Arnold stopped at his locker after school, putting away all of his books besides algebra. Added to the worry and apprehension of meeting Helga again, Arnold had to admit that he really knew nothing of teaching or tutoring. How on earth was he supposed to help her? Especially considering he was convinced she'd be sharpening a butcher knife when he walked in the room. He could hear her voice, cold and chilling, saying, "You spurned my love for you… now you must PAY."

Oh, come on Arnold, get real.

"Hey man, you wanna go the arcade with me and Kevin?" Gerald Johanssen, Arnold's best friend since preschool, was standing next to his locker with his invitation that, to Arnold, sounded like a free pass out of hell.

Unfortunately, Arnold had given Mr. Quincy his word. "I'd love to, Gerald, but I've got to stay after school for a little bit and be a peer tutor. I could meet you there at around four o'clock, though. I should be done by then."

"Peer tutor?" Gerald raised an eyebrow. "How on earth do you get yourself into these kinds of things?"

Arnold sighed. "My somewhat advanced math skills and my top of the line people skills, that's how. The people skills being the deciding factor, from what Mr. Quincy said."

"Sheesh! Who are you tutoring, the spawn of Satan?"

Arnold couldn't help but smile. "Helga Pataki, actually."

"Holy Toledo! Even worse! Satan herself!"

Arnold laughed out loud. "Well, I wasn't going to say it…"

"Well, good luck, Arnold. I do not envy you at all, I gotta say. You want me to be a witness to your will or something?"

"Oh, come on, Gerald. I haven't even talked to her since elementary school. She can't still hate me." And she can't still love me, either, Arnold thought to himself, trying to quell his fears.

"I don't know," said Gerald, looking a combination of worried and "sucks-to-be-you". "That girl's still got claws and fangs. She's in my history class and she can be one nasty piece of work when she wants to be. And seeing you might start her hatred all over again."

"Well see," said Arnold uneasily, not wanting to pursue this line of conversation anymore. This wasn't helping calm his fears at all. "Anyway, four o'clock at the arcade? You'll still be there?"

"Heck yes we'll still be there. We'll be waiting for you. And, uh, if you're not there by four thirty I'll just start the funeral arrangements, alright?"

"Gerald," said Arnold, with a tone of half annoyance, half laughter.

"Hey, it's the least I can do for my best bud." He and Arnold clasped their right hands and did their thumb "handshake" that they had been doing since before they could even remember. "See ya later, man."

"See ya, Gerald," said Arnold as Gerald headed towards the doors. He gulped as he looked down the hallway, quickly clearing out of students who had no desire to stay. There was no putting this off anymore. With another gulp, he headed towards the library.

The senior high building had been built in 1942, and the library was now far too small to accommodate the needs of the one thousand, one hundred and twenty-three students who attended, but it had a nice array of side rooms, useful for small classes or one-on-one tutoring. Room 101 was the first of such rooms. The door was closed—Arnold wasn't sure if that was a good or bad sign. He was hoping that he would get there before Helga, just to give him more time to settle his nerves and figure out just what he was going to do and say. But what if she was already there? He hadn't exactly hurried at his locker.

Well, only one way to find out.

He opened the door. And sitting at the single table in the room, wearing shockingly bright blue leggings, a short pink plaid skirt, a long-sleeved black shirt, and a striped blue and brown tight polo shirt over it (the shirt looked as if it had come straight out of the seventies), was Helga. Her hair was almost normal looking—black—but it had an unnatural gloss and sheen to it that looked as though she had poured hair gel on it just minutes before.

She looked at him and gave him a half smile, half snort. "Hey there, football head."

Strangely enough, her usage of her elementary school nickname for him relieved much of the tension. Arnold gave a small laugh. "Hey, Helga."

"So, dispense your wisdom, O Guru of Algebra," she said, leaning back in her chair.

Arnold let out a small laugh again, although this one was more out of slight confusion. "Well, uh… what is it that you've been struggling with?" he asked, sitting down in the chair next to her.

"Oh, the usual: parents, grades, loser friends, having to baby-sit my nephew every hour of the day, life—"

"I meant algebra related."

"Hmm. Of course you did. Well, here, take a look at this and figure it out for yourself." Helga dug into her book bag and pulled out a worksheet, one of their homework assignments from a few days ago, and handed it to Arnold. On the top, written in bright red ink, was "62%—SEE ME".

"Hmm," said Arnold. Helga smiled. Arnold took no heed of it, however. "Do you mind if I…?" he asked, motioning towards the questions on the rest of the worksheet.

