chapter four. Que Sara Sara
"I could hurt someone like me,
Out of spite or jealously,
I don't steal, and I don't lie,
But I can feel, and I can cry,
A fact I'll bet you never knew,
But to cry in front of you,
That's the worst thing I could do."
--excerpt via "There Are Worse Things I Could Do", via the musical Grease
Arnold was deeply and respectfully pissed.
He was pissed at Gerald, for letting him open the package. He was pissed at the mysterious deliverer with no return address for sending him the package. He was pissed at his grandpa for being at the store while he opened the package. He was pissed at the package itself. He was pissed at the mysterious Malachi, whoever the hell he was. And he was pissed at a whole lot of things he could give no reasons for being pissed at. Most of all, however, he was pissed at the one who had written the letter, the one who had sickeningly brought it all upon himself.
Arnold wasn't just pissed at that person; he hated him.
Gerald was squeamish. He had always been at least slightly squeamish, fidgeting involuntarily when forced to sit for long periods of time, jumping into conversation in the midst of awkward pause. But now, then, in the family room of what could never be technically called a family, he was suddenly sickeningly squeamish.
Arnold had yet to do or say anything after it finally processed in his brain that Helga hadn't after all destroyed the document his and his parent's lives had so desperately hung upon. She had destroyed his book report, just as she had intended. And he had hated her for three solid years, made her beg, made her cry, because she had torn up a book report. And she, only registering that what she had picked up had the name "Arnold" on it, had always thought she had deserved to be hated.
Suddenly Arnold was in the wrong. And he very much didn't like it.
"Hey Arnold?"
He looked up from the totally random place on the white-washed wall he'd been staring listlessly at for the past five minutes.
"Yeah, I'm ok," he said automatically.
"I always thought you had the pieces already," Gerald replied after another three minutes of silence, wryly amused. "So that you could piece it back together maybe. Or something like that."
Arnold shook his head in a despairing way. Gerald simply nodded. Gerald understood without having to have it explained: Arnold, to whom true raging anger was practically foreign, hadn't known how to handle it once he had it. So he had chosen the nearly worst possible decision to choose in a situation like that: scream at the girl, declare your hatred in front of a large crowd of people...and then...
"Run away," Arnold suddenly croaked in a horrified sort of voice.
"Say what now?"
"Ran away," he repeated, murmuring in a transfixed sort of way. "I ran away...I didn't do the brave thing, or the good thing...I ran away from the problem...from the girl...so that I wouldn't have to deal with them on my own. And then I tried to hide behind the excuse that it was her fault. Maybe I always knew, deep down, that Helga would never destroy something like that, ever...maybe I always knew deep down it was some stupid book report...maybe I just didn't want to talk to her. Jebus, Gerald...I have no balls."
Gerald, for the one and only time in his life, didn't speak in reply. He nodded.
Arnold was suddenly torn between three major emotions, only two of which he could actually identify. None had a guarantee; none seemed precisely in the right. His head was grieving, too mixed up in guilt and self-pity and self- hate and self-whatever to actually think of much of anything anymore. His hands were itching to strangle something, in the hope of maybe more anger could correct the anger of before. And his heart...god, he couldn't begin to name what was going on in there.
Gerald let out a sigh by inflating his cheeks slowly with air and letting it out in the sound of a mild explosion. Arnold agreed whole-heartedly.
"So," replied Gerald, talking more in Arnold's direction than actually to him. "What do we do now?"
"Now..." began Arnold, trailing off. He could think of nothing to say.
Gerald sighed again in the exact same way.
More silence. More listening. More listening than either of the boys had done all school year.
"Maybe it's a joke," suggested Gerald, sounding rather doubtful.
Arnold glared. "Nobody," he declared firmly. "in this town would ever do something like that."
"Maybe it was Helga, you know trying to make it look like you were in the wrong or something."
"HELGA WOULDN'T DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT," Arnold blurted suddenly, surprised at himself. If Gerald was surprised, he did an immensely good job of not showing it.
"She wouldn't do that," Arnold repeated, in a more rational, more Arnold-y voice. And, in a way he considered quite graceful, Arnold changed the subject. "What is all that stuff you were saying about a Malachi, Gerald?"
