Dreamland Social Club(41)

“Maybe you should take a little nap,” I say, and she says, “Maybe I should.” She smiles weakly and says, “Maybe I’ll meet you tonight in Dreamland.”

I lie down next to her and try to sleep, too—or at least I pretend to try to sleep—but then I sense that something has changed. Her body isn’t as warm by my side. Her chest isn’t rising and falling against my cheek.

“Mom?” I say finally, and I wait and wait and wait . . . for a reply that never comes.





She hadn’t been upstairs long—just long enough to write about that last night in her journal—before the house phone started ringing. It took a while for it to register in her brain that that’s what the sound was.

Not an alarm.

Not a bird.

Not a toy.

Once she had made her way downstairs, following the sound, she found her father standing in the kitchen. And so the two of them just stood there for a moment, dumbfounded, staring at the phone as if it were a wailing baby that had magically appeared.

“Should we answer it?” Jane asked finally, and her father, as if awakened from a zombie state, said, “Of course,” then stepped over to the phone—a rotary one, the color of split pea soup, mounted on the wall. “Hello?”

He listened and then looked at Jane, held the phone out and said, “It’s for you.”

She stepped over and took the phone. “Hello?”

“You people sound like you’ve never used a phone before.”

It was Leo.

“We just didn’t know it worked.” Jane exhaled. “I don’t think there’s been a bill.”

“Same number as always. My mother still remembered it.”

Her father was still hovering, so she covered the mouthpiece and said softly, “It’s a friend from school.”

As if that explained it all.

Leo said, “Hey, so I’m really sorry to have to do this, but something came up and I can’t make it tonight.”

“Oh.” She looked pointedly at her father now, and he finally left the room.

Leo said, “Can you go tomorrow night instead?”

“Sure.” It was no big deal. Something came up.

“It’s just that Venus . . .” He trailed off. “Well, never mind. Tomorrow night for sure, though. Okay?”

“Okay.” Jane managed through a lump of disappointment, and they rang off just as Marcus came home. He opened the freezer and held a bag of frozen peas to his face. His lip was bleeding.

“What happened to you?” Jane handed him a paper towel and he looked confused. She said, “Your lip.”

He pulled the peas away to allow him to dab his lip and she saw his swollen eye.

“Dad!”

“Jane, don’t.”

She called out, “I think you better get in here.”

Marcus put the peas back and sighed and sat at the kitchen table. Their father came in and said, “Let’s have a look.”

Marcus pulled the bag away again.

“Come on,” their father said. “I’ll walk you down to the hospital.”

“It’s not that bad, Dad. Really. It’s just swollen.”

Their father sat. “What happened?”

“It was dumb.”

“How dumb?” their father said.

Marcus smiled and said, “I might have neighed.”

“Why would you do that?” Jane snapped. “Why would you antagonize them?”

“I don’t know, Jane. Maybe I’m sick of them acting like they own the place.”

“It’s just for one year!” she said. But for the first time, she doubted the truth of it. What if it wasn’t just for one year?

Then maybe it wouldn’t matter so much that Leo had canceled. It was just one night. Not out of 365, but out of years. One measly night she wouldn’t even remember when she looked back on it all, on the early days on Coney.





CHAPTER four


THERE WERE NORMAL KIDS, of course. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. And Jane had met a lot of them. Sarahs and Jacintas and Kiras and Londas. A few Matts. A couple of Emmetts. She couldn’t seem to keep any of them straight, though; couldn’t seem to remember or connect. None of them seemed to know who she was—or who Preemie was—and none of them seemed to care. At first, she’d thought that would be nice. And she’d made some efforts to try to befriend some of them by the lockers and between classes. But she kept feeling drawn to Babette. To H.T. To the others. Even the ones who made her sort of uncomfortable, like Venus.

So when she walked into the girls’ bathroom that morning and saw a slew of freaks reflected in the mirrors, she had to work hard to make sense of the scene. Gone was the backdrop of normalcy. Everyone in the mirror was skewed. Then she saw the sign above the funhouse mirrors—somehow layered over the normal ones—and it read ARE YOU NORMAL?





Smaller letters below the question read DEEP THOUGHTS FROM THE DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB.

Girls with long blond hair had been turned into boyish ghouls. Girls with cropped dreads had hair down to their knees or knees where their eyes should be. Jane could be either a dwarf or a giant, depending on where, in front of the mirror, she stood. There was laughing and gasping and a few people saying, “Ugh. Could you imagine?” And that’s when Jane ducked out, decided she didn’t have to go so badly after all.