Dreamland Social Club(45)
BUM-BUM-BUM. Bum-be-bum. Bum-be-bum.
Flap. Flap. Jiggle. Jiggle.
BUM-BUM-BUM. Bum-be-bum. Bum-be-bum.
That’s when Beth saw her and came over.
“Hey there,” she said, sliding into the booth. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Jane said, wondering why it felt like a lie. Everything was okay, wasn’t it? “I wanted to show you this.”
She pulled the photo out of her bag and put it on the table in front of Beth. “It was in the archives at school.”
“Wow,” Beth said carefully, and then she held the photo closer to the small light sconce on the wall of the booth. Then, finally, she shook her head and put the photo down. “We were so young.”
Jane picked it up and turned it over. “It says D.S.C. on the back. Do you know what that means?” It didn’t matter that she already knew it had to be the Dreamland Social Club. She wanted to be told.
Beth’s eyes got sad. “Oh, honey,” she said, shaking her head again. She pushed the photo over so that it sat in front of Jane. “Here’s what I will tell you.” She pointed to the face of one of the boys in the photo and said, “That’s one of your mother’s ex-boyfriends.”
“Really?” Jane studied the boy’s face. “What was his name?”
“You’re not going to like it.” Beth tapped his face with her finger. “That’s Freddy Claverack.”
“You gonna walk right by?” the voice said. “You’re a regular ole Looky Lou.”
Jane’s head snapped toward the voice, and she saw a man holding a microphone standing in front of the Shoot the Freak booth.
“Well, would you look at that?” He nodded at her. “She’s got ears. Just not the nerve to shoot the Freak.”
He had dark peach fuzz for hair and wore mirrored sunglasses that covered half his face. His neck pooled under his chin like a deflated inner tube, and his belly pushed out on a Mets T-shirt that barely met the top edge of his denim shorts. Turning away from Jane he said, to no one in particular, “Shoot the Freak in the freakin’ head.”
Jane looked up and down the boardwalk—saw no sign of anyone she knew, though it was a warm night so pretty bustling with people—and then she stepped up to the guy and studied the Shoot the Freak booth.
The target was standing among the field’s scrap metal and trash, just standing there and waiting. The entire scene was splattered with paint, and paint guns rested on a ledge in front of Jane. She said, “How much?”
Peach Fuzz pointed to the sign that Jane really should have seen, hanging right behind him. Ten bucks for ten rounds sounded like a lot, and Jane thought maybe she’d just move on but suddenly she really wanted to shoot the Freak.
“I don’t have all night,” he said.
“Fine.” She reached for her wallet and handed him the money.
Peach Fuzz loaded up a gun with paint pellets, then handed it to Jane. She stabilized her hands by propping her elbows up on the barrier between the boardwalk and the Freak’s junk-metal obstacle course and found her target. He was moving slowly, swaying on his feet and holding a plastic shield. Jane aimed low and fired. Orange paint exploded on the Freak’s leg.
He started to show a little more life as she fired again, and hit him again—imagining now that he was a Claverack. Harvey. Cliff. Freddy. It didn’t matter. Right then something about the Freak’s body movements—he took a few determined steps forward—made Jane think he was getting mad. But if he didn’t want to get hit, he needed to move around more, show some hustle.
She popped him again, this time with a splatter of blue and this time imagining he was Leo, who’d canceled on her. Leo who was on course to break her heart.
Peach Fuzz was trying to attract a crowd. “Check, check, check it out. We’ve got a sharpshooter here.” The last word sounded like heeya.
She let the rest of her rounds pop faster once she’d gotten the hang of the gun, and she hit the Freak each time. When the gun was emptied—and that last time, it was her mother, her mysterious, elusive, dead, fun mother whose image had flashed through her mind—she put it down and felt a rush of excitement at how well she’d done.
“Not bad,” he said, and Jane said, “Thanks.”
He gathered up some saliva in his mouth with a whipping sound and then spat on the boardwalk and shrugged.
High on catharsis, Jane blurted, “You should give out prizes or something.”
“Yeah.” He was counting a wad of bills. “I’ll look into that.”
CHAPTER five
SNEAKING OUT A SECOND TIME took some of the thrill out of it, but not much. This time there was the added edge of fear that Leo just wouldn’t turn up—because maybe he really was sick?—or that she’d get delayed somehow and miss him. How long would she wait for him? How long would he wait for her?
She’d gone to sleep at 12:00 and set an alarm for 1:45 and saw evidence that her father had, in fact, finally come home within that window. So each floorboard seemed a little bit more squeaky, each lock on the front door seemed clickier. Because what if she actually got caught this time? What if Leo showed up and she didn’t?
A psst whizzed by when she hit the sidewalk, and Leo stepped out from behind a lamppost in front of the abandoned lot next door. “You scared the crap out of me,” Jane whisper-yelled, though there was a secret, calming thrill in feeling like she’d stepped into a scene in a noir film—all lampposts and shadows and lurking.