Past Perfect

“Drama,” Nat drawled, rolling his eyes, like he was just so over drama.

  “Is everything all right?” I watched Patience and Anne support Maggie as she hobbled into her house like she had argued with Ezra, and then somehow broken her leg. Her brother stayed outside, setting up some complicated-looking drinking game. Fiona was doing a masterful job of not looking at him.

  “Who knows.” Nat kicked the water with his feet. “They’re both a couple beers in. This might not even be a real fight.”

  “Either way,” I said, “it’s kind of shitty to fight with your girlfriend at her own party.”

  “Hold up.” Fiona put up her hands. “Ezra did something kind of shitty? This is truly blowing my mind.”

  Nat laughed and playfully splashed her legs. I suddenly noticed something so obvious, I couldn’t believe I had missed it for even an instant. “Nat, your hair!” I gasped.

  His ponytail was gone. It was still longer than Ezra’s or Dan’s hair—still longer than a guy’s hair is supposed to be—but for Nat, it was downright short.

  “I know.” He touched the ends of it. “I’m getting used to it.”

  “You cut it off?” I asked, impressed by Nat’s sudden understanding of twenty-first-century fashion.

  “Hell, no!” He looked offended. “Those farbs across the street did it. They caught me coming out of work yesterday. Two of them grabbed me. Big guys. I eventually got away, but not before one of them had chopped off most of my ponytail.”

  “It’s horrible,” Fiona murmured. “That’s so traumatic.”

  “They’re monsters,” Nat declared. “The only thing that makes it even slightly okay is that I know they’re being stripped of their Barnes Prize. So let them pull their stupid pranks, let them cut off my hair, which I’ve been growing out for four years”—Fiona shook her head sadly—“but it’s okay, because we already won this War.” Nat nodded at me. “Thank you for giving me that, Chelsea.”

  I didn’t want to be thanked for hurting Dan. I didn’t say anything.

  “I think it looks just as adorable as it did before,” Fiona told him, running her hand through his hair.

  This was serious. If Fiona liked Nat even without his revolting, scraggly long hair, then she was going to like him no matter what.

  I decided to give them some alone time. “I’m going to get some food,” I said, standing up and shooting Fiona a meaningful glance. At least, I hoped it was meaningful. The meaning I was trying to convey was, Make this happen, Fiona, for the love of God.

  Ezra stood alone by the grill, wearing swim trunks and a crew-neck T-shirt. His hair was damp, like he’d already been in the pool, and he was prodding at the burgers with a spatula.

  “Got one for me?” I asked.

  “Chelsea!” His eyes lit up when he saw me. Or maybe I just thought they did. It was dark outside, and who could say.

  “Hey. Um, is everything okay?” It was none of my business, of course, what happened between him and his girlfriend. But if it was the talk of the party, well, I was curious.

  “Yeah. Well, not really, no. This thing with Maggie isn’t really . . . working.” He shrugged. “Sometimes I just don’t know what she wants from me. Everything seems fine, and then she freaks out at me over nothing. Literally, nothing. It’s like she wants something really specific, but she doesn’t tell me what it is, and then when I don’t magically figure it out on my own, she flips her shit. I don’t get it.”

  I wondered, suddenly, whether Ezra would ever be able to maintain a happy relationship with any girl at all.

  Rosaline came over, looking for a burger, and after she had slathered it in ketchup and left, Ezra said to me, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk?”

  “Who will man the burgers?” I asked.

  He set down the spatula. “The burgers can man themselves.”

  So we headed off together, leaving behind the sounds and lights of the party. Maggie’s property was enormous and bordered by woods; within a few minutes, we couldn’t see the party at all, or even the house itself.

  “Do you remember that time we went to D.C.?” Ezra asked me abruptly.

  “Sure.” We’d had the day off from school for President’s Day, and I had told Ezra that I wanted an adventure. He picked me up in his car, and we didn’t even know where we were going. He just started driving, and the next thing we knew, we were on the road to Washington.

