The Afterlife of Holly Chase by Cynthia Hand
“Thank you, ma’am,” whispered the little boy on the monitors. “God bless you, Mrs. Charles.”
Grant passed the twenty back to Marty.
The screens went black.
“Good work, everyone.” Boz came up to the front of the room. “We were a well-oiled machine tonight. Which means that the world is a better place, thanks to us. And, of course, merry Christmas!”
The room filled with a chorus of Merry Christmases. Even I found myself mouthing the words.
“Go home. Rest up. Enjoy your holidays,” he continued, “and I will see you all back here next year, ready to start on Scrooge 173.”
The team began to disperse. I hurried toward the door.
“Oh, Havisham,” Boz called. “Before you go, I’d like to see you in my office, please.”
Sigh. “Now?”
“You can get cleaned up first,” Boz said charitably. “Just see me before you leave.”
Double sigh. “Okay.” I turned and trudged off toward my dressing room.
I ran into Dave—the Ghost of Christmas Present—in the hall. He’d taken off his robe and his wreath, but he still reminded me of the Jolly Green Giant. Dave was, like, six foot four and bearded and had probably died in his late thirties, and all I could really think when I looked at him was how I probably should have been nicer to him the night I was the Scrooge. He knew exactly who I was, but in five years he’d never acted like I was anything but a vital part of this company. Dave was the very definition of a nice guy. Which made me wonder how he’d ended up working here. What was he being punished for?
“It’s a good thing,” he said.
At first I wasn’t sure he was even talking to me. “What?”
He stopped outside of his dressing room door—the one marked Copperfield—and gave me a goofy smile. “Working here. It’s a good thing.”
FYI: Dave could read minds. It was part of his job description. Most of the time he kept that ability turned off, to be polite, I guess, but on Christmas it always kind of overrode his system.
“We help people,” he said. “We change the world.”
“Yeah. I know.” Cue the company motto.
“For the record, I like working with you, Holly.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m going to miss it.”
Okay, so that was a strange thing to say. But before I could ask what he meant, he went into his dressing room and closed the door.
I changed into my regular clothes and reported back to Boz. When I got to his office, I found him standing at the window looking out at the city while big, fluffy flakes of snow danced past the glass. Boz just loved New York. He loved the lights of Times Square and the bustle of Broadway. He loved the subways and the hot dog stands, the honking cars and the brush of shoulders on the street. He even loved the cold. He was always going on about it.
I tapped on the door nervously.
“Oh, Havisham, come in,” he said. “There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”
I wasn’t even two steps inside his office when a girl jumped out at me. For a second I thought she was going to attack me or hug me. Either way, I stepped back fast.
“Oh, wow,” the girl breathed. “You’re the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” I admitted.
“Havisham, meet Dorrit,” Boz said. “She’s a sophomore at NYU—isn’t that fantastic?”
The girl didn’t look a day over fifteen, in my opinion. I mean, she was wearing a green sweater with a polar bear on it, her platinum-colored hair was in one of those messy half-falling-out ponytails, and her purple glasses were much too big for her face, but not in the cool hipster sort of way.
“Wow,” she chirped. “You’re the biggest celebrity I’ve ever met. Well, I did see Taylor Swift in Central Park once, but I didn’t actually meet her.”
Boz cleared his throat. Project Scrooge wasn’t a place for fangirls—Boz never let people from the outside see what went on inside the Project, never ever. “Well, Dorrit,” he said awkwardly, avoiding my questioning stare, “it’s Havisham’s job—not Havisham herself—who’s famous. Holly’s only been with us for a short while.”
Oh, thanks, Boz, I thought. Thank you so much.
“What’s it been now, Holly? Four years?” he asked.
“Five.”
“Yes, that’s right. Five.”
“Wow,” the girl said again. “Five years as the Ghost of Christmas Past. That’s so—wow.”
I didn’t know how many more wows I could take.
“I’ve wanted to meet the Ghost of Christmas Past ever since I found out about this project,” the girl said. “So cool, by the way, so totally noble, what you’re doing here. You’re changing the world.”
“How did you find out about the Project?” I asked carefully.
“Oh, Dorrit is our new intern,” Boz answered for her.
I frowned. We didn’t use interns. PS wasn’t the kind of company that did its headhunting through the normal channels. For obvious reasons. Not all of the people who worked there were dead—that was just me and the other Ghosts, I thought, and possibly Boz, but he never talked about it—but there was enough top-secret stuff going on that Boz was super careful about who we hired. People around the office joked that it was harder to get a position at Project Scrooge than it was to get recruited for the FBI. The process apparently involved Blackpool’s power to see the future and rigorous tests and interviews and layers and layers of confidentiality agreements.
“I’ve decided that she’s going to be your assistant,” Boz continued.
The girl gave a suppressed squeal of excitement.
My mouth dropped open.
“But . . . I’ve never had an assistant.”
“You’ve never had an assistant until now,” Boz corrected cheerfully.
Dorrit’s smile was almost a supernova.
“But I don’t need an assistant,” I protested.
