Past Perfect (4 page)

Fiona offered me a stick, but I shook my head. My stomach felt tight, and it got worse every time I looked at Ezra, who was sitting across the fire from me, not looking at me.

Not like he
purposely
wasn’t looking at me, because even that would have meant something, would have meant he thought or cared something about me. But this was like . . . he just didn’t notice me.

Fiona’s back was toward me as she faced the campfire, and I felt suddenly trapped on the outside of this circle of people. I tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m going to talk to him,” I said.

“Who?” Fiona asked. “Oh, shoot.” Her marshmallow had caught on fire.

“Who do you think?” I said.

She turned around, blowing on her charred marshmallow.

“Really, Chelsea? Tell me, is it August seventh yet?” I rolled my eyes at her.

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“I’m sort of getting this vibe,” Fiona went on, “like maybe it’s not August seventh yet. But that might be just my opinion.” When Ezra broke up with me, Fiona told me that I was not allowed to talk to him again. I asked,
“Ever?”
and she said,

“No. Just not for three and a half months.” Then she marked the date in her phone.

Now she whipped her phone out of her skirt pocket, checked its calendar, and said, “It looks like, hmm, about forty-three days until you’re allowed to talk to him.”

“Fiona, August seventh is a completely arbitrary time constraint.”

“Absolutely.” She bobbed her head up and down. “It is an arbitrary time constraint. So what’s your point?”

“I will talk to him for one minute,” I promised. “Less than one minute. Just don’t watch.”

She bit into her marshmallow and its innards oozed down her chin. “Good luck.”

I slowly walked around the campfire to where Ezra stood, and I placed myself directly in front of him, so he had to look at me. I refused to speak to him first, though. I have my pride. My pride is small and halting and bitter, but I have it.

“Hey, Chelsea.” He gave me a polite smile, like we were
coworkers
.

The inside of my mouth felt cottony as I said, “What are you doing here, Ezra?”

The smile faded off his face. “I got a job here.”
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PAST PERFECT

“I know that. I can
see
that. I mean . . .
why
did you get a job here? You knew that I work here.”

He furrowed his eyebrows, looking puzzled in the light of the fire and the stars. “Last time we talked about it, you said you wanted to work at the mall this summer. You said you were through with Essex.”

And is this sad, that my heart felt a little bigger, hearing him acknowledge that once we had talked, once he had listened to me say what I wanted to do over the summer? “But even if that were true, Ezra,” I said, “Essex is
my
place. It’s mine. You don’t see me joining the boys’ soccer team or the school paper, do you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t stop you if you wanted to.” He grinned at me. When I didn’t grin back, he sighed. “Chelsea, I don’t see what the big deal is. We’ll probably run into each other even less here than we do at school. I’m not going to cramp your style. Promise. We’re friends, right? We never stopped being friends.”

This had been one of Ezra’s big things when he broke up with me: how he still
liked
me, and liked spending time with me, and didn’t want to lose our friendship, and whatever.

Except that we had never been friends before we started dating, so I’m not sure what exactly he was talking about.

Anyway, I had said fine, so then we became the sort of friends who never talk or hang out.

That was all I really remembered from our breakup con-29

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versation. The rest of it, I just didn’t like to think about.

“Look,” he said, “I was working at a coffee shop on weekends—”

“I know,” I said. “The Diamond Café. I
know
.” It killed me to hear him act like this, like we were strangers.

“Right, but The Diamond Café closed down, and I needed a summer job, and Lenny said he could get me something here. So, I don’t know, here I am. But if it really bothers you, Chelsea, I can quit. I don’t want to make you unhappy. If this is making you unhappy, just say the word, and I’ll take off.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Ezra had
already
made me unhappy, and I guessed his working at Essex couldn’t make that any better or worse. And I wasn’t going to make him quit his job just because we broke up two months ago and I couldn’t handle it. Because I should be over this. Obviously, I should be over this. So I shrugged and said, “It’s fine. Just stay out of my way,” and walked away. We are always drawing battle lines, between Patriots and Redcoats, between Civil War reenactors and Colonial reenactors, between Ezra and me.

