CHAPTER five
SNEAKING OUT A SECOND TIME took some of the
thrill out of it, but not much. This time there was the added edge
of fear that Leo just wouldn’t turn up—because maybe he really was
sick?—or that she’d get delayed somehow and miss him. How long
would she wait for him? How long would he wait for her?
She’d gone to sleep at 12:00 and set an alarm for
1:45 and saw evidence that her father had, in fact, finally come
home within that window. So each floorboard seemed a little bit
more squeaky, each lock on the front door seemed clickier. Because
what if she actually got caught this time? What if Leo showed up
and she didn’t?
A psst whizzed by when she hit the sidewalk,
and Leo stepped out from behind a lamppost in front of the
abandoned lot next door. “You scared the crap out of me,” Jane
whisper-yelled, though there was a secret, calming thrill in
feeling like she’d stepped into a scene in a noir film—all
lampposts and shadows and lurking.
“Sorry,” he whispered back, and then they took off,
with him guiding her down the street with a hand on her elbow. “I
realized I shouldn’t let you walk by yourself. After the other
night.”
He had his backpack on again, and another tight
band tee, and they headed straight for the fence around the
abandoned tower. Quietly, they circled its perimeter, methodically
trying the locks they found at the four gates—one per side—but had
no luck at all.
“Well, it has been a long time,” Leo said,
and they took a break on a bench on the boardwalk. It was breezy
and there was a cool edge to the air, a threat from fall.
“Are we giving up?” Jane asked, but Leo shook his
head. Then he said, “Let’s go back this way,” and led her to a post
at one corner of the fence. After looking up and down the
boardwalk—they were the only two players in their noir scene—he
cupped his hands down low and said, “Okay, step up and over, using
the post.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Jane had never climbed a fence or trespassed
before, but she took one look at the moon—and saw the outline of
the whole of it, lit by the crescent—and felt that gravitational
pull again, this time like a tug in her Achilles’ heel. And then
there was her foot in Leo’s cupped hands. And then there was her
body going up, up, up. And then there were her hands grabbing
fence, and then her belly was scraping wire, and then her feet were
finding footing, and then moving down, down, down, and then with a
jump backwards she was in.
In no time, Leo hooked his backpack over the fence
to her, then scaled its rungs. Soon they were taking crunchy steps
through tall grass toward the tower, which looked so much larger
now, like it couldn’t possibly be that same steel flower she’d
first spied from the cab. Jane followed Leo right up to its
base—the beams were so much thicker, wider, redder—where he stopped
and unzipped his backpack and spread out his small blanket. He lay
down, looking up, and patted the spot next to him.
“Best view in the world,” he said, and Jane
realized something. She said, “Why do I get the feeling you’ve done
this all before?”
When he just smiled, she took her place beside him,
looking up at the steel tower. From here, lit just so, it took on
the shape of a roulette wheel in the sky, and that felt somehow
fitting. She closed her eyes and imagined it spinning and spinning
and spinning. Jumping off it had been a gamble, just like being
here tonight. It was time to go for broke.
“I’ve been remembering things,” she said quietly.
“About my mom.”
“What kind of things?”
“All these games we used to play when I was
little.”
Leo looked over at her and raised his
eyebrows.
“We moved around so much so we didn’t have a lot of
toys, I guess.” She looked up at the shadow moon as she spoke but
felt Leo watching her. “So she’d always make up games using stuff
we had around the apartment, like Trip to the Moon and Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Like inspired by Luna Park.”
When he said nothing, she just kept talking.
“Like she’d turn a box into a spaceship or pretend
that green string was seaweed, or she’d dress up as an Eskimo or
pretend to be the captain of a ship going to the moon.” Jane put on
a deep voice. “This is your captain. We are traveling through a
storm. We are quite safe.” She added, “That was from Trip to the
Moon.”
Leo spoke very slowly when he said, “That. Is.
Awesome.”
Jane had to keep talking to keep from crying. “One
of my favorites was playing Elephant Hotel. One time she actually
made a bed of peanuts for us to sleep on. I’d never seen so many
peanuts.”
