Confederates Don't Wear Couture

by Stephanie Kate Strohm

  “Garrett, let me speak to you, mano a mano,” Dev sniffed, and smooshed his head against mine. “I need her. For just a few itty-bitty months. And then I’ll deliver her safe and sound to the great state of Massachusetts, where you can spend the entire academic year, slash the rest of your lives, together.”

  I elbowed him in the ribs.

  “I think you should go,” Garrett said decisively, folding up the brochures. “This reenactment thing sounds like something you’d really love. Plus the costume opportunities will be way better.” He smiled, and I did too. “Besides, the Paul Revere House will be here next year.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure,” he said softly. “I love you, Libby.”

  “I love you too,” I answered.

  “VOMIT!” Dev shrieked, and closed the laptop.

  “Shhh!” the WoW nerds in the corner chorused. Dev rolled his eyes yet again.

  “That was rude! I didn’t get to say goodbye!”

  “It’s good to keep ’em on their toes.” Dev shrugged. “We-ell?” he asked leadingly.

  “I’ll do it,” I said decisively. “I’ll do it.”

  “Yee-haw!” Dev let out a bloodcurdling Rebel yell.

  “Shhh!” the WoW nerds exploded. Dev shot them his fiercest glare.

  “But, um, a question,” I asked. “Why are we Confederates? We’re from Minnesota. That’s about as north as you can get. Not only geographically, but also historically Northern. As in fought for the Union. Minnesota became a state right before the war, in 1858, and sent troops to Bull Run, Gettysburg, Antietam … all the major battles. Besides, the South lost. Why would we want to be on the losing side? And we haven’t even addressed the fact that their ideology was inherently corrupt!”

  “Duh, better outfits,” he countered. “Yankee girls were plain, plain, plain! I want giant hoop skirts and ribbons and lace! And statistically, for whatever reason, Confederate reenactors spend more on their gear. Plus there are more of them. All that ‘Lost Cause’ business really makes you shell out, apparently. Buy back the glory of Dixie!”

  “Okay. But not to sound racist,” I started hesitantly.

  “Libs, we’re talking Confederacy. A little bit racist is kind of a given.”

  “Okay, okay,” I agreed. “Will it be awkward to be a Confederate and, um—”

  “Sexy like milk chocolate?” he interrupted.

  “I was gonna go with ‘not white.’”

  “Sexy like a Twix bar?”

  “Or ‘Indian.’”

  “Sexy like a Kit Kat bar? Break me off a piece of that! Ow!” he yelped, as I smacked his arm.

  “Yes, yes, sexy like any number of milk chocolate–flavored confections,” I said, attempting to stop him before he could go through the entire contents of the vending machine.

  “Clark Gable was, like, super tan. I’m not worried. Margaret Mitchell herself wrote that Rhett Butler was, quote, ‘swarthy as a pirate,’ unquote, and who is more pirate swarthy than me?” he finished.

  “Wow, you actually researched something. I’m impressed. And, quite frankly, astonished.” I decided not to harp on the fact that Gone with the Wind was not exactly the epitome of historical accuracy, presenting, as it did, the mid-nineteenth century through a twentieth-century Technicolor lens.

  “There are greenbacks to be made, Miss Libby. We go to the South to worship at the altar of King Cotton! And King Taffeta! And King Silk Moiré!”

  “So basically you want to be carpetbaggers.”

  “Not just any carpetbaggers,” he corrected me. “We are Prada carpetbaggers. And don’t you forget it.”

  I didn’t forget. And almost before I knew it, senior year had fled by, my faux Prada carpetbags were packed, and I was at the last event of high school, before heading off to the Civil War and then on to college.

  “So this is prom.” Garrett looked around, taking in the foil stars hanging from the ceiling and the crinkly crepe paper bedecking the walls. “I thought I’d escaped it, but it got me in the end.”

  “You mean you’re not feeling the ‘Enchantment Under the Stars’?” I asked, poking him in the ribs as I quoted our prom theme.

  “I wouldn’t say that.” He smiled. “The stars may leave a little something to be desired, but ‘enchanting’ doesn’t even begin to describe the way you look tonight.”