  “You had made those banana muffins,” Ezra reminisced.

  “Right. Because we were on an all-day interstate exploration, and I was worried that we might starve.”

  “And we were singing along to Elvis the whole way there.”

  I smiled. Neither Ezra nor I can sing. We sing loudly, but we can’t sing.

  “Wise men say,” Ezra began in his horrible, faux–Elvis Presley baritone, “only fools rush in . . .”

  “. . . but I can’t help,” I joined in, “falling in love you.”

  We stopped singing. For a second, all I could hear were the cicadas. “It doesn’t seem like that long ago,” Ezra said.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But sometimes it feels like forever.”

  He stopped walking and cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice came out unsteady. “I miss you, Chelsea.”

  “I miss you, too,” I said.

  And as soon as the words had left my lips, he leaned in and kissed me.

  For close to four months now, I had been remembering Ezra’s kisses. How they were amazing, fulfilling, like fireworks. For months, I had been remembering how they made me feel. Like I was the most special girl in the world, like I could never want anything more than just this. For months, I had been unable to confront head-on the reality that Ezra would never kiss me again, and I would never feel that way again, that it was really and forever over.

  Now it wasn’t really and forever over. He was kissing me again. I was kissing him back.

  And the thing about it was this: it was good. It wasn’t perfect. I didn’t feel like fainting or crying or throwing him to the ground in these woods and stripping off all his clothes. It was a good kiss, because he’s a good kisser, and I liked it, but that was all.

  I stayed there for a moment. I knew this was the last time I would ever kiss him, and I wanted to hold on to it for as long as I could. Then I pulled back.

  “What about Maggie?” I asked.

  He shook his head and touched my hair. “Maggie and I are over. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t going to work.”

  “It’s funny,” I said quietly. “You and Maggie looked so happy together.”

  He seemed to think about this for a moment. “Did we?”

  “Mm-hmm.” I sighed. “But I guess you and I must have looked so happy together too.”

  “Chelsea,” Ezra said, cupping my face in his hands and looking into my eyes. “Let’s get back together. This isn’t about Maggie, this isn’t about anyone else but you. I miss you, you miss me. Let’s get back together, and we can spend every weekend exploring the world and doing a terrible job of singing Elvis songs to each other. Please.”

  I looked into his gray-blue eyes, and what came into my mind was not a chorus of hallelujahs. What came to mind was the line Mr. Zelinsky repeated every summer orientation. Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

  I didn’t want to be doomed to repeat the past anymore.

  And I thought how funny it was. Funny and sad, at the same time. Sometimes you get everything you ever wanted, only it doesn’t look like what you wanted anymore.

  “No,” I said to Ezra. “Thank you. But no.”

  His face twisted. “Is this because of your Civil War boyfriend? I didn’t realize you were still with that farb.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I snapped, “but I’m not. We stopped seeing each other after you told Tawny everything about his dad. So, you know, thanks for ruining that, too.”

  “I told Tawny all of that to help you,” Ezra protested. “No one was speaking to you. You were miser
able. Now everyone at Essex adores you again. I did that for you, Chelsea.”

  And I guessed it was true, that there’s a version of that story in which Ezra told Tawny because he was trying to help me. And then there’s a version of that story in which Ezra told Tawny because he was using me. History is written by the victors, but I could be the victor here. I could believe whichever version of the story that I wanted.

  “Either way, I’m not going to thank you,” I said. “Dan might never take me back after what I did to him and his family. But that’s not what matters here. Even if he never speaks to me again, I would rather be alone than be with you.”

  Ezra just blinked at me, like he didn’t understand.

  “Why now?” I asked. “Why have you decided that you want to get back together now? After all these months, you were just like, ‘Oh, hey, it’s August seventh, how about I take Chelsea back’? Wait—is it actually August seventh?”

  I double-checked the date on my phone. It was.

  Goddamn, that Fiona Warren was a genius.