Leo laughed.
“We had a game about living under a roller coaster,
too. She must’ve been thinking of the Thunderbolt.”
“How old were you when she died?” Leo asked
tentatively, sadly.
“Six,” Jane said. “So I don’t remember a lot. Or
didn’t. Until lately. And I mean, I didn’t even know she’d ever
been to a mermaid camp or kept a journal or anything,
really.”
In the silence that followed, Jane felt a magnetic
pull between their hands, their bodies, and knew she wasn’t making
it up. “I just found out, from your mom, actually, that my mother
actually dated one of the Claveracks.”
“Oh, snap.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Exactly. I mean, how is that
even possible? Nothing makes sense.” She shook her head. “I really
wish I could find that journal.”
“It’s been a really long time, Jane,” he said, sort
of sadly, and Jane said, “I know. But we used to play this game,
hiding this little journal I kept when I was little. I feel like
she must’ve hidden hers, too. And like maybe I could find
it.”
“Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t sound convinced,
and Jane couldn’t blame him. She wasn’t entirely convinced
either.
“So what was the deal anyway?” He pulled a blade of
a grassy weed up out of the ground and played with it. “How come
your mother never came back to visit or anything? My mom said she
hasn’t—hadn’t—seen her in like twenty years.”
“I don’t know.” Should she know? “I guess
she never really got along with Preemie, and then she met my dad
and they just started traveling and stuff and it sounds like Coney
Island was pretty awful back then, too. But we were all going to
come back together, apparently, when I was little. To meet my
grandparents, probably even your mom, when I was six, but then she
died and we never did.”
“That’s sort of wild to think about.” Leo tossed
his grass blade. “We could’ve met when we were six.”
For a moment she imagined what that trip would have
been like, what Coney would have been like all those years ago,
what it would’ve been like to see this all as a kid, with her mom
walking her down the boardwalk, holding her hand and playing tour
guide, and not as who she was now, older, more alone, adrift. What
it would’ve been like to meet some weird boy her age, with a weird
accent, and what it would’ve been like to pretend to be interested
in whatever he was interested in then, like comic books or
guitars.
They sat quietly a while longer and finally she
said, “Did you ever hear that story about the elephant that swam to
Staten Island?”
“Sure!” Leo shook his head. “Poor bastard.”
Jane knew it as a happy story, one of escape. “But
he made it!”
“He did. But, I mean, it’s Staten Island!”
Jane looked at him blankly.
“Never mind.” He shook his head. “But anyway, they
charged the elephant with vagrancy and put him in jail.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Then people from Luna went to get him
and brought him back.”
“Oh.” Jane hadn’t remembered reading that part. It
made the story entirely different.
“I’m not really sure my mom would want us to be
back here,” she said finally, the thought having occurred to her
right then for the first time. “I mean, she made such a point of
leaving.”
Leo shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters.”
After another moment, he sat up and said, “All
right. Time to climb.”
“No,” Jane said, looking at the thick base of the
Jump.
“Yes,” he said, and then he waited for her to come
to his side. He put two fingers into his mouth and let out a
piercing whistle.
“What are you doing?” Jane said, confused and a
little panicked, and then she saw the lights coming their way. Two
security guards. “Why did you do that?” she snapped, but Leo wasn’t
moving, wasn’t running.
“It’s cool,” he said. “I know these guys.”
“You sure about this, Leo?” one of the men said as
they stopped in front of Leo and Jane and turned off their
flashlights.
“I’m sure.”
One of the guards went to the structure surrounding
the base of the Jump and found a key on his waistband keychain and
opened a door. He pushed it open—nothing but darkness in there—and
stepped back, looked at his watch, and said, “I’m giving you
fifteen minutes. Not a second more.”
“Appreciate it,” Leo said, shaking his hand and
accepting the flashlight being offered. He nodded at Jane to follow
him inside.
