Past Perfect

by Leila Sales

  Some people started chanting my name—“Chel-sea! Chel-sea!”—and it was like that first War meeting of the summer all over again. Only this time, it wasn’t going to end with Dan kidnapping me, because I hadn’t heard from him since the evening he showed up at my house and told me I was a bad person. I had called and texted him countless times since, trying to explain, begging him to forgive me. But for all the response I got, I might as well have been apologizing to myself.

  So this meeting wasn’t going to end with Dan showing up. But it wasn’t going to end with me becoming General, either. That was one thing I could control.

  I stood up before the cheering got too out of hand and said, “Essex!”

  Everyone quieted down right away.

  “Essex, I appreciate your confidence in me. But I’m going to have to say no. No, I don’t want it.”

  Silence. Confused looks from my compatriots.

  “I don’t want to be always at War,” I explained. “That’s not me. And whatever I’ve done for our War efforts this summer, I promise you, most of it was unintentional. What I really want is to be at peace.”

  Still more confusion. If there’s one thing drama kids don’t really want, it’s to be at peace.

  I figured, Oh, what the hell, and continued, “But there is someone among our ranks who would rise to fill the role of General. Someone who is more dedicated to the cause of Essex than I am. Someone who will never let you down. I think we all know who that someone is.”

  Nope. Everyone was coming up blank.

  “Bryan Denton,” I said. “For next summer’s General, I’m endorsing Bryan Denton.”

  I sat down. There was a moment of silence, then a voice slowly started chanting, “Bry-an, Bry-an.” And it wasn’t even Bryan who started the chant. It was someone else. It spread through the rest of the Colonials. Soon everyone was cheering “Bry-an! Bry-an!”—myself loudest of all.

  “Bryan, do you accept this honor?” Tawny shouted over the roar of the crowd.

  “Yes! Yes!” He shot to his feet and started jumping all over the place, nearly landing on Patience. He kept pumping his fists in the air and waggling his head about.

  “You just couldn’t help yourself, could you.” Fiona sighed.

  “Nope.” I smiled, at peace. “I for sure could not.”

  “Bryan, come on up here!” Tawny hollered.

  But before he got the chance, Anne, apparently overcome, darted over to him, whirled him around, and planted a big wet one right on his mouth. He kissed her back valiantly, enthusiastically, his tongue flailing.

  All the other Colonials hooted and hollered. “All right, man!” Nat shouted.

  Fiona and I just stared at each other. “Anne has a thing for men with power?” Fiona suggested.

  “Anne has a thing for amphibians?” I guessed.

  Fiona shook her head. “We may never know.”

  Anne sat down on my other side as Bryan ascended to the rock of power. “Thank you so much for endorsing him,” she whispered to me, her eyes shining, cheeks flushed. “I just know he’s going to be great at it.”

  “I’m sure,” I agreed. And then—I mean, far be it from me to say anything derogatory about someone else’s love interest, since it’s not like I have such foolproof taste, but the words just slipped out. “You do know he’s like a toad, right?”

  “Yeah.” Anne shrugged, her adoring gaze still fixed on Bryan. “I don’t really mind that.”

  Bryan went on for a while, spittle flying out of his mouth, about all the brilliant historical plans he had for next year. I mostly tuned him out. I wasn’t sure if I would be back here next summer. And even if I worked at Essex again, I didn’t want anything to do with the War.

  Anyway, this year wasn’t over just yet. We still had one last week to get through.

  So instead of listening to Bryan, I looked around at all the other Colonials in this grove of trees with me. Fiona was resting her head on Nat’s shoulder. They had been almost inseparable since Maggie’s party, nearly three weeks ago. I had even heard Fiona call him her boyfriend, though she quickly explained that she was just using the word as shorthand.

