Free Dreamland Social Club by Tara Altebrando Page B

grandfather you’re not going to curl up and die.”
    “Why are you being so nice to me?” Jane asked before she even realized she was going to. Almost like the cow’s eye had said, Just ask her.
    But was she being nice? As soon as she asked, Jane wasn’t so sure.
    “I don’t know. You seem cool.” Babette shrugged with one tiny shoulder. “And you’ve got carny blood, even if it’s obviously very highly diluted.
    “Here’s a tip, though.” She dug into her book bag, pulled out a rumpled newspaper, and handed it to Jane. “You should really read the paper once in a while.”

    Something about biology labs had always made Jane a little nauseated, and this lab at Coney Island High certainly wasn’t going to help matters. It had that smell she hated—of something antiseptic and half dead—and there were jars along the far wall that she dared not look at too closely. The cow’s eye was bad enough. But when Jane’s partner showed up and it turned out to be Venus Anders—a walking, talking tangle of red dreads and rose tattoos, the girl equivalent of Tattoo Boy (who was not, to Jane’s disappointment, in this class)—Jane felt like the cow’s eye might be the least of her problems. At least she only had lab once a week.
    “So, what’s your deal anyway?” Venus said as they started to line up a bunch of equipment they needed, though Jane had dared not read the full instructions on the handout in front of her: scalpel, magnifying glass, petri dish.
    “No deal.”
    “Where are you from?” An ink vine with black roses on it climbed up her neck. More roses peeked out from under her black long-sleeved shirt, touching the knuckles on her hands.
    “Nowhere, really,” which was how it felt. “I mean, sort of all over.”
    “Your grandfather cheated me out of a stuffed animal once.” In between words, she was chewing on a fingernail that had been painted black. “When I was little. He used to tell me to go play in traffic.”
    Jane knew she had to stand her ground. She’d been confronted by the alpha female in pretty much every school she’d ever transferred into, which had always seemed strange to her, as if she were any kind of threat at all. She said, “You don’t seem like the stuffed-animal type.”
    Venus studied her, not sure how to react. After a moment, she said, “Not the point.”
    Jane was about to say, “What is?” but got distracted by the ink on Venus’s skin, wondering how deep it went. Venus said, “So you think you’ve seen Leo’s seahorse before?”
    Jane fought to hide the sting of what felt like a betrayal. “That’s right.”
    “What about my tattoos?” Venus rolled up her sleeves. “Have you seen mine before?”
    “No,” Jane said. “I don’t think so.”
    All at once a dream she’d had the night before—a nightmare, really—came back. She’d been struggling to breathe underwater. The seahorse had been there, staring her down. For a second she had thought she’d be able to ride it up out of the water to safety, so she’d grabbed onto it, only to find out it wasn’t real but was made of plastic, a toy. It wouldn’t save her, couldn’t save her, and she awoke as if gasping when breaking through to the surface of the sea.
    “What about these?” Venus turned around and lifted up the back of her shirt, revealing a whole garden of ink. Wildflowers reached up toward her shoulder blades; lilies floated on what seemed to be a small pond. If you blocked out the red, shiny bra straps cutting across it, it was beautiful in a shocking sort of way. Jane couldn’t help but think that you just shouldn’t do that to skin. “Familiar?”
    Jane, suddenly self-conscious about staring at Venus’s bare skin and bra strap, said, “No, pull your shirt down.”
    “Yeah,” Venus smacked her gum and fixed her top. “I didn’t think so. Just Leo’s.”
    “Right,” Jane said. “Just Leo’s.”
    Then Venus said, “Go figure,” and the teacher, whom Jane had just met