“Everyone! Eyes front!” Tawny Nelson hollered, clambering up on a large rock.

Tawny is our General in the War this year. It was an obvious choice: she just finished her senior year, she’s worked at Essex for ages, and she’s clearly a warrior. I would not want to mess with Tawny Nelson. Last year she led a raid on Reenactmentland that successfully captured their Confederate flag.

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I don’t know how she managed to do this without getting caught. That flag is always flying over there. Like, what did she do, scale their flagpole? In broad daylight?

Tawny is also one of the few African-Americans to work at Essex. They can’t
not
employ interpreters of color, as that would be
discriminatory hiring practices
. But they also don’t hire hundreds of people to play black slaves because, while that would be authentic, it would also probably be offensive.

So Tawny portrays a middle-class girl in one of the historical houses, and everyone acts like, sure, there were all sorts of black middle-class girls in the Colonies in 1774.

“Yo!” Tawny shouted when we didn’t immediately quiet down.

“Taw-ny! Taw-ny!” Nat started chanting, thrusting his fist in the air. The rest of us joined in. “Taw-ny! Taw-ny!” We raised our hands and marshmallow sticks up to her.

She stood atop her rock, hands on hips, chin raised into the breeze. “Soldiers!” she said once our cheers had died down. “I am proud to lead you into battle this summer. We will show those Civil Warriors no mercy. We will teach them that there is only one time in American history that matters, and that is the Colonial period. That is
us
.”

“Yeah!” a bunch of people shouted. “Get ’em!”

“And we are not afraid to fight dirty!” Tawny continued.

“We will overrun their territory with historical anachronisms.

We will cut off their supply chains. We will do whatever must
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be done, anything at all, as long as the bosses don’t find out about it. We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the landing grounds, we will fight in the fields and in the streets, we will fight in the hills. We will never surrender!” That last bit was definitely Winston Churchill, not Tawny Nelson, and it came about two hundred years too late. Nonetheless, the applause crescendoed, and Tawny had to wait another minute before she could go on.

“To get you all psyched for this year,” she said, “I present to you the Essex Cheerleaders!”

Three theater kids bearing pom-poms pranced in front of Tawny’s rock. They were two girls and a femme guy who had played the doo-wop girls in our community theater’s spring production of
Little Shop of Horrors
. They were in Colonial Essex’s dance program, which meant they spent the summer gallivanting around, demonstrating minuets. Last year, they had placed themselves in charge of leading fight songs against Reenactmentland. There was no question in my mind that Fiona would join them before this summer was out. She can’t get enough of stuff like that.

Pom-poms aflutter, the Essex Cheerleaders chanted:
United we stand, divided we fall

Just watch us as we beat ya’ll.

You say ‘brother against brother’?

Well, my brother screwed your mother
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PAST PERFECT

And she liked it!

We’ll kick your shins and break your knee

’Cause all you got is Robert E. Lee.

Farbs!

They jumped up and down and kicked their legs and showed off some jazz hands, while everyone else hooted and hollered,

“Farbs!”

Farb
is a terrible thing to call a reenactor. My dad says it’s shorthand for
Far be it from authentic
, but in the War, we just use it to mean that a reenactor is
sloppy
in his historical details.

Or we use it when we just don’t like someone.

The Essex Cheerleaders skipped back into the crowd to much applause, and Tawny resumed her speech. “As you know, soldiers, we are at a slight disadvantage this year.

Because of the Barnes Prize.”

We all booed. The Barnes Prize for Historical Interpretation is awarded by the National Register of Historic Places very occasionally, to historic sites that are especially important, and that do an impeccable job of presenting the past.

Inexplicably, last summer the farbs at Reenactmentland won a Barnes. They found some letters or building specs or something proving that the Confederacy had built there a top-secret ironclad battleship, the CSS
South Carolina
, to send into the Battle of Hampton Roads. The boat sank before seeing any naval action, and it wasn’t until Essex discovered this
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LEILA SALES

paperwork that historians could even confirm the existence of a CSS
South Carolina
. There were a million news articles about it, and suddenly photos of Reenactmentland’s stupid battlefield were appearing on the covers of travel magazines.

