Devine Intervention (4 page)

That year, she'd made a sketch a day, keeping them in a stack in the family room. One day while she was at school, the stack disappeared. She asked her mom, who was organizing the spice cabinet, if she'd seen it.

“What, those sketches?” She clicked a jar of pepper and one of paprika down on the counter. “I recycled them. I'm sorry. We just have so much art from you, Heidi. You can't save it all. And I have to say, I know you like your drawings, but it's time to realize you don't have time for
that anymore. Doodling is taking time away from the things you need to be doing, like thinking about where you want to go to college and what you want to do with your life. The art — it just isn't practical.”

“Come on.” Megan interrupted Heidi's memory. “Just let me look.”

Heidi slid the napkin toward her and took another bite of chili. She forgot to blow on it and scorched the roof of her mouth.

“Hey, not bad, but you forgot something crucial,” Megan said. She drew an extravagant handlebar mustache on Heidi's portrait. “Did I ever tell you about my cousin?”

“The one who goes to Brown?”

“No. That cousin is pretty much a perfect specimen of humanity. He's even hotter than Vincent Lionheart, and I would marry him if I lived in one of the twenty-five states where that sort of thing is legal. My
other
cousin. The one who sings on cruise ships.”

Heidi smiled at the mention of Vincent Lionheart. She'd just bought Megan's Christmas present, a limited-edition deluxe action figure of the movie vampire Megan had coveted ever since they saw him at Undead Con. He even had hand-painted facial features, a houndstooth blazer, and miniature lace-up wing tips.

“I don't think you've talked about that cousin.”

She hasn't. I'd remember that
.

“She once messed up really bad at her high school talent show,” Megan said. “She and her best friend were doing their two-headed farm-girl act. They were inside a pair of giant overalls together —”

If I was a farmer, I'd be an egg farmer because everyone there gets laid.

Heidi shushed Jerome.

“No, it's a good story,” Megan said. “I promise.”

“No, not you. I was … never mind.”

“Were you having another one of your Earth-to-Heidi moments?” Megan said. “You have that look on your face again.”

The look was slack-mouthed and vacant, like she'd just come back from getting a cavity filled. Heidi tried to tighten up her expression. “That doesn't sound that embarrassing. Not like what I did.”

“Just wait.” Megan scraped the sides of her yogurt tub. “So Robin and her friend were in their overalls together, singing ‘I Feel Pretty' from
West Side Story
. And they did mean for it to be funny, because, when you get right down to it, there's no way a two-headed farm girl is going to rate as pretty, unless the word is followed immediately by
freaky
.”

“So what happened?”

“It was going really well. Everyone in the audience was cracking up. My cousin was laughing. Her friend was laughing. The laughter got bigger and bigger. It was like a rampaging elephant. Unstoppable.”

“That sounds like a good thing.”

“Not when you've hydrated like a camel,” Megan said. “Gatorade, water, chocolate milk. She even had a Frappuccino for breakfast, and you know what all that caffeine does.”

“Why didn't she use the restroom beforehand?”

“Because the stupid principal had decided a couple days earlier to take all the doors off the bathroom stalls because people kept writing graffiti on them. ‘Taking faculty names and phone numbers in vain,' he called it. So no one was peeing at school, because there is no shame more humiliating than a public tinkle.”

Try using a urinal sometime. At a hockey game.

“Uch, I'm eating here,” she said, as much to Jerome as to Megan. Not that it mattered.

“So when everyone at school was loving the act, my cousin got the giggle fits.”

“No.”

“Yes,” Megan said. “And she sprang a leak.”

“Was it a lot? Could people tell?”

“Well, any pee on stage is too much. That's a truth universally acknowledged. But this was huge.”

“You're making this up.”

“Nope.” Megan mined the bottom of her yogurt container. “The school yearbook photographer was there. They printed the photo. It took up most of a page. For the rest of her life, she'll have to see how she looked doing a surprise whiz. They even packaged it with a pun headline. ‘Tinkle, Tinkle, Little Star.'”

