Dreamland Social Club(9)

The mist had lifted, unveiling a clear, hot morning. The ocean was churning up some white breakers right near the shore, and Jane stopped for a moment to watch and took a deep breath of salty air. It felt weird to be so close to the sea on a school day; putting a high school barely half a block from the beach seemed somehow cruel.

There was a fake palm tree on the beach right in front of her and it turned on: water sprayed from it, scattering a few startled birds. Jane tried to imagine wearing a swimsuit, dancing under the palm’s spray, but couldn’t yet wrap her head around it. She hadn’t been swimming in what felt like a lifetime—not since the Ocean Dome, not since her had mother died—and she wondered whether and when she’d ever do it again. Noting the cigarette butts and soda cans in the sand, she thought that this hardly seemed the place.

Jane trailed behind everyone else, looking for Tattoo Boy and thinking it wouldn’t be that big a deal to just ask him about his seahorse tattoo.

Would it?

But there was no sign of him, so she just watched some of the other kids joking around and felt a strange sort of longing. Then one of them said, “Check out the new chick,” and nodded his head toward Jane. A few people turned, and Jane froze. A seagull landed on the railing a few feet away and seemed to study her to determine whether she was edible, peck-able.

“She looks like she’s been dipped in gray paint.”

A guy with a skull tattooed on his neck stepped out of a crowd, and Jane recognized him from the table of geeks that morning. He had piercings in his nose and eyebrows and huge, draping holes in his earlobes. Jane still wasn’t sure what a geek was, exactly, but figured she’d find out eventually. He said, “What were you doing at Preemie Porcelli’s house this morning?”

“I live there,” she said, and the geek started to circle her. Her legs had begun to vibrate but she didn’t think her fear was showing. Yet. She could see a few people in her peripheral vision, coming closer and listening in.

“You gotta be kidding me.” The geek turned and snorted at one of his friends. He smiled.

In that second, Jane dared to hope that maybe she was about to find a lead. Because if this guy knew Preemie, maybe someone he knew—someone older—knew her mother. Heck, for all she knew Coney Island High had a Preemie Porcelli Appreciation Association and she just hadn’t seen their sign on that bulletin board. Standing tall, with eyes clear and open, she said, “He was my grandfather.”

The geek looked at Jane, then spat not at her but in her general direction and said, “Your grandfather was a piece of shit.”

Tattoo Boy pushed his way up to the center of the action and said, to no one in particular, “What’d I miss?”

Jane had read a story the night before—in an old book in the living room—about an elephant that swam five miles from Coney Island to Staten Island, escaping from Luna Park, where he’d been part of some kind of circus-sideshow attraction. It had given her the creeps, that story, because what on earth would be so bad about a place that an elephant would swim five miles to escape it? But that had been before she’d seen Edison’s film. That had been before she’d started school. After barely an hour at Coney Island High, she looked out at the shimmering water and at the lump of land across the bay to the right. She wondered whether she could survive the swim herself.





“Come on,” Marcus said at day’s end. “I’ll take you on the Wonder Wheel.”

Jane had been fighting a sick feeling all day, but this brightened her mood considerably. So they headed out into a sweltering afternoon and over toward the Ferris wheel’s entrance and wound their way through a short series of metal barriers—like a corral for cows—and then a man working the ride said, “Swinging or stationary?”

Marcus looked at Jane, shrugged, then said, “Swinging” just before Jane got to say, “Stationary.”

The guy working the ride opened up the door of a big yellow-and-blue metal cage for them and they got in, sitting facing each other on hard benches, also painted yellow. They were locked in from the outside and soon floated way up high over Brooklyn. Jane saw the big brick buildings her father had warned them to stay away from— “Those are the projects,” he’d said, and Jane had nodded understanding though she’d never really understood that usage of the word—and she saw the Manhattan skyline—a small gray silhouette on the far horizon. She’d read in that book the night before that people used to say that you could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris from the top of the Wonder Wheel. You couldn’t, she saw now, and she felt foolish for being slightly disappointed.

“I don’t remember much,” she said finally. “But I remember her talking about this place like she loved it. Do you know what I mean?” She looked out at the water again and thought about life back in Tokyo so very long ago—the Ocean Dome, the funeral, the rest—and how it all seemed like a dream, too. But not even her dream, somebody else’s.

Marcus shrugged. “Sort of. I guess.”

In that moment Coney didn’t look as awful as it did from street level. From way up high in the sky, you could almost imagine it was cleaner, better.

Jane said softly, “I was thinking of trying to, you know, find some of her friends or something.”

Suddenly, their car unhinged, and it felt like they were going to plummet to the ground and crash to their death. But after a second it stopped dropping and it just swayed back and forth, back and forth. It had slid down a rail to another part of the wheel.