Casual Friday. She looked pretty good, actually. “I’m happy for you,” I said.
“What was going on in Ethan’s brain this time?” She smiled excitedly. “Did you find the Belle? Because, believe me, after that whole mess with Ethan not even showing up to the ball, we could use some good news right now. Finding the Belle would fix everything.”
“You weren’t watching the monitors?” I asked.
Her face flushed pink again. “Uh . . . not exactly.”
Nice. But I could make that work for me.
“I’m not sure about the Belle yet,” I said.
After Stephanie went home I spent hours alone in my office thinking things over, trying to understand what it all meant. Because, okay, maybe Dave was right, but Ethan wasn’t lying when he claimed that nothing of any real significance had ever happened with Bella since that day in the bathroom when they were seven years old.
They’d never had a relationship.
Which meant that they’d never broken up.
Which meant that I couldn’t take Ethan to Bella on Christmas Eve to show him all that he’d missed out on—all the love and happiness that could have been. Unless what Dave had been saying lately was also true. Ethan was supposed to have been at the ball. Maybe that’s when it would have started with Bella.
And I’d made sure that he hadn’t been at that ball. I’d changed his future.
No going back.
I used the Hoodie to sneak into the Transport Room. The recording of me sifting Ethan’s memory that night was cued up, ready for people to review later. By the morning the whole place would know that we’d officially found Ethan’s Belle. They’d be strategizing for how to get him back on track.
I watched the video once, twice, three times, until I’d committed every detail to memory.
And then I deleted the file.
NINETEEN
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I concocted this little fantasy for myself, one where after Christmas Ethan and I would still be together. We’d be together more, even, because then the company would no longer be watching him. Not closely, anyway. According to Tox, who used to work downstairs, remember, the company checked in on their past Scrooges once or twice a year, tops. Just to make sure everything was still going smoothly. So in January, PS would move on to a different Scrooge. I could have Ethan all to myself.
That’s assuming he succeeded where I myself had failed. He had to pass his Scrooge test.
But I wasn’t really worried. As the days passed, Ethan seemed less and less like a Scrooge to me and more like a regular boy. Sometimes I’d forget that was why I’d met him. Except for the occasional lie he told me, which was usually about his parents, he wasn’t like any Scrooge I’d ever known.
For instance: he bought me things, like chocolates and a fake ID. One day he presented me with my very own secret cell phone, so that we’d be able to speak freely. Of course, I couldn’t actually talk to him on it, because Project Scrooge had his phone tapped and I was sure they’d recognize my voice. So I had to keep it down to ambiguous texts. But I made it work.
Still, that was the thing: Scrooges didn’t buy people presents. They didn’t spend their money if they could help it. They didn’t smile as much as Ethan smiled at me. They didn’t tell jokes. They didn’t kiss.
It was like, whenever Ethan was with me (and he was with me more and more, in those days), he stopped being a Scrooge.
The company, of course, noticed that something out of the ordinary was going on. Their Scrooge 173 had this annoying habit of disappearing off the radar whenever their backs were turned, it seemed, and they didn’t know where he went.
It was clearly driving Boz bat-crazy. I’d never seen him so worked up.
“It’s a girl,” he was saying during one of our November meetings. “He’s met someone. I know it.”
“How do you even know it’s a girl?” I asked. “It could be anything. He could be playing poker or have a secret drug habit, for all you can tell.”
“It’s a girl; I know it. He has that love spring in his step,” Boz said.
Love spring. Aw.
“I’m on it,” Dave said. “I have my team working around the clock. We’ll find out what’s going on with him. I promise.”
My time with Ethan was really making Dave look bad. It was making us all look bad, actually. It was mid-November, and the company still didn’t have the Belle or all the locations where we’d take Ethan on Christmas Eve. I felt guilty about it, of course. It was all my fault. But I didn’t feel guilty enough to stop seeing Ethan.
“There still isn’t a Belle?” Boz said after I came up empty at yet another meeting. “Why haven’t we found a Belle yet? The Belle is very important. The Belle is critical.”
As if I didn’t know.
I felt mildly guilty about Bella. What would Boz do if he knew that I’d erased her transducer recordings? I shrugged. “I have no idea who the Belle is. Ethan’s never had a girlfriend. She just isn’t there.”
Boz frowned. “Or maybe you’re not looking very hard.”
“What?” I stared at him.
“Maybe you don’t want Ethan to have a girlfriend,” Boz added.
I actually gasped. This was the first time, like, ever, that Boz had questioned my ability to perform my job in front of the rest of the team.
“Why would I care if Ethan had a girlfriend?” I demanded. “Look. I’ve done what you’ve asked me to. I have sifted through Ethan’s love life pretty thoroughly by now, and I haven’t found anything. Nothing. Nada. I’m doing the best I can, Boz. So lay off.”
My heart was pounding. God, I was such a liar. But what else could I do?
Dave cleared his throat. “Maybe Ethan’s Belle isn’t a romantic kind of love. We’ve had Scrooges like that in the past.”
I put my hand up to stop him. “Don’t even go there.”
Boz sighed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t put so much pressure on you. I’m sure you’re doing a fine job, Havisham. It’s just . . . time is running out.”
