “Here on Coney?”

Just as a voice came from the ride’s control booth—“Do you want to go backwaaaaaaaads?”—Jane closed her eyes and let her head hang back and yelled, “Yes!”

Without anyone even specifically suggesting it, they all made their way down to the Anchor after they got kicked out of Wonderland at closing time. Leo went behind the bar and started pouring Cokes. Jane took a seat on a high stool and studied the crowd. There were old people and young people, black and white. Some were well dressed, some barely dressed. And they were shoulder to shoulder at the bar.

“Hey.” Jane saw the petition hanging on a clipboard on a nail in the wall behind the bar; the seahorse postcard from Weeki Wachee was back. “I want to sign the petition.”

“Re-he-heally,” Leo said. “You want to save this ratinfested shithole?”

She smiled and said, “I guess I do.”