Past Perfect (21 page)

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 behind 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.”
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“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.

So for a few minutes I followed him and his family around, their personal Colonial stalker. I noticed Linda approaching them, but I shot her this very intense look of,
Back off, I’ve got
this.
She turned and walked down another row.

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LEILA SALES

When I heard the little sister exclaim, “Look, it’s George Washington’s grave,” I saw my opening.

I swooped in and announced, “Actually, President Washington is buried at his home of Mount Vernon. But a few of his relatives are from Essex and are buried here, so that’s why there’s this big Washington monument. It’s mostly to attract attention!”

The family stared at me blankly for a moment, and it occurred to me that I had been so nervous about talking to my boyfriend-to-be that I had swallowed half of my words.

Then he said to his sister, “See, Mel, I
told
you Washington wasn’t really buried here.”

Ah
, I thought.
And he is also good with children.

The family started to walk away, so I launched into another story. “In the 1830s, they discussed moving President Washington’s remains from Mount Vernon to a crypt in the Capitol. But already there were rumblings of secession. Virginians worried that if the South seceded from the Union, then Washington would be stuck buried in a foreign country. So they kept him at Mount Vernon. And they threw the key to his vault into the Potomac River, so that his body could never be moved.”

“That’s cool,” the guy said. “I didn’t know that.” He smiled, his teeth pearly white.

“Would you mind taking a photo with our kids?” the father asked me.

“I would be delighted,” I replied with great sincerity.

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The little sister put her arm around me, and the presumable love of my life put his arm around my other side. This was probably the most fulfilling physical contact I was ever going to have with a person so gorgeous. Unless Fiona started being my friend again, and then became a movie star, and then invited me to hang out with her and her movie-star buddies, and then one of them somehow accidentally kissed me.

But for that to happen, I’d have to start with Fiona being my friend again.

The father snapped the photo, and his kids took their arms off me.

“Be sure to send me a copy of that one!” I said.

The whole family chuckled and moved on.

“I wasn’t kidding,” I mumbled.

This is one of the saddest things about my job. If he could see more of my body than the space between my forehead and my shoulders, then maybe he would be interested in me.

Probably not, but at least he would know that I was a genre of person whom he
could
be interested in. I was a girl, and I was sixteen. But in costume, I was like a walking, talking Disney character. I could recite as many charming stories about George Washington as I could find in the library or invent myself, but still he would never see me as an eligible human being.

So was it any wonder that I had a fallen for Dan, a fellow interpreter? I mean, was it really that big a surprise?

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LEILA SALES

“So,” Linda sidled up beside me, and asked in her usual deadpan voice, “did you get his number?” Sometimes I feel like I am the comic relief in everyone’s life but my own.

At dinner that night, even my parents noticed that something was wrong.

Slight overstatement. One parent noticed that something was wrong. The other parent was busy sharing the story of the time when he won an argument with the Thomas Jefferson interpreter about what sort of ink the Founding Fathers used to sign the Declaration of Independence.

“I will never let Mike live this one down.” My father chuckled. “The look on his face was priceless. Priceless!”

“Wasn’t Fiona supposed to be joining us for dinner tonight?” my mother asked me. “I didn’t put peppers in the salad, just for her.”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. Even shrugging felt like too much effort. Speaking felt like too much effort. Thinking about Fiona felt impossible. “I guess something came up.”

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked.

If I really wanted to tell them everything that was wrong, I wouldn’t even know where to start. With all my friends turning on me? With meeting Dan? With Ezra’s breaking up with me?

With joining the War? With Colonial America? How far back do I have to trace something before I can start to understand it?

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“The headstones,” I answered. “My favorite headstone in the graveyard got knocked over. I feel really sad about it.” Saying that I had a favorite headstone might have sounded weird to anyone who’s not my parents, but surprisingly, they knew exactly which one I meant.

“The Elisabeth Connelly stone.” Dad nodded. “Nice piece of slate.”

“You know the Elisabeth Connelly stone?” Even granting that my father knows everything, this was remarkable. It was one grave in a yard with hundreds of marked graves, and there was nothing special about it. Even its decoration, a skull with wings, was the same as so many others. And my father never spent much time in the graveyard. He was a silversmith. He hung out at the silversmith’s workshop.

“That’s always been your favorite grave,” he said.

“It’s because of that grave that your name is Elizabeth Connelly in the first place,” Mom said. “You don’t remember?”

“
I
remember,” Dad said, because obviously every question is actually directed at him. “When we first started working at Essex, what was it, ten years ago? You were so shy, you just wanted to be alone. You spent most of your time climbing the trees in the graveyard and eavesdropping on people’s conversations, as I recall. For some reason you were drawn to that particular grave. I don’t know what it was, but you insisted that we call you Elizabeth Connelly.”

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LEILA SALES

“You wouldn’t even answer to ‘Chelsea’ for a while,” Mom added.

