Confederates Don't Wear Couture by Strohm Stephanie Kate

Author:Strohm, Stephanie Kate [Strohm, Stephanie Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

five

“Now, where the hell are we?” Dev blinked into the sun. “Ugh, could somebody please hurry up and invent sunglasses? This is killing me. I’m, like, going blind.”

“If you’re waitin’ on the invention of sunglasses, you’ve got a ways to go. Sam Foster didn’t invent them until 1929,” Beau commented, as he hammered a post into the ground. “Course, the Chinese darkened eyeglasses by tinting them with smoke back in the 1400s. But they didn’t make ’em to protect your eyes from the sun, or reduce solar glare, or correct vision, or anythin’. Judges wore ’em to conceal their eyes while in session in court, so the jury wouldn’t have any idea what they were thinkin’.”

“Jesus.” Dev rolled his eyes. “You’re worse than Libby.”

I glared at Dev. I mean, come on, that was impressive.

“Sunglasses as we know ’em, glasses made specifically to shield your eyes, are strictly a twentieth-century phenomenon. So like I said, you’d have a ways to wait. And a ways to go. Sam Foster started sellin’ ’em up in Atlantic City. Not down here.”

“Which is where, again?” Dev asked. “Where is here?”

“Simpsonville, South Carolina.” Beau shook the pole, to make sure it was sturdy, before adding, meditatively, “The Golden Strip.”

“This is the Golden Strip?” Dev snorted. We stood at the edge of a dirt road and looked down a long green expanse of not much. “Um, why?”

“Low unemployment, or somethin’.” Beau stood up, wiping the dirt off on his pants. “And that’s a well-constructed tent right there.”

“With a name like the Golden Strip, you’d think there’d be more boutiques and less . . . dirt.” Dev rubbed his spotless boots with a silk handkerchief until they shone. “Or at least some strippers.”

No boutiques. And certainly no strippers. We were in a field behind the Upcountry South Carolina Historical Society, camping out until the Raid on Hopkins’ Farm that weekend. It was a much smaller reenactment, in a much smaller field, with even less to do. Another quiet week under the southern sun.

Dev never got that armed guard. The only people who had volunteered to sleep outside our tent and protect us from the ghost were Beau (whom Dev vetoed, as he was the ghost’s primary target and would therefore do more harm than good by attracting the ghost) and Cody (whom I vetoed, for obvious reasons). Even though another Boy Scout had left in the wake of our ghostly sighting, it ended up being for nothing. We hadn’t seen so much as a haunted footprint. Nothing even remotely spooky. Not a trace of the ghost.

So there was nothing to do but practice dancing. And I needed all the help I could get. Even by the close of the Friday Night Period Dance, a casual affair in the lantern-lit field, I still wasn’t really getting it.

“And one-two-three, one-two-three!” Beau shouted gaily, as we waltzed down the lane. Even though the dance was over, we hadn’t been ready to stop dancing. It was one of those perfect summer nights, where everything was bathed in moonlight, and you never wanted the sun to come up.

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