The Afterlife of Holly Chase

by Cynthia Hand

Genres: Young Adult; Holiday books; YA Fantasy; YA Paranormal

Synopsis

Before I Fall meets "bah, humbug" in this contemporary YA reimagining of A Christmas Carol from New York Times bestselling author Cynthia Hand.

On Christmas Eve five years ago, seventeen-year-old Holly Chase was visited by three Ghosts who showed her how selfish and spoiled she'd become. They tried to convince her to mend her ways. She didn't. And then she died.

Now she's stuck working for the top-secret company Project Scrooge—as their latest Ghost of Christmas Past. So far, Holly's afterlife has been miserable. But this year's Scrooge is different. This year's Scrooge might change everything…

The Afterlife of Holly Chase is a witty, poignant, and insightful novel about life, love, and seizing second (or third) chances, perfect for listeners who loved Before I Fall or Dash & Lily's Book of Dares.

Release date: October 24, 2017

Publisher: HarperTeen

Print pages: 416

Sample

ONE

THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD probably know is that Yvonne Worthington Chase was dead. It was all over the news when it happened, the entertainment shows, the newspapers and magazines, even the trashy tabloids. A sudden tragedy—that’s how the media described it, because she was only fortysomething when it happened, plus Yvonne was famous, so her death was considered a much bigger deal than an ordinary person’s.

Yvonne was a fashion stylist. Anybody who was, like, anybody in Hollywood hired her to make sure they were always looking fabulous. She had an uncanny ability to match the right item to the right person and situation, a way of finding that perfect gown to wear on the red carpet of the Golden Globes, or the correct shoes for that Vogue photo shoot on Zuma Beach, or the most infallible bag to take to lunch in Beverly Hills. Her obituary claimed that she died after complications from foot surgery, because her feet were screwed up from all the years she spent in stilettos. A believable story. But the truth is, Yvonne died getting your run-of-the-mill plastic surgery, which involved a breast lift, neck lift, and butt lift. It was during the neck lift that things went horribly wrong.

The obituary went on to state that Yvonne was survived by her husband, the well-respected film director Gideon Chase, and her sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Holly.

That’s me. Holly Chase.

I didn’t cry at Yvonne’s funeral. She wouldn’t have wanted an emotional display. The whole time, I wore a pair of Bulgari Flora sunglasses, which hid my eyes and took up most of my face (these had belonged to Yvonne, actually—a huge perk out of Yvonne dying was that I finally got to raid her closet), and when it was all over, I took my phone out of my purse and snapped a selfie in the graveyard with my amazing new sunglasses. And posted it for all my followers to see.

I was a bad person back then. Seriously, I was. I would have backstabbed even my supposed best friends if I thought I could squeeze any attention out of it. I mocked everyone who I perceived as having even the slightest imperfection—that geeky girl in second period who clearly had no idea what the word antiperspirant meant, that boy in the cafeteria with the disgusting mole on his cheek, that cheerleader who really needed to do something about the hideous fat roll poking out from under her bra. I gossiped and spread rumors like it was going out of style. I knew I was being mean. I didn’t care. All I wanted was to be like Yvonne. Rich. Fashionable. Famous. I already had fifty thousand followers, and that was only the beginning. Eventually, I just knew it, everyone was going to know my name.

So that was me. Holly Evangeline Chase. Sixteen—almost seventeen—years old, five foot seven, 115 pounds, brown eyes, blond hair, killer fashion sense, and a perfectly horrible human being. That’s all you need to know about me for now, outside of the fact that, like I mentioned, Yvonne was dead. And she’d been dead almost exactly seven months the night this story truly begins. The night everything changed.

Christmas Eve.

I hated Christmas back then. Like, really hated it. I had my reasons, but I won’t go into those just yet. That particular Christmas Eve, I’d spent the afternoon at a holiday runway show for Calvin Klein, which had given me a mega headache from all of the bright lights and the fake snow and the cheerful exclamations of “Merry Christmas!” that seemed to be coming at me from every direction. I’d worn this amazing pair of lipstick-red Charlotte Olympia shoes, but by five o’clock they felt like they were like two sizes too tight. So when I got home that night, I was in a mood. And I did what I usually did.

I took it out on the housekeeper.

“Why is it so hot in here?” I complained as she served me dinner.

“Hot?” she repeated in that voice she used when she was trying to act like she didn’t understand my English. She put a plate in front of me—risotto or something. It smelled amazing. One thing I will say for Elena—the woman could cook.

“I just got home, and it’s, like, over seventy in here,” I said. “It’s practically balmy.”

“I turned on the heat today. It was chilly.”

“But I haven’t been here all day,” I pointed out. “So why would you turn the heat on?”

We stared at each other for a few long seconds.

“It was chilly,” she said again.

I had her right where I wanted her. “Oh, so you turned on the heat for you,” I said crisply. “You think my dad wants to pay an astronomical heating bill to keep you all cozy and warm?”

