“I guess.”
I turned to look out at the city. The water along the edge of the river seemed gold, there were so many lights reflecting off it, and in the distance, where the water was black and absolutely empty, we could see the faint blue pillar of the Statue of Liberty. New York was starting to grow on me. Finally. The air was cool and tinged with salt. I felt alive, so completely alive again, just standing there with Ethan as the boat skimmed over the water, looking out at the glowing city.
But Ethan was looking at me. “Are you cold?”
I was fine, but I said, “Why, are you going to offer me your jacket?”
“No. I was just curious,” he said, and I laughed, and he laughed, and when we stopped laughing he had his arm around me.
“This is better,” he said.
“Much better,” I agreed. “And warmer.”
“Tell me more about you,” he said. “I want to know.”
I couldn’t help the little wrinkle of a frown that popped up for a few seconds. There was not much I could tell him, not much in my life that was normal or real. But I made up some stuff about the situation with my overbearing “dad,” who started to sound more and more like Boz the more I talked about him.
“He sounds pretty frustrating, your dad,” Ethan said after a while.
“He is. But he cares.” I tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “At least there’s that.”
Ethan nodded, his eyes suddenly distant, and I realized the idea of a dad out there caring about you must be painful for him. I tried to backpedal.
“Still. My dad’s so freaking condescending,” I said. “He always thinks he knows what’s best for me. But he doesn’t even really know me. He doesn’t bother to find out who I am. He just tells me what to do.”
“I get that,” Ethan said. “Is your dad starting to blab on and on about the future, and how bright it is? I hate it when they talk about the future.”
“College, you mean?” I asked. My dad—my real dad, not Boz—had only talked college with me one time. He’d said he’d hoped I’d go to USC or UCLA or Pepperdine, somewhere local, so I wouldn’t go away and leave him all alone.
“That’s the point of college, isn’t it?” I’d told him. “To get away from our parents.”
Yes, I’d been a little brat. Or maybe even a big one.
“Not just college. The future,” Ethan said, pronouncing the word future like it was in all caps. “My dad was—is—always talking about how amazing the future is going to be. How I’m going to grow up to be this supergenius, world-altering person. But I keep thinking, maybe not. Maybe I’m just a regular person. And maybe the future is going to suck. You don’t know.”
“So you’re, like, a total optimist,” I teased.
“I would say I’m a realist,” he said. “I just think, we don’t get promised anything good in this life. Bad things happen all the time. They’re happening right now, somewhere out there. They’ll keep happening. Who knows? Maybe this moment, right here, is as good as I’m ever going to be.”
He leaned closer. His eyes dropped to my lips. I sucked in a breath. I was weirdly nervous about kissing Ethan. Like it was all fun and games until someone got kissed. And then it would be really real.
I pulled back. “So is this the part where you say, ‘We don’t know what will happen tomorrow, so we better live for tonight, baby’?” I laughed. “That’s your big move?”
He made a production of removing his arm from around me. “Not anymore.”
“Aw.” I made a sympathetic noise. “I blew it, didn’t I?”
“You did,” he said, but he was smiling.
I turned to face him and put my arms around his neck, like we were going to start slow dancing to a song only we could hear. “Just so you know, I don’t think you’re a regular person.”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t think you’re a supergenius, either, though. But you’re pretty cute.”
He winced. “Cute.”
“Very cute,” I said.
“Well, I think you’re downright adorable,” he said.
“Hey!”
“Like a kitten,” he added, his hands settling on my waist in a way that made my pulse pick up. “An orange and white stripy kitten.”
“Oh, but you’re cute like a puppy,” I said. “A golden retriever puppy. Wrapped in a pink fuzzy blanket. With a bow around its neck.”
“Oh, man.” He pulled me a little closer. “That’s horrible.”
“Right? You’re so cute it makes me want to—”
He was looking at my mouth again. God, we were like magnets pulling toward each other. We had been since the beginning. He leaned in. Our lips were inches apart.
“Puke,” I murmured.
He sighed and closed his eyes. “Hey, Tori, are you ever going to let me kiss you?”
“Let you? Shouldn’t it be kind of mutual?” I rasped.
“Isn’t it kind of mutual?” His eyes opened and searched mine. I bit my lip.
“All right, it’s totally mutual,” I agreed. I leaned up and pressed my lips to his. Kissing him felt like falling, in a way. It felt like jumping without a net.
“Okay,” he breathed when we finally pulled apart. “Wow.”
I put my hand over my mouth, kind of shocked. I mean, I’d just kissed the Scrooge. There was no turning back now. It was happening. It was real.
He leaned in again but I stepped back.
“That was . . . amazing, but now maybe we could just get to know each other better?” I suggested faintly. “I’d like to talk.”
“I love to talk,” he said, which was funny because I knew that wasn’t true, but he didn’t know I knew that wasn’t true. “I’ll talk your ear off.”
I laughed. “Please don’t. I like my ears where they are.”
“Me too.” He pretended to inspect one of my ears. “You have very nice ears.”
My ears? That had to be, like, the least attractive part of me. And his breath against the back of my neck was making me crazy. I shivered and pushed back from him. “Talk.”
