Past Perfect (9 page)

Aftereffects. Ezra didn’t get it, and told me I was being silly.

“I like this place,” Ezra said now, glancing around the graveyard. “I can see why you wanted to work here.” My game plan for dealing with Ezra had been the same for the past two months: stony silence. Stoicism. Maybe the occasional death-glare, but mostly ignoring him to the point where he would wonder if he even existed at all.

That was the game plan. But when it was a beautiful summer day, and I was riding on the high of a successful military
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campaign against Reenactmentland, and Ezra was acting so
nice
, then I defaulted to plan B.

In plan B, I just try to make him happy. In plan B, I turn into a one-woman Entertaining Ezra Gorman show.

“You see this hill?” I asked him. “This is where the unbaptized babies are buried. Hundreds of them.”

“Seriously? That’s awesome. It looks too small for that, though.”

“Well, babies are small,” I pointed out. “That’s like what they’re known for. But this isn’t even the best grave. Come look over here.”

He followed me to Elisabeth Connelly’s headstone. “See,” I said, “she has my name!”

Ezra’s expression was as blank as Linda’s had been when I’d shared this with her. “I mean, my Colonial name,” I clari-fied for him. “But it’s the same thing. So random, right?”

“Sure,” Ezra said, nodding.

Hearing him say
sure
was like swallowing a weight. I knew there had been a time when Ezra would have been excited about this, if only because I was excited about it. When he would have gotten it, gotten
me
. I could remember that time so clearly. But it wasn’t now.

That just about pulled the curtain on the Entertaining Ezra show. It’s a short show, and it doesn’t get any applause, these days. I turned and walked out of the graveyard, him falling into step beside me.

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“I came over to congratulate you on the telephone thing,” he said. “The guys at the magazine can’t stop talking about it. It sounds awesome.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

All I ever wanted was for Ezra to be like this, to choose to talk to me, to compliment me. But when he did, that made it even harder. Because I couldn’t hear him say just,

“Nice job with the battle plan.” The ending I heard to that sentence was, “. . . and therefore I want to get back together.”

I would take him back, if he asked me. I told Fiona I wouldn’t, I told
myself
I wouldn’t, but, walking side by side with him now, I knew that I would. Since we’d broken up, I’d constructed countless fantasies in which he asked me to give him one more chance, and in these fantasies I made him beg, or I lectured him on the despicable way he had treated me, or I gave him a long list of conditions and requirements—but in the end, I always said yes.

He adjusted the brim of his tricornered hat and said in a self-satisfied way, “See, I knew you’d be a good Lieutenant.” We reached the parking lot. My bike was locked to a sapling in the corner. “What do you mean,
see
?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just that I predicted you’d be a good Lieutenant, and, see, I was right.”

“Are you taking credit for me coming up with this telephone plan?”

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“No, I’m just taking credit for nominating you for this position.”

“Okay, well, then congratulations to you.” I unlocked my bike and strapped on my helmet. “You win again. Yay.”

“Jesus, Chelsea, I just came to tell you that you did a good job. Why are you acting like such a bitch to me?” My nose and throat felt pinched. “I guess I just keep acting like some girl who used to be your girlfriend. I don’t know why I do that. That is pretty bitchy of me.” I hiked up my gown, pulled on my helmet over my mob cap, swung my leg over my bike, and pedaled away. The air rushing past felt good on my eyes.

The answer, Ezra, is that you broke my heart, and I want to hurt
you even one-tenth of how much you hurt me.

But I wasn’t going to tell him that. Because then I would have to tell him just how bad I felt about him, and I didn’t want him to know he had the power.

Before I went to bed that night, I found myself sitting at my desk, wrapped in Dan’s oversized gray hoodie and looking through my Ezra file. There’s not much in my Ezra file. It’s much skinnier than, say, my geometry file, which is depressing, because Ezra has had a far greater impact on my life than geometry ever will.

