He hadn’t felt that way in a long time.
His mind jumped to another memory, which happened sometimes—one memory leading to another without me directing it. I tended to follow the Scrooge’s train of thought in those instances. It was usually connected, somehow, to something important. Like with this memory with the same little boy, a few years older, standing in front of a coffin.
Ethan didn’t linger there. He didn’t like to remember, even in his subconscious mind. He pressed the memory deep down inside him and moved on.
In the next memory his dad had been dead for more than a year. His mother was out working late, and his sister was at a friend’s. There was a nanny now, but she was in another room on the phone with her boyfriend, by the sound of it. Ethan was alone in the glow of the television. He was watching a commercial that showed a family having breakfast together before opening their presents around a beautiful Christmas tree. A coffee commercial playing a familiar song: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
Ethan’s teeth clenched. I could feel the hate welling inside him, like a bitter taste in his mouth. He detested that family and their breakfast table and their stack of French toast and their steaming cups of supposedly delicious coffee. He loathed their Christmas tree and their presents and their matching pajamas. But most of all, he despised their smiling, happy faces.
He didn’t say the words, but they were there just the same.
Bah, humbug.
I knew exactly how he felt.
“Good sift tonight, Holly,” Grant said after I came back through the Portal.
“Yeah,” said Marty. “You’re a pro.”
“Thanks,” I said absently. Of course, Grant and Marty couldn’t know how the sift had actually gone. They could only see what the cameras saw—a dark bedroom and me standing over Ethan while he slept. I was the only one who truly knew what had been going on in the Scrooge’s mind.
“Now you’re supposed to fill out some sort of report?” piped up Stephanie.
Right, the report. If Project Scrooge was really my own personal version of hell, my hell was made up of never-ending paperwork.
I nodded and made my way back to my office. I told Stephanie to go home, I’d see her at the meeting in another few days. I didn’t want her pacing around while I wrote this dumb report, checking my grammar or highlighting all the important passages or something equally Stephanie-like. So then I was alone, finally, and I could think.
I spent ten minutes staring at my computer screen.
Ethan’s dad had died. It was so obvious that it was this single event that had put Ethan on the path to Scrooginess. And this I could totally understand.
My mom died when I was thirteen. It was like her death split an uncrossable line down the middle of my life, a before and an after.
Before, we lived in Beverly Hills in a house painted all warm, bright colors and filled with antiques and special flea-market finds that my mom had painstakingly collected and refinished, so every piece of furniture we owned was personal, she said. After, we lived in a pristine, sprawling place in Malibu, and the furniture and walls were mostly gray and white. Clean. Modern. Yvonne’s.
Before, Ro and I spent hours together, playing games by the pool and making the most elaborate paper dolls you’ve ever seen and dressing up in all my mom’s outrageously cool Hollywood clothes. After, we started hanging out at the beach, just watching the waves. And then hanging out less. And then not hanging out at all.
Before, my dad cracked jokes. After, he threw himself into work. He wanted to talk to me, sometimes, get involved in my life when it suited him to try, but he was never home. We didn’t talk about Mom.
Before, I was what you might call happy. After, it was like happy people became the enemy. Happy people were weak. They were clueless. They did stupid things like die on you.
Before, I thought Christmas was a day my mother had created entirely for my benefit. After, Christmas felt like a black hole that would suck me into it for weeks. It made me think of my mom when I didn’t want to think of her. Which understandably made me cranky, but you’re not allowed to be cranky on Christmas. You’re supposed to be all merry and bright.
After, I convinced myself that Christmas was just another day, an excuse to spend too much money on gifts people don’t really appreciate and go to lame parties where people wore Christmas sweaters—an affront to good fashion everywhere—and drank too much eggnog—possibly the grossest beverage ever to have been invented. After, when people said, “Merry Christmas,” I thought, Whatevs. Which was, I suppose, my version of Bah, humbug.