“We compromised that you would be called Elizabeth at Essex, but Chelsea at home.”

“That’s how we all wound up with the last name Connelly.” Mom drained her glass of water. “I’d been advocating for Gutenberg, but you were wedded to Connelly. You could be so stubborn when you were younger.”

“Gutenberg.”
Dad rolled his eyes to show how he’d felt about
that
idea.

“Is this true?” I asked, setting down my fork.

“Of course it is,” Dad said. “How did you think you wound up with that name?”

“Well . . . I knew I picked it myself, but I didn’t remember that it was
because
of that gravestone. I don’t remember hanging out much in the graveyard when I was little.”

“Well, that’s no surprise. It was years ago.” Mom started clearing dishes.

“You don’t remember everything,” Dad said, then followed her into the kitchen to wash dishes.

I sat alone at the table for a few minutes longer, trying to picture myself as a little girl, falling for a long-dead name and the stories it suggested. Before I knew Fiona or Tawny or anything about boys or wars or broken hearts.

That night, I stayed up hours too late, just leafing through my Ezra file. It was more like an addiction than
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because I really wanted to. It reminded me of happier times, but it didn’t actually make me feel any happier.

The next week passed in silence. My only conversations were with moderners, who mostly wanted to talk about where the nearest bathroom was. And with my dad, but that’s a one-sided conversation, and it’s not my side. I was starved for conversation, but all the Essex kids had cut me out entirely. Other than Bryan, they didn’t even bother to tell me that I was a traitor or a farb-lover. They simply acted like I wasn’t there.

The War seemed to continue as usual. I noticed miniature Confederate flags stuck under windshield wipers in the cars in Essex’s parking lot, which seemed like a classic, if unre-markable, attack. I didn’t know if Tawny had yet exacted revenge for her injury. I assumed not, because I hadn’t heard anything about it. But since everyone was refusing to speak to me, how would I have heard?

Here is who actually wanted to talk to me: Dan.

He called me in the middle of the week, after work, while I was miserably watching TV in my living room. “How’s it going?” he asked.

“Rotten,” I replied, not taking my eyes off the flickering of the TV screen.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I feel like this is my fault.”

“It’s probably my fault. I think I started kissing you first.”
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LEILA SALES

“Really? I thought I started kissing you first. Either way, is there anything I can do?”

I snorted. “Like what? What exactly could you do?” He was silent for a moment. “I guess telling the other Colonials that you didn’t do anything wrong wouldn’t help you.”

“Yeah, I don’t think they would to listen to you.”

“Want me to come over to your place tonight? Would that make you feel better?” His voice was low and suggestive.

I changed the television channel and answered, “I’m pretty busy tonight. Maybe this weekend or something. I’ll call you.” And we hung up.

It should have been easier for me to be with Dan, now that everyone knew. The worst had already happened, so now I might as well live it up and tongue-kiss him all over town.

Except that wasn’t what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was avoid him completely and pretend like none of this had ever happened. Like maybe if I pretended hard enough, then things would go back to the way they used to be. I could get back Fiona and Essex and everything that really mattered.

Dan was attentive and smart and good-hearted and good-looking—okay, not like my surfer soul connection, but still hot in his own right. He was all of that, but that didn’t make up for losing my entire world. He couldn’t even come close.

After many days, I got sick of moping alone at home. I felt that it would be more poignant to mope out in the
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open, where I could peer through restaurant windows and see groups of friends, couples, connections that didn’t include me.

I was moping my way past the bank when I saw a guy turn around from the ATM. Ezra. He stood a couple feet away, so it would have been hard for me to pretend that I didn’t notice him. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what I was prepared to pretend, until he said, “Chelsea! Hi!” like I wasn’t Public Enemy Number One.

I stopped walking. “Hi, yourself.” I wished I had worn something a little more appropriate for a Friday night ex-boyfriend run-in. Instead, the look I had going was for ease of moping, which meant old gym sneakers (so I could walk away my blues without getting blisters) and no makeup (so I could burst into tears without mascara dripping down my cheeks.) Ezra always catches me off guard.

“What are you up to?” he asked. He, of course, was looking great in worn-in jeans and an Essex High soccer T-shirt which tastefully proclaimed, “We’ll kick your balls.” I shrugged. I didn’t know why Ezra was talking to me like I was a human being. No one else was.

“Can I take you out for a scoop of ice cream?” he asked.

The thought of ice cream without Fiona turned my stomach. “No, thanks. I’ve kind of lost my taste for that,” I said.

“Wow. That doesn’t sound like the Chelsea Glaser I knew.

I guess you really
have
changed.”
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LEILA SALES

I stared at him and tried to figure out whether he meant that I had changed over the past week, or that I had changed since we were together. I
felt
like I was still the same girl who he broke up with, three and a half months ago now.