"I can't believe they're putting the festival on the anniversary, and like, not even acknowledging it? I dunno, guys. If I were a ghost, and it was my death anniversary, I'd be pretty offended if a bunch of people came up and threw some big freakin' party right on my doorstep!"

"It's like tempting fate!"

"I couldn' agree more, fellas. I'm a already feelin' a change in the air. Why, look, it's already given me a right ol' case of gooseflesh."

"Ugh! My. God. Can you guys seriously get any more superstitious?" Rhonda ejected with an impatience that had been building up all week, and it was a wonder she hadn't cut them down sooner. Or maybe she already had, Helga mused, as she watched from her spot further down the table, but if the Idiot Trio could get anywhere in life, it was nowhere and ahead of themselves.

"I mean, sure, even I'll give a little 'knock on wood' sometimes," Rhonda rapped the table with her knuckles, minding her nails. "But you guys are so easy to scare, it's pathetic!"

"Hey!"

"Well, beg my pardon."

"Oh, come on, Rhonda! Even you gotta admit—that double murder suicide? That one was like—wicked, freakin' nasty. Like, sure, there've been other murders, but that was a big one. Even you can't take that one lightly."

"Sid," she rolled her eyes, throwing her hands up. "They're anniversaries all the time, okay? This place is old, and far from proper civilization," she added the last with a bite, "people go crazy when they're isolated—and honestly, no sane person wants to live in a lighthouse to begin with! Of course a ton of people have been murdered here. Heck, we've probably already passed a murder anniversary just in the time we've been at camp! And you know what?" She rudely gesticulated throughout her tirade with dramatic, irritable animation, flashing her palms at the end. "We're all fine!"

"For now!" Harold blew back.

Stinky closed his eyes, shaking his head; whether for patience or pity, Helga couldn't tell.

"Rhonda—sure, okay, I get it," Sid held his palms out, disarmingly. "Some of what you're saying—it's pretty sound. And sure, some of the ghosts here—I'm sure they're not so bad. Heh," his gaze skipped around the room nervously, and if Rhonda rolled her eyes back any further she'd see brain.

"But this anniversary is The Tolmens," Sid continued with impassioned trepidation, leaning over his plate, "and a ton of weird stuff always happens around now. Go talk to anybody!" he gestured wide, indicating the entire mess hall as he did. "Things getting knocked over, stuff going missing—"

"Those are just pranks, Sid."

"Freak weather—"

"Coincidence!" she snapped back, looking ready to throttle Sid's skinny little neck if he didn't let up. "We're right off the ocean! And it's New England! The weather here changes all the freakin' time! Which is a nightmare for my hair, by the way," she added fussily, and with a particular viciousness that made Helga smirk.

"Well, I reckon I just dunno, Rhonda," Stinky drawled, "on account'a all the stuff I've heard from them counselors. Thundersnow, sun dogs…"

"Sun dogs?" Rhonda slowly repeated with incredulous contempt.

"They're this super rare weather phen—look, whatever," Sid shook it off, "Rhonda, this place's even had rogue waves. Waves. Like, more than once."

"Yuh huh. And I'd have to say, Rhonda, that that right there?" Stinky indicated mildly with the tip his fork, "is freaky."

"No. Duh," she ground back, her fork stabbing her hotdog after cutting it in fastidious quarters. "On a peninsula, off the ocean. What're the odds?"

Sid shook his head—a bit sadly, like she was lost. She shot him a glare and held it.

"Alright, well," he shrugged, continuing wistfully, "don't say I didn't warn you. And don't you go tempting fate," he gestured his spoon at her, "disrespecting the dead, saying ghosts aren't real, or—"

"Ghosts aren't real, Sid." she deadpanned.

"Rhonda! I just freaking—" he spazzed, cringing in his seat, making himself smaller. "What if they hear you?!"

"OH, GOD FORBID," she threw her arms out.

Helga gave a soft snort and turned back to her breaded chicken, nodding to Phoebe about her schedule that day, and tuning out the rest. She'd loathe to admit it, but she found that she came to miss her classmates a bit more the past few days, and sat at the Hillwood table for lunch this time to soak in their old familiarity from the sidelines. And it had, to her surprise, given her some subtle sense of comfort.

And ideas.

She idly scanned the room while she chewed.

There he was, at the other end with Gerald, the first time they ate at the same table. Not together, of course. But their truce on 'safe ground' was either solid enough for him to join, or something else, she couldn't tell.

All she knew was that he'd sat down at the same table as her, and held off articulating any presumptions beyond that, her inner world oddly quiet.

They stole glances at each other. Or at least, she did, and could sometimes sense, out of the very corner of her eye, the shifting, blurred colors of his blond hair as his head turned toward her, stilled, and turned back.

This time when she looked their eyes met and they held each other's gaze.

Their exchange only lasted a few long, lingering seconds, but Helga could already feel a whole world of meaning filling up that moment shared between them.

Indecipherable and remote as ever, particularly since the other day.

For once, she looked away first, and didn't look back to him the rest of lunch. She minded the depth of her breathing as her vision unfocused, looking through her emptied plate as she swam in her thoughts.

Though her tension was unabated, the recent, fiery roar within her had eased down to a low, manageable flame.

At moments, it almost felt calm.

But she knew better than to trust that shift.

They were merely cast in the eye of the storm, and whether he knew it or not, she did.

And it would pass.

She caught the back of his hair as he left the mess hall.

As more campers began dumping their trays and heading out, she cast a look across the hall to a section she never sat in. There, at a sparsely occupied table, was Brainy, speaking sign language with a girl she didn't recognize from one of the other schools. His face was lit with a shy smile, which, from the view she had of his companion's body language, likely reflected hers. They apparently had a lot to say, their hands moving animatedly yet within their own sphere, gestures small as they 'spoke' with contained excitement.

