Past Perfect by Leila Sales

not there to help? . . .”
    “Mom,” I said. “I will be literally down the road from you.
    If I scream loud enough, you will be able to hear me. And if there’s a question I can’t answer, I’m sure the boss at the graveyard will know.”
    This was the other thing I’d learned from my weekend of being grounded: that there was absolutely no way I would be able to survive ten weeks in the silversmith studio, day in and day out with my father, and his rhetorical questions, and his know-it-all attitude. I would snap. One or both of us would not live to see September.
    Plus, Bryan Denton was going to be apprenticing at the silversmith’s this summer. And the only thing that could be worse than Bryan relentlessly hitting on me from nine to five every day would be my parents witnessing every second of it.
    My dad told me about Bryan’s apprenticeship over brunch on Saturday, sounding very pleased. He has always been a Bryan Denton fan. “That boy has a good head on his shoulders,” Dad said, to which I replied that if the only positive thing you can say about a person is that he has a “good 56

    PAST PERFECT
    head,” then there is probably something malformed about the rest of him.
    Dad just laughed at me and said, “You know what it means when a girl criticizes a boy, don’t you?” I tried ignoring him.
    “You know what it means, right? When a girl protests that really she hates a boy? You know what that means?” The “ignoring” plan never works. “Does it mean that she really hates him as much as she says she does?” I snapped.
    He chuckled superiorly. “No. It means that she really has a crush on him.”
    I immediately left the kitchen and called Mr. Zelinsky.
    “Elizabeth Connelly!” he cried into the phone, like the past sixteen hours of not speaking to me had been abject torture.
    “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
    “Mr. Zelinsky,” I said, “I need to work somewhere that’s not the silversmith’s studio this summer. Anywhere. I don’t care.
    Actually, I do care: if you could put Fiona and me together, that would be best. If that’s not possible, fine, I will accept that, but just please, for the love of all that is holy and Colonial, get me away from the silversmith. I will make shoes, I will make barrels, I will make soap, but I cannot make silverware.” Mr. Zelinsky made some sympathetic murmuring noises.
    “Did you know, Miss Connelly,” he said pensively, “that, unlike with iron, you cannot strike silver while it’s hot? Should you strike silver while it’s hot, it’s likely to shatter.” 57

    LEILA SALES
    “Sure,” I said, because I found that out for myself years ago.
    “Would you consider this symbolic ?” Mr. Zelinsky asked.
    “No? Wait, what would it symbolize?”
    “The heart ? If you strike it while you are hot—that is, angry —”
    “Mr. Zelinsky, I can’t handle metaphors today. I am begging you. I need to be reassigned.”
    So I got the burying ground. Fiona got assigned to the milliner’s, which is where the cool girls work—though saying someone is “cool” by Essex standards is not saying much.
    Although I wished Fiona and I were placed together, I didn’t need to spend every day sewing shifts and listening to Anne Whitcomb, Patience Algren, and Maggie Fairchild gossip about which Colonials are hooking up with one another and how far they’ve gone.
    The only people assigned to the burying ground this summer are me and Linda Osborne, an adult interpreter. So there’s no potential for drama, like the time last summer when the milliner girls cast Maggie out of their group for a few days (because she had made out with Patience’s ex-boyfriend at a party). That was drama. But with only two of us in the burying ground, and one of us being a married woman in her thirties, probably no one was going to get cast out of anything. I suspected that Mr. Zelinsky assigned me to the burying ground because I am unfit for human company.
    After I