  Ezra and Maggie were sitting together a ways behind me. I had to twist around to look at them properly, so I didn’t look for long. They had gotten back together the day after Maggie’s party. Maybe they would work out this time around. Maybe he would finally get it together, and she would get it together, and they would make each other as happy as Ezra and I had never been.

  I didn’t think Ezra had told Maggie that, during the twelve hours they were broken up, he had kissed me. I didn’t think anyone knew about our kiss in the woods that night except for me and him. And Fiona, obviously, because I told her.

  Seeing Ezra and Maggie together, like they were now, still made me feel a little jealous, a little hurt. I guessed that I would always feel that way. I didn’t want what they had. But I wanted something.

  There was less than a week left to summer, but that didn’t stop the moderners from visiting Essex. If anything, there were more of them, and they were more high-strung, anxious to squeeze in the last bit of their children’s summer enrichment before the school year began. I spent my third-to-last day of work running all over the graveyard, talking constantly, without a moment of downtime. I must have given two dozen families directions to the bathroom.

  All three of the felled headstones had been put back up last week, and they looked as good as new. Or as good as old, I guess. None of the moderners gave them a second glance. The only way I could tell that they had been knocked over at all was because I remembered it.

  Shortly before my lunch break, things calmed down a little. Moderners get hungry too. In fact, moderners get hungry way more than I do. It’s because they’re on vacation.

  “What a day,” Linda said to me. She sounded potentially depressed by the day we were having. But, then again, it was so hard to say.

  “Seriously,” I said, like I shared her emotion, whatever it was. “It’s been crazy. I must have talked about the dead baby hill fifteen times.”

  Linda replied with her version of a smile. “You know, there might not actually be hundreds of dead babies buried there.”

  “What?” I exclaimed. “You’re kidding me.”

  “At the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, there’s a hill that resembles this one, where we’re pretty certain the Colonials buried a large number of unbaptized infants. So we believe that this hill served the same purpose. But no one’s ever dug it up to check, and the Colonials had no reason to keep careful records of the deaths of such young children. So . . .” She put out her hands and shrugged.

  “But I’ve been telling people about those dead babies all summer long!” I felt betrayed.

  “Me too.” Linda looked unconcerned. “Hey, it’s a great story either way.”

  She was right: It was a great story, true or false. It said what we wanted it to say. Tourists liked to hear about it. I liked to hear about it too. So it shouldn’t have mattered to me that it might be a fiction, an accidental or purposeful misrecollection, yet somehow it did.

  In my life, I wanted just one thing that wasn’t a story. I didn’t want to be far from authentic. I wanted one thing that I knew was true.

  “I’m going on lunch now,” I announced, and I didn’t stick around to hear whether Linda said that was okay or not. I gathered up my petticoats and walked as fast as I could out of the graveyard, down the main road. I didn’t stop for moderners requesting directions, I didn’t stop by the milliner’s to chat with Fiona, and I didn’t stop at the silversmith’s to get my sandwich. I just kept walking straight out of Essex, and, as soon as I hit the other side of the main gates, I broke into a run.

  I ran across the street as fast as my Colonial shoes would let me. I ran up the main drive to Reenactmentland, I kept running . . . until I saw the ticket booth.

  I had forgotten that it cost money to get into Reenactmentland. And honestly I would have paid the entry fe
e. I would have forked over my entire salary right then and there, just to get inside, to find Dan before the summer was over, before he went back to his modern world and disappeared from mine forever.

  But Colonial women aren’t allowed to carry money on them, because they are the property of their fathers or spouses, and property isn’t allowed to own property.

  I didn’t have the time to return to Essex, go to the break room above the silversmith’s, get my wallet, talk to my parents . . . More than not having the time, I just couldn’t wait. I needed to do this now.

  So I straightened my mobcap, dropped my petticoats, and strode slowly, sedately, straight past the ticket booth.

  To anyone who knows anything, Colonial clothing has no resemblance to Civil War–era clothing. This would be like if someone walked into a twenty-first-century mall wearing a dress from 1925. Everyone would notice.