Damn. Go Brainy.

A thought then occurred to her that made her face drop; if Brainy could get a girl before she got a guy, then she'd been doing something very, very wrong.

But, she thought, as she recalled their interactions after she quit clocking him in the face, he could maybe help with that.

She didn't know a lot about Brainy, but above all else, she knew he had a seemingly otherworldly way of getting things done, and was a keeper of secrets.

Many of them hers.

The first time she caught him trying to set her up with Arnold—in subtle ways he'd miss, like 'forgetting' a book so he'd have to go back to study hall where she was, or managing to disorient him on public transit routes, causing him to cross paths with her unnecessarily, well. She realized that for someone with such a keen knack for business sense, and a not-too-shabby judge of character, she'd really sold her options short each time she backhanded that scrawny little punk behind a dumpster during her scheming days.

That was some untapped, prime stooge material right there.

When she'd confronted him—wheezing, creeping, ever-grinning him, he stopped breathing, trembling on the spot. He backed away awkwardly, dropped a handwritten letter by her feet, and then 'disappeared into the shadows,' or just down an alley, seemingly without a trace. However the hell he did that.

A letter she opened with no small amount of wary suspicion, that, to her complete, gobsmacking shock, turned out to be so self-effacing and ironically verbose it left her reeling. She actually had to reread the damn thing to retain it.

Shy, apologetic, trying to work on his social skills, blah blah blah, sure. But then, when she read the part where he vowed to respect her space, she realized she hadn't caught him breathing or sneaking up on her for a while. A long while. So, despite her general feelings of disgust, she continued with a huge heap of salt.

The rest was harder to read.

She could always handwave and dismiss pandering and flattery, but anytime she felt really seen, or someone honestly saw something in her she didn't—that was, well. She couldn't take that kind of authenticity with a straight face, so when offered, she hardly took it at all. But, in the privacy afforded to her in a letter, she allowed herself.

She wished the expressed admiration and observation he'd acquired since preschool sickened her, but instead it left her stomach twisting in knots she couldn't name. Hated how, in some cruel twist of fate, she actually related to some of his feelings. Or how it felt when she learned how he admired her volume and boldness when his own lungs let him hardly speak.

And, somehow worse of all, that he was also a poet all along, too. And from what she could tell, not a bad one.

In fact, a damn, fucking good one, and by the time she'd read his poem about her and Arnold at the end of the letter, she wished she could have held it with contempt, but she couldn't.

But maybe, a bit at herself.

True. He stalked her obnoxiously, creepily in preschool and elementary, but the longer she held that against him the more she felt like a pot calling the kettle black. She may have stopped stalking and worshiping Arnold with shrines, with time and help from Dr. Bliss and Phoebe, but Brainy had stopped, too. She didn't have to forgive, but she couldn't condemn him without feeling like a hypocrite. She had no right to judge.

Yet most of all, it was hard to know that for someone who'd never really felt seen or noticed, she didn't notice someone who always had.

Granted, his sense of body space had been very not great, and his wheezing intolerable, and his face oh, so very punchable, so she was more than able to give herself a pass, but. Still.

That stung. And while she wasn't in regular contact with him by any stretch, she'd treated him differently ever since.

When she finally caught his eye across the room, his smile slowly dropped, pausing like he understood.

Before rising from his seat he signed to his companion, who nodded and looked back over her shoulder at Helga with a smile that was a bit too warm for a complete stranger, and then it hit her.

Shit. He must have said something nice about her. A half-smile tugged at her lip, and absently thought that was cool of him as he approached.

"Uh… Hi…" he wheezed, his prescription glasses obscuring his eyes, but he seemed both ready and touched to have been called over. And his presence, though still undeniably weird, felt like she was being regarded by an old friend.

Helga kept the line of her mouth straight, but smiled back at him with her eyes.

She tore out a few blank pages from her journal and slid them, along with a pen, across the table to his side. If he had anything to say, he could write it out.

Helga set her elbows on the table, steepling her fingers.

"Here's the deal."

Their discussion was efficient and brief; they never needed too many words to understand each other.

As he dutifully wheezed off and took his exit, the twins walked by, carrying their empty trays back from their table as they passed by her.

"Hey," mop-head greeted with a grin, "you replacing us?"

Helga stared, crossing her arms with an amused patience, and said nothing.

"My God, she is," his twin declared, pretending to be offended. Mop-head shot him a look.

"I'm so jealous, dude."

Purple hair snorted. "Yeah. But that's okay, we get it," he tossed back casually, grinning along with his twin. "We can see why."

"I can see he's a man of many skills," Mop-head offered as they both nodded in reasonable agreement.

"Being still."

"Breathing."

Helga cracked up, shaking her head as she looked away. The twins gave each other an amused glance and turned to head out.

"Actually," Helga said, "wait a minute."

They paused and slowly turned back to face her, appraising her with looks that oozed curious suspicion.

This wouldn't take brute force. If Helga wanted this to work, she'd have to shift tactics. In fact, she realized she already had, since the day he finally spoke to her for the first time in weeks. She just needed to nudge that momentum forward, along with some careful planning, some extra help, and a little luck.

Baby steps.

She leaned her elbows over the table, her eyes alight with mischief as a growing smirk spread slowly across her entire face.

"You guys wanna start some shit?"

… … …

Author's Note: Ghosts, Baby Steps

Brainy as a verbose poet? Not my idea :) The creator penned it in "Hey Arnold! E-Files" and when I learned about it, it blew my mind and recast Brainy in a new light for me lol

Comments always appreciated! :) This story isn't written in advance-I've been writing a new chapter every day, which is a lot lol, so yeah. Feedback gives me life LOL