Past Perfect (23 page)

“All’s fair in love and war,” I reminded him, aiming for Tawny’s tone. But my voice came out sounding just like me.

“Oh, yeah? And which is this?” he asked. “Love or war?” I opened my mouth to answer, but he was already turning away in disgust, walking down the stairs, down the driveway, leaving me.

“Who was that?”

I turned to see my mother standing in the doorway behind me. Her expression was calm; she hadn’t heard anything.

233

LEILA SALES

“Just my . . . nobody.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, trying to press back tears.

“Just your nobody?” Mom teased.

I leaned against the front door frame. “He was my friend.

He’s nobody now.”

“You could have invited him in for tea,” Mom said gently.

“I made a whole pot of it.”

“Thanks, but . . .” My whole body felt weary. My eyes. My heart. Even my hair. “He doesn’t like tea,” I told her.

“Hey, Chelsea, we’re going to Belmont’s! Want to come with us?” I looked up from Bridget Burroughs’ headstone (“A true Christian, a dutiful and loving Wife”) to see all four milliner girls in my graveyard. Three out of the four were smiling at me like we were the best friends in the world. But the one who actually
was
my best friend in the world was gazing pointedly into the distance.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I have some work to take care of around here . . .”

“
What
work?” Anne asked, which was a fair question, since we were clearly alone in the graveyard.

“Come on.” Patience tugged at my arm. “Have a little fun, Chels.”

I wanted to ask Patience why she assumed that going anywhere with her would be fun, but instead I kept quiet and went along. You can’t beat Belmont’s saltwater taffy.

234

PAST PERFECT

From the way the milliner girls were falling all over themselves to be seen with me, you would have never known that they weren’t speaking to me four days ago. Now that I was a War hero instead of a traitor, it was like the traitor part had never happened.

Fiona, though, was a different story. Why couldn’t my closest friend forgive me when everyone else at Essex had?

As we walked up to Belmont’s, Maggie linked arms with me and asked, “Chelsea, will you come to my party on Saturday?” Maggie and I had worked together at Essex for three summers now, and this was the first time she’d shown any interest in seeing me outside of the Colonial times. I guess she preferred me as the Lieutenant who would stop at nothing to take down the Civil War than as Ezra’s ex-girlfriend.

“Um,” I replied, “maybe? I think I can come?” Of course I could come. It wasn’t like I had any hot dates this weekend.

“I probably can’t make it,” Fiona said—to Maggie, not to me. “It turns out I have plans that night.” I’d had enough. I stopped on the bottom stair to Belmont’s.

“What is going on here, Fiona?”

She widened her eyes. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit. This is not ‘nothing.’ You’re volunteering to skip a party just because I might show up. Okay, yes, I kissed a Civil Warrior. I did, it’s true. But then I completely destroyed him. I humiliated him and his family and I reduced
235

LEILA SALES

Reenactmentland to a total mess that no one respects anymore. Last night he told me that I am a bad person with an ugly heart. Is that good enough for you? What else do you want me to do to atone for kissing him? What do you need me to do to make this up to you, Fiona?” Patience, Maggie, and Anne stood on Belmont’s porch, watching with wide eyes. I could almost feel them holding their breaths as they filed away my every word for inclusion in later text messages, e-mails, and other recountings of this moment.

Fiona shook her head. “I don’t want you to do anything to atone for kissing him,” she said, her voice sad.

“Then what do you
want
from me?” She glanced up at the milliner girls. But they had front-row seats to the best show in town; they weren’t going to budge.

Fiona sighed. “We’ll catch up to you guys later.” And, to what I’m sure was their great disappointment, she took my arm and led me away from Belmont’s and toward the Palace Green, where we could talk in private.

“I’m not mad at you for kissing a Civil Warrior,” she said straight off, as soon as we’d sat down in the grass. “You idiot.

You think I give a shit whether the guy you’re with wears a white wig or not? I barely even know the difference between the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. Hello, do you know me at all?”

