I was so encouraged by your reviews of my other piece that I decided I'd try my hand at another one – this time slightly longer.

Have some more angst, I'm in an angsty mood. This picks up several years after the 'cecile' fiasco, I imagine the kids are between 15 and 18.

Disclaimer: I do not own "Hey! Arnold," it is the intellectual property of craig bartlett, and is owned by Nickelodeon. If I owned it, there would be a second movie. :-(

Here we go!

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From this perspective, everything looked so strange. It was like looking through a fish-eye lens. She could see the cobwebs that accumulated on the ceiling, and could barely see the nicks in the wooden floor. The extra distance even deadened the sound of the television in the living room, though not by much. Helga stood and took stock of what she was seeing, looking for anything left to hide or destroy.

She had taken her books of poetry and any loose incriminating papers to the roof and burned them. If it caught fire, it went on the pyre. Helga couldn't help but liken herself to Dido, collecting items for her love's funeral pyre, her love that still lived. The candles, wax, and gum had been smashed to an amorphous lump in the trash. The Christmas lights had been carefully and inconspicuously stored in the attic. Maybe Miriam had found her shrine when she was 9, but damned if anyone was going to find it now.

The only things that remained were the locket and his letters. She hadn't the heart to destroy the locket, and as for the letters, she couldn't decide whether to keep them or destroy them. In the end, she determined that no one would read them anyway, and kept them in a neat pile, in chronological order on her desk.

In her final survey of her room, she couldn't help but to wonder just how things had gotten to where they were, to how she went from her guarded fortress to this weak mess of rubble, with no salvation from the wrecking ball, and could only welcome it with open arms.

It had been those letters, and her disproved hypothesis. Those years ago, she thought she had made a connection to him, even though it had been through an alias, it had been the real her – or as close to 'real' as she could have come without being revealed. She thought first letter had started well, at least.

"Dear Arnold, It's me, Cecile. Not 'that' Cecile, the other one."

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End prologue.