Past Perfect (19 page)

“
We’re
not the ones who are twenty-six minutes late,” I heard Patience whisper.

“Okay,” Tawny said, staring the Civil War General straight in the eye. “For starters, what happened on Saturday can’t happen again. We can’t tell our bosses and our parents that there
isn’t a war going on
when I suddenly show up with a sprained wrist.”

“Maybe y’all should have thought of that before you
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decided to attack us with crap,” the Civil War General replied.

“Oh, please,” Maggie interjected. “There’s a difference between throwing around some manure and physically assault-ing someone. In one, the worst that happens is your shoes get dirty. Boo-hoo. In the other, someone can get seriously hurt!”

“It was self-defense,” spoke up one of the Civil War boys.

“You infiltrated our land; we protected it.”

“That’s not self-defense!” Nat argued.

“In case none of you had noticed,” said a Civil Warrior,

“this is w
ar
. We work at a Civil War living history museum.

We spend all day demonstrating weapons and talking about battle formations. If you’re surprised that we know how to fight, then you’re a pack of idiots.”

“We are
not
idiots!” Anne squawked.

“We didn’t do anything outside the rules of the War,” Ezra said. “We spread around horse shit. Big deal. You’re so anachronistic, we could have been spreading around video game consoles and no one would have noticed.”

“And you’re so anachronistic, you let
her
be your General,” one of the Civil Warriors sneered, jabbing a finger at Tawny.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Patience screamed. “This isn’t the 1860s. You can’t just
say
stuff like that!” Then everyone started yelling at once. Except for me. I was horrified into silence. Dan’s voice won out. “You’re saying you didn’t do anything outside the rules of the War?” he said. “That’s bullshit. My kid sister has barely been able to get
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out of bed for the past two days. One of her eyes is swollen shut, her lip won’t stop bleeding, our mom is freaking out, and
you
didn’t do anything against the rules?”

“She started it!” Patience protested.

“I don’t give a shit who started it,” Dan spat out. He looked around the room at everyone, his gaze again slipping right over me. “You’re all hooligans. Get it together. It’s
just war
.” He headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” demanded his General.

“To take care of my sister.” And he left without a backward glance.

The room erupted into more shouting, but I tuned it out.

I kept staring at the door, like he might turn around and come back in. I wanted to run after him. But everyone would notice. And I didn’t even know if he would want me to chase him down, anyway.

Two nights ago, Dan had been kissing me so desperately that I hadn’t been able to focus on anything else since then.

And tonight he wouldn’t look at me once.

This was good, of course; this was for the best. No one could know there was anything between us. No one suspected a thing. And that was the goal. Wasn’t it?

192

“
E
xcuse me, miss. When in the course of human events does it become necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another?” This was a moderner in my graveyard, talking to me. He had a Southern drawl way thicker than Dan’s, a plaid shirt, a self-satisfied smirk, and three friends with him.

It had been three days since the War Council, and we were in a temporary détente. Tawny’s vowed revenge on Reenactmentland was on hold until she got back more of her energy, and until we thought of an awesome act of warfare that would be sufficiently vengeful. Tawny wanted to make them pay, and a simple act of sabotage wasn’t going to accomplish LEILA SALES

that. She was thinking more along the lines of launching a nuclear warhead across the creek.

I hadn’t heard from Dan since the War Council, either. I texted him afterward just to wish his sister a speedy recovery and to ask if there was anything I could do. He didn’t reply.

I didn’t know what that meant, and if he were any other boy, I would have brought the issue to Fiona and analyzed every possible explanation for Dan’s silence. But he wasn’t any other boy.

So for now, it was just me in the burying ground, turning the issue over and over in my mind. Me and some modern men with attitude.

“That’s an interesting question, sir,” I lied, while gazing longingly to the other side of the burying ground, where Linda was entertaining a batch of delighted-looking youngsters. I wanted to delight youngsters. I wondered if she would swap places with me.

