Dreamland Social Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

of before. One advertising the meeting of TEENS FOR THE REDEVELOPMENT OF CONEY ISLAND had been vandalized with a black marker; someone had scrawled CAPITALIST PIGS across the printed type. Another sign read, simply,
    dreamland social club
TOMORROW AFTERNOON, ROOM 222.
You know who you are.
    Whatever that meant.
     
    Jane was barely in her seat, way in the back of classroom 231, behind the giant she’d seen in homeroom, before a hip-looking older guy wearing jeans, a boiler hat, and suspenders got up from one of the student desks, walked to the front of the room, and said, “Okay, field trip! Let’s go.”
    The writing on the blackboard said “Topics in Coney Island History with Mr. Simmons,” and Jane thought it strange. She’d never been to a high school with a local history class before, but then she’d also never been to school with a giant and a goth dwarf and a kid with no legs. The room was decorated with old postcards and photos having to do with Coney Island—some news clippings, too—but now was clearly not the time to try to explore it.
    Feet shuffled and squeaked as everyone got up to follow Mr. Simmons out the door. Jane spotted Tattoo Boy in the chaos and her heart pounded harder. He was in her first class, a junior like her. And the seahorse tattoo was just as familiar today as it had been yesterday. It was more car-toonish than his other tattoos, like it was based on something fake, but that didn’t help Jane to place it.
    Babette was there, too, and Jane wasn’t sure yet how she felt about that. Her assigned escort seemed sort of like a know-it-all, but then maybe that was exactly the kind of person Jane needed to befriend.
    It was early, barely 8:00 a.m., and fine mist clung to the air as they walked along the boardwalk past shuttered amusements and closed-up clam shacks. Mostly, Jane just kept her head down, watching the warped and splintered boards under her feet, until they arrived at a building marked CONEY ISLAND MUSEUM. She trailed her classmates up a narrow staircase and then into the reception area.
    Mr. Simmons led them into the main room—past walls of old posters for something called the “Mermaid Parade” and photos of human oddities who’d performed in Coney’s famous sideshows over the years and of beachgoers in different eras. In a far corner, some old beach chairs and metal lockers sat below a bunch of old signs for different bathhouses. Jane wanted to linger on every item, every detail, sit in every chair—maybe even look for her mother in the pictures on those parade posters, because maybe that had been what she’d meant in her note about having been a mermaid once—but Jane didn’t want to get left behind.
    Finally, people started to gather around Mr. Simmons, who had stopped near a large television.
    “We came here today to talk about Topsy,” he said. “She was an elephant that worked at Luna Park, one of the great amusement parks of the turn of the century here on Coney, where she killed three men before she was sentenced to execution. That third victim, mind you, tried to feed dear Topsy a lit cigarette.”
    Tattoo Boy said, “Ouch,” and some of the boys around him laughed. Jane closed her eyes and saw his tattoo in her mind’s eye.
    “Ouch indeed.” Mr. Simmons stroked a goatee that didn’t look like it had the nerve to be a beard. “Now, the death penalty for men had very recently been changed from hanging to the electric chair, so hanging Topsy was deemed cruel and unusual.”
    Mr. Simmons started to walk among his students. “Enter Thomas Edison, who was competing with George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla for the contract to build the nation’s electric grid. He decided to use his competitor’s alternating current to execute Topsy, in order to show how deadly AC electricity could be.
    “And” —Mr. Simmons paused dramatically here—“he decided to film it so he could show it to audiences around the country.”
    “Now”—he waved an arm toward