Most of what was left seemed to be, well, junk, but it was the sort of junk that had to be sifted through very carefully because every once in a while, mixed in with a pile of old, useless bills or receipts, there’d be a photo or a birth certificate or a baptismal gown or a program from a play her mother had been in as a child or the newspaper announcement of Preemie and Birdie’s wedding. Her grandparents seemed normal in those moments of discovery, when the ordinariness of their lives loomed larger than the weird stuff. Jane liked it, though she didn’t like that it made her wonder whether her mother had maybe overreacted. Leaving and staying away for so very long.
Leaving them.
Leaving her.
Putting on “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” before heading back up to the house, Jane lay down on Birdie’s red sofa and thought back hard, to that day, that other sofa. She was getting better at this remembering thing, so thought she might try willing it into happening, willing a memory to life. The couch was blue, not red. The day was cold, not hot. They’d been shopping. Or something. Hadn’t they? And there it was....
I’m tugging at my mother, who is lying on the couch, with a hand to her forehead. “Come on,” I’m saying. “Get up, Mommy.”
We are having a dance party in the living room, dancing to some crazy loud and fast music—“Hey! Ho! Let’s go!”—and I don’t want to stop.
“In a minute, honey,” she says, and she takes my hand and strokes it. “I don’t feel so hot.”
“Maybe you should take a little nap,” I say, and she says, “Maybe I should.” She smiles weakly and says, “Maybe I’ll meet you tonight in Dreamland.”
I lie down next to her and try to sleep, too—or at least I pretend to try to sleep—but then I sense that something has changed. Her body isn’t as warm by my side. Her chest isn’t rising and falling against my cheek.
“Mom?” I say finally, and I wait and wait and wait . . . for a reply that never comes.
She hadn’t been upstairs long—just long enough to write about that last night in her journal—before the house phone started ringing. It took a while for it to register in her brain that that’s what the sound was.
Not an alarm.
Not a bird.
Not a toy.
Once she had made her way downstairs, following the sound, she found her father standing in the kitchen. And so the two of them just stood there for a moment, dumbfounded, staring at the phone as if it were a wailing baby that had magically appeared.
“Should we answer it?” Jane asked finally, and her father, as if awakened from a zombie state, said, “Of course,” then stepped over to the phone—a rotary one, the color of split pea soup, mounted on the wall. “Hello?”
He listened and then looked at Jane, held the phone out and said, “It’s for you.”
She stepped over and took the phone. “Hello?”
“You people sound like you’ve never used a phone before.”
It was Leo.
“We just didn’t know it worked.” Jane exhaled. “I don’t think there’s been a bill.”
“Same number as always. My mother still remembered it.”
Her father was still hovering, so she covered the mouthpiece and said softly, “It’s a friend from school.”
As if that explained it all.
Leo said, “Hey, so I’m really sorry to have to do this, but something came up and I can’t make it tonight.”
“Oh.” She looked pointedly at her father now, and he finally left the room.
Leo said, “Can you go tomorrow night instead?”
“Sure.” It was no big deal. Something came up.
“It’s just that Venus . . .” He trailed off. “Well, never mind. Tomorrow night for sure, though. Okay?”
“Okay.” Jane managed through a lump of disappointment, and they rang off just as Marcus came home. He opened the freezer and held a bag of frozen peas to his face. His lip was bleeding.
“What happened to you?” Jane handed him a paper towel and he looked confused. She said, “Your lip.”
He pulled the peas away to allow him to dab his lip and she saw his swollen eye.
“Dad!”
“Jane, don’t.”
She called out, “I think you better get in here.”
Marcus put the peas back and sighed and sat at the kitchen table. Their father came in and said, “Let’s have a look.”
Marcus pulled the bag away again.
“Come on,” their father said. “I’ll walk you down to the hospital.”
“It’s not that bad, Dad. Really. It’s just swollen.”
Their father sat. “What happened?”
“It was dumb.”
“How dumb?” their father said.
Marcus smiled and said, “I might have neighed.”
“Why would you do that?” Jane snapped. “Why would you antagonize them?”
“I don’t know, Jane. Maybe I’m sick of them acting like they own the place.”
“It’s just for one year!” she said. But for the first time, she doubted the truth of it. What if it wasn’t just for one year?
Then maybe it wouldn’t matter so much that Leo had canceled. It was just one night. Not out of 365, but out of years. One measly night she wouldn’t even remember when she looked back on it all, on the early days on Coney.
CHAPTER four
THERE WERE NORMAL KIDS, of course. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. And Jane had met a lot of them. Sarahs and Jacintas and Kiras and Londas. A few Matts. A couple of Emmetts. She couldn’t seem to keep any of them straight, though; couldn’t seem to remember or connect. None of them seemed to know who she was—or who Preemie was—and none of them seemed to care. At first, she’d thought that would be nice. And she’d made some efforts to try to befriend some of them by the lockers and between classes. But she kept feeling drawn to Babette. To H.T. To the others. Even the ones who made her sort of uncomfortable, like Venus.
