“So, what’s your deal anyway?” Venus said as they started to line up a bunch of equipment they needed, though Jane had dared not read the full instructions on the handout in front of her: scalpel, magnifying glass, petri dish.
“No deal.”
“Where are you from?” An ink vine with black roses on it climbed up her neck. More roses peeked out from under her black long-sleeved shirt, touching the knuckles on her hands.
“Nowhere, really,” which was how it felt. “I mean, sort of all over.”
“Your grandfather cheated me out of a stuffed animal once.” In between words, she was chewing on a fingernail that had been painted black. “When I was little. He used to tell me to go play in traffic.”
Jane knew she had to stand her ground. She’d been confronted by the alpha female in pretty much every school she’d ever transferred into, which had always seemed strange to her, as if she were any kind of threat at all. She said, “You don’t seem like the stuffed-animal type.”
Venus studied her, not sure how to react. After a moment, she said, “Not the point.”
Jane was about to say, “What is?” but got distracted by the ink on Venus’s skin, wondering how deep it went. Venus said, “So you think you’ve seen Leo’s seahorse before?”
Jane fought to hide the sting of what felt like a betrayal. “That’s right.”
“What about my tattoos?” Venus rolled up her sleeves. “Have you seen mine before?”
“No,” Jane said. “I don’t think so.”
All at once a dream she’d had the night before—a nightmare, really—came back. She’d been struggling to breathe underwater. The seahorse had been there, staring her down. For a second she had thought she’d be able to ride it up out of the water to safety, so she’d grabbed onto it, only to find out it wasn’t real but was made of plastic, a toy. It wouldn’t save her, couldn’t save her, and she awoke as if gasping when breaking through to the surface of the sea.
“What about these?” Venus turned around and lifted up the back of her shirt, revealing a whole garden of ink. Wildflowers reached up toward her shoulder blades; lilies floated on what seemed to be a small pond. If you blocked out the red, shiny bra straps cutting across it, it was beautiful in a shocking sort of way. Jane couldn’t help but think that you just shouldn’t do that to skin. “Familiar?”
Jane, suddenly self-conscious about staring at Venus’s bare skin and bra strap, said, “No, pull your shirt down.”
“Yeah,” Venus smacked her gum and fixed her top. “I didn’t think so. Just Leo’s.”
“Right,” Jane said. “Just Leo’s.”
Then Venus said, “Go figure,” and the teacher, whom Jane had just met and had already forgotten, probably for good, called the class to attention as Jane reconsidered her dream. The seahorse wasn’t going to save her, and if Leo was already blabbing about her questions, he was unreliable at best.
Only she could save herself. She’d have to go back to the yearbook, to the original plan of finding the names of other people who were in her mother’s club. Of seeing if she could track any of them down.
Walking out onto the beach at day’s end, after a quick stop at the library, where she had slipped her mother’s yearbook into her bag undetected, Jane sat down on the sand. She thought about looking through the yearbook right then, but didn’t want to get caught now, not after she’d successfully gotten it out of the building. So she took out some of the required reading for English Lit. Opening her book to a Wordsworth poem, she read,I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils . . .
But it was way too nice out for homework and besides, she’d already read that poem at least three gazillion times before, at three different schools. She pretty much felt like that cloud. But without the daffodils. The good news, she realized then, was that tomorrow was Friday. It appeared she would survive the week.
She put down the book and watched a group of older girls and guys—like in their twenties—sitting nearby on the sand. The girls wore pigtails and sunglasses half the size of their faces; one of the guys wore a T-shirt that said “Ithaca is GORGES.” The boys were building sand castles while the girls read glossy magazines.
What would Jane wear to a party? She did look like she’d been dipped in gray paint—day after day after day—and for a second, she closed her eyes and dreamed that if she dove into the ocean, her gray clothes would all fall off and fade away and she’d resurface in lavish new garments in coral colors. What had her mother meant when she’d said she’d been a mermaid once? Probably nothing at all.
Spying Babette’s newspaper in her bag, Jane pulled it out and scanned the page it was folded to. Her eyes landed on a headline that read NO MORE GO FOR CONEY’S GO KARTS.
Coney Island’s beloved Go Kart ride was demolished earlier this week. The destruction of the Go Karts before the official end of the summer season next week marks a dramatic move on the part of Loki Equities, who until now has been the silent and mostly invisible landlord to various Coney mainstays, including the Go Karts, Wonderland amusement park, and more. The Regan family, who ran the Go Kart ride for thirty years, confirmed that they received notification by mail from Loki several weeks ago that their lease would not be renewed. The operators of Wonderland confirmed that their lease is up this spring, though they have not yet discussed terms with Loki.
This winter, a special New York City commission is due to review a proposal by Loki Equities, the largest landholder on Coney Island, to develop a controversial year-round Vegasstyle theme park and mall. In the meantime, the city is moving forward with its own plans to develop several acres and is accepting bids from amusement park operators and designers.
She read that last bit again and thought she might burst.
Leo was suddenly sitting next to her. “What’s up, Looky Lou?”