  But apparently, to the ticket sellers at Reenactmentland, historical dress looks like historical dress, because they didn’t bat an eye at me. I walked straight through like I belonged there.

  Someone should tell the rest of the Colonials that sneaking into Reenactmentland didn’t require as much sneakiness as we’d always thought. Someone should absolutely tell them, but it wasn’t going to be me. After today, I was getting out of the War business once and for all.

  Reenactmentland was quieter than when I’d been there earlier in the summer, quieter than Essex was today. The scarcity of moderners was no doubt due to the Barnes Prize scandal. We had won the War this year, anyone could see it. Our victory was thanks to the Civil Warriors who had decided to cheat in the first place, and thanks to me.

  But unlike Ezra, I didn’t care about winning.

  This time, I knew where I was going. Purposefully, calmly, I walked to the big field filled with tents. The tent selling gentlemen’s clothes, the tent selling weapons, the tent selling books. The tent where Dan and his family worked. I walked to the middle of the field, and then I stopped.

  I waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

  The short girl, the Civil War General, came out of a tent and marched up to me. “What are you doing here?” she hissed, getting up in my face.

  “I came to apologize.”

  She took a step back, seeming thrown by my answer. “This is War,” she said, looking at me like she couldn’t tell if I was kidding or stupid or what. “You don’t apologize in War.”

  “Maybe you don’t, but I do. I am.”

  She didn’t reply for a moment, just sized me up, and I could tell she was thinking it over, getting ready to say, “Okay, we forgive you. Okay, we welcome you.”

  What she actually said was, “I’m going to give you to the count of ten to get the hell out of Reenactmentland. Start running.”

  Sometimes what I think is going on in people’s heads is not, in fact, what is actually going on in people’s heads.

  “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

  I didn’t move. I didn’t know what would happen when she reached ten, but whatever it was, I would take it.

  Here is what happened when she got to ten: In the absolute farbiest move I have ever seen in all my years of reenacting, she pulled a cell phone out of her shirt and typed in a text message.

  I opened my mouth to say So what wireless carrier did the Confederate Army use? before reminding myself that I was supposed to be here on a peace mission.

  Moments after she sent the text message, other Civil Warriors started emerging from their tents. They walked straight over to us, forming a tight huddle around me, so no one could see in, and I couldn’t get out.

  “What is she doing here?”

  “Who let her in?”

  “The better question,” said their General, “is, what are we going to do with her now that she’s here?”

  They closed in tighter around me. Someone behind me shoved my back, hard. I went falling forward into another Civil Warrior’s hands. He threw me to the ground, and the back of my skull knocked into someone’s knee. I tried to stand up, but they immediately shoved me back down.

  The name-calling started.

  “Farb,” one of them hissed.

  “Cheater.”

  “Liar.”

  “Bitch.”

  Someone spat on me, and I realized that, just because there were moderners and adults around somewhere, that didn’t mean this couldn’t get out of control. That didn’t mean I couldn’t get seriously hurt. These Civil Warriors weren’t playing. They were angry.

  “What the hell is going on here?” a familiar voice demanded.

  I looked up to see Dan shoving his way through the crowd. The Civil Warriors stopped and just watched him, waiting to see what he would do.

  “Hey,” I said, and tried to smile, but I hurt all over.

  He stared at me in silence for a moment, then around the circle at his friends, like he didn’t know where to begin.

  It occurred to me then that he could just walk away. He could tell them, “Do what you want with her, I don’t care,” and walk away.

  If he did that, then it would be really, truly over. If he left me here, then I would know for sure that we were never going to be together. And I would get over him, I knew—Fiona would make up another arbitrary time constraint for me, and I would erase the few precious text messages he had sent me, and I would work really hard, and I would get over him. I’d done it before, and I could do it again. If he walked away.

  He looked at the other Civil Warriors, and he ordered, “Get your hands off of her.”

