The Afterlife of Holly Chase

by Cynthia Hand

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.

There had been kindness in him, I thought. Once.

Because I knew: You can try to keep the worst things down inside you. You can shove them away, not think about them, not deal. But they bubble up to the surface. They always do.

“So you tell somebody,” his dad said. “You don’t push back.” Ethan scoffed. “Who would I tell?” Ethan’s dad pressed his hands to his chest. “Me! You tell me! And then we figure out what to do together, okay?”

Ethan’s dad slung his arm around Kid Ethan’s shoulder and hugged him. It felt good, being squeezed. Being loved. Being safe. It made him feel better.

Adults always loved to tell you that your life wasn’t actually real.

I knew I’d gone too far. I’d hurt him. But part of hurting him felt good, because it was a little taste of how I’d felt when he just kind of abandoned me after Mom died. How he wasn’t there for me.

“My dad was—is—always talking about how amazing the future is going to be. How I’m going to grow up to be this supergenius, world-altering person. But I keep thinking, maybe not. Maybe I’m just a regular person. And maybe the future is going to suck. You don’t know.”

“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.

Whenever he was around Stephanie he’d start pumping out all these useless facts about things—quantum physics, something called SciShow on the internet, the theory of relativity.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess,”

“Nobody’s perfect, right? We can work on our flaws together. We learn. We grow. Maybe instead of growing apart, this time we can grow together.”