Chapter 21

Helga stood on the impossibly wide white porch of Rhonda Wellington Lloyd. She had traversed a sprawling lawn the length of a football field and at least fifty stairs flanked by regal statues of white lions and perfectly manicured hedges, all to deliver a letter she'd written specifically to Rhonda.

When she thought back to the previous afternoon, she didn't like the plan any more today than she had when Arnold had first told her about it. "You communicate best in writing, right?" he said.

"Yeah, I guess so," she said suspiciously.

"So write Rhonda an apology letter," he said matter of factly. "Bury the hatchet."

She rolled her eyes. "How will that fix anything?"

He said firmly, "Helga, doing the right thing isn't always about if it can be fixed. It's about you trying to do the right thing. How the other person takes it is out of your control."

She shook her head. "I gotta say, you're not making a very convincing argument. Throwing myself at the feet of a girl who hates me so much she set me on fire? Just seems like a putz move to me."

He crossed his arms. "Don't you want to feel better?"

She wrinkled her nose in disgust. She hated that he could see how guilty she felt. "Alright, alright, I'll do it. But I've only ever written stuff about people I like. Er, rather, one person I like." He smirked, and she threw her hands up in the air. "You. I've only written about you. Because I love you. How am I supposed to write to someone I don't like?"

Arnold thought about that for a moment. "Maybe try putting yourself in her shoes. Think about how you'd feel after being called names, or excluded, or ignored." Helga bit her lip. Well, that wasn't hard to do. He added, "Then write all the things you'd want to hear to feel better."

She'd lain on her bed for hours trying to come up with something that didn't sound stupid or disingenuous while Arnold sat on the floor giving her encouraging words. Still, every attempt ended in a crumpled piece of paper.

Finally, after what felt like the millionth try, she leaned over the side of the bed with her arm outstretched in melodrama holding her pen.

"Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?"

"Helga." Arnold rolled his eyes. She'd told him before that only Shakespeare seemed to convey a level of angst modern speech couldn't quite capture. This must have been harder for her than he'd thought.

"O happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die." She pretended to impale herself with the pen then lay still on the bed. Arnold put a hand over his face, shaking his head. How did he end up with such a drama queen?

He decided to try a different angle. "Hey, Helga. Do you need some...motivation?" he asked through half-lidded eyes.

Helga perked up immediately. "It seems that even death is an escapable fate when the throes of passion are at stake."

He climbed up onto the bed. "You," he said, cupping her face in both hands, "are ridiculous."

She smirked. "And you like it."

"Yeah, I do." They kneeled together among the scraps of paper, looking deeply into each others' eyes. Just as they were about to kiss, she brought her pen and journal back in front of her. "Now, is Rhonda's last name spelled with one 'l' or two?" She smiled innocently, and Arnold took the pen and journal from her and tossed them aside.

She fell back on the bed and he placed his knees on either side of her, then pinned her hands above her head and interlaced their fingers together. His parted lips were against hers in an instant, and she noted with satisfaction how he kissed her- gentle but demanding. The combination of tenderness she'd come to know and love about him along with this new sexually frustrated side of him was perfection. It translated to the one fact that was still unbelievable to her: He wanted her.

Her hands slipped out from his and she softly ran her fingers along his broad shoulders. He shivered and deepened their kiss while her hands traced a path down his back to his hips, which she then pulled down onto hers. He groaned and pressed himself against her, reveling at how thin the material of her skirt was. He shifted his hips, accidentally rubbing against her in just the right spot. She let out a small whimper of pleasure and he broke their kiss to hear it. The sound was so perfect, so right, he had to use what willpower he had to lift himself off her.

Helga's face was warm and flushed, and her hair was mussed. "Is that enough motivation?" he asked, his voice husky.

"Never," she said, a glint in her eye as she ran her hand along his inner thigh, stopping just short of his groin. "But I guess I have to get back to work. Gotta do the right thing, you know." She winked at him, then turned her attention back to her journal.

He fell back on the bed in frustration with both hands over his face, knowing that in any other situation he would have happily encouraged her to get back to work. He peeked over at her, writing in her journal as if nothing had happened.

She tapped her pen on her cheek, and suddenly her face broke into a smile. "Hey, remember when all the boys crashed Rhonda's girl party? And Harold got caught?" She snickered.

"Yeah. I also remember him asking Rhonda the next day how to get the mascara off," Arnold said, and they both burst into laughter.

When their laughter died down, she thought of another memory with Rhonda. She hugged her knees to her chest and asked quietly, "Remember her paper fortune teller? The one that predicted who would marry who?"

Arnold smiled. "I do," he said, thinking how she'd tricked him into saying those very words in the dream he'd had.

He could still remember the day Rhonda had brought her paper fortune teller to class in fourth grade and told everyone who they'd marry. He remembered how devastated he'd been to learn that he would marry Helga, unable to imagine a life where the two of them could be happy together.

Then he recalled dreaming about him and Helga being married, and how at the end of the dream he confronted Helga and said there was no way she was that cold or unfeeling. She had been apologetic, and kind, and for just a moment before he'd woken up, he'd felt her walls come down to hint at her true feelings.

He was astonished to realize that some part of him must have always known she loved him, because he recognized the way he felt when he'd gotten to know her the past few weeks: it was the exact feeling he'd had when her walls were down in the dream. Whenever Helga let him in, he felt that invisible thread between them, connecting them despite the mask she sometimes wore in the world.

"Pretty silly prediction, huh?" she said.

"Silly. Right," he said, smiling at her.

"I think- I think I can write something now," she said.

He nodded. She turned onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. Her long hair formed a curtain around her face, which she impatiently brushed behind her ear as she concentrated. Her eyes were alive with inspiration, and her lips were silently mouthing the words she wrote.

She looked up at him and her gaze softened. She found herself never wanting to disappoint him. If what she needed to do was write the kindnesses and apologies she'd always wished to hear from the people in her life, and direct them at Rhonda, at least maybe then she'd know what to tell herself to feel better, too.

She came out of her reverie and stared down at the completed letter in her hands, written with words that were just as much for Rhonda as they were for herself. She'd written how sorry she was that she wasn't kinder or stronger back in elementary school, and how she didn't mean to hurt her and how she was trying to be a better person, a truer version of herself than she'd been in the past.

Thinking of the last time she saw Rhonda though - yelling insults and cutting her down with her cold stare - made her want to run back down the driveway. She could just leave the note there, wedged in the door, and hope Rhonda would find it. But thinking back to Arnold's words, she knew she'd feel better doing this face to face.

She took a deep breath, then lifted the heavy brass door knocker and knocked twice. Almost immediately, the door opened, and Helga braced herself for a conversation she didn't feel prepared in the least to have.