Read Devine Intervention for Free Online Page A

what I did.”
    â€œJust 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 .”
    â€œSo what happened?”
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œThat sounds like a good thing.”
    â€œNot 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.”
    â€œWhy didn’t she use the restroom beforehand?”
    â€œBecause 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.
    â€œUch, I’m eating here,” she said, as much to Jerome as to Megan. Not that it mattered.
    â€œSo when everyone at school was loving the act, my cousin got the giggle fits.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYes,” Megan said. “And she sprang a leak.”
    â€œWas it a lot? Could people tell?”
    â€œWell, any pee on stage is too much. That’s a truth universally acknowledged. But this was huge.”
    â€œYou’re making this up.”
    â€œNope.” 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.
    â€œBut she got the last laugh,” Megan said. “Now she really is a star.”
    â€œOn a cruise ship, though.”
    â€œCaptive 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.
    â€œI’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