"See for yourself," replied the popular coolly, indicating the over-turned cardboard box. "Some note was taped on to the bottom of that box."
Arnold turned the box over so that the mouth was facing him, and cocked his eyebrows as he read the message. It was written in bright red ink, in capital letters and in a pen Arnold couldn't recognize, on a slightly wrinkled piece of notebook paper which was taped to the inside-bottom of the box. The message was composed of all of three words;
GO SEE MALACHI.
"Now what?" asked Gerald for a second time.
Arnold looked at him, grinning slightly. "Now we find Malachi."
*~*
June bugs, annoying early this year, scattered from the back of the Pataki's white-wash screen backdoor as Helga shoved it open and sent it careening against the wall.
"MOM?! DAD?!!!"
No one answered. Rolling her eyes and putting on a look that would freeze hell, she began the trek up to her room. Passing by a firmly passed out Miriam without so much as a glance, she swung around the railing and walked up the stairs three at a time. Popping her bubble gum nonchalantly, she shoved her bedroom door open with her hip, threw her former backpack into a corner (where it would collect dust affectionately for the next three months), pressed a few keys on her silver laptop without even glancing at the screen, pressed the "play" button on her sterio and ended up, grinning slightly idiotically, next to the deathly black cat on her windowsill.
"Hey Malachi," she greeted her friend, if anything more warmly than those humans at her school. Oh, pardon her; former school. "You are so lucky you aren't a human."
Malachi's name meant "faithful messenger", a description Helga didn't think fit any humans she knew. Helga, having years ago given up hope with humans, decided suddenly one day to become an animal-lover. The Great and Glorious Elder Pataki's had given up caring about Helga when it became obvious she wasn't even going to grow beautiful. One day she came home to discover this rather discomforting fact, that her parents had given up caring about her and had given up hoping she'd ever be as perfect as Olga had grown to be. They had stopped in one day, over night, with no discussions and no debates. Snap decisions, Big Bob had said at one time, was yet another thing Pataki's were all about. They stopped officially caring the 2nd of December. Arnold had stopped officially caring the 2nd of September.
Helga had been born the 2nd of April (a/n: whether she really was or not i dont know but, hey, it's my fanfiction and she was now born that day). Everything always seemed to happen to her in twos.
The day the Pataki's officially dropped their youngest daughter off the face of their little world, they also stopped giving her restrictions. She wasn't even there any more, and honestly that suited Helga just god-damn fine. Any other child, any other person in Helga's situation, with suddenly no one and suddenly no rules, would've split at the seams, lost all respect, lost all responsibility. Luckily, Helga was Helga and Helga wasn't about to let Helga screw Helga up. Like Phoebe said, "You had to marvel."
Helga's other cat, the cat first to be picked up, had to have been at one time a beautiful femme fatal of a cat. She was a Persian, with long once- white hairs and chocolate brown huge cat-eyes. For a street cat (seeing as she lived in the ally next to the Pataki homestead), she was surprisingly fragile and dainty and always wore an expression that clearly seemed to say "Trust me, there's no way I'd be this dirty if I didn't have to be." Helga discovered the cat when she was 12 years old. That was when she believed fiercely and lividly in the concept of "I don't belong to no one and no one belongs to me." She still did, only less...dramatically. So, in this light, Helga had another trademark Pataki Snap Decision.
She named the cat 'Cat'.
She discovered Cat on the 2nd of March, while working on homework in her windowsill.
Everything happened to Helga in twos.
Helga discovered Malachi, the scraggly, scrawny and un-mistakably wise sorcerer of a black cat, seven months later on October 2nd.
Everything happened in twos.
Helga scratched the un-ruly ally cat behind the ears in a lonesome sort of way.
"I did something extremely stupid today, Malachi," she said, looking at the wall, talking to the cat. "I let what I was thinking slip out through my mouth, and now he hates me more than ever." She didn't have to say who he was; Malachi knew that clearly by now. He began to purr, roughly, sounding halfway between a motor and a crackling record. Malachi, being an ally cat by trade, didn't purr too often.