I knew that. I knew that not having the Belle was a huge problem, but I didn’t know how to fix it without losing Ethan. And I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t lose Ethan. Not now.
Boz was about to close up the meeting when suddenly Marty—my Marty, from my team—raised his hand. “Um, sir?”
Boz stopped and looked at him. “Yes . . . Claypole, right?”
Marty winced at the Dickens name. “Right.” He shook it off. “I just wanted to ask a question real quick.”
Boz sat back. “Go ahead, young man.”
“Why is Ethan Winters the Scrooge?”
“What?” Dave asked, like he didn’t hear him correctly. “What do you mean?”
“Marty . . .” I warned.
But Marty obviously had something he wanted to get off his chest. “I haven’t been here that long, so I don’t have a lot of experience with Scrooges, but it seems to me that the reason we’re having a hard time finding what we need to with this Scrooge is because he’s not, like, a real Scrooge.”
It was totally silent in Conference Room A for a full minute. You could have heard a pin drop.
“What?” Marty looked around. “Come on, guys. I’m just saying what we’re all thinking. Ethan Winters is no Ebenezer Scrooge.”
“But why do you say that?” Boz said quickly.
Marty closed his eyes to say the lines from memory. “Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. A squeezing, wrenching, grasping . . .” He frowned. “Uh . . .”
“Grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” Grant finished for him.
Marty opened his eyes. “That’s how Dickens describes Scrooge. Does that sound even a little bit like Ethan? I mean, he’s mean-spirited at times, but he’s not a covetous old sinner.”
“He’s also not a very nice person,” Tox interjected.
Grant picked up where Marty left off. “He’s not even really a miser. I see his room when I run the Portal,
and the guy has some nice stuff. Expensive stuff. He’s not pinching pennies. Isn’t it possible that we have the wrong guy? Maybe it’s supposed to be the grandfather?”
“The grandfather’s dead,” someone on Dave’s team pointed out.
“Okay, so maybe not the grandfather. But somebody else.”
“And what qualifies you to recognize a good Scrooge when you see one?” came a voice from the back of the room. I turned to see Stephanie standing up. She was wearing a violet-colored dress made out of sweatshirt material, but she’d taken off her big purple glasses, which made her look about a million times better than normal. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Ethan’s obsessed with money. He’s cold. He’s greedy. He’s oblivious to the human condition—he doesn’t see the people in need around him. He’s completely self-absorbed. That makes him just like all the other Scrooges.”
Ethan’s not, though, I thought. He wasn’t cold or super greedy or self-absorbed. But that was Marty’s point. He wasn’t that bad.
But then, I never thought I was that bad, either.
“He does fit the classic definition of an Ebenezer Scrooge,” Stephanie insisted. “His name even starts with the letter E. Coincidence? I think not.” She took a deep breath. “And there’s more to it than his flaws, clearly. We shouldn’t forget that Ethan Winters has a future—an important future, right? And Blackpool could see into that future, which is why he chose Ethan in the first place. Has Blackpool ever led you in the wrong direction before? Has he ever been wrong?”
Nobody said anything, but the answer was obvious. No. Blackpool had always been right.
But Grant and Marty still weren’t happy.
“Okay, let’s say Ethan’s got the right character deficiencies or whatever, which I still think is a bit of a stretch. The problem is that he’s seventeen years old,” Grant argued. “He’s just a kid.”
“He’s still going to die within the year, like all of the others,” Stephanie retorted. Her cheeks were red and her eyes had this scary light in them. I got the sense that she and Grant had had this fight before, about Ethan.
“But maybe it’s not really about his qualifications,” continued Marty like he and Grant shared the same brain. “Maybe it’s about our chances of success. The people of Ethan’s generation—and, okay, my generation, I’ll admit it—don’t believe in magic. We don’t believe in the supernatural. We believe in special effects. We’ve been watching movies all our lives. Nothing seems new or shocking or awe-inspiring to us anymore. So when we show up in Ethan Winters’s bedroom on Christmas with our dog and pony show, do you really think he’ll take it seriously? No. He won’t believe it. And because he doesn’t believe it, he won’t change.”
Again, he had a point.
Some of the people in the room were looking at me now. Because they must know that’s almost exactly what had happened in my case: I hadn’t taken it seriously. They weren’t saying anything, but I could tell what they were thinking.
My face felt like it was on fire.
Stephanie had been vigorously shaking her head the entire time Marty was talking, so hard her ponytail fell out and her blond hair tumbled down around her shoulders. “That’s ageism,” she said primly. “Pure and simple, that’s prejudice. Just because someone’s young doesn’t mean that he can’t be open to seeing the truth.” She opened her purse and grabbed a little red book with gold-edged pages—the company-issued copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Boz had given her. Stephanie held it up. “In this story, Ebenezer Scrooge starts out doubting that what he sees is real. He thinks the whole thing might be indigestion.” She flipped quickly through the pages. “‘There’s more of gravy than of grave about you,’” she read, her voice totally confident and not the least bit squeaky. “Right? But it didn’t take long for him to figure out that it’s all really happening—because the details that he was being shown were all real, and they couldn’t be faked, and he knew that. His dead partner showing up in his room. Scenes from his past that nobody else could have known about. The real people in his real life. The company convinced the Scrooge then, and we’ll convince him now. Because that’s what we do, and if society changes in a way that makes it harder, then we have to change, too. But we can’t give up on a Scrooge just because it might not be easy.”
