The Afterlife of Holly Chase

Nobody else looked particularly surprised by this announcement. I guess I was the last to know. Dave, for his part, seemed fine. He kept glancing in my direction, though, with this partly sad smile on his face. As if he was really going to miss me, like he said. Once again I wished I’d been nicer to him the night I’d been the Scrooge. His beard was fine.

  “And last, but certainly not least, the Ghost of Christmas Future: Blackpool!” Boz shouted like this was a baseball game and Blackpool was the MVP.

  Blackpool lifted his hand in an awkward wave. He wasn’t wearing his robe of death (that was only his costume on Christmas Eve), and without it he appeared to be a regular guy: tall, black, with a shaved head, smartly dressed in a dark gray suit and tie, maybe as old as fifty. He was nothing super impressive to behold, Blackpool. But when he turned to look at me I couldn’t help the chill that ran down my spine.

  I remembered the numbness. The suffocating dark. Like I was a light that he’d snuffed out once.

  “All right, now let’s see who we’ve got for a Scrooge this year,” Boz said, clapping his hands together.

  They wheeled out the Board.

  Blackpool took a pair of reading glasses out of his breast pocket, unfolded a simple sheet of yellow legal paper, and began to fill us in about this year’s Scrooge: he lived in New York, which was good news because it would make things easier for us working locally; he was some kind of real estate tycoon; and he was of course rife with all the predictably bad qualities that make up your typical Scrooge—hard-hearted, obsessed with money, that kind of thing. It was the same shtick every year. Find a really rotten person. Change him, change the world.

  Yawn. At this point, all the Scrooges essentially felt the same to me. They were all like reincarnations of the original Ebenezer Scrooge, which made sense, I guess. Sometimes it kind of blew my mind that I’d ever been one of them. Outside of the money thing (and yeah, okay, maybe I’d been a tad materialistic) I had nothing in common with all those shriveled, ugly old geezers.

  It still felt like some kind of colossal mistake.

  “Scrooges tend to be Caucasian males in their seventies, statistically speaking,” Grant said to Stephanie matter-of-factly.

  “You’re full of crap. You know that, right?” Marty told Grant. “We’re equal-opportunity at Project Scrooge. Our last Scrooge was a woman, remember?”

  “She was clearly an exception to the rule,” countered Grant. “An anomaly. Most Scrooges, if we’re just talking the numbers, are—”

  He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because that’s when one of Blackpool’s team tacked an eight-by-ten photo of the new Scrooge up on the Board, and everybody in the Go Room started talking all at once.

  “Wow.” Next to me Stephanie slid her glasses up on her nose. “Who is that?”

  “Now that’s an anomaly,” said Marty.

  “Whoa,” breathed Grant. “What the—”

  I pushed forward to get a better look at the Board. A crowd was gathering around the photo, pointing and saying things as eloquent as “Whoa!”

  It was easy to see why.

  This year’s Scrooge was no shriveled old geezer. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen.

  And he was totally hot.

  FOUR

  “I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I don’t like him,” Marty said loudly as he scarfed down his microwaved macaroni and cheese a few days later. He’d been saying that to anyone within earshot since Blackpool had first announced the new Scrooge’s name. Ethan. Ethan Jonathan Winters III, to be exact. Of course he was all the employees of Project Scrooge had been talking about in the break room. Ethan Jonathan Winters III—eye candy.

  “I don’t like him, either,” Grant said.

  Jealous, sniffed my Inner Yvonne. Which was probably true.

  “He’s a Scrooge, so isn’t he supposed to be unlikable?” Stephanie asked.

  “Oh, sure, they’re all unlikable,” Marty said with a shrug. “But you always end up rooting for them. You hope things work out for them in the end. I’m going to have a hard time rooting for Ethan Winters, is all I’m saying.”

  “I think he’s too young to be a Scrooge,” Grant added.

