Dreamland Social Club(21)
“Yeah,” Venus smacked her gum and fixed her top. “I didn’t think so. Just Leo’s.”
“Right,” Jane said. “Just Leo’s.”
Then Venus said, “Go figure,” and the teacher, whom Jane had just met and had already forgotten, probably for good, called the class to attention as Jane reconsidered her dream. The seahorse wasn’t going to save her, and if Leo was already blabbing about her questions, he was unreliable at best.
Only she could save herself. She’d have to go back to the yearbook, to the original plan of finding the names of other people who were in her mother’s club. Of seeing if she could track any of them down.
Walking out onto the beach at day’s end, after a quick stop at the library, where she had slipped her mother’s yearbook into her bag undetected, Jane sat down on the sand. She thought about looking through the yearbook right then, but didn’t want to get caught now, not after she’d successfully gotten it out of the building. So she took out some of the required reading for English Lit. Opening her book to a Wordsworth poem, she read, I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils . . .
But it was way too nice out for homework and besides, she’d already read that poem at least three gazillion times before, at three different schools. She pretty much felt like that cloud. But without the daffodils. The good news, she realized then, was that tomorrow was Friday. It appeared she would survive the week.
She put down the book and watched a group of older girls and guys—like in their twenties—sitting nearby on the sand. The girls wore pigtails and sunglasses half the size of their faces; one of the guys wore a T-shirt that said “Ithaca is GORGES.” The boys were building sand castles while the girls read glossy magazines.
What would Jane wear to a party? She did look like she’d been dipped in gray paint—day after day after day—and for a second, she closed her eyes and dreamed that if she dove into the ocean, her gray clothes would all fall off and fade away and she’d resurface in lavish new garments in coral colors. What had her mother meant when she’d said she’d been a mermaid once? Probably nothing at all.
Spying Babette’s newspaper in her bag, Jane pulled it out and scanned the page it was folded to. Her eyes landed on a headline that read NO MORE GO FOR CONEY’S GO KARTS.
Coney Island’s beloved Go Kart ride was demolished earlier this week. The destruction of the Go Karts before the official end of the summer season next week marks a dramatic move on the part of Loki Equities, who until now has been the silent and mostly invisible landlord to various Coney mainstays, including the Go Karts, Wonderland amusement park, and more. The Regan family, who ran the Go Kart ride for thirty years, confirmed that they received notification by mail from Loki several weeks ago that their lease would not be renewed. The operators of Wonderland confirmed that their lease is up this spring, though they have not yet discussed terms with Loki.
This winter, a special New York City commission is due to review a proposal by Loki Equities, the largest landholder on Coney Island, to develop a controversial year-round Vegasstyle theme park and mall. In the meantime, the city is moving forward with its own plans to develop several acres and is accepting bids from amusement park operators and designers.
She read that last bit again and thought she might burst.
Leo was suddenly sitting next to her. “What’s up, Looky Lou?”
She looked at him askance as she put the paper back in her bag so she could show it to her father later. Who was this guy?
He nodded toward the sand castles. “You going to join the fun?”
Jane watched a bucket full of upturned sand crumble in a series of small landslides. “Wouldn’t be a very good Looky Lou if I did.”
They were quiet for a moment; a seagull walked closer, presumably to see if they had any food.
“What does that even mean?” she said.
“What?” Leo smiled. “Looky Lou?”
“No,” she said. “Ithaca is GORGES.”
“Not worth explaining,” Leo said. “But suffice it to say, the hipster influx is not a good sign. It means the gentrification of Coney has begun.”
Jane had never heard the word gentrification before. “What’s that?”
“It’s a good thing you’ve never lived here before and have a reason for not knowing this stuff,” Leo said. “Otherwise I’d be starting to wonder right about now, whether you were sort of, I don’t know”—he rooted around for a word—“daft.”
Daft? It was one thing she most certainly wasn’t. “Are you going to explain or not?”
“You’re cute when you’re pissed off.” He smiled, then leaned back to rest on his elbows; Jane thought she might die from the cute. “It means that the hipsters and yuppies and rich people seem to have recently woken up and said, Hey, wait a second, Coney’s awesome. Why is it so working class?”
“And that’s bad?”
“Yes, that’s bad.” Leo was exasperated. “Because it means the price of everything is going to go up and the little businesses that have kept Coney alive all this time are going to get pushed out or bought out. It’s the beginning of the end. The Go Karts were only the start of it.”