“I know you don’t need an assistant,” Boz said. “But I thought it might be nice to have someone else around. A fresh pair of eyes. Someone to help you, someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to look after you and give you more personalized attention.”
This set off a bunch of alarm bells, obviously, but Boz had that freakishly stubborn glint in his eye. I’d seen that look on his face a few times before, and it had never turned out well for me.
I decided to go with it.
“Um . . . awesome.” I extended my hand for the girl to shake. “I guess this means welcome aboard, Dorrit,” I said in my very best Boz impression.
The girl simply exploded into a puddle of goo. “Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she said, pumping my hand up and down. “I won’t let you down, Miss Havisham. I promise. Thank you. Thanks.”
Suddenly I got a flash from when she was a kid, which happened sometimes when I touched people—the way Dave could hear the present and Blackpool could see the future, I felt the past. In that moment I could feel what this girl had been like as a toddler, snuggled up in her bed in a dark room, awake and waiting.
A light went on. A man’s voice said softly, Come on, sweetie. It’s morning.
Is it Christmas yet? she asked.
Freaking Christmas. I gritted my teeth and firmly pushed this girl’s past out of my mind. I walked her to the door. “All righty,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you later?” Then I pried my hand away from hers and closed the door right on her cute little button nose. I turned to Boz. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“You forgot to wish her a merry Christmas,” he said from where he was sitting at his desk. He straightened a stack of papers and gazed longingly at the record player.
“Or maybe you’re trying to kill her,” I concluded. “You think after a week with Little Mary Sunshine I’ll go crazy and rip her tiny blond head off. Because I will do it. I swear, Boz, I don’t deal well with her type.”
“I think she may surprise you,” he said, smiling in an annoyingly mysterious way. “All
“Fine. Can I go now?”
“Just one more thing.” He opened his desk drawer and took out a small wrapped gift, about the size and shape of a ring box. “Merry Christmas, Havisham.”
I stared at him. We’d never exchanged gifts before, not once in five years. “I didn’t . . . I don’t have anything for . . .”
He shook his head and pushed the box into my hand. “It’s all right. Take it. Open it when you get home.”
“Uh, thank you?” I didn’t know what else to say.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “And I’ll expect you at eleven sharp on your start date—what is it this year?”
“April first,” I answered. Boz always gave the entire company the month of January as vacation. Then Blackpool spent February and March deciding on who would be the new Scrooge. And then we were all back in business. The Scrooge business.
“Of course, April first,” Boz agreed. “Don’t be late.”
I never was. Even though I didn’t know why it would make a difference if I showed up on time.
The subway was almost empty on the way back to my place, apart from the few disgusting Christmas-morning types: lovers who couldn’t help their PDAs, smiling families on their way to their grandmother’s house, the odd guy in a Santa suit. I picked a seat at the end of the car and slumped there in my Hoodie the whole ride.
The Hoodie was one of the big perks that came with the Ghost of Christmas Past job. To the outside observer, it appeared to be a normal black hoodie, but when you zipped it up and pulled the hood over your head, you became completely invisible. It had saved my butt lots of times while I was sneaking around a Scrooge’s house. I wasn’t supposed to use the Hoodie for anything but company business, of course, but I wore it all the time. It was comfortable.
It was four stops between 195 Broadway, where Project Scrooge’s headquarters was located, and my stop downtown. Then down three blocks to my apartment. Then up four flights of stairs, because, of course, it was a walk-up. Then home.
I was legally deceased, which made regular things like credit checks impossible, so the company paid the rent for this place, plus the utilities and the furnishings: a twin bed and a lamp and an ugly-but-comfortable plaid sofa, a tiny kitchen table that could seat two (but never did, because I never had anyone over), the basic refrigerator and stove and all the necessary pots, pans, and dishes (but no dishwasher), a chipped pedestal sink in the bathroom, and an old claw-foot tub with a shower attachment. I also received a hundred dollars a month for food and miscellaneous expenses. That was it. One hundred dollars. No money for decent clothes. No internet. No smartphone. No frills of any kind. I had to get by with less money each month than what the Old Holly had spent on manicures.
I’d worked at PS for almost a year before I got over the sense of total outrage that flooded me every single time I opened the door to my closet-sized apartment—like I was stepping into a horror flick, complete with the occasional cockroach. I’d even tried to run away once, but I hadn’t gotten very far before my arms and legs went numb and I passed out in the middle of the airport. I’d woken up right back on the green sofa in the PS building, where Boz had gently explained to me (again) that I didn’t have a life outside of the company. I was there because they wanted me to be there, until they’d decided I’d been there long enough. In other words, I was stuck.
When I got home I flung myself down on the couch and sighed. I hated this part. There was nothing to do now for three whole months. It was supposed to be a nice thing for the employees of Project Scrooge—time to spend with your family and friends after months of hard, unrelenting work—but I didn’t have family. I didn’t have friends. I didn’t have money to shop or do anything cool. I couldn’t go anywhere.
Ten minutes into vacation, and I was already bored.
