“Why are you showing me this?” I asked the Ghost.
“I told you, these are just the shadows of things that have been,” said the Ghost. “If you don’t like them, don’t blame me.”
There was something so familiar about those words. The entire night felt like the worst case of déjà vu ever, all the way back to when Dead Yvonne had showed up in my room. Even then, after I finished screaming long enough to hear her warn me about the visit from the three spirits—even then, I thought, I know this. I’ve seen this movie before.
But I didn’t know I was a Scrooge.
Still, one thing was perfectly clear: I was the villain here. They thought I was a bad person. They—and who was they, anyway, who was orchestrating this?—thought I needed to change who I was.
The room had gone foggy again. The Ghost was talking—something about Ro and what the future had in store for her, something amazing, no doubt, since Ro could obviously do no wrong. But again, I wasn’t listening. I was thinking, Hey, there’s nothing wrong with me. I may not be nice, exactly; I may not be all sunshine and rainbows all the time, but I’m not a bad person.
I’m not that bad, I thought. I’m just a realist.
That’s what Yvonne used to call herself: a realist. Since she’d died I’d always listened to what I thought of as my Inner Yvonne, the voice in the back of my mind that told me how Yvonne Worthington Chase would have reacted to any given situation, as if my stepmother were still there grooming me. It’s about survival of the fittest, my darling, the Inner Yvonne said, so you have to be the fittest. That’s life.
And then I started thinking about tonight’s Yvonne, Yvonne-back-from-the-dead, moaning about how she should have been nicer, she should have been kinder to her fellow man. But the real Yvonne didn’t apologize to anyone. She didn’t compromise. She didn’t look back.
So there was no way that tonight’s Yvonne had been real.
The Ghost pulled at my sleeve. “Holly?”
None of this was real, I decided. It was all a dream, and when I woke up I would totally laugh at myself for how freaked out I’d been.
Take control of the dream, whispered the Inner Yvonne from the back room of my brain. That’s what we do in any uncertain situation. We take control.
Right. Take control. Starting with how I was apparently supposed to be feeling guilty about Ro. I pulled my shoulders back and stood up straighter.
“Ro wasn’t anything special,” I said, turning to face the Ghost. “I was only friends with her because her mom was friends with my mom, and she wanted us to be besties. We clearly didn’t have anything in common. I don’t care that we’re not friends anymore. I’m glad, even.”
I was so good, I was almost believable.
The Ghost cocked her head again and stared at me. “She was like a sister to you. You loved her.”
I scoffed. “Did not.”
“Did so,” the Ghost shot back, like this disagreement was about whose turn it was on the swings. “You loved Rosie, but you let her go because she didn’t fit in with the image you’d built of yourself.”
“I did not love Ro,” I insisted. “But that doesn’t matter. We’re not friends anymore. It’s in the past, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. So big freaking deal. Take me home. I am so done with playing this stupid game.”
“But—” For the first time the Ghost looked hurt.
I didn’t care. “Also, can you turn down your light thing? It’s giving me a migraine.”
“It matters,” argued the Ghost, but she didn’t look at me. Her light dimmed a few degrees. She reached for my hand again. “It matters,” she said softly. “We should go.”
I was different after that. I stopped taking it seriously. I mean, I laughed at the Ghost of Christmas Present—just point-blank laughed at his silly green robe and the wreath on his head. I even made fun of his beard. Then I stood there mocking everybody when he tried to show me what the other students at Malibu High School were saying about me behind my back. I sort of knew all that stuff anyway. Deep down, I always knew the truth—people despised me. It was because they were jealous, I told myself. They didn’t matter, because I was the real deal.
Next the Ghost tried to show me how I was messing up Elena’s life. Like I could really be responsible for someone else’s total lame factor. It was all so Hallmark Channel: Elena trying so hard to do what I asked of her, making my meals, ironing my clothes, keeping the house spotless, and then her sweet little daughter, Nika, having a terrible accident. All supposedly my fault. It was only a dream, I reminded myself again and again. A stupid dream based on a stupid Christmas movie I’d seen as a kid. So I kept laughing, snickering, rolling my eyes.
