The Afterlife of Holly Chase

  His smile faded. “Indeed I do.” He sighed.

  “Does his replacement have to be dead?”

  “We prefer that, yes,” Boz said.

  “But what if you can’t find the right dead guy?” I added as we continued down the hall. “I mean, what if there’s not an appropriately qualified dead person available to take the job? Doesn’t the replacement have to be a former Scrooge? Like me, and Blackpool?”

  “We have to properly time these transitions,” Boz answered slowly, as if he were carefully considering each word. “Sometimes, if there’s not a suitable replacement for the Ghost when we need one, we fill the position with a temporary stand-in for a short period. An interim Ghost, if you will. But usually we don’t have a problem finding our Ghosts. One seems to become mysteriously available at just the moment one is needed.”

  Interesting. This made me wonder . . .

  “Who was the GCP when I was the Scrooge?” I asked.

  Boz’s bushy eyebrows lifted in surprise.

  “Your Ghost of Christmas Past was an interim,” he said. “Before that, it was a lovely woman named Shirley. She was the Lamp for more than fifty years, that little old lady. Everyone just adored her.”

  How nice for Shirley. “So my Ghost was a temp?” That could explain a lot. Maybe I’d failed at being a Scrooge because I’d had a lousy Lamp. It’d be nice if that was the reason.

  Boz nodded. “Why are you suddenly so interested in your own case? You’ve never asked questions about your night as a Scrooge before.”

  He was right; I’d never asked. I hadn’t wanted to go there. The past was the past, I figured. There was no point in dragging it out and looking at it. It wasn’t like I could change what happened.

  “I’m not interested,” I said quickly. “I was just momentarily curious.”

  “Well, you know what they say about curiosity.”

  I blinked up at him. “What? What do they say?” I asked with false innocence.

  He frowned. “It killed the cat.”

  “I don’t own a cat,” I assured him. “Plus, I’m already dead.”

  TWENTY

  “OKAY. I’LL START. I AM thankful for all of my truly inspiring coworkers at Project Scrooge,” said Stephanie, looking fondly around the table at me and Marty and Grant and three of their nerd friends (who, come to find out, all worked in the Evaluation department at PS, although I’d never officially met any of them before) and even Dave and Blackpool, who’d also accepted her invitation to come to Thanksgiving dinner all crammed in her little apartment, which turned out to be even smaller than mine.

  “It really is the best place to work,” she added.

  From his place beside her, Grant squeezed her hand. “I’m thankful for my beautiful, smart girlfriend,” he said, “who never ceases to amaze me.” He kissed her hand, and she blushed and kissed him on the cheek.

  Vomit. But they were kind of cute together, I had to admit. Even if my Inner Yvonne was telling me that PDAs were rude in formal company. And even if Stephanie was wearing an orange striped dress and a flour-streaked blue apron with squirrels on it. And pigtails.

  “I’m grateful for my awesome friends,” said Marty, who was trying hard to look happy for the happy couple. (He was a much bigger person than I was. Plus, I’d heard he’d already relocated his affections from Stephanie to some brunette in accounting.)

  That brought us to Dave, who raised his bubbling glass of sparkling cider. “I am thankful for my family.” This was strange of him to say because a) his family wasn’t here, and b) Dave was dead, like I was, so when was the last time he’d seen his family?

  On the other side of Dave, Blackpool let out a heavy sigh like this tradition of saying what you were thankful for was unbearably stupid. “I’m grateful that this year is almost over,” he said.

  Yeah, because this year apparently sucked for Blackpool.

  “I can’t believe we still don’t have the Belle,” sighed Stephanie.

  Dave shook his head. “No work talk. Not today. Today we’re thankful for what we do have.”

  The three nerds were thankful for: stuffing, the internet, and meeting new people, respectively. I was pretty sure that the last guy meant me when he said new people, and he was using the toast to hit on me. Gross.

  “So now it’s your turn, Holly,” Stephanie said cheerfully. “What are you grateful for?”

