The Afterlife of Holly Chase

  I sighed. It’d been almost an entire week, and I still hadn’t seen him again. By now he’d probably forgotten all about me.

  “And what is it you have to share?” Boz asked. “Tell me you have the Fezziwig.”

  “I’m close. Any day now.” I didn’t care about the Fezziwig. I wasn’t remotely close to finding one, but Boz didn’t have to know that.

  “Have you learned anything new?” he asked.

  I’d learned lots of things. I’d been picking up all kinds of interesting tidbits of information in Ethan’s brain while I was trying to figure out his schedule. For instance: his favorite food was spaghetti, but he also liked pizza, with mushrooms and olives and green peppers. He brushed his teeth three times a day. And used mouthwash. And flossed. He was, like, the most kissable boy ever. And he was a Yankees fan, duh. He liked reality shows. He also liked watching soccer and golf, but hey, everybody has flaws. I could get past it. He actually enjoyed shopping for clothes—he liked building his image, piece by piece and item by item. His favorite color was black. Mine, too. He was a snob about the coffee he drank. Same. He also liked Perrier. God, it was like we were soul mates.

  And most important, he liked me. And I liked him. I liked him so much it was kind of killing me.

  I shook my head. “This Fezziwig’s a tough one.”

  “Look at parties. You know the Fezziwig loves parties,” Boz advised.

  I stared at him. “Yes, I know. This is not my first rodeo, Boz.”

  “It seems that everyone is struggling a bit this month,” he said. Which, again, made me feel somewhat better. “We need to focus. Help each other. Work together.”

  The meeting dragged on. Boz and Dave started talking about Jack, and how she may or may not be the Fred. I was hardly listening at this point. I was still thinking about seeing Ethan again. It felt nearly impossible, because he was under such constant surveillance. There were holes, of course, pockets of time when he wasn’t being watched as closely, but I didn’t know where and when those pockets occurred. Which brought me back to this simple fact: I needed to know what Dave knew. But I couldn’t just ask him, and it’d be suspicious if I started poking around in places I didn’t normally go. Even the Hoodie couldn’t help me, because I didn’t have access to Dave’s office. It required a badge swipe, and my security clearance wasn’t high enough.

  I sighed. I was out of ideas.

  “Can I get you a coffee?” whispered a voice right into my ear, and I nearly knocked heads with Stephanie. “You look like you need a pick-me-up,” she observed quietly.

  “No. Thanks.”

  I sighed again. Gosh, she was always just so helpful, wasn’t she?

  And then I had an idea. A wonderful but maybe awful idea. It suddenly occurred to me that if I was going to do this—if I was actually going to pull off seeing Ethan in real life—I’d need help. Someone inside the company. A person I could get to do things for me so I wouldn’t draw attention to myself. Cover for me. Someone to watch my back.

  Someone who, I just remembered, happened to mysteriously have full security clearance. “On second thought, I do have something you can help me with,” I whispered back to Stephanie.

  “Sure. What is it?” she asked.

  Boz stopped talking and turned to stare at me pointedly. “Wouldn’t you agree, Havisham?”

  I had no idea what he was asking about. “Yes,” I said. “I totally agree.”

  Boz and Dave went back to talking.

  “Later,” I whispered to Stephanie. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Okay. I can’t wait to hear what it is,” she whispered back. “You know I’m always here to help.”

  Which was just what I’d been hoping she’d say.

  TWELVE

  I INVITED STEPHANIE OVER FOR dinner at my apartment. As in, I told her to bring me a pizza.

  “Wow, your place is great!” she panted after I buzzed her in and she’d schlepped up the four flights of stairs. “So cozy.”

  I didn’t bother to show her around. She could see pretty much all of it from the doorway.

  Stephanie set the pizza on the middle of my little kitchen table. She was wearing a mint-green sweater with a cartoon hamburger on it, only the hamburger had a giant eye and possibly a pair of fangs, like it was alive and about to attack you. I couldn’t stop staring at it.