I knew perfectly well that my dad would have no problem paying any amount of heating bill. But for me that wasn’t the point. The point was that while my dad was out of town—and he was, like, always out of town—I was in charge, and Elena was not. In my opinion she took far too many liberties around the house. She needed to be put in her place.

“It’s like you’re basically stealing from us,” I said.

“I’m very sorry, miss.” She looked down at where her hands were clasped together in front of her. She had the worst hands—small and red and chapped. Maybe I should require her to wear gloves, I thought. Then she’d be warmer, too, and I wouldn’t have to look at those hands every day.

“Whatevs,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I took a tentative bite of the risotto, and it was delicious, so I took three more quick bites and then pushed my plate away. “And what is this stuff, anyway? This isn’t low cal. Obviously. Do you want me to get fat? Is that it?”

“No,” Elena said steadily. “I know. But I thought, this is a special meal for a special night.”

“A special night?” I repeated. “What special night?”

“Christmas Eve. And I made plenty for you to warm up for yourself tomorrow.”

I stared at her, my mouth opening in disbelief. “Wait, tomorrow? I’m supposed to eat this tomorrow? Where are you going to be?”

“I was going to spend the day with my daughter.”

“And who gave you the day off?”

“It’s Christmas.” She was looking at her hands again.

“So what if it’s Christmas?” I gasped, completely outraged. “I’m all alone here, and my dad pays you to attend to me. We didn’t discuss you having Christmas off.”

“But your father said—”

“I’m going to expect you to be here tomorrow.” My headache pounded more fiercely than ever—I hated having to deal with the hired help. “And if you’re not here, in the morning, on time, then maybe I’ll have to find someone else to fill your position. Someone who will take this job seriously.”

She glanced up, her jaw tightening, her eyes bright with all that she wanted to say to me, but of course she wouldn’t dare. I almost wished she would—it’d been a while since I’d gotten someone fired. But then who would make my dinner tomorrow? It’d be too much of a pain to get someone else on such short notice, on Christmas Day no less.

“Tomorrow I want salmon for dinner. With lemon. Maybe some asparagus,” I informed her like the matter was settled. “And pancakes for breakfast. And freshly squeezed orange juice.”

She nodded stiffly. “All right.” She took the plate of risotto. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

She scurried back to the kitchen. I’d been hard on her, I knew I had, but I didn’t feel bad about it. If you push people, Yvonne always used to say, then sooner or later they’ll start to push themselves. She’d be better for it, I thought. She’d work harder.

That took care of that, I thought with some satisfaction, and then I took a sleeping pill and went to bed. I was completely out, like, dead to the world, until a noise woke me in the middle of the night. It was loud, like a giant fist pounding against a door.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

And then silence.

“Dad?” I called, although I knew he was still on location in New Zealand or New York or somewhere. “Dad? Elena?”

No answer.

I checked my phone. The time was exactly midnight. No texts or emails. No other sounds in the house. I was, as usual, alone. I was about to slide my sleep mask back into place when something in the corner of the dark room caught my eye.

A shadow. A shadow that became my stepmother, standing at the foot of my bed. My stepmother, who, as I mentioned, had been dead for seven months.

Yvonne was still wearing the black Diane von Furstenberg dress she’d been buried in. Her face was a nasty yellow, covered in a heavy layer of funeral-home makeup. Her ice-blue eyes had clouded to a dull gray. Weirdest of all, she was wearing pearls, string after string of perfect white pearls, around her neck, her wrists, wrapping around her always-dieting-skinny waist, snaking down her legs to her ankles and her Jimmy Choos like strings on a deranged marionette.

I squeezed my eyes closed, then opened them again, but Dead Yvonne didn’t disappear. Instead she sat down at the edge of my bed and took my hand. Her fingers were cold. There was a jagged incision in the side of her neck, crudely stitched closed with black thread. As she leaned closer, I got a powerful whiff of formaldehyde and rot mixed with her 24, Faubourg perfume.

“Hello, darling girl,” she rasped, the caked powder around her lips cracking as she spoke. “I’ve come to warn you.”

I opened my mouth then, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

You know how the story goes, right? There’s this old banker type named Ebenezer Scrooge, who shuffles around saying, “Bah, humbug.” One Christmas Eve he’s visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. In the morning he wakes up, like, completely terrified, and says to himself, This is my chance. I can change my future, and starts handing out all of his money and buying a Christmas goose for a crippled kid and shouting, “Merry Christmas!” from the rooftops. Then he supposedly lives happily ever after. It’s a nice story. I guess. But that’s not how it happened for me. My version’s a little more complicated.

I’m going to skip ahead now to the part with the Ghosts. The first Ghost, specifically. Because that’s what this story is really all about. The Ghost of Christmas Past.