That was the worst — to be mocked with a pun. Tammy was the yearbook editor. She'd almost certainly assigned a photographer to
Talentpalooza!!
Heidi tried not to think about it.

“But she got the last laugh,” Megan said. “Now she really is a star.”

“On a cruise ship, though.”

“Captive audience,” Megan said. “If they can't leave you, they have to love you.”

Just like you love me, right?

Heidi put her spoon down and shoved the remains of her chili away. “I just want this week to end. If I didn't have to play basketball tonight, I would totally go home fake-sick right now.”

Megan nodded and started clearing the wreckage of her lunch: the yogurt tub, the peelings of an orange and a banana, and the wrapper from a Slim Jim she'd bought at the 7-Eleven across from school because her mother didn't let her eat nitrates.

Heidi arranged her dishes on her tray. She stood, and someone clipped her hard from behind. Her dishes slid to the floor in slow motion, spattering her with secondhand chili and tepid water. Then they shattered, and time sped up, and she turned to look at everyone else in the cafeteria, even though she knew that was unwise. For the second time in one day, people applauded, the slow kind they called sarcasticlaps. In the corner, someone was dancing a tango.

“I'm going to revise my earlier statement,” Megan said, turning Heidi away from her audience. “The bright side is that winter vacation starts tomorrow morning. By the time we get back to school, no one's going to remember this. And on the other bright side, it just proves the point I was making earlier about high school and Hell. Welcome to the nightmare.”

O
NE OF THE
first people I met in rehab was Howard. His soul, Sully, was a baby too, the big fat kind that crashes around in a diaper, pulling furniture over. Heidi never did that kind of stuff. She was also big, and also wore a diaper. But there was no crashing around. She was all ladylike, and for a while, I hoped it would be enough to get me out of rehab.

But I guess deep down I knew I was never getting out.

They paired me and Howard up a lot on account of our souls were around the same age. Part of me wonders if that's what made her think that douche box Sully was worth thinking about for more than two seconds. I knew all about her crush on him. Anyone within a mile could see it like it was written on her forehead. He was out of her league looks-wise, and she was out of his in every other way. But there was another reason they paired us up — a reason I learned about real early on in soul rehab.

We'd both killed cats. But mine was an accident. Me and Mike were drunk on Jägermeister. He was sixteen and I was fourteen, just out of Mrs. Domino's class. It was one of those hot summer days that make you do stupid things because you're pretty sure the day is never going to end, no matter how you fill the hours, and that life is always going to be the same sweaty mess. We wanted to see if this cat that was hanging around us would keep landing on its feet if we dropped it off higher and higher things, giving it a good hard flip each time. It was wrong. I knew it. But I didn't know what it would be like to live with something like that.

And forget about dying with something like that on my soul.

The cat stopped moving after we dropped it off the roof. It closed its eyes and gave one last creaky meow and it just lay there and I thought I was gonna be sick. All the blood rushed out of my fingers and they felt freezing even though it was almost a hundred degrees out. Mike got a shovel and we took turns digging a hole and I couldn't even feel my hands as I was scooping the dirt. It was a deep hole, way bigger than we needed, and we put the cat in and covered it up, all without saying a single word to each other.

Later, the cat's owner put flyers on all the telephone poles in the neighborhood, and they stayed up there till the rain washed them down that fall. I memorized the phone number and thought about calling it, but what would I say?

We never told anyone what we'd done, but there isn't hiding anything like that when it matters, and when the
weight of your life is being measured and you come up worth less than a pound of hamburger meat.

During one of my first group sessions, Xavier split me and Howard off from the rest so we didn't have to confess doing such horrible things in front of everyone else. He told us we could be each other's partners in penance. I wasn't sure what it meant, but I'm pretty sure he didn't want Howard to get off on my story.

