Helga watched the little drops of blood fall from her finger and slide down the side of the sink, fanning out in pale pink rivulets as they mixed with the water clinging to the sides of the basin. She grabbed some random bandaids from the medicine cabinet and carefully bandaged up the cut that stretched across half of her hand. It wasn't deep, but writing and eating and pretty much anything that required any sort of manual dexterity whatsoever was going to be a bitch for the next week.
Way to go, genius. Yet another brilliant decision.
Maybe smashing a porcelain picture frame against the wall hadn't been one of her best ideas after all—but somehow in the moment, hurling the frame that contained that idiotic picture of Miriam holding her as a blissfully ignorant little three-year-old against hard sheetrock felt like she was breaking apart all remaining delusions that her childhood had been anything but the absolute nightmare she knew it to be.
On any other day she would have just avoided her mother like she usually did, but that morning it'd finally sunk in that in four short days she'd be back at PS 146, and she thought for one brief moment that maybe she could actually talk to Miriam about the rising panic that was starting to overtake her like it did at the start of every new school year.
Mom, I'm really anxious about school, and I just—
What? Oh, hi Helga. Here, have some of this. You'll feel better.
Helga replayed the scene over in her mind: Miriam in her bathrobe, sliding her half-drained glass of whatever the hell she was drinking across the table without even looking up. Just thinking about it made her so angry again that she slammed the medicine cabinet shut, nearly shattering the mirror. She wondered if she broke it, if the old superstition might work in reverse. Maybe for seven years my life would stop being such a miserable joke. She shook her head at her reflection in the bathroom mirror; she'd only been awake for a few hours and she already looked completely worn out.
She shuffled back to her room and sat on the bed, feeling completely numb and completely furious all at once. She needed to get out of the house, now. But of course even that couldn't be simple.
Helga quickly brushed a stray tear from her cheek and forced herself to channel whatever it was that she was feeling into frustration over the fact that, as she'd discovered when she'd attempted to get dressed before her heartwarming little mother-daughter exchange over the cocktail of the day, she had almost nothing in her closet and no idea where any of her clothes were.
Pants . . . pants . . .
She scanned the room and then opened and closed the closet door again, as if it would magically turn into some kind of Narnia wonderland of fashion if she just wished hard enough.
Where the heck are my pants? I need to get out of this hellhole and I can't do that if I don't have any stinkin' PANTS!
She yanked out one of her dresser drawers and threw it on the floor in frustration. Mismatched socks tumbled out across the carpet, and she kicked them out of her way as she gave up on her room and trudged downstairs to check the laundry room.
"Mom!" Helga called out, more out of habit than of the expectation that she'd actually get an answer. Unopened mail, old towels and random papers cluttered the top of the laundry machine, but there were no clothes in sight.
"Miriam!" She hastily lifted up the lid of the washer to check inside, sending a stack of Pottery Barn catalogs sailing to the floor. Where the heck are all my clothes? Helga slammed the washer shut, toppling a stack of bills. She kicked those too. And then she kicked the washer. Twice.
Miriam had a habit of gathering up the family laundry and then getting distracted before she ever got around to actually washing anything, which usually meant she also deposited the as-yet unlaundered clothes in some completely inexplicable place like the bathroom closet, behind the sofa or, once, in the trunk of her station wagon. Helga was used to this phenomenon, much like she was used to coming home and finding her mother passed out on the couch while the smoke alarm blared and the charred remains of a chocolate cake sent clouds of gray smoke streaming out of the oven, but usually she just left for Phoebe's or the park or pretty much anywhere that wasn't her house when her mom was like this. It wasn't a great solution, but it worked well enough. Now, however, her own pantslessness was keeping her prisoner in her own personal hell and she quickly felt the panic that had already started to bubble up the minute she'd opened her eyes that morning threatening to turn into a full-blown attack on her sanity.
Helga dragged herself back upstairs and forced herself to knock on her mother's door. No answer. She considered putting her fist through it, but decided her hands had suffered enough abuse for one morning. She opened the door and there was Miriam, sprawled across the bed and out like a light. Some movie with Burt Reynolds was on mute on the flat-screen. Helga rolled her eyes, grabbed two empty glasses from the nightstand and headed back downstairs. After she deposited the glasses in the kitchen sink, she surveyed herself in the hall mirror. Skinny, pale, almost but not quite filling out her white ribbed pajama top, still looking exhausted—but all things considered, not too bad. She was silently grateful that she'd at least managed to escape the body obsession that seemed to plague almost every other girl in her school. It was like she had so many other things to feel bad about that there just wasn't room for her to worry about whether she was too skinny or not skinny enough, or whether her skin was as radiant as a dewy spring morning at all times.
She gave her reflection something that almost resembled a smile. For the briefest of moments she wondered if her pink lace underwear could pass for bathing suit bottoms, but she quickly decided even she wasn't that desperate to get outside. No, it was time to do the unthinkable.
Five minutes later, Helga grabbed a soda from the fridge, swung her bag over her shoulder and headed out the door in the lacy white sundress and obnoxiously cheerful blue cardigan she'd found hanging in her sister Olga's old closet.
Although is was already early September, a wave of sticky heat washed over Helga the moment she stepped outside. She didn't mind though; the moment her feet hit the sidewalk, she felt the weight of the morning's events starting to float away with the breeze.
