Dreamland Social Club(85)
“What do you mean?”
They started to walk toward the grown-up rides, some of which Babette would be too small to go on. “I just mean, you’re not a very good goth.”
Babette stopped by a bench and climbed up on it to stand so she could see Jane better. “Honestly, I think I did it because I thought it’d be a distraction, you know? Like people couldn’t just say ‘Hey look, there’s a dwarf.’ I thought that if I did the goth thing, I don’t know, the dwarf thing wouldn’t be my whole identity.”
It made sense. Somehow.
“I don’t know”—she held out a hand and Jane helped her down—“I think maybe it backfired. And we’re all in therapy now and I somehow can’t bring myself to go to the sessions as a goth. Analyze that!”
“It just doesn’t seem very you is all.” They were nearing the bumper cars. “But that’s good, about your parents and therapy, right?”
“Come on.” Babette pinched Jane’s leg. “I’m going to bump you so hard that your clothes will come back to life.”
Rita and Marcus were already in bumper cars. Legs and H.T. and Leo and Debbie and Minnie, too. Even the Claveracks were squeezing themselves into small seats and then someone threw a switch and the bumper course came to life. Jane hit her pedal hard and barreled across the course to hit Harvey Claverack sideways, and hard, and then backed up, turned, and moved on. She made a straight line for Leo and hit him hard on the side.
“Hey!” she said. He spun around and shot off and then came back and hit her hard head-on.
She had to shout. “I need to tell you something.”
But he just rammed her again and said, “Later, gator,” and was gone.
She and Babette and Rita hit the Teacup Ride together after walking off the bumper cars, tilting their stiff necks this way and that, shaking out their legs. Jane did most of the spinning of the turntable at the center of the cup when the ride started. She grew tired quickly.
“I could use a little help here, guys.” She looked up.
But Rita and Babette just exchanged a look and laughed, so they just let the car spin until it stopped and that was okay. The whole cup was also spinning on a disc and rotating on a larger turntable, so there was still plenty of spinning even without Jane’s help. The effect was dizzying. Jane wasn’t sure if it qualified as fun.
They went on a Tilt-A-Whirl after that and then took a break from rides to try to knock down three milk bottles with a baseball and shoot out paper stars with BB guns. When they shot water guns into clown faces to explode balloons, Jane thought of Preemie and how very much she felt indebted to him and his attic for making her year what it was. She’d spent enough time looking at enough pictures of him by now that he no longer looked like a clown in her mind’s eye.
Finally, as the park’s closing neared, Jane found herself sharing a car with Leo—just Leo—on the Polar Express. She wanted to just give her body over to the centrifugal force that was pushing her down the bench seat and into Leo as the ride gained speed, shooting them around in circles. She’d felt this way pretty much since the second she’d seen him outside the bar that first day—like some invisible force was pulling her toward him, pushing her toward him—so it was nice to not have to fight it for once.
She was watching paintings of polar bears and ice caps whir by in a white blur. Are you sure I’m not a brown bear? that baby polar bear had asked, and for the first time, Jane found the joke sort of sad. She herself had been behaving like that baby bear, trying desperately to find a place to fit in.
“I’m sorry I’m crushing you!” she screamed as the ride reached peak speed and her and Leo’s hip bones banged up against each other.
“It’s okay,” he said. Their arms had gotten tangled as they both clung to the bar in front of them, whiteknuckled and tense.
“I found some crumbs!” she shouted over the music.
“You did?” he shouted back.
She nodded and screamed, “Do you know what a bathysphere is?”
“Of course!” he screamed back.
“The Bath key,” she said, and then she waited for the realization to dawn.
“Seriously?” Leo shouted. “Here on Coney?”
Just as a voice came from the ride’s control booth—“Do you want to go backwaaaaaaaads?”—Jane closed her eyes and let her head hang back and yelled, “Yes!”
Without anyone even specifically suggesting it, they all made their way down to the Anchor after they got kicked out of Wonderland at closing time. Leo went behind the bar and started pouring Cokes. Jane took a seat on a high stool and studied the crowd. There were old people and young people, black and white. Some were well dressed, some barely dressed. And they were shoulder to shoulder at the bar.
“Hey.” Jane saw the petition hanging on a clipboard on a nail in the wall behind the bar; the seahorse postcard from Weeki Wachee was back. “I want to sign the petition.”
“Re-he-heally,” Leo said. “You want to save this ratinfested shithole?”
She smiled and said, “I guess I do.”
“Save yourself the trouble.” Leo took the petition down, started ripping it up.
“What are you doing?” Jane said.