Devine Intervention

by Martha Brockenbrough

  Also? There are no pictures. You’d think with the kind of technology Heaven has that can send messages directly into our skulls, that’d be the least they could do. Or maybe they could figure out a way where we don’t have to read, like maybe with the air TV thing.

  “Heidi, I don’t know what half of this Chevy means.”

  “Chevy,” she said. “Is that swearing thing going to happen to me? Let me see the book.”

  I wouldn’t let her, just in case she found out something bad. I wanted to find out why she hadn’t been summoned to the gates and all that stuff before she did, so I could fix it without getting her any madder at me than she already was. I also wanted to figure out how she could talk so she could get her last words out like she wanted. I flipped through the manual to see if I could find something that would explain everything. When I got to the part about swearing censors, I decided to do a test because that was the easiest thing.

  “Say a bad word. Swear.”

  She shook her head and crossed her arms over her milk cartons.

  “I don’t think so, Jerome. Can I please see the book?” She held out her hand. “Does that have instructions for Communing?”

  “I’ll show you if you swear.”

  “Jerome, swearing’s embarrassing!” Her ears were so red they went see-through at the tops. “And I don’t want to get a shock.”

  “It’s not like I said I wanted to touch your girl parts or anything. Just swear.”

  “Okay, fine. But I’m not going to say the worst word, just in case.”

  She closed her eyes for a second and I could tell she was thinking. There was no change in her cartons, but that didn’t surprise me because everyone knows those bits aren’t involved in making thoughts.

  “You’re an —” She paused, like she was afraid it was gonna hurt. “You’re an asshole.”

  My body jerked all on its own when she said it. That word causes a pretty harsh head buzz. Nothing happened to her, though. It was weird and unfair.

  “I can’t believe that didn’t hurt you.”

  “Maybe I didn’t get a shock because it’s true. You are a world-class a-hole at least half the time.”

  I took out my Megan Bingo notebook and pretended to make a mark, just to bug her. Bull’s-eye. Her eyes went dark and squinty.

  “Jerome,” she said through her hand. Using the worst word of all for emphasis, she told me to show her the handbook.

  After I got over my involuntary spazzing, I gave her some friendly advice.

  “Don’t make a habit of saying that word. Once they get your chip in, bang! And, also? You look real stupid covering your mouth all the time. If you’re gonna talk, talk. Stop hiding behind your hand!”

  I didn’t say it out loud or anything, but it made me mega-nervous that swearing didn’t fry her head. Because the Ten Commandments for the Dead? The ones that are in the manual? THOU SHALT NOT UTTER OATHS is the eighth one. They take it totally serious. It confused me when I was new in rehab, because I was getting zapped all the time, even without saying oaths. Then Xavier explained to me that the rule referred to not saying swearwords, any of them, and not only the word oaths.

  If they don’t want you to swear, they should say it plain. Like this. DON’T SWEAR. I had the book open to the page with the commandments.

  “Let’s look together.” She sat by me, crossing her arms.

  “Look at that,” I said. I planted my finger on the page. “It’s in crazy moon language. Good luck figuring it out.”

  Heidi read it out loud. “THOU SHALT NOT ENGAGE IN DISCOURSE WITH THE LIVING.”

  I looked over at her to see if she picked up on what was funny about that. She looked back with confused eyes.

  “Discourse,” I said to Heidi. “Man, that’s messed up. I can’t believe they care if we have sex with people who are still alive. It’s the dead ones you’re not supposed to touch. I had an uncle once who worked at a funeral home and he went to jail for —”

  “God, Jerome,” she said, once more not getting shocked for saying an oath. “You’re lucky you died before your SATs. Discourse is talking. Intercourse is sex.” She turned all red.

  Huh. I did not know that. All this time, I thought we weren’t supposed to be having sex with living people. But it turns out that I could’ve been doing that all along, and it was the talking that’s not allowed. Chevy! Sex and no talking sounded like Heaven, am I right?

  “Look who’s all smart and stuff,” I said. I was only kidding, but she reached over and twanged my arrow, and it took a minute before I could make words again.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said.

  “What? That there are no pictures? I know —”

  “No,” she said. “The First Commandment says you’re not supposed to talk with the living if you’re dead —”

  “And?”

  “You talked with me every day. Almost the whole day long. And I’ve been trying to talk with the living. You should have warned me!” She got off the bed and took the book with her. “If the doorbell rings one more time … stupid casseroles. Didn’t I at least deserve lasagna?” She had a point.

  “You know that saying, that every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings?”

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Total bull.”

  “You’re completely annoying. You know that, right?”

  She maybe had a point. The worse I felt, the less I could control what came out of my mouth. But it’s unfair to blame someone for this. You don’t get mad at people for being tall or having brown eyes. So why blame them for chronic, incurable mouth diarrhea?

  She poked her head through the wall, sneaking peeks at the people milling around, mostly her mom’s friends on account of her family wasn’t there. This was not improving her mood. I could see it on her face when she popped back in the room, so I tried to cheer her up.

  “I’m pretty sure these commandments are more like guidelines,” I said. “You know, stuff to work with.”

  “Jerome!” She slammed the book down on her desk. Even though it’s spectral, it made the papers on her desk flutter. You can do that sort of thing when you have a lot of emotion zipping around in your essence, like I did when I dumped the soda on Sully’s crotch and knocked the salt and pepper shakers over.

  “Commandments aren’t guidelines. They’re firm rules!” She sat, leaning against her desk.

  “Really?” I sat next to her on the floor and tried to give her some puppy eyes. It doesn’t work all that good with a forehead arrow.

  She made a plate with her hands and rested her face in it the way people do in pie-eating contests. Only, without the pie there, it was a much sadder thing to watch.

  “Which level of Hell are they going to send me to?” she said. “According to your book, I’ve broken the rules. Almost all of them.”

  She lifted her head and I saw a hard, bright look in her eyes. She reached for the book again and started flipping from the front to the back, where they describe the levels of Hell. “I mean, I wasn’t being ungrateful or cruel or wasteful. I didn’t steal anything and I wasn’t hypocritical. And I’m certainly not guilty of deceit, am I?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I’d been meaning to ask Xavier what deceit meant for a while, only he was always so mad when he was accusing me of it.

  “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.
r />   “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.”