Eventually the next Ghost showed up. He wore a hood so I couldn’t see his face, and he didn’t talk. He pointed with his long, skeletal fingers. I didn’t laugh at him, because he was, like, mildly terrifying, but I also didn’t believe him when he tried to show me the future: that I was going to die soon, apparently. Even when he brought me to Westwood Cemetery and presented me with the white marble slab with my name on it, I refused to take him seriously.
“Is this the best you can do?” I said with only the tiniest quiver in my voice. “Because this is such B-movie material. I’m practically Hollywood royalty, you know—my mother was a famous TV star, and my dad is a director, so I know the business. And this whole thing is obviously fake.”
The Ghost opened his cloak. Inside it I saw only blackness, like he was made up of nothing but an empty void, and without warning, the void swallowed me. I lost the feeling in my feet. Then the numbness moved to my legs. My fingers. My arms. My face. All at once I felt a terrible pressure in my chest, like my lungs were being pressed flat by some tremendous weight. I could feel my heart struggling to pump, slower and slower, slower and slower, until . . .
This is what it’s like to die, I thought. This . . . nothingness.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t call for help. I couldn’t even blink. The Ghost put his bony arms around me, and I felt something like cold and burning at the same time, like dry ice, and then everything went dark.
But the dark only lasted a few seconds. Then I woke with a jolt, choking for air, clutching at the bedpost. It was my bedpost, I realized. My room. Light streamed through the filmy curtains, and beyond them, a familiar palm tree swayed gently in the breeze.
I was home.
Somewhere in the house Elena was whistling a Christmas song.
I groped on the bedside table for my phone. It was 9:00 a.m., on the dot, December 25. Sixty-eight degrees in Malibu, and sunny. I laid a hand on my chest and felt my heart beating, fast but steady.
“Oh. My. God,” I laughed. “That was the most psycho dream ever.”
I stretched my arms over my head. My stomach rumbled.
“Elena!” I screamed. “Where are my pancakes?”
That day I didn’t wish anyone a merry Christmas. I lounged around the house in my pajamas and watched TV and had Elena paint my toenails. When my dad called I barely said two words to him. I posted some photos, I texted my so-called friends, and I did some online shopping. For myself. I tried to put the whole troubling dream about Yvonne and the Ghosts of Christmas Whatever out of my mind.
So, to summarize: I didn’t rethink my life choices. I didn’t change.
Six days later LA experienced a freak cold snap. It sleeted one night—not exactly snow, but colder and more solid than rain. Which formed a small icicle on the eaves of the Hot 8 building on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which is where on the morning of December 31, I was engaged in my Tuesday morning yoga class.
At precisely 8:58, the icicle fell. It caught the sun as it plummeted to the sidewalk, a gleam that temporarily blinded a bicyclist, who suddenly deviated into traffic, which caused a Hollywood Tours double-decker bus to swerve into the next lane, the people inside yelling and cursing, which caused a silver Bentley Continental GT, driven by a famous actress my dad had directed on three separ
ate occasions, who was just slightly hungover and also talking on her cell phone, to veer toward the sidewalk at the exact moment that I, Holly Chase, stepped out of the yoga studio.
At 8:59, as I was lying on the sidewalk with a crowd gathering around me, I thought, I know this. I’ve felt it before. I remembered the ghosts. And finally, I believed that all of it might have been real. But by then it was too late.
By then it was 9:00, and I was dead.
This time when I woke up, I didn’t recognize where I was. Not a hospital, I quickly figured out. I was lying on a weirdly shaped green velvet sofa with a crocheted blanket tucked around my legs. I sat up. I wasn’t injured, which was weird. The horrible pain I’d felt on the sidewalk was gone. The bones that had been broken were whole, and all of my blood seemed to be back inside my body where it belonged. I was still wearing yoga pants and a tank top, but not the ones I’d been wearing in the accident—these were bright, just-bleached white.