  Ezra looked confused and a little annoyed, like he hadn’t expected to be put through all this rigmarole just to win me back. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I’ve been waiting to ask you out for a while, but I was with Maggie, and you were with what’s-his-name, and you seemed so mad at me all the time . . . But then tonight you showed up looking so pretty, so I just . . . did it.”

  Although this wasn’t a good answer, I believed that it was true: He probably didn’t know why he wanted to win me back now. That wasn’t how Ezra’s mind worked. He felt that he wanted to date me again, so, boom, he asked me out. Just like when he felt that he didn’t want to be with me, he just stopped talking to me.

  Maybe it was because he and Maggie were falling apart, and he wanted reassurance that some other girl out there was still crazy about him. Maybe when he found out I was seeing someone else, it made him jealous, and it made him realize that I must have something to offer if another guy wanted me. Maybe he was impressed by how far I was willing to go to help Essex in the War, and that made him fall in love with me all over again. Maybe he had been carrying a torch for me ever since breaking up with me, and all he had thought about every minute since then was how to win back my heart. Maybe anything.

  “Ezra,” I said, not wanting to be cruel, but just wanting him to know, “you broke my heart. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. And when I slept, I couldn’t wake up in the morning because that’s how much I couldn’t face the day.”

  I’d expected Ezra to be at least a little horrified or apologetic about this, but, once again, I had expected too much from him. However little I expected from him, he always managed to give me less.

  “A person is allowed to break up with his girlfriend,” he said. “It wasn’t like we were married, okay? We went out for a few months, and then we stopped going out, and sometime thereafter, I started going out with someone else. This happens to people all the time. You can’t hold it against me that you couldn’t handle it. It wasn’t my fault that you cried and stopped eating and all that stuff you said.”

  “But I didn’t feel that way only after you broke up with me,” I told him. “That was how I felt for ages before you broke up with me too, because that’s what it was like to date you. That’s how you made me feel. When I was with you, when you were my boyfriend, I worried about every step I took, because I might step wrong. I felt like I always had to be the most interesting girl in the world for you, or else you would immediately get bored of me. I never stopped being nervous around you, not in all the time we were together.”

  His expression was concerned, and he tried to grab hold of my arm. “It wouldn’t be like that this time, Chelsea. I promise.”

  I wanted to believe him, but there wasn’t anything believable about this. “You can’t make any of that un-happen,” I said. “Us getting back together wouldn’t un-break my heart.

  “You talk about driving to D.C., but you know what really happened that day? What really happened is that we drove there and listened to good music and ate banana muffins and kissed at stoplights and had an amazing time. All those good things were true, but they weren’t enough. Because then what really happened is that we got lost on the drive home, and you blamed me because I was the one navigating, and we drove for hours, and we had to refill the gas tank, and we argued over whose fault it was that we used up so much gas and who should have to pay for it. What really happened is that I apologized for the first hour and a half of the drive, and then once we knew we were on the right road, I just started crying, and you just let me. Do you remember now? Are you remembering? That’s what really happened, Ezra.”

  “None of that was my fault!” Ezra was looking seriously aggrieved now.

  “None of it was my fault, either. We were bad for each other. That wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  I stopped talking. He didn’t have anything to say, either. We just kept staring each other straight in the eyes, only inches apart. The cicadas kept humming, the moon kept shining, the tall tree branches kept rustling in the breeze. It could have been the most romantic moment. But it wasn’t.

  “So, yes, Ezra, I do miss you,” I said softly. “But no, I don’t want you back.”

  We walked back to Maggie’s party, next to each other, but not together. When we got there, it was more or less the same party we had left. The drinking games were in full swing. The milliner girls were outside again. Ezra squared his shoulders and beelined over to Maggie. Patience and Anne moved a few feet away so that they could listen in while Maggie and Ezra talked about whatever they needed to talk about.

  Fiona didn’t even look up when we came out of the woods. She was sitting in Nat’s lap on a lounge chair, her arms wrapped around his neck, deep in conversation. I didn’t bother them.

