Past Perfect (17 page)

“Since you’re not planning on smashing the windows of my mom’s car or booby-trapping my trampoline or whatever, then I want you to stay.”

“Dude, you have a trampoline?” Dan’s eyes lit up. “Can we jump on it or something?”

“Yes,” I answered, relieved to have something neutral between us. “In fact, that is exactly what we can do with it.” We ran around to the backyard, kicked off our shoes, and climbed onto the trampoline. It was a warm, clear-skied night, with an almost-full moon overhead. The air felt cool rushing into my lungs as I started jumping.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Dan said. He jumped up,
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landed on his butt, rebounded to his feet, then did it again.

“No, I’m sorry.” I started doing seat drops, too, facing him.

“I was being ridiculous.”

“It’s war. We’re enemies. I’d react the same way, I think.” He did a few more seat drops. “This is good,” he said, as if to himself.

“The trampoline? It should be. It’s a top-of-the-line backyard trampoline.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know, the trampoline, the weather, everything. I’ve had a crappy day. It’s nice to know things don’t have to suck all the time.”

“What happened?” I asked, still jumping back and forth between sitting and standing.

“Nothing, really. Nothing important.”

“It doesn’t have to be important,” I told him.

“I don’t know, it was just . . . I called Nevin—he’s the lead guitarist in my band—and they’re having this amazing tour, apparently. They played Philly last night, and the crowd loved them, and one of the other bands on the bill invited them to go to New York and open for them.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“Sure, it’s great for them.” Dan sounded dubious.

“But not for you,” I supplied.

“Right. Because I’m not there. I wrote some of those songs that they’re playing, but I’m not
there
.” Dan stopped jumping and lay down, staring up at the sky. I kept going, so his body
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bounced above the trampoline every time I landed. “Nevin says they’re all crazy about the bass player who they brought in to replace me on tour. He’s really funny and a really great musician and whatever. I’m getting the sense that they want to keep him in the band permanently, instead of me, and they just haven’t figured out how to break the news.”

“Bastards. Traitors. I hope that’s not true.”

“Me too.”

“I guess this is just an off week for everybody,” I said.

“For you too?”

I nodded.

“Want to talk about it?” he asked.

I paused in my jumping for a moment, thought about it, then shook my head. “No. It’s war stuff.”

“Forget it, then.”

I returned to my seat drops.

“Anyway, look, I didn’t come over just to complain to you,” Dan said. “I don’t have anyone in my life to talk to about this, which is why you, lucky girl, are the beneficiary of all my whining.”

“I’m not in your life?” Sitting. Standing. Sitting. Standing.

“Not officially, no. Why, am I officially in
your
life?”

“Nope,” I answered. “No way.”

“Great. Glad we’re on the same page. Anyway, I’m not going to say anything to the band, because what kind of asshole would that make me? ‘Psyched you guys are having
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so much success on the road, but I wish you were having a worse time because I’m not there’?”

“Yeah, say that. I mean, they should be dedicating every performance to you,” I suggested. “They should light a candle onstage in your honor every night.”

“They should have a giant cardboard cut-out of me sitting in the van with them.”

“They should change all the lyrics of their songs so they’re just singing ‘Dan Malkin, Dan Malkin’ over and over.”

“Good plan, that doesn’t make me sound petty at all.”

“I can’t help you there. Non-pettiness isn’t really something that I strive for,” I said.

“My friends at the Civil War don’t . . . get it.” Dan clasped his hands behind his head. “They have reenacting, they have the War, and that’s
enough
for them. They don’t want anything more. And I like reenacting fine, but I’ve
done
reenacting, and now I want to do the music thing. I want to see if I can make it. I’m so close to making something happen in my life, but then I never do.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m with you on that. I have no idea how to make a change in your life.”

“Well, I think sometimes you just text a girl, and you see if she’ll let you come over.”

We locked eyes for a second as I landed across from him—

then I bounced back to my feet, and he looked away.