I stood up carefully and looked around. It was an office, clearly, although the interior design of the place was horrible. One wall was lined with glassed-in bookshelves packed with rows of faded books. The floor was covered in a busy black carpet patterned with red, pink, and blue flowers, the kind of design you might find in an old hotel. A water cooler burbled in the corner. On the far wall was a huge, obviously antique mahogany desk with a slanted top, which held, along with a computer, several stacks of papers and folders and a mug full of freshly sharpened pencils. In the other corner sat a worn leather armchair and a little table with an old-fashioned record player. I walked over and read the label off the gleaming black vinyl record that was resting there quietly.
From Them to You, it read. The Beatles Christmas Album. 1970. Free of charge to members of the Beatles Fan Club.
Ugh, Christmas, I thought. I’m so sick of Christmas I could puke.
The office had a window, and I went over to it. I struggled for a minute with the curtains, but I finally managed to draw them back. Then—quite understandably, I think—I gasped. Because there were no palm trees. No endless blue sky. No ocean. No sunbaked stucco houses or gleaming swimming pools.
I wasn’t in California anymore.
The window looked out onto the side of another tall building. All I could see were windows. I stepped closer to the glass. The sky overhead was a pale, yellowish gray, even though it was the middle of the night. It was snowing lightly. There was a layer of grungy snow on the window ledge. Hundreds of feet below, rows of red and white lights—cars—were moving slowly along the streets.
I recognized where I was immediately. New York City. I’d been there twice for Fashion Week, and I’d hated it both times, even though I knew as a fashion junkie I was supposed to love it. But back then I thought New York was like the opposite of LA. Dirty. Crowded. Gross.
The door behind me made a beeping sound—a lock being engaged. A man came into the room. He was old, like my dad’s age, with floppy brown hair and a goatee, wearing a brown suit jacket with patches on the elbows. God.
“Havisham,” he greeted me warmly in an English accent. “Delighted to meet you in person. Well, maybe not delighted. But glad.”
“That’s not my name,” I started. “My name is—”
“I know. But it’s tradition here to rename people after Dickens characters. A bit of an inside joke. I picked Havisham for you. It’s catchy, right? Holly Havisham.”
O-kay. I blinked a few times. “Who—who are you?”
“Oh, I’m Mr. Sikes,” he said, as if that explained everything. “But people around here call me Boz.”
He was holding a manila folder, and he tucked it under his arm so he could shake my hand. I noticed that the word HAVISHAM was printed in big black letters on the edge of the folder. I did not love the name Havisham. Plus I was beginning to feel a little woozy. Something unpleasant had just occurred to me.
“Am I . . . dead?” I whispered.
“Yes.” He didn’t sound too broken up about it. “And no.”
I stared at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said matter-of-factly, “that while you are working for us, for however long that may be, you are flesh, and not spirit. You are alive. But to everyone outside of this company, you are very much dead. Dead as a doornail, as they say.”
“I think I need to sit down,” I said.
He guided me back to the sofa, then fetched me a paper cup of water from the cooler. I sipped at it.
“Am I dreaming?” I asked him hopefully.
“No. There’s no waking up from it all this time, I’m afraid.”
“Did you say that . . . I’m going to be working for you?”
He smiled. “Yes, you are, my dear. Welcome to Project Scrooge.”
FIVE YEARS LATER
TWO
“TWENTY BUCKS SAYS THE KID actually speaks the words,” said Marty.
“No way,” said Grant.
“Why don’t you put your money where your mouth is, big shot?”
Grant pulled out his wallet. “You’re on. But it has to be the exact words.”
“Or the modern equivalent of the exact words,” Marty clarified. “I mean, of course he’s not going to say ‘God bless us, every one.’ This is the twenty-first century.”
I’m surrounded by morons, I thought. They were like twins, those two, even though Grant was black and Marty was Korean—they were both completely dorky and determined to mess up my day. Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. God.
“Cheater,” Grant said. “You didn’t say anything about the ‘modern equivalent’ before.”
