Past Perfect (18 page)

“Your phone,” I whispered.

“It can wait.” He kissed me harder.

This impressed me enormously. Ezra had never made his phone wait for
anything
, least of all me. No matter what we were doing, it was never as interesting to him as what
might
have been happening on his cell phone.

I kissed Dan back . . . but then his phone vibrated again.

Then my phone chimed in from my back pocket.

“Let’s put them on silent,” I said. “So we can focus.” We both managed to work our phones out of our pockets
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without letting go of each other for a second. I glanced at my screen.

1 new txt from Lenny.

Lenny had been with Tawny on Operation Horseshit tonight. I frowned and opened his message.

“Hi everyone the civil warriors caught us tonight there was a fight tawnys in the ER we’re having a war council with reenactmentland after work on monday be there Lenny”

“Shit,” I said. Dan said it too, at the same moment. I looked up at him.

“My sister was in a fight,” he explained, his face drawn.

“With Tawny,” I guessed.

“I don’t know. Is that what your text says?”

“Yes. Tawny’s at the emergency room now.”

“My sister’s home. They had to carry her there. Her friend says she’s really banged up, and she can’t even use her hand to text. I hope Mom’s not awake. This is the last thing she needs.”

“Oh, God.” I let my arms drop to my sides, away from him.

“I should have been there.”

“Why, so
you
could have been the one fighting?” he snapped.

“No, so I could have stopped them!”

He shook his head, looking angry. “You don’t get it. Nothing could have stopped them.” He rolled off of me. “I need to go home,” he said.

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“Right.”

“That’s war,” he said, making a face like the word tasted sour.

“What, had you forgotten?” I asked.

“For a few minutes,” he said wistfully.

He climbed down from the trampoline and tied his sneakers on.

“Hey, Chelsea,” he whispered. I scooted to the edge of the trampoline, and he grabbed my face between his hands and kissed me so thoroughly that I felt it from head to toe. Then he turned and walked away.

I lay back and listened to his car start, then drive off. I wanted to call Fiona and tell her: “I kissed a boy! And it wasn’t even Ezra!” But I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell anyone that I had been making out with a Civil Warrior on my trampoline while his sister was beating up the Colonial General. Because I should have been there.

I found myself, as happened so often, thinking about Ezra. I had loved Ezra for real, for many reasons—for his confidence and charm and cleverness. It had been so
easy
to love Ezra.

But this? This was really hard.

181

“
W
hat’s on your neck?” Bryan asked me as we sat in the ice cream shop on Monday, waiting for the War Council to begin.

“Nothing,” I said. This was a lie. It was something. Specifically, it was a hickey from Dan.

I am truly a class act.

“Did someone hit you?” Bryan looked creepily concerned for my welfare.

“No, it’s just a trick of the light,” I answered. Bryan wouldn’t recognize a hickey if one was staring him in the face, which, in fact, this one was.

Maggie, on the other hand, is a veritable hickey expert.

PAST PERFECT

“Why do
you
have a hickey, Chelsea?” she laughed, her hand resting on Ezra’s knee.

“Or if you’re going to have a hickey, why didn’t you put concealer on it?” Patience added.

I
had
put concealer on it. In the morning, before I left for work, before I sweated for eight hours. I even had my com-pact in my purse, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to touch-up between work and the War Council. For some reason, I had imagined the other Colonials wouldn’t be constantly and vocally assessing every aspect of my appearance. I, of course, turned out to be wrong.

“A
hickey
?” Bryan wailed. “That’s not
fair
!”

“Chelsea is so obviously still in your Top Five,” Fiona said to him.

“Yeah,” Nat said, in a quick-thinking agreeing-with-Fiona moment.

“She is
not
!” Outrage from Bryan’s corner.

“She is,” Fiona assured him. “Otherwise you wouldn’t care so much that she’s making out with other guys.”

“I’m not—” I began.

“Oh, now, I’m not sure those things are connected,” Ezra said to Fiona. “For example, Chelsea’s in my Top Five, and

I
don’t care that she’s making out with other guys.” Okay, and
screw you too, Ezra Gorman
.

