Dreamland Social Club(6)
“Surviving what?” Jane asked, and her dad said, “So much time. So much change.”
He turned his eyes down to look at his menu, but Jane just looked at her brother, wondering whether he wanted to say what she did: What about us? Are we going to survive?
“God, it’s weird to be here.” Her father put his menu down and sighed. “Your mother was planning on bringing you two here—we both were—right after the coaster opening in Tokyo. She hadn’t wanted to come back for a long time but finally decided you should meet your grandfather, at least, and get to know Coney Island, and her friends and all.”
He shook his head and said, “We had the plane tickets booked and everything.”
Jane looked at him with raised eyebrows. This was the first she’d ever heard of this supposed big family vacation, and she absorbed the news as a sort of loss. Her mother had wanted to bring her here to show her around—maybe even show her off—and now that would never happen. Her grandparents were dead and her mother’s friends—well, who even knew who they were or if any of them were still here.
“Do you remember any of her friends’ names?” Jane asked, afraid that at any moment the portal would close again. “Anything?”
“I don’t.” He shook his head. “I wish I did.” Then he said, “I wish I’d known your grandparents better, too—at least I think I do. But there was never any time.”
Jane’s parents had met when her mother was in art school in Manhattan, and they’d eloped to Paris just a few weeks after she graduated. They’d honeymooned in the French countryside, and her mother had fallen in love with France and they’d decided not to go back to New York right away. So they traveled for a while and then Jane’s father, who already had his engineering degree and a few ride designs under his belt, got a job at the company that was designing the rides for Euro Disney. Her mother got hired as a caricature artist at the park, and then after that they’d jumped around the world for ten years before deciding—finally, in their mid-thirties—to have kids. At which point, they all followed her father’s coaster design work wherever it took them, until it didn’t anymore.
“Anyway,” her father said. “It’s just for one year.”
Jane’s eyes found the octopus on the ceiling again, and she felt a sort of empathy. She’d read somewhere that the average life span of an octopus was only one year. With the way her family moved around so much, she felt like she’d lived her own life in octopus years—each of her own sixteen years so distinct from the others that they might as well have each been lived by different people entirely. She’d be spending this one in her mother’s childhood home, though—and starting school at her mother’s high school the very next day.
Would Tattoo Boy be there?
It dawned on her that this was the chance she’d always hoped for without even realizing it, to get to know her mother better. Maybe there’d be old photos in glass cases and old yearbooks to flip through, maybe even some that would lead to friends, people who knew her. The very prospect made her so giddy she knew she wouldn’t sleep.
CHAPTER three
ARE YOU ONE OF THE TRANSFERS I’m supposed to hand-hold?”
Jane turned from her new locker, where she was struggling with her combination lock, and saw swarms of kids milling in the hall but no one who was speaking to her. She’d been to the office to meet Principal Jackson—a tall, all-business African-American woman wearing a red suit—and to get her schedule and locker assignment, but no one had said anything about hand-holding.
“Down here.”
The goth dwarf came up to Jane’s waist. Her ears were pierced more times than it seemed an earlobe could sustain. Her charcoal-lined eyes were a fierce turquoise, the color of the ocean near the equator. This girl had been there, outside the bar, with Tattoo Boy the night before. Unless there were two goth dwarfs kicking around Coney Island, which, at this point, Jane realized wasn’t entirely unlikely. The goth’s tiny black T-shirt had a white silhouette of a girl’s profile, with teardrops falling from her eyes. For a second Jane felt like that girl; she wanted to jump into the shadows of the shirt.
“Are you done yet?” the small girl said, and Jane shook it off and said, “I’m Jane Dryden, if that’s who you’re looking for.”
“I wasn’t really paying attention but yeah, Dryden sounds right.” She put on a fake smile and said, faux-cheery, “Welcome to Coney Island High!”
Jane turned to her brother for saving, but Marcus had already struck up a conversation with a kid who looked a lot like him: floppy hair, broody eyes behind geeky-cool glasses. They were leaning against a row of lockers, deep in conversation. That quickly, that easily.
“Yoo-hoo. I’m Babette.”
Jane snapped to attention.
“And it was my understanding that you had a brother.”
It was a simple statement of fact, but it made Jane sad. That had been her understanding, too—for her whole life—but her brother had never been particularly brotherly.
Jane looked at Marcus again, and this time he looked back. He raised his eyebrows, and Jane gestured at Babette and he turned to his new friend, shook hands, and said, “See you later, man.” He came over to his sister’s side.