“And?” the moderner prompted me.

I quickly ran through the rest of the Declaration’s opening sentence, but it turns out that our Founding Fathers didn’t exactly tell us
when
it becomes necessary to dissolve political bands. Just that it does, sometimes.

Thanks a lot, Founding Fathers.

Fortunately, Plaid Shirt Man wasn’t looking for my answer.

He had an answer at the ready. I am accustomed to that style of questioning. “Would you say,” he boomed, “that whenever
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any Form of Government becomes destructive of the ends of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it?”

“Yeah!” his friends cheered. Presumably as in, “Yeah, our friend has memorized the Declaration! What a cool guy!”

“I might say that,” I replied. “I can’t think of a particular instance where I
have
said it, but . . .”

“And would you say that time is now?” the man went on.

“Would you say that this left-wing, hippie, socialist Congress is ruling without the consent of the governed? Would you say that it is tyrannical? Would you say that it is our
duty
, as
Americans
, to resort to arms to fight for
our
liberty?” Another day, another moderner who ought to be commit-ted to an insane asylum.

“With all due respect, sir,” I said, “I am a lady. We ladies do not participate in the menfolk’s talk of politics and war.

Furthermore, I know not of this ‘hippie,’ ‘socialist,’ or ‘Congress’ of which you speak.”

The moderners were silent, looking disappointed.

“Also, I am a Loyalist,” I added. Which, again, I’m not, but it’s a handy claim to whip out sometimes.

Plaid Shirt Man shrugged and walked off with two of his buddies, presumably in search of a more militant Patriot. The third friend lingered for a moment. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Elizabeth Connelly, sir.” I curtsied.

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He smirked. “Elizabeth Connelly, huh? Yeah, I see that. I like me an Irish girl. They’re feisty.” I didn’t say anything.

“Nice dress,” he went on. “That Colonial look is hot. Makes you wonder what’s under all them petticoats. What about your boyfriend? Does he like your dress?” Enough was enough. This wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever heard from a moderner. They’ll say anything to you if you’re in costume. But on this particular afternoon, I didn’t need sexist libertarians asking after my nonexistent boyfriend.

“Sir,” I said. “I’m not really Irish. Essex is a tourist destina-tion; I don’t know if you’ve noticed. Everyone here is an actor.

Also, I am still in high school. I’m sixteen. My parents work down the road. And they’re strong. My father was a wrestler in college. Now get the hell out of my graveyard.” He did.

Of course Linda had come over just in time to hear the end of my spiel. “Elizabeth,” she said in an exasperated tone.

“I know, I know, but he was hitting on me!” I protested.

“It was gross!”

“Nonetheless, we must never break character,” Linda said.

“Our job is to give every tourist an authentic experience of the past, no matter who that tourist is.”

“If we want to give him an authentic historical experience, then I’ll tell my father to challenge that guy to a duel,” I said.

But Linda was, predictably, unmoved.

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In my next life, I want a job that never requires me to interact with the public. Like maybe I’ll pursue a career as a hermit.

I called Fiona after work to tell her stories about the day’s sexual harassment, but she didn’t answer her phone. I called her again after dinner, but she
still
didn’t answer, and so then I called her once more, intending to leave a detailed message, but this time she picked up.

“You realize you’ve called me three times over the past three hours, right?” she said. “That’s an average of one phone call per hour,
every single hour
.”

“Wow,” I said. “Division, Fiona? Really? What’s next, expo-nents?”

She didn’t laugh.

I opened my bedroom window so I could better hear the rain. “This is the value of friendship,” I explained to her.

“I can call you whenever I feel like it without coming off as crazy and obsessive. This is why friends are better than boys.

Can you imagine if I had a crush on someone and I called him three times in a row? He’d think I was a psychopath. But you already know me, which is why it’s okay.”

“You mean I already
know
you’re a psychopath.”

“Sure. But you love me for it, I promise.”