I shook my head, trying to clear out my crowded thoughts. I had to finish my work. I dashed off a quick report about the details of the sift and headed home, still thinking about Ethan’s dad and my mom the entire time. Like when Ethan was looking at that TV family all snug in their pain-free, insufferably content lives, hating them so much, how I felt like I instantly got him. I knew him.
That night I had a dream about my mom and Charlie Brown.
It was the last Christmas before she got sick. We spent that one in Hawaii, because my dad had to film there at the beginning of the year. We used to go with my dad on location all the time. Before, I mean. Anyway, in my dream/memory my mom somehow got this little tree to put up in our hotel room. A Charlie Brown tree, she called it, because there was this Charlie Brown Christmas special where Charlie is sent to get a tree and comes back with this stunted, tipped-over shrub, but when they decorate it, it magically becomes beautiful. So this Hawaii tree of ours was kind of pathetic, but it still deserved someone to care about it, Mom said. We didn’t have ornaments, so Dad made popcorn, and he and I sat on the bed threading it piece by piece onto a long strand of dental floss. Mom cut some napkins into odd little snowflakes. And we found some grocery store candy canes to hang on the branches.
“You see, you don’t need much to make Christmas,” Mom said after we were done decorating. The tree wasn’t pretty, but it was nice. It was ours. She planted a kiss on the top of my head. “All you need is love.”
In the dream, I wanted to say, “You’re wrong. We need you,” because somehow I knew it was only a dream, and I knew that she was dead—she’d been dead such a long time, it felt like forever—and I wanted to tell her that her dying had really screwed up everything for me. I was a freaking Scrooge now. I was dead, too, and where was she? If we were both dead, why couldn’t I find her? Why wasn’t she here? I wanted to ask her, but that’s when I opened my eyes.
I was back in New York City. Cars honking on the street below. I smelled peppermint.
I closed my eyes again. “Bah, humbug,” I said out loud to the empty room. “Whatevs. So what?”
SIX
“SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED about Ethan Winters?” Boz asked when the other Ghosts and I, along with several members of all three teams—Past, Present, and Future—were gathered in Conference Room A for our initial Scrooge meeting. “Havisham?”
Stephanie slid a folder over to me. I opened it and scanned through my report of the memory sift and the notes my staff had put together from their research into Ethan’s past so far.
I cleared my throat. “Well, Ethan’s had kind of a tough life, it turns out.” Next to me I heard frantic scribbling. I turned to see that Stephanie had taken out her notebook and was jotting all of this down. Like this meeting was a class she’d have a test on later.
“Indeed. A tragic past is quite normal for a Scrooge,” Boz said, way too cheerfully.
This, I would argue, is why Scrooges are so messed up. It wouldn’t be hard to avoid becoming a bad person if your life had always been full of ice cream and apple pie. But we’d been given rotten apples. It was monumentally unfair, in my opinion.
“His dad died when he was twelve,” I said. “After that he was left on his own a lot.”
“A history of isolation, yes. That’s typical.”
Scribble scribble scribble, went Stephanie.
“Have you identifi
ed a Marley?” Boz asked.
It was early in the game for that—the Marley was our starting point in April and May, but I’d been in Ethan’s memories only the one time. At this stage I was expected to do sifts once a week, unless getting the right details out of Ethan proved difficult—then I’d get approved for twice a week, although more than that was apparently not great for the Scrooge’s brain. But right now I was still trying to find my way around Ethan’s mind, sort the flashes I’d seen that meant something from the random, insignificant ones. No one expected me to have the answers yet. Still, I thought about the old man with the cold blue eyes I’d seen during those first moments in Ethan’s memory. He was old—which Marleys tended to be. Obviously rich, from the impeccable three-piece suit he’d been wearing, another Marley quality. And scowling.
“It’s too soon to tell,” I said, “but I do have a hunch.”
“Follow it,” Boz ordered like this was his idea. “It’s like I’ve always said: follow your instincts.” He turned to Dave. “Copperfield, tell us about the present.”