Helga sighed a long, low sigh. "You're name means faithful messenger, Malach," she remarked playfully. "But what've you brought for me lately, hm?"
Suddenly her computer talked.
"You've got mail!"
Helga pondered blandly just who was the woman who's voice had been recorded for the purpose of crowing to the e-mail's owner "You've got mail!" What did that woman do? Was she paid a lot of money? Did she get her e-mail from the same provider as the one she'd been recorded for? And if she did, did that mean every time she herself got a new e-mail she'd hear her own voice going "You've got mail!"? Personally, Helga found that rather creepy.
Helga clicked some buttons and pressed some keys and got to her e-mail account, rememberme@hotmail.com.
4 messages; 1 new.
She'd had the account for 2 years.
Looking at the sender and the subject, Helga's eyebrow jumped up and down again in surprise. The sender was 12:00 Tuesday. The subject was "So Long Suckas!" 12:00 Tuesday was supposedly the time and day the world was destined to end. And only one person went by that name.
Of all the people who had changed over the span of three years, Lila had un- questionably changed the most. At 14, Lila had dyed her hair black, shaved one half of her head and dreamed of joining a heavy metal rock band. She laughed at the world that had rejected her when she "found herself" in the beginning months of 6th grade. The beginning of junior high is a rather bad time to find oneself. Or, at least, that was Helga's view of it. However, whenever Lila was called a freak, or skidded around, or whispered about, she didn't get mad. She didn't get even. She laughed.
"The world is one naive place, Helga," she'd said once to the only person who hadn't deemed her "Child of Satan". "All you can do is laugh at them because one day you're gonna be bigger than they are and they aren't gonna be able to say anything at all to or about you. And we are, Helga. We're gonna be big people someday. And anyone that seems big now...you can almost bet they're gonna turn out small."
Helga liked Lila much better that way.
Lila liked Lila much better that way.
"When you figure out who you are too, Helga, you're gonna really like who you turn out to be." Lila always knew more about people than they knew about themselves. Ever since she'd stopped her image of "Little Miss Perfect" (who, she figured out later, was one manipulative bitch), Lila didn't look at who the person was then; she looked at the person they would be.
The e-mail wasn't just sent to Helga, Helga soon discovered. Lila had sent it to the whole eighth grade class.
Here was how it went;
"Dear sucka's,
Then again, why the hell am I saying 'dear'? You aren't 'dear' to me. 'Dear' is just a sign of politeness and a majority of the time, the person to whom the sender is saying 'dear' to, isn't dear to them at all! So, I would like to change that beginning to simply 'Sucka's'.
Sucka'sâ€" I am getting the hell out of here, so congratulations to all of you, you will never be forced to see my changed-and-thereby-threatening- face ever again. In a half an hour I'm gonna be on board a one-way flight to London, living in with my aunt and two cousins. You wondering why I'm leaving? Well, why the hell should I tell you? You don't care, remember? Oh yes...now you remember...
This letter is not to bitch. This letter is to say just one last thing to all you sucka's before I leave: I've known every last one of you since the 4th grade, way back when I was what you still see as "the real Lila". But people, you don't get it. THIS is the real Lila. The real Lila is the Lila you see with a shaved head and leather and chains and piercings and all. But I haven't changed my outside to look "cool" or any of that. I changed my outside to suit my inside. I'm the real Lila. Me. Not the Lila of yesteryear. I think that the real Lila has turned out just a little too threatening for your tastes, hasn't she? So you say that I'm not the real me, that the real me is the sweet little girl who manipulated boys and who put on a pretty face. Well, I'M NOT. And now that I've realized who I am, and (hopefully) made it quite clear to you that I am not imagining things nor is this a temporary glitch in my system, I can only hope and pray for all of you that you figure out who you all are really too. I just hope to God it isn't the person who I'm seeing now. And if it is, I feel nothing but mild pity and offer nothing but a "Que sara, sara". The only person who I truly hope finds themselves is Helga Pataki because, girl, if you ever do find yourself you're gonna be very happy with her.
Cheers, sucka's!
I leave you with one last message from me: Ever so all of you kiss my ass.
--lila.
Malachi jumped up onto Helga's extended right leg as she finished reading. Helga chuckled slightly. Lila was never the kind of girl to not make a grand exit.
