“I look a lot like one of my aunts,” Rita said. “She’s older.”
Babette pinched Jane’s arm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jane shrugged and Babette sighed, then said, “How?”
“Brain aneurysm,” Marcus said. “Here one minute, gone the next.”
He looked at the second half of Rita’s sandwich, untouched on a piece of waxy white paper. “You going to eat that?”
She pushed it his way and Jane noted the gold rings on her fingers, matching the hoops peeking out from those curls. She couldn’t believe Marcus could be so nonchalant about things sometimes.
“Can you ask her?” Jane pressed. “Your aunt?”
“Yeah,” Rita said. “Sure, I guess.”
Marcus was chewing, but Jane could tell he was also subtly shaking his head.
They were all quiet for a moment and then Babette, apparently taking her tact cue from Marcus, turned to him and said, “So, did you hear about the party on Saturday?”
He nodded while he chewed, not looking up from his half sandwich.
“You should totally go.”
Jane felt embarrassed on Babette’s behalf.
“Hey, I just heard about the headless chicken thing.” He turned to Jane as he brushed his hands together—the sandwich was gone—and got up. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Jane was annoyed that he was playing the part of the good big brother when he never did it without an audience. “It was a lifetime ago. And anyway Rita helped me out.”
Marcus turned to Rita and said, “Thanks for the sandwich,” then got up to throw out his trash. Rita crumbled the waxy white paper into a ball and threw it about ten feet to land in the same can a second later. She stood and pumped her fists in the air, revealing the brown skin of her taut belly. Marcus turned and smiled. Babette looked like she might cry but only for a second, only until Rita turned back to the table, pulled her shirt down. She had some serious breasts in there.
“So really,” Babette said brightly to Jane, “what are you going to wear?”
The next morning a naked baby doll hung from the door of Jane’s locker in a noose. The Claveracks were hovering, as usual, and Jane decided to just leave the doll there. At least for now. Maybe even all day. What did she care? It was just a doll. So she gathered her books, closed her locker, and walked away, leaving the baby hanging.
“You forgot your grandfather,” Harvey said. “He looks like he could use an incubator right about now.”
“That’s just not funny,” she said.
“You know what’s really not funny?” Cliff said. “You keeping our grandfather’s horse when he
made
it and has the right to do whatever he wants with it.”
“And what, exactly, does he want to do with it?” she snapped.
“Sell it,” Harvey snorted. “What else?” He elbowed his brother. “Ride it around the living room?”
“How much is it worth?” she asked. It wasn’t like her family couldn’t use the money.
“Like we’d tell you,” Harvey said. “You know what, Cliff? That old house of Preemie’s doesn’t look that hard to break into.”
“You know, Harv, you’re right.”
Jane said, “Breaking into the house isn’t the problem. The problem is the horse is chained to the radiator and the radiator and horse combined probably weigh, I don’t know, a ton? So good luck to you.”
They backed away, snorting useless comebacks—“I could probably bench-press the freakin’ thing”; “F.U. and the horse you rode in on”—and Jane walked back to her locker, pulled the baby off it, and walked down the hall toward Principal Jackson’s office, fully prepared to register an official complaint. But when she found the office empty, she lost her nerve, tossed the doll into the trash can by the door, then hurried to Topics in Coney Island History, where Mr. Simmons was handing out postcards in see-through plastic sleeves.
“Americans bought seven hundred and seventy million, five hundred thousand postcards in 1906,” he said, giving Jane a solemn raise of the eyebrows since she was officially late. “And imagine this: on one day in 1906, over two hundred thousand postcards were sent from the post office right here on Coney Island. One day. Two hundred thousand postcards.”
Jane gingerly held the card Mr. Simmons handed her right then, but she also tried to bore her thoughts into the back of Leo’s head.
Seahorse, seahorse, seahorse.
Postcard, postcard, postcard.
“Ms. Dryden,” Mr. Simmons said. “If you will. . . .”
“Johnny,” she began, then took a breath. “I’m having the time of my life here on Coney. The bars are rowdy. The women are mad.”