  I took a minute to think about it. “I guess what I’m the most thankful for this year is you, Steph,” I answered finally. “I know I was . . . hard on you at first, but you turned out to be not only the best assistant a girl could ask for, but also somebody who I’m glad to call my . . . friend.”

  Stephanie’s eyes immediately went watery behind her purple glasses. “Wow,” she breathed. “Thanks, Holly. Just . . . wow.” Grant handed her a napkin, and she dabbed at her eyes.

  “To Stephanie, the host with the most,” I said, and we all raised our glasses and toasted her.

  It was true, though, what I’d said. In five years, no one had liked me enough to invite me to anything, let alone Thanksgiving. I usually spent this particular holiday eating cereal and listening to neighbor lady’s grown-up children argue through the walls. I don’t know how it happened, but somewhere along the line, Stephanie had become my friend. My only friend, if you didn’t count Ethan.

  “All right, enough gratitude,” grumbled Blackpool. “I thought there was going to be pie.”

  I met up with Ethan later. It was a good night for us to get together, because Boz let almost everybody at PS off to celebrate the holiday. “Relax and enjoy yourselves, people,” he’d told us, “because when we get back it’s going to be crunch time.”

  Tonight there’d be nobody tracking Ethan. The whole city was our oyster.

  “So your dad lets you go out on Thanksgiving?” was the first thing Ethan asked when he saw me sitting on the bench by my pal, the left lion.

  “What my dad doesn’t know can’t hurt him,” I said.

  Usually that kind of comment made Ethan smile, like he liked how bad I was, how I so did not care what my parents thought, but not that night. He was obviously thinking about something, his expression distant. And, because it was Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving was for family, he was probably thinking about his absent family and feeling more alone than usual.

  I knew exactly how he felt.

  In other news, it was snowing. Winter had fully arrived in Manhattan.

  “It’s freaking cold,” I complained. Once a California girl, always a California girl.

  “We could always go inside,” he said with a lift of his eyebrows. “I know you’re an outdoors sort of girl, but maybe we could go to my place. There’s nobody else there.”

  Oh, I thought. Ohhhhh. It was dumb, but I actually blushed. “What about your parents?” I asked, flustered. “Where are they?”

  It was like shutters closed in his eyes. He glanced away from me, down the street. “They’re visiting my grandmother upstate,” he said without even the slightest tell that he was lying, not a lip twitch or a blink or anything. “It’d just be you and me.”

  He’d asked me to come back to his place before. And I’d said no, of course. Project Scrooge was watching Ethan’s apartment twenty-four hours a day. There was no way I could ever go there. But I was running out of excuses.

  “Is this the part where you pressure me to move our relationship to the next level?” I asked.

  “We’ve been going out for months,” he said. “And you’ve never seen where I live. And I haven’t seen where you live. You know that’s weird, right?”

  I grabbed his hand. “Look, I know we’ve been going out for a while.”

  “Months,” he repeated.

  “Yes. Months. And that’s been amazing. You’re the best fake boyfriend and the best real boyfriend I’ve ever had. I mean it.”

  “Is this about you wanting me to buy you flowers?”

  “No. I’m not a flowers kind of girl.”

  He
smirked like he didn’t believe me. “You’re not.”

  “No. I’m just not ready for the heavy lifting,” I explained. A blast of cold wind hit me, and I pulled my coat more tightly around me. “If we do that kind of thing, stuff gets heavy, and I like things to be light. Anyway, let’s go get some hot chocolate or coffee or something and go over to Rockefeller Center and make fun of the ice-skaters,” I said.

  “All right,” he said, but he was quieter than usual as we made our way up Fifth Avenue.

  We were almost to our destination when the impossible happened: I glanced up and saw Ro walking toward us, holding hands with a guy I’d never seen before. Not Captain Bland. A new guy.

  My heart gave a little leap at the sight of her. Ro.

  Time seemed to slow. She glanced up. She frowned. Her lips formed a word.

  Holly?

