Devine Intervention by Martha Brockenbrough Page B

was the perfect shape. I’d never noticed it before. I touched that part of my own mouth, just to see if mine matched, but I couldn’t tell.
    Even though I don’t drink earthly stuff anymore, all that talking made me wish I had something from my lobby vending machine to wash the taste of the words away, like a Sermon on the Mountain Dew, only I couldn’t take Heidi with and there was no way I could leave her alone anywhere, not with Howard on the prowl.
    We leaned against each other for a while, just listening to the wheels against the track. The sound was a lot bigger than what I imagined it would be when I was a kid and still allowed near Pop’s model trains. It wasn’t something that was just in your ears. It went all the way through you.
    â€œSo, rehab,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but why haven’t you gotten out? Does rehab go on forever?”
    I should’ve expected that she’d ask that. I’d wondered it fifty or a thousand times myself, but there wasn’t a good answer, so I was all, “Duh, because you would’ve missed me too much.”
    I sort of punched her again on the arm, and that’s when I realized that was the opposite of true. I would’ve missed her. Completely. Her face did that thing where it turned red all the way out to her ears. “What about girls in rehab?”
    I cracked up again. “You’ve seen me, right? I have an arrow sticking out of my forehead. I’ve seen the kind of guy girls like. Ones like the stupid vampire doll you got Megan. I am not that kind of guy. I am the guy who hands the socket wrench to the guy who fixes the Volvo that guy drives.”
    She got a puzzled look on her face and then she was all, “Uh, that’s not what I meant.”
    Chevy. Of course it wasn’t. I messed with the cracked button on the cuff of my jacket. That button would always be broken, no matter what.
    â€œNope,” I said. “No girls in rehab. Not in our section anyway.”
    â€œSo they probably wouldn’t take me, even if I had nowhere else to go,” she said. She was quiet for a while and opened her mouth a couple of times without saying anything. Then, right before I made fun of her for looking like a fish face, she dropped the bomb, a quiet one, but the words exploded all through me.
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me any of this stuff before, Jerome?”
    â€œThis stuff?”
    â€œYou know, about rehab. About the afterlife. About dying and what it was like. You just took up space in my head —”
    â€œYou never said you minded.”
    â€œI thought you weren’t real ,” she said. “I thought I was crazy.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that, and the look on her face gave me a prickly feeling. It crossed my mind I could sing “Freebird” or something to remind her of some of the good parts of me being with her, but before I got a chance, her eyes went woop! and got all wide, and her body started to flicker again worse than it had before. She called my name and I reached for her hand. It felt all full of static like a balloon you’ve rubbed on your head, and I held on tighter, hoping that I wasn’t hurting her.
    â€œYou’re okay,” I said. I looked in her eyes, but they didn’t look all that okay, and I hoped that was the kind of lie that wouldn’t count against me when the end came. “Just hang on. We’re going to shoop to Megan’shouse. Maybe you can Commune with her, like a best friend thing.”
    I didn’t actually think that was gonna work, but I didn’t know what else to do. Something was messed up, big-time, and I didn’t know how to fix it and could only hope I wasn’t gonna make it worse. The second she turned solid and warm again under my hands, I closed my eyes and took us there, hoping she’d survive the trip.

Appendix F: The Problem of Dislocated and/or Lost