Helga rolled her eyes. "If I minded, football head, I wouldn't have given you the worksheet in the first place. Knock yourself out."

Arnold examined the questions marked wrong, his apprehensions almost completely lifted. Helga did not seem as though she wanted to strangle him, nor did she seem as though she was in love with him. These were both very promising signs.

"Well, it looks like you missed a lot of the questions on adding exponentials. Do you want to go over those first?"

"I suppose," sighed Helga. "I actually got all those right, though—I did them on my calculator. But we had to show our work and since I hadn't done any work and didn't know how I got my answer… I just made it up."

"Well, maybe if you tried writing it out, you'd find out that you can do it without a calculator," said Arnold with an encouraging smile.

Helga sighed. "Oh please, keep your Mr. Sunshine out of the picture—"

"Well, you're not going to get any better if I yell at you and say you can't do it," said Arnold. "Have you ever heard of that saying, 'If you believe you can, or believe you can't, you're probably right'? It's true. If you think you can do it, then you can do it." He pulled out the worksheet for that day. "Here's our quiz review. I'd like you to work on problem, uh… seventeen without a calculator."

"Very well," said Helga, reaching for Arnold's worksheet.

"Uh, Helga, this is my worksheet. Unless you'd like to do my homework…"

"I'm the one who's being tutored here," said Helga with a snort. "I don't think you'd want me to do your homework." She pulled out her own copy of the assignment.

"I'll work on it too, and we'll see what we come up with," said Arnold.

"Works for me."

The two students zeroed in on their homework, pencils flying, hardly looking up at each other. Even so, Helga's pink skirt kept jumping out at Arnold from the corner of his eye. The way Helga dressed, it was hard to focus on something else in the room, even if you weren't directly looking at her. He couldn't help but wonder how the kids who had classes with her were able to get anything done.

"I like your skirt," he said without thinking.

Helga looked up at him in surprise. "Excuse me?"

Arnold felt his cheeks flush. Note to self—keep mouth shut. "I, uh, like your skirt. The color, I mean. It, uh… it looks nice." He turned back to his worksheet.

"Are you flirting with me or something?" Helga demanded.

Arnold smiled, but didn't look back up at her. "No, I am not flirting with you, I'm just saying that your skirt looks nice. It's kind of hard to ignore, actually."

Helga turned back to her homework as well, but she too was smiling. "Well, I know how much you love skirts, seeing as you used to wear one all the time."

"That was a shirt, Helga."

"So you say."

"I'm serious!"

"I know, I know. I'm just pushing your buttons. Shut up and finish your problem. I'm done."

"You're done?" Arnold still hadn't gotten very far on his.

"I can wait. Within reason." Helga leaned back again and folded her arms, watching Arnold continue to work on number seventeen. "You know," she said after awhile, "I would return your compliment on my clothes, but you're just dressed so boring."

Arnold took a moment to look at what he was wearing that day. A blue T-shirt, jeans, sneakers. He smiled. "Well, not all of us can be free-thinking fashion-wise, I guess."

"You are attractive though," said Helga levelly. "I'll give you that, although I hate to admit it. But yes, you are quite good-looking."

Arnold hesitated only for a moment. The ease of their conversation thus far, added to the fact that Helga brought it up, gave him the push to attempt to resolve the unfinished business from his childhood.

"Coming from someone who's kissed me—more than once—I cant say I'm surprised at that."

"Oh jeez. You had to bring that up." Helga recoiled back again, looking for the first time that day slightly flustered.

"You brought it up." Seeing Helga's discomfort, however, Arnold immediately changed his tune. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

"No, whatever. I would have been surprised if you didn't." She laughed, a bit awkwardly. "You must have peed your pants when Mr. Quincy told you who he wanted you to tutor."

"Close," Arnold admitted. He was nearly done with the equation, but his mind was swimming by this point. He sighed, dropped his pencil, and looked up at Helga. "Helga," he said slowly, "I've been wondering—and if I'm going too far and I'm making you uncomfortable just tell me and I won't bring it up again—"

"I think I know what this is about," said Helga softly.

"I think you do too," said Arnold.

There was silence, although Arnold could swear he could hear a crackling in the air between them. The elephant in the room had finally been brought to light, and there could be no true silence until it was taken care of.

"In… in the fourth grade," Arnold finally continued, "during that whole FTI thing, when you told me… when you told me you loved me…"

"When I told you I loved you," Helga continued, "but then later that day you asked me if I hadn't just gotten caught up in the moment and I said I had, and then I continued to hate on you for the rest of fourth grade, and all through fifth and sixth grade too, as if nothing had ever happened between us—and you want to know if what I said on that rooftop was really true. Is that it?"