  “Do you have some plates?” she asked after a minute.

  I broke out my stash of Diet Coke and a couple of mugs and got out two plates. I gave her the chipped one with the blue flowers. She acted like it was the finest china.

  “I don’t live far from here,” she informed me as we sat eating the pizza. “About three blocks away, off St. Marks? So we’re practically neighbors. We should hang out more often.”

  It was an unfamiliar feeling, having someone over at my place. It made me feel naked, in a way. Because if I showed up at work with my hair and makeup done perfectly, wearing the right clothes (black skinny jeans and a nice white button-up rolled at the sleeves was my typical look), nobody would really know how utterly shabby my life was. But now this girl was here to witness it firsthand, and she was trying to be nice and tell me how great she thought it all was—such a pretty plate, such a cozy place, such a nice view—but that made it all seem worse to me.

  “So you’re a Ghost, right?” she asked. “Does that mean that you’re dead?”

  I choked on my Diet Coke. Stephanie waited patiently for me to stop coughing. She didn’t pester me, but her expression clearly said, Well, are you?

  “Yes,” I answered finally. “And no.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I died once. But clearly I’m still kicking, aren’t I?”

  She laughed, but she felt bad for me, obviously. Poor dead me. “I thought so. I was talking to Da—Copperfield the other day, and he was telling me about how it happened with him, and it occurred to me that you must be dead, too. So how did you die?”

  The way I saw it, the less she knew about the circumstances surrounding my death, the better. If she knew I was a failed Scrooge, she’d never be able to trust me. And I needed her to trust me, or this new plan of mine was never going to work.

  “Car accident,” I sputtered. Which was not exactly a lie.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, like I’d just told her that my grandma had passed away. She leaned forward with her elbow on the table and put her chin in her hand. “What’s it like, being dead?”

  I shrugged. “Boring. When you’re alive—really alive, I mean—you change, a little bit every day. But when you’re dead, nothing really changes. You’re just the same, day in and day out.”

  Except that day with Ethan, I reminded myself, when it felt like everything changed.

  “But you eat and sleep and use the bathroom like everybody else, right?”

  “I can, but I don’t have to,” I explained. “If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have to eat or sleep. I couldn’t starve to death or die of exhaustion, because in the morning my body would just start over again.”

  Her eyes were wide. “Your body starts over again every morning?”

  “Uh-huh.” I didn’t know how to explain that to her, so I didn’t even try. “There are definite advantages to being dead.” I grabbed another piece of pizza. “For instance, I can eat anything I want and not gain weight.”

  She had the good sense to look envious.

  “My hair never grows, so I never have to dye my roots,” I said, twisting a golden curl around my finger. “And I won’t ever get old.”

  Or be old enough to vote. I thought again about Ro and her job and her date and the way she was following her dreams. Which made my chest feel tight.

  Stephanie squinted at my part line. “What color’s your hair really?”

  “On the other hand,” I continued, “every single morning I have to cover up this tiny little zit right here.” I pointed at it. “I mean, every. Single. Day. It’s like I’m stuck in never-ending puberty. It sucks.”
r />   “You can’t even see it,” she said.

  She was nice. So freaking nice. Too nice.

  “I can imagine how that would be hard, though,” she said. “The unchanging part. It would make it tough to have normal relationships, I think. How would you make friends if you always stay the same, and everyone else just naturally moves on with their lives?”

  Well, this was a depressing conversation.

  Stephanie tucked a strand of corn-silk-colored hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry, that was rude. I’m just interested in this whole dead-but-alive thing. I’m a psychology major, can you tell?”

  “Yeah.” Sometimes she seemed like a little girl—sweet and clueless and likely to remain that way forever, no matter how old she got. But other times I was reminded that Stephanie was actually a college student, something that I would never be, and there were real, honest-to-goodness thoughts going on behind those big purple glasses of hers. Maybe she was smarter than I gave her credit for.

