TIME STARTED TO FLY. THIS is the part where, if my life were a movie, there’d be a montage, and you’d see Ethan and me on a series of dates all throughout that fall: tasting our way through the delights of Chelsea Market, wandering the High Line slurping Popsicles, watching Shakespeare in Central Park. The trees started to turn red and the air finally cooled. At least once a week Ethan and I met at the left lion and wandered the city together, almost always outside, away from the reach of Dave’s prying cameras. It was nice, being with Ethan. It was more than nice. It felt . . . normal. Like I was a normal girl, instead of a dead one. I was alive.
It was also complicated. I wanted to be with Ethan, but what did that mean for Christmas? For the Project? For me?
These were questions I didn’t know how to answer. I just knew I had to keep seeing him.
Then one day I was in a meeting that was going just fine until Dave said, totally out of the blue, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and took a photograph out of his folder and slid it to the center of the table. “I think she might be Ethan’s Belle.”
The Belle was my job, not Dave’s. So I was understandably surprised.
“What?” I grabbed the eight-by-ten and pulled it toward me. It was a surveillance photo from one of Dave’s cameras. It was a bit grainy, but you could still tell that this girl was gorgeous. She was wearing a white Badgley Mischka gown that made my breath catch, with a high front and a swooping back, a jeweled belt at the waist. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a simple, sleek ponytail. Clean, minimal makeup. A breathtaking beaded handbag.
“Where is this?” I asked.
“A fund-raiser Ethan attended last week,” Dave answered.
Well. I was of the opinion that you should never wear that kind of dress to a fund-raiser—not in white. Too bridal. And Ethan was meeting a girl at a fund-raiser last week? I’d seen him two days ago, and he had never said anything about it.
My stomach did this weird twisty thing.
“Who is she?” Boz asked.
“I was hoping Holly could tell me,” Dave said. “I only know that when she showed up at the dinner, Ethan began to act strangely. Like they had a history.”
A history. I swallowed.
“I haven’t seen her in Ethan’s head before,” I said. I was reasonably sure, anyway. Not that I had been looking very hard yet for the Belle. I wasn’t too eager to see memories of Ethan with another girl, even one who broke his heart. I guess that was because the Scrooge was usually still secretly pining away for the Belle. Which was what made her such an effective tool on Christmas.
I coughed. “So far it’s been like you said: Ethan’s got a different girl at every party. But no one special. No ex-girlfriend.”
“Maybe I’m wrong.” Dave smiled vaguely. “It was just intuition on my part, nothing solid. But I was thinking that it’s possible that Ethan’s relationship with the Belle is yet to come. Maybe he’s about to fall in love.”
The twisty feeling in my stomach got even twistier. Normally the Belle was in the past. She’d already broken up with the Scrooge well before we arrived on the scene. The idea that Ethan’s Belle was yet to come, well . . . that could royally mess things up for me. That would be horrible.
“That would be ideal,” said Boz. “Love can be an excellent motivator for change. Falling in love can help us to see the things in life that are truly important. It can make us want to be better people. It can teach us to sacrifice what is in our own best interest for the sake of someone else. I hope Ethan does fall in love with this girl. For his sake.” He turned to me. “You’ll need to go looking for Ethan’s history with her immediately. Find out who she is. Where their connection lies. What’s happened between them.”
“I’ll get right on that,” I said faintly.
He turned back to Dave. “What’s your progress on the Tiny Tim?”
Dave blew out an exaggerated breath. “This one is hard to pin down. I’m thinking Daniel Denton’s mother. I’m still certain that the Cratchit is Denton—he continues to exert a Scrooge-like control over the boy—and Dent’s only family connection is his mother, so she’s the natural choice. But I’m not sure yet.”
“Perhaps you should be paying attention to your own duties instead of Havisham’s,” Blackpool said from the end of the table. “Mind your own business?”
Everyone turned to gape at Blackpool, and then back at Dave, whose stubbly face was turning a deep shade of red. I usually didn’t agree with Blackpool about anything, but this time he was right. Dave should do his job, and let me do mine. But wait, why was Blackpool suddenly speaking up for me? That was suspicious.
“Hey. Boz said that we should be helping each other,” piped up Stephanie from her seat next to mine. “Da—Copperfield was just trying to help.”
“Indeed,” growled Blackpool. “You’re so very helpful, Copperfield.”
“No, Little Dorrit is right,” Boz said. “We should help each other. There’s always been some overlap between the Ghosts. We are working together for a common purpose, after all.”