I glanced at the door, hoping for Tawny to show up and put an end to this soul-crushing conversation, but, typically,
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she was running late. Of course, she had a sprained wrist, which was a better excuse than she usually had.

I’d run into Tawny at Essex earlier. Just for long enough to see her bandaged arm, and for her to tell me that the Civil Warriors were going to pay for this. Just for long enough to say that I was sorry for not being there when she got hurt, and long enough for her to reply, “It’s okay, Chelsea. Family stuff comes up sometimes, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not your fault.”

I stood up and said to the other Colonials, “I’m getting ice cream.” Ice cream is the best method that I have ever discovered for dealing with guilt.

“That’s a good idea,” Maggie said. “Because if it comes with a cold spoon, you can press it to your neck. That’s great for getting rid of hickeys. Trust me.” She pretended to bite Ezra just under his chin, and he laughed and pulled away.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Maggie, for that thoughtful advice.”

Fiona followed me as I went to the counter to order as much chocolate as I could stuff down my throat. “So . . . ?” she said, gesturing toward my neck. I ignored her to focus on my ice cream options.

“I’d like a large Mudslide,” I said to the cashier. When he turned around to prepare it, I said to Fiona, “You see this?

This guy wearing a T-shirt and surrounded by ice cream?

This could have been us. He has no special talents. There is
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no reason why
he
gets to wear T-shirts and scoop ice cream while
we
are trapped in this horrific panopticon of the eighteenth century.”

“That’ll be six fifty,” the cashier said, shooting me a dirty look, like maybe he didn’t appreciate my saying that he had no special talents.

“Chelsea, come on. Who were you making out with?” Fiona asked in a low voice.

“No one!” And I felt bad about this, lying not through omission, but lying straight to my best friend’s face. But I rationalized it as . . . well, Dan was a Civil Warrior. So he was practically, effectively, no one.

“Are you really not going to tell me?” she snapped. “What, was it Ezra?”

“Right, like that would even be a possibility. After all, it’s not August seventh yet. And did you miss the bit where he said he
doesn’t care
if I’m kissing other boys?” Fiona heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Don’t believe that for a second,” she said. “He didn’t say that he ‘doesn’t care’

because he means it. He said it to make you feel bad about having anything else going on in your life that isn’t him.”

“Really?”

“I wish you wouldn’t look like you find that a
good
thing.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said as we carried our ice cream to join the rest of the Colonials. “Because I’m really
not
hooking up with anyone. I’m not.”

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Fiona just shook her head, looking massively pissed off.

And yes, I felt bad, but I would have felt worse if she knew the truth.

“You know what’s so great about your hickey?” Maggie said to me. “You would be a shoo-in for the role of lady of the night, if we ever made those costumes. You’d look so authentic.”

“You’re still on that, huh?” I said.

“Can’t those Civil Warriors be on time to anything?” Patience complained. “It’s already six forty-five!”

“They must run on Confederate time,” Bryan joked.

Ezra groaned. “What’s Confederate time, Bryan?” Bryan looked confused, as usual, to find that he knew a fact that the rest of the world did not. “You know,” he said.

“The Confederacy ran about half an hour behind the Union.

Because they relied on apparent solar time, while the North used mean solar time. This was before there were standard-ized time zones. So that would explain why the Civil Warriors are
late
today, get it?”

“Yet more proof that time is just a social construct,” I commented. And I wanted to ask
why
Bryan knew this esoteric piece of nineteenth-century trivia, but most likely it was because he had already run out of esoteric pieces of eighteenth-century trivia.

Tawny stomped in the door to the ice cream parlor. Other than the stark white bandage on her arm, it would have been
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impossible to tell that she had just been in the hospital. There should be a video game made about Tawny. She’s that inde-structible. “Where’s the enemy?” she snapped.

“Running on Confederate time, apparently,” I replied.

“How are you feeling?” Patience flew to Tawny’s side. “Do you need anything?”

“I just need those farbs to show up,” Tawny growled, shaking off Patience. “If this weren’t a War Council, I’d kick their asses right here.”

“And if your arm was working,” Bryan added.

