Past Perfect (6 page)

What, Ezra,
now
you care?

Somehow when Ezra had carried me away, he had brought Dan’s hoodie with him. So now I put it on properly, sticking my arms through the sleeves.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to him until August 7th, because of Fiona’s pointless, made-up, arbitrary time constraint, but I felt like I was allowed to say this, anyway: “You didn’t have to rescue me, Ezra.” And for some reason I felt like crying. “I didn’t need you. I
don’t
need you. I was doing fine.” I flipped the hood up onto my head and walked away from him, down the road, to Essex.

48

I
got in trouble, of course. I walked in my front door at 12:27 a.m., and my father was sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, waiting for me. He was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and he looked terrible.

“Where have you been?”
he growled.

This was a good question to which I had no good answer.

“Reenactmentland” wasn’t going to fly.

“What time were you supposed to be home tonight, Chelsea?”

“Well, you didn’t set an actual
time
. Mom just said I was supposed to call—”

“And did you call?”

LEILA SALES

“No.”

“Why not?”

I stood in the kitchen doorway, shifting my weight from foot to foot. All I wanted was to escape to my room, call Fiona, and go to bed
. Why didn’t I call? Because I’d been kidnapped.

Why do you
think
I didn’t call, Dad?

“Do I or do I not pay for you to have a cell phone
so that
you can call and tell me when you’ll be home late?” I shrugged.

“Have you been drinking?” Dad demanded.

“No.”

“I hope you’re not lying to me, Chelsea. Were your friends drinking? What have we always said about getting into cars with people after they’ve been drinking?”

“
Dad
, no one was drinking. Do you want to smell my breath?

Here, smell my breath.”

If I was in trouble for spearheading a War against a band of Civil War reenactors, I’d be like,
Okay, fair play, I guess
I deserve that.
But it was just offensive to get in trouble for drinking, which I
wasn’t even doing
.

“Your mother and I have been worried sick. Do you think we wanted to stay up all night, waiting for you?” My dad is the master of rhetorical questions. I was tempted to answer, “Yes, I think you wanted to stay up all night, waiting for me.” Or to point out that Mom was clearly asleep in bed, like a normal parent.

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But my dad can be scary. He’s a big, burly man with a big, burly voice, and he smiths silver for a living, plus he’s a PhD in history. There is no point to arguing with him, and I know because I’ve tried.

“Don’t just stand there and sulk, young lady. Answer me.” I sighed. “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to come home late, and I didn’t mean to make you worry. I got tied up in things.” Literally, tied up. “It won’t happen again.”

“You’re damn right it won’t. You’re grounded.”

“But Dad, it’s
summertime
. This is so unfair! How long am I grounded for?”

He thought about it. “Until Monday.”

“Wait, so I’m grounded for two days?”

“Yes,” he said brutally. “You can spend the weekend boning up on your history.”

“Oh. Okay. Can I go to bed now?”

He nodded, and we walked upstairs together. Before I went into my room, he kissed me on the forehead. “I’m glad you’re home safe,” he said.

I got into bed and tried to fall asleep, but there was a rest-less, buzzing energy throughout my body. It had been one hell of a long day. I had finished school for the year (good), found out my ex-boyfriend was working at my summer job with me (bad), been selected as the second-in-command for our War (mostly good), gotten kidnapped (bad), and met a guy who actually seemed promising (good) . . . except that
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LEILA SALES

he was a Civil War reenactor (very, very bad). I felt exhausted and wired, all at the same time.

My phone vibrated. Fiona. “I’m grounded,” I whispered into the receiver.

“So are you not allowed to talk?”

“No, Dad didn’t say anything about that.” My father grounds me periodically, but he’s not very good at it. He mostly just does it to prove that he has control. He doesn’t care about the technical details, like whether I use the phone.

“Then listen, I just got off the phone with Nat.”

“Did he declare his love for you?” I asked. I kicked my comforter off my bed and rolled over onto my side.

“Not yet. He was saying that in the future, whenever we have nighttime meetings at Essex, we need to post guards.