She looked at him askance as she put the paper back in her bag so she could show it to her father later. Who was this guy?
He nodded toward the sand castles. “You going to join the fun?”
Jane watched a bucket full of upturned sand crumble in a series of small landslides. “Wouldn’t be a very good Looky Lou if I did.”
They were quiet for a moment; a seagull walked closer, presumably to see if they had any food.
“What does that even mean?” she said.
“What?” Leo smiled. “Looky Lou?”
“No,” she said. “Ithaca is GORGES.”
“Not worth explaining,” Leo said. “But suffice it to say, the hipster influx is not a good sign. It means the gentrification of Coney has begun.”
Jane had never heard the word gentrification before. “What’s that?”
“It’s a good thing you’ve never lived here before and have a reason for not knowing this stuff,” Leo said. “Otherwise I’d be starting to wonder right about now, whether you were sort of, I don’t know”—he rooted around for a word—“daft.”
Daft? It was one thing she most certainly wasn’t. “Are you going to explain or not?”
“You’re cute when you’re pissed off.” He smiled, then leaned back to rest on his elbows; Jane thought she might die from the cute. “It means that the hipsters and yuppies and rich people seem to have recently woken up and said, Hey, wait a second, Coney’s awesome. Why is it so working class?”
“And that’s bad?”
“Yes, that’s bad.” Leo was exasperated. “Because it means the price of everything is going to go up and the little businesses that have kept Coney alive all this time are going to get pushed out or bought out. It’s the beginning of the end. The Go Karts were only the start of it.”
Jane just looked out at the sun’s white reflection on the waves and thought about telling him about her idea, how her father could maybe help turn things around by bringing more business to the area if the city bought one of his coasters—maybe even a whole
theme park. But then Leo said, “Now that you’re landed gentry you probably don’t even care.”
“It was just a dopey puzzle piece,” she said, and Leo shook his head and said, “I’m talking about the house. Preemie’s house.”
“Oh.” Of course. Maybe she was daft. “I don’t technically own it yet.”
“Ah, but you will. And when you do, someone will come along and offer you more money than you can refuse so they can make way for some big-box store or some other crap, and you’ll take it.”
Her head hurt. “Isn’t that sort of how it works?”
“Doesn’t mean it’s right.”
Jane couldn’t argue with that, not on the spot anyway, so she said, “I’m sorry for what I said about the boardwalk today.”
“What, you mean, how the Anchor should be knocked down?” He was smiling.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jane dared. “But the Anchor sort of looks like it’s going to fall down on its own.”
He smiled and elbowed her. “I could say the same thing about your house.”
“Touché,” Jane said. But it was different. She didn’t love the idea of Leo’s father owning such a dump. She felt like it said something about the kind of guy Leo was, or would end up being, though she wasn’t sure what.
Leo wiped sand off his hands. “Have you even been to the Anchor?”
Jane shook her head. “Of course not.”
“We’re going to have to remedy that situation one of these days.”
“If you say so,” she said with an edge of sarcasm.
“I say so.” He ran a hand through his hair. “And shit, I have to find that postcard for you. Sorry. I looked around the house. I swear I’ve seen it recently, but I can’t think of where.”
“It’s no big deal,” she felt the need to say, then wanted to take it back. She felt like she wanted to ask him to ask his parents if they’d known her mother, but then she felt like she was already asking too much. The guy barely knew her. Finding the postcard was good enough for now.
“Either way.” Leo stood up and wiped sand off his jeans, and said, “So I guess I’ll see ya.”
“Yeah.”
He turned to go but then stopped and said, “Actually, Jane?”
She looked up.
“Do you think maybe I could see it sometime, Preemie’s old Coney stuff?”
“Of course.” She looked at her watch, wondered whether anyone was home, whether it mattered.
Leo laughed and said, “I don’t mean right this second, but you know. Just say when.”
He backed away a few steps before turning away, before Jane had a chance to whisper when.
Like Orphans, this film—labeled ‘King’ & ‘Queen’ the Great Diving Horses, 1899—was grainy and black-and-white, and when the projector whirred to life in the quiet attic, it was hard to believe, somehow, that the images were real.
Jane sat on the dusty floor in her pajamas and watched one horse and then a second one plunge off a high platform into a pool below, making a huge black-and-white splash. She tried to imagine what it felt like for an animal of that size to hit the water with so much velocity, and imagined it hurt. Maybe even a lot.
She watched the reel again, this time looking for a trainer with a prod, maybe something electrical and sharp. But the horses had jumped on their own. Seemingly, no one had forced them.
Jane felt like maybe she knew what King and Queen had been thinking, if they’d been thinking at all. Because Leo—who wanted to take her to a bar, who wanted to come up to the attic, who made her feel like staying—seemed dangerous, but all she wanted to do was dive in.
CHAPTER eight
SMOKY AIR DREW JANE TOWARD the back window of her room on Saturday around lunchtime, and she saw her brother out in the yard, manning a small charcoal grill. Since she was up to the letter R in the yearbook and still hadn’t found any more members of the school’s original Dreamland Social Club, she set the task aside and went downstairs and out the back door—swirls of wrought iron with a screen that let cool air pass—and stepped over all sorts of old, dead foliage, then sat in a black metal chair near the grill. She stretched out her legs and said, “What’s the most fun you’ve ever had?”
