Disclaimers: I do not Hey Arnold or any other of the media characters. Truth be told, the only person I know to give credit is to Nickelodeon, but they're not the creators. I created this fiction for the soul purpose of enjoyment.
Author's Note: Inspired by the manga Forbidden Dance, one wacky dream, a lot of angst and several songs on Yahoo Music. If this is not what you except from your regular Hey Arnold fan fiction, well, either click your back button or open up your mind and enjoy. Please leave a timely review after you finish. Thank you, Abigail.
Doctor Bliss says that I'm a city girl at heart, and that is true. I have lived most of my thirteen years in a crowd downtown city, which is much more than a caboodle of houses roasting in a green spot alongside the Mississippi river Just over a year ago, Big Bob plucked me up like a weed and took Muriel and all our belongings (no, that's not true—he didn't take the ocean by the wharf, the clouded sky, out house, which all belong to me.) and flee us nearly two thousand miles to merry old England.
"A small brick house," I said, "this is just like our old home. Are you sure we're going to have to live here?"
"No," Big Bob said, "This is a client's house."
The front door of the house opened and a man with slicked back hair stood there. I looked up down the street. The houses were all jammed packed together like a row of bird houses. In front of the houses were tiny squares of grass with a metallic black fence and a thin grey sidewalk running alongside a grey road.
"Where's the dollar mart," I joked, "and the arcade?"
"I don't know Helga, you'll find out soon enough." Big Bob said, "Stay in the car with your mom, I'll be back soon." He waved to the man at the door.
"Can I come with you?" I said, desperate to get out of the car and stretch my legs, "Or at least walk around a bit?"
"Don't be silly Helga, stay in the car."
I did not want to stay in the car. But Big Bob's word was final. I sat there, looking around, and that's when I saw the face pressed up against the upstairs window. It was a skinny girl's face, and it looked afraid. I didn't know it then, but that face belonged to Maggie Houghton, a girl who had a powerful mind, who would become my friend, and who would have particular things happen to her and me included.
Not long ago, when I was locked up in the car with my wacky sister for three days, I told her the story of Maggie, and when I finished telling it –or maybe as I was telling it it, I realized that the story of Maggie was like the wallpaper in my bedroom at my old house in the downtown city area.
When I got tired of my pink hearts wallpaper, I started chiseling away at it when I got home from school one December morning. Each afternoon, I continued at it, as Big Bob stayed late nights at work and talked endless hours with a partner on the phone.
On the night I got the bad news –that I was moving temporarily to England –I chiseled and ripped away at it. At two o clock in the morning, I finally finished. Hidden behind the wallpaper was a whitewash wall. A blank page.
The reason that Maggie's story reminds me so much of that whitewash wall and the wallpaper is that beneath her story was another one. Mine.
It was after all the adventures of Maggie that I got accepted into Saint Augustine's School for Girls. My sister came up with a plan to drive me from Bloomsbury, where she was to pick me up, and then the two of use would drive to Vauxhall. This is how I got locked in a car with her for nearly three days. It was not a trip I was egger to take, but one I had to take.
Big Bob had said, "You'll get to spend quality time with your older sister and it'll be cheaper than a train!"
Olga had squeezed my cheeks and said, "This trip will give me a chance to be with my favorite little sister again!" I am by the way her only sister.
Olga, if you don't already know is my older sister, full up to the top of her head with sweetness and goodness and a large dash of mind power. However this combination does not make her the next Marie Curie but a blonde bubble head with a 4.0 GPA.
Once it was settled that the two of us could go, the journey took on an alarming, expanding need to hurry, like there was a hurricane coming to destroy the town. During the week before we left, everyone was packing and shoveling my stuff into a moving truck and my sister was calculating the expenses. I didn't think we would ever make it into the car, and yet I didn't want to make it there anyways. I didn't expect to survive the trip with my head in place.
But I had a headmistress to meet and I was destined to get out of my parent's hair, that and I had to be there by a selected date. This was extremely important. The headmistress, after taking with here briefly, knew that I was a dedicated pupil and that she expected promptness and possibilities from me.
When at last Olga and I set out on the first day of the trip, I prayed for the first few minutes none stop that I wouldn't die of sisterly love or an accident and that we would get there on time. Over and over I prayed the same thing. I prayed to the air freshener and to the sky because that was easier than praying directly to God.
As we pulled into the country side, which was just a combination of Kentucky green grass hills, Olga interrupted my praying. "Helga--"
In the car, as we started down our long journey to Vauxhall, my sister said, "Helga why don't you tell me a story?"
I stared at her for a minute, racking around in my brain for some sort of excuse, and instead came out a lame, "What type of story do you want to listen to?"
Olga said, "Anything."
I certainly didn't know heaps of stories, I learned most of them from books and plays I'd read in the past. But I didn't know them by memory, and just when I got to the point of shrugging and asking her to turn up the radio instead Olga said, "Tell me about your life."
The only other person in the world we had ever said those five words in her lifetime was Doctor Bliss and for a second I was stunned speechless. Somebody wanted to know what was going on in my life besides Doctor Bliss!
