“Does Holly have a cold?” Grant said. “Her voice sounds funny.”
“What past?” Ethan asked. “What Christmas?”
“Yours.”
That answer didn’t seem to satisfy him. “Who are you, really?” He moved like he was going to get up and confront me, but then he realized that he wasn’t exactly dressed for company. As in, he was only wearing a pair of boxers under there.
“I have a lot of names.” I crossed over to his dresser and took out a pair of black sweatpants that he often wore to the club. I knew exactly which drawer they’d be in. “But all you need to know right now is that I’m your friend.”
“My friend,” he said slowly.
“I am. I’ve been sent here to help you.” I handed the pants to him and looked away while he pulled them on.
“Are you trying an accent or something?” Grant asked me. “Because I’m not going to lie—it’s not working.”
Ethan stood up.
“Come.” I held out my hand again. He hesitated and then took it. I worried that the feel of my hand in his felt familiar to him the way it did to me. I started to lead us toward the door, where we’d be transported into the Time Tunnel and off across time, but suddenly Ethan stopped and grabbed me by both arms.
“Wait,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere with you until I know what’s going on.”
“Uh-oh.” I heard Grant’s voice in my ear. “The Scrooge is getting physical with the Lamp.”
This almost never happened. The Scrooges were usually scared of me—too scared to do anything but what I told them.
“Tell me what’s happening,” Ethan demanded. “Tell me.”
“Ethan . . .”
“Do you need us to tase him?” Grant asked. “Then we’ll have to use the forget serum and the time stuff and, ugh, that will be a mess. But we could totally tase him.”
“No,” came Boz’s voice—he was also linked into this feed. “No, just wait.”
Ethan shook me a little, and my hood fell back. I turned my lamp up so he couldn’t look directly at me. “This is a joke, right?” he said angrily, his fingers biting into my arms. “I know it’s not real. What’s going on?”
“It’s not a joke,” I said.
“Wait.” His eyes widened. “Tori?” he whispered.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I’d been saying all this time that he wouldn’t recognize me, that he simply couldn’t recognize me in my crazy costume and with my altered voice. I’d told myself that so I could justify hanging out with him. So I could tell myself that I wasn’t really jeopardizing my time with him on Christmas Eve. But that was dumb. “We ghosts can appear however we wish,” I said softly.
“Say what now?” Grant was confused.
“But you look just . . .” Ethan began.
“I have chosen this form so that you would trust in me.” It was all I could think of to do. I’d pretend I was just wearing Holly like a costume. That kind of thing happened in the movies, right? “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past. Your past,” I said again, emphasizing the word your.
“You said that already.” He relaxed slightly, but I could tell that this was still royally freaking him out.
“Okay, so no Taser?” Grant said.
“No,” repeated Boz. “What did you say to him? About trust? I didn’t quite catch it.”
“Come with me,” I said to Ethan.
Ethan’s hands dropped away from me. “Fine. Whoever you are. Let me at least put on a shirt.”
I waited while he tugged a T-shirt over his head and put on a pair of woolen clogs he used for slippers.
“Do you have a robe?” I asked him. “It will be cold where we’re going.”
He shook his head. “Where are we going, exactly?”
I took his hand again and pulled him toward the door. It was glowing. He reached out and touched the wood as if he’d never seen it before. It was warm to the touch—like there was fire on the other side.
“Here we go,” I said, and opened the door and walked us through.
We were instantly surrounded by a formless, foggy white. The Time Tunnel was like a long hallway, with two ends that could be flipped around. On one side was a waiting area, where I was sure Dave and Blackpool were already hanging out, watching the monitors. On the other side was, of course, an archway that would take us across time. On Christmas we filled the tunnel with fog and snow, so you couldn’t really see anything unless you knew specifically that it was there. It was like we were walking through a cloud.
Ethan stumbled, not sure where to put his feet. I stopped and put my hand on his shoulder. “Look at me,” I directed, and he did. “Hold on to my arm, and you won’t fall.”
“Okay,” he said.
We started walking again. Ethan stayed close. I felt the change in the air when we crossed under the archway and the tunnel was activated—a subtle vibration under my feet and an electric hum as we shifted through time and space.
Then we were in a little boy’s bedroom. It looked like it was straight out of one of those pricey kiddie catalogs. The walls were painted blue, with a definite astronaut theme—star charts on the wall, a picture of a rocket ship blasting off, a lamp on the bedside table that cast a pattern of stars onto the ceiling. And there was a large letter E posted above the bed.
Beside me, Ethan tensed up again. “This is my old room.”
“Yes.”
“It’s just like I remember it.” He crossed over to the dresser, which had a fish tank bubbling on it, and two fat black goldfish. “Like, exactly.”
“What were their names?” I asked him.
“Sharky and Bones,” he answered automatically, and then seemed surprised that he’d still known the answer after all this time.
He turned in a slow circle, drinking in the details of his old life: the quilt with the solar system stitched onto it, the colored balls hanging from fishing line from the ceiling to represent the planets. He stopped when he got to the series of black marks on the side of the closet door frame—a growth chart, going back to when he was three years old. His fingers brushed the marks as he read the dates.
