Past Perfect

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SIMON & SCHUSTER CHILDREN’S PUBLISHING

ADVANCE REVIEWER COPY

TITLE:
Past Perfect

AUTHOR:
Leila Sales

IMPRINT:
Simon Pulse

ON-SALE DATE:
10/4/2011

ISBN:
978-1-4424-0682-7

FORMAT:
Hardcover

PRICE:
$16.99/$19.99 CAN

AGES:
14 and up

PAGES:
320

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ALSO BY LEILA SALES

Mostly Good Girls

LEIL A SA LES

Simon Pulse

New York London Toronto Sydney

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SIMON PULSE

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Simon Pulse hardcover edition October 2010

Copyright © 2011 by Leila Sales

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Designed by Mike Rosamilia

The text of this book was set in ITC Baskerville.

Manufactured in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK

ISBN 978-1-4424-0682-7

ISBN 978-1-4424-0684-1 (eBook)

Dedicated to my parents,

with all my love

And I’ve been standing on the same spot now since it’s been over.

—Shout Out Louds

A dreaded sunny day, so I meet you at the cemetery gates.

—The Smiths

CONTENTS

T
here are only three types of kids who get summer jobs at Colonial Essex Village instead of just working at the mall, like the normal people do.

Type one: history nerds. People who memorized all the battles of the Revolutionary War by age ten; who can, and will, tell you how many casualties were sustained at Bunker Hill; who hotly debate the virtues of bayonets over pistols. They are mostly pale-skinned, reedy, acne-scarred boys in glasses (unless they can’t find a pair of historically accurate glasses and are forced to get contacts). I don’t know if they were born so unappealing, and turned to history for companion-ship because they realized they were too grotesque to attract LEILA SALES

real-life friends,
or
if their love of history came first, and maybe they could have turned out hot, but instead they invested all their energy in watching twelve-hour documentaries about battleships. It’s a chicken-or-the-egg type of question.

The second type are the drama kids. The drama kids are not so interested in authentic battle techniques, but they are
super
interested in dressing up like minutemen. And they are interested in staging chilling scenes in which they get fake-shot and fall to the ground, bellowing, “Hark! I’m wounded!

Oh, what cruelty is this?” even when the history nerds grouch because that is not how it happened at all, and, in fact, no soldiers were wounded during the Battle of Blah Blah Blah.

The third reason for a teenager to work at Essex would be if her parents work there. Which is why I do it. Because my dad is the Essex Village silversmith, and my mom is the silversmith’s wife, and I am the silversmith’s daughter.

The silversmith is the guy who makes silverware and jewel ry, and also sometimes he does dental work like fillings. Paul Revere was a silversmith, too, as my dad likes to remind me, when he’s trying to make me value his profession. Silversmiths play an important role in society, or at least they did, in the 1700s.

Thanks to my dad’s career, I’ve worked at Essex since I was six years old. Well, I wasn’t technically employed for the first few years, since I did it for free. It was more like Take Your Child to Work Day every day, except that I had to wear
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PAST PERFECT

a historically accurate costume of tiny boots, petticoats, a pinafore, and a bonnet.

When I turned twelve, I started getting paid—not a whole lot, but nothing to turn up my nose at either, especially since the only other jobs available to twelve-year-olds in my town are being a mother’s helper or trying to sell baked goods on street corners. And the baked goods market is really saturated. So historical reenactment was a solid gig for a while, and I had more independent income than anyone else in my middle school. I used it to buy a trampoline.

But now that it’s nearly the end of junior year, I’m sixteen years old, which means I’m legally employable. I can finally get a real job at a real place. A place where my coworkers won’t spend their lunch breaks debating who would have won the Revolutionary War if the French never got involved; where I can wear shorts instead of floor-length skirts; where there might even be
air conditioning
. Also and most importantly: a place where my parents don’t work.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents and all. But my father and I have the sort of loving relationship in which, whenever he says more than one sentence in a row to me, I want to stab myself in the heart with a recently formed silver knife.

“So obviously what we want to do this summer,” I said to my best friend, Fiona, “is work at the mall.”

“Yeah . . .” Fiona said in a tone that meant
No
. We were having this conversation over ice cream in her kitchen, a
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LEILA SALES

few weeks before school let out for the year. Fiona and I had recently decided to devote the summer to becoming ice cream connoisseurs. Which essentially meant that we were going to eat as much ice cream as possible, and then discuss it intelligently and rate it on qualities such as “flavor” and “texture.”

“We
could
work at the mall,” Fiona said. “Or, instead of that, here’s another idea: we could work at Essex.” I sighed. “Fi—”

“
Think
about it,” she said.

“Trust me, I’ve thought about it for the past ten years.

Working at Essex is not really that fun,” I tried to explain to her. “It’s like going to family camp, only you have to be in character all the time, and strangers watch you and ask questions.”

“I actually love being in character,” Fiona reminded me.

“And I love having strangers watch me.” Fiona is a drama kid, and she’s
good
. She can belt out songs, and she emanates this confidence that just commands attention when she’s onstage. You can’t help but watch her.

To top it off, she’s tall and willowy with waist-length chestnut-brown hair and catlike green eyes. I will be surprised if Fiona
doesn’t
grow up to be a famous actress.

Fiona and I have never spent a summer together because she’s gone to the Catskills for theater camp every year since we were little. But this past fall Ms. Warren lost her job, which
4