Keeping Arnold: Or, How to Get Disowned

by Lachesism

After ten long years in San Lorenzo, Arnold suddenly returns to Hillwood, throwing Helga's world into chaos irreversibly. Gerald and Phoebe start acting suspicious about his return; what secrets does he bring with him, and what does it mean for Helga? Can she get him to stay? Does she want him to stay? And how does Lila, mysteriously absent for years, factor into his return?

6. Chapter 6 - Young and Happy!

A/N: Here it is, the party! Sorry it's taken this long to get an update up. Fighting off a cold and it took me away from my obsession. Anyway, here's finally an Arnold POV. He's got a lot to say and show, and the Party promises to deliver the most interesting events yet. So strap in, this will be the longest chapter so far by a country mile. This is by NO means the end, but perhaps the first climax of many to come. Once again, the songs are not mine, merely chosen for their relevance and inspirational qualities to the story. Songs: "I Get Nervous" by Lower Dens, "Tibetan Pop Stars" by Hop Along, and "Young and Happy!" by Hop Along. I highly recommend you check these artists out! Hop Along is basically my inspiration for this entire story. I will remove all song lyrics at the original artist's request - but I doubt they'd mind. Enjoy the show.

Keeping Arnold: Chapter 6, Young and Happy!

"Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?" - Leo Tolstoy

---

Arnold Shortman stared at the long tunnel extending from the passenger jet he just spent ten hours nervously anticipating this very moment on. At the other end of the tunnel was Hillwood, or at least the short taxi ride from the international airport to that smaller satellite city he once called home. There was Helga. There was his past.

A bump on his back triggered his momentary return to the present, and the press of impatient passengers with their own lives to return to ushered the ever considerate Arnold to cross the threshold. He shouldered the even weight of his military-grade duffle bag, all fifty pounds of his belongings carefully packed, rolled, and stowed away within. His mother and father had outfit him with the rugged pack as a gift when he was much younger, explaining to him that it was designed so that the average weight of whatever he put inside would come out to around fifty pounds, total. It made trekking through the jungle much easier, and travel a trivial burden. It was one of the many practical, pragmatic things his parents had taught him in ten years of humanitarian work, private tutoring, and globe-trotting adventure.

He watched the dusty boots on his feet pull him forward through the lonely, air-jet cooled boarding tunnel. The white dust on his boots was clay from a rock salt quarry in Brazil; Stella and Miles had said their goodbyes to him there just two days before, working on negotiating the miner's rights with the American-owned minerals conglomerate. That's where they'd been for the last six months, and where they'd likely be until filial duties to their son obliged them return to the country they found themselves constantly working against.

Arnold had been shocked, he recalled, when he learned that his mother and father were basically comunistas that had changed their mission to education and protection of the indigenous tribes like the Green Eyes through organizing their elders against the encroaching powers of the capitalist first world. He had ideas about their proclivities from the journal, but, the truth of their ordeals had been quite the eye-opener.

Arnold stood outside the tunnel, surrounded by the press of people eager to get to their next gate. Air travel had simply changed so much since he was a kid; he recalled the first time he was at an airport, and being allowed all the way up to the terminal gate. He recalled seeing families expectant and joyous to see the arrival of their loved ones. He was always touched, but slightly saddened by the particular ritual of an airport reunion. He often fantasized about Helga meeting him at some airport gate, almost bouncing with excitement to see him.

The reality of the world, he had learned, was that things progressed towards pushing people apart. Gone were the crowds of lovers and loved ones to greet the weary travelers. There was just the next gate now, the next destination, the reclamation of protected and checked belongings.

Everyone is so alone. Arnold progressed through the airport towards security checkout and customs, reciting the exact words he would repeat to the border agents. I hold dual citizenry in San Lorenzo and America. I am returning home from educational travel. I have nothing to declare. It was mostly true. Technically, nothing he had in his pack was illegal. Just frowned upon.

His mind kept drifting to the immediate future while he waited in line at customs. What does Helga look like? Is she still mean and sour? Did she get tall? Does she still have one eyebrow? He felt the kernel of guilt within him twinge when he noticed he was only thinking of her. It was an ugly thing, something he had to swallow now. He would feel guilty when he thought about Helga, probably forever. It was a consequence of chasing his future, and of making Lila happy in the best way he could. I'm doing the right thing, he thought to himself, stepping up to the customs agent.

"Name, country of origin, and do you have anything to declare?" She seemed bored. She asked this question thousands of times a day. She probably barely flinched when they arrested someone, Arnold thought.

"Arnold Shortman. I hold dual citizenry in San Lorenzo and America. I am returning home from educational travel. I have nothing to declare." His voice was easy, calm. He held eye contact, and didn't shift his weight around a lot. He had reason to be nervous.

The customs agent eyed his dusty boots and jeans, looking him up and down, before deciding something inwardly, and stamping his passport.

