sometimes i ask myself

what is it going to take for me not to be afraid?

to be loved the way i really wanna be loved?

you know, it's like you want something

but you don't know if you can handle it

you give me hope that maybe one day i'll get over my fears

and i'll receive.

-Blood Orange (Dev Hynes)

Author's Note/Disclaimer:

Well… after more than nine months of working on this story, this is the last chapter. I actually stuck with a project for more than a week, y'all. That's a thing I didn't expect my scatterbrained self to actually accomplish. While it's impossible for me to step back and view the whole thing from anyone's perspective other than my own, and while I definitely feel that it's awkwardly paced and likely unnecessarily drama-laden in places (due to my stubbornness in wanting to stick to the plot as I initially outlined it), it's been a learning experience for me. Your reviews and thoughts about how it turned out are more appreciated than you know.

A random side comment – you will note that Helga keeps her unibrow in this story, not because I have anything against women (or anyone, for that matter) doing whatever they want to feel good about their appearances, but because Craig said several times that she'd decide she likes it and wants to keep it when she gets older. And I really love the idea of Helga being like, "You know what, eff what other people think. I don't have to look like everyone else to be beautiful." I personally find that more poignant and endearing than the trope of Ugly-Duckling-Grows-Up-And-Gets-A-Makeover-And-Transforms-Into-Stunning-Show-Stopper.

Hey Arnold belongs to the amazing, creative, charismatic Craig Bartlett, not to me. You guys are extremely cool for loving a great cartoon enough to read fanfiction centered on it. I mean, truly, I wish I knew you in real life. I wish you the very best of everything in the whole world.

25: Bring Hope When You Come Around

X

"Dr. Bliss?"

P.S. 118's school counselor glanced up from her mug of tea. Her coworker, the new administrative secretary, was standing in the doorway again. He'd popped up in her office too many times to count over the past several weeks, usually to ask questions he was too nervous to bring to Principal Wartz.

"How can I help you?" she asked kindly.

"There's a visitor here for you. No appointment."

"Oh." She looked at her watch. "A student? Billy Jensen is due to arrive in twenty minutes."

"Not a student anymore. A former one – she looks about high school age. Said she just wanted to stop by and say hi. Should I tell her to come back a different day?"

"No, no. Please tell her she can come right in."

The secretary disappeared down the hallway.

For a split second, Dr. Bliss blinked at the young woman who took his place moments later. The last time she'd seen the blonde teenager, nearly two years before, she had still been in her most awkward stage of adolescence: all gangly limbs, angry scowls, and stubborn pigtails. The girl waiting for her now was long-legged and curvy, with hair flowing past her shoulders. The unibrow and large nose and ears remained the same.

"Helga," Dr. Bliss said calmly. "I was starting to think I'd never see you again."

Helga fumbled with her hands. "I know – and sorry it took me so long. I wanted to visit earlier. Just, life and stuff. I got a little distracted."

"The important thing is that you're doing well."

"I think I am. I mean, for me."

Dr. Bliss thought for a second. "You must be almost done with… sophomore year now." How surreal; how quickly the time went.

"Yeah, almost done with that bullshit. Thank Jesus."

"And did you enjoy it?"

"No." Helga grimaced. "But I'm the co-captain of the lacrosse team and stuff. So there's that."

"That sounds perfect for you. Any special plans for the summer?"

"Nah. Well, I got my job at Slausen's back. I worked there last summer, too. Ole Bill can't resist my charms. He's a nice guy, when he's not being dumb and sexist."

"Yes, he is, isn't he? Good ice cream, too."

"Mm hmm."

"And it's always nice to make a little extra money."

"You got that right." She paused. "How are your little patients doing, and stuff? Did you have lots of crazies this year?"

"We're all doing very well, Helga."

"Good." Helga began to chew on her lower lip. "Well, listen, what I really wanted to say is… thanks for everything you did for me. Most people are full of crap, but you're not. I'm really glad you exist."

Dr. Bliss didn't bother to bite back her smile. "Thank you. I'm glad that you exist, too."

"And can you do me a favor and tell Mr. Simmons I said hi? Next time you see him?"