The Ezra file includes printouts of our first e-mails back and forth, from September; a Diamond Café napkin on which
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he’d written, “Meet me after work? xoxo Ezra P.S. Writing on a napkin is hard!”; a strip of photobooth photos showing us looking mad, sad, surprised, and, finally, happy; a twenty-year-old Coney Island postcard that he’d bought for me at a junk shop; ticket stubs from a midnight movie we once went to; a picture of us bundled up and sitting on a sled, his arms wrapped around me, both of us squinting our eyes and smiling up at the camera. That’s the Ezra file.

“I shouldn’t let you keep all this,” Fiona said back in April, after she had already gone through and deleted every sweet text from him, every one of his e-mails. “You should really throw this whole thing away.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“It would make you feel better.”

I shook my head and held on to it. The few, flimsy items in this file were my only proof that Ezra had ever been mine, that we had ever happened. That he had ever once missed me, that we had ever gone sledding together, that he had ever thought about me for long enough to write my name.

These were our historical artifacts.

“Fine, I’ll let you keep it,” Fiona relented, “but only if you never look through it.”

I told her I wouldn’t, and usually I kept to that promise, but it was harder in the nighttime, especially tonight, when I was too tired even to make myself go to bed. I opened the Ezra file more nights than I should have, though I can’t say
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what I ever hoped to find in there. I guess I just wanted reassurance that it had been real; we had been happy together.

That I hadn’t made up the whole thing.

Two days later, I was showing Elisabeth Connelly’s grave to a group of day-camp kids in matching neon green T-shirts when a cell phone started to ring.

“I want to sex you up,”
the ringtone blared.
“All night, I want
to sex you up.”

The summer campers, startled out of their it’s hot/I’m hungry/Jeremy stole my friendship bracelet stupor, started giggling. “Sex!” shrieked one of the boys.

Their counselor looked both embarrassed and downtrod-den. “Whose phone is that?” she demanded as it kept ringing.

“We don’t
have
phones,” answered one of the girls, who looked to be maybe six years old.

“We aren’t
allowed
to bring our phones,” said another girl.

“We’re at
camp
.”

“I want to sex you up!” sang someone else in time with the ringtone.

Linda marched over to me, her gown swishing around her ankles. “Miss Connelly,” she said, “will you please
turn
off
that sound?”

“I don’t know where it’s coming from! Some moderner must have dropped it.” I hated that she assumed this was my fault. If there’s one rule every Essex employee follows,
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even Tawny, it’s that you don’t carry your cell around with you, because you never want something like this to happen.

The ringing stopped for a minute, then started up again.

The kids were in hysterics.

“Listen up,” I said. “Treasure hunt! Whoever can find the cell phone wins!”

The kids scattered amongst the graves, screaming randomly.

“I found it, I found it!” One of the little boys ran up to me, holding a cheap-looking flip phone. “It was behind that grave!”

The phone was still ringing when I grabbed it out of his hand. “Hello?” I said.

“I heard you Colonials like phones,” said a girl’s voice on the other end. “So, here you go.” Then the line went dead.

Okay, Civil War. You are
asking
for it
.

“Miss Connelly, please
put away
that modern device,” Linda snapped.

“It’s not mine!” I said “I swear. Can I bring it down to Lost and Found? I’m sure someone’s looking for it.” Lies, lies, lies.

Linda let me go, and I took off practically running down the road.

“Can you tell us where the bathroom—” An elderly couple tried to flag me down.

“Later!” I shouted, dropping them a curtsy without slowing
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my pace at all. The phone in my hand started to ring again, so I turned it off.

I ran into the Bristol House, where Tawny was in the middle of re-creating a typical middle-class family experience for a handful of onlookers. “This is a sampler,” she explained as I thundered into the room. “Young ladies practice their embroidery stitches . . . Oh, welcome, Miss Connelly.”

“Miss Nelson,” I replied, curtsying. “We have a bit of a problem.”

The moderners crowded around.
Real slick, Chelsea.
They probably thought our problem was like “The King is taxing our tea!” and now they wanted to hear all about it.

I thought fast. “The fife and drum parade is about to start on Governor’s Row,” I announced. “It’s an excellent performance. Very authentic!”

The moderners scrambled for the door.

