“Sure,” he said sardonically. “Why not? I can’t wait to see your next setup.”
“Our setup.”
“This is a scam,” Ethan said. “This isn’t about my character. It’s about my money. Right?”
“No,” Dave said firmly. “This is about your soul.”
Ethan laughed. “My soul. Right. My precious soul.”
“It is precious.”
Ethan sighed. “If I just write you a check, can we be done now? Honestly, I would pay a lot if you’d just return me to my home. I won’t even press charges.”
“This isn’t about money,” Dave said.
“It’s always about money.” Ethan held a hand up as if to say Just give me a number. “No? Okay, then, let’s go. Before the flowers in your beard wilt. Seriously, dude. Who puts flowers in their beard?”
I could tell by the look in his eyes that we’d officially lost him. Ethan didn’t believe anymore. The same way that I hadn’t believed.
He’d decided that he wasn’t going to play along. Which meant that he wouldn’t repent. He wouldn’t be saved. He’d die.
I didn’t know what to do. I could only stand there in the Go Room helplessly as it all played out, watching and waiting like everyone else. Some people even had popcorn. Like this was a freak show, and Ethan was the freak.
Stephanie popped up at my elbow. “There you are, Holly. I’ve been looking for you. Your performance was inspiring, by the way. I think you really made an impression on him.” She lowered her voice. “And I’m sure that one-on-one time you spent with him made a big difference, too.”
It had made a big difference. Maybe it had made all the difference. I swallowed.
“So,” I said numbly, “has it been everything you thought it would be?”
She looked at me blankly.
“This. Christmas.” I pointed to the monitors, where Ethan and Blackpool were standing over the homeless man on Sixth, who was lying there completely still, his face a pale blue. Blackpool was the towering phantom now, faceless and silent. I shivered and tried to focus on something other than the memory of my body going numb, limb by limb. “It’s your first time seeing it all play out in real life—A Christmas Carol, American version 173. Is it, like, blowing your mind?”
“Oh. Yes. It’s changing the world,” she said, but for once she didn’t sound that stoked about it. “Hey, can we go to your office for a few minutes? I want to talk to you about something.”
I sighed. “Look, Steph, if this is about you researching me, I told you, I’m over it. It’s fine. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
I meant it, I realized. I wasn’t mad anymore. I couldn’t feel anything in the moment. I was so done.
“I got you some Chinese takeout,” she added. “I thought you’d be hungry after your big performance. Do you like egg rolls?”
I happened to love egg rolls.
Part of me wanted to stay and watch Ethan, but a bigger part of me wanted to run far, far away now. I knew that Blackpool was going to last at least another hour—he had to take him to Danny Denton’s still—the Cratchits’—and there was a scene at the school where the boys there cleaned out Ethan’s locker and stole his stuff. Then, according to the itinerary, Blackpool would take him to the mortuary.
I didn’t know if I could stand to watch the mortuary scene.
So Stephanie and I went back to my office, and found it all laid out on my desk: little white containers of fried rice and chow mein and sweet and sour chicken, and oh yes, egg rolls.
Stephanie got out a couple of paper plates from a drawer in my desk, but then I found I couldn’t eat anything.
“Are you okay?” Stephanie asked. “I’ve never known you to pass up egg rolls.”
“He’s going to fail,” I said miserably.
Weirdly, she didn’t seem surprised by my assessment. “He might.”
“He’s already decided.” I bit my lip. “I know him.”
“It will work out the way it’s supposed to.”
“Stop saying that!” I burst out. “No, it won’t!”
“It will,” she argued. “Besides, if he fails, he’ll just end up working here, right? Like you. That’s not so bad, is it?”
She wasn’t making any sense. “What?”
“If Ethan fails, he’ll die. This morning?”
This morning. Six fifty-six a.m., on Broadway. God, it was only hours away. I needed to sit down. I sank into my chair.