"Yes. That's exactly it."

"Well, it wasn't exactly true."

Arnold jolted. He hadn't been expecting that. For all these years, despite Helga taking back what she had said, he had always believed that she did, indeed, love him. If it hadn't been true, then… why had she said it? What was the true explanation for the way she acted around him?

"I fucking adored you," said Helga.

Arnold blinked.

"Love was way too weak of a word for what I felt," Helga continued. "I lived and breathed for you. You were on my mind every waking second of every day, and in every single one of my dreams. You were my inspiration for everything. I worshiped the ground you walked on. I was so in love with you I couldn't think straight."

There was silence again. Arnold could do nothing but blink. He wasn't sure if Helga was waiting for him to say something, or if she was trying to find something else to say to him. He tried to say something, anything, but his throat seemed to have dried up.

"I… I knew you did," Arnold finally said, his voice cracking a bit. "I mean, after you told me but then took it back, I still knew that you'd told me the truth up there. The more I thought about it, the more you being in love with me… made sense, I guess. Even though it was such a crazy notion, you loving me, it still just… made you make sense."

"I'm honestly surprised you didn't figure it out by yourself," said Helga with a laugh. "I mean, I gave you so many clues—unintentionally, of course…"

"How long have… had…" Arnold realized at that moment that when speaking of her love for him, Helga was only using the past tense. That, and her frankness about the whole ideal, was leading Arnold to believe that she had, in fact, grown out of it. "I mean, when did you first—"

"The day I met you. The first day of preschool. You probably don't remember."

Arnold shook his head. He couldn't ever remember meeting Helga—of course he knew that he had met her for the first time once, but that had been so long ago that it just seemed as though he had been born knowing her. "That was preschool, we were what, three? How could I remember something that far back?"

"Oh trust me," said Helga. "If it was the day you first fell in love, you'd remember it too."

"Well, what… happened? When we met, I mean? What was it that…"

"I was having the shittiest day imaginable," said Helga bluntly. "My parents were so busy fawning over Olga that they forgot to take me to preschool, so I had to walk there. It was only like a mile away but that's a really long walk when you're three. And it was raining and I didn't have a raincoat or umbrella. I had to walk through a bad neighborhood and a dog stole my lunchbox and I got splashed with mud and… oh shit." She discreetly wiped a tear from her eye.

"Wow," said Arnold softly. "That's terrible, Helga."

"I know it's dumb for me to cry about it," she said quickly, "but come on, you can't get much worse circumstances when you're three. Anyway, so I somehow managed to find the preschool. I'm wet, cold, crying, alone, all that. But then suddenly… this umbrella appears above me, and I turn around and I see… you."

"Me," Arnold repeated softly. Even though he couldn't remember any of this, he already knew where this was going, and he already understood just why Helga had been in love with him.

Helga laughed softly. "And then you smile at me and tell me that you like my bow because it's pink like my pants. What's with you and liking the color pink, anyway?" She tugged at her skirt, and Arnold couldn't help but laugh a bit at that. "I'm not surprised you don't remember. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary for you. It's always been in your nature to be caring and help others. I thought about that day a lot, obviously. I always couldn't help but think that if that had been an isolated incident for you, that you were only taking pity on me because I was so miserable that day but any other day you wouldn't give me or anyone else two seconds of your time… that then, my crush on you was just a crush and I would have gotten over you pretty quickly. But the problem was that you really were that sweet and caring. Every day you were always nice to me, always saying nice things to me, even when I was being a jerk to you… even when everyone else was ignoring me." She shrugged, almost helplessly. "So how could I not have fallen in love with you under those circumstances?"

There was silence again. Arnold rubbed his arm uncomfortably. "I'm, uh… I'm sorry for bringing this all up again, Helga."

"Oh, please, Arnold," said Helga, rolling her eyes. "Don't you realize how therapeutic this is for me? I kept my feelings secret for so long and they were eating me up and turning me insane. I had to pay attention to you somehow, but I didn't want anyone to know that I loved you, so the only thing I could do was harass you. Which reminds me—I owe you a huge, huge, huge belated apology for how much of a bitch I was to you."

"Uh…" Arnold, again, didn't know what to say to that.

"I know it's a lame excuse—'I only treated you like shit because I was in love with you'—but it's the truth. Damn, does that sound stupid. But anyway, really, you don't know how sorry I am. Even back then I hated treating you that way. I guarantee you, after every single time I did anything mean to you, as soon as I could I'd find some place where I was alone so I could berate myself for treating the love of my life with such cruelty."

