Past Perfect

by Leila Sales

  “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. 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.

  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. And there was Elisabeth Connelly in the middle, laid out flat on the ground. Part of the stone had broken off and lay a couple feet away.

  Unsure what to do, I stood up and approached the huddle of Essex employees. They would know what was going on. Maybe there was a good explanation for this. Routine maintenance or something.

  “Good morning, Miss Connelly,” Mr. Zelinsky said, unsmiling. No one was smiling. The routine maintenance explanation wasn’t seeming too likely.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We are still trying to ascertain that,” Mr. Zelinsky said.

  “It could have been the thunderstorm last night,” one of the other office workers suggested. “There were pretty strong gales. I could hear it outside my window.”

  I felt hopeful for a moment. Then I thought about it. “Is it likely that a gravestone could stand for more than three hundred years and then get knocked over by some ‘pretty strong gales’?”

  Mr. Zelinsky coughed into his handkerchief. “Not likely, no.”

  “So what is likely?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Vandals,” the security guard answered.

  “It’s those Civil War punks across the street,” Linda said. “It’s got to be. They have no respect for the past.”

  “We don’t know that,” Mr. Zelinksy cautioned. “We would do best to check our facts before we go pointing fingers.”

  “Who else would have a reason?” asked Linda.

  “Why would the Civil War have a reason?” Mr. Zelinsky replied.

  But of course they did have a reason. War. That was their reason.

  I didn’t realize I was about to cry until I already was. All the adults turned to me, alarmed. “Miss Connelly!” Mr. Zelinsky exclaimed. “Chelsea! Are you all right?”

  I had no idea he even knew my modern name. “I’m fine,” I sobbed. “It’s just . . . I just really loved that headstone.” Saying it made me cry harder.

  In most other places in the world, crying over a felled gravestone doesn’t garner much sympathy. But in Essex, everyone gets it.

  “It’s a beautiful one,” Mr. Zelinsky agreed, which was kind of him, since it really looked no more or less beautiful than any of the others.

  “I remember your showing me that stone on your first day working here,” Linda said with more compassion than I had ever before heard in her voice. I felt like we were at a funeral for a grave, only a grave is dead from the beginning.

  “We’ll get them back up, young lady,” the security guard promised. “They’ll be standing again and as good as new before you know it.”

  Mr. Zelinsky lent me his handkerchief so I could dry my tears, and then they set to work hauling the gravestones off the paths so no moderners would trip over them. Once that was done, everyone left the graveyard except for me and Linda, and it was back to a mostly normal day of work.

  Only it felt nothing like normal. Once I stopped being heartbroken over the Elisabeth Connelly gravestone, I started getting mad. I was mad at all the Civil Warriors. But at one of them in particular, I was absolutely furious. Because he could have stopped it. If he really cared about me, he could have stopped it.

  The minute that work ended for the day, I ran out to the main road separating Essex from Reenactmentland. I didn’t even take the time to change out of my gown. I stood by the exit across the street, waiting, arms crossed. Moderners stared as they passed me on their way out of Reenactmentland, and some snapped pictures, but I didn’t care. Let them gawk. Let the Civil Warriors see me on their way out of work, and let them do their worst to me. Just let them try. I was untouchable. And until I saw Dan, I wasn’t leaving.

  Finally, after the crowds had dwindled, I saw him, still in uniform, walking down the driveway. He was listening to his headphones, so I had to shout “Dan!” to get his attention.

  “Chelsea!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  Dan’s forehead creased with concern. “Okay,” he said. He took my arm and led me down into a little ravine, so we weren’t quite so visible from the road. “You look amazing,” he said in a low voice. “I’d forgotten how pretty you are in costume.”

  I glared at him. “I look amazing? You ignore me for days, you knock over my gravestones, and now when I show up you tell me that I look amazing?”

  “What makes you think that I knocked over the gravestones?” Dan asked, still holding my arm.

  “Are you telling me you didn’t?”

  He paused for an instant, then said, “No. I did.”

  I shook off his hand. “Why?”

  “Are you kidding me?” He laughed, then stopped when he saw that I wasn’t laughing. “Why? Okay, because we’re at War, where property destruction is perfectly accepted and encouraged for both sides. Because I hadn’t done much for the War since kidnapping you, and it was my turn. Because my sister’s injured, and I wanted to get some nonviolent revenge.” He gave me a look like this is totally logical, and of course it was totally logical, but . . .

  “You know I work in the burying ground,” I said.

  “Sure.” He frowned. “Does that make it off-limits or something?”

  “They’re real headstones, Dan. They commemorate real people, who actually lived, and actually died. They’re not American Girl dolls.”

  “I didn’t think—” he began.