“And then he’ll wake up here just like you did,” Stephanie said. “And he’ll be the new Ghost of Christmas Present.”
My mouth opened. For a few seconds I just stared at her. “The Ghost of Christmas Present,” I repeated stupidly.
“Da—Copperfield’s replacement.” She sighed. “I think the company actually knows Ethan’s going to fail. Blackpool does, I’m pretty sure—all that stuff about Ethan’s hazy future. His future is probably not that hazy. It’s just that it would be so discouraging, you know, if he came out and told everyone that Ethan was going to fail.”
“The Ghost of Christmas Present,” I whispered again.
“Yes.” Stephanie gave me a little smile. “So it would be okay, you see?”
I immediately tried to picture Ethan as the Ghost of Christmas Present. If he let his hair grow out and grew a beard . . . and then I remembered that as well-preserved zombies, our hair doesn’t grow. But hey, that’s what wigs and fake mustaches are for, right? We had a stellar costume department. And Ethan was tall. Not like Dave, not Jolly Green Giant tall, but still. Tall enough.
He’d make a great Ghost, I decided.
The idea was so great, so amazing, so incredibly awesome that I got up and started to pace around my office. If Ethan failed, then the company could give him his own crappy apartment, his non-smart phone, his pitiful hundred bucks a month, and he’d spend some time being super mad about it—I remembered those days, how furious I was underneath everything, like a pot about to boil over. But then he’d start to accept it, like I did. He’d be fine. We actually could be together.
I was smiling now. I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of it before. Ethan was going to be the Ghost of Christmas Present. It was like a dream come true.
Then I began to picture other things, too, like Ethan and me in our Hoodies walking down the streets of NYC together. Making jokes about the losers we worked with. Holding hands. Kissing. I’d have some explaining to do, sure, about the whole Victoria Scott thing. But eventually he’d understand, wouldn’t he?
We’d have a future. Something that lasted past Christmas. Maybe even forever.
“How do you . . .” I couldn’t catch my breath. “How do you know for sure he’ll become Dave’s replacement?” I was thinking about what Boz had said all those months ago, about how a Ghost seems to become mysteriously available at just the moment one is needed.
“He told me,” Stephanie said.
“He?”
“Copperfield.”
And then I suddenly remembered Dave’s vision of hugging Stephanie. Kissing her head. I shuddered. “Ew, that’s not right. I’m sorry, but . . . ew.”
“Ew?” Now it was Stephanie’s turn to be confused.
“You and Dave together. And you still call him Copperfield? Weird. So weird. And I thought you were with Grant now. Grant’s awesome. And Dave’s, like, old enough to be your father.”
Her eyes widened, and she covered her mouth with her hand. At first I thought she was crying, and I felt bad. I mean, age is just a number, right? Who was I to judge? But then I realized she was laughing.
“Wow,” she said after a minute. “You always end up surprising me, Holly.” She laughed again, then took off her glasses and wiped at her eyes. “Dave is old enough to be my father.”
I threw my hands up. “Ew!”
“He’s not only old enough to be my father. He is my father.” She set her glasses on my desk.
“What!”
“He’s my dad.” She took a breath and let it
out. “Wow, it feels good to get that off my chest. Sometimes this year I felt like I was going to explode. And why not tell you tonight? You’re done with your Christmas Past stuff. It’s the last night of my internship.” She said the word internship like it was a code word for something else. “It’s a night for revelations.”
“What?” I felt like this was the only word I was saying in our entire conversation.
“You’re not the only one with secrets, Holly. I’ve got a few. Big ones.”
Obviously.
“Secrets?” I was sure I didn’t know what she was talking about, me having secrets. But suddenly I got the feeling that she knew things about me beyond what she’d read in my file. “Like what?”
I couldn’t imagine what else there could possibly be.
