Devine Intervention Read Online Free Page B

Ballroom Dancing with the Elderly, which is for Jerks.
    The camera zoomed in on each level, one at a time, and through the tiny windows I watched people take their punishments. On Level II, they fancy-danced around the room even though they totally looked like they needed to sit. Every time someone tried, though, a fork of lightning would whip up from the floor and jolt them right back up and smoke would curl out of their ears and hair. Most of the people there were old, but not all. Some of the younger ones were guys about Mike’s age.
    Each level got worse, all the way to Level IX, where people who were violent in body and spirit turned into maggots and were set loose in the world to eat rotting food before getting eaten themselves, or turned into flies and crushed. Then their souls dropped back to Hell and started all over again as maggots. If I’d ever seen a nature show that bad when I was alive, I would’ve turned off the TV forever and, just to be sure, put the remote control on the train tracks for a fatal crushing.
    The video cut to a part that showed how in the olden days, every angel watched over a human, but then the population got out of hand, and angels started demanding the right to enjoy their deaths without having to do stuff. Pretty soon, the rehab angels were the only guardians left, and there was only enough of us for one in ten people or so to have one.
    That made us special. We had a second chance to become good people and get into Heaven. Not exactlywhat I wanted, which was to not be dead. But it wasn’t like I had a choice in the matter.
    â€œThou shalt have a soul to tend,” Xavier said after the video ended. “One carefully chosen for you. Consider thyself blessed to have her.”
    That’s when I first saw a picture of Heidi.
    She was a baby then, about the size of a loaf of bread, and I was all, Sweet! She lives in a crib! They gave me a handbook that was supposed to have all the rules and stuff for guarding our souls and getting into Heaven. I didn’t bother reading it. What was the point? I’d be out of rehab before she got out of diapers. How much work could a baby be? Also, her mom was hot, so I didn’t mind hanging around one bit.
    I stashed the book in one of my hiding places and pretty much forgot all about it for the next sixteen years, a decision I regretted about five thousand times when that thing happened out at the pond.

H EIDI KNEW she should have avoided Talentpalooza!! altogether. Reason One was the unnecessary punctuation in the name. Reason Two: Tammy Frohlich had organized it. But Megan had begged her to enter, telling Heidi it would be good for her reputation and their friendship if they did a really amazing dance number onstage, like something out of Dancing with the Stars but without the traditional moves and same-sex partner restraints, which made Reasons Three and Four.
    The more times Megan talked about it, the more Heidi got used to the idea, which stopped sounding like the worst one in the world and instead merely sounded like a mildly embarrassing way to spend two minutes and forty-seven seconds of her life. It seemed a small price to pay to make Megan happy.
    But that was before she saw her costume, a formfitting tuxedo made out of black-and-white spandex. “You dancethe male role,” Megan said. “It makes more sense. You’re so tall and muscular.”
    You look like a … Jerome paused.
    Like a deranged penguin , Heidi thought.
    And that was only from the front. She didn’t have the guts to check the rear view in the three-way mirror at the costume shop, not only because the mirror was right by the place where the Goth kids were trying on studded collars, but also because she was still in mild shock that the shop actually stocked a penguin suit that fit her six-foot frame. She tried not to think about who’d rented it previously, what reason anyone might have to wear a stretch tuxedo, and whether