"I certainly will. Mr. Simmons will be happy to hear about you."

Helga hesitated for a moment. Then, seeming to make an important decision in her mind, she strode forward and threw her arms around the older woman.

This was what made her job worth it, Dr. Bliss thought. Moments like these. And she didn't think twice before she wrapped her own arms around the teenager and hugged her back.

They sat on the striped carpet in Sheena's room, cross-legged among a littering of magazines, glue sticks, and scissors. Sheena held a panting Ann Austin in her arms. She patted the sweet Beagle on the head to keep her from chewing every bit of paper she could get her large, gummy mouth on.

"What do you think of him, Eugene?" Sheena asked, holding up a copy of Teen Vogue for him to consider. The ad on the page featured a very handsome model, who was posing sexily with a bottle of cologne.

"Gorgeous."

"He is, isn't he? Ooh, and look at this guy." She pulled up another glossy photo, this one showcasing a half-naked hottie leaning over the edge of a surfboard.

"I like it," Eugene said approvingly. The two of them set to work cutting out the images for his new corkboard. The plan was to plaster every wall in his bedroom with them: men in bathing suits, men on beaches, men wearing smiles and smirks and fashionable marled fedoras. With the photos on display, inspiring him every morning, he'd be celebrating not only their shiny, lovely bodies, but himself.

"Can I get you two some snacks?" came a familiar soothing voice. Sheena's mother appeared in the doorway, adjusting her flower crown. "I made homemade gluten-free biscuits."

"Oh, yes," Eugene said. "Gosh, that sounds wonderful."

She came towards them with her tray full of sweet-smelling biscuits and organic juice boxes - the carrot-flavored pouches, the ones they'd loved as little kids. The sight of them filled Eugene with comfort. Plus, the biscuits, soft and pillowy, tasted like clouds in his mouth. As he swallowed, he felt both Sheena and her mother's fervent stares on him.

"Did you decide what you want to do yet?" Sheena squeaked in her sturdy, high-pitched voice.

Eugene straightened his arms, steeling himself. In the pocket of his jeans, he could feel the folded-up pamphlets Arnold and Helga had surreptitiously given him the day before. Helga had snagged them from an AA meeting, she'd explained, but they weren't just resources on dealing with alcoholism. They contained hotline numbers - website links - crisis centers, for dealing with everything from rape to cyberbullying to abusive parents.

"I want to report him, Sheena," he said finally. Whether or not anyone would listen to him, he couldn't know for sure. But he did know, at the very least, that he wanted to hear his own voice.

They were slow. Not nerdy, but awkward. Not confused, but sometimes, still, afraid.

They didn't trade kisses and hold hands in the hallway, like Phoebe and Gerald did. They weren't highlighter-noisy, like that football player Samuel and his new blonde cheerleader girlfriend, who'd recently taken to excessive, gaudy displays of make out sessions and rose-giving in the middle of the Hillwood hallways (poor Rhondaloid, Helga actually found herself thinking).

He never serenaded her with music or greeted her with flowers between his teeth, like the guys in those soaps Big Bob still liked to watch at one A.M.

But what he did do was bring bottles of Gatorade, only the blue ones, her favorite flavor, for her to drink at practice. What he did do was stay late at the school library, so he could leave just in time to walk home with her on days when she had games. And what she did was wait for him - on the stoop of the boarding house, at his bedroom skylight, on the bus with her locket tucked securely in her bra strap underneath her T-shirt.

She'd never been good at being patient. But for him, she'd promised she would try harder. And with every bone in her body, every ray of hope in her heart, she did.

"I'm getting cooked out here, Football Head. Aren't you gonna be a gentleman and buy me a drink or something?"

Helga was panting as she walked, pushing locks of hair away from her sweat-plastered skin. She could feel the baking asphalt through the bottoms of her flimsy sandals and cursed herself (once again) for not wearing sneakers. What was she thinking, anyway? Wearing sandals to Dino Land just because they matched her sundress? Man, she was turning into a real throw pillow.

"I'll buy you whatever you want," Arnold told her.

