Past Perfect (22 page)

Well, no. I didn’t always feel that way. But when I thought about him a lot, or when I saw him like this, I was exactly that girl again. The girl who was his other half, waiting to be made whole again.

But all I said in response to his comment was, “It changes you a little, when all your friends stop being your friends overnight. You know you’re not supposed to be talking to me, right?”

“Yes, I know that.”

I started walking and Ezra fell into step beside me. It wasn’t August 7th yet, but Fiona wasn’t my friend anymore, so I didn’t even have to try to follow her rules.

It had been an oppressively humid day, but when darkness fell, it had cooled into the perfect summer night. Fairy lights twinkled on the trees and streetlamps lining High Street. Ezra and I walked past wood benches and potted flowers and a parked car that was blasting an old doo-wop song.

Ezra had been my boyfriend from November to April.

I didn’t know what it was like to date him in summertime because I had never done it. But I missed it anyway; I missed these moments that we had never had. Maybe it would have been something like this.

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PAST PERFECT

“Where’s Maggie tonight?” I asked.

“Hanging out with Patience and Anne,” he replied. “Seeing a movie about shopping or something. I figured I didn’t need to be there for that one. We can each do our separate things sometimes, you know? She can be a bit much.” I wasn’t responding to that. There was nothing I could say without coming off as a bitch or a liar.

“Why did you do it, Chelsea?” Ezra asked suddenly.

“Why did I do what, exactly?”

“That Civil Warrior.”

“Well, I didn’t
do
him,” I answered.

Ezra laughed. “Nice,” he said. “Well played. And I’m glad to hear it. But, come on, you know what I’m asking.” I did know. And it occurred to me that Ezra was the first person to ask
why
. All the other Colonials just instantly turned against me, because no reason I could give would be reason enough.

“Because . . .” I began. “I thought I really liked him.”

“Oh.” This made Ezra look tense for some reason, his face briefly transformed into a scowl. “You said
thought
, not think.

So now you don’t really like him?”

“I think I don’t really like him enough to be worth all this.” This seemed to relax Ezra a little, and his next words came out sounding less severe. “Personally, I don’t know how you could like him at all, after what he did to you.”

“After he did what to me?” I asked.

“Knocked over that gravestone you like!” Ezra said.

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“You remember which gravestone I like?”
You pay attention
when I talk?

“Yeah, Fiona said it was your favorite. Seriously, how could you want anything to do with a guy who would show such total disregard for your feelings?”

Ezra made a good point. How could I? “I
was
mad about it,” I said. “But he didn’t know that grave was special to me.”

“Of course he did.”

I stopped walking and looked at Ezra. “No, it was too dark for him to read any of the names . . . .”

“
That
time, maybe. But he’d been to Essex before. Last summer, for example. Remember when he spied on you?

However he did it, he knew that one was yours. I heard them all laughing about it when I went undercover.” I sank down on to one of the benches lining the sidewalk.

“So the Undercover Operation finally happened,” I said stupidly, like that was what mattered here.

“Yeah.” Ezra sat down beside me, leaving space between us.

“It went really well. I’d tell you what we did to them, but—

well, I’m not allowed to talk about it with you. You know.”

“Dan told me he didn’t know about my grave,” I said. And he’d meant it. Hadn’t he?

“Chelsea, he
lied
to you,” Ezra said gently.

I realized right then that I had traded in everything I had, in exchange for nothing. Really nothing worth having, nothing at all.

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PAST PERFECT

I needed to find my way back. And here was Ezra, sitting beside me, listening to whatever I had to say.

So without stopping to think about the consequences, I started talking.

225

T
he Essex summer interpreters welcomed me back with open arms. After a week of the silent treatment, it was a hero’s homecoming when Tawny invited me to the next War meeting. She pulled me up onto the big rock with her, and it was like the first day of the summer all over again, before I got kidnapped and everything changed.

