Dreamland Social Club (36 page)

He was molding sand, but he looked up with a suspicious smirk. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.” She shrugged and returned to her own bucket, and after a moment he said, “The sound of you laughing.”

Jane’s hands were gritty and wet and Birdie’s dress was covered in clumpy sand. She wiped them off as she shot him a look.

“I mean it,” he said, shrugging and looking away like he was shy, though she knew better by now.

“Okay,” she said, feeling a warmth in her heart despite the cold wind off the ocean. “What was the last dream you had that you remember?”

“There were rats in my house. I was trying to escape.”

Jane looked up, skeptical.

“I’m serious!”

“Name one thing you want to do before you die.”

“Have a kid.”

“Wow,” she said.

Jane hadn’t ever actually imagined having a kid, but thought that yes, someday, that would be nice. Like Leo said, she could play those old games with her child, keep that memory alive.

“Too heavy?” Leo asked.

“I was thinking more along the lines of drink a cocktail out of a pineapple.” She asked him, “What’s the best thing about being you?”

“I don’t know.” He stopped and looked around. “I think it might be this. The fact that I grew up here. Makes you not take anything for granted.”

He still hadn’t built anything that looked anything at all like the Shoot the Chutes. It was dark, but the relative lack of light wasn’t the only problem.

“How in the hell did she even do this?” Leo asked as another bucket of sand fell away in a series of small landslides.

“I don’t know.” Jane was having no better luck with a Monkey Theater. “Maybe I don’t even remember it right, you know? Maybe I made it up.”

“Don’t say that,” Leo said. He was kneeling in the sand in his jeans, scooping wildly.

“No, it’s okay if I did,” Jane said. “I mean, I was really young. Who knows?”

“You could ask your brother.”

She thought about that for a second. “Nah,” she said. “It’d ruin it.”

Leo started to build the Shoot the Chutes again.

“Here.” Jane tossed him a smaller bucket. “Try this one.”

They worked quietly for a while, then Jane said, “That song you played on the saw at the party, and tonight . . . She used to sing that to me, the Dreamland song.”

“Yeah?”

“When I was little and didn’t want to go to bed because I wanted to be with her, she’d tell me that she’d meet me in Dreamland, and she’d lull me to sleep. I’m pretty sure she said it right before she died, too. That she’d see me there.”

Leo looked up, pushed some hair out of his eyes with sandy hands. “Are you
trying
to kill me, Jane?”

Luna,
she almost said. The name’s
Luna.

He wiped sand off his hands and she did, too, and they lay back on their blanket and Leo said, “I forget sometimes.”

“Forget what?”

“That it’s a beach.” He shook his head and laughed. “Seems like an awful lot of fuss over a beach.”

S
O, “BABETTE SAID AT LUNCH. “Friday. Electric Bathing.”

It was the last week of school, and Jane was a little sad that she wouldn’t be seeing much of their cafeteria table for a few months. The good news was that she’d be back next year. Talks between the city and Loki were ongoing. Her father was still in the mix, as was his Lunacy ride.

“Are you both going?” Babette asked.

“Definitely,” Rita said.

“I don’t know,” Jane said.

“Oh, you’re going,” Babette said.

“Hell yeah, you’re going,” Rita said.

But Jane tried to picture herself swimming in the ocean; there was more than one problem. “I don’t own a bathing suit.”

Her friends started laughing then, and at first Jane felt like her cheeks were going to crumble and give way to tears, but then it struck her as funny, too.

Hilarious, even.

Babette said, “You can borrow one of mine,” and they all started laughing even harder, and Jane said, “Do you have anything in black?” and they laughed even harder. Then finally, when they stopped, Rita said, “I guess we’ll go shopping.”

 

 

Jane bumped into her brother sneaking out of the house at midnight that Friday. She had her new swimsuit on under shorts and a T-shirt. It felt good to be wearing new things, and Jane thought she’d have to go shopping with Babette and Rita again sooner than later.

“
You’re
going?” Jane said. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” Marcus said back. “Since when did you decide you’re so much cooler than me anyway?”

“Give me a break, Marcus.”

They elbowed each other as they pushed through the front door and onto the porch. The sagging window there seemed somehow to have tightened up, and Jane imagined it was because she’d gotten rid of Preemie’s dead weight. The house felt lighter, newer, like it wouldn’t be the worst place to spend another year. Or two. Jane had kept the stuff that held meaning for her—the
Is It Human?
poster and framed photos and some of the old books and costumes, even the two-headed squirrel. But that was all.

They headed for the boardwalk and turned left when they got there. Jane saw shadows on the beach, the silhouette of a pole of some kind, and a figure atop it.