"Welcome home, Mr. Shortman. Baggage claim is to the left."

He took his passport, offering her a "Thanks, have a nice day," and mostly meaning it. Inwardly, he was relieved. He'd made it through with the plant. I'm not doing anything illegal, this genus of plant is native to Canada. Non-native and invasive species laws are specific enough. A different species of a native genus is allowed under the right circumstances. The plant. It was probably Lila's best hope at nerve therapy, if they got the right people to look at it. Stella had spent the better part of the last few months looking for it in Brazil, one of the other reasons they made the trip South. The whole Shortman family felt terrible about what had happened, and all three had agreed, without much discussion, to do everything in their power to help her.

Arnold stood outside the airport, smelling the sulphurous, stale, sour stink of the late-summer roads. America just had a different smell to him now. Or maybe it was the smell it had all along, and he had never noticed it. It's weird to be back, he recognized. The air is so dry.

A taxicab, the bright yellow of Helga's hair, pulled into the long circular drive at the loading bay area of the airport terminals, slowing to stop in front of Arnold when he held out his hand. Arnold swung his heavy, drab pack into the trunk, slamming it shut, and climbed into the backseat.

"Llévame a Hillwood, por favor," he automatically rattled off. The cabby turned bodily in his front seat, eyeing Arnold. He was tan, but had that bright, sun-drenched blonde hair of a lifetime spent outside. He carried the dirt of a Brazilian rock salt quarry, and hadn't shaved in a few weeks. The cab driver pulled an eyebrow high, not saying anything.

"Ah, sorry. Uh, Hillwood. Please." Arnold felt embarrassed. Spanish was one of those languages almost everybody spoke in the Americas. He was unused to the stares he was getting now that he was coming home. The cab driver wordlessly turned back around, pulling into traffic to start the drive.

Arnold breathed a sigh of relief. He was back. He wasn't home, but he was back. It felt nostalgic, more powerfully than any of the pictures he'd obsessively kept in pristine condition of his childhood friends. That folio was carefully wrapped in bubble-wrap packaging plastic, at the bottom of his pack, where it was safest. He had looked at every picture of his younger self with his old friends as he packed it, spending an hour slowly turning over the pages of the binder by the light of his cellphone. So many memories. An electric anticipation surged through him. He wanted to see them all.

Most of all, he wanted to see Helga.

The plan was to head to the boarding house and see his grandparents first. Phil took his calls every week, always managing to complain when Arnold called collect. Gertie sometimes answered the phone, all excited, calling him "Robinson Crusoe" and asking him how the bushmen were treating him. He smiled fondly, thinking of them, his spirit always gallened that somehow, time hadn't really touched either of them. Phil walked with a cane now, but was still just as salty, unscrupulous, and scheming as always. Gertie was in remarkable shape, probably owing to all the karate she practiced, and was still hopping around the boarding house by all accounts. Even if his entire world had shifted dramatically when he decided to stay with his parents, the anchor of his world, his loving grandparents, had remained the lighthouse he could point his soul at for purchase. Phil was always there with half-cocked advice, and Gertie was always there with outrageous wisdom that she cloaked and obfuscated with what seemed like nonsense and rambling.

He hoped seeing them again brought him a bit of stability, something resembling a recognizable foundation that would make this return trip less terrifying.

A light late summer rain draped over the windows of the taxi, slipping him into a veil of grey mist as he was brought back home. The black interior of the cab was almost womb like, stifling hot, and smelling like bodies. Within the well-traveled memories of his past, nothing had ever felt so alien and isolating as the lonely ride back to Hillwood.

---

"Hey, is that Arnold?" a person that reminded Arnold remarkably of Sid shouted out. He was sitting on the stoop of the red brick frat house, rolling something to smoke and surrounded by a group of people Arnold didn't recognize. Arnold didn't reply at first, walking slowly to the party to keep his nerves in check. Closer, he saw that it was indeed his old friend Sid; black hair slicked back, wearing a black western pearl snap shirt tucked into skinny black jeans, which had their cuffs rolled up to expose recently polished and shined black ostrich skin leather boots. Arnold could hardly believe the well-dressed figure was Sid even with that familiar bold and prominent nasal profile, but when he stood up eagerly to throw a big hug around Arnold, a wave of familiarity and excitement crashed into him.

"Sid!" Arnold could hardly articulate the surprise he felt. Sid tucked the hand-rolled cigarette behind his ear, shaking Arnold's hand firmly.

"Hot damn, Arnold, it's way cool to see you. I figured you'd be shorter; I owe Stinky fifty bucks." Arnold saw tattoos on Sid's forearms, dark shapes and figures he couldn't make out but that reminded him strongly of the kinds of things he saw on cartel enforcers. It unnerved him, but he pushed it out of his mind, focusing on the brief reunion.

