The Afterlife of Holly Chase

by Cynthia Hand

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.

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.

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.

But I didn’t know I was a Scrooge.

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.

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 over again, a flicker of the cold and the dark. It was mildly disorienting, to say the least. I preferred to be sleeping when it happened, and therefore unaware.

possibly the grossest beverage ever to have been invented.

“He’d ask me about the things I read, too,” Ro said. “Later, there was a period at the end of high school when he became a bit of a shut-in. I’d go and visit him, and we’d have these amazing conversations. About philosophy. Religion. Art. Once he said something about the nature of stories that I never forgot. He said, Without stories, we’re all just lonely islands.”

“Stories let us see and hear and feel what someone else does,” she explained. “They build bridges to the other islands. That’s why stories are so important. They create true empathy.”

“I just think, we don’t get promised anything good in this life. Bad things happen all the time. They’re happening right now, somewhere out there. They’ll keep happening. Who knows? Maybe this moment, right here, is as good as I’m ever going to be.”

“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.

My fortune read, It’s never too late to become what one could have been.

It’s a wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”

And if you’re wondering if I changed—if I really and truly became a better person than I was in the beginning—I’ll tell you that I have good days and bad ones, of course, like everybody else, but I’m growing. I’ll get there.

But love doesn’t always have to be about the happy ending. Love can be about beginnings, too.