by Leila Sales
“I already feel different,” Fiona said as we cruised down the wide, tree-lined drive toward Essex. “More capable, more mature. I have a job, for example. I am a wage earner.”
“I’m just glad this year’s over,” I said, sticking my arm out the window, letting my fingers drag through the wind as it rushed past. “I couldn’t be readier for summer.”
Junior year had been hard. Well, not all of it. During the winter, I had been dating Ezra, and that was easy. Dating Ezra was so easy. But he broke up with me on April 17th, and everything since then had been hard. Choosing what to wear every day, knowing he might see me, was hard. Taking notes in Latin class, knowing he was sitting three rows behind me, was hard. Walking into the cafeteria, knowing I wasn’t going to sit with him, was hard. I went to this school before dating Ezra, and I stayed in this school after dating Ezra, but somehow, in those five months that we were together, everything in that place became infused with a little bit of Ezra-ness. There was nothing I could do there, nowhere I could go without being reminded of him, and of us.
Ezra had nothing to do with Colonial Essex Village, and for that I was glad. It’s hard to get over someone when you still have to see him every day.
Fiona parked in the lot just as my parents were walking to their car. It was six o’clock, so they had finished work for the day. They had only partially changed out of their Colonial costumes, so my dad was wearing buckle shoes, breeches, and a Washington Nationals T-shirt.
“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Glaser!” Fiona chirped.
“Hi, girls!” Mom gave me a big hug. “How was the last day of school?”
I shrugged. Fiona and I go to a charter school, which maybe sounds fancy, but it’s just school, like any other place. All it takes to get in are halfway-involved parents and halfway-decent grades. It just has a higher college acceptance rate than my town’s public high school, that’s all.
“Well, I had an excellent day,” Dad informed us. “I had a long conversation with a professor from Stanford who’s writing a comparative paper on the gravesites of all the signers of the Declaration. Fascinating!”
Dad loves talking to professors because he used to want to be one himself. He grew up in Wisconsin, a state wholly unconnected to the American Revolution, before moving east to get his degree in history. There he discovered the irresistible appeal of Colonial reenactment, and boom, that was the end of his career in academia.
“Are you excited for orientation?” Mom asked Fiona and me.
Fiona nodded, but I just shrugged again. Orientation is always a long-winded speech by Mr. Zelinsky, Essex’s director, and then a whole brunch of dos and don’ts. Like, do greet moderners with a smile. Don’t tell them that, in Colonial times, parents used to whip their children, and so now all young visitors to Essex are whipped in a historically accurate fashion. That’s what the apothecary a couple years ago used to tell kids, before he got fired for drinking on the job, and for keeping actual laudanum in his fake laudanum bottles.
“Well, I’m excited to have our junior interpreters back,” Mom said. “It’s been lonely without all of you. Just a bunch of us old fogies.”
“Denise,” Dad called, jingling his car keys. “It’s getting near dinnertime. Let the girls go to their meeting.” My father does not have a lot of patience for small talk, unless he is the one small-talking.
“All right, all right.” Mom hugged us both again. “What time will you be home tonight?”
“Oh,” I said. Fiona and I exchanged a glance. “We might go out after orientation. You know, with some friends or whatever.”
“Just call if you’ll be out past eleven,” Mom said.
“It’s summertime!” I objected.
“Okay, call if you’ll be out past midnight.”
Then Dad yelled “Denise!” again, and they left us.
“Do they really not know?” Fiona asked in a low voice as she and I walked through the main gate.
“All the grown-ups here act like they don’t know. They must have some idea, though. They can’t be that clueless.”
“I’m so ready for it,” Fiona said, getting a skip in her step. “I’ve never been in a war before. I’ve had to listen to you talk about how awesome this War is for years, and now I finally get to play.”
“Shut up,” I muttered. “There’s Mr. Zelinsky.”
Fiona’s mouth formed an O before she snapped her lips shut.