"Yeah, it's good to be back. I'm super glad to see you too, Sid. Where is Stinky?"

"The slammer." Sid grinned.

"Wh-what? What happened?" Arnold couldn't hide his shock.

"Ah, I'm just fucking with ya. But you sure bought it easy enough! Show's what you think of us after all these years huh?" Sid's grin was wide. Arnold always appreciated his friend's unique sense of style and jocularity. Sid was a kidder, and it gladdened Arnold to see that hadn't faded. "He's inside, trying to get into some twiggy girl's skirt." Sid brought the hand-rolled cigarette to his mouth, lighting it casually. "Say, you need to party? Everything I got's on the house for my man The Returner tonight. Sid's special stocks are wide open for Arnold Shortman, the Man of the Hour."

Arnold felt uncomfortable. It wasn't that he was against people using recreational drugs of their own free will; he had just spent a long time seeing the harmful effects of the trafficking of said substances. You looked at a joint differently when you had seen first hand a little girl harvesting the plant used to roll it at gunpoint.

"Nah, thanks though. I pregamed," Arnold lied. That was another thing he'd picked up in his ten year absence; a sense of subtlety and the tools to put it to use.

"You just find me outside if you change your mind," Sid grinned, shaking Arnold's hand again. "You better get inside though, it'd be way uncool of you to keep her waiting."

"Her? Who do you mean?" Arnold had a feeling whom Sid had meant, but played the fool for her benefit. He still didn't know how people regarded her about this topic; Helga never told him anything.

"C'mon man," Sid tilted his head knowingly. "Just get inside."

Arnold nodded, smiling and offering awkward pleasantries to the circle of people around Sid that had watched their reunion with silence. He had no idea who any of them were, but it was obvious to him that every single one of them knew of him.

Squeezing past two girls holding hands in the doorway, Arnold stepped into the stale warmth and smoky haze of the party, the smell of beer and marijuana immediately clinging to his senses like an August heat wave. He'd never been inside a party of this size before, having mostly been to tribal celebrations and a few quinceaneras with far fewer people crowding the spaces within. He spotted the beer line, a big guy in a letter jacket pumping the keg and pouring drinks into red plastic Solo cups, which were snatched up as soon as he could get them out on the table. Another line snaked and roped through the house, leading to what he saw was the downstairs bathrooms under the stairs leading to the second floor. A third line wove up the stairs, leading beyond where he could see, but he imagined it was to the private rooms where people could sequester themselves.

In the far corner of the living room, he spotted Brainy behind the unearthly blue glow of a MacBook and a wide spread of DJ turntables and sound mixers, large sound-canceling headphones pressed to one ear, his head bobbing to the complex beat he was mixing and that thrummed in the air around Arnold like a heartbeat.

Brainy glanced up from his music, making eye contact with Arnold for half a beat. The look was brief, but it was enough to tell Arnold everything he needed to know about Brainy and Helga. Jealousy has a lot of ways it manifests, and the lemon look Brainy painted on his face said in one instant that Arnold was not welcome in Brian's world. Arnold couldn't blame him.

Arnold moved towards the stage where Brainy was suddenly mixing in "Hit the Road Jack" by Ray Charles into the pounding house rhythm. The message wasn't lost on him, but Arnold wanted to get a better look and to size up his rival - if he is a rival, Arnold wondered - and say hello. Even Brainy deserved a greeting after so many years, though it promised to be awkward with the music so clearly expressing how the tall, wraithlike boy felt about the possible reunion.

"Just a minute, Shortman," a soft, feminine voice purred in his ear up close, a slender hand slinking around his arm. "Don't you dare slip by without saying hello to Rhonda Wellington Lloyd."

Arnold turned to see Rhonda, her tall and slender form pressed up tight against his shoulders. She held his arm with two thin hands, the nails painted black and tipped in red, a silvery bangle hanging loose and large from a small wrist. She was wearing a dusky red dress, just as Arnold always pictured her, but poured into it with a taught and slinky body Arnold hadn't ever imagined. Her sharp, nearly flawless bob curled up and in under her chin, framing her heart shaped face and drawing attention to the thin red line of a feline smile on her strikingly pretty features. Arnold had to force himself to take a breath; she was stunningly beautiful, and immaculately styled and groomed to match.

"Give us a kiss for old time's sake?" She purred, leaning up to whisper the request into his ear. His face felt hot, and he turned his face to oblige, offering a quick friendly peck on the cheek.

"Rhonda, you look amazing." He sincerely meant it. Arnold had always liked Rhonda, even if she was shallow and stuck up, because he'd always seen the side of her that needed validation and attention just as much as Helga did. Rhonda's difference was in that she gathered friends up around her like weapons against loneliness, and ruled over them with her good looks and wealth, charming them with wit and cowing them with the fear of her harpy tongue. Even still, he had always seen a nice girl under all of that glitz and glamour.

