Devine Intervention (11 page)

“I want to talk to your teachers,” she said. “Now.” She crossed her arms again.

“Xavier's pretty busy.” I knew that'd be a dead end. “So this deceit thing means —”

“It means lying. I know I haven't done that,” she said. She climbed onto her bed, still holding the book in her hand. “Which makes one of us.”

“Like you said, I talked with you all the time when you were alive,” I said. “If you were going to go to Hell for that, I'd already be there.”

“Really?” She sat up and leaned against a pillow. “Because I don't want to go to Hell. I don't even want you to go there.”

“A hundred percent sure,” I said, even though I wasn't, which was pretty nice of me, considering I now knew this to count as deceit, which would send me to Level III, where I'd have to scan newspapers to make microfiche in the library of infinite bad news and school board minutes.

“Well, that's good to hear,” she said in a voice so small I could have set it on the head of a nail. She started getting all leaky-eyed again. I looked around her room for a Kleenex. Maybe I could move one and she'd use it instead of my sleeve or her finger. “But just in case I am, I want to be able to say good-bye to people, you know? It sounds stupid, but I just want, you know, closure.”

The snot and tears started bubbling out again. She was the juiciest dead person I'd ever seen. Maybe it's because she'd died underwater. I thought about this TV show where a kid fell through the ice and drowned, and when they revived him he coughed up green water like he was a human fountain.

And that's when it hit me why she might be having some trouble talking with the living and shooping and seeing the service entrance of Heaven, but I didn't want to admit it to myself because I would be in way worse trouble with Gabe and Xavier.

Chevy.

Because if there was one thing worse than having your human die in an accident, it was what was going on with Heidi. It was totally possible that there was not even a level of Hell for people who did what I had maybe done, though the maggot level was probably about right for me. This whole thing happened on account of me. I'd pulled
her soul out of her body. When I was trying to revive her, I was killing her. Maybe if I hadn't touched her, they'd've been able to bring her back. Maybe she wouldn't be dead.

If I'd been a halfway decent person, I would've told her then and there. But I didn't have the words to say it, and the scared part of me wanted to lead her as far from the truth as I could.

I took the book from her and the doorbell rang again. Heidi stopped her sniffling.

“Corn dogs.” I said. “Do you like them?” I tried to make my voice sound normal.

“They're okay. Why?”

“Because I know this place …” Maybe if I told her while we were sniffing corn dogs …

“Jerome!” She tried to take the book back, but I wouldn't let her. It didn't matter. She saw one of the commandments anyway. “No! I coveted.”

“No, you didn't. I'm pretty sure.”

“The cookies, Jerome.”

“You didn't covet them. You sniffed them. It's totally different.” My voice sounded like I was going through puberty in reverse. I punched myself in the neck to make it stop, and when I could talk again, I said, “What's
coveting
even mean?”

She went over to her desk and tried to pick up this fat red book with gold letters on it. Her hand went right through.

“Darn it,” she said. “This is a dictionary. You're lucky I can't pick it up or I'd throw it at your head.”

We had a book like that at our house, and Dad used it to prop up the table in the kitchen. It had one short leg
because of this thing that happened when I was, like, six, and we were always looking for stuff to make it not wobble. Rocks, cups, baseball gloves … we tried a lot of stuff. The book turned out best because of how flat it was, which was the most use it ever was to me.

“Okay,” I said. “So?”

“You use it to look up the meaning of words.”

That explains why Mrs. Domino used to talk about them all the time. I always stopped listening when I heard the
dic
part.

“
Coveting
means ‘wanting.'”

“No problem,” I said. “I covet all the time. It's no big deal. Nothing happens.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “Because I think —”

“Exactly. Stop with all that thinking. Look at this. It's cool. Commandment Nine: THOU SHALT NOT INHABIT THE BODIES OF THE LIVING.”

I stopped. I didn't know that was possible.

“Who'd want to do that?” she said.

I could think of two reasons, or three, if you count a girl's boobs separately instead of together. If I'd read this far in the manual before, I for sure would have tried to inhabit a girl's body and try it out, head zaps and all. But I didn't mention that to Heidi, because she might have thought I meant
her
body, and I wasn't necessarily ready to commit, especially with Tammy Frohlich and Heidi's mom, mayor of MILFtown, USA, in the picture.

