Past Perfect

  “Yeah, say that. I mean, they should be dedicating every performance to you,” I suggested. “They should light a candle onstage in your honor every night.”

  “They should have a giant cardboard cutout of me sitting in the van with them.”

  “They should change all the lyrics of their songs so they’re just singing ‘Dan Malkin, Dan Malkin’ over and over.”

  “Good plan, that doesn’t make me sound petty at all.”

  “I can’t help you there. Non-pettiness isn’t really something that I strive for,” I said.

  “My friends at the Civil War don’t . . . get it.” Dan clasped his hands behind his head. “They have reenacting, they have the War, and that’s enough for them. They don’t want anything more. And I like reenacting fine, but I’ve done reenacting, and now I want to do the music thing. I want to see if I can make it. I’m so close to making something happen in my life, but then I never do.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m with you on that. I have no idea how to make a change in your life.”

  “Well, I think sometimes you just text a girl, and you see if she’ll let you come over.”

  We locked eyes for a second as I landed across from him—then I bounced back to my feet, and he looked away.

  “Sometimes I feel like I understand my dad.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “I never feel like I understand my dad. What’s that like?”

  “Creepy!” We both laughed. “Okay, to be honest, I don’t understand why someone would marry the wrong girl a couple months after graduating from high school, knock her up three times in rapid succession, and then have some messed-up early-onset midlife crisis and take off in a trailer at the age of thirty-seven. He has shitty priorities and he’s a cheater—he cheated on my mom, and he cheated on the application for the Barnes Prize, and he’ll cheat on whatever he does next. I’m not saying any of that makes sense to me. But I understand how he could look at his life and want to make it into something more, something that mattered. Because that’s what I do every day.”

  “It makes me sad that you can’t share that with your friends,” I said. “Though I’m not surprised, since the Civil War sucks in every regard.”

  “The Civil War is the best,” Dan replied, as if automatically. “It’s just that everyone there has known me for years, and they’ve known me in this particular context, so that’s the context they expect me to stay in. But I knew you would get it. I knew that from the first time I saw you.”

  “Tied up like a trussed pig and screaming my head off? Yeah, I’m sure that did make me seem like the empathetic type.”

  “Less empathetic, more just plain pathetic.”

  “It’s truly amazing how your wordplay never grows old for me,” I said.

  “I meant last summer, at the silversmith’s,” he said.

  “I honestly don’t remember you there at all.”

  “Right, because I was spying. I kept a low profile.”

  “You’re tall, though. You’d think that would stand out in my mind. Maybe you were so tall that I couldn’t even see your face, and that’s why I didn’t know you were there.”

  “Chelsea, I’m, like, maybe six feet.”

  “A giant,” I said. “A freak of nature. A redwood tree.”

  “I’m trying not to be offended that you didn’t notice me. But I noticed you. I saw you reenacting, and it just . . . you wowed me.”

  No one had ever said anything like that to me before. Not even Ezra during our glory days, when he passed me notes and sent me flowers and asked me every day if I wanted to hang out every night. Not even when we were perfect together did he ever say that I wowed him.

  “Thank you.” I hoped the darkness hid my blush.

  “Seriously, you’re an incredibly natural historical interpreter. And what can I say: Talent is a turn-on.”

  The phrase turn-on made me feel shivery inside, so I acted like he hadn’t said it. “I should be natural at it. I’ve been doing it for long enough.”

  “And I’ve done it for long enough to know that you’re better at it than other people.”

  I flopped down onto my stomach, next to him. “I guess I just don’t look at it as history. So it’s easier for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I’d never explained this to anyone before. I pressed my face to the trampoline, staring at the grass underneath, as I tried to figure out how to put this into words. “Okay,” I said at last. “I don’t know if you do this at Reenactmentland, but at Essex, we always talk about history in present tense. ‘This is the hill where we bury the dead babies,’ or, ‘That’s where the cabinetmaker lives.’”