The creature poured against him, touching his chest and smiling, was someone quite familiar and yet altogether strange.

"Thanks, darling, but I'm sure I'm a total fright in this dreadful heat. But look at you, you're all grown up." She squeezed a hard bicep for emphasis. "Very nice, I approve as a naturally born gifted connoisseur on everything male. Have you been here long?" She started to lead him through the party towards the back of the house. Away from Brainy, who he cast one last look at.

Brainy had watched the whole interaction, and just watched Arnold go.

"I just got here. I saw Sid outside-" Arnold began.

"Ugh, Sid, that little cretin." Rhonda scowled. "He's shaking down everyone that comes in for party favors, and making a small fortune I'd wager. No respect for decorum at all, that wretch. I'll have to remember that the next time he booty calls me."

"Sid booty calls you?" Arnold couldn't hide the surprise in his voice.

"He tries to, the vicious little troglodyte." Rhonda smiled sweetly up at him, pulling him through a doorway past a couple grinding in front of the amps, and into the kitchen. About a dozen people mingled in the large room, some pooled around a game of beer pong around the kitchen island, a few others raiding the open fridge for anything of interest. Rhonda pushed Arnold back against one of the walls, letting her hand trail on his torso. "You just sit tight right here. I'll fetch Gerald straight away. No use having you blunder about like a lost little orphan all night-oops, my sincerest apologies, Arnold, forgive the clumsy choice of words." She smiled playfully, tapping her head with a small fist as if she'd forgotten that up until they were ten, he had been an orphan.

Has she always been this calculated? Arnold just stood where she planted him, embarrassed, her lingering eye contact making him self-conscious. Her almond shaped mahogany brown eyes seemed to be looking for something in his gaze.

"Have you seen her yet, Arnold?" Her voice had changed tone. It sounded almost sad.

"We ran into each other earlier this week, my first day back." Arnold didn't even try to feign ignorance now. He knew Rhonda well enough to know she was just well connected as Gerald, if not more. He knew she meant Helga.

"Not yet tonight, though? Be alert, Arnold," she started cautiously. "Something's woke our dear Helga up. Or I should say someone. The lioness has teeth again. I just had a delightful tete-a-tete with her and I could swear I was seeing a ghost."

Arnold felt the confusion twisting on his face. He couldn't imagine a Helga without the vicious teeth of her youth. Even if she had been subdued and deflated when they last met, he had thought he could see that fire inside her still lit and tended. "What does that mean?"

"Up until about two hours ago, Helga Pataki was a big dog with a big bark and no bite since practically forever and a day. Since the day you left, actually. Outside of a few noteworthy feminist outbursts-I believe she knocked someone poor grabby-handed mandchild's teeth out last fall?-our little Helga G. Pataki has practically been a pussycat. I've felt so bad for her that I even rigged prom so she'd win Queen. It's been so privately sad. Nobody likes knowing the tiger at the zoo is declawed; it spoils the adventure."

Arnold stared to the side, his eyes falling on the middle distance while he considered this unwelcome, unpleasant news. He didn't like to imagine Helga as anything less than what he remembered her. It not only spoiled the adventure, it frightened him. What else died down in her passionate heart, if her fury had been thus dimmed?

Because like Helga, Arnold had changed. Through a decade of constant struggle against the worst in people, the brilliant beacon of goodness within Arnold that guided him and shined on the best in people and reflected their best potential back to them and brought them the gift of self reflection and kindness had dimmed and cooled to small and carefully tended embers of hope. Arnold had the unfortunate privilege of a prematurely adult perspective from a young age once he reunited with his parents. Exposure to the grandiose, nearly operatic efforts people of enormous privilege and wealth went to utterly annihilate those unfortunate souls that were the least of all humanity soured the brilliant hope within him. Arnold still wished for the best in people, and he worked tirelessly to help them realize this potential as part of his life's ambition; but reality had checked the rampant and unwieldy naivete of his youth, sculpting it into a pragmatic, cautious optimism.

If so much had changed within his heart, Arnold feared, who's to say that everything he loved about Helga wasn't lost as well? Who's to say that her words at the cafe weren't utterly truthful? Stupid, blind hope and a stubborn belief in magic and fairy tales buoyed his affections despite that fatefully chilly meeting; tonight, he aimed to conclusively and utterly squeeze the conclusion to a potentially misspent youth and settle the matter of his heart once and for all. He owed it to Lila. He owed it to Helga. He owed it to himself.

"Rhonda, I'm still in love with-" Arnold began. He had to tell her, he had to tell someone.

"Ah! Ah, no no! No, shush. Shush, shhhhh." Rhonda put her fingers on his mouth, shutting him up. "I don't want to hear you say whatever it is you were foolishly and prematurely thinking about saying. I've always thought that you were a great man, and they are few and far between. Don't spoil my night by shattering that heroic image by attempting some clumsy confession of your truest undying love for me."

