Disclaimer: I own nothing. Thanks for reading!
Helga reached up to pull off her old catcher's mask and rubbed her face with the back of her forearm. Arnold liked to imagine she believed it held some sort of magic or luck in it—she'd had it since before he could remember. She shook her head and her hair came loose, large sections matted down in places and many wisps of it straggling in a cloud around her face. Arnold sat nearby on the bleachers, drinking some water and watching her absentmindedly. It was getting warmer every day, but once the sun went down it became chilly.
Gerald walked by and looked at his friend, shook his head, and kept walking. Arnold was a bold dude.
Helga was mumbling something along the lines of "criminy" and "are you kidding me" as she impatiently detangled her hair with her fingers.
Arnold asked before he knew what he was saying. "Want me to walk you home?" Most of their friends were wandering out of Gerald Field on their various routes home. The sunlight was fading quickly—spring was on its way but it still got dark pretty early.
"Yeesh, Arnoldo, I know where I live now." Helga rolled her eyes, albeit good-naturedly. "I only had amnesia for a d—a couple days, not years." She brushed past him towards the street.
"You know what I meant," Arnold was in the middle of his response before his brain caught up to Helga's slight discrepancy. Only one day? He remembered he'd walked her home then, too. So that's how she wants to play… Arnold decided right then that Helga had been fond of his company much longer than he more recently supposed.
"You live in the opposite direction from me. Why could you possibly want to walk me home?" They were already walking towards her house.
"What's so weird about me wanting to walk you home?" Arnold countered her question with another. The street lights were blinking on.
"Gee, maybe because I bug you all the time?" Her use of that word stung slightly. That's the word he used to complain about her to Gerald back when they were younger.
He smiled awkwardly. "You don't bug me that much."
"Really, huh?" Helga raised an eyebrow at him. "You sure didn't seem so high-and-mighty during the game." She lowered her voice, "Mickey Kaline wannabe."
The sharp annoyance Arnold had felt at bat flared up again. "Hey, I've been working on that! And it's not my fault Harold is… well, Harold."
"Newsflash, bucko. You're a butt-wiggler."
Arnold mouthed soundlessly for a moment, aghast. "Am not!"
"Are too! Why else would Pink-Boy be yelling at you the whole time, 'Loooooook, I'm Arrrrrnuuulld, the butt-wiggler!'" Helga jumped into the empty street and did an eerily accurate impersonation of Harold's immensely poor imitation of Arnold's batting stance.
Arnold had to laugh—Helga's hearty laughter was too contagious. "It can't be as bad as Harold does it. Why don't you just show me what it really looks like?"
The air seemed to turn solid. Helga abruptly stopped shaking random parts of her body and froze, her back towards him, shoulders shrugged up into a flinch. Arnold blinked, at a loss for how to recover.
Her face snapped around, "How would I know what you're doing?" She looked like she was thinking fast. "I'm watching the ball. And, unfortunately, I also have to witness the buffoon that is Harold Berman trying to communicate his deep and complicated observations to us all."
"Sure, Helga. That's probably what you're doing."
"What do you mean, 'probably?' Don't flatter yourself," Helga crossed her arms, stuck her nose in the air, and walked back onto the sidewalk as bright headlights approached. A bus whizzed by and barreled off into the night behind them.
Arnold dropped the subject with a casual "whatever" and grinned to himself when she wasn't looking.
There were Helga's steps up ahead. Helga was either too embarrassed or had run out of sarcastic wit to throw at him—she turned and started up her stairs as soon as they arrived. Arnold stood there, looking at her door like it was a puzzle he didn't know how to solve. Then he finally voiced what they had always kept unspoken between them. "See you tomorrow on the way to school?" Now they couldn't pretend like they happened to simply run into each other every day.
Helga stopped, her hand on the door handle, and turned back to look at him. Her face was unreadable. Arnold wasn't used to her looking so normal. "Yeah, see you tomorrow." He heard, yes, I'll wait for you.
He smiled softly at her. She turned back to go inside.