Instead, I said, “If you're inside someone's body, you can use it, Heidi. Sheesh.”

“Use it?” she said.

“Be alive in it. Walk around. Talk to people. Say your good-byes and things.” I was starting to understand why Gabe switched on the loudspeakers when he was talking to me. People can be so dense.

“I don't know,” she said. “Wouldn't the other person mind? Wouldn't I want to get permission first?”

Permission! I would've started laughing right then and there except I didn't want her to cry at me again. I was a real applehat for not figuring out earlier why she hadn't gone straight to Heaven and why she could swear. She totally met all the angel requirements. All except the one where you actually have to die like in a normal, human way.

“Better to shoot for forgiveness,” I said. “Besides, how would you ask?”

“I don't know. I haven't the slightest idea how you'd even occupy a body. I mean —”

I cut her off. “Why don't you start small? Like with an animal.” I pointed to the fishbowl on top of the bookcase.

“There's no way I'm going inside Fred,” she said. “I can't breathe underwater, and besides, even if I could say anything, it would probably sound bubbly.”

She had a point. Still, she was making stuff hard. I looked around her room. There was the stupid vampire doll she got for Megan. I would give almost anything to see that thing talk, and for the money she spent on it, it should. In several languages.

“Try the doll,” I said. “It's not alive or anything, so it's not technically against a commandment, but maybe it will work anyway.”

“What? Oh … He's not a doll. He's a collectible figurine. They're totally different,” she said, like anyone would actually believe that. “Hey! I can't believe someone took him out of the box.” She walked over to where the doll stood on a shelf, wearing his little black coat and old-man shoes. “I don't think I'm going to fit, and I don't want to do anything that's going to diminish his resale value even more. That would upset Megan.”

“Heidi, don't be a dope. You ever heard the expression ‘can't take it with you'? It's real. You shoulda seen the air gun I left behind. It was a .177-caliber Beeman rifle. My cousin got it and he's using it to shoot squirrels. It's practically a crime.”

“The poor squirrels,” Heidi said. “Your cousin sounds like a real sicko.”

“Who gives a Chevy about squirrels? I'm talking about that beautiful machine in Mike's hands. He doesn't wash them after he goes number two.”

Heidi reached out one finger all nervous-like toward the doll.

“That's the stuff,” I said. “Now imagine you're —”

I guess she has a good imagination, because
whoomp!
I couldn't see her soul anymore. The doll wiggled a little bit on the ledge. It blinked. I almost Chevy'd my pants because it was so creepy. And then it — I mean, Heidi — talked in a little squeaky voice like the kind you get when you suck the helium out of balloons.

“Omigod! I'm inside Vincent Lionheart!”

I wished I had a video camera because it was that funny hearing a girl's voice coming out of a tiny vampire's
mouth, but it wasn't all that realistic, because his lips didn't move right, so on second thought, it probably wouldn't make the best video. People would think it was a fake.

Heidi tried to cover his mouth with her hand and it made her fall off the ledge and somersault through the air like someone jumping off a skyscraper in a movie. She screamed as she fell, making this chipmunky sound. The doll flipped under the bed and Heidi swooped out.

“Jerome! Vincent Lionheart's off his ledge! We have to put him back.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good luck with that.” I flumped up her pillow. Might as well be comfortable.

That was maybe not a good move. Heidi had eyes full of murder. Or at the least, punching. I sort of hoped she'd let loose. Instead, she just yanked the handbook away and started flipping until she found something that made her stop. I didn't think her face could get any whiter than right after she came out of the pond, but I was wrong. She faded to the color of new snow and looked at me for a long and rotten moment. She didn't blink, and if her hands hadn't been shaking, I would've thought someone had pressed the
PAUSE
button on her.

She finally spoke in a low and terrible voice. “Did you know about this?”

“About what?” From experience I knew the best answer to this question was usually “no.”

“About what happens to souls if they don't go to heaven in twenty-four hours.”

“Uhhh,” I said.

“Jerome!” she said. “My soul will DISSIPATE in twenty-four hours if I don't get into Heaven!”

Dissipate
. I hadn't heard that word before.

“Do you even know what that means?” She was shouting at me. Her hand was not in front of her mouth. I backed up a little bit so I was between the pillow and the headboard.

“No?” I said.

She started crying again. Huge tears.