“Sometimes I feel like I understand my dad.”
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“Whoa,” I said. “I never feel like I understand my dad.

What’s that like?”

“Creepy!” We both laughed. “Okay, to be honest, I don’t understand why someone would marry the wrong girl a couple months after graduating from high school, knock her up three times in rapid succession, and then have some messed-up early-onset midlife crisis and take off in a trailer at the age of thirty-seven. He has shitty priorities and he’s a cheater—

he cheated on my mom, and he cheated on the application for the Barnes Prize, and he’ll cheat on whatever he does next. I’m not saying any of that makes sense to me. But I understand how he could look at his life and want to make it into something more, something that mattered. Because that’s what I do every day.”

“It makes me sad that you can’t share that with your friends,” I said. “Though I’m not surprised, since the Civil War sucks in every regard.”

“The Civil War is the best,” Dan replied, as if automatically. “It’s just that everyone there has known me for years, and they’ve known me in this particular context, so that’s the context they expect me to stay in. But I knew
you
would get it. I knew that from the first time I saw you.”

“Tied up like a trussed pig and screaming my head off?

Yeah, I’m sure that did make me seem like the empathetic type.”

“Less empathetic, more just plain pathetic.”
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“It’s truly amazing how your wordplay never grows old for me,” I said.

“I
meant
last summer, at the silversmith’s,” he said.

“I honestly don’t remember you there at all.”

“Right, because I was
spying
. I kept a low profile.”

“You’re tall, though. You’d think that would stand out in my mind. Maybe you were
so
tall that I couldn’t even see your face, and that’s why I didn’t know you were there.”

“Chelsea, I’m, like,
maybe
six feet.”

“A giant,” I said. “A freak of nature. A redwood tree.”

“I’m trying not to be offended that you didn’t notice me.

But I noticed you. I saw you reenacting, and it just . . . you
wowed
me.”

No one had ever said anything like that to me before. Not even Ezra during our glory days, when he passed me notes and sent me flowers and asked me every day if I wanted to hang out every night. Not even when we were perfect together did he ever say that I
wowed
him.

“Thank you.” I hoped the darkness hid my blush.

“Seriously, you’re an incredibly natural historical interpreter. And what can I say: talent is a turn-on.” The phrase
turn-on
made me feel shivery inside, so I acted like he hadn’t said it. “I
should
be natural at it. I’ve been doing it for long enough.”

“And
I’ve
done it for long enough to know that you’re better at it than other people.”

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I flopped down on to my stomach, next to him. “I guess I just don’t look at it as
history
. So it’s easier for me.”

“What do you mean?”

I’d never explained this to anyone before. I pressed my face to the trampoline, staring at the grass underneath, as I tried to figure out how to put this into words. “Okay,” I said at last. “I don’t know if you do this at Reenactmentland, but at Essex, we always talk about history in present tense. ‘This is the hill where we bury the dead babies,’ or, ‘That’s where the cabinetmaker lives.’”

“Of course.”

“But we do this with
every
moment in history, not just 1774.

‘That’s where two signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried’—even though there was no Declaration of Independence until 1776, and even though they weren’t buried until 1807 and 1815, respectively.”

“We do that too, I guess. I hadn’t noticed, but we do.” This was the hard part to explain. “So it seems like all of history is concurrent. It’s not a linear series of events. It’s all happening simultaneously. There is one moment, and that moment is now, and we are always present in it. So I’m not reenacting history so much as just living every time at once.” I looked up at him. “Does that make
any
sense?”

“Yeah, I get it.” Dan nodded his head a few times. “That’s brilliant. I don’t know if it’s true. But it
sounds
true.”

“I don’t know if it’s true, either. But I believe it.”
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“So that’s why your friend says you have problems moving on?” he asked.

“Well, she doesn’t know about my whole theory, but yeah.

How am I supposed to move beyond the past when it is still happening, when it is always, endlessly happening?”