“Okay, talk,” he agreed.
So that’s what we did—we talked. For hours, we rode the ferry back and forth, and we talked. I invented some more nonsense about people at my school and class and my imaginary life, and Ethan complained about how much he hated all the hoop-jumping you had to do to get through school, and how maybe he wanted to take a year off before he went to college. We chatted about the music we liked and places we wanted to see in the world and politics and even a little bit about fashion, and then the sun came up, blazing over the water, coloring us both with gold.
Ethan yawned and checked his watch. “This was fun, but I’m going to have to sleep at school now.”
“Dream of me,” I told him, which was an inside joke. But that’s also what it felt like with Ethan. Like I was living a kind of dream.
And also kind of like I was waking up.
“We’re ready whenever you are, Holly,” Grant said. “Holly? Holly?”
I blinked. I was standing in front of the glowing door in the Transport Room, about to cross back into Ethan’s apartment. Back to work.
“Earth to Holly?” Grant said into the microphone. “Come in, Holly.”
Stephanie touched my shoulder. “Do you need anything?” The big blue eyes behind her glasses were concerned.
I shook my head. “Sorry. I’m fine. I’m ready.”
The lights in the Transport Room dimmed. The door started to hum. I opened the door slowly, padding silently into Ethan’s apartment. I knew the floor plan so well by now I could navigate his bedroom easily in the dark, slipping silently around the edge of his bed to the side where he was sleeping.
He sighed and turned over to face me.
God, he really was the most insanely beautiful boy I’d ever seen. He smelled amazing, for one thing, even his breath, which washed over me as the air moved in and out from between his slightly parted lips. My head swam with it—his be
auty, his scent, his heat. I felt like I could just stand there indefinitely, watching him, close enough to see every curving eyelash, the slight dent in his chin. All it would take would be for me to lean forward about two feet. I could be the Prince to his Snow White in the glass casket, and wake him with a kiss.
I couldn’t stop thinking about our kiss on the boat. How amazing and right it had felt. How good.
“Geez, she’s just standing there,” came Grant’s voice in my ear. “Holly?”
I coughed and moved back a little. Act normal, I told myself. Do the job.
I walked myself through all the usual business: the transducer, holding his hand, merging into his dreams. But when I arrived inside Ethan’s mind, he was dreaming about me.
He was dreaming about me!
In the dream we were standing at the edge of the ferry. Only in the dream, Ethan was wearing a business suit. I was wearing a little red dress. I could see myself from his perspective, staring into my own brown eyes, rubbing a soft golden curl of my hair between his fingers, honing in on my lips. I could even see the stupid little zit, although Ethan didn’t think anything of it.
“This is a date, right?” he murmured. He lowered his head to kiss me.
“What the . . .” I heard Grant say in disbelief. Because Grant could totally see what I saw. Because of the stupid new transducer. This was all being televised at the office. And recorded.
Everything happened very fast then. I yanked away from Ethan, both physically and mentally, and ripped off the transducer. Which totally woke him up.
He jerked upright in bed. I stumbled away from him.
“Who is that?” he called out, his voice sharp. It was dark—thank God it was dark—but he still saw someone there. A shadow. “What are you doing in my room?”
I pulled the hood over my head and vanished.
Ethan turned on the lamp next to the bed and leapt to his feet. The sudden light blinded me. I crept to a corner of the room and waited, hardly daring to breathe, as Ethan looked around. He checked by every large piece of furniture. He looked under his bed. He threw open the closet, which about gave me a heart attack, but there was nothing there but the neat line of his shirts. The closet door wasn’t the Portal anymore, because Grant kept the Portal closed during the time I was in a Scrooge’s bedroom, opening it only for the few minutes it took me to come in and out. Which was company policy because of situations such as these.
“Tori?” Ethan whispered.
Maybe he could smell me, I thought. Or sense me, somehow. I pressed my eyes closed. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Without the Portal I’d have to get out the hard way. The elevator. The doorman. The street. Or I could just stay here and wait for Ethan to go back to sleep. Which, judging by the freaked-out look on his face, could be a really long time.
But then another door slammed loudly somewhere else in the apartment. Ethan whipped around toward the sound and then strode out of the room.
I ran to the closet door.
“Now, Grant, now,” I whispered fervently. “Get me out of here.”
The edge of the door began to glow, and I opened it and tumbled back into the Transport Room. I shut the door and leaned against it, gasping for breath. The lights came up. Grant, Marty, and Stephanie all ran up to me.
“Holy crap, Holly!” said Grant.
“Dude,” said Marty, his face almost green. “Dude.”
Stephanie tried to smile, but her face was pale, too. “Well, that was a close one,” she said with a nervous laugh.
Of course there had to be an incident report on the whole thing. It was a Code 2319, after all, which was shorthand for: HOLY CRAP THE SCROOGE IS AWAKE!
In the entire history of the company, it had only ever happened twice before. It was Stephanie’s quick thinking (she’d had the idea to open a Portal in another room and then slam the door to draw Ethan out of his bedroom) that had allowed me to return to Project Scrooge safely. And I’d left the transducer on the floor. Which meant the team had to go back to get it.