“But,” I said, “you joined the Essex cheerleaders and everything—”

236

PAST PERFECT

“Because I like choreographed
dances
. The War itself is so . . .” She twirled her hands around, searching for the right word to express how vastly unimportant she found the War. “
Whatever
,” she concluded.

“So if you’re not mad at me for sleeping with the enemy, then
why
are you mad at me?” I asked.

“Chelsea!” Fiona shrieked. “You
slept
with him? You said that you only kissed him!”

I sighed. “I did only kiss him. ‘Sleeping with the enemy’ is an expression. I didn’t
literally
sleep with the enemy.”

“Oh. Well that’s reassuring, I guess. But I’m still mad at you.”

I threw back my head and squinted up at the bright midday sun. I was so sick of living in this topsy-turvy world where the milliner girls couldn’t wait to hang out with me, while Fiona and Dan—the people I actually
liked
—hated me. “Why?” I asked.

“
Because.
You’re supposed to be my best friend, yet somehow you couldn’t even trust me enough to tell me that you were dating someone. How do you think I felt hearing this news from
Anne
, of all people?” Now that Fiona pointed it out, I remembered that she’d started acting distant before the milliner girls saw Dan and I together outside of Reenactmentland. Fiona had been sharp with me ever since I showed up to the War Council with an inexplicable bruise on my neck. But—

237

LEILA SALES

“You didn’t
want
me to date him. Remember, I told you about him on the night I was kidnapped. I said that I had met a cute boy, and you said that it didn’t matter, because he was a Civil Warrior, so it would make me a
traitor
. You said it would never work out.”

“To be fair,” Fiona replied, tucking her legs under her, “I turned out to be right. He’s a Civil Warrior, and it
didn’t
work out.” I didn’t even crack a smile.

“Look, it doesn’t matter whether I wanted you to date him or not. The point is that I want to
know
. It’s a big deal in your life, so I want to be included.”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “I told you, he didn’t matter to me. He’s cute, we hooked up a couple times, but really I was just using him. He means nothing more to me than any one of your random guys meant to you.” I stared down at the patch of clover next to me.

“See, this is what I’m talking about. I’m not going to forgive you until you start telling me the truth once in a while.”

“What makes you think this isn’t the truth?” I asked.

“Because I know you better than that, and that is not your style.” Fiona looked straight at me. “You have turned down every single guy for the past three and a half months, all because they’re not Ezra Gorman. So if you wanted this guy—who’s
definitely
not Ezra Gorman—then there must be something special about him. What’s his name, by the way?

No one seems to care what his name was.”
238

PAST PERFECT

“Dan,” I answered.

“Do you even listen to yourself?” Fiona asked. “Do you even hear the way you just said his name? And you expect me to believe that
you don’t care about him
?” She waited, her eyebrows raised.

“Okay,” I said finally. “Okay, yes. I liked him.” I closed my eyes briefly.

“Tell me why,” she pressed on.

I paused. “Because he’s smart and funny and really cute.

And caring and ambitious and a good listener. The more I found out about him, the more I liked. And . . . I felt like he
understood
me. I felt like I understood him. Just spending time with him made me feel . . . happy.”

“Wow.” Fiona shook her head. “That sounds serious.” I busied myself picking clovers. “I don’t know. Maybe it could have been.”

“So why couldn’t you tell me any of that in the first place? Did you actually think that I was going to run off and tell Tawny?

Were you honestly scared that I was going to be mad at you?”

“Yes! I knew I wasn’t allowed. And I thought that if I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing, then it would be . . . as if I wasn’t doing it.”

“Firstly,” Fiona said, “I
never
would have ratted you out to Tawny. I care about you more than I care about the War, or about pretty much anything else. Okay? Can you
get
that, Chelsea? Can you remember that?”

239

LEILA SALES

“Yes.” I looked down at the clover collection on my skirt.

“Secondly, let’s get real: you
weren’t
actually scared that I was going to tell everyone about you dating a Civil Warrior.

What
actually
scared you was getting over Ezra.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “All I have wanted for months is to get over Ezra. You know that.”

