I didn’t feel anything different. “Okay. Thank you?”
“Just wait until you see what it can do.” They took my hands and pulled me over to the monitoring station.
There, on one of the screens, was Ethan, lying on his back with one arm thrown over his head.
“Here.” Grant pointed to another monitor.
It was, as far as I could tell, a video feed of the monitor itself. Which showed the monitor, and a little monitor inside of that one, and an even tinier one inside of that one, and back and back. An eternity of monitors.
Marty and Grant high-fived each other. “It works!” Grant said. “Well, I mean, at least the visual part works. We’ll still have to test the other part.”
“The other part.” I was starting to get a bad feeling about this little invention, whatever it was.
“Let’s test it real quick,” Marty said. “Close your eyes, Holly.”
I frowned. “I don’t think I—”
“Come on, boss! You’re going to love this,” Grant pleaded. “Trust me.”
“Do it in the name of science,” said Marty.
Stephanie looked at me and smiled. “I bet it’s going to be neat.”
She was back to wearing her own quirky clothes—a blue top with little gray foxes all over it, black pants, and a gray button-up sweater. My gaze went instantly to her feet—her ballet flats had rabbit ears sticking out of the fronts.
My makeover hadn’t stuck. So very sad.
“Whatevs.” I closed my eyes.
“Now, no matter what happens, don’t think about an elephant,” Marty said.
Which of course made me instantly picture an elephant.
“Oh, wow!” Stephanie gasped from beside me.
“How about a pink elephant?” Grant said.
Then the three of them, Marty, Grant, and Stephanie, all burst out laughing.
“That’s amazing!” Stephanie said. “So, what, you can read what she’s thinking?”
Uh-oh.
“Yeah, if she’s thinking about an image—it only reads what she sees and hears, not her actual thoughts,” said Marty.
“What that means,” explained Grant, “is that now we can actually see not only what’s going on inside of the Lamp’s head, but what’s happening inside of a Scrooge’s brain when she connects with him. We’ll be able to see everything Holly sees, and we can even record it so we can analyze it later—maybe show clips of it at the weekly meetings, et cetera.”
He and Marty high-fived again.
This was bad. The last thing I wanted was for the entire company to be able to see what was going on inside of my head. Or Ethan’s head, for that matter. I opened my eyes and tore the electrode off my head. “You know, guys, I don’t think this is a good idea . . .”
I trailed off. Because Boz had just entered the room.
“Hello, Team Lamp,” he greeted us with his usual deadly cheerful smile. “How are we today?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I came to witness this new gadget these two geniuses have come up with.” He shook hands with Grant and Marty. “Won’t that be something, to see what you see?”
“That will be something,” I agreed faintly.
Grant checked Ethan’s vitals on a monitor. “Ethan’s ready.”
Terrific.
Boz patted me on the shoulder. “You don’t mind if I watch you work, do you, Havisham?”
I plastered a smile on my face. “Of course not.”
“Splendid.” Boz took a seat behind the monitors.
Stephanie handed me the Hoodie, and I put it on. Grant checked the sound levels for my earbud. We dimmed the lights and fired up the Portal, I put up the hood, and then I was in Ethan’s bedroom.
I was understandably nervous. I was also pretty disappointed, like crushed, at the idea that I wasn’t going to be able to dig up any more of Ethan’s memories of us. Not so long as everyone could follow along. Stupid Grant and Marty. Inventing things. I never asked them to invent things. Why couldn’t they just do the bare minimum at their jobs like everyone else?
Good mood gone.
I took my time getting over to Ethan’s bed. He was sleeping soundly, one arm still curled around his head. It was quiet except for the deep, rhythmic chuff of his breath.
I sprayed him with the lavender deep-sleep mist.
“You’re good to go, Holly,” said Grant in my ear. “He’s ready.”
I took out the new transducer and applied it, first to his head and then to mine.
A few minutes ago I’d hoped that Ethan might be dreaming about me, but now I was praying he wasn’t. Then I’d have some serious explaining to do.