People started laughing, and Jane felt herself start to blush. She read on: “Hope you’re holding down the fort. Cheers, Geoff.”
“Thank you, Ms. Dryden.” Mr. Simmons nodded. “Anyone think their postcard is particularly worth sharing?”
Leo raised his hand.
“Mr. LaRocca,” Mr. Simmons said. “Let’s have it.”
“Billy. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you half the things we’ve been up to,” Leo began, in an Irish accent.
Everyone laughed again and Jane smiled and had to resist the urge to doodle her name and Leo’s in a heart. She’d dearly loved Ireland, and was impressed with the accuracy of his accent.
“Was picked up last night for drunk and disorderly behavior. Turns out the copper has a taste for the Irish; we’ll have to send him a case when I return. ’Tis a mad place, this Coney. Who knew the States were so liberated? Best, Jimmy.”
“Excellent,” Mr. Simmons said. “Now can anyone point out something that these messages have in common?”
In the silence that followed, Jane heard the flutter of a bird and looked out the window. A pigeon had landed on the outside ledge, and for a moment she studied it because it seemed to be studying her. She looked hard into its round pigeon eyes, wondering if maybe it was Birdie reincarnated?
“The people are having fun,” Babette called out.
“Bingo,” Mr. Simmons said, and he turned and wrote the word FUN on the board. “Coney was known during this era as the ‘Playground of the World.’ So let’s talk for a minute about fun! What is it?”
Luckily he didn’t seem to actually expect a response. He just kept talking. “Is fun by definition bad? Sinful?”
Now he waited.
“Not necessarily,” Legs said. “If you think things like the human roulette wheel and the Shoot the Chutes are fun. Or riding wooden horses at Steeplechase Park.”
“Good,” Mr. Simmons said. “That’s what I believe we call good clean fun, right. But Coney Island has also been called ‘Sodom by the Sea.’ And not by some religious fanatics or anything but by a reputable source:
The New York Times
. Who can tell me what Sodom is?”
Jane waited for someone to answer, but everyone’s faces seemed blank. For the first time she wondered whether her education to date—while scattered about the globe—was actually better than she’d realized. She raised her hand, and Mr. Simmons called on her. She said, “It’s a city that was destroyed by God for being so full of sin.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Simmons said, and Jane thought,
Thanks, Mrs. Chester
, who had taught her religious studies class in Ireland. “And it was considered sinful back in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds for women to cavort in the surf with their skirts pulled up, or to wear swimsuits in public. There were, let’s face it, brothels here on Coney and bars—lots of bars—where people were free to overindulge.”
“Sounds awesome,” Leo said, and people laughed.
“How’s this for fun?” Mr. Simmons said. “When Fred Trump bought Steeplechase Park, he threw a demolition party where guests were handed bricks and encouraged to destroy windows, rides, whatever, at Steeplechase. Does that sound like a fun party?”
“It sounds like a party for assholes,” Leo said, and everyone laughed again and Mr. Simmons did, too. “You do have a way with words, Mr. LaRocca.”
Back at the bulletin board, Mr. Simmons said, “What about executing an elephant? Or watching it? Fun?” He picked up the stack of Topsy essays and started handing them back with grades. “Some of you thought so. Others, not so much.”
Jane was a little bit disappointed that she’d only gotten a B+.
“Before we meet again, I want you all to turn that sentence you wrote last week”—he winked dramatically and said, “And I know you all did it”—“into a postcard. A postcard from the place and time here on Coney where you had the most fun of your life. And I want you to send it to me.”
He pointed to an address written on the board, the school’s address. The class groaned.
Mr. Simmons just kept talking. “Be creative. Have fun with it. Bust out your crayons or markers if you must!”
Jane studied the main word in question—the hard corners of the F, the symmetrical curve of the U, and the jagged rise and fall of the N—but nothing was clicking. There was nothing fun about this assignment at all.
A tightly folded piece of paper landed on her desk as Mr. Simmons went on with his lesson, and she held it down low and out of sight to open it. Probably from Babette.
