Dreamland Social Club(7)
“I’m Babette and I’m supposed to show you to homeroom.”
Marcus said, “Excellent. I’m Marcus.” He had spent two seconds deciding what to wear on this, their first day at their new school, while Jane had been obsessing over her own outfit—namely which gray skirt to wear—for days.
Babette said, “Well, come on then,” and led Jane and Marcus down the hall and around a few corners to a pair of double doors. She threw them open with small arms and shouted over the din of the crowd inside the cafeteria: “It’s an experimental new homeroom approach. Based on some Quaker thing, or so they say. It’s supposed to teach us about community or how to be accountable for our own actions or something. You just sign in over there”—she pointed to a long table—“and sit wherever you belong.” She studied the Drydens and said, “Honestly, I have no idea where that could possibly be.”
Hundreds of students were talking in clusters, sitting at long tables. Marcus waved across the room and said, “I’m good,” and took off toward the guy he’d met in the hall. Babette jolted a bit, then said, “I guess that just leaves you.”
Story of my life.
Babette took a deep breath and surveyed the room. “Here’s my parting advice. That table over there?” She pointed to a table of big, loud guys with shaved heads and, in some cases, big holes in their earlobes. Jane didn’t even want to imagine what they had those holes for, or how they’d been made.
“Those are the wannabe geeks, and not geek-geeks like smart. But geeks like sideshow geeks. Total wasters. They won’t give someone normal, like you”—she looked Jane over again—“the time of day if you’re lucky. In other words, stay off their radar.”
“Okay,” Jane said. “Thanks.”
Babette nodded solemnly and went to a table near the windows where she was greeted excitedly by a few of the other kids Jane had seen the night before, like the girl who could bend this way and that. Tattoo Boy, again in jeans and a black shirt, was sitting at the table in front of a large doll dressed in a tiny T-shirt and jeans, which seemed odd for all the obvious reasons, but then the doll turned around and started talking to Babette, and flipped her long curly blond hair. Was she some kind of genius toddler?
They were like something out of a movie—a special effects extravaganza—and the way they laughed so easily made Jane wish she had a second head, or a tail, or claws for hands.
Right then a black boy who had no legs slid past her on a skateboard. Dizziness swelled inside Jane’s head as she watched him give the crowd at Babette’s table a quick salute—a tap of the finger to the forehead—and stop to chat. It had to be some kind of optical illusion, a trick of the eye.
His body just . . . ended.
Having never really fit in anywhere, Jane had hoped she might here, in Brooklyn, a place known around the world for its diversity, its lack of pretense. And if she wasn’t destined to suddenly morph into a cheerleader or class president, it’d be nice to fit in among the misfits.
But she’d never seen misfits like this before.
Looking around the room for a potential in, a place to sit, Jane was as stumped as Babette. Frankly, there weren’t that many white kids; maybe three tables of them, all clustered near one another, a fact that Jane found sort of sadly predictable. From the Indian kids in London, the black kids in Ireland, and the white kids in Bahrain, Jane knew that minorities usually stuck together. She’d often been among them. But what would it mean if she just strolled over to the white kids here, assuming they’d accept her?
She watched the guy with no legs slide on his skateboard away from Babette’s table across the room, where he joined a large table of other black kids. Climbing up onto the seat bench, he shook hands with the guy next to him, then they laughed about something and he did a sort of weird pop-and-lock move with his arms. Jane couldn’t help but think he looked like he was sinking in quicksand, and had to resist the urge to run over and pull him up. Watching him and his friends, she wondered again: What would it mean if she walked over to his table? Or Babette’s?
There were only a few minutes before the first bell anyway, so she went back out to explore the hallways, to see if there were any old trophies or photos in glass cases. When she found none, she studied a bulletin board on one of the walls. There were signs for a math club and a science club, which had been her extracurricular staples all along the way. But there were some signs for clubs she’d never heard of before. One advertising the meeting of TEENS FOR THE REDEVELOPMENT OF CONEY ISLAND had been vandalized with a black marker; someone had scrawled CAPITALIST PIGS across the printed type. Another sign read, simply, dreamland social club
TOMORROW AFTERNOON, ROOM 222.
You know who you are.
Whatever that meant.
Jane was barely in her seat, way in the back of classroom 231, behind the giant she’d seen in homeroom, before a hip-looking older guy wearing jeans, a boiler hat, and suspenders got up from one of the student desks, walked to the front of the room, and said, “Okay, field trip! Let’s go.”
The writing on the blackboard said “Topics in Coney Island History with Mr. Simmons,” and Jane thought it strange. She’d never been to a high school with a local history class before, but then she’d also never been to school with a giant and a goth dwarf and a kid with no legs. The room was decorated with old postcards and photos having to do with Coney Island—some news clippings, too—but now was clearly not the time to try to explore it.