“Chelsea Glaser,” Tawny announced, “is a daring double agent! She went behind enemy lines without the enemy knowing—without
us
even knowing—and she uncovered a secret that will win us this War. She single-handedly learned that certain Civil Warriors forged historical documents to make their lam-eass battlefield seem like it actually mattered. They PAST PERFECT

cheated on their application for the Barnes Prize, and their superiors
knew
that they cheated, and fired them for it—but kept the prize as though they had rightly earned it.”

“Farbs!” everyone shouted.

“I am not ashamed to admit that, though I’ve been fighting this War for seven years now, Chelsea’s courage and instincts surpass any of my own. Soldiers—Chelsea Glaser!” The Colonials applauded madly. There was even a performance of a cheer that had been written specially about me:
Keep your Stonewall Jackson.

Keep your General Lee.

Both of them are cowards

Compared to our Chelsea!

Chelsea is the best!

Chelsea is the one!

If you don’t have Chelsea

You’ll lose the Battle of Bull Run!

The three original Essex cheerleaders followed up this cheer with a confusing pantomime portraying how I supposedly wrested secret information from Dan. The girl who was playing me batted her eyelashes at the boy who I guess was representing Dan, even though he was close to a foot shorter than Dan and wearing eyeliner. After she had looked coquettish for a while, he ran over and pretended to whisper
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a secret in her ear, after which they did a lot of fake kissing, him holding his thumbs between their two mouths.

The thing about historical reenactors is, they’ll reenact
anything
. Even if it just happened a couple weeks ago.

Although Fiona was at the meeting, she was surprisingly absent from both the cheer and the pantomime. Either she was bored of cheerleading, or she was still mad at me.

But how could she still be mad at me? I was on the right side again. I had told what Dan’s father had done, so now we had the ammo we needed to reveal those farbs for the fakes they were. I couldn’t have planned it better if I had planned it.

Bryan ran up to me once the meeting was adjourned.

“I just wanted you to know,” he said, “that when I said you were really and forever not in my Top Five . . . well, I didn’t mean
forever
.”

“Good to know,” I said.

“So if you ever want to pretend to be betrothed to me, well, I would be okay with that.”

“Thank you, Bryan,” I replied. “Thanks.” As my friends and I left, we spotted some Civil Warriors trying to steal one of the street signs pointing to Colonial Essex. They bolted as soon as they noticed us.

“Should we go get them?” Lenny asked, already lunging after them.

But Tawny just waved her hand dismissively. “Let them
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go,” she said, so over their petty thievery. “We have bigger fish to fry.”

And fry them, we did. Tawny proceeded to call the director of the National Register of Historic Places; the local ABC, CNN, CBS, and Fox affiliates; and the editors of
The
Washington Post
and
The Essex Courier-Journal
. She went on to every travel website and left comments panning Reenactmentland. “If they lied to win the Barnes Prize, who knows what else they’re lying about????” read her review on historicalholidays.com. “How can you trust anything these so-called historians say now???”

My parents were scandalized by this news. Scandalized and I think a little thrilled, or at least my father was. On Tuesday we sat glued to the TV as the eight o’clock news reported, after its usual rapes and murders, that the director of Reenactmentland had resigned under allegations of cor-rupt business practices.

“The Barnes Prize for Historical Interpretation moves tourism dollars,” explained the bobbed blond anchorwoman, for the benefit of those viewers who don’t spend nine-tenths of their waking lives on reenactment. “When Civil War Reenactmentland falsified documents to prove the existence of a ship that could have altered the outcome of the Civil War’s most important naval battle, they secured this award for themselves. The director, Lindy Steussel, claims she did not know that her living history museum had applied
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LEILA SALES

for—and been awarded—this prize under false pretenses.

However, she did let go employee Robert Malkin last August, after he spearheaded the Barnes Prize application commit-tee. This act indicates to many that Steussel was, in fact, aware of what was going on.”