"Well, Malach," replied Helga, x-ing out the screen and smiling. "Let's just hope I find myself, huh?"
The cat's green eyes gave her a "I-know-something-you-don't-know" sort of look.
Helga smiled some more, wryly storing Lila's memory forever into some file in the back of her mind. That was when she noticed it.
Her smile flickered slightly, then turned itself off. Now, irresponsible pet-owner she may be called (she constantly left her bedroom window open so they could slide in and out between her room and the ally), Helga did do one thing: she bought the two cats collars and tags. Both collars were jet- black and leather and looked more like chokers than anything else. The labels both said that basically same thing: Cat's name, home address, home phone, license and the name of their vet's offices. That day, Helga found something extremely unsettling; a folded piece of notebook paper had been jammed in between Malachi's collar and his furry neck.
Cautiously, Helga slid out the paper, unfolded it, and began to read.
*~*
Arnold and Gerald had checked every phone directory they could find for the first name "Malachi". And they didn't come up with a soul. They checked in every major business corporation, asked every person they could think of, checked in the all the directory's of nearby towns and cities.
Nothing.
"Gerald," Arnold replied to his friend irritably as he crossed out another business with no employees named Malachi. "I thought you said you were lucky."
"Well I am!" argued Gerald, squirming uncomfortably in a silent fear that his luck maybe had really run out. "Or, I was."
"What a time for your luck to run out."
"Hey, man, my luck has gone nowhere. It's just...out on vacation."
Arnold rolled his eyes. "Sure Gerald, sure......."
"You know what I think?"
"What?"
"I think that the only reason you're investing so much time into finding this Malachi guy in the first place is that you're avoiding having to go tell Helga you screwed up big time."
"Why does she need to know?" asked Arnold, trying not to sound guilty at his alternative motive being discovered.
"Why do I need to tell you why she needs to know?!" exclaimed Gerald, rather pissed off that his friend was so scared of her he wasn't even going to correct his mistake.
Arnold stopped walking, sighed, looked up at the sky, coughed, and sighed again. He was buying time.
"Arnold..."
Finally, Arnold stopped fidgeting, looked at Gerald with a hopeless but resigned face and said, "Okay. I'll go talk to her tomorrow."
Gerald shook his head firmly. "Hell no, brother, you're going NOW."
"But it's almost 6:30! She's probably eating dinner."
"Arnold, come off it!" Gerald finally snapped. "Why are you even scared of her? She hasn't beaten anybody up in years!"
"Because she doesn't hate me, Gerald!" Arnold blurted at his friend. "All these years I've Pretended to hate her and now I've discovered it was all a big mistake and when I tell her that she is going to hate me and I can't handle someone hating me!"
Two long seconds passed where neither boy did anything but stare at the other. Finally, Gerald spoke.
"So, you're basically worried she's gonna do the same thing to you that you did to her."
Arnold hung his head. "Yes."
Gerald stared at his friend, seemingly deep in thought about something. Finally, he closed his eyes, grabbed Arnold's wrist and began walking firmly down to Helga's humble abode.
"That, my friend, is a risk I am willing to take."
~*~
Arnold made his way up to Helga's front door with shaking knees and a bad feeling in his stomach. What happened next depended on the mercy of his victim; and, seeing what he had done, he had very little faith Helga would let him off.
Ding-Dong.
"The witch isn't quite dead," Arnold continued humorlessly to himself.
Seconds later, the door was opened by none other than Helga Pataki, the witch, the nameless one, herself. Immediately she saw who it was and literally freezed.
Arnold stared at her in surprise; she stared at him in alarm. It was anything but romantic.
Arnold opened his mouth to say something he hadn't quite figured out what was yet but before he could get anything out, Helga grabbed him by the shirt and pried him inside her house.
~*~
that's all for now, folks! dont forget to r&r. i apologize profusely for it taking so long, i kinda got caught in a bad case of writer's block. sorry again!