The ladder in the center of the room led them up to
a hatch that opened with a good hard shove from Leo. Jane stood on
the ground, waiting for him to abandon the ladder. It took a
minute—he looked around a bit—but then he lifted his legs out,
scurried around, then stuck his head back down and shined the
flashlight in her face. “Come on up,” he said.
“You didn’t have to pay them, did you?” she
asked.
“Nah,” Leo said. “They both have unpaid bar
tabs.”
“Well, thanks,” she said.
She climbed, the metal dusty and cold on her hands,
and then took Leo’s hand at the top and stepped up onto the roof of
the base.
“You ready?” he said, and Jane nodded. She wasn’t
sure what the point of any of this was, the re-creating, but she
felt good—different—doing it, being out on nights like this. Jane
was not the kind of girl who would scale the Parachute Jump with a
boy at two in the morning. Or at least she hadn’t been until
now.
So they climbed, on the inner side of the tower,
and Jane tried to imagine that she wasn’t climbing but instead was
sitting in some kind of harness, being hauled to the top by cables.
When she finally caught up with Leo, she said, “I think this is
high enough.”
He said, “Okay,” and hung his elbows on a rung and
Jane did the same, to give her hands a break, and they just perched
there for a minute with the wind blowing and the ocean right there
crashing and churning, and Leo said, “Your mother was one crazy
chick.”
“Her mother used to pretend she was half-bird, and
her father called himself Preemie,” Jane said.
Leo said, “Good point.”
“The Anchor actually looks kind of nice from here,”
she said. It was true.
“Well, take a mental picture, since it’ll probably
be gone come spring.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I mean, if they
build new rides and stuff, won’t that mean more people? People who
would drink at the Anchor?”
“Loki owns the Anchor.”
“I thought your dad owned—”
“My dad owns the bar. The business. But Loki owns
the property.”
Oh.
“And they keep jacking up my dad’s rent. It’s
ridiculous. Probably illegal.”
Oh, no.
Jane said, “But if more people spent money there,
and it made more money, then the rent wouldn’t be a big deal,
right?”
“You’re missing the point.” Leo shook his head.
“They’ll knock the building down before they let the Anchor stay
there. They’re even making anonymous calls to the health department
about violations that totally don’t exist. Because that right
there”—he nodded at the bar—“is where they want to put a big indoor
water park or roller coaster or some bullshit, so they might not
even renew my dad’s lease.”
“Oh, no.” She said it out loud this time.
“Oh, no is right,” he said. “They are seriously
evil.”
“My arms hurt,” she said, because it was the only
thought she was having that she felt she could share, and Leo said,
“Mine, too,” and so they went back the way they’d come—down the
rungs and through the hatch, and down the ladder and out the door
and then through the proper gate this time—with a thank-you for the
guards—and then back out onto the boardwalk. And the whole time,
all Jane could think was that she had to tell her father about
Loki. About how awful a company it really was—fake health code
violations?—and how he could not sell them the Tsunami.
“Two down, two to do,” Leo said, and Jane pushed
everything else aside but the keys and said, “I guess Wonder is
next, since I still have no idea what ‘Bath’ means. But I still
don’t know if it’s the Wonder Wheel or Wonderland.”
“It sounds to me like a reconnaissance mission is
in order.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t after school tomorrow—”
Jane had seen new signs for the Dreamland Social
Club meeting. Was that why? Or was it Venus? Or both?
“But after school the next day, we’ll scope out the
‘Wonder’ stuff.”
Sneaking back in was as hard as sneaking out.
Either way you were caught. But just knowing that Leo was watching
from beside that lamppost made her feel stealthy and calm and
confident. She wondered what he thought while he watched her, what
parts of her, specifically, he kept his eyes on, and whether he
wondered those kinds of things, too, about her, when she was the
one doing the looking. Then inside she wondered whether she’d ever
find out what the deal was with him and Venus, and then up in her
room she wondered whether he’d ever touch her or kiss her or want
to. With Leo in her life, there were endless things to wonder
about—not just the keys.