  I could have argued this point, of course, but then I came to the Scrooge situation from a unique perspective. And I didn’t think Ethan Winters was so bad. He came from a good family, and by good I mean rich. He was the heir to one of the biggest real estate dynasties in New York, a family legacy that stretched back more than two hundred years, practically a Rockefeller. He had stellar taste in clothes. And then there was how he looked, oh, how he looked, coming in at six foot two—a little tall for my taste, since I didn’t like to crane my neck in order to look at a guy, but otherwise perfectly proportioned: not too beefy, not too skinny. Hair: dark brown and always neatly cut and meticulously styled. Blue eyes, but in some pictures I noticed they appeared a steely gray. And a face that could have been chiseled by Michelangelo.

  Oh yeah, the new Scrooge was like sunburn. Like lava. Like the heat of a thousand suns. The universe was doing me a favor, putting this boy up on the Board.

  “But he’s as rotten as the rest of them,” said Marty.

  Okay, reports were coming in from Dave’s team about our Scrooge 173 doing some not-good stuff to his fellow man, the way he spoke to the people who worked for him, the maid and the cook and so on, the way he treated the other boys at his exclusive all-male prep school, the way he jumped into cabs that someone else had hailed, for instance, or showed up to fancy charity events without actually doing anything for the charity.

  But who was I to judge?

  Stephanie took a sip of her chocolate milk. “So what happens now?”

  “Now we get to break inside his head,” Marty said wickedly. “And take over his mind.”

  From the next table over, I checked my watch and gathered together the remains of my half-eaten lunch. Stephanie noticed me getting up and told the tech guys that she had to go. She followed me out of the break room and down the hall to my office. Even though there were still ten minutes left of her lunch hour.

  She started yammering as soon as my office door closed behind us. “Um, Miss Havisham?”

  I winced. “Do me a favor and call me Holly. Havisham was a crazy old spinster in Great Expectations.”

  “The one who never takes off her wedding dress?”

  “That’s the one. So . . . Holly, please.”

  She smiled. “Holly. Okay. The paperwork for last year is all finished, and I filed it with the records department. I also made you a copy for your office. I color-coded it pink. It’s in your filing cabinet,” she informed me.

  “I have a filing cabinet?”

  She pointed behind me, where, yes, what do you know, there was a filing cabinet tucked against the back wall. It looked freshly dusted, too.

  “Great.” I sat down at my desk, which was now neatly organized. No papers or work orders or anything, and the paperwork that usually took two or three weeks to get all squared away was apparently done. All thanks to my perky new assistant. It didn’t totally suck. But today she was wearing a navy-blue T-shirt with sailboats on it that read, “Not all who wander are lost.” That would have been okay by itself, but she had paired it with a bright red cardigan and a white eyelet skirt. Happy Fourth of July in April, everyone. It physically hurt me to look at her. Plus she was just so in my face with her big glasses and her cheerful smile and her squeaky little voice.

  I had to get rid of her. I tried to think of a new errand to send her on. I’d come up with a few good ones in the past week. More expensive coffee. A wild-goose chase after a file that didn’t exist in the records department. A two-hour journey to an office supply store halfway across the city to pick up a specific type of pen—the only kind I could work with, I told her. But she always came back sooner than I’d hoped.

  Stephanie sat down across from my desk, perched on the edge of her seat like she might take flight at any moment. “Is there anything else I can do for you tod
ay?”

  I stared out the window at the building across the street. I was out of ideas. It was Friday. Maybe I could just tell her to go home early.

  “If not, I was wondering if you might finally have time to answer some questions I have about the company,” she said in a hopeful voice.

  I spun my chair back around to find her waiting with a pen and a notebook. “Didn’t you get a kind of briefing when Boz hired you?”

  She shook her head. “Boz just gave me a copy of A Christmas Carol. He said you’d explain everything to me when you had time.”

  I sighed. “Did he tell you anything? Anything at all?”

  She chewed on her lip guiltily. “I mean, I understand the general concept of the company: saving people, rehabilitating them one soul at a time. Changing the world. But how it all happens—I don’t know much about the actual process.” She positioned her pen on the paper. “So. I’m ready to learn. Tell me everything.”