Author's Clue: Rememberâ€"Helga leaves her bedroom window opened day round so Cat & Malachi can go outside. Also remember that everything happens to her in twos.
check back soon for 5!
keep a mild groove on,
rock steady13
"I could hurt someone like me,
Out of spite or jealously,
I don't steal, and I don't lie,
But I can feel, and I can cry,
A fact I'll bet you never knew,
But to cry in front of you,
That's the worst thing I could do."
--excerpt via "There Are Worse Things I Could Do", via the musical Grease
Arnold was deeply and respectfully pissed.
He was pissed at Gerald, for letting him open the package. He was pissed at the mysterious deliverer with no return address for sending him the package. He was pissed at his grandpa for being at the store while he opened the package. He was pissed at the package itself. He was pissed at the mysterious Malachi, whoever the hell he was. And he was pissed at a whole lot of things he could give no reasons for being pissed at. Most of all, however, he was pissed at the one who had written the letter, the one who had sickeningly brought it all upon himself.
Arnold wasn't just pissed at that person; he hated him.
Gerald was squeamish. He had always been at least slightly squeamish, fidgeting involuntarily when forced to sit for long periods of time, jumping into conversation in the midst of awkward pause. But now, then, in the family room of what could never be technically called a family, he was suddenly sickeningly squeamish.
Arnold had yet to do or say anything after it finally processed in his brain that Helga hadn't after all destroyed the document his and his parent's lives had so desperately hung upon. She had destroyed his book report, just as she had intended. And he had hated her for three solid years, made her beg, made her cry, because she had torn up a book report. And she, only registering that what she had picked up had the name "Arnold" on it, had always thought she had deserved to be hated.
Suddenly Arnold was in the wrong. And he very much didn't like it.
"Hey Arnold?"
He looked up from the totally random place on the white-washed wall he'd been staring listlessly at for the past five minutes.
"Yeah, I'm ok," he said automatically.
"I always thought you had the pieces already," Gerald replied after another three minutes of silence, wryly amused. "So that you could piece it back together maybe. Or something like that."
Arnold shook his head in a despairing way. Gerald simply nodded. Gerald understood without having to have it explained: Arnold, to whom true raging anger was practically foreign, hadn't known how to handle it once he had it. So he had chosen the nearly worst possible decision to choose in a situation like that: scream at the girl, declare your hatred in front of a large crowd of people...and then...
"Run away," Arnold suddenly croaked in a horrified sort of voice.
"Say what now?"
"Ran away," he repeated, murmuring in a transfixed sort of way. "I ran away...I didn't do the brave thing, or the good thing...I ran away from the problem...from the girl...so that I wouldn't have to deal with them on my own. And then I tried to hide behind the excuse that it was her fault. Maybe I always knew, deep down, that Helga would never destroy something like that, ever...maybe I always knew deep down it was some stupid book report...maybe I just didn't want to talk to her. Jebus, Gerald...I have no balls."
Gerald, for the one and only time in his life, didn't speak in reply. He nodded.
Arnold was suddenly torn between three major emotions, only two of which he could actually identify. None had a guarantee; none seemed precisely in the right. His head was grieving, too mixed up in guilt and self-pity and self- hate and self-whatever to actually think of much of anything anymore. His hands were itching to strangle something, in the hope of maybe more anger could correct the anger of before. And his heart...god, he couldn't begin to name what was going on in there.
Gerald let out a sigh by inflating his cheeks slowly with air and letting it out in the sound of a mild explosion. Arnold agreed whole-heartedly.
"So," replied Gerald, talking more in Arnold's direction than actually to him. "What do we do now?"
"Now..." began Arnold, trailing off. He could think of nothing to say.
Gerald sighed again in the exact same way.
More silence. More listening. More listening than either of the boys had done all school year.
"Maybe it's a joke," suggested Gerald, sounding rather doubtful.
Arnold glared. "Nobody," he declared firmly. "in this town would ever do something like that."
"Maybe it was Helga, you know trying to make it look like you were in the wrong or something."
"HELGA WOULDN'T DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT," Arnold blurted suddenly, surprised at himself. If Gerald was surprised, he did an immensely good job of not showing it.
"She wouldn't do that," Arnold repeated, in a more rational, more Arnold-y voice. And, in a way he considered quite graceful, Arnold changed the subject. "What is all that stuff you were saying about a Malachi, Gerald?"