“Like I’m not actually majoring in psychology.” She closed her eyes for a minute and then rushed on, like she wanted to get this out before she lost her nerve. “I really do feel like I’m your friend. You’ve got to believe me, Holly. I always felt like we were going to be friends someday, even when—gosh, this is so much harder than I thought it would be. My dad, he thinks I should wait until it’s all over and then write you a letter or something, but I think we deserve more than that, right? Because we’re friends. We might be the weirdest friends ever, but we’re friends.”
“You’re not a psychology major?” I was still stuck on this.
She acted like she hadn’t heard me. “But that’s what’s so great about it, because before, you couldn’t be anybody’s friend, not really. You weren’t capable of it—you were so self-involved. But that’s changed. It took a while, but now you’ve learned how to think about other people. You know how to be a friend now. Not a great friend yet, but you’re getting there.”
I was so lost I needed a map for this conversation.
She sighed. “Sorry, I’m not making sense.”
“No,” I said. “You’re totally not.”
“Okay. Let me just get it out.” She plunked down in the chair across from my desk. She took a deep breath and released it, then leaned forward so we were looking into each other’s eyes. “I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
My heart started to pound. It was exactly what I’d always been afraid of, the minute that this girl had walked in the door at Project Scrooge—that she’d been brought in to replace me.
“Okay, whoa there. Calm down.” Stephanie reached across the desk and grabbed my hand as I started to hyperventilate right there and then. “It’s okay, Holly. Trust me.”
“How can you even say that?” I gasped. “What’s going to happen to me? Where will I go?”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Wait. You think . . . No. No, Holly. You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not going to replace you.” She smiled tentatively. “You replaced me.”
I stared at her. “Huh?”
“I was your Ghost of Christmas Past. Six years ago. I’m not surprised you never recognized me. I was almost fourteen, but Leigh and Marie tried to make me look like I was even younger. They had this vision of the Lamp as a little girl.” Her big blue eyes were full of amusement and concern.
I was shaking my head, I realized. It was too much.
She frowned, and her eyebrow bumps appeared. “Holly? Say something.”
“How? Why?” Oh good, I thought dazedly. I’d moved on to other one-word questions.
“My dad was a Bob Cratchit once, a single parent just trying to make ends meet, and I was the Tiny Tim. It’s a long story, but essentially the Scrooge that year failed to be rehabilitated, and my dad died later in an accident, and Boz felt so bad that he brought us both here afterward, where they gave us the option of working for the company instead of my dad moving on. So then my dad became the Ghost of Christmas Present, and I became the Ghost of Christmas Past. As an interim, of course. The real Ghosts have to be dead, and I’m alive.”
“But—” My head was spinning. “But you said you were almost fourteen when—”
“I was eleven, actually, when I started working here. Almost ten years ago.”
“You’ve been working for Project Scrooge for ten years?”
“I’ve been on a leave of absence, so to speak, for the last six,” she explained. “But, yes, I worked here before. That’s part of why my dad and I decided to take this job. Because then I would get to spend time with him while I was growing up. I got to live with him. I wouldn’t have to lose him or go into foster care. Anyway, as you know, this is my dad’s last year, so I came back to help him out. I wanted to spend more time with him before . . .” Tears popped up in her eyes. “Okay, it’s pretty emotional, finally losing my dad after all this time, but it’s the right thing. Being a Ghost is not being alive. It’s like being a shadow. You’re not fully part of the world. It’s time for him to move on and join my mom.”
“Does Grant know?” I blurted out. “Does Marty?”
She blushed. “I told Grant a couple weeks ago. He was pretty shocked. He and Marty didn’t have a clue about me being the Lamp before. Like you, they thought I was new here.”
I sat back, pretty shocked myself—probably more shocked than I had ever been in my whole life.