  “Of course.”

  “But we do this with every moment in history, not just 1774. ‘That’s where two signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried’—even though there was no Declaration of Independence until 1776, and even though they weren’t buried until 1807 and 1815, respectively.”

  “We do that too, I guess. I hadn’t noticed, but we do.”

  This was the hard part to explain. “So it seems like all of history is concurrent. It’s not a linear series of events. It’s all happening simultaneously. There is one moment, and that moment is now, and we are always present in it. So I’m not reenacting history so much as just living every time at once.” I looked up at him. “Does that make any sense?”

  “Yeah, I get it.” Dan nodded his head a few times. “That’s brilliant. I don’t know if it’s true. But it sounds true.”

  “I don’t know if it’s true, either. But I believe it.”

  “So that’s why your friend says you have problems moving on?” he asked.

  “Well, she doesn’t know about my whole theory, but yeah. How am I supposed to move beyond the past when it is still happening, when it is always, endlessly happening?”

  “You ask tricky questions, Chelsea Glaser. I think the answer is that you have to make something else happen.”

  Dan got to his feet, so I started to stand too, but he said, “Just lie down while I jump. That’s what I was doing while you were jumping earlier. It feels good.”

  So I did. I lay on my back and watched the stars in between the crisscrossing tree branches overhead. I let my body go limp, and every time Dan jumped, I sank into the trampoline, and every time he landed, my body lifted into the air.

  He screwed up the rhythm of the jumping so that he double-bounced us, both of our bodies flying into the air at the same time, twice as high. I shrieked, then clapped a hand over my mouth so my parents wouldn’t hear. We landed simultaneously, him half on me.

  “Ow,” I grumbled. “You’re not really a natural gymnast, are you?”

  He didn’t reply. He shifted his weight so he was lying completely on top of me, pressing me into the trampoline. I could feel his heartbeat stuttering against my own.

  “Oh,” I whispered.

  “Oh,” he replied, staring into my eyes, his head only inches from my head, his mouth so close to my mouth.

  “Dan . . .” I wrapped my arms around him, pulling him closer to me. “Look. I know we’re not actually kissing.”

  “Right.”

  “Because that would be a really bad idea.”

  “Really bad,” he echoed.

  “But we’re still . . . This is still . . . I mean, it’s not technically kissing, but we’d still get in trouble for it. If anyone found out.”

  “I see what you mean,” Dan agreed, touching his forehead to mine, his lips even closer. I could almost feel them brushing against my own as he murmured, “You mean, since we’ll get in trouble either way, then we might as well do something really wrong.”

  That was the opposite of what I meant, but as I opened my mouth to explain, he closed the space between us and kissed me. It was a long, purposeful kiss, one of his hands tangled in my hair, the other holding on to my hip, our legs entwined, as we breathed in and out of each other. The trampoline swayed underneath us, and my hands slid up and down his back as if on t
heir own accord. It might have lasted a minute, or it might have lasted forever. I couldn’t tell and wasn’t curious. I felt like all of time was happening in one moment, and that moment was now.

  Ever since Ezra had broken up with me, I’d worried that maybe I had forgotten how to kiss entirely. Or maybe I didn’t know how to kiss any boy who wasn’t Ezra. But when I stopped thinking about it, it turned out that my body remembered. Apparently kissing is like riding a bike.

  Dan pulled away just a little bit. “Wow,” he said, and inhaled a quick, ragged breath. “I’ve spent a lot of time imagining doing that.”

  “And how was it compared to what you’d imagined?”

  “It was almost as good.”

  “Almost?” I gave his shoulder a small shove.

  He grinned. “I have a really well-developed imagination.”

  He started nibbling at my neck, and if I weren’t already flat on my back, I would have had to lie down, that’s how dizzy it made me. I closed my eyes and kept my chin up, so he could have maximum neck access. Then, because I am very successful at romantic situations, I said this:

  “What did you mean when you said your dad cheated at the Barnes Prize?”