The TV screen flashed a color photo captioned “Former Reenactmentland employee Robert Malkin.” The photo must have been taken a few years ago. It depicted a gangly young man in full Civil War regalia, toting a rifle. His wife stood next to him in a plain muslin dress, her hair hidden under a starched white bonnet. Two girls in similar outfits flanked their parents. And off to the side stood a dark-haired boy, maybe twelve years old, his shoes untied, staring straight at the camera.

I recognized that look.

The camera cut back to the anchorwoman. “The truth will always out,” she said solemnly, before moving on to a story about a holdup at the Plainville Toys “R” Us.

I sat on the couch between my parents and thought that I don’t know if that’s true, that the truth will always out. I think a lot of truths are lost to time. In this case, the truth was outed because Dan told me, because he liked me. And I told Ezra, because I missed him. And Ezra told Tawny, because he wanted to, And Tawny launched a media blitz that told everyone, because she is a warrior, and that’s what warriors do to win.

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“They had it coming to them,” Dad announced, turning off the TV and putting his feet up on his ottoman. “I said this last year—how could an organization that is so filled with anachronisms win the Barnes? Even
we
haven’t won the Barnes. It didn’t make sense. Didn’t I say that it didn’t make sense?”

“I feel bad for them.” Mom took a sip of tea. “Most of the people at Reenactmentland are innocent bystanders in all of this, just trying to do their jobs. And now they’re the laughingstock of the historical interpretation community.

And their director is gone? Can you imagine what we’d do without Myron Zelinsky?”

“I think they deserve it,” I said, even though I didn’t think they deserved it. I kept seeing Dan’s family in my mind, that photo of him staring directly at me. “If you cheat, you shouldn’t be allowed to just get away with it. Right?”

“Right,” my father agreed. To my mother, “Your daughter is right.”

But instead of feeling right, I felt nauseous. “I’m going to go lie down,” I said, but on my way out of the living room, the doorbell rang.

“Go see who that is,” my father called.

It was Dan. From my TV screen to my front porch, from five years ago to right now. I stared at him through the keyhole for a moment, taking in his clenched fists, his hollow eyes, his gray hoodie that had once, briefly, been mine.

What was sad was that, despite everything standing between
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us—the hills that had grown into Kilimanjaro-size moun-tains—I saw him and my heart still jumped, and I still wanted this to work. I wanted to fling open my door and have him sweep me into his arms and kiss me. I would kiss him back.

Instead, I opened my door, and he took a deep breath and said, “You are a bitch, Chelsea. You’re a bad person with an ugly heart.”

I didn’t say anything.

“This is my
father
, Chelsea. And maybe you can’t get that, because you have your perfect little family all together in your perfect little house, and you carpool in your perfect little car over to your perfect little Colonial tea party.

“But here’s what I have: a sister with a busted face. A mother who can’t deal with the real world at all. A lying, cheating father who doesn’t give a shit what happens to us. A dream that is never going to get off the ground. A girl who
I really
liked
, who turned out to be just another goddamn actress.

That’s
it
.

“And you? You could have anything. So you used me. You just used me, because you could have me so easily.” I could hardly breathe. I hadn’t thought it was going to be like this. I hadn’t thought at all. I hadn’t told anyone Dan’s secret, really. I just told Ezra. I had been mad. It had spiraled out of my control.

“I don’t know if you noticed,” Dan went on, “but I have a lot of people in my life who I can’t trust. And for some stupid
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reason, I thought you could be . . . Whatever, I
wanted
you to be someone I could trust.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Why did you do this?” He was shaking. “Just tell me
why
.” I tried to muster up some of the righteous indignation that I’d felt on Friday night as I said, “You knocked over my gravestone!” But even to my ears, the words sounded tinny and pathetic.

Dan’s face was pale. “It was a gravestone, Chelsea. And it was a
mistake
. I told you that already, and I meant it. I’ve never lied to you. My God, can’t you tell the difference between a gravestone and a person you love? Can’t you tell which one matters?”

But if I had to point to the real problem in my life, it’s that I’ve never known the difference between a gravestone and a person I love. I have never known which is which until it’s too late.