  “Did you know that one of the headstones you knocked over was for a fifteen-year-old girl named Elisabeth Connelly?” I asked.

  Dan shook his head slowly. “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “Really?” My voice rose. “You mean you came into my graveyard and you just knocked over three completely random headstones?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without thinking about whose names were on them? You really expect me to believe that?”

  “Yes!” Dan grabbed my shoulders, forcing me to look at him. “It was the middle of the night, it was pitch black, we were trying to move fast, we went for headstones that seemed like the
y’d be easiest to knock over. Chelsea, that was it. I promise. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I would never try to hurt you.”

  “Of course you would,” I snapped back.

  “I swear I wasn’t trying to—”

  “At the War Council,” I said. “You just . . . ignored me.”

  “Oh.” Dan tilted his head. “And that hurt you.”

  “Yes.” I swallowed hard.

  “Then I guess this will sound stupid, but I thought that was what you wanted. I thought you didn’t want anyone to know about us, and I knew that if I even smiled at you, people might suspect. I spent the entire time trying not to look at you, when all I wanted to do was look at you.”

  “Oh.” I leaned into him.

  “And frankly, Chelsea, you could have talked to me. But you didn’t. You seemed to want to act like we were enemies, starting from that first time I saw you at Abbott’s. So I acted like we were enemies.”

  “Huh.” I frowned. “I guess we didn’t really set any rules for this. Like, how to do it without hurting each other’s feelings.”

  “No,” Dan said. “We definitely did not set any rules.”

  “The thing is . . . my ex-boyfriend—”

  “The one who sucks?” Dan supplied.

  “He doesn’t suck. He’s great. But . . . well, he used to do that a lot. Act like I didn’t exist. Like he didn’t notice me. Like I didn’t matter to him. So when you looked past me at the War Council, I felt like . . . God, I just never really matter to anyone.”

  “Chelsea.” Dan cupped my face in his hands. “I promise you really matter to me.” He touched his lips to mine. “I promise.”

  “And you didn’t know it was my headstone?”

  “I promise,” he said.

  I pulled him toward me and kissed him again. His hands moved to cradle the back of my head.

  I moved my lips away from his for a moment. “You know, if you really didn’t want anyone to know about us, here is something you could have done: not given me a hickey.”

  His eyes flew to my neck. “Oh, crap, did I really?”

  “Well, it’s gone now,” I said.

  “I’ll do it again,” he promised in a tone that made me feel breathless.

  We kissed again, and I wondered, why hadn’t we done this for nearly a week? We’re awesome at it. We should be kissing all the time! I found myself lost in this world of him: the taste of his salty-sweet mouth, the smell of his skin, the feel of his hands pressing into my lower back—and then I heard a sound, a cross between a giggle and a gasp, that was definitely not part of the world of Dan. That was a sound that belonged to the real world. I couldn’t tell if Dan noticed it or not. Instinctively, I pushed him away, and I turned around.

  And saw Patience, Maggie, and Anne, staring straight at us.

  Chapter 17

  THE SECRET

  The milliner girls told everyone. I couldn’t blame them. Girls like that are basically invented to spread gossip. To hold that against them would be to deny them their lifeblood.

  The next morning started with me dropping off my lunch at the silversmith’s. Bryan didn’t talk to me about bundling, or menopause throughout history, or how the Colonials referred to French kissing. All he did was pretend to ignore me until I was almost out the door, and then run up to me and say, “Hey!” He glanced around to make sure my father wasn’t listening, then continued, “You suck.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “How could you?” Bryan asked, his chin quivering. I couldn’t tell whether he was asking how I could betray our troops, or how I could fall for a Civil Warrior, or how I could fall for any guy who wasn’t him, Bryan Denton. But no matter what he meant, I could tell that he was truly hurt. He looked like his slimy, toadlike heart was breaking.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Bryan just sniffed and walked away. “This time you are really and forever not in my Top Five,” I heard him yell after me.

  I went and hid in my graveyard. Linda didn’t know what I had done, Linda didn’t care, and everyone else in a graveyard is dead. But the fallen stones, still prostrate on the ground, kept reminding me that even this place wasn’t safe from the horrors of War. And Tawny showing up midway through the morning confirmed that.

  With her unbandaged arm, she pulled me behind the Hawthorn family tombstone and said, “I will give you two options.”

  I felt sweat trickling down my chest. Ever since joining the War at the age of thirteen, I had been glad to have Tawny on my side. I always said that I would never want her as an enemy.

  And now I was her enemy.

  “Option one, you can resign as Lieutenant,” Tawny said. “Walk away with whatever scraps of dignity you have left. But don’t you ever show your face at another one of our strategy meetings, because I don’t trust you.

