Saving the world or not, life does go on. There were other things equally worthy of obsession.
Namely (duh!) boys. One specific boy to be exact.
Civil War reenactments had abruptly ceased to be a PITA. What with Kevin Malloy proudly marching with the Army of Northern Virginia, I was counting down the seconds to the next battle.
“What’s up with you?” Britt asked. “You actually want to go?”
It was Saturday and we were heading up to Maryland to annihilate the Army of the Potomac.
“Well,” I said. “You know how it makes Dad happy to have us there. And Auntie Sadie needs my help again.”
“Since when did you ever care about making Dad happy?” Britt asked.
“Well, you know ... I mean ... like ...” It was hard to speak in the grip of a full-body blush.
Britt stared hard at me.
“Wait a minute!” she said. “You can’t fool me! There’s something else going on here. It’s that boy, isn’t it? The one you attacked! Kevin Malloy!”
Ouch! Outed by the little sister! And this from a twelve year-old?
And all of it was true. Unintentional or not, I had touched an Untouchable. Since the moment he had fallen on top of me at the Haunted Lunatic Asylum and I had whacked him half to death with the peg leg, I was having a hard time getting that boy out of my head.
If Mr. Cooper had, with all of his scientific know-how, at that very moment dissected my head and computed the percentage of my brainpower devoted to matters of critical importance, he would have come up with the following statistics:
“I don’t understand why the English essay ranks so high?” Ashley asked me. “It seems to me that all of that valuable mental energy could be much better spent focusing on Kevin.”
•
Before the incident at the Haunted Lunatic Asylum, Kevin Malloy was about as untouchable as they came. I had seen him at school roaming the halls but he was a senior, for goodness sake, and best friends with Marc the Mascot, one of the populars. He was firmly entrenched as a Number Two. There had been no need to go there.
But now, wonder of wonders, I had another chance to redeem myself from the awkward spaz move at school and get up close and personal. He wasn’t just Kevin the senior, he was Private Kevin in the 3rd Division, 7th Regiment of the Army of Northern Virginia.
“What’s gotten into you, young lady?” Auntie Sadie asked. “A week ago I had to drag you here by the hoops on your skirt. Now you’re frothing at the bit for a go at it!”
Once again, a blush. A sort of Neiman Marcus Bordeaux Lust nail polish kind of blush, the one that Ashley lusted over, the one brighter than a deep plum but more intense than standard red. Just like it said on the bottle.
I was once again decked out in the Christmas-tree look of the hoop skirt borrowed from one of Sadie’s friends. The same one that Kevin called cute, that he had said I looked hot in. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
And, once again, after a few hours of bullshitting tourists with Civil War nursing nonsense, I took leave of the field hospital so that I could have a front-row seat during the actual battle.
Battles were pretty much the same for every reenactment. There were a few subtle differences but for the most part they all kind of looked alike. One side charged. Everybody shot off cannons and guns and screamed like lunatics. The other side retreated or counterattacked or whatever. And, as always, much to the audience’s delight, lots of tragic deaths for both the Blue and the Gray.
Meanwhile the tourists gawked and got hammered and cheered raucously while their kids ran around out of control, acting like little Yanks or Rebels and creating all sort of mischief and mayhem.
This particular reenactment’s claim to fame was that it featured the 4th Artillery Regiment of the 2nd Maryland Volunteers. Their twenty-two Civil War–replica cannons were brought in by real live horses and they were now furiously firing on the advancing Confederates from atop the grassy knoll. Even if you didn’t give a rat’s ass about the Civil War or history or any of that stuff, it was still a sight to see. Twenty-two cannons firing away. Boom after boom after boom.
And there he was: Private Kevin. Marching into the thick of it. Guns blasting, cannons crashing, smoke wafting over his fallen comrades.
And still Kevin marched on.
Into the Valley of Death.
My hero!
When the Union artillerymen fired their cannon, they would use a rammer to drive home powder into the cannon breech. In real war it would have also driven down the cannonball, but (duh!) they left those out in the reenactments. The cannons were all bark and no bite. At least up until now.
A rammer was a long wooden stick with a round piece of wood at the end. Before discharging the cannon, you had to (duh again!) take the rammer out.
And here’s where it got interesting.
In the heat of the battle, with the Confederate troops yeehawing their rebel yells as they charged the grassy knoll, some Union yahoo, half in the bag and zoned out in la-la land, forgot to take the rammer out of the cannon he was firing. Even without their balls, those cannons could sure get it up. The officer set fire to the fuse and the cannon shot out the rammer. It lazily arced into the air above the battle and the troops and the noise and the confusion and, like a drone strike, came down, you guessed it, slam-bang on Private Kevin’s head.
Boom!
I had my gaze fixed on Kevin when down he went with a thud. Oblivious, his gallant comrades bravely marched on. With the smoke and the shots and the shouts and the booms, nobody seemed to have witnessed this tragedy but me.
“He’s been hit!” I yelled from the sidelines. “Kevin’s been hit!”
“Of course he has, sweetheart!” one of the tourists yelled back. “That’s the whole point isn’t it?”
Everybody laughed but me.
There was Kevin lying face down in the field and no one seemed to notice. Nobody.
Maybe he was dead! Not just play dead but real dead. As in dead dead!
It couldn’t be true! Not to Private Kevin. Not to my Kevin! (Well, not really my Kevin, but I was already beginning to think of him that way. A girl can dream, can’t she?)