Soon she found herself walking toward Hillwood City Park. Peace and quiet and a little green grass and open sky were exactly what she needed to forget all about another exciting day full of Miriam being so predictably indisposed.
"Have some of this, you'll 'feel better?'" Well, I guess we know who isn't winning any mother of the year awards . . . Not like there was any danger of that happening to begin with.
Helga tried her best to shove down all thoughts of the morning. It was just going to be a nice, uneventful afternoon in the park with her Diet Coke and the last of her summer reading list. As she neared the park entrance, however, it was starting to look more crammed than serene; it seemed that with school just around the corner, everyone else in town had had the same idea. All around her, the park bustled with people trying to squeeze the last few remaining drops of magic out of summer before the days of exams and papers and being crammed in the same building with the same old people descended upon them once again—but crowd or not, Helga dreaded the start of school more than anyone and she was determined to distract herself from her inevitable doom for as long as possible. She made a beeline for a shaded patch of grass, set up her blanket and sat down, determined to clear her mind. She cracked open her drink and turned to the first page of her book.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . yeah, you're telling me.
Her thoughts wandered as her eyes skimmed the page.
It was the best of times, it was . . . I wonder who I'll have for English?
It was . . . I wonder if he'll be in my class? Ugh. Get ahold of yourself. It was the best of times . . .
Well, if he is in my class, I can just sit in the back. Or if he sits in the back, I can sit in the front. Which would be better, actually, because then I won't have to stare at the back of his stupid head.
It was the best of times . . . ARGH!
After about fifteen minutes of rereading the first sentence, Helga slammed the book shut, flopped back into the grass and sighed heavily. Her best efforts to find "inner peace," as Miriam so annoyingly put it ever since she started up with all that yoga junk, weren't going as well as she'd planned. So far all she had to show for her efforts were three mosquito bites and a grass stain on Olga's otherwise pristine dress. Even lying in her favorite spot under the big weeping willow tree—far enough from the playground and the fields that it was relatively secluded even on a busy day—wasn't helping her relax. She balled up Olga's cardigan under her neck, stared up at the calm blue sky and tried once again to will herself into believing that things were going to change this year.
There is no reason I have to be sucked back into the same miserable cloud of despair and unrequited longing that has darkened every other stinking school year since I can remember.
Just because I've been sucked back into the same miserable cloud of despair and unrequited longing every stinking school year since I can remember, there's no reason I have to be sucked back into that same miserable cloud of despair and longing this year.
Just because every year I tell myself I won't get sucked back into the same miserable cloud of despair and longing and every stinking year it takes roughly point-two seconds to get sucked back into that miserable cloud doesn't mean that this year I'll . . . damn it.
The whole thing seemed completely unfair and irrational. After all, why should she be subjected to nine months of uncontrollable lust or love or like-like-induced misery when she'd gone the entire summer without even really thinking about Arnold? Well until now. But thinking about not thinking about him wasn't the same thing as just thinking about him was it? She banged her head against the ground, as if she could rattle her unwanted thoughts loose and they'd just tumble out onto the dirt. Off in the distance, she heard kids shouting out a very heated game of Simon Says.
Simons says? Simon says, shut your traps! I'm trying to find inner peace over here!
Helga absentmindedly ripped a fistful of grass out of the ground and tossed it into the breeze. She wished she could rip out everything she was feeling and just watch it all flutter away like the blades of grass.
At a certain point, she figured she'd just been wrapped up in Arnold for so long that it was like a switch had flipped permanently on and her brain didn't know how else to respond around him other than to turn all gooey and stupid. She had little hope that her usual strategy of simply trying to avoid him as much as possible would work any better this year than it had any other year—which is to say not at all—but it was all she could think of outside of transferring schools. Not that she hadn't given that ample consideration. Still, it was senior year—the last hurrah, the final countdown. Soon enough, major life changes would be completely unavoidable, so maybe there was some hope after all.
Helga yawned and stretched her limbs out against the grass. The heat and the idea of moving far far away from Hillwood City next year and never having to think about Arnold or her lousy mother or Bob and his increasingly long and frequent "business trips" again finally lulled her mind into submission, and she gave up on thinking about not thinking about Arnold. She laid her book across her chest, closed her eyes and soaked up the sun's afternoon glow from behind her eyelids, letting it warm up her cheeks and dance across her nose. She inhaled deeply, breathing in the scent of grass and leaves, mingled with the faintest notes of sunscreen and cotton candy. A bird warbled erratically from some nearby branch, the steady rush of bicycle tires crunching across gravel came and went, and in the distance she could hear kids laughing and the faint jangling of the Jolly Olly truck. The familiar symphony of Hillwood City Park carried her away from all of her racing thoughts, and she started to believe that maybe this year things really would be different. For one lovely moment she actually felt carefree and weightless—right up until a rogue soccer ball careened in out of nowhere and cracked her in the face.
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Well, there you have it! This is really a setup chapter-the rest of the story is going to have a lot more action and interaction betweens characters, but I really wanted to set up Helga's world before diving into all of that. Poor Helga. I have kind of a huge sprawling story outline for this thing, so hopefully it'll go well and people will like it . . .or everyone will hate it and I'll just post it anyway, because why not?! :) Anyway, I have the next chapter written already, so I'll be updating soon. Thanks for reading! And because I thrive on approval and/or acknowledgement, I would love to read your reviews if you'd like to leave them!
xox- FL