The director stood greeting new employees as they filed into the church. The church is a big, white clapboard building filled with pews, perfect for staff meetings.
“Elizabeth Connelly!” Mr. Zelinsky boomed, crunching my body in a hug. He’s a tiny man with an oversized voice and an oversized attitude. “So charmed to have you join us again for yet another tremendous summer. Your mother tells me you considered deserting us this year! For the ‘mall’?” He also has this way of saying modern words like they’re some crazy slang that he’s never heard before.
“Oh, well . . .” I shrugged.
“Miss Connelly, Miss Connelly.” He took me by the shoulders and slowly swayed me back and forth. “Simply put, we could not do it without you. No one knows this place like you do, I daresay not even myself.”
“Glad to be back, Mr. Z,” I told him, which actually, now that I was there, felt true. The air at Essex smells fresher than the air anywhere else. There’s something about it that just feels like home.
“And, prithee, miss, remind me your name.”
Mr. Zelinsky gave a small bow to Fiona, who didn’t miss a beat. “Fiona,” she said, dropping only a mini-curtsy, since her jean skirt had about as much fabric as a headband. “Fiona Warren. But I want to go by Temperance.”
I snorted. Fiona has no sense of temperance.
“Of course,” Mr. Zelinsky said smoothly. “Welcome to Essex!” And he ushered us into the church.
It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim interior lighting. The first few rows of pews were filled with junior interpreters, mostly middle- and high-schoolers. I knew a lot of them from previous summers at Essex, or even a couple of them from school, but there were some new faces too.
“Hi, Chelsea!” a bunch of people greeted me when we walked in.
“Let’s go sit with Nat.” Fiona steered me toward Nat Dillon, who was instantly recognizable, even from behind, by his long, flaxen ponytail. I don’t know what my best friend sees in him. I guess he’s nice and smart and they have similar interests and whatever. But, I don’t know, ponytails are just a deal breaker for me.
“Hey, Chelsea. Hey, Fi.” Nat and his friend, Bryan Denton, scooched down the bench so we could sit. “Happy summer!”
“I know, right? Best day ever.” Fiona scraped her long, thick hair off her back and piled it on top of her head. Nat did the same. Honestly, those two.
“We were just discussing tactics for the War,” Bryan told me.
I loathe everything about Bryan. For one, he is the sort of person who not even kidding uses the word “tactics” in casual conversation. He was the youngest person ever to get a job at Essex without his parents already working there. The summer after fourth grade, his parents went to Mr. Zelinsky and were like, “We’re sick of buying season passes to this historical village every single year. Will you please just let our son work here. We will pay you.” Bryan is clingy and toadlike, and also his teeth are crooked because he refuses to get braces because they would be anachronistic. For some reason, Bryan harbors an enormous crush on me, even though I have never done anything to encourage this. In fact, whenever possible, I act to discourage it.
For example, now I said, “You know the rules. No talking about the War where the bosses can hear.”
“But I had a really great idea! For a tactic!” Bryan persisted, bouncing a little in the pew. “I was reading in Essex: An Extended History that there’s a woman buried in the graveyard here who gave birth to twenty-two children. Only three of them were stillborns. Medical scientists theorize that her uterine lining was twice a
s thick as the average woman’s. She died of smallpox, ultimately, in 1748 . . .” Bryan is also the sort of person who unabashedly remarks on dead women’s uterine linings.
Now, how this information was going to help us win a War, I could not imagine, in part because I had stopped paying attention. I saw someone on the other side of the church who looked like Ezra, and I can’t pay attention to anything when a person who looks like Ezra pops up.
Whenever I see a guy who resembles my ex-boyfriend, here is what happens:
1. I stop listening to whoever is talking to me. Or, if I’m the one talking, I just fade into silence without even noticing. Maybe I will keep nodding and smiling, but I’m not really there.
2. I develop this intense tunnel vision where all I can see is the Ezra look-alike, in stark relief, and everything else blurs off to the sides.
