Missing
This is probably not one of my better ideas. I'm already midway through some other longform fics, and updates may be sporadic, but given that Arnold/Helga was one of my baby ships I'd like to give something to the fandom to tide us all over until the Jungle Movie.
Note: Although this is somewhat inspired by Anohana, it is a very different egg with some twists and turns planned. Enjoy!
…..
It should have been a healthy sixteen-year-old heterosexual boy's dream come true to wake up to find a girl sitting on your bed.
Not so much when that girl was a girl you hadn't seen for five years.
Not so much when that girl was a girl who nobody had seen in five years.
Definitely not when she looked just like she had on the posters and fliers and news reports, right down to her clothes (pink sundress, white sweater, pink ribbon in her hair, sneakers), the only difference being that the girl in those posters and fliers and news reports had been eleven years old, and the girl sitting on the end of Arnold's bed was around the same age he was.
It was unmistakably her. He would recognize those eyebrows anywhere.
"...Helga?" he just about managed to choke out.
She jumped, frowned down at him as if he'd done something wrong (and oh, something in him had missed that look) and made to step off the bed. Dimly he noticed she was wearing only one shoe.
"...what? You can see me? Now?" she growled.
"Of course I can see you...where have you...what..." he spluttered.
This has to be a dream.
"I've been here for weeks," Helga groaned. "You didn't see me before?"
He reached out to her, and at the same time pinched himself. The pain barely registered because his hand sank through her arm to clutch at the bedspread under her.
Oh...well, he was definitely awake.
"That hasn't changed, then," she said, tapping at his hand. His skin felt cold where she was touching him, like being touched by mist. It was a feeling he'd had before...he'd been looking for gaps in the drywall and the floorboards, for the source of that cold...well over five weeks...
"What are you doing here?" he managed to ask, his mind working furiously to make sense of this. Making sense of a girl who was missing, legally declared dead, suddenly popping up on his bed.
"I don't know," she told him with a careless shrug. "I woke up here. And I can't seem to leave."
"You can't...leave...?"
"I tried," she continued. "I can't work the door, I keep sinking. I tried to get outside when the door was open, but I ended up back inside."
It was all starting to make a crazy sort of sense. Of course she was a ghost. Everyone knew she was dead, even though she hadn't been found. But why would she end up haunting Arnold's house?
"I can't call you Football Head anymore," she said, awfully casual for a dead person. "It almost looks normal. Too bad."
Football Head.
He wanted to cry. It had been so long. But instead he laughed.
"You can call me Football Head if you want."
…..
They worked out some facts in the most bizarre conversation Arnold had ever had.
Helga couldn't remember anything about the day she disappeared, or anything after that until she 'woke up' in Arnold's house. She had been wandering around the boarding house for five weeks, wondering why nobody would talk to her or acknowledge her. She figured out she was a ghost about two weeks in, after phasing through the walls trying to leave. She couldn't move anything with solid weight, didn't sleep, didn't eat. Didn't do anything but watch.
But now Arnold was able to see her, she said she felt more 'solid.' She could still phase through walls and couldn't open doors, but she could pick up small objects (pens, paper, socks etc.)
He brought her downstairs (it was still early, everyone else was still in bed) and he opened the front door for her, and she made it down to the end of the stoop before she had to stop.
"I can't go any further," she said.
"Why not?" he whispered, looking around for anyone else on the street.
"I don't know," she shrugged. "Just a feeling."
"A feeling?"
"I've never been a ghost before, doy," she scoffed. "How am I supposed to know anything?"
They went back inside. The boarding house was just starting to wake up. In another hour he was going to be leaving for school. He grabbed some oatmeal from the kitchen, took it upstairs with a hurried comment to his grandmother that he had homework to finish.
He brought up news articles on his PC for her to read about her case. About how she had left school on a Thursday evening, hadn't gone home, and hadn't gone to school the next day. About how the alarm hadn't been raised until Saturday when she missed Little League practice, and how her best friend had called the police but her parents hadn't. About how one of her sneakers had been found in a ditch 30 miles out of town.
He watched her skim articles and think-pieces and polls all about her case with a solemn, indifferent gaze. She had been cute at eleven, big eyebrows and all. Theories about what had happened to her were wild, sordid, sometimes ghoulish. He'd seen pictures of her digitally altered to how she would look at sixteen, but they had gotten some details wrong. She was beautiful at sixteen, dead or not. Or maybe he just thought that because he had missed her more than he ever thought he would.
"Who's this Lancie guy?" she asked suddenly, making him choke a little on his oatmeal. "His name keeps popping up..."
"He's an out-of-town suspect," Arnold answered. "He was found with your bike. I think he was in jail before for something to do with girls..."
"Huh," she said, scrolling down the page. "I don't remember having a bike..."
"It was Phoebe's," he said. "She gave you her old one to help you get to Little League."
"Oh yeah," she smiled. "She covered it with those stickers...I got most of them off but those stupid butterflies..."