  My words came out sounding dreamy and spaced-out. Dan bit down on the skin above my collarbone, and the question swam out of my mind.

  “I don’t know,” Dan said a minute later, his lips tickling my neck as he spoke. “I just think he did. I think that’s why he got fired.” His voice, too, had the unfocused quality of someone who’s thinking mostly about making out, and not so much about living history.

  Dan propped himself up on his elbows to look me in the eye. His expression reminded me of Nat watching Fiona in the Essex Cheerleaders. Like nothing could distract him from me. I held on to the back of his head with both my hands. Now that we were here, now that we were touching, I didn’t want to stop touching him. I didn’t want any part of my body not touching his.

  “I’m glad you came over tonight,” I said.

  He touched his nose to mine. “Me too.”

  “Though you did pass up a golden opportunity to set fire to our car or assault my parents or something.”

  “You’re right, that would have been smarter of me. But”—he tightened his arms around me—“then I wouldn’t have gotten to kiss you.” Which he started to do again, his hands on my back, then on my stomach, under my shirt, on my ribs. I could hear him breathing faster—and then I felt a vibration against my thigh.

  “Your phone,” I whispered.

  “It can wait.” He kissed me harder.

  This impressed me enormously. Ezra had never made his phone wait for anything, least of all me. No matter what we were doing, it was never as interesting to him as what might have been happening on his cell phone.

  I kissed Dan back . . . but then his phone vibrated again. Then my phone chimed in from my back pocket.

  “Let’s put them on silent,” I said. “So we can focus.” We both managed to work our phones out of our pockets without letting go of each other for a second. I glanced at my screen.

  1 NEW TXT FROM LENNY.

  Lenny had been with Tawny on Operation Horseshit tonight. I frowned and opened his message.

  “Hi everyone the civil warriors caught us tonight there was a fight tawnys in the ER we’re having a war council with reenactmentland after work on monday be there Lenny”

  “Shit,” I said. Dan said it too, at the same moment. I looked up at him.

  “My sister was in a fight,” he explained, his face drawn.

  “With Tawny,” I guessed.

  “I don’t know. Is that what your text says?”

  “Yes. Tawny’s at the emergency room now.”

  “My sister’s home. They had to carry her there. Her friend says she’s really banged up, and she can’t even use her hand to text. I hope Mom’s not awake. This is the last thing she needs.”

  “Oh, God.” I let my arms drop to my sides, away from him. “I should have been there.”

  “Why, so you could have been the one fighting?” he snapped.

  “No, so I could have stopped them!”

  He shook his head, looking angry. “You don’t get it. Nothing could have stopped them.” He rolled off of me. “I need to go home,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “That’s war,” he said, making a face like the word tasted sour.

  “What, had you forgotten?” I asked.

  “For a few minutes,” he said wistfully.

  He climbed down from the trampoline and tied his sneakers on.

  “Hey, Chelsea,” he whispered. I scooted to the edge of the trampoline, and he grabbed my face between his hands and kissed me so thoroughly that I felt it from head to toe. Then he turned and walked away.

  I lay back and listened to his car start, then drive off. I wanted to call Fiona and tell her: “I kissed a boy! And it wasn’t even Ezra!” But I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell anyone that I had been making out with a Civil Warrior on my trampoline while his sister was beating up the Colonial General. Because I should have been there.

  I found myself, as happened so often, thinking about Ezra. I had loved Ezra for real, for many reasons—for his confidence and charm and cleverness. It had been so easy to love Ezra.

  But this? This was really hard.

  Chapter 15

  THE WAR COUNCIL

  “What’s on your neck?” Bryan asked me as we sat in the ice cream shop on Monday, waiting for the War Council to begin.

  “Nothing,” I said. This was a lie. It was something. Specifically, it was a hickey from Dan.