Dave scratched at his beard. “Ethan’s been easier than most Scrooges to get our eyes and ears on, since he’s in the city. He recently became legally independent even though he’s not eighteen yet—‘emancipated,’ they call it, and now he resides in a penthouse apartment on the corner of Sixty-Fourth and Third, which used to belong to his grandfather. His mother lives in the Bronx with her second husband. She calls Ethan once a week, but otherwise he has no family interaction. He lives alone. He attends the Browning School on Sixty-Second, where he’s a straight-A student and the captain of the tennis team, but I wouldn’t exactly call him popular. He has friends, but no close friends, as we’d expect in a Scrooge. And outside of school he spends most of his time at the New York Athletic Club.”
“So he’s a—what’s the word?—jock?” Boz said.
I pictured Ethan swimming, the way his arms had sliced through the cool water in his dream.
Dave shook his head. “I think he focuses on athletics only because he wants to perfect himself. It’s very important to him to have the best of everything. The best equipment, the best scores, the best body. He simply wants to be the best.”
An admirable quality, if you ask me, sniffed my Inner Yvonne.
“Any ideas on the Cratchit?” Boz asked. That was always Dave’s first assignment after he set up surveillance: find the Bob Cratchit, who was usually an employee of the Scrooge’s or someone he had a kind of authority over. It’d be interesting to see how this worked out in Ethan’s case, seeing as he was only seventeen and unlikely to be anybody’s boss.
Dave flipped through his notes. “I’ve got a good candidate. Daniel Denton is his name, but the students refer to him as ‘Dent.’ He’s a scholarship student—a hilarious, sweet kid, actually—only obviously lacking the wealth and advantages the other boys at the school enjoy. Ethan Winters seems to take personal offense that this kid is at Browning, so he’s always playing cruel jokes on him. Right now he has Dent believing that there’s a secret society at the school—the Eucleian Society. Dent wants to join, of course. So Ethan has Dent doing all of these initiation stunts. First it was sticking a raw egg in the back of the desk of an unpopular teacher. Then he made Dent come to school in a toga and recite a poem at the top of the school stairs just as class was getting out. That sort of thing.”
“But there is no Eucleian Society, right?” I asked.
“Not at Browning. So Ethan has Dent doing all of these humiliating things for nothing. Anyway,” Dave summed up, “he exerts a kind of power over this boy, which is consistent with a Cratchit. I’m not certain yet, but like Holly said, I’ve got a hunch about him.”
“Oh, I love hunches,” Boz said. “How about you, Blackpool?” He turned toward the other side of the table, where the GCF was brooding. “What does the future have in store for our Mr. Winters? Any hunches there?”
“I have seen the Scrooge’s death,” intoned Blackpool. That was grim, but it wasn’t surprising. Every Scrooge we encountered had less than a year to live. It didn’t matter how they old they were—they were all fated to die sometime in the next twelve months. I’d asked Boz about that once, and he’d said it was one of the criteria Blackpool used to choose a Scrooge—his “imminent demise,” he called it. “They have to run out of all the other chances that life has given them to change on their own,” Boz had explained. “So our chance will be their last chance.”
“When will it happen? How?” asked Boz.
“Struck by an automobile,” Blackpool answered, “on Christmas morning.”
Wait, what?
“On Christmas Day, this year?” Stephanie sounded as shocked as I felt. “You mean that if we don’t succeed, if Ethan Winters doesn’t see the error of his ways and change his present course, he won’t even make it through one day?”
“Six fifty-six a.m.,” Blackpool said with an air of grim satisfaction. “On Broadway.”
There was a moment of silence. I shivered. I knew exactly what dying after you got hit by a car felt like, after all. Not fun.
“But that’s what we’re here to do, right?” Of course Dave, with his endless optimism, was the first to recover from this morbid news. “We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’re going to change the Scrooge’s fate.”
“Well said, Copperfield,” Boz agreed. “That is exactly what we’re here to do. We are going to save this Scrooge. Or at least we’ll give it our very best try.”