  Everyone backed up slightly, giving me a little room to breathe.

  “Dan, all of this is her fault,” the General said.

  “Yeah, I’m aware of that,” he snapped.

  “So we thought you’d want us to . . .” One of the guys gestured toward me.

  “Then you thought wrong,” Dan said.

  “Christ, could you be a bigger pussy?” another guy asked him. “Okay, so you think she’s hot. So what, man? She’s still a backstabbing bitch, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I’d noticed,” Dan replied, killing any hope I might have had that he rescued me because he still liked me. He went on, “Haven’t enough people already gotten hurt in this War? How many more people have to suffer before you can all be happy?

  “And you.” He turned his gaze on me. “What are you doing here, Elizabeth Connelly? Didn’t you even consider that if you came over here in the middle of the day, sashaying around in your Colonial dress, that you’d be in danger? I guess you just never have any clue what impact your actions might have, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out.”

  What hurt me most wasn’t his tone or his criticism. It was that he called me by my Colonial name. Like he’d stopped caring who I really was. It was only our roles that mattered.

  “Well?” he said, staring at me.

  “Well?” I repeated blankly.

  “Well, what the hell was going through your mind?”

  “Oh. I thought that was a rhetorical question.”

  Dan looked furious. “No, when I ask you what you’re thinking, it’s because I want to know what you’re thinking.”

  And with that sentence, I loved him. I sat on the ground, bruised and muddy and spat-upon, and I just loved him. In a weird way, that was one of the nicest things that anyone had ever said to me.

  “Yes,” I said, starting to smile. “I knew this was going to happen.”

  “But you came over here anyway,” Dan said.

  “Yes. I wanted this to happen.”

  “Freak,” one of the Civil Warriors coughed loudly. Neither Dan nor I glanced at him.

  “I wanted this to happen because I wanted to try to make things even between us,” I said. “I’m sorry, Dan. I needed to tell you that before the summer ended. I betrayed your trust and damaged your whole family. I used you to try to win back people who weren’t worth winning. I was trying to win an unwinnable war. I’m sorry. And I wanted to give you a chance to hurt me as
much as I hurt you.”

  “Stop it.” Dan exhaled a long sigh. “Just stop. I don’t want to hurt you as much as you hurt me.”

  “Now that,” commented the Civil War General, “is actually real sweet. Why weren’t you that sweet to me when we were together, Dan?”

  “You guys used to go out?” I blurted out, looking up at her.

  “When we were twelve,” Dan said.

  “I broke his heart,” the General added smugly.

  A voice came from behind her. “Excuse me! Yoo-hoo! Civil War people!”

  The circle around me opened up to reveal a family of moderners. A mom, a dad, and four scowling little blond boys in matching cowboy hats.

  “Can we get a photo with all of you?” the mother asked. “Y’all look so fabulous in your costumes!”

  “Of course,” we chorused. Even me. If there’s one rule that every reenactor knows, it’s that you always say yes to a photograph, War or no War, heartbreak or no heartbreak.

  The modern woman stared down at me. “You okay there, hon?” she asked.

  “Yes,” all the Civil Warriors and I said together.

  “I fell,” I explained, wincing as I stood up and tried to brush some dirt off my gown.

  “She fell,” the Civil War General agreed.

  “Well, hop to. It’s photo time!”

  The modern woman proceeded to arrange everyone exactly how she wanted us. “Caleb, honey, you kneel here, in front of this lady. That’s right. Now, you two, pretend like you’re carrying that basket. Ooh, I love that!”

  “Do you actually want me in this photo?” I asked the moderner. For one thing, I’d just been beat up, and I looked it. For another, I came from an entirely different century.

  She looked puzzled and said, “Of course. Get on in there! Say cheese!”

  I wound up placed next to Dan. “I assume this is what it’s like to work with Ansel Adams,” I muttered. The corner of his mouth twitched in what might have been a smile.