“How is this possible?” he breathed. “We can’t really be there, can we? I mean, we sold that place. We moved away.”
I could see that he was starting to believe it was real. Stephanie had been right when she’d made that argument. It was the details that made the whole thing convincing. Those details, like Sharky and Bones, that couldn’t be fabricated.
The door was suddenly flung open, and a little boy stomped in, scowling.
It was Ethan at age eight. He was mad about something—furious, in fact. He kicked his favorite stuffed doggy out of his way and threw himself onto his bed. He was a miniature version of the Ethan I knew—same cloudy eyes, same way of furrowing his eyebrows, but his dark hair was overgrown, and his elbows were scrawny, and he was missing one of his front teeth.
Ethan stared at him, speechless. Because maybe we might have been able to fake his old bedroom. But no way we’d be able to fake this.
“That’s . . . me,” he said.
“That’s you,” I confirmed.
He took a step toward the kid on the bed. “Can he hear me?”
“No.” I snapped my fingers next to the little boy’s head, but he didn’t react. “All that you see here—it’s just a shadow of the things that have happened before. The people here won’t be able to see or hear us. The point is for us to see and hear them.”
He was still staring at the younger version of himself. “I think I remember this day,” he murmured. “It was right before Christmas break, second grade. The day of the science fair. I did a project on—”
“Space?” I gestured around us.
He looked at the floor and nodded like he was embarrassed. “It was a phase. I was going to be the next Neil Armstrong. Colonize Mars. Save our dying world. My science project was on the existence of water on Mars. I worked on it for weeks.” He snorted. “My poster said, ‘
What Happened to the Little Green Men?’”
It hadn’t gone well, though, obviously, because the younger Ethan was muttering and punching his fist into his rocket ship pillow.
“I didn’t win,” Ethan explained. “I got something like an honorable mention. The every-kid-wins-a-prize kind of thing.”
There was a light tapping on the door.
“Go away!” said Kid Ethan.
The door opened a crack. “Hey, buddy. I don’t want to interrupt you at whatever you’re doing, but I thought maybe you’d want to talk.”
“Okay,” little Ethan grumbled, and the door opened wider to reveal Ethan’s dad.
I took a moment to really look at him. I’d seen him before in Ethan’s mind, lots of times, but this was different. In this place he was entirely real, not part of a reconstructed memory. He was tall, like Ethan, with the same brown hair and blue eyes—it was the eyes, really, that gave away the family resemblance. He was wearing a suit, but he’d taken the jacket and tie off and rolled up the sleeves to his elbows. His shoes, I noticed, were a little worn and needed a polish. His watch couldn’t have cost more than a hundred dollars. His hair needed a trim. Still, there was something warm about him—something approachable and kind.
At the sight of his father, the present Ethan suddenly looked like he’d been given an electric shock. He went completely silent.
“Tough day?” Ethan Winters II asked little Ethan Winters III.
The kid didn’t answer. He just punched the pillow again.
“I saw your project this afternoon,” his dad continued lightly, coming into the room and shutting the door behind him. “And let me just say, it was awesome.”
“It was better than the one about magnets,” Kid Ethan burst out. “Who cares about stupid magnets?”
“Magnets suck rocks,” his dad agreed solemnly.
“So why did the dumb magnets win first place, and I didn’t win anything? Are the judges mental?”
His dad sat next to little Ethan on the bed and ruffled the boy’s hair. “I don’t know, buddy. It’s all subjective, I guess.”
“What’s subjective?”
“It means that everybody has their own opinion, and everybody thinks differently, so they all come up with different conclusions.”
The boy shook his head. “My poster looked way better, anybody with half a brain could see that. Mom bought me the cut-out letters and the spray paint. The one about magnets looked cheap—he just wrote on it in marker.”
“Hey, have you heard that phrase, don’t judge a book by its cover?” his dad countered. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on something, or how fancy it is. It’s what’s inside that counts. Maybe that kid had the best explanation of how magnets work that the judges had ever heard. We don’t know.”
Little Ethan was still scowling. Even back then, he was stubborn.
“Here’s what I do know,” his dad said. “I know I’m very proud of you for all the work you did. I know that you are now, like, an expert on the planet Mars, and that is so ridiculously boss. That’s the point of having the science fair, when you think about it—you get to learn all the amazing things there are to know about science. When you’re an astronaut, I bet you’ll look back on this day as a turning point in your life.”
“I guess,” the kid mumbled.
His dad clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You know what would be great? How about you and I go down to the Christmas tree lot after dinner? You can use that sharp scientific mind of yours to figure out which tree would be the best one to put in our living room.”
Eight-year-old Ethan brightened visibly at the idea. “Just you and me?”
“Yep, me and you. No girls allowed.”
“No girls allowed,” the older Ethan repeated softly. “Just me and you. I remember that.”