  I only hoped she wasn’t too smart.

  “Anyway,” she said. “You said you needed help with something?”

  I took a deep breath. This was either my best idea ever or my worst one. “First off, I just wanted to say thank you for what a stellar assistant you’ve been these past few months. I know I was a little wary in the beginning, but now I totally feel like you’re part of the Project Scrooge family.”

  Stephanie gasped and put a hand over her heart. “Oh, thank you, Holly. That means so much.”

  “I mean it. Really.”

  “So what can I help you with?” she asked. “Because you know I’d do anything to help you. I believe in you and all that you’re doing at Project Scrooge.”

  “Great. I, uh . . .” God, this was nerve-racking. It was now or never. “I need access to Dave’s office so I can get Ethan’s schedule.”

  Boom. There it was.

  Her head tilted to one side. She finished chewing a bite of pizza and swallowed. “Why?”

  Here it was, my big confession. “I want to talk to Ethan in real life.”

  “You mean, when he’s awake?”

  “Yes. That’s my plan.”

  Her mouth dropped open for a few seconds. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because Ethan’s not like the other Scrooges,” I said. “Showing up with him on Christmas Eve isn’t going to be enough to save him. He needs more direct intervention. He needs someone in his life to help him change. Someone young, who understands what he’s going through.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “But that’s not how we do things, Holly.”

  “I know. I know. But I think this is an extreme case here. Which is why I’d like to risk it. Because I really, really believe it’s the only way we’re going to pull it off this year. Someone has to go the extra mile.”

  Stephanie still looked doubtful. “So you would, what, just talk to him?”

  I nodded. “Basically. And get him to talk to me. You can accomplish a lot just by listening to someone. And I’d try to provide him something positive in his life. I’d become his friend. Sometimes all a person needs to turn themselves around is one good friend.”

  I was getting through to her. I could tell by the look on her face.

  “Okay, that might be true,” she said. “I guess I’ve had my doubts about the ‘just show them the error of their ways’ approach, if I’m being totally honest. But then what would happen on Christmas Eve? We’d still have to go through the Performance part of the process, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But when you went to show Ethan his past, he’d recognize you. He’d know something strange was going on. And that could undo everything.”

  I’d already thought this through. “He wouldn’t recognize me,” I said quickly. “The costume is pretty extreme, trust me. If I was wearing it right now, you wouldn’t know it was me.”

  She bit her lip. “I don’t know, Holly.”

  “You have to trust me,” I said. “I’ve been doing this job for a long time. I just have this feeling about it. Sometimes that’s something that happens when you’re a Ghost—you sense things that ordinary people don’t. And there’s definitely a feeling I’ve had about Ethan Winters, ever since Blackpool first called his name. It’s like a little voice in the back of my mind, telling me I have to do something big, something extra. So when that kind of thing happens, when I feel that . . . special intuition, I try to pay attention to it, let it guide me.”

  Stephanie was still biting her lip. Then she said, “You’re right.”

  I hardly dared to breathe. “I’m right?”

  “I trust you to know what you’re doing. And if you say you’re being guided by something—something obviously bigger than us, you know, you should do what it’s telling you.” She smiled bravely. “I’ll help you. Whatever you need, I’ll do it.”

  I poured her a little more Diet Coke. “You can’t tell anyone at the office. They wouldn’t understand. They’re so stuck on the way they’ve always done things, you know.”

  She grinned. “This is kind of exciting. Like we’re secret agents.”

  “Exactly like secret agents,” I pointed out. “I’d get in big, big trouble if anyone at Project Scrooge ever found out what we were doing. We’d both get in big trouble.”

  “I’m like a vault.” She made that lip-zipping motion again and then beamed at me. “I won’t breathe a word.”

  “Cool,” I said, and I couldn’t help smiling myself. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “What do you need me to do first?” she asked.

