Dreamland Social Club(22)

Jane just looked out at the sun’s white reflection on the waves and thought about telling him about her idea, how her father could maybe help turn things around by bringing more business to the area if the city bought one of his coasters—maybe even a whole theme park. But then Leo said, “Now that you’re landed gentry you probably don’t even care.”

“It was just a dopey puzzle piece,” she said, and Leo shook his head and said, “I’m talking about the house. Preemie’s house.”

“Oh.” Of course. Maybe she was daft. “I don’t technically own it yet.”

“Ah, but you will. And when you do, someone will come along and offer you more money than you can refuse so they can make way for some big-box store or some other crap, and you’ll take it.”

Her head hurt. “Isn’t that sort of how it works?”

“Doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Jane couldn’t argue with that, not on the spot anyway, so she said, “I’m sorry for what I said about the boardwalk today.”

“What, you mean, how the Anchor should be knocked down?” He was smiling.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jane dared. “But the Anchor sort of looks like it’s going to fall down on its own.”

He smiled and elbowed her. “I could say the same thing about your house.”

“Touché,” Jane said. But it was different. She didn’t love the idea of Leo’s father owning such a dump. She felt like it said something about the kind of guy Leo was, or would end up being, though she wasn’t sure what.

Leo wiped sand off his hands. “Have you even been to the Anchor?”

Jane shook her head. “Of course not.”

“We’re going to have to remedy that situation one of these days.”

“If you say so,” she said with an edge of sarcasm.

“I say so.” He ran a hand through his hair. “And shit, I have to find that postcard for you. Sorry. I looked around the house. I swear I’ve seen it recently, but I can’t think of where.”

“It’s no big deal,” she felt the need to say, then wanted to take it back. She felt like she wanted to ask him to ask his parents if they’d known her mother, but then she felt like she was already asking too much. The guy barely knew her. Finding the postcard was good enough for now.

“Either way.” Leo stood up and wiped sand off his jeans, and said, “So I guess I’ll see ya.”

“Yeah.”

He turned to go but then stopped and said, “Actually, Jane?”

She looked up.

“Do you think maybe I could see it sometime, Preemie’s old Coney stuff?”

“Of course.” She looked at her watch, wondered whether anyone was home, whether it mattered.

Leo laughed and said, “I don’t mean right this second, but you know. Just say when.”

He backed away a few steps before turning away, before Jane had a chance to whisper when.




Like Orphans, this film—labeled ‘King’ & ‘Queen’ the Great Diving Horses, 1899—was grainy and black-and-white, and when the projector whirred to life in the quiet attic, it was hard to believe, somehow, that the images were real.

Jane sat on the dusty floor in her pajamas and watched one horse and then a second one plunge off a high platform into a pool below, making a huge black-and-white splash. She tried to imagine what it felt like for an animal of that size to hit the water with so much velocity, and imagined it hurt. Maybe even a lot.

She watched the reel again, this time looking for a trainer with a prod, maybe something electrical and sharp. But the horses had jumped on their own. Seemingly, no one had forced them.

Jane felt like maybe she knew what King and Queen had been thinking, if they’d been thinking at all. Because Leo—who wanted to take her to a bar, who wanted to come up to the attic, who made her feel like staying—seemed dangerous, but all she wanted to do was dive in.





CHAPTER eight


SMOKY AIR DREW JANE TOWARD the back window of her room on Saturday around lunchtime, and she saw her brother out in the yard, manning a small charcoal grill. Since she was up to the letter R in the yearbook and still hadn’t found any more members of the school’s original Dreamland Social Club, she set the task aside and went downstairs and out the back door—swirls of wrought iron with a screen that let cool air pass—and stepped over all sorts of old, dead foliage, then sat in a black metal chair near the grill. She stretched out her legs and said, “What’s the most fun you’ve ever had?”

Marcus raised his eyebrows salaciously and said, “I don’t think you really want to know.” He was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, a combo that Jane guessed worked on only about three days of the year in New York weather. Today was one of them.

“Ew.” A hydrangea plant next to her held some purple blooms in defiance of the decay around it. “And I don’t believe you anyway.”

“I don’t know.” Marcus flipped his burgers and each one sizzled. “I had fun at that big theme park in Germany, and that Ocean Dome place in Japan was pretty cool. Actually, they should build something like that here, you know?”

An indoor beach was certainly a better idea than a shopping mall, but Jane still wasn’t convinced that day at the Ocean Dome was the most fun she’d ever had. She reviewed her memory of it all. The sand castles of Coney. The volcano erupting. The wave pool. It had been fun, at the time. But now she had a hard time thinking of anything she’d done with her mother as fun. “I’m supposed to write a sentence about the most fun I’ve ever had on Coney, or somewhere else since we just got here. I’m drawing a complete blank.”