  I blushed, turning a darker shade than the pale pink prom dress Dev had made for me. It felt almost like Garrett and I were the only two people in the world, or at the least all alone in our own magical corner of the St. Paul Crowne Plaza Hotel Event Room. In actuality, we were just one small island in a sea of partying St. Paul Academy Pioneers. And we were sharing our island with Dev and his date, whose name I couldn’t pronounce to save my life, as well as two of my fellow sopranos from chorus, plus their dates. My chorus friends were busy trying to harmonize to “Firework,” with moderately successful results, as their dates were heavily invested in a game of paper football featuring a cocktail napkin in the pivotal role.

  “Explain to me how you made it to your advanced age without experiencing the quintessential high school experience,” Dev asked from across the table, as he poked his rubbery piece of chicken.

  “Why doesn’t someone explain to me why they bother with plated dinner service at this bourgeois fest of mundaniness? Or how they have the audacity to pass off this reconstituted meat byproduct as dinner?” Dev’s date complained loudly.

  “Why doesn’t someone explain to him that ‘mundaniness’ is not a word?” Garrett whispered.

  Stifling a laugh, I choked on my Diet Coke, giving the chicken a wayward glance. “It is pretty bad,” I agreed. “Fee—Fy—Uh, how do you pronounce your name again?”

  “It’s Fyodr,” he drawled. “And this is inedible.”

  “He’s vegan,” Dev whispered proudly. “Garrett? Advanced age? Paucity of social experience?”

  “I think the real mystery is why anyone would want to go to prom,” Garrett grumbled good-naturedly. “But before now, there wasn’t anyone worth enduring this for.”

  “Whatever Libby wants,” Dev sang off-key, “Libby gets.”

  “Oh, come on!” I lobbed a piece of dinner roll across the table. It bounced off Dev’s nose, and he stopped butchering Damn Yankees. “It’s not like I forced him. I didn’t force you, right?”

  “Of course not.” Garrett chuckled as he poked at a limp green bean. “You’re five foot three. I don’t think you could force anyone to do anything.”

  “Don’t make me use this.” I brandished my remaining dinner roll at him.

  “Seriously, Libby, of course you didn’t force me. I wanted to come. Because even if I don’t completely understand why it’s important to you, it is. So it’s important to me.”

  “Adorable,” Dev said drily. “Fyodr, why don’t you regale us all with your eyebrow-grooming regime again.”

  “Come on, you must get it at least a little. Why it’s important, I mean,” I clarified for Garrett. “It’s such an iconic cultural touchstone! Didn’t you ever watch Pretty in Pink? Never Been Kissed? Footloose? She’s All That?”

  “You never wanted your very own Laney Boggs moment?” Dev asked.

  “Is that a disease?” Garrett asked.

  “Ignore him. And, you, focus on your vegan,” I reprimanded Dev.

  “Regardless, none of those movies make me want to go to prom. They just make me break out in a cold sweat at the thought of all that dancing.”

  “Har-har.” I crumbled my remaining dinner roll in my mouth and chewed its cottony substance.

  “And now that we’ve completed this journey through cinematic prom classics, Libby,” Garrett said, as he pushed out his chair and stood up from the table, pulling up to his full height, a dangling silver star threatening to tangle itself in his messy brown hair, “may I have this dance? As long as you don’t mind the cold sweat.”

  “Bring it on,” I said, smiling as I stood.

  “Just try not to trip on th
e dress!” Dev called, as we crossed to the dance floor. “That’s dupioni silk!”

  I rolled my eyes as Garrett pulled me close to him.

  “I’ll try not to wrinkle you, I promise.”

  “A little bit of wrinkling never hurt anyone,” I said, as I leaned my head against his chest, still a head shorter than him even in my heels.

  In a stroke of good fortune or careful planning on Garrett’s part, the DJ switched to a slow song, so all he had to do was sway. I mean, really, he was lucky this wasn’t a hundred years ago, because then he’d have had to waltz. I chuckled a little, imagining the panic that would seize Garrett if the DJ unexpectedly segued into “The Blue Danube.”

  “What’s so funny?” Garrett murmured into my ear.

  “You waltzing,” I replied.