Howard had all these questions for me, like
Did blood come out its ears?
and
Did you ever dig it up again, just to see the bones?
And this one …
Were you watching at the very second it died? What happened in that moment its soul left its body? That's what I wanted to see when I killed my cat. That moment in time. But I didn't know then that souls live on, and now what I really want to see is what happens if a soul is extinguished, you know? Does it disappear? Leave a pile of dust? Smell like burning rubber? Scream for mercy? Wouldn't it be awesome to find out?

I didn't want to be like that Howard guy, but there was no getting around the fact that we were both killers. That made us the same. Still, it didn't make me want to spend any more time with him than I had to.

He cornered me by the craft table the afternoon Heidi stink-bombed the talent show. We were in the place where group meets, a sort of rec room with fluorescent overheads that buzz so much you feel like you're surrounded by flies. The carpets are the color of dust, cookie crumbs, and old bruises, and no one cares if you spill because it never shows. They keep it like that to make us want to go to Heaven more.

We spend part of our time in group at an activity station, like crafts, or board games, or whatever, and part sitting in a semicircle talking about our feelings and what we learned while looking out for our souls. We weren't required to share, so I never did. But we had to show up, or else.

Howard stood between me and the table, leaning into my space with his arms crossed, and I could smell pizza rolls on him even stronger than the open pots of craft paste behind him. It looked like they were setting up for our annual Snowman Gratitude art project, which was a fun thing for a kindergartner, but not so much for someone who'd been seventeen for sixteen years in a row, especially since we'd been banned from giving the snowmen boobs on account of they are not mammals.

“Jerome,” he said, trying to make his voice go all low and manly. “Nice work this morning.”

He had the hairiest knuckles I'd seen since I went to the zoo in third grade and lost a staring contest with a gorilla.

“You weren't even there,” I told him. “Your guy left the lights on in his car. So shut it.”

“Got an offer for you,” he said. He stepped a little closer and I leaned backward so I wouldn't have to touch his plaid shirt. “I'm gonna trade you souls. My guy's easy. You just gotta make sure he doesn't choke on French fries or skateboard without a helmet.”

“If he's so easy, why are you still here?”

Howard squinted and cracked his knuckles, and for a second I thought I was going to lose a staring contest with
his fist. Even though we can't touch earthly things on account of we're on a heavenly plane, guardian angels can bust each other's faces just like the living do. We can maybe even hurt each other worse because we're going bare soul to bare soul with nothing in between.

“Don't you ever get sick of spending all your time with one person?” he said. “Don't you want to see what might happen if you tried another soul on for size?”

I didn't like the look in his eye or the sound of his voice when he said that. “Shove it.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. He flicked the collar of my jacket. Nobody touches my jacket. My dad gave it to me, said he never wanted to wear it again but that he didn't care if I did.

Xavier came in and asked for a volunteer with the chairs, and I stepped forward even though I never do that sort of thing. At first, my hands were shaking, which made the chairs plonk against each other, but eventually I relaxed and unfolded the seats like a pro. I passed them to Xavier, who arranged them in a C shape. When we were done, Xavier clapped his hands together real loud. He has his hands hooked up to a celestial amp, so it was like two metal doors banging shut. People headed for their seats.

During sharing, Howard told Xavier what had happened to Heidi at the talent thing. He even brought a show-and-tell video from the Internet and played it on one of his gadgets. One of Sully's friends had taken it and put it online after the assembly, and he sent a link to everyone in school, and then it made it around the world before lunch because at the 2:57 mark, you could see a flash of
her behind when her penguin suit split in two. Some guy in Uruguay even put a marriage proposal in the viewer comments, which I found out about later because Heidi's little brother, Rory, had translated the words on his computer and texted them to her when she was in math, where she cried on her precalculus problem set.

“Maybe Jerome's human should get a more suitable guardian angel,” Howard said, looking all innocent-like. “I could watch over her. I could even do two souls at once, you know, if you're gonna send Jerome down.”