“You ask tricky questions, Chelsea Glaser. I think the answer is that you have to make something
else
happen.” Dan got to his feet, so I started to stand, too, but he said,

“Just lie down while I jump. That’s what I was doing while you were jumping earlier. It feels good.” So I did. I lay on my back and watched the stars in between the crisscrossing tree branches overhead. I let my body go limp, and every time Dan jumped, I sank into the trampoline, and every time he landed, my body lifted into the air.

He screwed up the rhythm of the jumping so that he double-bounced us, both of our bodies flying into the air at the same time, twice as high. I shrieked, then clapped a hand over my mouth so my parents wouldn’t hear. We landed simultaneously, him half on me.

“Ow,” I grumbled. “You’re not really a natural gymnast, are you?”

He didn’t reply. He shifted his weight so he was lying completely on top of me, pressing me into the trampoline.

I could feel his heartbeat stuttering against my own.

“Oh,” I whispered.

“Oh,” he replied, staring into my eyes, his head only
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inches from my head, his mouth so close to my mouth.

“Dan . . .” I wrapped my arms around him, pulling him closer to me. “Look. I know we’re not actually kissing.”

“Right.”

“Because that would be a really bad idea.”

“Really bad,” he echoed.

“But we’re still . . . This is still . . . I mean, it’s not technically kissing, but we’d still get in trouble for it. If anyone found out.”

“I see what you mean,” Dan agreed, touching his forehead to mine, his lips even closer. I could almost feel them brush-ing against my own as he murmured, “You mean, since we’ll get in trouble either way, then we might as well do something really wrong.”

That was the opposite of what I meant, but as I opened my mouth to explain, he closed the space between us and kissed me. It was a long, purposeful kiss, one of his hands tangled in my hair, the other holding on to my hip, our legs entwined, as we breathed in and out of each other. The trampoline swayed underneath us, and my hands slid up and down his back as if on their own accord. It might have lasted a minute, or it might have lasted forever. I couldn’t tell and wasn’t curious. I felt like all of time was happening in one moment, and that moment was now.

Ever since Ezra had broken up with me, I’d worried that maybe I had forgotten how to kiss entirely. Or maybe I didn’t
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know how to kiss any boy who wasn’t Ezra. But when I stopped thinking about it, it turned out that my body remembered.

Apparently kissing is like riding a bike.

Dan pulled away just a little bit. “Wow,” he said, and inhaled a quick, ragged breath. “I’ve spent a lot of time imagining doing that.”

“And how was it compared to what you’d imagined?”

“It was almost as good.”

“Almost?”
I gave his shoulder a small shove.

He grinned. “I have a really well-developed imagination.” He started nibbling at my neck, and if I weren’t already flat on my back, I would have had to lie down, that’s how dizzy it made me. I closed my eyes and kept my chin up, so he could have maximum neck access. Then, because I am very successful at romantic situations, I said this:

“What did you mean when you said your dad cheated at the Barnes Prize?”

My words came out sounding dreamy and spaced-out. Dan bit down on the skin above my collarbone, and the question swam out of my mind.

“I don’t know,” Dan said a minute later, his lips tickling my neck as he spoke. “I just think he did. I think that’s why he got fired.” His voice, too, had the unfocused quality of someone who’s thinking mostly about making out, and not so much about living history.

Dan propped himself up on his elbows to look me in the
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eye. His expression reminded me of Nat watching Fiona in the Essex cheerleaders. Like nothing could distract him from me. I held on to the back of his head with both my hands.

Now that we were here, now that we were touching, I didn’t want to stop touching him. I didn’t want any part of my body not touching his.

“I’m glad you came over tonight,” I said.

He touched his nose to mine. “Me too.”

“Though you did pass up a golden opportunity to set fire to our car or assault my parents or something.”

“You’re right, that would have been smarter of me. But”—

he tightened his arms around me—“then I wouldn’t have gotten to kiss you.” Which he started to do again, his hands on my back, then on my stomach, under my shirt, on my ribs. I could hear him breathing faster—and then I felt a vibration against my thigh.