So when she walked into the girls’ bathroom that morning and saw a slew of freaks reflected in the mirrors, she had to work hard to make sense of the scene. Gone was the backdrop of normalcy. Everyone in the mirror was skewed. Then she saw the sign above the funhouse mirrors—somehow layered over the normal ones—and it read ARE YOU NORMAL?
Smaller letters below the question read DEEP THOUGHTS FROM THE DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB.
Girls with long blond hair had been turned into boyish ghouls. Girls with cropped dreads had hair down to their knees or knees where their eyes should be. Jane could be either a dwarf or a giant, depending on where, in front of the mirror, she stood. There was laughing and gasping and a few people saying, “Ugh. Could you imagine?” And that’s when Jane ducked out, decided she didn’t have to go so badly after all.
In homeroom that same morning it became clear that word of Marcus’s black eye had spread quickly, but not quite as quickly as word of Harvey Claverack’s black eye. Even Jane was caught off guard by the damage her brother had managed to inflict upon the geek, who was easily twice his size. Marcus’s eye region had retreated to its normal size but turned a deep shade of lavender. Harvey’s was a dark eggplant.
Ouch.
When she was sick of fielding questions about it for which she had no answers—and sick of pride and fear doing battle in her heart—she escaped into the basement halls and knocked on the door to the Siren offices.
“Oh, hi!” Legs said. “I was actually just coming to find you.”
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re doing a story about my brother’s black eye.”
“No.” He smiled. “Though it’s not the worst idea in the world. I wanted to show you something. You never came back to look through the archives, and I felt sort of bad that I brushed you off.” He handed her a large black-and-white photo. “I think that might be your mother?”
Jane took the photo and studied it. In it, her mother wore an Empire-waisted dress in a bright red with black leggings underneath and black boots—like combat boots—on her fee
t. Three others—one a man with his arm around her mother’s shoulder—stood side by side. “It is,” she said. “What about the other people? Are there names?”
“No,” Legs said. “Sorry.”
And right then she recognized Beth in the photo. Younger, but definitely Beth.
Legs said, “You can keep it,” and Jane said, “Thanks.”
He was probably not the kind of guy who had ever canceled on Minnie. Jane was dreading having to look Leo in the eye and not show her hurt.
“Just don’t tell anybody, okay?” Legs said. “Technically it’s school property.”
“Of course,” Jane said.
The first-period bell rang and they both headed toward the door. Jane stopped to put the photo into her bag and saw, in a light pencil marking on the back, the letters D.S.C.
“So would you, like, maybe want to go rollerskating on Friday?” Legs opened the door for her. “There’s a benefit thing.”
When she didn’t answer right away but kept, instead, looking at those letters, so barely there it was a wonder she’d even spotted them, Legs stammered a bit and said, “A bunch of people from school will be there.”
Sliding the photograph into a folder, Jane looked up. It was sweet of him to want to be friends, to include her in a group outing like that.
But rollerskating?
“Rollerskating isn’t really my thing,” she said, but then she felt such a rush of gratitude for him, for the photo, for his reaching out this way, she said, “But yeah, sure. Sounds fun.”
Venus seemed to want something from Jane in biology lab that morning. A confession of some kind? An apology? But since Jane was going to give her neither, she ignored Venus’s expectant looks and studied the instructions on the handout. They were doing a lab called “Invertebrate Diversity” and were going to be moving around the room to different stations, comparing general characteristics of a bunch of animals without backbones.
It turned out that Leo hadn’t shown up for school, and Jane wondered what that meant about his backbone, or lack thereof. Fortunately, she found that it was much easier to bluff in front of Venus without him around to remind her of what she was trying to hide. And what, exactly, was she hiding? Her feelings for Leo? The night at the Thunderbolt? Their plans to meet again tonight? The fact that she had seen them, maybe, kissing?
It’s just that Venus . . . he’d said on the phone.
It’s just that Venus what?
“So I was hanging out with Leo last night,” Venus said, and it felt like a kick in the gut. They’d just finished studying an earthworm—taking notes on whether it was symmetrical and had legs or eyes and how it moved—and had gone over to the snail station. Venus’s tattoos seemed to be in full bloom that day—she even smelled like roses—and Jane wondered whether the bugs were drawn to her. “He said your moms were friends.”
Jane nodded and studied the markings on the snail’s shell, looking for patterns or anything of interest at all.
“It doesn’t mean anything, you know.” Venus wasn’t taking many notes; just the bare minimum. “I just mean, it’s not like that means you two are gonna be bestest friends or anything.”
“Right.” Jane struggled hard not to add, Go play in traffic, and said instead, “I know.” She was sure now that their specimen had started to inch toward Venus.
Venus picked up the snail then, and Jane said, “I’m not sure you’re supposed to—”
“Read the handout,” Venus snapped, and Jane found the line that said “You are encouraged to handle the earthworms, crickets, and snails, but please be careful and don’t handle them too roughly.”
“He’s out sick today.” Venus coughed a fake cough. “I hope I didn’t catch it.”
Jane sat and stared at her lab sheet, not able to decipher her own notes and wondering: Did getting tattoos hurt more or less than conversations like this? Was there any way to measure physical pain against emotional pain? Did snails and earthworms and crickets know the difference? She wished for a note she could circulate—one about maybe treating her carefully, about not handling her too roughly. She’d give the first copy to Venus and the second one to Leo.