“We should measure how tall the ceiling is,” little Ethan suggested eagerly. “So we can make sure not to get a tree that’s too big.”
Ethan’s dad lifted his hand for a high five, and little Ethan giggled and slapped his hand.
“I knew you were the perfect person to be in charge of this very important job,” his dad said. “Come on, chief. Let’s go help your mom set the table and we’ll plan our strategy.”
And just like that, they left the room, little Ethan smiling again and his eyes almost glowing with excitement. His bad mood dissipated like a spent storm cloud.
Grown Up Ethan didn’t say anything after they’d gone. He just kept staring at the door.
“Your dad was a good man, I think,” I said.
He nodded and swallowed hard. “He always made me feel like I could do anything, like I could be anything I decided to be. An astronaut. A fireman. A pirate.” He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his tee and turned away from me. “The president of the United States.”
Oh boy. I knew everyone in the Go Room would be freaking out over this little remark.
“He died when you were twelve, right?” I asked softly. “A freak accident.”
Because God wouldn’t give Ethan’s dad one minute.
“We should go,” I said. “There are other things that you’re supposed to see.”
He didn’t argue. He took my hand again when I offered it and let me lead him back through the Portal and into the Time Tunnel again, where there wasn’t even a little bit of a lag before we were swept forward nearly two years, to the Christmas party with his mom and dad and sister all wearing terrible sweaters.
The minute we got there Ethan went straight to his dad and followed him around, which wasn’t a problem, exactly, except that we were supposed to be focusing on his mom.
I understood why he did it, though.
I knew what it had been like for me to see my mother again, even if it was just “a shadow of things that have been.” Seeing her had made me remember all that I’d slowly been forgetting, like the shape of her lips when she smiled. The way she smelled like jasmine. That habit she had of clicking her fingernails on the table. All of those things about her had been fading out of my memory, but then suddenly she was right there in front of me, beautiful and vibrant and alive.
“You should redirect Ethan back toward his mother,” Boz reminded me through the earbud. “We’re getting off topic.”
I led Ethan back toward the kitchen. His mom was there wearing her apron and dancing to the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” while she poured lime soda into a bowl of fruit punch.
“Your mom liked a good party, didn’t she?” I observed.
Ethan’s mouth turned up in the corner in that half-amused way he had. “Yes, she did. She still does. And my grandma.”
I knew he was thinking about his grandmother’s party invitation.
“It seems like a waste, though,” I said. “Look at all of this—the decorations, the food, the music and the lights and the fizzy punch—all this time and expense for a few hours celebrating.”
This was part of the Scrooge script, actually. You criticized the Fezziwig, called the party frivolous or wasteful, and then the Scrooge always felt compelled to argue on the Fezziwig’s behalf. Just a little reverse psychology.
Ethan was no different, apparently. He frowned. “She liked to see other people happy—what’s wrong with that? It didn’t matter what her job was or where my dad was working or how much money we had—because we didn’t have a lot at this point, as you can see. But she’d always go through so much effort so that we could have a good time. She was happy when we were happy.”
“She had a generous heart,” I agreed. “Back then,” I added.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Back then,” he said, almost to himself.
The breakup scene, which was what came next, was always the hardest one to get through. Probably because the Belle tends to tell it like it is.
Jack was no exception. “I’m not going to come back here again,” she was saying as Present Ethan and I watched from a corner of his grandfather’s office. “You’ve
changed. I don’t even recognize you anymore. Call me if you decide to grow a soul.”
“Oh, come off it, sis,” Past Ethan spat back at her. They were in the full-out-fight part of this discussion now. “Like you haven’t benefited all your life from our family’s wealth. What pays for Vassar? Who pays for you to pretend to be an artist so you can afford to sit around dabbling with paints and moaning about the tragic state of the world? At least I’m honest about it. I like money. I want to make more of it. I want to take what Grandfather built and make it into something huge and indestructible and a legacy for all of us.”
But seriously, why am I supposed to feel guilty about having money? I remembered myself saying in my own version of this moment. The world runs on money. That’s just how it is.
And Ro had looked so sad then, and she’d said, Do you remember what it was like before, Holly, when we used to watch TV with the sound turned off and make up the dialogue? Or we’d go to the pet store and name all the fish. We’d hang out on the beach and build weird sand creatures. We’d write songs. None of that was about money, remember?
It was about us, she’d said. And then she’d asked me what happened to that girl. She’d said she’d liked her.
She’d liked me, even when there really hadn’t been anything special to like.
I had been so stupid not to understand then what she meant.
I forced my attention back to Ethan. Who was still getting chewed out by his sister.
“You should hear yourself.” Jack gave a disbelieving laugh. “You know, you used to be sweet. You were always stubborn, and you always had a temper, but there was this sweet side to you that made up for it. And you were snarky and hilarious and fun to be around. But now you’re just this stand-in for Grandpa. It’s sad.”
“You’re the one who’s lost your sense of humor.”
Jack threw up her hands. “You just pitched a fit over how your meat was cooked.”
“Who cares? You’re a vegetarian, aren’t you?”