Dreamland Social Club(62)
I take it from him and sip hot chocolate. Because Legs has actually become my friend. And even though I’m sure he still wants us to be more than that, he never says anything about it and neither do I. He doesn’t care that my father designed a coaster for Loki, thinks maybe a big slick coaster would be really cool for Coney. Even if I’m not sure anymore, it’s nice to not be judged.
Down the beach a ways, I spot Rita—squeezed into a black string bikini and wearing a hot-pink bathing cap. I marvel that it can contain all that hair. I can tell that one of the women she is with is her mother and figure the other is her grandmother. They all three take hands and then walk straight out into the surf, exclaiming things in Spanish that I don’t understand. Watching them, I feel a pang of envy, like a jellyfish has somehow pulsed its way into my heart and stung me there. Rita and Babette have a truce of sorts, too. Rita pretends nothing is going on with Marcus and Babette pretends she believes that. Or maybe she really does.
H.T. has arrived, too, and he says, “You’ll notice that most of those idiots are like y’all.” He’s bouncing on his legs, trying to keep warm. “White.”
He’s right.
“Why is that?” I ask, because I sense an opening where openings rarely exist.
He pulls his hat down to better cover his ears and breathes icy fog into his hands. “You tell me.”
“Seriously,” I say. “Why aren’t you out there?”
“’Cause it’s COLD!” he says, and we all laugh.
Legs says, “This is ridiculous. I can’t take it.” He turns to go. “You coming?”
I take one last look at the ocean, with the winter sun glaring off it in a shocking white burst, making me squint.
Tomorrow, things will go back to sleepy and only the pigeons and seagulls will miss the crowds. Winter will settle over Coney again like an invisible igloo. The streets will be cleaner, the nights quieter, and there will be no girls with pigtails and oversize sunglasses, no smart-alecky T-shirts, no families from Westchester, wherever that is. I will go back to poking around the attic for keys and journals and contemplating the Bath key and hiding my heart away in a shipwreck or submarine. I will go back to puzzling over the increasingly cryptic Dreamland Social Club fliers—“You really don’t know, do you?”; “Are you daft?”—and wait to see what they do next.
I will hum the Dreamland song and hear Leo’s sad, sad saw song in my head and hope that the tsunami of spring will never come.
Part Three
GABBA GABBA HEY
CHAPTER one
THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING, a Friday, actually felt like the first day of spring. Even Jane had been in a light and breezy mood—and had dared to wonder why she’d ever dreaded the onset of the new season—until she walked into the cafeteria at lunchtime only to have her red skirt blown chin-high by a cool blast of air.
The room was full and staring and laughing as Jane froze—Idiot! She froze!—and tried to hold her skirt down against the wind and then, finally, stepped aside. A small ramp had been placed over the steps down into the room, with a fan blowing up through a grate. She was thinking Claveracks! when she saw these words written in thin black paint on the ramp’s wooden top step: IT’S WHAT’S UNDERNEATH THAT REALLY MATTERS.
DEEP THOUGHTS FROM THE DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB.
Everyone in the room was still laughing.
She stormed out, blushing, as another unsuspecting person walked in and had her skirt blown up and the laughter roared louder. It was only when she went into the girls’ room and locked herself in a stall that she remembered the Blowhole Theater at Steeplechase Park. Which made her feel slightly better—she had not been the intended target but just one of many unsuspecting ones—but at the end of the day, she snapped when she saw the fliers all over that said: dreamland social club
EMERGENCY MEETING TODAY, ROOM 222
Which was familiar enough, but they all had a new slogan: YOUR MOTHER WEARS COMBAT BOOTS.
She ripped down the closest flier she could find and stormed up the stairs and knocked on the door to 222. Babette opened the door, and Jane was thinking of that armless, legless girl in the white dress in the old photo and feeling just that vulnerable, when she said, “What’s the deal with this club and its deep thoughts, anyway? And You know who you are? Your mother wears combat boots? Why be so exclusive? So vague? I mean, what if I wanted to join?”
She stepped into the room, and a chorus of voices let out a rhythmic “Gooble gobble. Gooble gobble.”
Legs was there. And Minnie. Leo. Venus. Rita. And Debbie, too. Pounding out a beat on the desks with their hands.
“Gooble gobble. We accept her. We accept her. One of us, one of us.”
For a second Jane wanted to scream, wanted to play her part—was that what she was supposed to do?—and shout out “FREAKS!” because that’s what the normal woman in the movie had done, but then something dawned on her. Her mother never would have started a club so exclusive; there was no way. The signs weren’t meant to exclude but to tease those who might want to be included. So when the chanting and pounding stopped, she said, “It’s the opposite of exclusive, isn’t it?”
“Yes, you idiot.” Babette closed the door. “And we’ve been waiting. All freaking fall and winter. I mean your mother founded the damn club.”