"About my life?" I croaked.
"Of course baby sis, tell me about your life." She said airily.
"Can I trust you with it?" I asked cautiously, knowing that if I ever spilt something of importance to her, it could cost me my reputation. But then again, we were miles away from civilization or my old city for that matter.
"Alright Olga," I said smugly, "let me tell you about my life."
And that's how I happened to suspend my prayers and tell her about Maggie Houghton and the whole other cast of characters I had come to know over the years.
Because I had saw Maggie the day my family and I moved to Bloomsbury, I began my story with of Maggie with the visit to the gel head, Francis Houghton. Not that there was much to tell. He looked pretty sleazy, with an imitation silk white shirt and a black coat and pants. As they were leaving, Francis whispered to Big Bob, "Hey, did you tell you family about the pact we made –you know."
Big Bob looked uncomfortable, "No," he said, "It's best to keep it quiet. Besides what they don't know can't hurt them."
Now that was a lie. Big Bob was known for his black dealings, and what we didn't know could hurt us. But then again, I couldn't force him to tell anyways. So I pretended I hadn't overheard and just sat with an un-amused look on my face.
When at last we left Mr. Houghton and Ms. Houghton, we drove for approximately ten minutes. Three blocks from Maggie Houghton's was the place where my family and I where now going to live.
Large maple trees. Little freshly potted flowers. No loud mouth street gangs, no graffiti on the wall, no window bars. Instead a metallic black fence, a little brick stone house with a miniature patch of grass in front of it.
"We're here," Muriel said, rather too heartily, "let's go look around."
We walked into a tiny living room, into the miniature kitchen and upstairs into Big Bob's and Muriel's bedroom and into my pocket sized bedroom and into the two itty bitty bathrooms. I looked out upstairs into the back yard. Half of it had a wooden patio and the other had a patch of green growing. There was a tall wooden fence covering all of the yard and as I looked out onto the neighbors' yards I could see to identical fenced plots.
After the moving van came arrived and several bulky men crammed our furniture into the little house, I inched up to my bedroom, crawling over the sofa, chairs and boxes after boxes. One nearly tripped me and it could have sent me down the flight of stairs. This earned an, "What in the heck!" from me and a swift kick at the nearest object.
A week later, I started school and saw Maggie again. She was in several of my classes. All of the kids dressed in stiff, new uniforms and wore braces. They talked in hushed whispers as if they didn't want anyone to hear what they were saying. Most girls wore their hair up in ponytails or a braid and they repetitively tugged on them to see if it was loss.
Everyone kept eyeing my hair oddly; "Doesn't she know she's wearing two brooms?" two girls snickered to each other. "Crazy that one.Does it naturally stick up like that? Is she trying to be creative or something?" I could tell they didn't like me off the bat, they probably thought I was mad.
One girl, Bridget Jo Finn, was so ridiculously makeup and wore her skirt a little too high. She disgusted me. She read teen magazines and hung out with the boys. I couldn't make any sense out of her behavior. There was Fannie and Willow Gilbert, who were identical twins, wore identical clothing and accessories (Even though they were uniforms) and always finished the other's sentence for them, loud mouth Marie Peters, pale faced Daniel Roberts. There was Casper Hampton who had his face in a book and kept away from everybody else, and a smart mouth Gabriel Murdoch.
And then there was Maggie Houghton. Marie called her "Know it all diva" and waggled her finger like Principal Warts, calling out in a fake high pitched voice "You're doing it wrong! Stop talking in class! Bridget have you no shame!" Maggie blushed but remained quite and dug her head into her text book.
Maggie was a quite girl who stayed mostly by herself. She had a pleasantly skinny face with two enormous mud brown eyes. Around her pleasant skinny face, her hair was sprayed and pinned up in a bun.
During the first week, when my father left the house constantly, and Muriel and I lived off the local Chinese takeout, I saw Maggie pass by my house as I paid the delivery boy. She had a gym bag slung around her shoulder, muttering to herself in French. Once I even waved to her, but she never looked my way.
Then one day at lunch, she slid into the seat next to me and said. "Hi Helga, want to be friends with me?"
To tell you the truth, I was surprised. You could have knocked me over with a feather. No one had ever spoken to like that. Most lines were along, "You did notice you're wearing to brooms for hair."
"Me? Be friends with you?"
"Of course,"
"Alright, I'll be friends with you."
I, Helga G. Pataki since the entire time I'd come to Darwin Jr. High had a friend for a change. I was surprised, worried, and happy. Truth be told, she wasn't really the type of girl I'd be friends with, but then again, I didn't really have a type. I was friends for Phoebe for heaven's sake!
At this point in my story, Olga interrupted me to say, "That's great Helga! I'm so glad you found a little playmate."
"She's not my little playmate Olga."
"Whatever you say little sis," she said as she pulled off into a dirt road parking lot, "and how about we go for burgers. I'm beat."
I looked up at the rickety old sign reading, Joe's House of Pancakes and Hash browns, my stomach grumbled, "All right, I am pretty hungry."