  “We have to get into Dave’s office. We need to know about the surveillance shifts—who and when each member of his team is assigned to monitor Ethan. And we need a detailed description of Ethan’s daily schedule.”

  “I know just how to get that,” she said.

  Her badge. Which for some crazy reason would work on Dave’s office door when mine wouldn’t.

  “Cupcakes,” she said. “Nobody can resist cupcakes.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Cupcakes!” Stephanie called out in the middle of the hall at exactly 11:30 the next morning. Operation Cupcake, as she called it, was a go. “There are cupcakes in the Go Room!”

  That got everyone’s attention fast—heads started popping out of doors and people began shuffling down the halls just as fast as their feet would carry them to the free cupcakes. Pretty soon the Go Room was crowded with people stuffing their faces with cupcakes. Plus, we had chips and a veggie tray with dip and soda, and the song “A Holly Jolly Christmas” was playing on the loudspeaker. All Stephanie, by the way. I hated that song.

  “I made one just for you. See, it has an M.” Stephanie handed a cupcake to Marty, who was staring at her kind of glassy-eyed.

  “Uh, thanks, Stephanie,” he mumbled. “Thanks a lot.”

  It wasn’t just the cupcakes attracting the attention, either. We’d stayed up all night baking, and somehow in the delirium of this morning, I’d decided to give Stephanie a makeover. So today she was wearing a charcoal-gray pencil skirt and a lavender Dolce & Gabbana top I’d found on the clearance rack at Bloomingdale’s a few years ago. The lavender was a good color on her; it brought out the blue of her eyes. It’d be better if she were wearing contacts, but she didn’t have any and she was as blind as a bat without her glasses, she said. Still, with the shimmery violet eye shadow and mascara I’d put on her, a dash of blush and highlight on her cheekbones, some mouthwash and a rose-petal-colored lipstick, she was looking much better than usual. I’d curled her long blond hair and pinned it into a simple updo that escaped down her back. She was a bit wobbly in my black suede heels—knockoffs, but more attractive than Stephanie’s inventory of terrible flats—but the look rocked on her. She appeared to be a college-age business professional for once. Like a bona fide grown-up.

  “Hey, where’d you get the cupca—” Grant shuffled into the Go Room and came to a full stop in front of Stephanie. “W
hoa. What happened to you? You look . . . nice.”

  She frowned, revealing these cute little bumps on her forehead. “You don’t like how I usually look?”

  Grant scratched the back of his neck. “Oh, no, I love how you usually look. It’s just that you look extra nice today.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled sweetly. “Hey, could you do me a little favor?”

  “Whatever my lady desires,” he said.

  She laughed. “Could you help me pass these out?”

  She handed him a tray of the cupcakes. And off they went together, with Marty following behind hoping for another cupcake.

  Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Boz cruising past the Go Room with his typical long-legged strides, but then he paused and came back to the door to watch Stephanie and Co. dispense their sugary goodness. He seemed momentarily confused. “What’s going on in here? Is this your doing, Havisham?”

  I raised my hands in mock surrender. “Don’t look at me. It was all Stephanie’s idea. They’re French vanilla with fudge frosting.”

  Boz went over and got a cupcake. “This is delicious,” he said between mouthfuls. “Now I need tea.”

  I pointed to the electric teapot in the corner. Stephanie really had thought of everything. I was going to get some myself, but just then Dave strolled in with a bunch of his people, looking both confused and delighted. Which was what I’d been waiting for.

  “Cupcakes! Get a cupcake!” Stephanie sang out.

  “I love cupcakes!” Dave exclaimed.

  Time for me to go.

  There were very few stragglers in the hall, and if I saw one I said something like, “There are cupcakes in the Go Room—hurry and get one before they’re gone!” and then they’d start running. Just before I reached Dave’s office door, I stopped and looked around. Nobody was watching. I zipped up the Hoodie just in case and pulled on the hood. Then I slipped Stephanie’s badge out of my pocket and swiped it. The door beeped and swung open.