We can’t have any more kidnappings.”

“No kidding,” I agreed. “It sucked. More or less.” I thought again of Dan saying
It was cute
about me. That part hadn’t sucked.

“Nat was part of the rescue mission that found Tawny.

But—get this—she had already managed to cut through the ropes they’d wrapped around her. Nat said she had a Swiss Army knife in her back pocket, and she got it out and sawed her way through without anyone even noticing.” This made me feel bad about myself. The only knives I used were butter knives, and I certainly never carried one around in my pocket. (Like, what, in case there was an
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emergency butter-spreading situation?) I wanted to be the girl who rescued herself, like Tawny. Instead I’d had to be rescued by stupid Ezra. Stupid Ezra whose body still felt exactly right when he picked me up and carried me away to safety.

“What was being kidnapped like?” Fiona asked, breathy with excitement.

“Boring. I just sat there. There was one kind of cute boy, though. One of the Civil War guys.”

“Really? Tell me about him.” Fiona can focus her attention like a laser when cute boys are involved. At all other times, she’s really hit-or-miss.

“Well,
you
might not find him attractive since, you know, he doesn’t have a long, flowing ponytail or anything. But his name’s Dan, and he’s tall and pretty skinny, and he dresses well, and he has this cute floppy hair. And he seems to be literate, or maybe he just likes to carry around books as props.”

“I’d hit it,” Fiona agreed. “Except that he’s from the Civil War.”

Quietly, I let out a long breath. “And we definitely can’t date people from the Civil War,” I said. “Right?”

“Of course right. Hello,
we are at War
. Dating someone from the Civil War would make you a traitor. Like Benedict Arnold.”

“How the hell do you know who Benedict Arnold is? I’m very impressed, Fiona.”

“I saw a movie about him once.” She paused. “He was in
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LEILA SALES

the American army for the Revolution but then he defected to the British, right?”

“Yes.”

“Awesome, that’s what I thought. Don’t be Benedict Arnold, Chelsea! You’re our Lieutenant. Can you even imagine what it would do to troop morale if you, of all people, hooked up with a Civil Warrior?”

“Calm down, Fi. All I said was that he’s cute. It’s an aes-thetic judgment. I’m not actively planning to hook up with this guy. A lot of people are cute. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to make out with all of their faces.” Fiona didn’t accept this, since she usually
is
trying to make out with every cute person’s face. She pressed on, “You two are from different times, and different worlds. It wouldn’t work.”

“Of course.” I rolled onto my back and gazed up at the ceiling. “Of course you’re right. It wouldn’t work. I never thought it would.”

As I put on my work clothes on Monday morning, I felt the past ten months slip away from me. It seemed like no time had passed since the last day I had worked at Essex, since the last time I’d put on this dress.

Every Essex employee gets one outfit. If you want more, you have to buy them yourself, and they are outlandishly expensive. Of course,
good
reenactors sew their own clothes, but personally I’d rather wallow in the same sweaty garments
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all summer long than figure out how to use a sewing machine.

You have to thread a bobbin or something. It’s very complicated. My father once tried to teach me, and we wound up screaming at each other. Not worth it.

My gown is forest green, fronted by a matching green stomacher with decorative stitching across it. I wear that over a navy blue petticoat, and under all of
that
I wear a plain white shift, which looks like an ill-fitting nightgown. Shoes are leather boots, made by the Essex shoemaker, Jonathan Shoemaker.

(Colonial name. His real name is Jonathan Shulman. Close enough.) This whole outfit was assigned to me when I was thirteen, and I still haven’t outgrown it.

My parents and I drove to Essex together. “Tell me, Chelsea, what have you learned from your grounding?” my father asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.

“Um . . .” Should I say,
Don’t get kidnapped by hot Civil War
boys
? Or should I say,
I’ve learned that my father is insane
? No, that doesn’t count; I already knew that. So I didn’t say anything except “Sorry,” which was fine, since it turned out Dad wasn’t actually looking for an answer.