  O-kay. Everything seemed like a lot. “Well, as you may have noticed, this company revolves around one particular day of the year.” Start with the obvious, Yvonne always said.

  “Ooh, ooh, I know this,” Stephanie squealed. “Christmas! I just love Christmas. When I was a kid I used to stay up all night on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t sleep, I was so excited. And then I would—”

  “Stephanie.” I stopped her.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a lot to go over here, and if we’re going to make it through it all before quitting time, I’m going to need you to focus.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll be quiet.” She made a motion like she was zipping her lips together.

  I sighed. “There are different branches of Project Scrooge all over the world—in London, obviously, where the whole thing began, but also in Tokyo, Sydney, New Delhi, you get the idea. We here in New York City cover the entire United States.”

  “What about Canada?” she asked. “Who does Canada?”

  “I don’t think there’s ever been a Scrooge in Canada,” I answered. “At least, not that I’ve heard of.”

  “No Scrooge in Canada, eh?” she said out loud as she wrote that down in her notebook. Then she giggled at her own joke.

  I soldiered on. “Every year at Project Scrooge is broken up into five staves.”

  She frowned. “Staves? Do you mean stages?”

  “No, I mean staves. It’s a musical term, like part of a song. Because the company is based on—”

  “A Christmas Carol!” she burst out. “Staves! That’s so neat.”

  Or totally corny, but okay.

  “Stave one is the Generation part—that’s where Blackpool comes up with the name of the new Scrooge. Which he does in the first few months of the year, while the rest of us are on break, so we’re technically into stave two now—the Identification part of the process.”

  “Identification,” she wrote. “What’s that?”

  “Blackpool tells us who the Scrooge is, because he can see it, somehow—I’m not sure how that works, actually, except that he can see the future. Then it’s our job to figure out how the person Blackpool picks fits into the Ebenezer Scrooge narrative. That’s the big task for us. It takes most of our time leading up to Christmas.” She looked like she was going to ask another question, so I talked faster. “It’s our responsibility, as Team Lamp, to filter through the Scrooge’s memories. We determine the turning points in his life, the important moments, the game changers. That’s so we can decide what scenes from his past to show him when we come to him on Christmas.”

  Stephanie’s pen paused against the paper for a moment. “And how do you get his memories? Do you really take over his mind?”

  I shook my head. “It’s a delicate process. One part science, one part . . .” I didn’t want to say the word magic, because that sounded too Disneyland. “Supernatural . . . stuff.” I kept going.

  “Anyway, so that’s Identification. Then comes Preparation—where we come up with a detailed plan for the night we’re going to kidnap the Scrooge—what we’re going to show him and what we’re going to say. After that comes the actual Performance—December the twenty-fourth, although we don’t enter the Scrooge’s bedroom until midnight—so it’s technically the twenty-fifth. Christmas.”

  Stephanie grinned. “I can only imagine how thrilling it would be to perform a new version of the Christmas Carol—but for reals—every single year.”

  “Yes, thrilling.” Boz had assured me that Stephanie wasn’t there to replace me, but I still didn’t love hearing her gush over my job. She could get her own job.

  “And then what? What’s the fifth stave?”

  I shrugged. “That’s called the Evaluation. It’s like maintenance, as I understand it. Keeping an eye on the past Scrooges, making sure that they don’t backslide.”

  “Do they? Backslide?” She seemed disappointed by the idea.

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t know much about the successful Scrooges—I just knew about one particular failed Scrooge: me. “The Evaluation people hang out in the lower levels of the building. I don’t go downstairs, like, ever.”

  Stephanie looked over her notes. “So, Gippy.”

  “Huh?”

  “The five staves are Generation, Identification, Preparation, Performance, and Evaluation. G. I. P. P. E. Gippy.”

  I held in a sigh. “Right.”

  “I’ve got a few more questions.”

  Of course she did.

  “I’m still unclear about the Identification part. What exactly are we trying to identify?”

  “We’re trying to match up our current Scrooge’s life with the Christmas Carol story, basically,” I explained. “We need to figure out—‘identify’—all the major characters, like the Freds and the Fezziwigs and all the others.”