“You used to try to call Ezra three times in a row,” Fiona pointed out. “I had to physically retrain you.” I chose not to respond to that. Instead I said, “So what
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have you been doing all evening that was more important than taking my calls?”

“Hanging out with Nat.”

“By ‘hanging out,’ do you mean ‘making out’?”

“
No
. If Nat and I had spent the past three hours making out, you can rest assured that I would just
tell
you about it.” As with her comment about Ezra, this struck me as a pointed jab straight at me. I made a face at my reflection in the mirror on the back of my door. “So explain to me why you and Nat were ‘hanging out’ but not ‘making out.’” Fiona was momentarily silent. “I don’t know,” she replied at last. “I think he and Rosaline are still hooking up. I think he doesn’t like me that way.”

“Really?”

“Plus, maybe I don’t like him that way either.” I rolled my eyes so hard that it hurt.
“Really?”

“We had a great conversation, though. I was telling him about this theater group I’m trying to start. It’s going to be loosely based off the British pantomime style, but also drawing inspiration from big sketch comedy shows like
Saturday
Night Live
. The other Essex cheerleaders are all about it, and Nat had a lot of ideas for me tonight.”

“Oh.” I frowned.

“‘Oh’?” she repeated.

I tried again. “That’s awesome, Fi. I mean it, it sounds really amazing, and you know I’ll cheer you on in every single
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performance. It’s just . . . I didn’t even know you were working on this at all.”

“Well, it’s still in early stages. There’s not much you could have known about it at this point. And . . .” I heard her take a deep breath. “You’ve just seemed so caught up in your head this whole summer, Chelsea. We spend eight hours a day down the road from each other, but there are always other people around, and I feel like you’re always working on the War or thinking about
something
that has nothing to do with me. So this theater project I’m working on, well, it never really had the chance to come up.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t tell Fiona the reason why I’d been so distant, but I
was
sorry.

“Okay,” said Fiona, her voice still sounding small.

“Want to come over on Saturday night? My mom will make dinner and we can just hang out. We can have all the Fiona-Chelsea quality time we want.”

“By ‘hang out,’ do you mean ‘make out’?” Fiona asked.

“Only if you’re very lucky,” I said.

“In that case, yes. I accept your dinner invitation.” Fiona sounded happier, and I felt better. This wasn’t a serious problem. This wasn’t like Dan, or Ezra, or the War.

I could fix this one.

The next morning, my parents drove me to work, like normal. My dad talked the entire car ride there, like normal.

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The one time I interjected something, about how Fiona was coming over tomorrow night, he thought I had said the word

“kite” instead of “night,” which started him off on a long, self-absorbed anecdote about a boy who he once saw flying a kite. So that was incredibly normal, too, and then I put my lunch in the fridge in the break room above the silversmith studio. When I came downstairs Bryan tried to talk to me about bundling, a Colonial practice where unmarried couples would share a bed but keep their clothes on and supposedly not actually Do It (though probably some of them did). And while it was nauseating to hear Bryan talk about bedroom cuddling, it was still completely normal early-morning conversation for us. Then I walked down the road and let myself into the burying ground. And that’s when things stopped being normal.

Linda wasn’t alone. She was standing with Mr. Zelinsky, a couple other administrators, and a security guard. I paused at the entrance. Maybe I was in serious trouble because I had mouthed off to those moderners yesterday. Or maybe those modern men had since started an anarchist uprising and overthrown their local government, and now the police were trying to figure out exactly who at Essex told them this would be okay.

Then I decided that I was being ridiculous and started forward to ask Mr. Zelinsky what was going on. But I saw the problem before I reached him.

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Three of the headstones were knocked over.

One was by the stone wall in the back. One was near the dead baby hill. And one was the Elisabeth Connelly stone.

I ran to it and crouched beside it, hoping I had made some mistake, but there was no mistake. There was Samuel Otis on one side, and there was Benjamin Hall on the other.