3. I stop breathing, which, in turn, means that
4. I get dizzy.
5. I start sweating.
6. My neck and chest turn all red and blotchy.
7. Then, once I realize that the guy in question is not actually Ezra, I start breathing again, and I get this huge rush of adrenaline that almost makes me vomit. And then I try to get back into whatever conversation I was in, before I briefly disappeared into psycho-freak-ex-girlfriend land.
My problem is that Ezra is of average height and average build, he has brown hair, and he likes to wear jeans. So I have one of these panic attacks pretty much every time I see a boy, unless he is really tall or really short or obviously my dad or something.
When I saw this Ezra look-alike in the church as Mr. Zelinsky took the pulpit to begin orientation, I went through steps one through six. But I couldn’t quite get to the final step (the one where I notice the guy is not Ezra and almost throw up), because it really seemed like . . . I mean, this guy really could be . . .
“Fiona,” I whispered, trying to breathe like a human being. “That guy over there. In the second row. Is that . . . Um . . .” Deep inhalation. “Is that Ezra?”
Fiona flicked me with her hair as she looked over, then flicked me again as she turned back to me. “Yes,” she said.
I clutched the pew and sunk down low so that he wouldn’t see me. “What is he doing here?” I whispered.
“Uh, working here, probably,” Fiona answered with a shrug. “Unless he likes to hang out at staff orientation meetings for fun. Chelsea, you know you have, like, red things all over your neck right now, right?”
“You know you’re, like, the worst best friend in the world right now, right?” I snapped back.
Fiona arched her eyebrows in surprise. “Whoa there, killer. What’s wrong? It’s been ages. You see him every day at school. You never act like it’s a big deal then.”
“Of course it’s not a big deal. It is a very small deal. It’s just different,” I said, shielding my eyes and turning my head to look in the opposite direction from him. “It’s different when I’m not . . . prepared for it.”
“You guys talking about Gorman?” Nat asked, jutting his chin toward Ezra.
“No,” I answered, at the same time that Fiona said, “Yes,” in part because she is the worst best friend in the world, but mostly because she will say yes to anything Nat Dillon asks her.
“I do not respect that guy,” Bryan said fiercely.
“You don’t respect that guy because he got to date Chelsea and you didn’t,” Fiona pointed out in a brief moment of wisdom.
Bryan opened his mouth to make what I’m sure would have been an appalling retort, but, thankfully, Mr. Zelinsky began his remarks at that moment.
“Young ladies and gentlemen!” he said. “Welcome to the forty-ninth summer of Colonial Essex Village. Though time has passed in the outside world since Essex was first added to the National Register of Historic Places, here it remains always and forever the summer of 1774. Unrest is brewing—King George has recently passed the Intolerable Acts, and it will not be long before war breaks out.”
There was some rustling throughout the room at the word “war,” and Fiona and Bryan both elbowed me at the same time, jostling my body between them. Mr. Zelinsky didn’t notice.
“Indeed, this is a difficult time to be a Patriot, but it is a difficult time to be a Loyalist, as well. Difficult, yet thrilling! We stand upon a precipice from which we dare not fall. And it is in that milieu that we all will live for the next ten weeks. I am pleased to see so many returning faces, as well as many new ones. But for all of you, new and old, I want to be clear that your primary responsibility this summer is to make all of our guests feel that they have truly stepped back in time. Make them believe that the past is, in fact, their present.
“Who would care to explain to all of us just why the study of history is so important?”
A lot of hands shot into the air—Bryan’s first, of course.
“History is important because it’s all events that really happened and if we don’t study it then we won’t know what really happened,” Bryan announced.
Sometimes—let me say most times—Bryan does not have anything wise to contribute. He just can’t pass up the opportunity to talk.
Mr. Zelinsky slid his gaze over to me. “Anything to add, Miss Connelly?”