She tugged on his thumb, leading him aggressively through the throngs of people because she knew if she didn't pull him, she'd end up ten yards ahead of him while he meandered along in an attempt to avoid the prospect of pushing anyone. And you couldn't get around at an amusement park if you were going to just not push anyone. That just wasn't how that worked.

They passed the whizzing dino egg cups and their favorite roller coaster, the one with three upside down turns. The lines at the concession stand snaked all the way down towards the bathroom. But they waited anyway, bodies almost touching, sticky in the swollen heat.

"I want a sugar cone with three scoops of chocolate ice cream… and a jumbo lemonade. And an extra-large popcorn with butter," she added, after taking a moment to think.

"Okay," Arnold told her as he pulled out his wallet.

Helga blinked. "That's it? Okay?"

"Yeah."

"So you're just gonna blow twenty bucks or something on a bunch of overpriced junk food for me?"

"Well, the coin slots on the washing machine in the boarding house broke. I haven't had to pay for laundry in a couple weeks. And I am going to be working at the animal shelter this summer."

"And?"

"And so I have enough money. I mean, at least enough to buy you junk food."

She stared at him, her heart full to bursting. They were moving closer towards the red-and-white striped umbrella, where the boy at the metal counter waited to take their order.

"One chocolate ice cream cone with three scoops, one—" Arnold began, but Helga cut him off in a hurry.

"I changed my mind. Just the ice cream'll be good."

He shrugged and she watched while he counted his bills out, steady and meticulous. She made a mental promise to buy him dinner, all of it, not just half.

Arnold thanked the boy as he handed over the dessert, and they headed to a bench, where they sat getting sunburnt and licking the cone one after the other, the ice cream melting in sticky puddles down their palms.

"I fink we should go ta the movies next weekend," Helga told Arnold over a large sugary mouthful. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. "In the freaking air conditioning. Plus, I never got to see that latest Evil Twin movie, what with your dad's heart attack interrupting everything and all. It's supposed to be really good. A lot of people get their heads chopped off."

"Yeah, it sounds good," he said, and when he took another lick of ice cream, some of the chocolate stuck to his mouth.

Her heart pounded as she stared at him, eyes bearing like lasers into his lopsided, sultry lips until she couldn't stand it anymore. Without thinking, she leaned over to put both hands on his shoulders, pressing her own mouth against his, softly, just enough to graze the dusting of ice cream under his nose. It was quick; only seconds before she pulled away in embarrassment. But he dropped the end of the cone into the gravel in surprise, anyway.

"What happened to no public displays of affection?"

"I forgot," she mumbled lamely, and flinched. "Sorry."

Awkwardly, he reached over, picked up the fallen cone and walked it to the garbage can beside them.

When he returned, his fingertips grazed her shoulder, and the corners of his mouth quirked upward, slightly, gently, beckoning her to stand up. He kissed her back, only for a moment. And she wasn't sure, but she thought, maybe, that was his way of letting her know it was okay.

When they returned to the boarding house, he closed the door to his bedroom. They couldn't hear anything except for vaguely muted clatter - the assorted bangs of Mr. Potts drilling anchors in the walls, and his parents laughing through the vents, and Grandpa telling some version of a story that began and ended with more and more baseless details.

He pressed the button on the remote to his stereo system. The room flooded with trombone-soaked jazz and she looked up from where she was sprawled out on his couch to face him, her humid blue eyes heavy with longing. He couldn't help it; his arms erupted in goosebumps.

"Is it cool enough in here?" he asked her.

She nodded. "Yup," she told him. Her voice was halting and higher than usual.

"Good," Arnold told her. The birthmark on her shoulder blade, shaped like the number seven, stretched across her pale skin when her arms moved. She was wearing that sundress, the strapless one, the one that showed the expanse of her whole back.

"Do you want anything else, Helga? Some water?"

"What? It's hard to hear you over this dorky music."

"You want me to turn it off?" he suggested, but she shook her head. "I asked if you wanted anything else."

"No," she told him, and then added under her breath, "Just you."

