Free Past Perfect by Leila Sales

interpreters. There are conventions for everything.)
    So I went over to Ezra’s house, because his parents were almost alwaysout of town, and we didn’t do anything. That was the best part. We didn’t eat a fancy dinner or go to a party or anything. We baked brownies and watched a couple hours of reality TV, and I remember leaning against his chest and feeling like we had all the time in the world. We had hours until the next morning, and we could spend every minute of those hours together, just us. We weren’t doing anything except lying together on his couch, and it felt like the most exciting night of my life.
    We fell asleep in his bed ridiculously late at night, his arms wrapped around my waist, his breath tickling the back of my neck. But we came apart in the night, and when I woke up a few hours later, the sun was shining through the windows and we were on opposite sides of the bed. I watched him sleep for a while, the hypnotic rise and fall of his bare chest.
    Eventually I got bored, and I couldn’t fall back asleep with him there. I whispered, “Ezra. Ezra,” a few times. He didn’t stir. I tried cuddling up to him, but he shrugged me off. “Leave me alone,” he mumbled. “Stop it. Can’t you just let me sleep ?”
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    He probably wasn’t awake enough to know what he was saying.
    I lay on my side of the bed and stared at the ceiling for a while. I texted some friends. I finished the book in my purse.
    Ezra slept on like a dead man. Finally I just left.
    When he called me later that day, we had a fight. He was mad at me because when he woke up I was gone, and I was mad at him for refusing to wake up, and I think both of us had pictured this perfect morning together, like the perfect night before it, and we were both mad at each other for ruining it. It was a stupid thing to fight about, and if I could go back in time, I would just let it go. I would lie right next to him for as long as it took him to wake up, even if it took all day. Because that way, whenever he woke up, at least we would be together.
    I remembered all of this as Fiona pulled into Essex. I could still feel his arms around me, if I tried. “Yeah,” I said to Fiona. “Ezra really hates mornings.” In the Essex parking lot we met Tawny, Nat, Bryan, two out of three milliner girls, and a half-dozen other Colonials. The trunk to Tawny’s car was open and filled with plastic bags of telephones. “Let’s do this,” she said in her commander’s voice.
    “Time to show those farbs they’ve reached the wrong number.” We each grabbed a bag of telephones and marched across the street and into Civil War Reenactmentland. Although they keep the main gate locked overnight, nothing prevented us 75

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    from just walking in through the woods. They really should pay more attention to their security.
    Once inside, we split up. We had a lot of ground to cover and not much time in which to do it, since we had to get out before any Civil War reenactors showed—and I had to be home before my parents woke up.
    Other than my kidnapping, I had never been to Reenactmentland before. I usually played more of a backstage role in the War. But I quickly found a big field of canvas tents. I peeked inside one and saw a few cots, kitchen supplies, and clothes. This must be where they lived. Perfect.
    I placed a hot pink wall phone on one of the cots. I took a bludgeonlike rotary phone and stuck it in a big saucepan.
    I perched a cordless phone atop a pair of boots.
    I loved this plan. I wished only that I could stick around to see the expressions on those farbs’ faces when the first moderner asked, “So, like, do you guys make a lot of long-distance calls while you’re out defending the Confederacy?” I hid a few phone cords in a trunk, hoping some reenactor would be stunned to find them weeks from now, long after the rest of the plague of telephones had been forgotten. I opened another trunk and found in it a music magazine and a