  Despite Maggie’s insistence that everyone wear a swimsuit, the pool was empty. I stripped down to my bikini and dove in alone. The water stung me with its coldness, and my chest felt tight. But that was okay, I could live with that. I swam along the bottom of the pool with my eyes wide open and, in the moment before I came up, gasping for air, I felt clean.

  Chapter 21

  THE BEGINNING

  “Troops, it has been an amazing summer. A truly amazing summer. I cannot begin to express how proud of you I am, how honored I have felt to be the General of such a kick-ass army.”

  This was Tawny speaking, of course, addressing the rest of us from atop her rock. Such words could come from no one but Tawny Nelson.

  “Our accomplishments have been extraordinary! Our ingenuity and tenacity have no rival! Whenever they hit us, we hit back harder!”

  Cheers all around.

  “It is my sincerest regret for this summer to come to an end,” Tawny went on. “But time stops for no man. School starts on Tuesday, no matter how much we want the War to go on and on forever.”

  I snorted, quietly, so only Fiona could hear. She was sitting next to me, holding Nat’s hand, and she threw me a sympathetic look. If I could wish for anything, it would be that War not go on and on forever.

  Well, no. If I could wish for anything, it would be for one particular boy, who was too good for me, who I would probably never see again.

  “It’s always sad to see the summer end,” Tawny went on, “but this year is sadder for me than any other. Because, as you all know, I’m . . . going to college.”

  I was stunned to see Tawny blink hard a few times, like she was holding back tears. In the five years I had known her, I had never seen Tawny cry. Not from pain, not from sadness, not from joy. She was a fighting machine. Two summers ago, the Civil Warriors stole a necklace that had been a gift from Tawny’s godmother before she died from ovarian cancer. Tawny didn’t even think about crying. Instead, she led a raid on Reenactmentland that liberated not only her necklace, but also one of the Civil War’s cannons in the process. Crying was not in Tawny’s repertoire.

  Yet here she was, standing on the tip of
her rock, her voice wavering with emotion. “This place . . . and you all . . . mean so much to me. I look forward to the War all year round. But this is . . . This is it for me. I’m too old to fight anymore.” She sniffled, and I saw a few other girls dabbing at their eyes too.

  “I’m just glad I got to go out with a bang,” Tawny said, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

  So that’s it, then. Tawny Nelson does have real, human feelings. They’re caused by weird things. But they are, nonetheless, real. That may have been the biggest surprise of this entire summer.

  “As of next week, you will no longer be able to count me among these ranks,” Tawny went on, louder now. “Which means that it’s time to elect a new General. Nominations are now open. Who among you do you want to be your leader?”

  Bryan’s hand immediately shot up. “I nominate Bryan Denton,” he said. “I think he’s been really dedicated to the War effort for many years now, and this summer, in particular, he has come into his own, especially during the Undercover Operation, which he pulled off masterfully.”

  “He’s talking about himself in the third person, right?” I muttered to Fiona. “Is that actually what’s happening here?”

  She looked pained. “It’s all so unclear.”

  Nat raised his hand too—his right hand, the one not holding Fiona’s. “I nominate Chelsea Glaser,” he said.

  A smattering of applause.

  “This has been a rough season, but Chelsea contributed more than the rest of us combined. The intel she scoped out has put us in a position of power for years to come. Reenactmentland won’t recover easily from losing their Barnes Prize, and that’s all thanks to Chelsea. She’s shown herself willing to take unpopular stances, if it’s for the overall benefit of Essex. And from serving as Lieutenant to Tawny’s General, she already has experience leading our troops. So that’s my vote, and I hope it’s yours, as well. Chelsea Glaser for General!”

  Nearly everyone, even Tawny, burst into applause. I didn’t do or say anything for a minute. I was flattered, of course, just as I’d been flattered two months ago, when they’d asked me to be Lieutenant. But being flattered wasn’t reason enough. And Nat’s understanding of what I’d done for the War this summer, and why I’d done it, was just so far from my reality, it was hard even to believe that he was talking about me.