Even the Travel Channel filmed a show there, and they mentioned Essex at the very end, as an “additional attraction to visit if you have an extra day.”

“Some might say we are at a disadvantage,” Tawny continued. “But I say that just makes us the underdog. And no one ever expects how much damage the underdog can cause!” Massive cheering.

“What I need now,” she said, “is a second-in-command.

Someone to keep track of our manpower and our resources.

Someone who knows everyone and notices everything. A strategist, an ideas man. Someone who has Essex running through his veins. Who do I need?”

“Me!” Bryan shouted. He swung his hand in the air and jumped up and down a little, in case Tawny couldn’t see him.

“Pick me, pick me!”

But then Ezra shouted, “Chelsea!” and everyone turned to stare at me.

I gaped at him through the fire. What
was
this? Did he think he was doing me a favor? Was he trying to play a prank on me? And how was this his idea of
staying out of my way
?

Then Fiona piped up, “Chelsea would be great at it!” And I would like to know what made my best friend and my ex-34

PAST PERFECT

boyfriend, both of whom had
never worked here before
, suddenly feel that they were experts on what Essex needed in this War.

Everyone picked up the cry of “Chel-sea! Chel-sea!” with the exception of Bryan, standing near me with his lower lip stuck out, who kept mumbling, “Bry-an, Bry-an,” like that was going to catch on.

“Chelsea?” Tawny looked down at me. “I would be thrilled to have you as my Lieutenant, and it seems that everyone here agrees.”

“Yeah!” Loud cheering.

“What do you say?”

I locked eyes with Tawny and considered it for a moment.

It would mean getting in more trouble than anyone else, if we got caught. But no one ever got caught. All the real employees at Essex and Reenactmentland turned a blind eye, just as long as no one got seriously hurt, which people barely ever did.

And it was such a high honor. The greatest honor anyone could have at Essex was to lead the War efforts. I felt overwhelmed that everyone here would trust me with that responsibility. These were my people. This was my community.

And as I heard them all chanting my name, I wondered if I had ever seriously intended to trade this in for a retail job.

There was nothing the mall could offer that would rival this moment.

So I said, “Yes. General Tawny, I accept.” Fiona shrieked and hugged me like I had just been crowned
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Miss Teen U.S.A. Then Bryan tried to hug me too, as if he were happy for me, even though he
obviously
was not and just wanted an excuse to touch me with his toadlike arms. Tawny reached a hand down toward me, I grabbed it tightly, and she pulled me up on to the rock with her.

Still holding my hand, Tawny hoisted our arms high, like we were already victors in this War. I gazed out over my cheering friends and coworkers and ex-boyfriend, and the fire and the fireflies and the brook and the trees and the summertime. And I felt happy, for a moment. For a moment, everything felt perfect.

And then it all disappeared as I was grabbed from behind, knocked over, pulled backward and down into nothing.

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A
t first I could hear a lot of people screaming, but I couldn’t distinguish any individual voices or words.

I couldn’t see at all because someone had hastily tied what felt like a strip of cloth over my eyes. And probably I would have been able to pull the cloth down, except that people were gripping my arms and legs, so I couldn’t move at all.

They were running with me, running fast, and I had no idea where. Soon my friends’ screams faded away, so they must have carried me pretty far. Whoever ‘they’ were.

I tried to kick my legs, but the people holding on to my ankles and knees were too strong. I twisted my head around as much as I could, hoping I could bite someone’s hand, LEILA SALES

but I couldn’t find anything. Then I realized that my mouth was unbound—no strips of cloth, no attackers’ hands—so I started screaming. Loud.

“Help me!” I screamed. “Help! I’m being kidnapped!

Help! Help!”

“Shut
up
,” someone said. He didn’t sound much older than me, and I couldn’t decide which was worse, getting kidnapped by professional criminals, or getting kidnapped by a gang of underage amateurs. Either way, this was bad, so I kept screaming and thrashing, hoping that I could slow them down, or that someone would find me.