He grinned to himself. The butterflies on her bike had been used as a sort of unofficial logo for any discussions of her case. It was just like her to hate the thing everyone was using to identify her.
"Lots of results for Bob here," she muttered. "They really think he did it?"
Yes. The general consensus was that Bob Pataki had murdered his daughter, in Hillwood anyway. He had been called in for questioning multiple times and though they couldn't prove he had done it, all the dirt that came out about him in the papers ruined any kind of reputation he could have had afterwards.
"What do you think? He's your dad, could he have done it?" he asked carefully.
She spun a little in the computer chair, thinking. How bitter to think that she couldn't immediately say no, her father could not and would not have killed her.
"It's possible," she said at last, so casually it hurt Arnold to hear it. "Maybe not on purpose, but accidents happen..."
Over her shoulder the picture they had used in all the case files flickered on Arnold's PC screen. It was her school photo, she was smiling, her hair was tidy and her clothes were clean. But Arnold knew that there was much speculation about how few pictures they had gathered, how her family had almost none, and how a lot of the alternative photos had come from either the school or Phoebe. There were two floating around on the internet, on true crime websites. She had stitches on her head in one, a bad case of measles in the other. These were evidence that her family were neglectful at best, outright abusive at worst.
We all knew. All the kids, all the grown-ups. Nobody did anything until she was gone.
"Wonder why I didn't wake up at my house," she mused, spinning in the chair. "You think Bob had something to do with that?"
"They don't live there anymore," he told her.
"What? They moved?"
"Yeah, about six months after you went missing," he explained.
They'd had their windows broken, doors smashed in, paint thrown at the house. Bob's store had been broken into and trashed. Arnold thought they might have even changed their names.
"Figures," Helga huffed.
The chime on his phone, the one that told him it was time to leave the house for school, jingled on the desk.
"I gotta go," he told her regretfully. "You'll be here when I get back, right?"
"I think so," she said, clicking on another crime blog. "I'm not planning on going anywhere, anyways. Say hi to Phoebe for me."
Biking down the hill, Arnold had time to think. Once upon a time he had dreaded going to school to deal with Helga G. Pataki. Then, he would have given anything to deal with her at school, to make things normal again. And now he wanted nothing more than to stay away from school to deal with her. It felt like something had clicked back into place.
…..
Arnold was something of a loner at school, nobody bothered him but nobody bothered with him either. Out of the corner of his eye, as he was taking books out of his locker, he spotted Gerald with his crew, lounging outside the door for Homeroom and passing comments on any girls that skittered past them.
How long has it been?
Their friendship hadn't disintegrated overnight, but shortly after Helga went missing Arnold had found he didn't like the person Gerald was becoming. They cut ties for good almost a year later, and they were coldly polite to each other in person. It helped that they didn't have many classes together, Arnold was top in pretty much everything and Gerald was flunking most of his.
Rhonda was sitting across from him as he took his seat in homeroom. She was furiously typing something on her phone, stroking her thumb across her jaw to blend some tiny flaw in her make-up. Her long elaborate nails clattered against the phone screen obnoxiously. How many words had she spoken to Arnold in the past few years? Probably less than ten.
As the bell rang, Phoebe hurried in, curled in on herself as she always was. She sat at the back, close to the door.
Say hi to Phoebe for me.
For the first time in a long, long time, Arnold really looked at Phoebe.
She had been interviewed on TV a few times during the search. America had warmed to this poor little girl who had lost her best friend, shaking and stumbling over her words as newscasters gently asked her about what they did together, about the bike she had given her, if she wanted to send her friend a message.
I WANT YOU TO COME HOME the headlines quoted in huge glaring letters, with the tear-flushed face of the little girl on the front page. I MISS YOU SO MUCH.
Then the story was old news, and Phoebe was largely forgotten by the media, except to bring up a point that she, as an eleven year old girl, had been the first person to alert police that Helga was missing. Sometimes whoever was writing the article or blog-post wondered how she was doing.
She wasn't doing well.
Her hair was long, stringy and unkempt. Her glasses were smudged, her skin pale and ashy-looking. She was buried under a shapeless wool sweater and leggings with holes at the knee. She might have still been pretty, under that lackluster appearance, if it wasn't for the air of pure misery that followed her around.
Arnold was a loner, but people still talked to him every now and then. People went out of their way not to talk to Phoebe. Ironically, she was more of a ghost than the actual ghost sitting in his room surfing the internet.
…..
He hurried home after school, half-afraid that the morning had been some hallucination, that Helga wouldn't be there.
She was.
Exactly where he had left her, in fact, and looking more alive than any dead person had a right to.
"That was quick," she quipped, spinning in the chair and poking her one bare foot in his direction. "You say hi to Phoebe for me?"
"No," he answered, tossing his bag onto the bed. "I thought it might make me look a bit...insane."
"Fair point," she agreed. "How is she?"
How could he tell her? When he knew she'd want to leave the house when she physically couldn't, to save her friend from drowning in her own unhappiness?
"She's...okay," he lied.