Rhonda smiled kindly at him, releasing his mouth from her touch. Arnold felt embarrassed, recognizing that Rhonda had just saved him from telling the most nosey and most powerful gossip in Hillwood who of the two girls in his life he intended to choose. There was that kindness in her, shielding Arnold from her even as she accepted the truth of her own character.

"Just keep in mind," she continued, "you're going to see an experience a panoply of remarkable circumstances tonight. This is just the beginning. Everybody here is glad you're back, and everything has been done for you."

Arnold blinked, unsure what to make of that awkward admission.

Rhonda had the unlikely beneficence in her to tell him precisely what to make of it. "So just keep in mind, we all love you very much, Arnold Shortman. Some of us more than others." With that, she leaned up on the toes of her black flats to press a lingering, tender kiss to his mouth, smiling against his confused and automatically pursed lips. She dropped from her tiptoes shyly, and flashed him one of her more cunning and defiant grins.

"I always wanted to try that," she laughed with a conqueror's joy, and swayed out of the kitchen with lingering eye contact until she was out of view. Arnold was left wondering what other surprises were in store for him, his lips tingling with the sticky taste of cinnamon lip gloss.

---

Arnold stepped out into the lightly misting rain, the coffee shop door closing behind him with the tiny jingle of the bell hung above the doorway. Engrossing anger overwhelmed him, frustration and confusion hoarding the lion's share of his emotive balance, squashing the calm he was desperately attempting to gather in the relatively fresher air.

What the fuck is going on, he struggled inwardly. Helga was stonewalling him. She wasn't just acting put out to be seeing him, she was doing the best she could, by his estimation, to be outright hurtful. What in the hell happened to her in ten years?

Seeing her had been a shock. It didn't help that she had literally barrelled into him, the surprising strength and weight of her momentum knocking him right off his feet. The Amazon River had less luck toppling him in the past. But the physical sight of her, an adult beyond the scope of his imagination to anticipate, had sent him into an unexpected shock. Luckily for Arnold, the place his mind went when he couldn't think was friendliness and kindness; to Helga, he had hoped, he just seemed excited rather than dead nervous.

She was beautiful. Not in the way you'd see in glossy magazines or movie screens, Arnold thought, but in a vivid way, an expressive way, like the brush strokes of Van Gogh, making bold, powerful shapes of color to fleetingly express the weight of beauty in a single moment. Arnold was captivated by her, not because she didn't match up to his imagination, but precisely because she exceeded it in every capacity.

Her eyebrows-plural, now, he noticed-were still large, bold, and nearly pitch black in stark contrast to her early morning sunlight hued hair. He marveled at the expressive quality her powerful eyebrows possessed, quivering and curling like emphatic punctuation around the story of her eyes. Her eyes, he noticed, were still large and round and emotive, crystal blue and now lined with the oddly mature colors of adult makeup. Her long hair, really long compared to his memories, fell around her shoulders and down to her hips unencumbered by the bow he couldn't fathom seeing her without. Her lips, which had always seemed slightly large on her young face and had given her a pouting expression and a slight frown when they were kids, now seemed plush. Plump. Kissable.

He had stared. Easily more than he had gawked at Lila when she came to visit. The physical transformation in Helga was remarkable, because even though she had grown into her features, her round nose and her slightly too-large ears no longer as awkward on a pre-teen face, she was still Helga.

And now she was alone in the coffee shop, hopefully chewing on his suggestion. Hopefully finding the truth inside herself that she needed to say. Hopefully, Arnold wished, about to end this nightmare.

He needed to talk to someone. Gerald just got off the phone with me a half hour ago, he's no good. Arnold pulled his phone from his pocket, dialing one of the only people that knew the whole story, and who had remained stubbornly unbiased through the whole affair.

"Bueno?" Stella picked up the line, automatically answering her son in Spanish. When he started living with them, traveling between indigenous territories in South and Central America, Arnold had learned that his mother was a brilliant teacher, but a strict instructor. She spoke only Spanish to him for a full year before he became fluent, finally easing off and having English conversations with him on special days. It had frustrated him terribly at first, the young boy merely wishing to talk to his mother in a language that he understood, merely wishing he could tell her everything he had always wanted to say but couldn't; it wasn't until he was seamlessly switching between the two languages with her, effortlessly communicating ideas and concepts with a creative flair he'd never had before that he understood the reason she had so rigidly pushed him. Arnold was close enough to his mother that no secret was sacred between them; no topics were taboo. She had given him his first beer on his 18th birthday, and given him advice when his first girlfriend in Bolivia had told him he wasn't very good at kissing. Arnold trusted his mother with everything, precisely because he could communicate with her in any medium that was necessary.