Marty crossed his arms over his beanpole chest. “I win if he says the word ‘God’ or the word ‘bless’—how about that?”
“Fine.” Grant grinned. “But I’ll bet you twenty dollars that she buys the family a big turkey.”
“She’s a vegetarian,” Marty pointed out.
“Are you going to take the bet or what?” Grant tapped the face of his watch. “Time’s running out.”
“She won’t buy a turkey. She thinks that’s murder.”
I turned my attention back to the set of monitors that covered the wall at the front of the Go Room. The current Scrooge, number 172, had just woken up to find herself back in her own bedroom, alive and well.
Everybody leaned forward to see what she would do next.
For a few seconds the old lady just stood there in her silk nightgown (people that age should not wear silk, I thought) and looked around.
Then: “It’s not too late,” she whispered, tears in her eyes and everything. “It’s not too late. I can still make things right.”
“Bingo!” some idiot near the front of the room shouted. “We have reformation, people.”
The Go Room exploded in applause. The receiver buzzed in my ear, reverb from all of the commotion going on, and I pulled it out and let it dangle on my shoulder. The mood was instantly lifted—if this Scrooge was truly changing her ways (which remained to be seen, I guess, but hey—this was the critical first step), then the operation could be counted as a success. People were already passing around champagne.
“No, thanks,” I said as a newbie from accounting tried to offer me a glass. I didn’t even bother trying to sneak any booze this year—according to Boz I was still technically a teenager, and therefore not old enough to partake in that part of the celebrations. “It’s true that some of aging is about life experience,” he always said whenever I tried to argue. “But a great deal of it is physiology, and in that way, you are still very much seventeen years old.”
I was apparently going to be seventeen forever.
“Great job tonight, by the way,” said the noob from accounting.
“Thanks,” I answered, but the girl had already moved on to somebody else.
I always felt self-conscious at this stage. Everyone in the room knew me as the Ghost of Christmas Past—the Lamp, they called me—but I didn’t know how many people here also knew that, not so long ago, it’d been me up
on the monitors.
A failed Scrooge.
The current Scrooge was now dancing around her room like a schoolgirl, gleeful in the knowledge that she wasn’t dead. The excitement transformed her into someone that I, even after spending months inside this woman’s head, wouldn’t have recognized if I’d met her on the street. Already she looked like a completely different person.
Nonsense. People don’t change, the Inner Yvonne said matter-of-factly from the back of my brain. They are who they are. What changes is only the way they allow us to see them.
My feet hurt. I wished I could escape to my dressing room, get my makeup off and pack up my costume for the dry cleaner’s, but Boz always insisted that everybody, from the lowliest analyst at the company to the tech guys (like Grant and Marty) to the major players (me and the rest of the Ghosts), stay for the big ending. I found this wildly hypocritical, because he was, in essence, forcing his staff to work on Christmas. But nobody argued with Boz.
Speaking of the illustrious Mr. Sikes, Boz had finally caught on that there was gambling taking place on the floor. Which was against another one of his rules.
“We don’t wager on them,” he was saying to Marty firmly. “This is not a game, young man.”
Marty looked put out. “I wasn’t betting on the big stuff—just the details. You know, to keep it lively.”
“No wagers,” Boz repeated.
Buzzkill.
On the monitors, Scrooge 172 (whose real name was Elizabeth Charles, CEO of one of the largest and most corrupt health insurance companies in the country) was making a few phone calls. “Merry Christmas!” she kept exclaiming. “Merrrrrrrrrrry Christmas!”
Then she called and ordered the Brown family (this year’s equivalent of the Cratchits) a giant Christmas turkey.
Marty covertly passed Grant a twenty.
We kept watching throughout the morning, until Scrooge 172 ended up visiting the Brown home personally to tell Mrs. Brown that her son Todd’s medical expenses were going to be covered after all. Everybody started sniffling at that point. Everyone, that is, except me. I never did the crying thing. It would have ruined my makeup.