"See for yourself," replied the popular coolly, indicating the over-turned cardboard box. "Some note was taped on to the bottom of that box."
Arnold turned the box over so that the mouth was facing him, and cocked his eyebrows as he read the message. It was written in bright red ink, in capital letters and in a pen Arnold couldn't recognize, on a slightly wrinkled piece of notebook paper which was taped to the inside-bottom of the box. The message was composed of all of three words;
GO SEE MALACHI.
"Now what?" asked Gerald for a second time.
Arnold looked at him, grinning slightly. "Now we find Malachi."
*~*
June bugs, annoying early this year, scattered from the back of the Pataki's white-wash screen backdoor as Helga shoved it open and sent it careening against the wall.
"MOM?! DAD?!!!"
No one answered. Rolling her eyes and putting on a look that would freeze hell, she began the trek up to her room. Passing by a firmly passed out Miriam without so much as a glance, she swung around the railing and walked up the stairs three at a time. Popping her bubble gum nonchalantly, she shoved her bedroom door open with her hip, threw her former backpack into a corner (where it would collect dust affectionately for the next three months), pressed a few keys on her silver laptop without even glancing at the screen, pressed the "play" button on her sterio and ended up, grinning slightly idiotically, next to the deathly black cat on her windowsill.
"Hey Malachi," she greeted her friend, if anything more warmly than those humans at her school. Oh, pardon her; former school. "You are so lucky you aren't a human."
Malachi's name meant "faithful messenger", a description Helga didn't think fit any humans she knew. Helga, having years ago given up hope with humans, decided suddenly one day to become an animal-lover. The Great and Glorious Elder Pataki's had given up caring about Helga when it became obvious she wasn't even going to grow beautiful. One day she came home to discover this rather discomforting fact, that her parents had given up caring about her and had given up hoping she'd ever be as perfect as Olga had grown to be. They had stopped in one day, over night, with no discussions and no debates. Snap decisions, Big Bob had said at one time, was yet another thing Pataki's were all about. They stopped officially caring the 2nd of December. Arnold had stopped officially caring the 2nd of September.
Helga had been born the 2nd of April (a/n: whether she really was or not i dont know but, hey, it's my fanfiction and she was now born that day). Everything always seemed to happen to her in twos.
The day the Pataki's officially dropped their youngest daughter off the face of their little world, they also stopped giving her restrictions. She wasn't even there any more, and honestly that suited Helga just god-damn fine. Any other child, any other person in Helga's situation, with suddenly no one and suddenly no rules, would've split at the seams, lost all respect, lost all responsibility. Luckily, Helga was Helga and Helga wasn't about to let Helga screw Helga up. Like Phoebe said, "You had to marvel."
Helga's other cat, the cat first to be picked up, had to have been at one time a beautiful femme fatal of a cat. She was a Persian, with long once- white hairs and chocolate brown huge cat-eyes. For a street cat (seeing as she lived in the ally next to the Pataki homestead), she was surprisingly fragile and dainty and always wore an expression that clearly seemed to say "Trust me, there's no way I'd be this dirty if I didn't have to be." Helga discovered the cat when she was 12 years old. That was when she believed fiercely and lividly in the concept of "I don't belong to no one and no one belongs to me." She still did, only less...dramatically. So, in this light, Helga had another trademark Pataki Snap Decision.
She named the cat 'Cat'.
She discovered Cat on the 2nd of March, while working on homework in her windowsill.
Everything happened to Helga in twos.
Helga discovered Malachi, the scraggly, scrawny and un-mistakably wise sorcerer of a black cat, seven months later on October 2nd.
Everything happened in twos.
Helga scratched the un-ruly ally cat behind the ears in a lonesome sort of way.
"I did something extremely stupid today, Malachi," she said, looking at the wall, talking to the cat. "I let what I was thinking slip out through my mouth, and now he hates me more than ever." She didn't have to say who he was; Malachi knew that clearly by now. He began to purr, roughly, sounding halfway between a motor and a crackling record. Malachi, being an ally cat by trade, didn't purr too often.
Helga sighed a long, low sigh. "You're name means faithful messenger, Malach," she remarked playfully. "But what've you brought for me lately, hm?"