"Uh…" Arnold's vocabulary seemed to have been reduced to that once utterance.

"I know, you're thinking I was crazy. And I was. I was insane and I knew it. So finally, after sixth grade ended and we were about to go to junior high, I decided, 'You know what, it's a new beginning for me and I want to change who I am. I'm tired of being so wrapped up in Arnold that it's affecting my everyday functioning.' So I decided I had to kill you."

That jumped Arnold out of his stupor. "You had to what?"

"Metaphorically, of course," Helga quickly said. "I had all these shrines to you, all these mementos of you, like locks of your hair and stuff, and thirty-two books of poems all about you, and—"

"Thirty-two?" Arnold repeated, incredulously.

"Yep."

"Holy cow."

"You're telling me. Anyway, I burned them. All the poetry volumes, all the shrines, all the mementos—anything and everything I had that was related to you I burned. It was…" Her voice trailed off. "Dammit, Arnold, it was the hardest thing I've ever done. I know you'll think it's silly, but it was like I was killing myself. I was, kind of, because I had let you take over my life so much you had practically become my life. So I knew I had to do it, but it literally felt like I was twisting a knife through my heart when I burned all that stuff. It hurt me so bad that I cried throughout it all, and I even screamed and fainted towards the end. I couldn't take the pain anymore."

Arnold just stared at her, his jaw hanging open.

"But it was for the best," she insisted. "Really. When I woke up I felt… free. I thought of you and I didn't feel any longing, any tugs at my heart, and that was when I knew it had worked. I was over you. Granted, I had to get over you in a really dramatic way—but that was the only way it could have worked. And it did."

"So… so you're completely over me now," Arnold clarified.

"Indeedy-do," nodded Helga. "For three glorious years now I've been living just for myself, not for you, and it's been wonderful."

"And that's why you were okay with me being your tutor?"

Helga smirked. "Oh, that. Well, to be honest, I didn't want anybody as a tutor, but Mr. Quincy pretty much told me I was going to be tutored whether I liked it or not, and I decided what the hell, maybe it'll result in just one less bad grade for Big Bob to yell at me for. So today, when he told me that he wanted you to be my tutor, I literally had to stop myself from laughing. You must have shit a brick when he asked you."

"Can you blame me?" Arnold said, good-naturedly rolling his eyes. "Every time you've ever interacted with me it's always been to extremes. I didn't know if when I walked in here you were going to rape me or kill me, but I figured it would be one of the two. And I was leaning towards kill."

"Oh, Arnold, Arnold, Arnold. I would never kill you on school grounds. I'd do it somewhere much more hidden."

They stared at each other, unsmiling, for about three seconds, until Helga finally broke into a laugh, Arnold quickly following her.

"Now, for God's sake, football head, finish your damn math problem. It's nearly four already."

"Already? Oh man. I was going to meet Gerald at four and we've hardly gotten anything done. And he's probably already convinced that you've killed me by now." He quickly turned back to his math problem.

"Criminy, you two are like elephants. Never forgetting." She leaned over to look at Arnold's progress, for he had started to scratch his head in confusion. "Add the second column to the exponential."

"Thanks." Arnold quickly did so, looked at his answer, and suddenly stared at Helga in surprise. "You completely understand how to do this, don't you?"

Helga smiled and shrugged. "You're the guru of algebra. Your teachings are quick and effective. That nonsense about believing you can do it seemed to have worked." She stood up and gathered her belongings into her book bag.

Arnold ripped a page out of the back of his notebook and quickly scribbled something on it. "Wait, Helga, before you go—here's my number. If you—"

"You're giving me your number?!" Helga cried, incredulously. "Criminy, Arnold, I'm not in love with you anymore, remember?"

"I'm giving you my number," said Arnold slowly, "so that if you have any questions over your homework, you can call me and I'll try to help you. I want to see you improve your grade, and I know that you're smart enough to be one of the best in the class."

Helga stared at Arnold for a second or two before barking out a noise that sounded like a mixture between amusement and confusion. "For God's sake, Arnold. You haven't changed a bit. Can you ever actually be mean to someone?"

Arnold shook his head. "I don't think so."

"Criminy. No wonder I was so in love with you." She tucked his number into a pouch on her book bag and turned and left the room. "But don't think I'll be calling you!" she hollered after she was already gone.

Arnold let himself laugh again. "Whatever you say, Helga!" he called back at her.