“It means,” she said, stopping every once in a while, “it means I'm going to disappear. We have been goofing around and sniffing cookies and not getting any messages through to the people I love, and I have —” She stopped to look at the clock on her bedside table. “I have only about fourteen hours left until I am gone forever. FOREVER.”

She crumpled herself on the floor like an old Kleenex and cried. “I hate you, Jerome. I
hate
you.”

I can't remember exactly what I said back. But I think it was this: “Uh.”

Just like I hoped she would, Heidi launched herself off the carpet and came at me with both fists flying. Girl packed a wallop. I leaned back and let her do her thing. I deserved it. In a way, it was a relief, so much so that I even laughed during it. What's more, I'd always be able to say I got busy with a girl in bed. I don't remember exactly what she said when she was done with me. But she took the handbook and left me there, and she didn't look back.

Thirteen hours and fifty-six minutes left.

S
OMETHING HAD BROKEN
inside of her. For her whole life, she'd carried this terrible secret, knowing it made her different from everyone else. For the past couple of years, she'd even thought it meant she was crazy. But no. The voice was real, and he was using her to keep himself entertained instead of doing his job and keeping her safe. He'd watched her when she thought she was alone. He'd even made a game out of her friendship with Megan. He was the thing that made her hide herself away from the world, the voice she listened to when she should have been listening to her own.

It was as if she'd collected all this shame and sorrow in her heart, layered it with sand, and filtered it with tears until all that was left were the stony remains of things she'd hoped to do and be. Then the whole mess of it had
shattered inside her, cutting her most tender parts on its jagged edges.

Jerome had broken the rules. He'd let her think she was nuts. And then he'd let her die and set her soul to wander and, through his own stupidity, condemned her to disappear in just a few hours. His presence had already erased her life. Soon, it would obliterate her soul.

She wasn't the sort to go around hitting people, but she poured her rage into her fists and pounded them at Jerome's belly and chest, as though doing so would be her salvation. Her hands thumped against him, one after the other, filling her ears like the heartbeat she no longer had. It felt good. Necessary. She didn't even feel like she was still dissolving, although she knew her fate had been sealed. But maybe anger was the thing that could hold off the inevitable. In any case, the rhythm of it,
thump-bam
,
thump-bam
, made her feel alive again, almost.

She wanted to provoke a reaction from him. An apology. Tears. Anything. But instead, he laughed through part of it, a jittery giggle that inflamed her further. How could he be enjoying this? What was wrong with him? Where was the part of him that was supposed to care about her?

Her hands throbbed, but she kept on hitting and would've continued indefinitely but for another sound, a short, sharp bark that pierced the darkness in her like a star.

Jiminy.

He was outside again. Either the casserole brigade had been careless with the front door, or Rory had left his win
dow open. Jiminy loved climbing on Rory's bed and using it as a launching pad to freedom. He could never get back in, though, and he'd stand in the juniper bushes below, barking himself hoarse.

He needed someone to let him back inside. He needed Heidi. The thought of this lifted her out of her haze. She stopped hitting Jerome. Her hands felt hot and strangely empty, and Jerome lay on the bed, putting ragged breaths between each word.

“You … done … yet?”

She didn't bother answering. It wasn't as though he cared about her, or had ever cared. It had only felt that way, and maybe that was the thing that hurt most of all.

She slid off the bed and rubbed her knuckles on her thighs, hoping to soothe the ache in her fingers. Vincent Lionheart was under the bed, gathering dust. It pained her to see her gift to Megan there, but she couldn't do anything about it, and Jiminy needed her to lead him back to where he belonged.

Before she passed through the wall to the garden, she gave Jerome a warning.

“You'd better not be here when I get back, or I am going to tell everything you've done.”

She didn't know whom she'd tell. She also didn't know how she'd do it. So far, she had zip when it came to finding her voice, or any way into Heaven. But Jerome was going to pay for what he'd done, maybe with the people who gave him headaches. Or that guy … Howard. If Jerome didn't want her to talk with him, then that was probably exactly what she should do. She took the handbook and
shoved it into her back pocket, intending to study it as soon as she'd taken care of Jiminy.

She slipped through the wall of the house and felt the brief tickle of plaster, the shrill whistle of insulation, and the crackling vibration of the cold siding throughout her soul. Outside, the air smelled lightly of pizza rolls. Had someone actually brought that for dinner? That was worse than a casserole.

