Free Dreamland Social Club by Tara Altebrando Page A

octopus—a yellow image on a gray base. “It’s really only a matter of time before he drops his aloof act and falls under my spell. I’m small, but I have other charms.”
    “I’m sure.”
    “Oh, please.” Babette punched Jane’s thigh. “Like you’re not going to bed at night thinking about getting tattoos that say ‘I Heart Leo.’ ”
    Jane shot her a look.
    “I’m not blind. I see the way you look at him, all dreamy.” Babette batted her eyelashes.
    “I hate needles,” Jane said.
    “Well, this little plan of yours to knock stuff down so you can rebuild Dreamland or some slick new coaster isn’t going to wow him either,” Babette said with new energy that sounded like frustration. “His father owns the Anchor, you know.”
    That dump?
    It would explain why Leo’s father told him stories about the strange bar bets Preemie had made. It would explain why they’d all been outside the bar that night. Was it possible that Leo’s father had known her mother?
    Babette said, snarkily, “And his mother is only the president of Coney Islanders for Coney.”
    Even better. Maybe his mom had known her?
    But before getting carried away with the idea, she asked, “What’s Coney Islanders for Coney?”
    “It’s a local sort of activist group that’s fighting the Loki plan.”
    It was like Babette was speaking a different language. “What’s the Loki plan?”
    “Dear naive Jane.” Babette’s eyes seem to glitter in the hallway’s fluorescent lights, and her hair looked deep purple. “You really have to get a clue, or an act.”
    “An act?”
    “Yeah, you know. An act? An angle? A shtick? Something that sets you apart from the rubes?”
    Which was carny for losers, chumps, paying customers.
    Jane said, “Why can’t I just be me?”
    “You have heard of adolescence , right?” Babette huffed. “Traumatic period of life wherein no one is free to just be themselves. Not without ridicule anyway.”
    Jane looked around at the hordes of normal kids, plowing through the halls, going about their typical high school day. She said, “Plenty of people here— most people here—don’t have an act and no one cares.”
    Babette threw her little hands up in the air. “Fine, hang out with them !”
    “Maybe I will!”
    Babette sighed. “All I’m saying is I can’t hang out with you unless you do something for your image.” She put her hands on her small hips. “I mean, really. Jane. Have you looked in a mirror lately?”
    Jane looked down at her blah outfit and wanted to tell Babette that it wasn’t her fault that her mother must have taken any fashion sense their family had ever had to the grave. That her clothes had actually worked, she thought, in London.
    Babette said, “Just promise me you won’t wear that to the party next weekend.”
    “I’m not going to a party next weekend.”
    “Oh, yes you are.”
    They took back-to-back stools in biology lab—they’d been assigned neighboring lab tables—and Babette said, “You and your brother should both come. It’s in the projects, so it’s mostly gonna be project kids. But the project kids are cool.”
    “I don’t know any of them,” Jane said.
    “But you know me . And I know H.T. And he knows Mike and Ike, who are the drop-dead gorgeous twins you will have already noticed if you’re not a lesbian, and it’s their party.”
    Jane couldn’t say for sure that she’d seen them, but nodded recognition anyway. H.T., at least, she’d actually met.
    “It’ll be good for you,” Babette said. “You’d be making a statement.”
    “What kind of statement?” Jane studied the cow’s eye in the jar on Babette’s table. It seemed to be looking at her skeptically, like maybe it had heard through the cow grapevine about her, about the way that she seemed to prefer the company of cows to people during that year she’d spent living in Ireland.
    “I don’t know,” Babette said. “That just because people are talking trash about your