“And I’ve got the Tiny Tim,” Dave said. “I just don’t know what the TTF is yet.”
“The TTF?” Stephanie asked.
Boz smiled at dear, dumb Stephanie. “Part of what we do here at Project Scrooge is not only to rehabilitate a wayward individual, but to seek to understand each Scrooge’s potential to affect the world. When a Scrooge decides to change his ways, it can often make an essential difference in other people’s lives, not just his own.”
Stephanie whipped out her notebook and wrote that down, of course. “Can you give me an example?”
“All right,” Boz said. “We once had a Bob Cratchit who was a housekeeper named Elena.”
I froze.
Boz didn’t look at me as he continued. “Elena had a young daughter named Nika, and very early on Blackpool got the impression that if young Nika grew up, she’d become a doctor. Not just a doctor, though. A world-famous surgeon.”
At the other end of the table, Blackpool was frowning deeply again, like he didn’t enjoy having his name drawn into it. Or maybe he just didn’t like to be reminded of my case, which was probably the first significant failure the company had experienced in years. And also why he’d never tried to hide that he didn’t like me.
“So the little girl, Nika, could grow up to save hundreds of lives as a surgeon,” Stephanie said. “Which could have an enormous impact, like a ripple effect.”
I was staring under the table at my shoes now.
“But what happened to Nika?” Stephanie asked.
“Well, one evening, as Blackpool predicted, this particular Scrooge kept Elena working late . . . ,” Boz said.
It’d been the day before I died—I’d told Elena that she had to vacuum out my car before she went home, after she made my dinner and did the dishes and put fresh sheets on my bed.
“And then Elena stayed nearly an hour longer, instead of coming home,” Boz continued. “She forgot that she was supposed to be home early to be with her daughter while her mother, who usually watched the child during the day, picked up another shift at the restaurant where she worked. So Elena was late. And Nika tried to cook dinner for herself. And there was a fire. . . .”
Stephanie made a distressed noise. I kept looking at my shoes. I hadn’t even heard about the fire. I’d been killed the next morning after yoga. I mean, Blackpool had shown me what would happen when he came to me that Christmas. He’d even taken me to the funeral after, to see how Elena’s family was so totally broken up, how Elena’s life was essentially ruined by the death of her daughter. But I hadn’t believed him at the time. I’d laughed it off.
“Do all the Tiny Tims die?” Stephanie asked quietly.
“Not all,” Boz said. “But if the Scrooge doesn’t repent, there is always a negative impact to the Tiny Tim. It’s not just about the Scrooge, you see. It’s about every person the Scrooge touches. A ripple effect, as you said. We call this the Tiny Tim Factor.”
“TTF. So I guess it’s really important that we figure all of this out,” Stephanie concluded.
“Yes, it is. And we usually do,” Boz said more cheerfully. “We have a fairly good track record.”
A good track record, with a few notable exceptions. Just put a big fat F in the middle of my forehead. Right then I could have punched Boz for bringing up Elena and Nika. And Dave for smiling at me so sympathetically. And Stephanie just because.
“Do you have anything to add, Havisham?” Boz asked.
I glanced up at him, startled. What could he expect me to say? It wasn’t like what happened to Nika was directly my fault. And even if it was, I couldn’t change it now.
“About Ethan?” he added.
Oh. Ethan. “I’ll investigate the Belle,” I said. “And I could sift memories with this Denton kid and look for a Tiny Tim figure. If that would be helpful.” I smiled at Dave.
He nodded. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” I said. “No problem at all.”
That night I dreamed about Nika. I had only one memory of her, from a day that Elena’s childcare had fallen through, and she’d brought her daughter to the house for a few hours. In that one memory I had, in the dream, Nika was a scruffy little girl with white-blond hair wearing a red-and-blue-striped jumper dress.
“Can I play with you?” she asked.
I was sitting at the kitchen table cutting out clothes for paper dolls. I was about twelve—the last year of normalcy. Before my mom died. Before Yvonne. Back when I was just a regular girl with a regular life.
If I was twelve, that would have made Nika about three or four.
“Can I play?” she asked.
“These scissors are too sharp,” I said. “Only for big girls.”
Nika ran off somewhere and came back with a pair of safety scissors—clunky and plastic and completely blunt. “Now can I play?”
I sacrificed one of the paper dolls to give to her, and it turned out to be a real sacrifice, too, because within five minutes the doll got ripped in half.