She looked around for Jiminy, acutely aware of the dwindling time her soul had left. In the distance, a car rumbled. She recognized it as the diesel engine of Mrs. Thorpe's ancient Mercedes. The car was a monster with huge, round headlights and a chrome grille that grimaced as it prowled the streets.

Jiminy burst from the shadows and stood on the sidewalk under a streetlamp, his tiny paws studded with clumps of snow. He barked at her, wagging his tail.

“Jiminy!”

He heard her call, bless him. He was the only one besides Jerome who knew what had happened to her, who knew she was still here. He bounded toward her, diving up and over the freezing slush piles that glowed lavender under the light of a shrinking moon. With Jiminy, at least, nothing had changed. He stopped and cocked his head.

That's when she noticed the squirrel. Out much later than normal, probably starving, frantically looking for home. In so many ways she could relate, even as she hoped Jiminy wouldn't see it as it dashed for a tree, its eyes mirrors in the evening light.

But of course Jiminy saw. He gave chase, sliding once in a deep patch of snow. He bounced right back up and kept running. Mrs. Thorpe came closer, her car's engine rumbling ever louder. The squirrel blurred into the middle of the street. Jiminy followed, barking.

The car rounded the bend. Heidi ran after them, shouting, “Stop, Jiminy, stop!”

He didn't.

Neither did the car, which carved a loose S in the icy street as Mrs. Thorpe braked. The squirrel made it across in time and dashed up the tree to scold Jiminy, who stood in the road with his back to the car. The headlights framed his silhouette in the snow. For a terrible moment, that image held still in her mind, a sketch from a book of nightmares.

Jiminy was wagging his tail when the car struck him. His body flew through the air, over the sidewalk, and past a snow-covered rhododendron.

Heidi ran to him.

“Jiminy! Jiminy!” She slid and stumbled, her vision crooked with tears.

Behind her a car door popped open and a voice said, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” The car's engine grumbled and its headlights blasted two slashes of light into the darkness.

When Heidi finally found Jiminy, he lay on his side beneath a bush, taking quick breaths. His collar was gone, torn off somehow by the impact. He looked up at her, his eyes dimming with each passing second, as though
he'd been waiting to see her one last time before he let go. Was that the look she'd had in her eyes when she was dying?

The light disappeared and her soul grew heavy, as if someone had filled it with sand. Jiminy exhaled. She reached out to stroke his fur, and as she said his name, he stepped out of his body, as if to come to her call one last time.

He shook himself the way he did when he was just out of the bath and touched his damp nose to her face. It felt the way it always had, warm and sweet, and she smiled until she understood what it meant.

Then he barked and galloped off after the squirrel, completely unaware that he had died. Either that, or it made no difference to him.

She couldn't let this happen to him. He couldn't die. Not like this.

“Jiminy!” She called for his soul to come back, but he kept running after the squirrel.

If she didn't do something soon, it would be too late. His body was so still in the snow. An idea seized her and she hoped it would work, commandments be damned. If she could keep his body alive and lure him back inside, she might be able to undo this horrible accident.

She pressed her hand to his heart and willed herself inside his still-warm corpse. A soul-tearing sucking sound filled her ears. Something tugged brutally on her essence — far more powerful than whatever had pulled her inside Vincent Lionheart. She braced herself, fearing
that she'd made a terrible mistake. That instead of keeping his body safe, she'd hastened the destruction of her own soul.

She was caught in a hot vortex of light that lifted her, spinning and twisting what was left, filling her eyes with blinding streaks of brightness. Then came that strange almost-sound that remains after musicians have stopped playing, the vibrating memory of melody, and it coated her with a swirling, liquid peace.

For one long moment, she felt better than she ever had, and she wondered whether that was how it felt to have your soul melt into the universe, to disappear. Maybe it wouldn't be such a terrible end.

Then her arm blazed. She looked at it and tried to move it, but couldn't. Agony. More shocking, her arm was no longer an arm but a bloody paw covered in black and tan fur, growing more swollen by the second. It felt fat and foreign and on fire, and wherever Jerome's handbook had gone, she could no longer reach it and was therefore cut off from anything that might help her figure out what to do next.

The world around her had turned into a strange place, hot and painful and alive with smells: diesel fuel, wood smoke, the anxious breath of small animals, the needles of a Douglas fir tree, low clouds full of pending snow. She inhaled them and felt their shapes touch her mind and was instantly dizzy with the oddness of it all.