  I turned to Ethan and kissed him; I just grabbed his face and pulled it down to mine, turning us so Ro couldn’t keep looking at me. Then I dragged him up the steps and in the door of the nearest building: Saint Thomas Church. I didn’t know if Ro had really recognized me or just thought she did. I didn’t know if she’d follow me in here, or what I would say to her, how I would explain myself or fix this mess, but I suddenly needed to hide.

  “What are we doing?” Ethan said, clearly confused as I towed him into the sanctuary.

  “Consider it an adventure,” I said breathlessly.

  It was dark in there. Good. I led Ethan into a section of pews along the edge of the room, out of sight of the main doors, and sat down, keeping my back to the entrance. I wished in vain for my Hoodie.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I felt the sudden need for prayer,” I said wryly.

  He was frowning. “Tori. What the—”

  “Don’t talk. This is supposed to be a place of quiet contemplation,” I shushed him.

  He was starting to look mad.

  I sighed. “Okay, fine. I saw someone on the street just now who I really didn’t want to deal with.”

  “Who?” he wanted to know. “That girl?”

  So he’d seen her, too. I wasn’t losing my mind.

  “Yes, a girl from school,” I said. “She’s like the queen bee.”

  “I would have thought you’d be the queen bee at school,” Ethan said.

  It was like he knew me. “Right?”

  “So she has it out for you? Why? What’d you do?”

  “I’m running for student body president, against her,” I blurted. “I’m winning, and she is not taking it well. She keeps wanting to confront me all the time. She’s accusing me of trying to ‘buy’ the election, just because my dad is rich.” Oh, the lies, how easily they slipped off my tongue. It made me sad. I just kept getting farther and farther away from myself. And I was in a church, lying like crazy. I expected the lightning bolt to come down on my head any second now. “Anyway, I’m sorry to drag you into my drama,” I said, looking down at where the Bible was stuck into the back of the pew. “I just didn’t want to deal with her today.”

  I felt like crying all of a sudden.

  “Hey,” Ethan said softly. He took my hand in both of his and stroked his thumb over the top. “It’s okay. I’m glad you told me. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, being rich. I’m rich. My name is actually Ethan Winters the third, which means there was an Ethan Winters the second and an Ethan Winters the first, and they were all very, very rich.”

  “Were?” I said.

  He sighed. “I have my drama, too. Stuff I haven’t told you. Like with my parents. My dad.”

  So that was it. He was going to tell me about his dad.

  I waited.

  “My dad never liked being rich. He could never come to terms with his money. He was always trying to give it away to people, or trying to make it so he could live without it. He was supposed to inherit my grandfather’s real estate business, but he didn’t want it. He wanted to go it on his own. He wanted to earn it.”

  “Nothing wrong with that, I guess.”

  He laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “Yeah, well. It didn’t do him any good. He liked to take the subway and walk to work like the regular guys, but then this one day—at nine oh seven in the morning—he was walking down Lexington Avenue on his way to a meeting. It was just a regular morning. He ate breakfast, kissed my mom and my sister and me good-bye, took the 6 train to 116th Street, paused for a minute and listened to a homeless guy playing a saxophone on the corner of 115th. He gave the guy a twenty, and then continued on Lexington.”

  He stopped.

  “Ethan, you don’t have to . . .”

  “They were doing construction on the upper floor of the building he was passing. It was a freak accident—that’s what everybody called it. Freak. Accident. Like, the guy was goofing off up there—he got fired later—my grandfather made sure of it—and he lost his balance and the hammer slipped out of his hand. And that was it for my dad.”

  We both sat there in the corner of the empty church with our heads bent. I’m sure we looked like we were praying. I squeezed his hand. For a moment I started to see a memory of that day. When the policeman showed up at their door to inform them that his dad was dead.

  “So, he’s dead,” Ethan said now, almost angrily, jerking us both back to the present. “I lied to you about it. My dad’s dead. My mom pretends like it never happened—not the accident, but the whole thing—her getting married, having kids, becoming a widow—all of it. She just started over. So my parents are not happily married, obviously. I don’t even live with my mom anymore—I got myself legally emancipated last year. I don’t know why I told you my parents were fine. I just—”

  “I get it,” I murmured. “You don’t have to explain.”