“Nice,” Tawny said once they’d gone. “You know the fife and drum show isn’t until one.”

I shrugged. “They should get there early to claim their spots. That parade route gets crazy-crowded.”

“It’s nine thirty.”

“
Crazy
-crowded.”

“Look, we won’t have much time before more moderners come in,” Tawny said. “What’s going on?”

“There was a cell phone in the graveyard. Someone from
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the Civil War hid it there. And then they called while I had, like, a full-on troop of Cub Scouts.”

“Shit. Do we think it’s just a one-off, or is this a far-reaching sabotage plan?”

As if to answer Tawny’s question, tinny strains of a ringtone pierced the air.
“Let’s talk about sex, baby! Let’s talk about you
and me!”

“Classy.” Tawny rolled her eyes and moved purposefully toward the sound.

“God, this is an old song,” I commented.

“Unfortunately, it’s not
two hundred fifty years old
, so it is still an
anachronism
.” Tawny found the phone on the man-telpiece, tucked away in a silver sugar bowl, which had most likely been handcrafted by my dad. She flipped the phone open and barked into it, “Tony’s Pizza! Pickup or delivery?” She paused. “I
said
, pickup or delivery?” Pause. “Listen, lady, I don’t know what you mean by ‘Colonials,’ but next time you call this number, you better have your pizza order ready.

Capiche?”

“You know, I’ve heard of prank phone calls,” I said once she’d hung up, “but I’ve never before witnessed a prank phone answer.”

Tawny was barely listening. “We’re going to need a really good retaliation, but for now let’s focus on damage control.

Let’s both spread the word, and hopefully everyone will be able to find the phones and turn them off before they ring.”
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“I’m on it.” I headed out, nearly bumping into a kid on his way into Bristol House who was explaining to his dad, “See how the door is so short? That’s because they were really short back then! Except for George Washington. George Washington was nine feet tall. And all the doors in his house were enormous.”

I made a break for the silversmith’s. I could hear a phone ringing as I walked inside, but fortunately both my parents were out of the room.

“Where is that coming from?” I snapped at Bryan.

“I don’t know. It keeps ringing, though.”

“So why haven’t you found it and turned it off?” Bryan looked thoughtful and toadlike. Technically, Bryan is much smarter than I am. But in any category that counts—like the category of “what to do when a phone is ringing ‘Let’s Get It On’ in the middle of your living history village”—Bryan is not the brightest candle in the abra.

I found the phone in the box of silver shavings that my dad keeps. Every year or so, Essex sends them to Richmond and cashes them in for actual money. A year is about how long it takes to collect any significant amount of silver shavings.

I answered the phone, drawing inspiration from Tawny.

“Thank God you called, Maurice,” I said. “What did the test results say?”

There was a moment of silence. Bryan squinted his eyes
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at me. “Uh, Chelsea?” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Is that you? Who’s Maurice?”

“Yes,” I said. “Wait, who’s this?”

“It’s Dan. You know, we met when I kidnapped you?”

“Right, of course.”

“I’ve been calling you all morning, but no one answered.”

“Oh, I don’t work at the silversmith’s anymore, so I wasn’t here. I’m working the graveyard shift now.”

“What’s the graveyard shift?”

“In the graveyard.”

“Elizabeth!” I looked up to see my dad standing over me, looking furious. “Mayhaps you could take this call
somewhere else
?” He gestured with his chin to the onlook-ing moderners.

I gathered up my skirts and edged out of the studio and upstairs to the break room.

“Sorry,” Dan said as I climbed the stairs. “Did I get you in trouble?”

“Yeah. Just with my dad, though, so it’s fine. Anyway, it’s war.

Getting your opponents in trouble is pretty much the point.”

“Then I guess we’re winning this War.”

“You are not.”

“Uh, pretty sure we are. Come on, ringing cell phones?

Genius.”

“Pshh. Clichéd. And ‘Let’s Get It On’? You’ve got a dirty mind, Dan.”

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He laughed. “That ringtone is purely coincidental. Maybe
you
have a dirty mind?”

I blushed.