Next door, through the paper-thin wall, I could hear the neighbor lady watching It’s a Wonderful Life. My dad and I always used to watch that movie together, before Mom died and Yvonne came along to take her place. Dad loved it, for some reason. I always told him I thought it was the cheesiest cheese.
“What is it you want, Mary?” Jimmy Stewart was asking Donna Reed through the wall. “You want the moon? Just say the word, and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.”
Dad was such an incurable romantic.
I’d told Dad that the movie was lame, but I’d secretly loved it, especially the romantic parts, the parts where it’s like George and Mary can’t help but fall in love with each other. That’s how it felt like love should be—inevitable. Irresistible. Written in the stars.
Not that I would know.
I sneaked into the hall with my Hoodie to “borrow” the neighbor lady’s newspaper. To check the movies section. To see if one of Dad’s movies was playing.
He didn’t make a film for two years after I died. Then he did a couple of big blockbusters, one about robots and one about aliens. That wasn’t his style at all, but it paid the bills, I suppose.
I saw those movies, like, fifteen times each. They were both pretty good if you like that kind of thing, grand adventures, full of bright colors and sweeping music and all the feels in the key moments. Of course they both had happy endings, too. The hero wins. The villain loses. The end.
Anyway, so I checked to see if there was a new movie from Gideon Chase. There wasn’t. I returned the paper to the spot outside my neighbor’s door and went inside. I was about to hang up my Hoodie when I felt something stashed in the pocket.
The present. From Boz.
I opened it. Inside was a pocket watch—silver and a little tarnished. It was pretty, in an antique sort of way. Vintage. It was still going, but the time it showed was three hours behind.
An old watch. Weird, I thought. Why would Boz give me a watch?
Why, for that matter, would Boz give me an assistant?
What was he up to?
It probably wasn’t anything good. But maybe I didn’t care. After five long years, five Scrooges, five Christmas Eves performing the same old show, I was just so tired of it all—the same people, the same tasks, the same script, the same paperwork afterward—and what did it get me, I thought, what did this crap job ever do for me?
Nothing.
It was just a job. A job that—if I was lucky, right?—I was probably going to be doing for decades, if not centuries. Over and over and over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I’d figured out a long time ago that Project Scrooge was my own personal version of hell.
THREE
I’M GOING TO FAST FORWARD again, past the three months where I basically lazed slothlike around my apartment, or aimlessly wandered the streets of New York looking in store windows at stuff I didn’t have the money to buy, or used the Hoodie to sneak into movie theaters for free and spend hours sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers who never even knew that I was there. Let’s pick up on the first day back at Project Scrooge. Where my new assistant was waiting right inside my office door the moment I arrived, a cup of coffee in hand.
“Good morning, Miss Havisham!” she bubbled.
Oh good, she’s a morning person, I thought. And today she was wearing a yellow polka-dot sweater and orange capris with black ballet flats. The girl needed serious help in the fashion department.
I took the coffee, drank a sip, then spit it out. “This is cold!”
She grabbed the cup back from me. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I’ve been waiting here since nine. I didn’t know you didn’t have to come in until eleven.” Her head tilted to one side like a curious puppy’s. “Why don’t you have to come in until eleven, when everyone else has to be here at nine? If you don’t mind me asking.”
I could have given her the truthful answer, which was that I had died at exactly nine o’clock in the morning, so that was when my body “reset” itself. Sometimes I barely felt it, like a ripple that started at my head and worked down to my toes, but other days that moment felt like dying all ov
But I didn’t mention this to the annoying blonde.
“I work a lot of nights on this job,” I explained instead. “The only time I have to be here during the day is for department and company meetings. So today it’s eleven.”
She nodded. “Eleven. Check. And what do you like in your coffee? Sugar? Milk?” she asked. “I thought I saw a few of those flavored sweeteners in the break room, too.”
“You know, there’s a great little coffee shop about four blocks away from here,” I answered brightly. “I’d love a large vanilla latte. Extra hot. Whole milk.”
She stared at me with her huge eyes from behind her huge glasses for a minute, surprised by my order. I could tell she wanted to ask me if there was a company account to pay for said latte (there wasn’t), but she didn’t want to look stupid.
“Large vanilla latte, extra hot, whole milk,” she repeated.
“That’s it.” I estimated that I had about three days before Boz caught on to this fancy coffee thing and shut me down, but it would be worth it while it lasted. “Okay, now off with you.”
She blinked. “Off with me?”
“To the coffee shop.” I took her by the shoulders and guided her out of my office.
“But isn’t there a meeting with your team in a few minutes, like you said? I don’t want to miss that,” she protested as I walked her to the elevators.
“The sooner you go, the sooner you can return.” I pressed the button for down. “Oh, and what’s your name?” I asked.
She hesitated. For a second, it looked like she couldn’t actually remember her name. “Um, Dorrit?”
“No, not the stupid Dickens name Boz gave you. Your real name.”
“Stephanie,” she stammered. “My friends call me Steph.”
The elevator dinged and the door opened. She got in. I waved. She waved back, her face a little crestfallen.
“Bye, Stephanie.”
The doors closed.