Dreamland Social Club(72)

That’s what they’d called it?

Baby Class at Lunch?

Because if they’d called the first one Baby Class at the Beach instead, she would have been spared an awful lot of heartache.

When the film was done, just a minute after it started, Jane took the reel off the projector and put it in a box with the others. It was time.





CHAPTER five


ALL RIGHT, PUT YOUR BOOKS AWAY.” Mr. Simmons turned to the board and started to draw a big building. It had columns on the front and peaked roofs, and above the doorway, where an inscription might appear cut into marble, he wrote TOWN HALL.

“Since you’re all aware that Loki Equities is trying to force ‘the future of Coney Island’ to arrive”—he put the chalk down and brushed his hands together—“I thought we’d take today to talk about some of this past weekend’s events in our own mock town hall meeting.”

He looked out at the room, stroked his goatee. “Anyone want to get us started and jump right in?”

Leo stood. “My father’s bar is getting shut down. It’s not fair.”

Somebody in class, maybe an Emmett, said, “Nobody’s making him sell it! Just don’t take the money!”

“They don’t own the land.” Leo turned to speak directly to the guy. “They rent the space, and Loki is forcing them out by not negotiating a new lease.”

“The Anchor’s a dump,” another person, possibly a Stephanie, said.

Leo said, “Sure, it’s run-down and stuff, but it’s old. And it’s run-down because it caters to thousands and thousands of people. It’s a Coney Island institution.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Simmons was writing years on the board: 1949, 1964, 1985.

Then after that he wrote, History repeats.

“Today, my dear students, you are taking part in an age-old Coney tradition. Namely, fighting about what Coney means, what Coney’s future should be. We can, and should, look to the past as a series of cautionary tales, because each time”—he pointed at each year with the piece of chalk in his hand, making a click each time—“Coney was going to be redeveloped . . . and each time . . . what happened?”

“Nothing,” Legs said.

“Exactly,” Mr. Simmons said. “What, if anything, is different this time?” He put the chalk down on the ledge beneath the blackboard.

“It’s hard to say,” Babette said. “Something is different every time. This time it’s Loki.”

Mr. Simmons said, “Well put. Loki does seem to be serious. And of course the city has a few acres of its own to develop. Though politics seems to have brought all that to a screeching halt.”

Jane had sort of hoped her father had been misinformed about that.

“The long and short of it,” Mr. Simmons said, “is that I might be—any of us might be—rolling in our graves by the time any of this actually happens.”

“Mr. Simmons?” Leo said. “Why don’t you ask Jane for any insider information she might have? In case you haven’t heard, her father designed Loki’s weenie.”

Something about the look in Leo’s eyes when he turned to her made her blood boil, and she said, “The only inside information I have is that your father hasn’t paid his rent in months and that there are rats in the bar.”

“You’re joking, right?” Leo rolled his eyes.

“Now, now,” Mr. Simmons said, patting the air in front of him with his palms to say calm down. “I am curious, though, Jane. What do you think of Loki?”

She said, “I was thinking of reserving judgment until after I actually see the new plan.”

“I suppose that’s sensible enough,” Mr. Simmons said, and Leo snorted.

He took his petition up to the front of the room after class ended. Mr. Simmons signed without batting an eye. Was she the only one who saw how complicated all this was?

“Yikes,” Babette said, appearing by her side in the hall.

“Yeah.”

And then there was Leo, right in her face.

“I just don’t get you. At all.” He looked visibly shaken for the first time since she’d known him; even his seahorse seemed agitated, blurry. “It just seems sometimes you do one thing, then do something else that’s like the total opposite.”

“What are you even talking about?” Jane said.

Legs walked past them then and Leo looked up at him and nodded briefly, and it felt like some sort of weird exchange of male sympathy, like they both felt they were better off not even dealing with crazy girls like Jane.

“Forget it, Jane.” Leo looked back at her, seemed to shake something off. “But I mean, what side are you on anyway?”

It wasn’t about sides.

There weren’t sides, unless there could be like a million of them.

Nothing about it was black and white, this or that.

“You know what?” Jane said to Leo, and Babette drifted away with an apologetic raise of the eyebrows. “I don’t get you either. I don’t get how you can be so smart about so many things and have such ridiculous tunnel vision about this. About the bar. And I mean, have you even looked around lately? Taken a good look? Coney is a dump, and Loki’s the only person—or company or whatever—who’s really trying to do anything about it.”