He very badly needed that connection now, when Helga had ripped the foundation of his fantasies out from under him.

"Mom, it's not going well," He began in Spanish. He would speak in that passionate language for this, needing the specific cultural concepts it could express. "Helga is the bull at the gate."

"Oh Arnold. You knew that the dreams of your past would be difficult to find in your present." Stella sighed for her son, the affectionate and disappointed sound making her seem so close to Arnold.

"I want to see the fire in her heart. But Helga is an icy wall; I will never get the truth of her feelings when she holds herself in locks and chains." Arnold found the poetic expression he fell to with his mother in this conversation to be oddly apt. Helga's poetry sprang to mind, and it filled him with painful nostalgia. "If there's no open door for me here, I have to close it for Lila."

"Lila knows you are in HIllwood, and the smart girl knows why. Don't lie to yourself for Lila when Lila has only shown you truth." Stella cut to the heart of it, always a blunt and candid presence in Arnold's life.

"If I can't get through to Helga, the only choice is to return home. To San Lorenzo." Bitter frustration welled in his voice. This wasn't how he wanted it to be when he had finally come back. Nothing was like he imagined.

"My beautiful son, so bright like the sun and yet so dim. Don't let the memory of your past spoil the adventure of returning home to Hillwood. Phil and Gertie are there, and they've missed you very much. Your true friend Gerald has written you faithfully for many years. There's so much for you there. Not just Helga. Helga is difficult. She never wrote you a letter, not really, and I think I know why, but she has to express it for herself. The trouble with Helga is that she can express herself so beautifully to everyone but the one she loves. Maybe she still loves you. Maybe you still love her. Maybe you love Lila. The gift you have is that in your present, there is only possibility. Open your gift when it's ready. Don't be scared of what is inside before you've opened the box."

Arnold listened to his mother pour out all the words he had needed, her beautiful Spanish curling around the poetry of her expert advice. He knew she was right; he was pushing things too fast. Helga took seven years to tell him how she felt the first time; if she still felt something-and he very much needed to know if she did-it wouldn't come spilling out of her beautifully the instant she saw him.

"You're right. I'll give her time. I can be her friend for now, or forever if she wishes it. I've waited so long for the truth, a little longer is nothing to me."

"You're such a good man, Arnold. Helga and Lila are lucky you have enough love to shine for them both. Just don't keep either of them waiting for long." Stella still didn't know about the engagement, he was fairly certain. Stella wouldn't be giving him advice as if there was still a choice to be made if she did know. Stella was one for keeping your promises.

"Thanks mom. I better get back to Helga. She's expecting me to come back in, and I'll hear her confession or else reassure her with patience."

"Good boy. Tell me how it goes later. Your father says hello."

"Love you mom," Arnold said, closing the conversation in English. Putting the phone in his pocket, he pulled out a scrap of paper, the receipt from his taxi. Just in case she tries to close this chapter up prematurely, he thought, jotting down the date he and Lila had decided that they would be married, barring any changes in Hillwood.

"Christmas Day, we say goodbye." He stared at the note, feeling awkwardly melodramatic when he read it back to himself. But, if she closed herself off fully, really giving him the firm "no" he was afraid of, he'd have to say goodbye for himself and for Lila.

He swallowed the gnawing, nagging guilt that always boiled within his guts when he considered for too long that he was playing with Lila's feelings, an ugly truth that he struggled with every step forward he took in Hillwood. She deserves better, he thought, even as he followed it up with, I deserve to know the truth.

One way or the other, he would have his answer, stepping back into the coffee shop after gathering his courage and locking eyes with a very sad looking, very frightened blonde girl from his memory that struggled and refused the meaning of his return.

---

"HEY, AW~NOLD" A deep, raspy voice nasally shocked Arnold from the nervous, anticipatory haze his mind had settled into in the kitchen. He glanced around, looking for a familiar face from the voice he could almost recognize.

His gaze settled on Harold, although he almost hadn't recognized him at first.

A dirty-looking, metal-studded street kid dressed in torn, patched, and filth-crusted denim sneered back at him, looking like he was squeezed into his clothes like cheap sausage and smelling like he'd spent the night under a car. His short denim cap, rimmed with rusting-out metal studs and festooned with badges and patches of symbols Arnold couldn't possibly recognize, sat right where the Jewish boy's blue baseball cap had always been, bill turned up to expose a massive unkempt unibrow pierced in six places. A scruffy, salt-and-pepper beard blossomed from the tanned and grinning face, emerging from a thick neck with every available inch of surface area blackened with bold tattoos. A denim vest, squeezing his arms and chest into pronounced shape, boldly displayed Satanic and Anarchist imagery, painted and sewn and stitched on, flying the colors of a Punk for all to see.