Footsteps crunched in the snow. A shadow blocked the light. Her tail — her tail! — wagged feebly when she looked up and saw Mrs. Thorpe, as though the love Jiminy
always felt for everyone had stayed in his body and was responding, even without the presence of his soul.

“Oh, you poor thing!” Mrs. Thorpe said. “I couldn't stop in time! But you shouldn't have been playing in the street. No, sir.”

She took off her coat, spread it flat on the ground, and placed Heidi on top of it. The pain, so deep she could drown in it, took her breath away. Her breath. She was breathing again. She'd never realized air was such a heavy thing or that a still-beating heart could feel so broken. Mrs. Thorpe wrapped the coat around Heidi and lifted her against her chest.

“I can't take you home,” she said. “Not on a day like this. Oh, what a day it's been. Oh, my. I suppose I should take you to the vet so he can look you over.”

She set Heidi on the backseat of her car, and Heidi wondered whether she should try to fasten her seat belt. She'd have to ask for help with it. That's when she remembered. She'd made Vincent Lionheart speak. She could probably do the same with Jiminy — use his body to say what she wanted to her family, to Megan. A little part of her thought about just staying inside Jiminy's body as long as she could, and maybe even living the rest of her life as a dog. She whimpered.

“Oh, you poor thing,” Mrs. Thorpe said. “We'll be at the vet soon.”

It couldn't be soon enough for Heidi. The army of pain marched through her paw, up her arm, toward the cage of her ribs, and into the soft nest of internal organs that quivered there.

A strange voice, distant and cold, whispered in her ear. It wasn't Jerome playing around, though the voice was male and vaguely familiar. She couldn't see who was speaking.

Let go
, he said.
Come to me. You want to join me
.

For the time being, she ignored him. He might be a hallucination. A real one, for a change. In any case, she couldn't leave Jiminy's body, not just yet. She focused instead on the pain, which grew more insistent every second. She'd always loved riding in cars, looking out the window, watching the world blur by. It made her feel detached from everything. Floating, padded, protected. But her injuries stripped away this buffer, and for the first time she could remember, she noticed every angle, every bump, every burst of the streetlamps they passed. It hurt, but she wanted it to. She wanted to feel every minute of what it was like to be alive again for as long as it lasted. Feeling it was better than fading away.

The car slowed and turned into a parking lot. Mrs. Thorpe caught the edge of a curb with her tire and Heidi felt its shape slide through her, a solid block of suffering. She whimpered again. The car stopped.

Mrs. Thorpe sucked in her breath. “Such a bad night to be driving.”

She killed the engine and looked back at Heidi.

“We're here,” she said. “And you're still alive — that's good news.”

Mrs. Thorpe pulled her keys from the ignition. She opened her door, grunting as she eased her bulk out of the car and plodded through the crusted heaps of snow,
looking cold without a coat. Her shoulders rode up to her ears as she wrapped her arms around her body. Heidi absorbed every movement and sound, and most especially the small gestures Mrs. Thorpe made. Each one was a poem dense with meaning. No wonder Jiminy had always seemed to know how she felt.

The back door opened.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Thorpe said. “I don't think that blood will ever come out.”

Heidi examined her paw. There was blood on it, to be sure, but nothing that wouldn't wash out in a warm bath. It took her a second to realize Mrs. Thorpe was talking about her coat.

“Sorry,” she said, before she thought better of it.

Mrs. Thorpe stepped back. She looked over each shoulder.

“Who's there?”

Heidi's voice had sounded grotesque, like peanut butter smeared over gravel. She itched to cover her mouth with her paw, but didn't, knowing how much it would hurt to move it.

“Hmm,” Mrs. Thorpe said. She slid her arms beneath the coat and lifted Heidi. “Was probably just in my head.”

Heidi pressed her jaws together to prevent any more slips. It felt strange, having a mouth full of small, pointed teeth. It made her miss her old teeth, her old mouth, her old body, something she'd not thought possible. She'd spent the better part of her life wishing she'd been someone else, anyone but the awkward, oversize girl who heard
a voice in her head and couldn't stop drawing cities. Now she'd give anything to be back inside that body, able to move fingers, able to pick up a pen and hold it in her hand.