  “Option two, you can come to the meeting tonight, and we’ll have a democratic impeachment vote. Maybe someone will vote to keep you on. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “Tawny,” I squeaked out. “He’s a really good guy . . .”

  Tawny spit on the ground in front of me. “You are such a girl.”

  A flushed, overweight woman approached us, dragging a Goth-looking preteen behind her. “Can my daughter take a picture with you?” she asked. “She is so excited to be here!”

  The Goth daughter looked like she’d rather be dead. I knew exactly how she felt.

  “Of course, good lady,” I said to the moderner. To Tawny, I said, “Option one. I quit.”

  I smiled for the camera while the Goth girl held up devil horns behind my head.

  “Then we’re done here,” Tawny said. “Have fun with the Civil War. But stay out of our way.”

  “Huh?” asked the Goth girl.

  Tawny hitched up her petticoats and strode away.

  I let out a deep breath and tried to focus on the positives. For example, now I’d have a lot fewer reasons to break character. Now that I didn’t have all those pesky distractions of “friends” and “fun.” Maybe my dad would become so proud of me.

  And wouldn’t that be just a super-great trade-off.

  It was going to be okay, though. So I had lost Bryan and the milliner girls—I hadn’t wanted them, anyway. So I had lost Tawny and the War—I would deal. So I had lost Ezra—I lost Ezra long ago, nothing had changed now. As long as I had Fiona and as long as I had Dan, I would be fine.

  When it was time for my lunch break, I decided to brave the milliner’s. Fiona was there. And I didn’t care what Patience, Maggie, and Anne thought about me, but I needed to talk to Fiona. She hadn’t replied to any of my calls or texts last night, and I needed to hear her say that everything was going to be okay.

  When I arrived, all four milliner girls—Fiona included—stood lined up behind the counter, glaring at me from under ribbon-adorned, wide-brimmed straw hats.

  “Oh, look, it’s the traitor,” Patience muttered under her breath.

  “I can hear you,” I told her.

  She gave a who cares? shrug.

  “Seriously, Chelsea, if you wanted to make out that badly, I’m sure you could have found someone here,” Maggie sneered. “I know you feel all wah-wah-wah about Ezra breaking up with you, but he’s not the only guy at Essex. It’s not like your only choice was to run across the street.”

  “You don’t,” I said, my voice catching in my throat, “know anything about how I feel about Ezra breaking up with me.”

  “At least now we know what really happened to our Civil War uniforms,” Patience said, stabbing a needle into a nearby pincushion. “I should have figured it out then. But I guess we all made the mistake of trusting you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I insisted. “Everyone is being ridiculous. I kissed him a few times; it’s no big deal. I never did anything to hurt Essex.”

  Four blank stares.

  “Fiona,” I tried. “Can I talk to you? Alone, please?”

  She flicked her hat ribbon behind one shoulder and came out from behi
nd the counter. Already I was getting this sense like maybe my best friend wasn’t on my side.

  I led her into the back room and pulled her behind the dressing screen.

  “Are you really mad at me about this?” I whispered, in case the other three milliner girls were eavesdropping, which they almost certainly were.

  “What do you think?” Fiona’s voice was hard, and she didn’t bother to whisper.

  “We’ve been friends for eight years, and now it’s all over just because everyone thinks I sabotaged the War? A War that you weren’t even fighting until a few weeks ago?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Fiona answered. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Fiona, I wouldn’t be here this summer if it weren’t for you. I would be working at The Limited, and the worst that could happen would be if we were at war with the Abercrombie across the hall. But you wanted us to spend the summer together. So I just want to know—” I swallowed hard. “I want to know when a made-up War became more important than our friendship.”

  “Good question,” she snapped. “Maybe you should ask yourself that.” And she shoved past me to get out of the dressing room and rejoin the other milliner girls.

  There was nothing left for me there, so I walked out.

  I wallowed away the afternoon in my graveyard of self-pity. The only thing that took my mind off my predicament for even a few minutes was when a mind-bendingly hot moderner showed up with his parents and little sister. He looked to be a little older than me, wearing board shorts, and all sandy-haired and tanned and muscular.

  I saw him, and I was like, This is it! This is the solution to all my problems! I will forget about Dan and date this random dude here, and no one at Essex will care, because he is not “the enemy.” He’s just a super-hot normal person. I will have a happy relationship without having to trade in everything and everyone who I care about. Fiona won’t be mad at me anymore, and neither will Tawny, and possibly Ezra will be jealous, which would be a bonus. Also I won’t care about anything so petty as War, because I will spend all my time catching waves with my new boyfriend. Or hanging ten. Or whatever it is that we surfers do all the time. We will lie on beaches and apply sunscreen to each other’s backs.