  “Hey, now,” he said, mock offended. “I think I’m acquitting myself pretty well with this shuffling technique.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “And you look very handsome in your tux.” He really did, too. He looked like a tall, lanky, not particularly lethal spy. “Actually, you look a little bit like—”

  “James Bond’s IT guy?” he interrupted.

  “More like the guy Flynn Rider plays in that TV show.”

  “First of all, Libby, Flynn Rider is not a real person.”

  “But—”

  “Cartoon, Libby. He’s a cartoon.” He held up his arm and motioned me under it. “Second, I believe you are referring to the actor Zachary Levi, who plays special agent Charles ‘Chuck’ Bartowski in the eponymous television show.”

  “Did you just spin me?” I asked with disbelief, as I completed my turn.

  “Watch out, McCaffrey’s gettin’ fancy.” He next did something that could only be described as a jazz hand.

  “You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?” Garrett. Enjoying dancing. Now that was something I never thought I’d see.

  “Libby, I have fun with you no matter what we do. Because I’m with you.”

  And even though I knew I was setting myself up for a stern lecture on appropriate prom behavior from Ms. Heitkamp, I grabbed his lapels and kissed him.

  But before Heitkamp could barrel down on us, we were startled apart by Ke$ha blaring out of the speakers at the approximate decibel of a jet engine. A flicker of pure pain crossed Garrett’s face.

  “Wanna go outside?” I offered.

  “You are the best girlfriend,” he exclaimed, crushing me to his chest in an enthusiastic hug. “Come on, Tiny, let’s blow this Popsicle stand.”

  “Tiny?” I laughed as he grabbed my hand and led me off the dance floor. “You’re in a particularly heightist mood today.”

  “Just testing it out. Thought you might need a nickname. Something to put on the back of your Amherst jersey.”

  “I don’t know what sport you think I’ll be playing at Amherst—”

  “Rounders? Croquet? Fencing?” He shrugged. “I didn’t think I’d play a sport in college, but now I’m one of the finest keepers that Tufts Quidditch has to offer.”

  “Garrett, your commitment to the nerdification of America is truly impressive.”

  “Careful in that glass house, closet nerd.” His eyes twinkled as he pushed open the double doors to the patio space.

  The patio was mostly empty, except for a few of the guys from my AP English class choreographing a lightsaber battle in a dark corner. I sent up a silent prayer that Garrett wouldn’t be tempted to join them. Fortunately, we blew right past Revenge of the Sith and made for the stone wall demarcating the end of the patio. It was low enough that even I could hop up and sit on it without any problems.

  “Are you sad?” he asked softly.

  “About what? High school being over?”

  He nodded.

  “Not particularly.” I shrugged. “I’ll miss seeing Dev every day, of course, and my parents, but mostly I just feel excited to start college. And to be in the same state as you.”

  “A marked improvement,” he said with a grin. “How ever will you while away the tedious hours between now and autumn?”

  “Life with Dev is never dull. And if they intend to cram four years of Civil War into one summer, things must be pretty fast-paced.”

  “You sure there’s no Yankee reenactment on Boston Common you can do instead?” he asked, holding my hand.

  “Pretty sure,” I said reluctantly. “But the summer will fly by. You’ll be super busy at the newspaper, and I’ll be busy—”

  “Staving off dysentery?” he supplied helpfully.

  “And before we know it,” I continued, “we’ll be together.”

  “Summer in Dixie, fall in Boston.”

  “Exactly.” I grinned. “Trust me. The time will fly.”

  one

  “Wait, listen! Listen. In Virginia in 1864, at a dance that the Union soldiers held, some of the soldiers dressed up as women because not enough local women would attend: ‘Some of the real women went, but the boy girls were so much better looking that they left… . Some of them looked almost good enough to lay with and I guess some of them did get laid with.’” Dev looked up from his copy of The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War and grinned. “You hear that? They got laid with!”

  “Of course I can hear you—you’re two inches away from my face and shouting.”

  We were on a teeny-tiny plane we’d boarded in Charlotte, North Carolina—or what our very friendly pilot had informed us was a “puddah jumpah.” After about fifteen seconds, I deciphered his accent and figured out he’d said “puddle jumper”—which was a pretty accurate description. I swore I could hear the wind whistling through cracks in the siding. We were snuggled in so tight, I was practically sitting on Dev’s lap, and his Fred Perry track-jacketed elbow was perilously close to knocking into the little old lady across the aisle.