Tawny glared at him. “I’d kick their asses with both arms tied behind my back.”

“We’re getting ice cream,” Patience said, clearly bummed that Tawny the Victim was no more vulnerable or needy than Tawny the General.

“Try the Mudslide,” I suggested to her. “It’s a total eight.”

“My strawberry is an eight point five,” Fiona countered.

“No. That is, in fact, impossible,” I said. “Excellent strawberry cannot compare to excellent chocolate, and this is notably excellent chocolate. Strawberry spans the scale from maybe two through seven. But even the worst chocolate can’t be less than a four, and the best chocolate, well, that’s a ten.

That is straight-up a ten, Fiona.”

“This sounds more confusing than Confederate time,” Maggie muttered. She, Patience, and Anne headed to the counter, but along the way, they encountered a group of girls with
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slender tanned legs, either tiny sundresses or booty shorts, eye shadow, flat-ironed hair. It was immediately apparent to me that these girls had never sweated a moment in their lives. They had never dealt with an unsupervised five-year-old trying to yank off their petticoats. And I guarantee that none of them had ever been unable to date a boy because he
came from the wrong time
. I could not figure out what they were doing in an ice cream shop, since they couldn’t possibly eat actual calories. I imagined they just fed off the misery of less cool people.

“Oh, God,” sneered the one with the most fashionable sunglasses. “It’s some of those history losers.” She looked Patience up and down, and immediately the three milliner girls caved in on themselves. “Hi,” Patience, Maggie, and Anne murmured in unison, eyes cast downward.

The girl sighed loudly and tossed her hair. “Let’s get out of here,” she said to her friends. “This place is just
overrun
with them tonight. Freaks.”

The group of girls sashayed away, leaving Patience, Maggie, and Anne staring longingly after them. They were so entranced, they didn’t even remember to get their ice cream.

The whole scene was mind-blowingly phenomenal. There is nothing like
real
popular kids to put Essex’s popular kids in perspective. I gave Fiona a nudge, but she seemed not to feel it.

I caught Ezra’s eye for a brief moment, and, before we
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both looked away from each other, I noticed the small smirk on his face.

He and I had had our own encounter with our school’s popular clique, a few months ago. One of the girls—the one who always wore tube tops, even in the depths of winter—

accused Ezra of having a crush on her. And I do mean
accuse
.

It was a very Salem Witch Trials moment.

We had been in chem lab, centrifuging some stuff, when she extended her arm, dramatically pointed a finger at Ezra, and said, “
This guy
is obsessed with me. He’s like
constantly
staring at me. Give it a rest, psycho, I am
way
out of your league.” I remember watching this with my mouth hanging open.

How are you supposed to respond when a girl says that to your boyfriend? And I remember Ezra laughing in her face and saying, “Actually, I’m good,” and then dipping me over our work station and kissing me for the whole lab to watch.

Maybe Ezra was remembering that moment, too, as we watched those girls stalk away.

Or, maybe he wasn’t.

The door hadn’t even closed behind the real-world popular kids when the Civil Warriors marched in. They were all wearing matching Confederate flag armbands, which I had to admit looked good, if a bit National Socialist for my tastes.

Dan stood in the thick of the Civil Warriors. He was wearing jean cutoffs, a scruffy T-shirt, and the hoodie that I’d returned to him. It was a soft, comforting hoodie. I kind of
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regretted giving it back. His mouth was set in a hard line, a soldier off to battle.

The Mudslide churned in my stomach. There’s something nerve-wracking about seeing someone in public after you kiss them. How were we supposed to act now? The same as we had before? Was that even possible? Something changes after you kiss someone. You can’t ever again really act the same as before.

I gave Dan a small smile, but his eyes swooped past me.

Like he didn’t even see me. Like I was the same as every other Colonial.

“Let’s get this War Council started,” said the short girl who had orchestrated my kidnapping that first night, weeks ago. I assumed she was the Civil War’s General. With her leathery skin, upturned nose, and hicktown accent, she reminded me of a pit bull. A Southern pit bull. “Unlike y’all, we got War plans to take care of, so we don’t have all night to hang around and chat.”