  “Fezziwigs?” She looked confused.

  “It’s all in that book Boz gave you—A Christmas Carol. You should read it cover to cover. Each Scrooge has a series of characters that are meant to represent something important in his life. The Fezziwig, for instance, represents an early role model the Scrooge had who was kind and generous. In the book he was an old chubby guy, but with our Scrooge, the Fezziwig could be anybody—it could be a skinny woman or a little kid, just so long as that person represents the spirit of giving and openheartedness that the Scrooge needs to see. Get it?”

  “Identify the characters.” She wrote that down. “So who are the other characters? Besides Fezziwig, I mean?”

  I was about to run down the list, but then I figured it’d be easier just to show her.

  “Come on,” I said. “Follow me.”

  We headed down the hall toward Conference Room A, Little Dorrit on my heels like a happy Labrador. The room was much bigger than Conference Room B, with a large table in the middle surrounded by chairs. I flipped on the lights.

  The big corkboard that had been in the Go Room, the capital-B Board, had been moved to the head of the table, with Ethan’s picture still stuck to the top of it. The walls around the perimeter of the room were set up with large whiteboards each labeled with a name, starting with one that read MARLEY on the far left: MARLEY, FAN, FEZZIWIG, BELLE, CRATCHIT, PORTLIES, FRED, TINY TIM.

  “Wow,” remarked Stephanie.

  I crossed over to the board that read FEZZIWIG.

  “This is the room where we have all of our monthly meetings on the Scrooge situation. In the time between these meetings we’re supposed to identify an equivalent for each of these characters,” I said. “We as Team Lamp are responsible for the Jacob Marley, the Fan, the Fezziwig, and the Belle—the important people in the Scrooge’s past. And then Dave’s team handles the Cratchit, the portly gentlemen, the Fred, and the Tiny Tim, since those are all people in the present. We focus on one of these characters every couple of months, so from now until the end of June, we’ll work on the Marley, and Dave’s team will work on the Cratchit.”

  “So what does the Ghost of Christmas Future do?” Stephanie asked.

  “Blackp
ool? Mostly he just sits around looking like Grumpy Cat. But apparently while he’s doing that he’s seeing visions of the Scrooge’s future, so he helps with the Identification thing, too, since he can tell what’s going to happen to people.”

  The door to the conference room opened, and Dave and Boz waltzed in. They looked momentarily surprised to see us in there.

  “Oh. Havisham. Dorrit. Hello,” Boz said.

  “Hello,” Stephanie replied cheerfully. She even waved at Dave.

  “Uh, as I was saying, we’ve got at least one feed on almost all of the central locations,” Dave reported to Boz. “It’s not as many as last year, but I think it’s good coverage for now.”

  “Excellent,” Boz replied.

  I had an idea. “Can we take a peek at what we have set up? I’m showing Dorrit here how the company works, and that might be nice for her to see.”

  Dave and Boz exchanged glances. “Of course,” Boz said at last. “We’ll go have a look right now.”

  We went back down the hall toward Dave’s office. Dave had to swipe his badge to open the door. Inside was a fairly regular-looking office with a desk and filing cabinet and so on, a lot like mine. But on the other side of the room there was an oversized bright red door, and through that door there was a large room filled with television monitors and a bunch of other fancy-looking electrical equipment.

  The Surveillance Room. I’d been in there only a few times myself. It was pretty cool.

  “Wow,” breathed Stephanie. “This is like a spy movie.”

  Dave picked up a remote and pressed a button, and suddenly all of the monitors turned on, each one showing a different location.

  “Before we really get started on our work with the Scrooge, Dave’s team has to set up extensive surveillance.” I nodded at Dave. “The company monitors his house, his job, the places he goes out to eat, anywhere where we can observe him interacting with the world. That way, wherever the Scrooge goes, we can watch him.”

  “In the bathroom?” Stephanie grimaced.

  “No, not in the bathroom! Ew.”

  “We don’t monitor bathrooms,” Dave said gently.