"What's UP Shortman, you skinny piece of shit!" Harold pounced, tackling Arnold into the wall with a powerful bear hug. The sour, earthy smell of him poured into Arnold's nose, almost watering his eyes. Arnold struggled to get an arm free, unsure if he was surprised, disgusted, or laughing. He heard himself laughing.

"HAROLD oh my god let go-Harold, dammit! Harold you smell like a chain smoking horse butthole!" Arnold got out between breaths, his finally freed arm pounding on the muscular boy's back.

Harold released him with a yellow grin, punching Arnold straight on the arm with a painful thud.

"Aw, I'm sorry Arnold. Too much of a pussy to get hugged? What, does your mommy wave her arms at you when she tucks you in for beddie-bye, afraid she might bruuuuise you?" Harold sarcastically blinked his eyes at Arnold. He couldn't believe how little Harold had changed, outside of being a physical ordeal to experience.

"What happened to you, uh, I mean, you look so different." Arnold tried to hold back the distaste he had for the change in the boy. He wasn't sure that Harold missed it.

"Aw me and Patty just said the big 'Fuck You!' to our parents, been livin' free together finally after all these years."

"Wow. Patty too?"

"Yeah! It's great, she's great. Baddest bitch in Hillwood, she's messed me up so many times, oh man, she's so strong and so ruthless and so punk. She's the most punk bitch in Hillwood, Arnold, it's great! Oh man, she's so great."

This guy's still an idiot, Arnold realized. But his heart's still in the right place. Even if Harold was arguably worse to be around, and throwing around gendered slurs about his apparent girlfriend, Arnold still felt the obvious love and affection and warmth radiating from Harold. Maybe he had changed.

"ANYway, me and Patty are gonna blow this lame party soon, after the big show I mean. Helga's shitty band will probably fuck everything up, oh man, it's going to be hilarious! Ahahahaha!" Harold's cackle grated on Arnold. Helga's band? Arnold didn't know about that.

"What do you mean, Helga's band? Is Helga in a band? Are they playing tonight?"

"Oops! Sorry, Arnold, I spoiled the surprise! Oh well, it was a dumb surprise anyway, like anyone'd be impressed with dumb Helga's shitty love songs! It's so not Punk!"

Love songs? Arnold felt a buzzing in his blood, an electric galvanism that threatened to animate his body into alien and impossible configurations; his skin leapt with excitement. Are they about me?

Instantly Arnold recognized the ego in his question. How small of him, he felt, to assume that Helga was only capable of feeling affection for him. Helga was enormous. Within her oceans there were depths he could never fathom. It was a puny assumption on his behalf that everything was bent towards him.

"Is Patty here?" Arnold needed to change topics. Letting his thoughts linger in the unwelcome garden of uncertain romances brought squirming anxiety to his guts.

"Yeah! She's totally hammered!" Harold cackled with glee, proud of Patty in a way that Arnold couldn't understand, but could recognize just the same. "You wanna come see her?"

"Yeah, I'd like that." Arnold was ready to proactively try to find more of his friends. Harold was just the foul smelling beacon he needed to call out to the rest of PS118, summoning their scattered attentions.

Harold shouldered through a group of preppy looking kids, cruelly forcing his bulk physically through them. "ExCUSE me, got a V.I.P. coming through! And Arnold's here too!" Harold's obnoxious nasal cackle followed his bad joke. Somehow, it made Arnold nostalgic to hear that braying laugh again.

Arnold followed his old friend, apologetically smiling to the half dozen or so strangers Harold had managed to offend in an instant. Harold was leading him outside to the back yard, he realized, where the crowd fanned out and clustered into familiar groups. Three speakers as tall as him stood on the small concrete porch, pumping out a funky groove of Poolside and Burial that Brainy was mixing together into a cooled down, slower tempo writhe in the buzzing air of celebration.

Arnold was shoved against the wall almost as soon as he left the building, pushed back and up into the brick of the doorway by two people in the frenzy of what seemed to be a fistfight. Arnold threw his hands up in loosely held fists in front of his face, curling his shoulders over to protect his torso automatically. Six years of boxing in South American gyms had given him rudimentary instincts in self defense that served him well when a large fist haphazardly thudded against his bicep, immediately numbing the entire limb.

"WHOA watch it, you stinking cow!" A familiar voice screeched in surprise, a skinny figure in what appeared to be an extremely fine charcoal gray suit with shiny black hair and designer-looking sunglasses pressed against him. Arnold sucked in a breath of surprise as another fist from the aggressor collided with his shoulder from the other side of the well dressed victim pressed against him.

"CURLY?!" Arnold growled in surprise, looking over Curly's shoulder to see the short flame red Mohawk and row of spiked hair atop the tall figure of the tattered-clothing clad girl drunkenly throwing hands.

"P-patty! Patty stop, it's Arnold, I'm behind Curly!" Arnold cried out in surprise and shock, the crowd of people gathered in excited attention around the sorry excuse for a fistfight. Really, to the gathered gawkers, it was just a big street girl pounding on some rich boy while a tan-looking kid in a pink flannel shirt got caught in the mess.

