Dreamland Social Club by Tara Altebrando
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 couldn’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.