Suddenly her computer talked.
"You've got mail!"
Helga pondered blandly just who was the woman who's voice had been recorded for the purpose of crowing to the e-mail's owner "You've got mail!" What did that woman do? Was she paid a lot of money? Did she get her e-mail from the same provider as the one she'd been recorded for? And if she did, did that mean every time she herself got a new e-mail she'd hear her own voice going "You've got mail!"? Personally, Helga found that rather creepy.
Helga clicked some buttons and pressed some keys and got to her e-mail account, rememberme@hotmail.com.
4 messages; 1 new.
She'd had the account for 2 years.
Looking at the sender and the subject, Helga's eyebrow jumped up and down again in surprise. The sender was 12:00 Tuesday. The subject was "So Long Suckas!" 12:00 Tuesday was supposedly the time and day the world was destined to end. And only one person went by that name.
Of all the people who had changed over the span of three years, Lila had un- questionably changed the most. At 14, Lila had dyed her hair black, shaved one half of her head and dreamed of joining a heavy metal rock band. She laughed at the world that had rejected her when she "found herself" in the beginning months of 6th grade. The beginning of junior high is a rather bad time to find oneself. Or, at least, that was Helga's view of it. However, whenever Lila was called a freak, or skidded around, or whispered about, she didn't get mad. She didn't get even. She laughed.
"The world is one naive place, Helga," she'd said once to the only person who hadn't deemed her "Child of Satan". "All you can do is laugh at them because one day you're gonna be bigger than they are and they aren't gonna be able to say anything at all to or about you. And we are, Helga. We're gonna be big people someday. And anyone that seems big now...you can almost bet they're gonna turn out small."
Helga liked Lila much better that way.
Lila liked Lila much better that way.
"When you figure out who you are too, Helga, you're gonna really like who you turn out to be." Lila always knew more about people than they knew about themselves. Ever since she'd stopped her image of "Little Miss Perfect" (who, she figured out later, was one manipulative bitch), Lila didn't look at who the person was then; she looked at the person they would be.
The e-mail wasn't just sent to Helga, Helga soon discovered. Lila had sent it to the whole eighth grade class.
Here was how it went;
"Dear sucka's,
Then again, why the hell am I saying 'dear'? You aren't 'dear' to me. 'Dear' is just a sign of politeness and a majority of the time, the person to whom the sender is saying 'dear' to, isn't dear to them at all! So, I would like to change that beginning to simply 'Sucka's'.
Sucka'sâ€" I am getting the hell out of here, so congratulations to all of you, you will never be forced to see my changed-and-thereby-threatening- face ever again. In a half an hour I'm gonna be on board a one-way flight to London, living in with my aunt and two cousins. You wondering why I'm leaving? Well, why the hell should I tell you? You don't care, remember? Oh yes...now you remember...
This letter is not to bitch. This letter is to say just one last thing to all you sucka's before I leave: I've known every last one of you since the 4th grade, way back when I was what you still see as "the real Lila". But people, you don't get it. THIS is the real Lila. The real Lila is the Lila you see with a shaved head and leather and chains and piercings and all. But I haven't changed my outside to look "cool" or any of that. I changed my outside to suit my inside. I'm the real Lila. Me. Not the Lila of yesteryear. I think that the real Lila has turned out just a little too threatening for your tastes, hasn't she? So you say that I'm not the real me, that the real me is the sweet little girl who manipulated boys and who put on a pretty face. Well, I'M NOT. And now that I've realized who I am, and (hopefully) made it quite clear to you that I am not imagining things nor is this a temporary glitch in my system, I can only hope and pray for all of you that you figure out who you all are really too. I just hope to God it isn't the person who I'm seeing now. And if it is, I feel nothing but mild pity and offer nothing but a "Que sara, sara". The only person who I truly hope finds themselves is Helga Pataki because, girl, if you ever do find yourself you're gonna be very happy with her.
Cheers, sucka's!
I leave you with one last message from me: Ever so all of you kiss my ass.
--lila.
Malachi jumped up onto Helga's extended right leg as she finished reading. Helga chuckled slightly. Lila was never the kind of girl to not make a grand exit.