“Oops,” Nika said. “But don’t worry. I’ll get tape.”
That’s all I remembered. I’ll get tape.
I woke up and poured myself a bowl of cereal. I hated my dreams these days. It almost might be worth it not to sleep anymore. With the reset, I didn’t need sleep, and I could do without the dreams.
I couldn’t shake the image of Nika from my mind. The girl who died in a fire.
Because of me. I didn’t turn on the stove in Elena’s house, but I also didn’t bother to save her. I didn’t do anything. Elena was probably like that paper doll, ripped in half, and there wasn’t enough tape in the world to fix her.
The next morning I went to a library with free internet and tried to look up Elena. She used to run a cooking blog, something called The Russian Chef, where she’d post all her best recipes. But when I looked, all Elena’s social media had been taken down. She hadn’t posted anything for five years. It was like she vanished off the face of the earth at the same time Nika did.
She was gone. And, as usual, I tried really hard to push her out of my mind.
I’d said I would get right on finding the Belle, so that’s what I did. During the next sift I went to a party where something out of the ordinary, Ethan felt, had happened with a girl.
A girl. This still made me feel all twisty inside. I did not want to be investigating into Ethan’s time with another girl—especially if it was the beautiful girl in the Badgley Mischka dress. I obviously wasn’t feeling super motivated to find the Belle. She suddenly felt like competition. But looking for the Belle was what I was supposed to be working on, and I had to keep doing my job. So I concentrated on the stupid party.
A party was a good place to find the Belle—in many versions of the story, anyway, young Ebenezer Scrooge meets Belle for the first time at a Christmas party. This particular party in Ethan’s memory was a big, loud shindig in another Browning student’s brownstone in Brooklyn. Absentee parents. A lot of booze. People crammed in every nook and cranny. The music was turned up so high Ethan could feel the waves of sound bounce off his eardrums, the beat thumping him in the gut, the chest, reverberating through his entire body. He didn’t like it. He didn’t enjoy parties. But the people around him all knew his name—they said hello as he passed by—and he liked that they knew his name. Even if he didn’t know most of theirs.
Then Ethan saw someone he didn’t expect to be there—Dent. The kid was chubby and redheaded and had pretty bad acne, and he was hiding out in the corner of the living room all by himself. At school the day before Ethan had invited Dent to this party on a whim, but he hadn’t really thought the kid would actually come.
“Hey, Dent,” Ethan called out over the music.
“Hey, Ethan!” Dent stumbled toward him, banging his shin on the coffee table. He was wearing a slightly small navy-blue polo and cargo pants with his stomach poking out at the top. He tried to smile. “I’m here,” he yelled.
“I see that. I’m glad you could make it,” Ethan yelled back.
“Yeah. Me too.” Dent wiped his nose. “Uh, what’s up?”
“The next phase in your initiation, right here, right now,” Ethan said.
Oh, that’s right, I thought. There was something about a fake club that Ethan was making Dent try to get into.
“What do I have to do this time?” Dent asked warily.
“First you have to have a drink,” Ethan said. “That’s not an official requirement, but it will make the rest easier.”
“Okay.” Dent sounded pretty uncertain.
“And then you have to kiss the hottest girl at the party,” Ethan shouted over the bass.
If it was possible for Dent’s face to get an even pastier shade of white, it did. He actually grimaced. “You’re joking, right? Me, kiss a girl.”
“Not just a girl. The hottest girl.”
That seemed extreme. And about as probable as snow in Times Square in the middle of July.
Dent’s mouth fell open. “I can’t kiss her. That’d be, like, assault.”
“I have faith in you, buddy,” Ethan said with a shrug. “The members of the Eucleian Society are known most for our guts. Besides, you wouldn’t want to come this far and then strike out here, would you?”
He clapped Dent on the back and then left him to go find the aforementioned drinks. There was an entire line of suitably hot girls in the kitchen, waiting to mix up their rum and Cokes or something. One of them was easily the hottest of the hot—Kendra Cunningham, standing there in a black minidress with a cascade of dark blond curls piled over her shoulder. She broke into a flirty smile the second she laid eyes on Ethan. Which seemed to be a completely normal reaction from any red-blooded female. Myself included, apparently.
“Ethan Winters,” Kendra said sweetly. “Nice to see you again.”
“It’s always good to see you, Ken,” he replied.
“It’s been a while.” She fake pouted.