The minute I touched his hand, I saw the pool, but I didn’t let us stay there for more than a split second, on the off chance that we’d come face-to-face with Victoria. I hurried us right into the stores of his memories and started to move past the barrage of images and sensations that flooded through my brain.
There was the little girl in the tiara.
The smell of rain on a hot city sidewalk.
A landscape of barren red rocks—Mars? Why was he thinking about Mars, of all things?
“Whoa, this is so awesome,” came Grant’s voice in my ear. “We can see everything.”
Yeah. Awesome. Right.
“Um, this is all good stuff, Holly,” said Grant a little hesitantly, “but Boz says that you should seek out the Fezziwig.”
Oh good, now Boz was going to be telling me how to do my job. As if I didn’t know I was supposed to be looking for the Fezziwig—that was this month’s assignment, as usual. But if Boz wanted the Fezziwig, I’d find the stupid Fezziwig.
This time I thought I’d check out Ethan’s mom as the Fezziwig. From what I’d seen in Ethan’s memories, his mom had been pretty cool, before his dad had died, anyway. Then she’d essentially had the same reaction to losing her spouse that my dad did. She’d found a replacement—a new husband and an entirely new life, which wasn’t fair to Ethan, but still, she’d tried to be a good mom. She was kind. Generous with people. Talented at what she did—she was a world-class photographer, Dave had informed us once. All of these were qualities of a good Fezziwig. And I also knew that Ethan’s mom liked a good party. Because when he thought of the word party, he immediately connected it to his mother.
I went back into Ethan’s memory bank, looking for a Christmas party with his mom, and almost immediately I stumbled upon a great one.
Christmas music blared from a stereo in the corner of the living room. The air was full of good smells: trays of roast ham and turkey, fresh-baked rolls, and pumpkin pie. Ethan’s mom was wearing a white apron with holly leaves embroidered around the edges, and she was singing along to the music.
Ethan, however—the seven-year-old version—was not in the best mood.
“Oh my God, he’s, like, adorable,” came Grant’s voice in my ear.
“Do I have to wear this?” Ethan complained loudly, shuffling into the kitchen struggling to pull a red sweater vest over his head. Even back then, Ethan had the good sense to oppose sweater vests.
“You look very handsome,” his mother insisted, tucking in his shirt and then smoothing down his hair.
“Come on, Mom,” he bellyached. “I hate this. It’s lame.”
“And . . . there he is,” Grant observed. “That’s Ethan, all right.”
I wanted to tell him to shut up, but this time it would be on tape. And in front of Boz.
The doorbell buzzed. Ethan’s mom turned back to the stove. “Ethan, sweetie, can you be the doorman for this party? Let people in for me? Take their coats?”
He made a face at her.
“That’s my good boy.”
His dad entered the room buttoning up a red-and-green plaid shirt. He smelled like soap and aftershave, and his hair was still wet from the shower.
“Do I have to wear this?” he asked, frowning.
She produced a sprig of mistletoe from her apron p
ocket and dangled it over his head. “Come here, you.”
“Well, if I must,” he said with a sly smile.
“You must. You simply must.”
They kissed. When they came apart his dad was holding a square silver box. He waggled his eyebrows up and down and put it in his wife’s hand. “I feel the need to decorate you this fine evening,” he said.
Inside was a ring with a set of blue stones across the top. Ethan’s mom gasped when she saw it. “Baby! This is beautiful.” She put it on the ring finger of her right hand and then pulled it in to her chest. “This is too much. We can’t afford it.”
“We can’t afford this party, either,” he said. “But some things are worth sacrificing for. That’s what you said, right?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “We should spend money on things that bring us together. I’m not sure this brings us together, but thank you.”
“Sure it brings us together,” said Ethan’s dad. “Look.” He pulled her in for another kiss, a deeper, much more passionate kiss this time.
Kid Ethan thought the kissing was disgusting. Mostly Grown Up Ethan, who was reliving the moment with me, like a dream, missed his dad and his mom so much in that moment that both he and I felt it like a physical pain, a phantom limb that was severed a long time ago and could never be reattached. As usual, I knew that feeling all too well.