It’d been a tough night.
“So do you want to tell me what happened?” Boz asked as I sat across from him at his desk the following morning.
“I don’t really know what happened.”
“The tape shows something I don’t know how to interpret,” he said grimly. “It appears as though Mr. Winters saw you in his mind. He was dreaming of you.”
I thought up a lie, and I thought it up quick.
“It wasn’t Ethan’s mind you saw in the video.” I rubbed my hand over my face like I had a headache. “It was mine.”
Boz’s bushy eyebrows were low over his dark eyes. “Yours.”
“I was imagining that . . .” I trailed off guiltily. “I guess I just pictured . . . Ethan and me . . . together.”
Boz’s eyebrows lifted. “I see.”
“I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again.”
He scribbled something down on a piece of paper. “The footage also shows that you didn’t apply the deep-sleep spray when you first entered the room. Which explains why Mr. Winters woke up.”
I was starting to feel slightly sick to my stomach. This was bad, so bad.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I don’t know how I forgot.”
“You’ve been distracted lately,” he said. “You’re unfocused, Havisham, and you’re making small mistakes, like that sift when you remembered your own mother instead of Ethan’s. You were very late finding the Fezziwig. You’re even filing your paperwork incorrectly. If it weren’t for Stephanie, you’d be a total disaster.”
He paused. I realized that he was waiting for me to explain myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
His frown deepened. “Are you developing feelings for Ethan Winters?”
The question seemed to hang in the air for several seconds before I finally sputtered, “Feelings for Ethan? For a Scrooge?”
“It wouldn’t be so surprising,” Boz said. “You’re spending a great deal of time with this boy.”
I froze.
“You’re inside his head, privy to his dreams, his fears and desires, his joys and sorrows, his most private inner thoughts and most treasured memories. There’s a level of intimacy that comes with that. And you’re a young girl, and he’s a young man, and he’s somewhat attractive. Under these conditions, it’d be easy for you to become confused about your feelings.”
“Confused about my feelings,” I repeated.
“What we do here at Project Scrooge is personal. There’s no avoiding that. I come to love every single one of the Scrooges, in my way. Which is why it’s so painful if it doesn’t work for them, and why we all try so hard to make sure that it does work out. But you must try to remember that this is not about you, dear,” Boz said. “This is about Ethan Winters. His fate. His soul. Not yours.”
“Right. Ethan Winters.”
“It’s personal, but it mustn’t become too personal.”
If only he knew how personal it was between Ethan and me. It had always been personal. We were so alike, Ethan and I. I mean, the similarities were pretty crazy when I thought about it. Seventeen years old? Check. Filthy rich? Check. Dead parent? Check. Doomed to be killed by a car? Double check.
I shivered. Some part of me would always hear that noise in the back of my mind. The squeal of brakes.
“Havisham?” Boz prompted.
I tried to lighten the mood. “Maybe we should come up with a professional-detachment-in-the-workplace seminar for all the employees, like a Scrooge harassment training thing.”
He stared at me. “What?”
“Joke.”
“Oh. Ha-ha.” He actually attempted to laugh. “A seminar. Yes. Now, as I was saying, it’s very important for us to maintain a certain level of distance and objectivity. Is that clear, Havisham?”
“Crystal.”
“Wonderful.” He wrote a few more things down in his notepad. “I’m almost glad we had this little mishap. It gave us this ch
ance to talk.”
I suddenly felt tired. It was exhausting keeping up with it all, pretending to be someone else when I was with Ethan, pretending that Ethan was just an ordinary Scrooge when I was at work.
“Yeah,” I said. “Great talk.”
SIXTEEN
TIME STARTED TO FLY. THIS is the part where, if my life were a movie, there’d be a montage, and you’d see Ethan and me on a series of dates all throughout that fall: tasting our way through the delights of Chelsea Market, wandering the High Line slurping Popsicles, watching Shakespeare in Central Park. The trees started to turn red and the air finally cooled. At least once a week Ethan and I met at the left lion and wandered the city together, almost always outside, away from the reach of Dave’s prying cameras. It was nice, being with Ethan. It was more than nice. It felt . . . normal. Like I was a normal girl, instead of a dead one. I was alive.
It was also complicated. I wanted to be with Ethan, but what did that mean for Christmas? For the Project? For me?
These were questions I didn’t know how to answer. I just knew I had to keep seeing him.
Then one day I was in a meeting that was going just fine until Dave said, totally out of the blue, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and took a photograph out of his folder and slid it to the center of the table. “I think she might be Ethan’s Belle.”
The Belle was my job, not Dave’s. So I was understandably surprised.
“What?” I grabbed the eight-by-ten and pulled it toward me. It was a surveillance photo from one of Dave’s cameras. It was a bit grainy, but you could still tell that this girl was gorgeous. She was wearing a white Badgley Mischka gown that made my breath catch, with a high front and a swooping back, a jeweled belt at the waist. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a simple, sleek ponytail. Clean, minimal makeup. A breathtaking beaded handbag.
“Where is this?” I asked.
“A fund-raiser Ethan attended last week,” Dave answered.