It said: “Still looking for that damn postcard. Want to go to the Anchor after school on Thursday?”
She looked over at Leo and he raised his eyebrows. Jane just nodded and then the bell rang.
Babette asked, “Where is your postcard going to be from?” as they headed out of the room.
“I’m not sure.” It was hard to talk to Babette while walking—
and
while freaking out about Leo’s invitation—but she had to try. “What about you?”
Babette looked up. “The Mermaid Parade last year. Hands down.”
“What, exactly,
is
the Mermaid Parade?”
Babette’s eyes widened into large blue pools.
“Sorry. But I don’t know,” Jane said.
Babette shook her little head. “You, my dear, are in for a treat.”
“How many Preemies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” a geek said as he passed them in the hall. Jane and Babette both braced for the punch line.
“I don’t know, but it only takes one of me to screw a Preemie.”
“I swear,” Jane said to Babette when the geek had passed, “I’m just going to give them the stupid horse.”
“And let them win?”
“They’re already winning!”
“What did I tell you about reading the newspaper?”
“I read it!”
Babette stopped and huffed so that her black hair lifted off her forehead for a second. “Here’s the thing about newspapers, Jane. They have
news
in them. Like
every day
.
Different
news.”
“Just tell me what you’re talking about.”
“The city just announced that it’s going to restore the Claverack carousel as part of this whole redevelopment that’s happening. It’s like a landmark, and they’re moving it to like Ohio this winter to have it fixed up. Maybe they’d want the horse, since it was part of the original.”
So the carousel was
still here
? Which meant the Claveracks were probably looking to sell the horse to the city, which wasn’t the worst idea in the world, not if the horse could take its rightful place back on the original Claverack carousel. Maybe Preemie had guarded it for all those years awaiting just this sort of project. He must have had a reason for keeping it, right?
“I just want them off my case,” Jane said finally, having no idea how to go about seeing if the city even wanted the damn horse.
“You think that’ll happen if you hand it over?”
“It’s worth a shot!”
“I see you didn’t inherit Preemie’s spine.” Babette shook her head and walked away.
Rita, whom Jane found in the hall heading for the cafeteria at lunch that day, looked at her apologetically, then said, “So my aunt remembers your mother.”
Jane’s body jolted. “She does?”
“Yeah.” Rita made a wincing face. “But that’s all. She knew
of
her. She wasn’t friends with her. She’s not sure they ever actually talked. It’s a big school, you know. Was then, too.”
“Oh.” Jane’s mood deflated. “Well, thanks for asking.”
Rita chewed her lip for second, then said, “Legs said you were going to try to find her in the school paper, but then you never followed up.”
“He told you that?” It seemed a weird thing to share.
“You should do it.” Rita shrugged, then said sadly, “I guess you don’t remember a lot about her.”
Jane could only shake her head, holding back tears. “I need to go in here,” she said, indicating the girls’ bathroom, then she ducked in with a small wave. She sighed with relief when the other girl in there went on her way, leaving the room in silence. She went into a stall and just stood there and wondered how long she could stay without being missed.
One hour? Two?
One day? Two?
The stall’s thick pig-pink paint was carved up with graffiti, and Jane started reading it, wondering how old it was and whether any of it might date back to her mother’s high school years. She hadn’t seen any trophies. There were no old photos in glass cases. Nothing.
SAVE CONEY, she read.
Followed by: SCREW CONEY.
And then Coney crossed out and replaced by YOU.
Next to that someone had carved out CARNY ISLAND HIGH.
To which had been added SUCKS.
Looking farther up, some newish-looking writing made her want to hide out forever: PREEMIES MUST DIE.
She might have just turned up for the meeting of the Dreamland Social Club that week if it hadn’t been for Venus, who found her in the hallway after school and said, “What are you still doing here?”
“Oh,” Jane said. “Nothing.”
Venus had her hand on the doorknob of Room 222 and twisted it before saying, “I think it’s lame of you to not give them the horse, by the way.” She opened the door, and Jane heard voices and laughter all mixed up together. “I know that’s not the popular opinion, but there you have it.”