"Well, Malach," replied Helga, x-ing out the screen and smiling. "Let's just hope I find myself, huh?"
The cat's green eyes gave her a "I-know-something-you-don't-know" sort of look.
Helga smiled some more, wryly storing Lila's memory forever into some file in the back of her mind. That was when she noticed it.
Her smile flickered slightly, then turned itself off. Now, irresponsible pet-owner she may be called (she constantly left her bedroom window open so they could slide in and out between her room and the ally), Helga did do one thing: she bought the two cats collars and tags. Both collars were jet- black and leather and looked more like chokers than anything else. The labels both said that basically same thing: Cat's name, home address, home phone, license and the name of their vet's offices. That day, Helga found something extremely unsettling; a folded piece of notebook paper had been jammed in between Malachi's collar and his furry neck.
Cautiously, Helga slid out the paper, unfolded it, and began to read.
*~*
Arnold and Gerald had checked every phone directory they could find for the first name "Malachi". And they didn't come up with a soul. They checked in every major business corporation, asked every person they could think of, checked in the all the directory's of nearby towns and cities.
Nothing.
"Gerald," Arnold replied to his friend irritably as he crossed out another business with no employees named Malachi. "I thought you said you were lucky."
"Well I am!" argued Gerald, squirming uncomfortably in a silent fear that his luck maybe had really run out. "Or, I was."
"What a time for your luck to run out."
"Hey, man, my luck has gone nowhere. It's just...out on vacation."
Arnold rolled his eyes. "Sure Gerald, sure......."
"You know what I think?"
"What?"
"I think that the only reason you're investing so much time into finding this Malachi guy in the first place is that you're avoiding having to go tell Helga you screwed up big time."
"Why does she need to know?" asked Arnold, trying not to sound guilty at his alternative motive being discovered.
"Why do I need to tell you why she needs to know?!" exclaimed Gerald, rather pissed off that his friend was so scared of her he wasn't even going to correct his mistake.
Arnold stopped walking, sighed, looked up at the sky, coughed, and sighed again. He was buying time.
"Arnold..."
Finally, Arnold stopped fidgeting, looked at Gerald with a hopeless but resigned face and said, "Okay. I'll go talk to her tomorrow."
Gerald shook his head firmly. "Hell no, brother, you're going NOW."
"But it's almost 6:30! She's probably eating dinner."
"Arnold, come off it!" Gerald finally snapped. "Why are you even scared of her? She hasn't beaten anybody up in years!"
"Because she doesn't hate me, Gerald!" Arnold blurted at his friend. "All these years I've Pretended to hate her and now I've discovered it was all a big mistake and when I tell her that she is going to hate me and I can't handle someone hating me!"
Two long seconds passed where neither boy did anything but stare at the other. Finally, Gerald spoke.
"So, you're basically worried she's gonna do the same thing to you that you did to her."
Arnold hung his head. "Yes."
Gerald stared at his friend, seemingly deep in thought about something. Finally, he closed his eyes, grabbed Arnold's wrist and began walking firmly down to Helga's humble abode.
"That, my friend, is a risk I am willing to take."
~*~
Arnold made his way up to Helga's front door with shaking knees and a bad feeling in his stomach. What happened next depended on the mercy of his victim; and, seeing what he had done, he had very little faith Helga would let him off.
Ding-Dong.
"The witch isn't quite dead," Arnold continued humorlessly to himself.
Seconds later, the door was opened by none other than Helga Pataki, the witch, the nameless one, herself. Immediately she saw who it was and literally freezed.
Arnold stared at her in surprise; she stared at him in alarm. It was anything but romantic.
Arnold opened his mouth to say something he hadn't quite figured out what was yet but before he could get anything out, Helga grabbed him by the shirt and pried him inside her house.
~*~
that's all for now, folks! dont forget to r&r. i apologize profusely for it taking so long, i kinda got caught in a bad case of writer's block. sorry again!
Author's Clue: Rememberâ€"Helga leaves her bedroom window opened day round so Cat & Malachi can go outside. Also remember that everything happens to her in twos.
check back soon for 5!
keep a mild groove on,
rock steady13