We parked in the staff lot hidden behind the magazine, which is the building where the old weapons are kept. Ezra had been assigned to work in the magazine, so I planned to avoid it all summer long. Which actually would be the same as every other summer. I’ve never gotten especially jazzed about Revolutionary War cannons.

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LEILA SALES

“Are you going to be all right today?” my mother asked, grabbing my forearm.

“Of course. Why?”

“Well, just that you’ve never worked anyplace other than with us, and I didn’t know if you were nervous . . . .What if someone asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to, and we’re not there to help? . . .”

“Mom,”
I said. “I will be literally down the road from you.

If I scream loud enough, you will be able to hear me. And if there’s a question I can’t answer, I’m
sure
the boss at the graveyard will know.”

This was the other thing I’d learned from my weekend of being grounded: that there was absolutely no way I would be able to survive ten weeks in the silversmith studio, day in and day out with my father, and his rhetorical questions, and his know-it-all attitude. I would snap. One or both of us would not live to see September.

Plus, Bryan Denton was going to be apprenticing at the silversmith’s this summer. And the only thing that could be worse than Bryan relentlessly hitting on me from nine to five every day would be my parents witnessing every second of it.

My dad told me about Bryan’s apprenticeship over brunch on Saturday, sounding very pleased. He has always been a Bryan Denton fan. “That boy has a good head on his shoulders,” Dad said, to which I replied that if the only positive thing you can say about a person is that he has a “good
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head,” then there is probably something malformed about the rest of him.

Dad just laughed at me and said, “You know what it means when a girl criticizes a boy, don’t you?” I tried ignoring him.

“You know what it means, right? When a girl protests that really she hates a boy? You know what that means?” The “ignoring” plan never works. “Does it mean that she really hates him as much as she says she does?” I snapped.

He chuckled superiorly. “No. It means that she really has a
crush
on him.”

I immediately left the kitchen and called Mr. Zelinsky.

“Elizabeth Connelly!” he cried into the phone, like the past sixteen hours of not speaking to me had been abject torture.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

“Mr. Zelinsky,” I said, “I need to work somewhere that’s not the silversmith’s studio this summer. Anywhere. I don’t care.

Actually, I do care: if you could put Fiona and me together, that would be best. If that’s not possible, fine, I will accept that, but just please, for the love of all that is holy and Colonial, get me away from the silversmith. I will make shoes, I will make barrels, I will make soap, but I cannot make silverware.” Mr. Zelinsky made some sympathetic murmuring noises.

“Did you know, Miss Connelly,” he said pensively, “that, unlike with iron, you cannot strike silver while it’s hot? Should you strike silver while it’s hot, it’s likely to shatter.”
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“Sure,” I said, because I found that out for myself years ago.

“Would you consider this
symbolic
?” Mr. Zelinsky asked.

“No? Wait, what would it symbolize?”

“The
heart
? If you strike it while you are hot—that is,
angry
—”

“Mr. Zelinsky, I can’t handle metaphors today. I am begging you. I need to be reassigned.”

So I got the burying ground. Fiona got assigned to the milliner’s, which is where the cool girls work—though saying someone is “cool” by Essex standards is not saying much.

Although I wished Fiona and I were placed together, I didn’t need to spend every day sewing shifts and listening to Anne Whitcomb, Patience Algren, and Maggie Fairchild gossip about which Colonials are hooking up with one another and how far they’ve gone.

The only people assigned to the burying ground this summer are me and Linda Osborne, an adult interpreter. So there’s no potential for drama, like the time last summer when the milliner girls cast Maggie out of their group for a few days (because she had made out with Patience’s ex-boyfriend at a party).
That
was drama. But with only two of us in the burying ground, and one of us being a married woman in her thirties, probably no one was going to get cast out of anything. I suspected that Mr. Zelinsky assigned me to the burying ground because I am unfit for human company.

After I said good-bye to my parents and reported to the
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burying ground, Linda explained to me that my job was to wander atmospherically amongst the gravestones and answer people’s questions if they had any.