I am Mr. Zelinsky’s plant in the audience. After so many years, there is no part of his orientation speech that I don’t know by heart. I rattled off, “It’s important to study history because those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.”
Mr. Zelinsky nodded at me, and Bryan mumbled, “That’s what I said.” Then orientation continued with instructions for what time we had to report to work every day, and where we could eat lunch, and when to pick up our costumes, and on and on, but I didn’t bother to pay attention. Ezra was sitting a few rows away. Why was he here? How dare he be here?
At last, Mr. Zelinsky concluded his speech. “I look forward to seeing you in costume and ready to go on Monday!” A couple other administrators handed out thick handbooks of Essex policies and historical facts. We all streamed out of the church before Mr. Zelinsky had even left the pulpit. Why would you take thirty kids who just finished school for the year and then make them sit still and listen to a lecture? I ask you.
We all headed “to the parking lot, to get our cars.” That was our cover story, if anyone asked us, which no one would, since Essex is deserted by Friday night. Of course, all of us junior interpreters knew we weren’t really going to our cars.
Really we were going to War.
Chapter 4
THE ENEMY
Like anyone else, we have our enemies. Of course, we have our enemies.
My father once explained it to me like this: If you’re going to open a new restaurant, you might think you’d want to open that restaurant on a block where there are no other dining options. But, actually, the savvy business strategy is to open your restaurant in a neighborhood with lots of other restaurants. Then this area will become an eating-out destination, and your restaurant will get more traffic. This is why clothing stores are in malls, where there are lots of other clothing stores. This is why there are three ice cream shops on High Street, and none anywhere else in my town. This is why Universal Studios theme park is a few miles away from Disneyland. And this is why Civil War Reenactmentland is across the street from Colonial Essex Village.
Yes, I am serious. There is a Civil War living history village. Directly across the street from my living history village.
We hate them, obviously. We hate them and their more technologically advanced rifles and their non-tricornered hats. My dad hates them most of all, although sometimes he will concede, as he stands at the edge of Colonial Essex and stares across the road at Civil War Reenactmentland, “Well, it was an inspired business plan. I have to give them that. Inspired.” Then he will keep watching it for a while, tapping his silver-tipped cane on the ground, before eventually muttering, “Assholes,” and retreating to his silversmith workshop.
My dad, much as he hates Civil War Reenac
tmentland, does not actively fight back. But we do. This is the War that has been raging between the Colonial Essex junior interpreters and the Civil War junior interpreters, summer after summer, for as many years as I’ve worked here. There’s a ceasefire every Labor Day, and then it restarts with a vengeance the following June. Unlike the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, ours is a War that will never end.
Virginia played a major role in early American history, so it makes sense that there would be a number of different living history museums in my state. But there is no reason why they have to be in the same very small town.
After we left the staff orientation meeting and walked to the parking lot, and after we’d made sure that Mr. Zelinsky and all the other administrators were nowhere to be seen, everyone scurried through the trees and down toward the brook. It was a dark, clear night, with countless stars overhead. Some people built a campfire, and others produced marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate from their purses, and we all crowded around to roast s’mores.
Fiona offered me a stick, but I shook my head. My stomach felt tight, and it got worse every time I looked at Ezra, who was sitting across the fire from me, not looking at me. Not like he purposely wasn’t looking at me, because even that would have meant something, would have meant he thought or cared something about me. But this was like . . . he just didn’t notice me.
Fiona’s back was toward me as she faced the campfire, and I felt suddenly trapped on the outside of this circle of people. I tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m going to talk to him,” I said.
“Who?” Fiona asked. “Oh, shoot.” Her marshmallow had caught on fire.
“Who do you think?” I said.
She turned around, blowing on her charred marshmallow. “Really, Chelsea? Tell me, is it August seventh yet?”
I rolled my eyes at her.
“I’m sort of getting this vibe,” Fiona went on, “like maybe it’s not August seventh yet. But that might be just my opinion.”