Yeah, I've been bitten by the Hey Arnold! bug. I can't help it. This is a beloved show from my childhood and now that I'm older I can appreciate the depth of it all. You don't really get that from cartoon shows today. So, here's my little AU of the infamous episode "Arnold and Lila." Where instead of switching names, Helga leaves the message as is and deals with the consequences. Yeah, I know this has been done before, but I'm going to try it, too.

"What about you, Arnold? Are you holding a torch for Miss Lila, too?" Helga felt her heart tighten at the question. She wanted to know the answer, and yet she didn't. If he didn't like her then she still had a chance! If he did…well she'd do everything to break them up. She was the one who loved Arnold. She wanted a chance with the boy who had unknowingly stolen her affections.

"I don't know, Stinky," Arnold admitted. "I mean, I like Lila, but I don't like her, like her." The boys walked past the alley Helga had been hiding in. Helga's heart soared and her knees became weak as she leaned against the alley wall. A lovesick smile graced her features and she closed her eyes, turning her face upward toward the sun.

"He doesn't like her, like her!" she gushed. Her knees gave way and she collapsed into an empty cardboard box. She let herself get carried away into another poetic monologue. "Oh, Arnold! So patient and thoughtful! Spurning the golden girl and saving his affections for one less likely yet perhaps ultimately more deserving! One who may not be the prettiest or the wittiest but whose primitive beauty, grace, and charms lies tragically unobserved and unawakened! Someone…like…me! Helga G. Pataki!" Helga walked further down the alley while she said this and when she looked up, she spotted a plant that reminded her of her love's wild golden hair and she was hit with further inspiration.

"Oh, Arnold! Bane of my existence! Blight upon my tortured soul! If only you knew my true feelings for you! And if only you felt the same feelings towards me!" If only, if only. Helga let her love and inspiration take her away, not caring about logic or the consequences her actions might hold. "Dare I imagine? If only for one, brief mad moment it were true! Call me mad, but I dare! I dare!" Helga pulled out the piece of chalk from her pocket she had been using at recess that day. "With this chalk and no witnesses in sight, I will write the words upon this wall that bear my soul! Expressing all, I hope, I dream, I pine, I pray was true! Forever and a day!"

Helga turned to the wall, determined now. "Arnold…loves…Helga…" she wrote in her prettiest cursive. She finished it off with a heart around the names and an arrow through it. Helga gushed for a moment at her creation. Perfect! Absolutely perfect! Then she heard familiar giggling. No! This was not perfect! There were supposed to be no witnesses!

"I mean, she mixed navy blue and black! What was she thinking!" No! Rhonda Lloyd of all people was headed this way. Helga tried to cover the chalk message. No! It wasn't enough! Why did she have to write it so big? There was no time to erase it and no hose anywhere! Panicking, Helga ran off to hide, hoping against all hope that Rhonda and her cronies wouldn't look in the alley!

"Hold up, girls!" Rhonda ordered. Oh, please let her have just seen someone commit a fashion faux pas! Helga prayed. "'Arnold…loves…Helga?'" Helga's eyes nearly bugged out of her skull and she had to prevent herself from screaming. She had to remind herself to calm down because it's not like she had just confessed her feelings. So at least her dirty secret wasn't out! Besides, they'd probably think it was just a bad joke!

"Gosh!" Lila gasped.

"Do you think it's true?" Nadine asked Rhonda. It's not true. Think it's a joke. Think it's a joke. Think it's a joke!

Rhonda scoffed. "Well, of course, it's true! It's written on the wall: 'Arnold loves Helga'." Crap!

"Well that's just ever so sweet, that Arnold would do something like this," Lila gushed. "But why would he put it on a wall instead of telling Helga herself?"

"The poor boy is just too shy for his own good sometimes," Rhonda explained. "He should have just come to me, though, if he wanted people to know. But don't worry," she assured as she led the girls back down the street. "I'll make a few phone calls and by tomorrow morning, everyone will know, including the object of his desires. I mean, it's so obvious that he wanted the right person to stumble upon this and help him out. That person just so happens to be me."