I rushed out to save him.
Running through a field with a hoop skirt on is sort of like hopping backwards down an escalator. It really shouldn’t be done. I must have wiped out about fifteen times before I finally made it to my fallen warrior.
As I was running I could hear the tourists cheer me on. They thought I was part of the act. Part of the reenactment.
“You go, girl!” someone yelled.
Kevin was still flat on his face, but even over the roar of the ongoing battle I could hear him moan.
“You’re alive!” I shouted, relief flooding over me. “You’re alive!”
Kevin rolled over and tried to sit up.
“Oh my God!” he said, rubbing the top of his head, cowering. “It’s you again!”
“You’re alive!” I cried again like a moron. “You’re alive!”
“What did you do this time? Attack me from behind? One beating wasn’t enough? Where’s the peg leg?”
“No!” I tried to explain. “You were hit by the cannon.”
“The cannon? I hate to clue you in, Sandy . . .”
“Cyndie.”
“Sorry. Cyndie. Those cannons aren’t real. This is just a ...”
I held up the rammer for him to see. “Some moron forgot to pull out in time!” I told him.
Kevin cracked a smile and continued to rub his head.
“Not a good idea,” Kevin said. “You know what they say about sex and basketball. You always dribble before you shoot!”
There I was, sitting in the field of battle in my hoop skirt, helping Private Kevin recuperate from his near-death experience, with the battle still furiously raging around us, and he’s making jokes about sex! About sex, for God’s sake! We’re surrounded by death and destruction and despair, and he’s cracking sex jokes! To me!
“Nice skirt!” he said. “Very . . .”
“Basketball-like? With the hoop and all?”
Kevin laughed.
“Help me up, will ya?” he asked.
To the cheering of the crowd I put my arm around Kevin and we both staggered to our feet. Kevin doffed his Confederate cap to thunderous applause and limped back to the sidelines.
“I thought it was your head that got hit,” I whispered.
“Shhh. Gotta play it up. We have them eating out of the palm of our hand.”
Kevin waved again to the crowd. The tourists had all stopped watching the battle and were eagerly turned toward the two of us. As Kevin continued to lean on me with one arm while using the rammer as a crutch with the other, he suddenly turned and gave me a kiss. Not a peck-on-the-cheek kiss but a lip-to-lip wowzie. For the whole world to see! No tongue involved but still enough to make me go limp.
The crowd went wild. People were hooting and hollering. To thunderous applause we wandered our way back to the hospital tent. Somehow, as weak in the knees as I was, I managed to stay upright.
“Sorry about that,” Kevin said after I settled him in on the field hospital cot and had placed an ice pack on the growing bump on his head.
“Sorry about what?” I asked.
“About the kiss. That was pretty inappropriate. I was just caught up in the moment.”
Sorry about the kiss? Oh my God! Was he kidding? It was the greatest moment of my life!
“No need to apologize,” I said. “It happens to me all the time.”
“What?”
“The living dead are constantly all over me. I’m like a zombie magnet! They can’t keep their mouths off of me.”
“Wow,” Kevin said. “Who knew?”
“Exactly. Anyway, the crowd loved it.”
“They sure did. Evidently we made quite the couple.”
Britt had come back bearing the news that we were the highlight of the reenactment. The hit of the show. A bunch of tourists came in wanting to take our picture. One little girl even asked me for my autograph. The event organizer wanted to know if we could schedule a repeat performance next year.
“It’s pretty amazing that you didn’t get seriously hurt!” I said to Kevin, still holding an ice pack to the bump. “I mean, that rammer was going five zillion miles an hour and came crashing right into your skull.”
The Union artillery officer who had let loose the weapon of destruction had showed up at the nurse’s tent and awkwardly begged Kevin’s forgiveness.
“Dude,” Kevin said. “That was, like, awesome. We’re the talk of the town. Celebrities. And best of all, once again I got to be rescued by my hot nurse.”
Blush, blush, and blush some more. I borrowed the ice pack to mop my brow.
“So,” Kevin said after our adoring fans had finally left us alone. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. First the smack-down with the peg leg, and now getting hammered with the rammer. And I thought the real Civil War was dangerous!”
I laughed.
God, Kevin was cute. He had these deep, dark brown eyes with girly-girl eyelashes that curled up forever. His unruly hair swept over the ice pack and cascaded down his ears and the back of his neck. Even the bump on his head was adorable.
And his lips. Oh my God. Thick, pouty, mischievous lips. Lips that had actually kissed mine. Even a totally fake just-for-show kiss was still a kiss.
“Next time I suggest substituting Marc the Mascot’s miner helmet for the Rebel cap,” I said. “Not exactly historically accurate but it’ll keep you alive to fight another day.”
“I don’t know,” Kevin said, looking up at me. “I’m sort of enjoying all the attention.”
I was still fussing over the bump. Caressing was perhaps a better word. “Keep this up and you’ll be getting even more,” I said. “The first reenactment casualty. You’ll be front page news of the Civil War Times. I might be a zombie magnet but you’re a disaster magnet.”
Kevin continued to stare at me.
“What are you, like, a junior?” he asked.
“Sophomore,” I said.
“Oh yeah, right.”
“What are you, like, a freshman?” I asked.
Kevin half laughed and half grimaced as I pressed down with the ice pack.
He reached out and shook my hand.
“Kevin,” he said.
“Cyndie,” I replied.
Neither of us let go for quite a while.