Right. I suddenly noticed that everyone in the room was smiling. It was a strange expression that’d been going around the office lately, this knowing smile that made me feel vaguely like I was missing something. Not to mention that everyone was staring right at me. I guessed Blackpool had made the announcement, and Dave and Boz had expressed their enthusiasm for the project, and now it was my turn.
“Yeah,” I said awkwardly. “That’s right. We’re going to do this thing. We are totally going to save this Scrooge.”
The Jacob Marley was usually pretty easy to identify. He was always a type of role model, but never in a positive way—he encouraged the young Ebenezer Scrooge to put blind ambition above everything else; he nurtured the Scrooge’s flaws, year after year, until they became equals and people had a hard time even telling them apart. Then eventually the Marley died and left the Scrooge to carry on for both of them.
I knew what had happened to my own Marley—Yvonne Worthington Chase. She was doomed to forever wander the earth, invisible, watching all the people come and go in all the wrong clothing choices, but never being able to do anything about it. Probably still wearing her Diane von Furstenberg and smelling like a corpse and dragging around her chains of pearls. It wasn’t the kind of ending I would have wished for her.
Yvonne wasn’t a nice person—I knew that. But all these years later, even after I understood her part in my own screwed-up fate, I was still grateful for what she did for me. Because before Yvonne, everyone used to say I looked like my mother. They always meant it as a compliment, being that my mom was drop-dead gorgeous. She and my dad met at one of those crazy exclusive parties in the Valley. By then both of them were already famous in their own right, but my dad didn’t watch a lot of TV, so he didn’t recognize her as the Ariana Jackson, and my mom had heard of Gideon Chase but never met him in person. He wore board shorts and flip-flops, or so the story went. She wore a white sundress and a magnolia in her hair. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her” was how my dad always told it, and I knew exactly what he meant. There was something mesmerizing about her, something that made you want to keep staring at her face. Her beauty was completely effortless, too. Even without makeup, she could light up a room.
I did look like her. Sort of. My eyes were the same shade of golden brown, my nose was long and straight with the small bump at the end, my bottom lip was much fuller than the top one, and my chin came to a point that was nearly too sharp, just like hers. But Mom’s hair was a shiny chestnut color and fell in perfec
t waves down her back. My hair was dull as muddy water, half curly, half limp. My teeth were crooked, and my ears—the only thing that I could clearly tell I inherited from my dad—stuck out horribly from my head. I was all angles, where Mom was gentle curves. She kind of floated when she walked. I slouched. Mom was luminous, amazing, charismatic. I was frizzy. Awkward. Shy. I was like a bad photocopy of her, which made it even worse, because people couldn’t help but compare us.
But Mom’s beauty didn’t last. She lost her hair and was left with a few little fuzzy strands that clung damply to her nearly bare skull. Her skin became sallow. Her face puffed out from all the drugs they pumped into her. Her lips chapped. Her eyelashes and eyebrows fell out. Her body withered away so much she started to look like a gruesome stick figure—her head abnormally large, bobbling on top of an intersection of straight, indefinable lines. She was ugly by the end. It was the thing that made her the angriest, I think—the cancer stealing her beauty. It wasn’t enough that she had to suffer so much and die so young. She had to die ugly, too.
That’s how we ended up with Yvonne. She was just Yvonne Worthington then, well established as a fashion stylist but not über-famous yet. She was in the middle of her first season of her fashion reality show. She’d worked with my mom a few times before the cancer, done her up for the Emmys one year. But when Yvonne heard she was sick, she pressured my mom to be on her show. So one day she showed up at our house with her camera crew, bringing with her a series of glamorous wigs, clothes that would disguise how frail my mother had become, products like organic bath soaks and soothing lotions and makeup that would hide the circles under Ariana Jackson’s bloodshot eyes. I remember that day like it was yesterday.
“This is so kind of you,” my mother kept saying, but she didn’t really want the attention. She’d only said yes to the whole thing because it was impossible to say no to Yvonne.