Helga emerged from her hiding place as the girls disappeared. She clutched the locked beneath her shirt and looked at the chalk message. "What have I done?" she asked herself.

"Hey, Olga!" Bob called from the other side of her door. "Another one of your little school friends are on the phone! That's the fifth one tonight!"

"Who is it?" Helga asked. So far, Rhonda, Nadine, Lila, and (surprisingly) Stinky had called her. With each call, she had told Bob some excuse: she was tired, she was busy, she was feeling under the weather, anything to avoid talking to people. She needed to calm herself down so she could act all mad and like she didn't know what anybody was talking about tomorrow and the only way she could do that was to build up walls again so she wasn't nearly as vulnerable as she felt now.

"That little Asian girl you always hang around with…Fiona," Bob answered. Helga breathed a sigh of relief.

"Thanks, Bob, I'll take the call up here!" Helga called back. She took a deep breath and picked up the phone. "Phoebe?" she asked.

"Hello, Helga!" Phoebe said brightly on the other end of the line. "I normally don't like to listen to gossip, but I heard something that you might be happy about. It has to do with ice cream!"

Helga sighed and laid back on her bed. "If this is about the message on the wall, then you can save it, Pheebs. I already know about it."

"Oh! Did someone else finally manage to reach you? Rhonda did call me right after I got off the phone with Harold and told me you couldn't come to the phone and said Nadine hadn't had any luck, either and I assumed that you just told them excuses so you could have some privacy-"

Helga shot up from her bed. "Wait, wait, wait! Why were you on the phone with Harold?"

"Well he was calling to tell me the same news I wanted to tell you. Although, I had already heard as much from Sheena and Eugene when they called. Harold apparently heard it from Curly." Helga groaned, putting her face in hear free hand.

"My life is over, Phoebe! Over! I'm going to have to move to Canada and change my name and whole life story! I'm ruined!"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Helga…may I stop speaking in code for a minute?" Phoebe asked.

"Yeah, sure, go ahead."

"Well, I just don't understand how your life is over," Phoebe continued. "I thought you would be so happy that Arnold has finally fallen in love with you. Now you don't have to hide your feelings for him anymore and you can finally be together."

"There's a major flaw in that little theory of yours, though," Helga pointed out. "Arnold never wrote that message."

"Oh," Phoebe said surprised. "Well if he didn't write that message, then…" Phoebe trailed off and then gasped. "Helga! You didn't!"

"Sorry, Phoebe, but I'm gonna have to disagree this time around. I did. I'm the one who wrote that message on the wall," Helga admitted.

"Oh, Helga! Why?"

"I don't know, Phoebe, okay? I overheard Arnold saying how he only liked Lila and didn't like her, like her and then I got carried away and next thing I know, I'm standing in front of a big heart with an arrow through it, with a message inside falsely proclaiming Arnold's love for me and Rhonda Lloyd is starting to come my way! So I ran and hid and hoped she wouldn't see, but she did. My life is over."

Phoebe racked her brain for a solution. "Well, I'm sure if you just explained it's just a big misunderstanding…" she began.

"So I'm supposed to go and tell people that I'm the one who wrote that on the wall? If I tell people I wrote the message then they'll know that I'm in love with Arnold and my life will be over! Then Arnold will reject me! Or worse, Arnold will find out, if he hasn't already, and if I then confess that I was the one who wrote it, he'll think I was trying to play some cruel joke on him and he'll still reject me! If I go to school tomorrow, everyone will be teasing me and Arnold! My secret won't be out but with the torment, my life will soon be over. No matter what, Phoebe, I can't win!"

Phoebe sighed. "Well, as bad of a predicament as this is, you still need to go to school tomorrow. It will just look suspicious if you didn't! Just act like you have no idea what people are talking about. Be dumbfounded, be angry, just don't give away more than you want to and with any luck this whole thing should blow over before you know it!"

Helga sighed, twisting the phone cord around her finger. "You really think so, Phoebe?"

"Of course!" Phoebe assured her. "While children our age do tend to get carried away with things like this, they will soon be bored and move on to something else that excites their interests."

Helga smiled weakly. "How long do you think that will take?"

"A few weeks."

Helga groaned again. "My life is over."