“Anyway. I’ve always wanted to tell you that I’m sorry,” Stephanie said. “For failing you, I mean. I’ve always been able to see the good inside of you, and the good you could do in the world—so much good, Holly, that you could have accomplished in your life. And you were so young—you were the youngest Scrooge we’ve ever had in Project Scrooge history. Did you know that? Not just for the American branch, either, but for the world. I was so excited to work on your case. But then I wasn’t able to save you. I couldn’t convince you that it was real. I failed. And you deserved better.” She looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry, Holly. Being the Ghost of Christmas Past is an enormous responsibility. You know that as well as I do. It takes patience, and a cool head, and quick thinking, but more than that—it takes real empathy. You have to understand deep down what the Scrooge is feeling in order to know what will affect him. Or her,” she added sheepishly. “Which is why you’re such a great GCP. You understand the Scrooges better than I ever could.”
“So you’re not a psychology major,” I said again.
She shook her head. “Too much reading.”
“Do you even go to NYU? Is your name really Stephanie? Was any part of this real?”
“All of that’s true,” she said quickly. “I do go to NYU—I’m going to graduate in two years, if all goes according to plan. I’m a theater major, actually. I have this dream about being on Broadway one day, but that might be a pretty big ambition. And yes, my name is really Stephanie. But you can call me Steph. If you can forgive me, that is.”
“Uh-huh.” I searched inside myself and found that a part of me, maybe even a big part of me, was definitely furious that she’d been stringing me along all this time, playing the wide-eyed newbie when in fact she’d been a veteran of this place. She’d totally had me fooled. But there was another part that just . . . accepted it. Steph and I were connected now, and we always would be, like we were sisters or something. We’d both worn the lamp.
I thought about that little blond-haired, blue-eyed twerp who’d taken my hand and tried to show me my life from a different perspective. She’d believed in me. And no matter how she felt like she needed to apologize, I knew the truth: I was the one who had let her down.
“Okay, I forgive you,” I said after a minute. “If you can forgive me for being such a stuck-up, horrible little brat.”
“Which time?” She grinned. “Back then or this year, when you kept sending me on all those crazy errands?”
“Shut up,” I said, smiling in spite of myself. “Both, I guess?”
“I forgive you for being a stuck-up, horrible little brat,” she said. “Both times.”
“You’re a decent actress, in my opinion,” I said. “And I’m qualified to know.”
“Wow, thanks, Miss Havisham,” she said in her squeaky voice. She laughed,
and then glanced at her watch. “Holy smokes, is that the time? Grant’s waiting for me. He wants to watch the final scene together.”
“Don’t make him any bets,” I advised. “He always wins.”
“I know. Especially this year.” She held her hand out to me. “It’s been a pleasure spending time with you, Holly. I mean it. Thank you.”
I shook her hand, and she walked around the desk for a quick hug. I didn’t resist. I even hugged her back a little.
“I’ll see you in there,” she said. “Oh, and Holly? I hope everything works out with Ethan. Then you won’t have to be so alone all the time.”
I stared at her.
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom,” she murmured. Then she was gone.
I should have returned to the Go Room with her, since Boz would be expecting me at this point, but I stayed in my office for a few minutes, thinking about everything Steph had said.
Thinking about Ethan. I was still trying to get my head around the idea that him failing meant that he’d become the new Ghost of Christmas Present.
My Christmas Present.
I wanted to laugh and sing and dance around, it was such an amazing, wonderful turn of events. No wonder Blackpool had been so cranky. Because he’d known all along. He’d known I was going to get a happy ending after all. I deserved to be happy, didn’t I?
But then what about what Ethan deserves? said a little voice in the back of my mind.
I felt the elation drain out of me. I couldn’t help but think about all the things Steph had just said to me about the responsibility that came with being the GCP. Then I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter. Everything was going to work out for Ethan—he’d get me out of the bargain, after all. And death wouldn’t be so bad as long as he had me, right?
A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
I loved him, I realized. I loved Ethan Winters. It hadn’t been just a game I was playing because I was lonely. I’d fallen in love with him. His heart had spoken to mine.
I loved him. That’s all the counted, right? That’s all he needed.
Wrong, said the voice.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I knew it was wrong.