Her mouth landed on his, warm and quivering. He ran his fingers through the soft strands of her sunshine hair, pulling her closer and closer until her body was flush against his. And after a few moments, he wasn't sure, but he thought he heard her moan, so soft and barely audible it made him shake, just slightly.

"Helga," he said, but she was all the way on top of him now, fingers digging into the sides of his thighs. She was melting into him and he was kissing her back, trying to match her fervor as her hands moved up and she pushed down hard on his chest.

"You look so pretty," he mumbled, because she did. She looked totally beautiful, her hair splayed out now and falling out of its ponytail and sweat lining her upper lip as her breath came out in short, punctuated gulps. He wished he could say it better, - he couldn't, didn't know how. He wasn't good at stringing romantic words together in intricate patterns, not the way she was. "Are you sure this is what you want?" he asked instead.

Helga nodded. "I'm ready," she told him. His heart pooled up in his throat.

Sweat was collecting in beads on Eugene's skin as he made his way towards the front steps of Hillwood High. He knew what he had to do: go straight to the principal's office, present his case, walk out. If he made any pit stops along the way, he'd surely lose his guts and save the trip for another day. If saved the trip for another day, that day might very likely never come.

He steeled himself, imagining Sheena's hand squeezing his shoulder. He was only a few feet from the building when he heard a loud voice yelling out in the alleyway directly behind him.

As usual, bad luck was following Eugene Horowitz everywhere.

"Did I or did I not tell you to get your FUCKING act together!"

"Dad, I know," came a familiar reply, only it didn't have nearly the same thundering quality to it that it usually did.

"You fumbled that pass big time, Wolfgang!"

"I know. I won't do it again."

"You won't do it again," Wolfgang Walker's father repeated mockingly.

"It was one practice, okay? What am I, a –"

"You're an idiot, that's what! A God damn idiot! You're a humiliation to this family and a pussy. One more screw up like this and I'll kick your ass out of my house. You think I'm kidding? You wait and see. You can live on the streets for all I care."

Eugene winced as he finally craned his neck around to stare at the bottle-blonde teenager he knew was there. There were another few moments of screamed curse words, and then, s white Lexus zoomed away, tires screeching on the hot asphalt.

In that moment, Eugene suddenly felt that he was seeing more clearly than he had in nearly a year. He sucked in a deep breath,feeling as though he'd just been sucker punched in the stomach. He held a hand to his forehead for a moment, trying to get the air back into his lungs.

Then he continued walking, to the stairs of the high school, through the football hallway, and towards the doorway to the principal's office.

Back when Arnold was little, Grandma used to sit with him in the small patch of grass beside the boarding house, encircled by a metal chain link fence that separated it from the building next door. Here, she enlisted his help in tending to her garden.

It had really always been more of a rectangle of dust than anything else. Year after year, they tried planting packets of seeds to grow: marigolds, daffodils, black-eyed susans. Gloriosa daisies and beardtongues and peonies, which, Grandma remarked cheerfully, would be splendid to look out at from the window in the kitchen.

But year after year, nothing ever bloomed. No matter how many times they came out diligently with their plastic watering cans and shovels, the patch remained empty. Maybe it was the polluted city air, or more likely, the positioning of the tiny spot, which was shaded by too many buildings to see a proper amount of sunlight.

Still, Grandma refused to give up on her project.

"Keep showing love to them and they'll open one day, Kimba," she promised him, face covered in mud as she bent down over the few stems, all of them with hard little buds that merely fell into the earth rather than blossoming. "They're hurting right now, all covered up in that dirt. That's why they need you. Because you're special – you're not going to give up on them. You'll keep loving them enough so they can open up and bloom one day."

At ages four and five and six, Arnold already knew better than to take everything his grandmother said at face value. But this job was something he clung to. When he lay in bed at night, covered up in his planet-patterned quilts and ensnared in the loneliness of missing his parents, he thought about his important duty. How nice it would be, when his mom and dad finally came home to see the garden all full of flowers. When kids, like his longtime school tormentor - the girl who couldn't seem to leave him alone - were mean to him, he focused very carefully on what his grandma had said. He was special. He wasn't going to give up on anyone.