“No. All you have wanted for months is for Ezra to come back to you. That’s a completely different thing. You don’t want the pain of missing him, sure. But you want to get rid of that pain by getting him back, not by moving on. You’ve been keeping yourself as this perfect little museum of what you were, so that it will be easy for him to come back to exactly what he left behind. And you’re scared to admit that you’re into this new guy because then you’d really have to deal with life after Ezra.”

I felt short of breath, like I’d been punched in the chest.

Fiona had never been this harsh with me. But, then, Fiona had never been this mad at me. “I know it seems so silly to you,” I said, my voice small and dull, “how much trouble I’ve had getting past Ezra. I know it’s silly. But I loved him. It just destroyed me that he used to love me back, until all of a sudden he didn’t.

“And I know this doesn’t make sense to you, because you’ve never felt that way about someone. For you it’s never been about one boy like this, because for you there has always been some other boy. But for me, there was no one other than
240

PAST PERFECT

Ezra. Except I felt like maybe . . . there could be Dan. Until I completely killed that one.” I focused on weaving together the clovers into a chain.

“You’re wrong,” Fiona said. “For starters, I
have
felt that way about someone.”

My fingernail slipped, ruining a clover stem. “Seriously?

Who? And how am I getting blamed for keeping secrets from you, when you’ve never told me that you’re apparently
in love
with someone?”

Fiona made a face. “I wouldn’t say
in love
.”

“Who is it, Fi?”

She blushed. I had never seen Fiona blush when telling me about any boy before. “Nat,” she said.

“Well, of course
Nat
. That’s old news. That news is literally years old.”

Fiona tossed her hair, still blushing. “I just didn’t think I actually, you know, cared about him.”

“You could have asked me. I would have told you that you actually cared about him.” In my excitement, I sat up onto my knees, knocking a bunch of my clovers to the ground.

“And he obviously loves you too, so this is perfect. God, I have been waiting for this all summer. I have been waiting for this since
freshman year
.”

“I don’t know,” Fiona said.

“What do you mean you don’t
know
?”

“It just seems easier,” she said, “
not
to really care about
241

LEILA SALES

them. If your life is anything to go by, it seems to me like it gets really complicated once you start to care. No offense.”

“But if you don’t care, then what’s the point?”

“Um, it’s fun?” Fiona laughed.

“Seriously, even if it winds up with your heart getting shattered . . . or even if it winds up with you breaking someone
else’s
heart . . . it’s still worth it, Fi. To actually care about someone.”

“Do you really believe that?”

I nodded.

“Huh.” She leaned back on her hands and considered me for a moment. “I’m sorry that things with Dan didn’t work out,” she said finally.

A “thank you” caught in my throat. I hadn’t thought about it before, but
no one
had said they were sorry that me and Dan didn’t work out. Not anyone at Essex, of course—because they
weren’t
sorry—but not Dan, either. Not even me.

“I feel really bad,” I confided in a whisper, as if someone might overhear. “I feel horrible about what I did to him.”

“If it makes it any better, the Civil Warriors did this to themselves. If it hadn’t been you to figure out that they falsified those documents, it would have been someone else.

They dug their own grave.”

“‘The truth will always out,’” I quoted the TV newscaster, hugging my knees to my chest.

“Anyway, without knowing him at all, except that he’s the
242

PAST PERFECT

enemy, he sounds like a good guy. Not a complete asshole like Ezra.”

“Ezra was not a complete asshole,” I said.

“Are you
kidding
me?” Fiona gave a dramatic sigh. “Still?”

“Yes, he broke up with me, and that was kind of an asshole move . . . But he had his reasons. Everything else about Ezra was perfect. The only imperfect thing about him was that he didn’t want to be my boyfriend.”

“Oh my God, Chelsea, that is delusional. You are filled with delusions.”

“You just hate him on my behalf because he broke my heart,” I said. “Which is sweet of you, but you’re biased. You don’t know what it was really like, because he wasn’t
your
boyfriend.”

“I do know what it was really like,” she replied, “because I was the one who spent hours every single night rubbing your back while you cried.”