  He looked around like he was finally noticing where we were for the first time, at the Gothic arched ceilings and the rows of polished wooden pews, the stained-glass windows and the carvings of the saints on the walls.

  “That’s why I don’t believe in God,” he said, his voice rising like he was challenging somebody. “Because my dad went to church every Sunday. And if he had just come along one minute later—like nine oh eight—it wouldn’t have happened. There were so many ways it could have not happened. If he hadn’t stopped to listen to the stupid music. If he’d taken a car instead of walked. If the subway had been delayed—it’s always delayed, right, so why not this time? If his shoelace had come untied and he had to stop to tie it. One minute. Sixty freaking seconds—that’s all he needed. My dad went to church, right? He volunteered—he was in the Big Brothers thing, where he helped this little kid with his reading and took him bowling and did the fund-raisers and everything. He was nice to people, always so freakishly nice. He gave to the poor. But God wouldn’t even give my dad one minute.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  He looked up like he’d almost forgotten I was there with him. “Are you religious?”

  “No. Church was never a thing in our house.”

  My mom used to say that she was a spiritual person, but organized religion gave her the creeps. Too much guilt, she’d tell me whenever we’d pass by a cathedral or see an advertisement for an egg hunt at a church on Easter Sunday. She liked to go to Christmas Eve service, though. She loved to hold a candle and sing “Silent Night.”

  “It’s all pointless, because God does not protect you,” he said. “He doesn’t intervene. For me it’s better to think he doesn’t exist than to believe that he’s up there, watching it all, and he never does anything to help us.”

  I nodded. God certainly hadn’t been watching out for me when I’d been alive. Still, I couldn’t help but believe in him anyway, because I was dead, and here I was still. Supposedly making up for my sins.

  Ethan stood up. “Do you think she’s gone now?”

  “Who?”

  “That girl you’re avoiding. I don’t want to be here anymore. Let’s go.”

  “She’s probably gone. I’ll check.” I crept back to the doo
r and peeked out. There was no sign of Ro. I motioned to Ethan. “All clear.”

  “Do you want to go to Rockefeller Center?” he asked. “Or we could still go to my place. It’d be warmer. We wouldn’t have to do anything special. We could just hang out.”

  I smiled at him. I would have loved to say yes. But I knew that even on Thanksgiving there would be somebody on Dave’s team watching the feed on Ethan’s home.

  “I’m kind of tired, actually,” I said. “Maybe I should just go home and crash. My dad’s probably looking for me, anyway.”

  He nodded like he’d been expecting me to say that. “Let me get you a cab.”

  We walked to a spot farther down the street and I raised my arm to hail a taxi.

  “You’re mad, right?” Ethan said. “Because I lied to you.”

  “I’m not mad.” I dropped my arm and took his face in my hands and kissed him lightly on the lips. “I promise. I’m not mad.”

  He tried to smile, but it came off as suspicious. “Why not? I’d be mad, I think, if you’d been lying to me all this time.”

  I raised my arm again. What I would have given for a cab to come along then to save me from answering his question. But cab after cab was passing me by, one after another. They all already had passengers.

  “Victoria?” he said.

  I wanted to scream, My name’s not Victoria! But maybe I could tell him part of the truth.

  I dropped my arm again. “I lied to you, too. My parents aren’t divorced. My mom died of breast cancer when I was fourteen. She was an actress, and things weren’t going well in her career, and—I don’t like to talk about her. I should have told you, I guess. Before now, anyway. So that’s why I’m not mad. I’m a liar, too.”

  Finally I dared to look at him, but his eyes were warm, not cold.

  “So we’re both in the Dead Parents Club,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that’s super exclusive. Lucky, lucky us.”

  “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  “I’m sorry about your dad.”

  “So we’re good?” he asked.

  “We’re good.”