Unfortunately, outside it’s even more oppressive than inside. It’s ninety-frickin’-eight degrees with a thousand percent humidity. Welcome to the early morning ugh of Coney Island, a sauna trapped inside an aquarium locked in a carwash next to a water park in hell. I sweat from every pore. My jeans glue themselves to my legs. My bangs drip like I used maple syrup to get just the right look. Awesome. I’m going to look like I swam to school, and because the universe hates me, here come the reporters to show the whole world my shame. They pounce like dogs on a pork chop, running across streets and through front yards, scampering over parked cars and surrounding us with microphones and questions. Their eyes are wide and eager. They flash smiles full of chalk-white teeth. Their spray-on tans have dyed their faces a rusty orange.
“Are you students at Hylan High?” one of them asks. Her hair is so motionless, it could actually be a helmet. I ignore her just like my father coached me. Keep your head down and they’ll go away. It usually works, but there are hundreds of them blocking the sidewalks and a dozen more racing in our direction. The neighborhood has been swarming with reporters for three years. They have a free pass in and out of the Zone, but I haven’t had to deal with this many in a while. Even my father is thrown.
“Can you tell our viewers your names?” one of them shouts.
“My name is Officer Leonard Walker,” he says, stepping between Bex and me and the cameras.
“And you’re a dad. Do you feel safe sending your girls to school today?”
My father nods. “The National Guard, United Nations, U.S. Army, Coast Guard, Homeland Security, and the Sixtieth and Sixty-First Precinct SWAT teams will be on campus to make sure things are safe. The NYPD Anti-Terrorism Division has done a great job as well. The students will have better protection than the president of the United States today.”
“How do you feel about sending your daughters to school with the—”
“I think it’s a big step forward for everyone,” my father interrupts. He doesn’t believe it, but that’s what the mayor wants all the police to say.
“Are you worried about violence?”
“Not from them. Our neighbors on the beach are pretty relaxed when they are unprovoked,” my father says as he continues to push us forward.
“Have you heard that Governor Bachman has threatened to block the doors to prevent the new students from entering?” another reporter asks.
“Then I hope I get to be the one that arrests her,” he says.
The reporters laugh and eye their camera operators happily. They’ve got their sound bite, and it looks like I’m going to be on the news after all.
He scowls. “It’s time to move on, people. You’re blocking the sidewalks. If you don’t disperse, I will have you arrested.”
“You can’t arrest us. We’re the press! We have rights,” they cry.
“Not in the Zone,” he says.
The reporters drift away, grumbling about the Bill of Rights, and when we can move again, I turn to my father.
“Remind me to give you a lecture about keeping your head down,” I say, hoping it stings.
They call our neighborhood lots of things—the Zone, the DMZ, Fish City. It’s two square miles of Coney Island that the military, government, and police keep under constant surveillance. The territory spans the western part of the peninsula at Surf Avenue, swallowing up the gated community of Sea Gate and Leon S. Kaiser Park. It travels east to Stillwell Avenue, and in the north it borders Neptune Avenue, a block from where I live. To the south is the ocean. There are two heavily fortified borders. The first, the north, has tanks, two armed guard towers, and a barbed-wire fence meant to keep us inside. If you want out, you need to have proof of who you are: driver’s license, birth certificate, and Social Security card. If you can’t provide all three, you aren’t going anywhere. The second border is the boardwalk, once the home of Luna Park, the Cyclone rollercoaster, Nathan’s Hot Dogs, and the Wonder Wheel. Now it’s the home of a massive tent city inhabited by thirty thousand immigrants who call themselves the Alpha, or the First Men. They have a similar fence, guarded by two hundred National Guard members. In the middle is a collapsing slum with frequent, and violent, clashes. You get used to walking around the bloodstains in the street.
So, why don’t we all move? Trust me, anyone with two pennies to rub together is long gone. Within six months of the Alphas’ arrival, the neighborhood lost ten thousand residents. They packed up, broke their leases, and never looked back. Many of my friends were dragged by their parents to points north—Bushwick, Sunset Park, Brownsville, East Harlem—essentially trading one span of urban blight for another. They’re the lucky ones. The rest are stuck without the money to move on. Sure, there are some who stayed out of loyalty. They grew up here and aren’t going to surrender their neighborhood, but most live in the housing projects and have nowhere else to go. The city doesn’t help poor people move unless rich people want their homes.
And then there are my parents and me. We’ve got our own screwed-up reasons for staying, but hopefully it won’t be for much longer.
“No way,” Bex cries when we turn the corner that leads to our school. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of locals are here to ogle. They mill about, taking pictures and uploading our lives onto Instagram or Tumblr. Hot dog carts are parked along the road; people sell bottles of water out of coolers. There’s a guy making balloon animals, and another running around with T-shirts commemorating today’s historic event. It looks like a street fair, but there is nothing festive about the mood. Something threatening and dangerous is in the air. It brushes past your arm, nudging you into an uncertain stride. It pokes at your frustrations, reminds you that you’re an animal in an overcrowded cage.