“And I’ve totally missed you.” He hooked an arm around her shoulder. Kendra didn’t exactly pull away. Because she liked him, probably. “Hey, can you do me a solid?” he murmured next to Kendra’s ear.
“Sure,” she breathed.
“There’s this fat kid in the living room, and in a minute, you should go out there and offer him a drink.”
She squeezed her perfectly shaped eyebrows together. “A fat kid?”
“Yeah. It’s a prank. You take him a drink, and then he’ll try to kiss you.”
She pulled back. “A fat kid will try to kiss me. And then what will I do?”
Ethan was unable to hide his wicked smile. “Whatever you want. A good old-fashioned slap, maybe. Drink to the face? Use your imagination.” He darted up to the front of the line for the alcohol. “Excuse me,” he said politely, like he hadn’t just cut the line. He poured something from a bottle into a red plastic cup, returned to Kendra, and held the cup out to her. “There you go. The fat kid awaits.”
She frowned. “You’re kind of a bad boy, aren’t you?”
“It’s why you love me.”
She bit her lip and then smiled. She took the cup. “Okay, I’ll do it.” The flirty smile returned. “But you owe me.”
He followed her from a distance as she went into the living room, his phone out to catch what happened on video. Kendra easily spotted Dent back in his hiding place in the corner. The boy looked shocked when she came up to him, but he did manage to talk to her. Neither I nor Ethan could hear what he said to her over the blare of the music, or what she said back, but she gave Dent the cup, and he drank one swallow and then scrunched his face up and stuck his tongue out and pretended to gag. She laughed. He smiled and shuffled his feet.
Ethan starting filming the scene. Here it came: the attempted kiss. The slap. The drama. It was all about to unfold. Ethan zoomed in on the scene. Dent’s face was red, but he was obviously gathering up his courage. Kendra turned to go, and he touched her arm to stop her.
The music quieted suddenly—we were between songs. We could hear again.
Ethan leaned forward to listen.
“I know this is kind of unorthodox, but would it be all right if I kissed you?” Dent asked, straightening up to his full, unimpressive height of like five foot four and looking right into Kendra’s eyes.
Asking permission. That was a surprise.
“You want to kiss me. Why?” she asked, glancing at Ethan again.
“You’re the hottest girl at the party,” Dent explained. “And I’ve never kissed a girl before, so I thought I’d try for the best. If you would do me this incredible honor of being my first kiss, it’s something that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.”
“Oh,” said Kendra. “Well, when you put it that way . . . okay.”
She leaned forward and Dent leaned forward and they brushed lips. Then Dent smiled and held out his hand like he wanted to shake hands with her. She laughed and let him.
“Thank you very much, miss . . . ?”
“Kendra,” she said.
“Kendra. You’ve kind of made my year,” he said. “Maybe even my life.”
She laughed, embarrassed, and turned and headed back for the kitchen. She didn’t say a word to Ethan as she passed. And the craziest thing about it was that people were already looking at Dent differently than they had just minutes before that, with a grudging kind of respect in their eyes. They started talking to him. Congratulating him.
Ethan scoffed. He was actually shocked by this turn of events. He had the strangest feeling now that maybe he was the one being pranked. And he was also secretly impressed with Dent, just asking her point blank like that.
The music blared again. I hung around in the memory for a while longer, although I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find the Belle here. By the end of the night Ethan had a girl hanging on each arm, giggling up at him, telling him how funny/smart/bad he was, but he wasn’t into either of them. He was bored out of his skull. Parties were always the same—the same songs, the same boozy breath all around him, the same lame jokes and dares and guys getting toasted. He hated parties. Why did he go to parties? he asked himself. He didn’t really know the answer. Because it was expected of him, he guessed. The guy he was supposed to be went to parties.
That was an interesting thought—the guy he was supposed to be. He even remembered it specifically from this night, thinking those words: the guy I’m supposed to be. That’s the only reason I could be here with him, sharing his memory of this night as he recalled it. He clearly remembered the moment with Dent and Kendra, he hazily remembered the girls, the dancing, the music. But most of all, he remembered being surrounded by people, but feeling alone.
Back in his bedroom, I wanted to tell him that I understood what he meant. I felt it every single day, as I rode the subway, as I walked the city streets, noticing the people on every side of me chatting on their phones or hanging out together or on their way to connect with someone else. There were eight and a half million people living in New York City. It was one of the busiest places on the planet. And it was the loneliest place in the world. At least it had been. Until I’d started spending time with him.