The door buzzed again.
“Is anyone going to get that?” Jack materialized from the hallway. Her gaze landed on her kissing parental units. “Gross, you two. Get a room.”
I never thought it was gross when my parents kissed. I’d gone to the set once when I was four or five, when my mom was shooting her TV show, and I’d seen another man kiss her while they were filming a scene. I’d ruined the take by running up and kicking that guy in the shin. Hard.
A stranger kissing my mother—that was gross.
But when my parents kissed, it always looked like what they should be doing.
“Uh, Holly?” Grant said in my ear.
My mom loved parties, too, only she hadn’t been my Fezziwig: that honor had gone to my great-aunt on my dad’s side—Sonja, who never met a party she didn’t like and often invited all the area’s homeless to the celebration. But my mom . . . my mom used to throw parties regularly at our old house in Beverly Hills, which was where we lived before she died and my dad moved us out to Malibu. I remember going downstairs in my pajamas on the mornings of those parties and seeing her already at work preparing for the night’s festivities: the glasses laid out sparkling in row after row, the mounds of plates and bundles of napkins and silverware piled high, the gardener stringing lights up around the back patio and dropping floating flowers into the pool, the smell of the most mouthwatering food on the planet wafting through the air.
She loved Christmas parties most of all, I think. Christmas had been a big deal in her family—she’d grown up back east and hadn’t moved to California until she was fifteen, and some part of her never left my grandma’s big white house in snowy Vermont. Her family would start celebrating the holiday season the day after Thanksgiving and wouldn’t stop until the first of January. There was a special sausage soup they’d eat on Christmas and a special eggnog-like drink with coconut and rum, and let’s not forget the turkey. My mother freaking loved turkey. She was a vegetarian for most of the year, but not at Christmas. She loved Christmas so much.
“Uh, Holly,” said Grant. “I think you’ve lost the memory. I don’t know what we’re getting here, but it’s . . . something else. Not the party.”
Except that last Christmas. My grandma came to take care of her that last Christmas, and she cooked up all my mom’s favorites: sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes and a three-bean salad that’d been my great-grandmother’s recipe, stuffing and green bean casserole and homemade rolls, and she’d made my favorite: cinnamon rolls, which we also ate on Christmas morning. But my mother refused to eat any of it.
“What, you want me to be a cow?” she spat, which was ridiculous because she had to weigh only about seventy-five pounds by then.
My grandma kept trying. Kept offering. Kept cooking and bringing the meals to my mother in bed.
“I can’t even taste anything!” my mother screamed, and then she threw the plate of gingerbread cookies against the wall, where it shattered.
She knew she was going to die by then. That was all she could taste.
“Stop it,” my grandma said. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Why shouldn’t I feel sorry for myself?” she cried. “What, you want me to just lie down and make my peace? Say I’m ready to go, and thank God for it? No!”
“You need to think of your daughter.”
Her eyes flitted to me, where I was standing near the door. “I can’t bear to think about her. I can’t.”
I ran out of the room when she said that. Later Dad found me sitting at the edge of the pool with my legs in the water, crying silently. He sat down beside me. He’d probably heard about what happened. I mean, she’d been screaming so loud, everybody probably heard her. Everybody knew.
He didn’t say anything, but he sat with me until the sun went down and I got cold, and then he said I should go in.
“Sometimes I hate her,” I whispered.
“It’s okay. She didn’t mean it, you know. She loves you. She’s just scared.”
I shook my head. “No. It’s not okay. Sometimes I wish she would die already.”
It was the worst thing to say, but it was true. I did mean it, which was the unforgivable thing about this memory.
Memory. I was in a memory. Wait.
“Holly! Come in, Holly!” Grant was almost shouting at me. I blinked a few times.
Oh crap. Where was Ethan? I’d totally lost my connection.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped.
“Boz says you should come on back, Holly,” Grant said in my ear. “Just come back.”