It helped him remember his strength, his kindness.

Because people, like plants, were not to be abandoned, he decided. Sometimes they just needed more. More love, more light, more helpers with watering cans to tend to them. Then, when the time was right, they would fold open one day. And when that happened, he would be right there, ready to help them face the sun.

They stopped at Bagel World on their way home from school, where they sold everything: sandwiches, cookies with rainbow sprinkles, packages of Haribo gummy bears and bacon-wrapped bagels. There was barely an inch of breathing space in the packed little shop.

"Who are those games for, anyway?" Helga snorted, nodding at the stacks of dusty cardboard boxes lining the shelves below the glass display cases of cream cheeses. "Like anyone's gonna sit there and play Monopoly while they wait for their bagel to be toasted?"

"Actually, I think board games are rather fun, Helga," Phoebe quipped. "I'd certainly play Monopoly here."

And so it was that they placed their orders and sat down at one of the little wooden tables, covering it in a mosaic of the ancient plastic pieces and cards. Arnold was the thimble - Helga the iron - Gerald the car - Phoebe the shoe. Curly sank into the corner, hands trembling slightly. His presence in their group remained awkward, riddled with a sense of unbelonging.

"C'mon, Curly Q." Helga nudged him. "No watching allowed. You gotta pick a piece."

"This set is missing the battleship. I can only play if I'm the battleship."

She glared at him.

"I'll be the horse," he conceded finally in a small voice. "It's almost as powerful."

And apparently it was, because inside of an hour Curly was laughing maniacally as he swept up hundreds of thousands in winnings. After the game had finished, Phoebe and Gerald left together, hand in hand as Phoebe chattered incessantly about the homework they had to do.

"I should get home, too," Curly mumbled.

"Is your mom doing okay?" Arnold asked.

"Oh, yeah. Better than ever, now that it's just the two of us."

He offered a half-hearted smile. Helga squeezed Curly's shoulder. "Text me if you need anything, bud." And with that, her dark-haired, manic friend had set off down the sidewalk. Arnold and Helga trailed behind him by several meters after they'd collected their backpacks.

"I can't wait one stinkin second longer for our freedom," she mused. "This'll be the longest five days of my life."

"I know," Arnold returned, laughing, as they made their way across the street. Neither of them noticed themselves falling into stride with one another, their feet landing again and again in exactly the same rhythm. "Your mom thinking about going to that AA meeting again tomorrow?"

"Who knows?" she remarked flippantly. She paused. "But she did give me her credit card. Plus all the cash in her wallet."

"That sounds… drastic."

"Yeah, but if she can't buy anything then that includes alcohol, too. The only thing is that I gotta get home later to escort her to the grocery store. Now that I'm the holder of the dough, I have to be there for any and all shopping."

"Well, that works out," Arnold told her. It was a slightly cooler evening than the one before, filled with gold-lidded trees and sidewalks soaked with water leftover from a kid's sprinkler party. The buildings across from them glowed in the setting orange sun. There was one week left till the end of the school year, and both of them could feel it in their bones. The summer, the whole luscious, heady summer, lay just ahead of them.

"Grandpa's taking us fishing later," he explained further, and then clarified, his voice cracking slightly, "My grandpa and my dad."

"I hope you catch yourself a good one, my love."

"Thank you. I love you, too."

It didn't make much sense. But at that moment, Helga couldn't have felt happy if she tried. What she did feel was her adrenaline pumping, heart speeding with the terrible urge to run away and hide under a rock. All she could do was stand there, panicked, frozen in place.

"Hey," Arnold whispered then, his soft voice tearing through her fear. The warmth on her shoulder brought her back to herself for a second. She looked down at the fingertips that brushed gently against her skin. "It's gonna be okay, Helga."

And honestly, she wasn't sure how he could know that, since she'd offered no words, and since even she didn't get it. But standing there, staring at the football-headed face full of understanding beside her, she made the decision to believe him, anyway.

And in the disappearing evening light, her head found his chest. She buried herself there for a minute, breathing in his sweet soapy smell.

Then he reached for her hand, and this time, she took it.