  I am truly a class act.

  “Did someone hit you?” Bryan looked creepily concerned for my welfare.

  “No, it’s just a trick of the light,” I answered. Bryan wouldn’t recognize a hickey if one was staring him in the face, which, in fact, this one was.

  Maggie, on the other hand, is a veritable hickey expert. “Why do you have a hickey, Chelsea?” she laughed, her hand resting on Ezra’s knee.

  “Or if you’re going to have a hickey, why didn’t you put concealer on it?” Patience added.

  I had put concealer on it. In the morning, before I left for work, before I sweated for eight hours. I even had my compact in my purse, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to touchup between work and the War Council. For some reason, I had imagined the other Colonials wouldn’t be constantly and vocally assessing every aspect of my appearance. I, of course, turned out to be wrong.

  “A hickey?” Bryan wailed. “That’s not fair!”

  “Chelsea is so obviously still in your Top Five,” Fiona said to him.

  “Yeah,” Nat said, in a quick-thinking agreeing-with-Fiona moment.

  “She is not!” Outrage from Bryan’s corner.

  “She is,” Fiona assured him. “Otherwise you wouldn’t care so much that she’s making out with other guys.”

  “I’m not—” I began.

  “Oh, now, I’m not sure those things are connected,” Ezra said to Fiona. “For example, Chelsea’s in my Top Five, and I don’t care that she’s making out with other guys.”

  Okay, and screw you too, Ezra Gorman.

  I glanced at the door, hoping for Tawny to show up and put an end to this soul-crushing conversation, but, typically, she was running late. Of course, she had a sprained wrist, which was a better excuse than she usually had.

  I’d run into Tawny at Essex earlier. Just for long enough to see her bandaged arm, and for her to tell me that the Civil Warriors were going to pay for this. Just for long enough to say that I was sorry for not being there when she got hurt, and long enough for her to reply, “It’s okay, Chelsea. Family stuff comes up sometimes, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not your fault.”

  I stood up and said to the other Colonials, “I’m getting ice cream.” Ice cream is the best method that I have ever discovered for dealing with guilt.

  “That’s a good idea,” Maggie said. “Because if it comes with
a cold spoon, you can press it to your neck. That’s great for getting rid of hickeys. Trust me.” She pretended to bite Ezra just under his chin, and he laughed and pulled away.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Maggie, for that thoughtful advice.”

  Fiona followed me as I went to the counter to order as much chocolate as I could stuff down my throat. “So . . . ?” she said, gesturing toward my neck. I ignored her to focus on my ice cream options.

  “I’d like a large Mudslide,” I said to the cashier. When he turned around to prepare it, I said to Fiona, “You see this? This guy wearing a T-shirt and surrounded by ice cream? This could have been us. He has no special talents. There is no reason why he gets to wear T-shirts and scoop ice cream while we are trapped in this horrific panopticon of the eighteenth century.”

  “That’ll be six fifty,” the cashier said, shooting me a dirty look, like maybe he didn’t appreciate my saying that he had no special talents.

  “Chelsea, come on. Who were you making out with?” Fiona asked in a low voice.

  “No one!” And I felt bad about this, lying not through omission, but lying straight to my best friend’s face. But I rationalized it as . . . well, Dan was a Civil Warrior. So he was practically, effectively, no one.

  “Are you really not going to tell me?” she snapped. “What, was it Ezra?”

  “Right, like that would even be a possibility. After all, it’s not August seventh yet. And did you miss the bit where he said he doesn’t care if I’m kissing other boys?”

  Fiona heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Don’t believe that for a second,” she said. “He didn’t say that he ‘doesn’t care’ because he means it. He said it to make you feel bad about having anything else going on in your life that isn’t him.”

  “Really?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t look like you find that a good thing.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said as we carried our ice cream to join the rest of the Colonials. “Because I’m really not hooking up with anyone. I’m not.”