Babette barreled over at lunchtime and said, “Legs and Minnie broke up.”
She was breathless: “I just saw her crying in the bathroom.”
Practically bursting: “He wants to see other people.”
“Other people?” Rita said with a swallow. “Like who?”
Jane studied the seam of her book bag; the speckled pattern on the cafeteria floor, like a bird’s egg; the white skin showing through the openings of her Mary Jane–style shoes. Finally, when she could ignore the question no longer, she said, “I think he may have asked me out.”
“I knew it!” Babette made a pouty sort of face. “That’s so sweet. What did you say?”
Jane lost interest in her lunch entirely. “I said yes, but I didn’t realize it was a date.”
“So what if it’s a date,” Babette said. “That’s awesome.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” Jane said, and Babette said, “Jane. Come on.”
“Come on, what?”
“You know.” Babette wasn’t actually tugging on Jane’s arm but it felt like she was, with that look in her eyes.
“No.” Jane was fuming, because she did know. “I don’t.”
Babette looked across the room to where Venus and one of Leo’s friends were playing that game where you try to slap the other person’s hands before they slap yours; a flat thwack cut through the din of the room as Venus nailed the guy hard.
“Fine,” Babette said when she looked back at Jane. “It’s your life. Waste it if you want.”
“Are you guys going?” Jane said finally. “Rollerskating?”
“Yes, we’re going. But you can’t tell him you didn’t know it was a date. You have to pretend.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, so you’re going to tell him?” Babette put tiny hands on her hips. “You’re going to say, ‘Sorry I said yes, but I thought it was a group thing, and the thought of going on an actual date with you is so repulsive to me that I have to retract my yes.”
“I never said I was repulsed!” Jane protested. “I’m not!”
“Still.” Rita winced. “She has a point.”
Jane was almost at the boardwalk with Babette at day’s end when Mr. Simmons appeared and stopped her. “I’m still waiting for your postcard, Ms. Dryden.” He rubbed his goatee. “I check my mail so often I’m starting to feel like an army wife.”
“I’ll catch up,” Jane said to Babette, who had started to walk over toward the bench on the boardwalk where Rita and Marcus were sitting.
“I know,” Jane said to her teacher. She would have made a postcard about the night at the old Thunderbolt site, her night with Leo, if he hadn’t ruined it all the next day by canceling on her to be with Venus.
Mr. Simmons said, “You’re losing points each day I don’t have it.”
“I know,” Jane said again, and she was about to skulk away when she had a thought. “Mr. Simmons?”
He turned.
“What do you know about carousel horses?”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning, I don’t know, how much money would a Claverack carousel horse be worth?”
“From what I know—anything from maybe ten grand to sixty grand? But here’s the thing”—he paused and seemed to be choosing his words—“like any collectible of any real value, it’s priceless to the right owner.”
“But who is the right owner?” The answer to that question would solve everything.
Mr. Simmons shrugged and said, “The person who finds it priceless.” He started to back away. “The postcard, Jane. Don’t forget.”
She turned and moved on to meet Marcus, Rita, and Babette but saw that Babette hadn’t made it to the bench yet. She was frozen in place, watching from a distance, while Marcus and Rita sat side by side, laughing in the sun. They were watching H.T
. and his friends dancing on the boardwalk to loud hip-hop music coming from a boom box. H.T. was doing some kind of fancy, spinning handstand. Marcus and Rita were sitting very, very close.
“Babette!” Jane called out—more loudly than was necessary during a gap in the music—and Rita looked up and elbowed Marcus, who quickly put space between them.
Babette turned to Jane, who caught up with her, and together they joined Marcus and Rita.
They all watched H.T.’s crew dance for a while more, and then Jane pulled out the photo of Birdie and the legless man, which was tucked into the front cover of one of her texts. What Mr. Simmons had said made her realize why she’d taken it from the house, why she’d been carrying it around. When H.T. stopped dancing, she walked over and said, “Hey.”
“Hey.” He looked at her expectantly.
“I was looking through some of my grandmother’s old stuff and I found this picture.” She looked at the picture again now and felt like this was probably a huge mistake. But there was no turning back. “It’s her and a guy who also, well . . .” She suddenly couldn’t find words.
H.T. snatched the photo out of her hand and looked at it, then said, “Oh, man, no way. Johnny Eck, the Half Boy. This guy’s, like, my idol.”
“Really?”
“Totally.”
“Jane,” Babette said, with a whine. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“You can have it,” Jane said to H.T. “I mean, if you want it.”
“For real?”
“Jane!” Babette said again.
“Yeah,” Jane said to H.T.
“Awesome,” he said. “Thanks.” Then he turned to Babette and said, “And why are you in such a hurry, Little B?”
Jane thought it was cute he had a nickname for her.
Jane had done all her homework and made another search of the attic and her own room for her mother’s journal—what a nagging thing that was, to know it existed and might still—but there were still hours to fill before she was meeting Leo. If he was even going to show up.
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