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the breeze. “Soldiers!” she said once our cheers had died down. “I am proud to lead you into battle this summer. We will show those Civil Warriors no mercy. We will teach them that there is only one time in American history that matters, and that is the Colonial period. That is us .”
    “Yeah!” a bunch of people shouted. “Get ’em!”
    “And we are not afraid to fight dirty!” Tawny continued.
    “We will overrun their territory with historical anachronisms.
    We will cut off their supply chains. We will do whatever must 31

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    be done, anything at all, as long as the bosses don’t find out about it. We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the landing grounds, we will fight in the fields and in the streets, we will fight in the hills. We will never surrender!” That last bit was definitely Winston Churchill, not Tawny Nelson, and it came about two hundred years too late. Nonetheless, the applause crescendoed, and Tawny had to wait another minute before she could go on.
    “To get you all psyched for this year,” she said, “I present to you the Essex Cheerleaders!”
    Three theater kids bearing pom-poms pranced in front of Tawny’s rock. They were two girls and a femme guy who had played the doo-wop girls in our community theater’s spring production of Little Shop of Horrors . They were in Colonial Essex’s dance program, which meant they spent the summer gallivanting around, demonstrating minuets. Last year, they had placed themselves in charge of leading fight songs against Reenactmentland. There was no question in my mind that Fiona would join them before this summer was out. She can’t get enough of stuff like that.
    Pom-poms aflutter, the Essex Cheerleaders chanted: United we stand, divided we fall
    Just watch us as we beat ya’ll.
    You say ‘brother against brother’?
    Well, my brother screwed your mother 32

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    And she liked it!
    We’ll kick your shins and break your knee
    ’Cause all you got is Robert E. Lee.
    Farbs!
    They jumped up and down and kicked their legs and showed off some jazz hands, while everyone else hooted and hollered,
    “Farbs!”
    Farb is a terrible thing to call a reenactor. My dad says it’s shorthand for Far be it from authentic , but in the War, we just use it to mean that a reenactor is sloppy in his historical details.
    Or we use it when we just don’t like someone.
    The Essex Cheerleaders skipped back into the crowd to much applause, and Tawny resumed her speech. “As you know, soldiers, we are at a slight disadvantage this year.
    Because of the Barnes Prize.”
    We all booed. The Barnes Prize for Historical Interpretation is awarded by the National Register of Historic Places very occasionally, to historic sites that are especially important, and that do an impeccable job of presenting the past.
    Inexplicably, last summer the farbs at Reenactmentland won a Barnes. They found some letters or building specs or something proving that the Confederacy had built there a top-secret ironclad battleship, the CSS South Carolina , to send into the Battle of Hampton Roads. The boat sank before seeing any naval action, and it wasn’t until Essex discovered this 33

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    paperwork that historians could even confirm the existence of a CSS South Carolina . There were a million news articles about it, and suddenly photos of Reenactmentland’s stupid battlefield were appearing on the covers of travel magazines.
    Even the Travel Channel filmed a show there, and they mentioned Essex at the very end, as an “additional attraction to visit if you have an extra day.”
    “Some might say we are at a disadvantage,” Tawny continued. “But I say that just makes us the underdog. And no one ever expects how much damage the underdog can cause!” Massive cheering.
    “What I need now,” she said, “is a second-in-command.
    Someone to keep track of our manpower and our resources.
    Someone who knows everyone and notices everything. A strategist,