I wanted to go angry rock star and trash him like he was a hotel room. I had this vision of myself, all slo-mo, where I brought my foot back and swung it under his chair and connected on the metal with this sweet, sweet
thwack
, and then I watched him pinwheel backward into space. The other guys all leaned forward in their chairs. I don't breathe anymore, but it felt like all the air left the room, and the hairs on my arms and head and stuff stood up like they were trying to follow. I curled my fingers into my palms and dug in my nails. The pain was good, so I held on to it and decided that, for now, it was enough.

“She has a name,” I said. “Heidi.”

I thought Xavier might fling me to Hell right then and there, but he surprised me, which is sometimes the thing with him. He put his palms together and tilted his head. “Heidi suffered an embarrassment, to be sure. But embarrassment is not the end of the world. And in fact, it can build character. Her spirit will rebound, stronger than ever.”

Howard smiled and said, “Of course, Xavier. You're right, as always,” but I could feel the anger rising off his skin, and I realized that if he wanted Heidi so bad, he probably had some sick reason for why.

Xavier moved on to some of the other guys, asking them about their spiritual journeys, and he wrote their feelings down in his notebook, and then pretty soon group was over. I did this thing we call the shoop, where your molecules slide through the molecules of the universe in a high-speed burst of color and sound. It's a little like sticking your head out of the car on the freeway, only you're going faster than a rocket, so it's a good thing you're already dead.

I was back with Heidi in study hall. I wanted to say something to her to make her feel better, but I couldn't really think of the right thing, so I just hummed a little “Freebird” and hoped she knew she wasn't alone.

The study hall is the worst room at Heidi's school, and that includes the JV boys' locker room. They've set it up in the dungeon of the library, where it's always cold and smells like mushrooms, and the dividers between the desks are covered in so much handwriting, they look hairy. It's not too crowded on Friday afternoons, and she was at the desk in the corner behind the pole, the one people sit at only if they are doing something they don't want anyone to see.

Usually, two people at a time use that desk, if you catch my drift, but Heidi was there alone. She had one of her drawings and was bent over it with her pen, which could
make lines practically as thin as a spiderweb. She bought it herself with money she earned taking care of the neighbor's dog, which, if you ask me, was a rip-off because that dog is a lethal weapon in at least seven countries. Dogs can see the dead, and whenever he sees me, he barks so much it feels like my soul is going to vibrate into a heap of shavings.

When she first started making her pictures a few years ago, I used to try to give her ideas for what to draw, mostly of awesome animals, but she was all, “I draw cityscapes. Now shush so I can concentrate.”

“What about Godzilla? He busted up cities.”

“No living things,” she said. “They're too hard.” But she was smiling.

“Mechagodzilla? He was mostly robot.”

“Jerome!”

Later, when she'd gotten really good at it, I used to wish for more.

There was this one time she was drawing a broken-down street in the bad section of her town, all full of storefronts with handwritten signs advertising cheap stuff no one wants. The one nice building on the block is a church, or used to be. A fat, rusting chain sealed off its door and a
FOR SALE
sign was stuck by the parking strip out front. I watched her work on that drawing, seeing everything so terrible in front of her and turning it into something else. It was a windy day, and the breeze kept blowing her hair into her face, and I wanted to hold those strands back so she could work without getting bugged by it. And I wished I could rest my hand on the back of hers
as she drew, so I'd know what it felt like to lay those lines down on paper. I wished she could feel me there, not just hear me, but feel me next to her, watching her work, loving what she was making.

I wished she'd draw me too. But she'd have to see me to be able to do that, so it was never going to happen.

This time, in the library, Heidi was crying and blacking out all the windows in her drawing of a city built on top of a narrow hill. It looked like the whole tiny place was shutting its eyes, one at a time, and I never would've said anything like this to anyone, especially not Xavier with his feelings notebook, but watching her do that made me feel … well, they say you only die once. But on days like that, Heidi could kill me once or twice, easy. I sometimes gave her a hard time just to make it hurt less. So I watched her, folded over her tiny little world, turning it dark, and I felt the same inside.