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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.

  18

  “He kissed you and then he held your hand?” Ashley asked.

  “Cut it out, Ashley. It was a stage kiss and then we shook hands.”

  “Kids don’t shake hands. That’s totally lame. You might pound it. You might high five it. You might even wave. But no one shakes hands. No one.”

  “We shook hands,” I repeated.

  “You didn’t shake hands. You don’t make sex jokes, slip them the tongue, and then shake their effin hand. You just don’t do it. He held your hand.”

  “It was a shake Ashley. And there was no tongue. I was there, remember?”

  “No tongue?”

  “No tongue.”

  “But definitely a hold.”

  “Stop!” I said.

  We were back in Tom’s Mine following another round of flag cutting. American had come back and marked the identical trees just as before. We had cut them all down. The flags, not the trees.

  And we had also ripped down the signs that they had nailed up all along the road.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  NO TRESSPASSING

  ANY DAMAGE TO THIS PROPERTY WILL RESULT IN

  ARREST AND CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS

  AMERICAN COAL COMPANY

  Once again, we hadn’t really thought about it, we had just done it. We didn’t have a plan. We hadn’t even talked about it. It just seemed to be the thing we had to do. Part of what was expected. The new normal.

  The whole way up the mountain it was a snip snip here and a snip snip there and down came the flags.

  “Is it my imagination or are our little Tomsters a bit chattier than usual today?” Ashley asked as we cut down the last flag. We called the animals on Mount Tom “our Tomsters,” and like the trees, we had even named a few of them.

  There was Lady Gaga the barred owl, which we’d sometimes see at dusk, staring us down with her deep brown, almost black eyes and asking us, “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” in her haunting hoot. She’d sit at her perch and twist her head round and round in that freakish way that owls do as if their necks were wind-up toys.

  “If I could do that,” Ashley said, “I’d join the circus and make a million.”

  There was Jay-Z the red squirrel, who’d chatter-rap nonstop as he raced back and forth across his old stone wall, hurling zingers at us fast and furious. It was unclear to Ashley and me if he did this because he was totally pissed or actually quite delighted to see us.

  There was Taylor Swift, the whitetail deer that never stuck around long enough for a proper introduction but instead high-tailed it out of there—flight at first sight.

  There were the Black Crows, TNTC (too numerous to count), that laughed at our every move as if we were the funniest effin things this side of Comedy Central.

  I know, I know. It all sounds so juvenile and lame, so Walt Disneyish, as if we were third graders. But somehow, the act of giving them names made them all that more real to us. They weren’t just animals. They were our animals. Our very own Tomsters.

  There were a lot more of them as well. We couldn’t see them, we couldn’t even hear them, but we knew they were out there. We could feel their presence, watching our every move, eyes staring from behind the trunks of trees or camouflaged under leaf litter. Not staring at us in a creepy-stalker, horror-movie kind of way. Not like “better watch your backs girly-girls or you’ll be breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” But in a comforting “hey, welcome back” kind of way.

  They knew we belonged here, too.

  “It seems as though they approve,” Ashley said.

  “Approve of what?” I asked.

  “Us cutting down the flags. Listen to them. It’s like applause. It’s like we’re rock stars.”

  Ashley was right. The noise level was definitely ratcheted up a notch. With every cut flag it had seemed to grow louder and louder until the entire woods was a symphony of sound. Hoots and churs and grunts and caws. The Tomsters were twittering and tweeting the news to the whole wide world. “Go for it!” they were shouting.

  “Do it!”

  “Yes!”

  The angst I had felt after the first time we had cut down the flags was still there. I was, once again, confused and uncertain. But there was much less hesitation this time.

  My father was a great fan of an old-time folk musician named Pete Seeger who once said, “The world will be saved by a million little acts.”

  This was starting to feel like one of them.

  “Do you think they look good?” Ashley asked.

  “Of course they do,” I replied.

  “Seriously?”

  “Duh! How could they not? They don’t have flags on them anymore.”

  “Jeez, Cyndie,” Ashley said, adjusting her bra. “I was talking about my boobs, not about the trees.”

  This was one for the ridiculous jar. Here we were trying to save the world, or at least our little portion of it, and Ashley was once again obsessing about her boobs.

  “Chill, Ashley,” I said. “If I had boobs like yours I’d think I’d have died and gone to heaven. If I was a guy or if I was into girls I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off of them. They’re perfect. Quit your bitching. I mean, seriously, look at mine. I’ve got boy boobs.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to a word I said?” Ashley asked. “That’s the issue. That’s t
he problem. I’m only fifteen and I’m already a C. If they don’t stop growing I’ll be flying past Z by the time I’m twenty!”

  “I should be so lucky. Mine don’t even make the alphabet! What comes before the letter A?”

  “I’d so rather have yours than mine any day. Before too long I’m going to need an effin wheelbarrow to cart these things up this mountain.”

  “Let’s just hope there’ll still be a mountain to climb,” I said.

  “Anyway, you do too have boobs,” Ashley said. “They’re perfect for you. Totally hot. No wonder Kevin’s all over you.”

  “Kevin’s not all over me.”

  Ashley snorted.

  “Anyway, can we please change the subject? If I hear one more thing about your boobs I’m going to take out these scissors and . . .” I waved them menacingly at her chest.

  “Message received,” Ashley said, removing her hand from under her top.

  “So what are we going to do now?” I asked.

  “About Kevin?”

  “No, about Tom.”

  “Tom?” Ashley asked. “Tom who? You have another guy after you? Jeez, when it rains it pours!”

  “Mount Tom, you moron!”

  “Yeah. Right. Sorry. I have an idea.”

  “As long as it doesn’t involve boobs I’m all ears,” I said.

  “A children’s crusade,” Ashley said.

  “A what?”

  “A children’s crusade. I was thinking about this the other day in history. You know the thing they did in the Middle Ages in Europe where tens of thousands of kids marched to the Holy Land to convert everyone to Christianity. We could do the same thing.”

  “March to the Holy Land?”

  “No! March on Mount Tom!”

  “Thank God,” I said. “That’s way closer. But didn’t they all die of disease and starvation and get sold into slavery or something?”

  “Whatever,” Ashley said. “And there was another children’s crusade in the 1960s down in Alabama. A bunch of African American kids marching for civil rights.”

  I was impressed. Ashley had actually stayed awake in class!

  “I hate to burst your bubble, but as I recall that didn’t go down so well, either. Like fire hoses sprayed on the kids and police attack dogs and beatings and arrests and all sorts of crazy racist crap.”