When I came through the Portal, everyone was quiet. Stephanie was clutching a tissue, her eyes red-rimmed and her face all blotchy. Grant and Marty both looked faintly embarrassed. Even Boz was solemn. I expected him to give me a kind of lecture on how I should have stayed focused on Ethan, but instead he just said, “That was . . . vivid. I didn’t know it would be like that.”
He didn’t know the half of how vivid it could be. He hadn’t felt what Ethan felt. What I felt. He didn’t know anything about what that was like.
I nodded. “I keep telling you, you should pay me more to do this job.”
I went to pass by him, but he put a hand on my shoulder. “Holly . . .”
I coughed to clear my throat. “Look, I screwed up. I’m sorry. But we’ve got the Fezziwig on the books now, right? That’s all that matters, isn’t it?” I glanced around. “Can we all agree that his mom is the Fezziwig?”
“Yes. The Fezziwig. It would seem so.” Boz let me go, and I fled to my office.
It took a while for me to calm down. I sat at my desk and turned my dad’s watch over and over in my hand, remembering. I hadn’t thought about that day for a long time—the day my mom went half crazy and threw my grandma’s cookies at the wall. The sound of that plate shattering. The look on my grandmother’s face when she said, “Stop it.”
There was a light tap at the door. Stephanie.
“I brought you some tea.” She handed me a mug. The heat felt good on my hands, which were like ice.
“Are you okay?” she asked as I sipped at it slowly. “That was intense for me just watching. I can’t imagine how it would be for you.”
“All in a day’s work.”
She bit her lip and looked at her bunny shoes. “My mom died, too, you know. I was little, and I don’t remember much, but . . .”
I didn’t want to talk about it. “Everybody’s mother dies,” I said. “It doesn’t make you special.” I was referring to myself there, not her. But hurt flashed in her big blue eyes.
“You’re right. Of course, you’re right. Anyway. I thought maybe you
might want to do something this weekend,” she said. “Maybe go shopping or see a movie . . .”
For a second I was actually tempted by her offer. Movies almost always made me forget myself. But then I remembered.
“I can’t this weekend.” I sat up a little, finding a hint of my smile again. Okay, so tonight had been a disaster, and totally not what I’d been hoping for, but Ethan wouldn’t remember it—it was locked away in his subconscious brain. I still had Ethan in the Real World to think about. To look forward to.
“Sorry,” I said to Stephanie. “I have plans.”
FIFTEEN
“THIS IS A DATE, RIGHT?” Ethan turned to grin at me. We were standing against the bright orange rail on the bow of the Staten Island Ferry. It was past four in the morning. The breeze was blowing Ethan’s hair around in the most adorable way. His eyes were deep blue tonight, and I kept finding myself staring into them.
“Yes,” I answered. “Why, does it not seem like a date to you?” A few hours earlier, we’d had dinner on the roof of the Kimberly Hotel under a canopy of little white lights with the Midtown cityscape looming in the background. Which in my mind definitely felt like a date, except for the two-minute ride in the hotel elevator, where I caught sight of the surveillance camera on the ceiling and considered whether or not Dave could have possibly been watching us. Which was silly of me, because of course Dave wouldn’t be watching some random elevator in a random hotel. Still, I felt much safer when we were outside in the open. Like there on the boat, where it felt like we were setting out on some big adventure. Which, in some ways, we kind of were.
“It’s not like any date I’ve ever been on,” Ethan said.
“Have you been on a lot of dates?” I arched an eyebrow at him.
He smiled like he was almost afraid to tell me. “A few.”
I put my elbow against the rail and leaned my chin into my hand. “And where did you go, on these few dates you’ve had?”
“Dinner. Movies. Concerts. I took a girl to a Broadway show once.”
I gasped like I was so jealous. “Which one?”
“The one with the witch?” He obviously couldn’t remember the name.
“Oh, the deeply misunderstood witch, the one who’s actually the good guy even though we’ve been taught to think she’s the villain,” I clarified. I’d sneaked into that one with my Hoodie once. I’d liked it, for obvious reasons. “And was she impressed, this girl you took to the theater?”