  “Chapter Eleven is just full of interesting nuggets.” Dev flipped a page. “Even Walt Whitman had an easy time picking up dudes. And look!” Dev held up the book, open to a black-and-white photograph of an old guy with a bushy white beard. “Whitman was one ugly ’mo. I am way cuter. If he can meet guys in the 1860s, so can I.”

  The old lady across from us, who had already been eyeing Dev’s book cover suspiciously, reached up to pat her immobile steel-gray curls nervously.

  “Dev,” I hissed over the roar of the engine, “while I am beyond pleased that you’re taking an interest in history, maybe a little quieter—”

  “Lincoln!” he shouted triumphantly. “Looks like that tall drink of water preferred to spend his nights with unmarried men, according to one Dr. Thomas P. Lowry!”

  Alarmed, the woman across the aisle reached into the floral-patterned bag that matched her pantsuit to pull out a Bible. I flipped my Martha Stewart Living closed, in case this escalated to an attempted exorcism and I needed both hands free to prevent a certain eavesdropping old lady from trying to get the devil out of Dev.

  “Oooh!” Dev squealed. “He had a little boy toy named Joshua Speed; they lived together and slept in the same bed, mind you, while they were young lawyers, like Law and Order: Gay Intent or Illinois Legal or Ally McQueer, and—”

  “Dev.” I nudged him and subtly nodded toward our eavesdropper.

  We turned slightly, peering across the aisle. Dev was wearing an “I’d Hit That” T-shirt with a picture of a piñata on it; the T-shirt was so tight you could see his nipples through it. The lady with the Bible was staring at the fuzzy-flocked letters on his chest like she was trying to crack the Da Vinci Code.

  “Dorothy”—he raised his book to cover our faces so we could whisper behind it—“I have a feeling we’re not in St. Paul anymore.”

  “Flight attendants, please prepare for landing,” a voice drawled over the speakers with an accent so thick you could have swirled a spoon through it. “Ladies and gents, please return your seats and tray tables to their upright positions, and turn off all approved electronic devices.”

  The engine roared louder and loude
r as we made our descent. I smooshed my face against the glass, and Dev leaned over me to look too, as we took in our first view of Montgomery.

  “‘Sweet home Alabama,’” Dev sang into my ear as we drew closer and closer to the spread of green trees and sprawl of buildings.

  We hit the ground and bumped along the runway.

  “‘Where the skies are so blue’” Dev sang as the rest of the plane applauded the pilot’s safe landing.

  The woman across the aisle crossed herself.

  Dev played a few licks on his air guitar as the captain turned off the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign. Dev continued to sing quietly as we collected our carry-ons and shuffled into the aisle. The old lady, still clutching her Bible, deliberately avoided eye contact.

  When we finally exited the plane, we stepped into an oven.

  “Holy crap, it’s hot!” I shrieked as we walked down the portable stairs onto the runway.

  “Oh, come on, it’s not that bad.” Dev pulled on his sunglasses and smiled into the sunshine.

  “Yes, it is!” I cried. It was like trying to walk through solid air. I didn’t know heat like this existed. I could feel sunburn forming on every inch of my exposed midwestern pallor.

  “Please,” he scoffed. “This isn’t hot. You’ve never been to Aunt Lakshmi’s birthday party in Mumbai in August.”

  “Obviously not!” I retorted. “The Keltings are like sixth-generation Minnesotans. We are winter people. The frosty blood of the Norse flows in my veins! Give me four feet of snow over this inferno any day!”

  “Oookay, drama Viking.” Dev rolled his eyes. “Move your little Nordic butt. We have a lot of luggage to get.”

  “Seriously, Dev.” I followed him off the tarmac into Montgomery Regional Airport and the sweet relief of blessed air conditioning. “Why Alabama?”

  “Oh, come now, Libby, you know why,” Dev replied breezily.

  “Because the Confederate States of America were formed in Montgomery in February 1861? Because it served as the first capital of the CSA? Because it was the inauguration site of Jefferson Davis, the first and only Confederate president? Because the order to fire on Fort Sumter, the act that started the entire war, was sent from here?” I rattled off every historical reason I could think of.