My Ghost was just a girl. It was hard to tell, what with the glowing robes and the whole human-lamp effect, but even then, I noticed there was something weirdly normal about her. Something about the way she stood with her head tilted to one side and her hands clasped behind her back, as if she were listening to someone talking, only there wasn’t anyone else there. You could almost believe, looking at her, that she was your average twelve-year-old, like this was just her job—playing the Ghost of Christmas Past—and the rest of the year she was playing with dolls. She kept bringing me to different memories from my past—this time I got left alone at school, a sad conversation I had with my dad, a Christmas party I’d actually enjoyed once from before my mom died—and every time she brought me to these scenes she kept staring at me with these huge, dead-serious blue eyes. Like she knew me.

“We can rest for a while, if you need to.” The Ghost turned to look at me and smiled. Her teeth were oversized and a little crooked. “Are you okay?”

I wasn’t even a little bit okay. Seeing my mom again, even if I knew it was just a memory, felt like having the wind knocked out of me. But I shook my head.

“Let’s just get this over with,” I said, and the Ghost grabbed my hand again to take me to the next place. The fog around us thickened, and the air took on a chill. There was something else in it, too, tiny particles of white swirling past. Snow. Which wasn’t something I was used to seeing in California.

“Come on,” the Ghost said, leading me forward through the flurry. We walked for a while—I couldn’t have said how long—until the Ghost finally stopped and parted the fog like a curtain, and on the other side I saw Rosie Alvarez. Ro, I’d always called her.

My ex-BFF.

We were standing in my bedroom from before I had it redecorated, back when it was still robin’s-egg blue and still had posters up on the walls and pictures of Ro and me taped to my mirror. I knew before the Ghost even said 

anything that she’d brought me back to the night Ro told me she didn’t want to be friends anymore. I remembered that night perfectly. It’d only been last year.

“I don’t want to be here,” I told the Ghost.

“But you have to,” the Ghost said. “You have to see it with new eyes.”

Whatever that meant. I yanked away from her, but in spite of my intention to act cool and uninterested, I found myself taking a step toward Ro, then another and another, until I was standing next to the younger version of myself: the clueless Holly who was about to get dumped by her best friend.

I’d told everybody at school that I’d dumped her, of course, not the other way around. I outgrew her is how I’d spun it, like Ro was last year’s designer jacket in the bin at the Salvation Army—not that I ever gave anything to charity. I outgrew Ro a long time ago.

In a way, this was true. That’s what Ro herself was saying at that very moment, but I wasn’t actually listening to her talk. I was staring at that splattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. I’d forgotten that Ro even had freckles, or that her hair had been so long, when sometime last year she got this pixie cut that I wished I could say looked terrible on her, but actually it made her look streamlined and more put together, somehow.

“I don’t even know why you still want to be friends with me,” she was saying to the old Holly, the one who’d been staring at her phone during this entire conversation. Who was wearing the most gorgeous pair of silk Olivia von Halle pajamas, by the way.

The old Holly glanced up, surprised. “I never said I didn’t want to be friends.”

“You never said that,” Ro agreed, “but let’s be honest. If we met today—if I bumped into you at school—would you even let me sit with you at lunch?”

No, I thought. Of course I wouldn’t.

But the old Holly didn’t answer right away. She smoothed her hair over her shoulder and said, “Maybe. You don’t know.”

Ro frowned. “Come on, Holly. I know you think I’m not good enough to hang out with you. You’ve got your designer bags and your expensive clothes, your ‘fifty thousand followers,’ and I’m just a regular T-shirt and sneakers sort of girl.”

Old Holly was still looking at her phone. “Well, I mean, not everyone can be fabulous, right?” she said distractedly. We’d had versions of this fight before, where Ro whined about how materialistic I was becoming and how everything shouldn’t be about a person’s wealth or social status. Of course Ro had to think that way, because she was poor. “But seriously,” Old Me said, “why am I supposed to feel guilty about having money? The world runs on money. That’s just how it is.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” Ro argued. “Do you remember what it was like before, Holly? When we used to watch TV with the sound turned off and make up the dialogue? Or we’d go to the pet store and name all the fish. We’d hang out on the beach and build weird sand creatures. We’d write songs. None of that was about money, remember? It was about us. What happened to that Holly?”

I remembered that Holly well. The one with the mousy hair and the braces who nobody noticed in a crowd. I’d been glad to get rid of her.

“I liked that girl.” Rosie reached and took the phone out of Old Holly’s hand. “I need you to hear this. Please.”

Old Holly sighed. “I get it, Ro. I’ve changed, but so what? I haven’t changed toward you.”

“It’s not the same. You’re not the same.” She bent her head and laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “Last week, I watched you making fun of a girl in the hall just because she was wearing leggings as pants. And her face when she saw you laughing at her, her face—” Her eyebrows pinched together. “We can’t be friends anymore, Holly. I can’t.”

That hurt, even a year later. I still felt that tightness in my chest, that jolt when I realized she was serious. Ro and I had been, like, joined at the hip since we were three years old, inseparable, so much that I hardly had a memory that didn’t include her. But with one little sentence our entire relationship was over.

I didn’t want to watch what happened next. I knew exactly how this scene ended. She walked out of my life and never came back. She just dumped me.

“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 separate 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. ...