Marcus raised his eyebrows salaciously and said, “I don’t think you really want to know.” He was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, a combo that Jane guessed worked on only about three days of the year in New York weather. Today was one of them.
“Ew.” A hydrangea plant next to her held some purple blooms in defiance of the decay around it. “And I don’t believe you anyway.”
“I don’t know.” Marcus flipped his burgers and each one sizzled. “I had fun at that big theme park in Germany, and that Ocean Dome place in Japan was pretty cool. Actually, they should build something like that here, you know?”
An indoor beach was certainly a better idea than a shopping mall, but Jane still wasn’t convinced that day at the Ocean Dome was the most fun she’d ever had. She reviewed her memory of it all. The sand castles of Coney. The volcano erupting. The wave pool. It had been fun, at the time. But now she had a hard time thinking of anything she’d done with her mother as fun. “I’m supposed to write a sentence about the most fun I’ve ever had on Coney, or somewhere else since we just got here. I’m drawing a complete blank.”
“One sentence?” Marcus shrugged. “Make something up.”
But that wouldn’t do. Something about the assignment was getting under Jane’s skin. It was under there right next to this business about the city accepting bids for their new amusement park attractions. She hadn’t had a chance to talk to her father yet. “Where’s Dad?” she said, and Marcus shrugged again.
He pulled the burgers off the grill with a spatula, slid them onto a plate where two open buns awaited. “So are you going to that party next weekend?”
Of course he already knew about it.
“I don’t have anything to wear,” Jane said, because Babette had gotten under her skin, too.
“It’s a party in the projects, Jane. Not a cotillion.” He bit into a burger, nodded approval as he chewed, and presented the plate with the other burger to Jane.
“What do you care what I do?” Jane said. Then she took a bite of her burger and felt her body come alive from it, felt the warmth of it slide down to her belly.
“Eat fast,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Five bites later their burgers were gone, and then Marcus got up and walked to a set of metal doors at the side of the house, built into the ground at an angle. He opened one of them and took a step down and said, “Follow me.”
Jane did as he asked and then the lights came up on what appeared to be . . . well, she wasn’t sure.
A huge fake stone facade covered the far wall, where a red leather bar sat on four small wheels. It had a fireplace on the front of it—replete with fake logs—and a wire running to a nearby outlet. Marcus plugged it in, and the fireplace glowed orange through a gray film of dust.
The rest of the room’s walls were covered with red-and-gold wallpaper adorned with American eagles. Overhead, wagon-wheel lanterns dangled from a white stucco ceiling cut across with dark wood beams. Then Marcus switched on a light by the bar, and a neon sign that read “Birdie’s Bavarian Bar” glowed red. On a shelf behind the bar sprung a liquid rainbow: liqueurs in bright green and cherry red, even electric blue.
“Wow,” she said, and Marcus said, “Yeah. There’s a bunch of Birdie’s stuff here. Some clothes, even. I thought maybe . . .”
“Thanks,” she said, trying to take it all in, since she hadn’t found much of Birdie’s stuff anywhere else in the house. “This is where you found the movie?”
“Yeah.”
There passed a split second during which Jane was going to get mad that Marcus hadn’t shown her the bar as soon as he’d found it, but she hadn’t exactly gone running to show him the attic.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Marcus said, heading back up the stair
s to the yard.
Jane found the clothes in a huge wardrobe in the corner. They weren’t dresses and costumes, like she’d been expecting, but more casual skirts and tops, the sort which a girl like Jane could actually wear to school. This was good, but no help on the party front. There were drawers beneath the hangered section, where some old shoes sat waiting in pairs. Jane slipped them on and they fit. She liked knowing she took after her grandmother physically, even if it was just a shoe size.
She approached a large wooden chest that sat on the floor in the farthest corner of the room. Please, please, please, she said—to herself, to God, to no one, but mostly to her dead grandmother—as she knelt and opened its dusty top.
First came the hats—five of them—and then a sequined green bird costume. She couldn’t exactly go to the party wearing only a hat or dressed as a bird, so she tossed it all aside, only to pull out still another bird costume, this one gold, and then another in a fiery pink and another in a neon blue. The last one was a sea-foam green.
She kept digging, though, and finally found a dress, and then another dress, and then another; they had been pressed and folded and individually wrapped with tissue paper like someone had actually hoped they’d be worn again someday. She pulled out a gorgeous deep blue, almost black, dress that was just way too nice for a high-school party. But soon she found a burgundy dress with an overlay of lace on a silken shift. It was a little ornate in its details but still managed to seem subtle, almost casual. She stripped down to her bra and underwear right there in the basement bar to try it on and said another silent prayer. Looking at her reflection in a mirror that had taken on a gold sheen with age, she saw that the dress fit perfectly, made her body look better than anything in her current wardrobe. Birdie Cusack had saved her life, and Jane would never be able to thank her.
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