He was stringing up a lightbulb that ran to the Anchor via the world’s longest extension cord. The bar had opened up again after the city’s purchase of the land went through, and while there were no guarantees, there was hope.

A moment later a small circle of white light cast a glow over a small portion of the surf and the beach. Bunches of people were suddenly in the water, shrieking and splashing. It looked like everyone from school had turned up.

Jane picked up her pace, afraid of missing out, afraid that it would be over—shut down by the cops—before she even got wet.

“Hey,” Babette said when Jane found her on the group’s outskirts. She had a towel around her shoulders but was bone-dry.

Jane looked out at the electric bathers and start to strip.

“You’re really going in?” Babette seemed giddy.

Jane nodded. She was a girl on a mission, a mission to claim some little part of the excitement of the park that was her namesake, of that bygone era.

The water was black, like fuel, and Jane tried hard not to think about everything that lived beneath its surface—electric eels and stingrays and big pulsing jellyfish—as she picked up one of the ropes tethered to the light tower and strode into the surf. It was cold, bracing, and the sand curled around her toes but she pressed on, until she was the farthest person out. The water was still only waist-high, but with each swell she wondered whether she was an idiot, whether she should scream for help right then, before she really needed it. Before it was too late.

Looking out over the water, she saw just a few lights—Staten Island—and she overheard someone behind her say, “Do you know how Staten Island got its name?”

Someone else said, “No,” and the other voice returned with “The Dutchman who saw it from his ship pointed and said, ‘Is stat an island?’”

Jane felt pretty sure that she wouldn’t ever have to swim away from Coney in fear for her life but wondered, still, how long she would be able to hold her breath. She imagined that her mother, a mermaid, had been able to do it for a really long time. But what counted as a really long time?

She inhaled and held it and watched her classmates in the water.

She saw Legs with Minnie propped on his shoulders. She saw H.T.’s floating torso next to a dog-paddling Babette and watched Rubber Rita push Marcus under the water and laugh.

They were
frolicking
.

There was no other word for it, as silly and old-fashioned as it sounded. And she closed her eyes for a second and opened them again and it was as if she could see the lights of Luna Park and Dreamland and Steeplechase Park right there.

It felt as though the water itself had trapped Coney’s history in its molecules and she was steeped in it, soaking it in through her pores, breathing it as if through gills. She thought of all the people who had come to this very place, who had swum in these very waters—millions upon millions—and who had had the time of their life. She had spent the year wishing she could travel back through time and spend just one day there, during the era of the dawn of fun, but that would never happen and maybe that was okay.

Because this felt close.

Something slimy brushed against her leg and she jerked away and started to head back to shore, skin prickling from the cool air and the shock of the reminder of all the murk and mystery beneath the water’s choppy skin.

Leo was directly in her path.

“Hey, Looky Lou,” he said. The lightbulb’s glow made his figure a backlit silhouette. It cast silver light on the right side of his wet face as she exhaled.

Someone in the crowd shouted, “Oh, victory! Forget your underwear. We’re free.”

 

I don’t know what that word means,
roulette
, but it’s fun.

 

They were standing face-to-face, wet and breathing hard, and she felt certain that if there were no one else around, Tattoo Boy would kiss her again. Or she’d kiss him.

A different
kind
of kiss, too.

If it didn’t happen tonight, it would happen the next day or the one after. She knew that it would as surely as she knew her own name, as surely as she knew that she’d been lost and then found.

“My name isn’t really Jane,” she said.

Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble
.

Tattoo Boy smiled lazily, like he already knew what she was going to say and maybe he did. “You don’t say.”

“It’s Luna,” she said. “
Luna
Jane.”

He lifted an inky arm out of waist-high water and she saw the
Gabba Gabba Hey!
tattoo for the first time. Had it been there all along? “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Luna.”

She went to shake his hand just as a wave swelled around their bellies and then curled over and crashed hard. They tumbled toward the shore together in a churning funnel of white and black, sand and sea, and then stood up—laughing, and still holding hands.

“I think,” Leo said between short, recovering breaths, “that might have been”—another inhale on the tail of a laugh—“Coney’s way of saying . . .”

“I know,” Luna managed, also struggling for air.

Then she licked her salty lips and found solid footing in the sand and nodded. “It’s saying, ‘What took you so long?’”

The Coney Island depicted in
Dreamland Social Club
is a mix of fact and fiction. The Parachute Jump, The Cyclone, The Wonder Wheel . . . these things actually exist on Coney Island. As did Dreamland, Luna Park, Steeplechase Park, and the Thunderbolt.

But The Anchor, Wonderland, and Morelli’s, while inspired by real places, are entirely fictional. The Coral Room is even
more
fictional, if it is possible to be such a thing, and Coney Island High bears no resemblance to Coney Island’s Lincoln High School.