“Well,” Dave said at last. “There you have it. Well said, Steph.”
Stephanie sat back down.
Boz gave a bemused laugh. “That was certainly a lively debate. And it’s fine for you to have your doubts, and I understand why you have them, given that it’s November and we’re running behind schedule, what with our missing Belle, but Dorrit is right that it all comes down to Blackpool.” He turned to face Blackpool, who’d been sitting at the conference table in complete silence for this entire brouhaha. “Blackpool, perhaps you could shed a little light on why you chose Ethan as our Scrooge this year. What do you see in store for our Mr. Winters?”
Blackpool looked at the door like he was considering walking out. “I cannot foresee his immediate future at the moment,” he mumbled.
What? The rest of the staff in the conference room started to whisper among themselves. Was Blackpool actually saying that he didn’t know the future? And what did that even mean? I for one had never figured out how Blackpool’s gift was supposed to work. It was a chicken-or-egg kind of problem. Did Blackpool see what would happen because that’s what was inevitably going to happen, or did things happen because Blackpool told us they would, and we all acted accordingly, which made them happen? It made my head hurt to think about.
“I don’t understand,” Boz said. “Surely—”
“Mr. Winters’s future has become rather hazy to me,” Blackpool said gruffly. “There are unusual variables at play.”
A shiver worked its way down my spine. He didn’t mean me, did he? He couldn’t mean me.
He was glaring at me again. But that was normal. He couldn’t know I’d been meeting Ethan in real life. He couldn’t know.
Well, obviously he could know. But if he did, he would have ratted me out by now, and I’d be on the fast track straight to hell. And it’d be real hell this time—I didn’t doubt it. Anyway, Blackpool would take real pleasure in the idea of me getting fired. So he couldn’t know, or he would have told on me already.
“So you have nothing to report?” Boz sounded disturbed. This never happened, at least not in the time I’d been with the company. Blackpool never said the future was hazy. He usually acted so certain, so unshakable in his assessment of the right course of action for us to take.
Blackpool made an aggravated sound in the back of his throat. “Sometimes a Scrooge presents a number of different possible variations for the future—the most likely option, and one or two alternatives. The path seems clear enough, but there are moments when the person could step off the path and change his destiny, so to speak.”
“So Ethan has an alternate destiny?” I asked.
Blackpool cleared his throat. “Yes. More than one, in fact. I could see immediately that he has great potential.”
That was the word that was always used to describe Ethan, I realized. Potential.
“What do you mean, potential?” Marty could not let it go. “What kind of potential are we talking here?”
Blackpool was staring at the table. “He could become an influential politician, for instance.”
“A politician—what, do you mean like the president?” Stephanie asked.
Blackpool hesitated, but then he said, “It’s possible.”
“Of the United States?” gasped Marty.
Blackpool looked right at me then, his expression unreadable, and I wondered again if maybe, just maybe, he could see that I’d been spending time with Ethan. That I was involved in one of Ethan’s versions of the future. But then why hadn’t he told anyone?
Everyone was murmuring excitedly about the Ethan For President possibility. Now that would definitely constitute changing the world.
“All
right.” Boz took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Enough speculation. It’s enough to say that this Scrooge is very, very important, even if he is unconventional, as Scrooges come.”
Then he promptly dismissed the meeting. The room cleared. But Boz asked me to stay behind.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” he said when we were alone.
“Oh. You’re sorry.” I waited. “For?”
“For insinuating that you . . .”
I raised my eyebrows. “Didn’t know what I was talking about because I’m just a silly girl?”
He looked away. “I apologize. Sincerely, I do. I don’t think you’re just a silly girl, Havisham. I don’t know what came over me. I’m out of sorts myself, it seems.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “We all get burned out sometimes.”
He smiled. “Yes. I find that I often struggle during times of transition. I resist change.”
“You? No. I don’t believe it.”
He snorted. “Thank you for that.” He held the door for me, and we started to walk out together. Then we came around the corner, and there was Stephanie hugging Dave outside his office door. They were just . . . hugging. After a few seconds Dave pulled back and took her by the shoulders the way a coach gives his star player a pep talk. He said something that I couldn’t hear. She nodded and smiled.
Boz cleared his throat, and they jumped apart. Stephanie gave Dave an exaggerated pat on the shoulder. “Thanks, Copperfield. I needed that.” She turned to us and pushed her glasses up.
She took off down the hall and into the break room without another word. Dave went into his office and closed the door.
“Well, that was weird,” I observed to Boz.
“I think you’ll find ‘weird’ things happen around here every day,” Boz said.
“Dave never gives me hugs,” I sniffed.
“You should ask him sometime. He’s quite the master of hugs,” Boz said.
I held back a laugh at the idea. Dave the hugger. “How’s it going, finding his replacement? You have to find a replacement, right?”