Arnold shoved Curly off of him with a grunt, sending the awkward boy bowling into Patty, who fell back and against the meaty wall of Harold. Arnold steadied himself, watching Patty's bare brows-totally devoid of any hair at all, and dotted with fierce looking metal studs-lift high when she looked at Harold with something that looked like adoration in her eyes. "Oh heeey, baby." She slurred. "Come to help me knock heads, my little dumpster Casanova?" Patty's strong looking hand, ringed with metal and leather bangles, caressed Harold's dirty beard affectionately.

"Yeah, babe! Who's the suit?" Harold seemed to completely disregard that up until a second ago, Patty had been wailing in Arnold in an attempt to pound Curly.

"The suit, you pathetically destitute street trash, is Thaddeus Gammelthorpe, and I could sue your porcine grandchildren for this!" Arnold brushed his chest off while Curly lectured the two punks who seemed wrapped around each other, totally unaware of Curly's outrage. "Hey! Listen to me! I buy and sell companies with payrolls larger than this entire party on the day to day!"

Arnold regarded Curly with an instant level of understanding and disgust. "I don't think they care how rich you've gotten, Curly," he blithely explained.

"Oh, hello, Arnold. Thank you for cushioning my fall. And for taking those hits for me. You always had a keen eye for justice. Glad to see that your innate altruism has blossomed into protecting the weak like a proper man." Curly's voice dripped with pretension and an audible note of disgust for everything around him.

"Yeah, great Curly, but let's let Sid and Nancy over here breed next to the speakers and get some space. I have questions to ask you." Arnold got some distance from Patty and Harold, watching Harold's thick hand feel up her fishnets and tiny jean shorts from the corner of his eye. I guess they grew up a little.

Curly and Arnold settled for standing underneath a large, drooping oak that was wrapped from root to leaf in festive christmas lights. Arnold rubbed the spot on his arm where Patty had slugged him, still feeling the intent to seriously injure or maim in the ghostly throbbing of the impact.

"Wanna tell me why Patty started throwing punches, Curly?"

"Thaddeus, actually. And as I'm fortunate enough to not be a zookeeper, how am I supposed to anticipate the juvenile outbursts of a beast like that?" Curly was inspecting the jacket of his finely tailored suit. Arnold's eye caught a glimpse of the designer label on the inside of his lapel when Curly bent over. Michael Kors. This piece of shit came to a frat party in a three thousand dollar suit. Come on.

"Sorry, Thaddeus, but do you think it had anything to do with throwing comments around like 'I buy and sell companies daily?' Something tells me Patty's not exactly a receptive audience to that sort of thing." Annoyance in his voice, Arnold tried to figure out what in the hell happened to Curly. Harold made sense, and so did Patty, in the same way that Harold did. Arnold needed to puzzle out the strange destiny of the boy he used to know as Curly.

"If you must know, that hell-weaned high school dropout was exercising what few brain cells devoted to memory I'm sure she has left to intentionally antagonize me. Big surprise, she was only just about the most miserable example of humanity in high school, a very paragon for failure and bitter futility."

"Yeah but what happened?" Arnold was losing patience with Thaddeus quickly.

"She had the audacious gall to bring up my nervous breakdown, you nosey prat. I wasn't about to let that slide anymore; I am a Wolf! I don't leave challenges to my self-made success and superiority go unchallenged. I cut her down immediately, reminding her how she slept on a city-hall spiked sidewalk last Christmas Eve while I slept soundly with my face between the right and left breasts of a supermodel whose name I didn't even bother to learn. That's what happened, and then you collided with me, nearly dislocating my shoulder, and then that blood-soaked she-beast starts swinging. You're all a sorry lot of buccaneers and hooligans, and Hell take you all!" Thaddeus's voice raised in pitch higher and higher the more he progressed, and Arnold became more and more infuriated the further the disgusting tale was told. By the end, Arnold felt like punching Thaddeus himself.

But what is that about a nervous breakdown? "I heard you're in New York. Wall Street?" Arnold took a guess, based on the suit and Thaddeus' remarkably myopic attitude.

"For once, you seem keenly observant, Arnold. I'd buy you a cookie, but bakeries usually can't break a hundred."

Everything made sense now. Curly had always been off, but Arnold had attributed his hyperactivity and childish psychosis to attention-starved thrill seeking behavior. A boy that thrived on negative attention, similarly to Helga, but who also seemed to lack the basic empathic need to be connected to someone in the way she did. It made sense that his highly unstable, grandiose exaggeration of a personality would translate especially well to the sociopathic world of hedge fund management, speculative trading, and hostile acquisitions of Wall Street.

Arnold had seen enough. Curly-Thaddeus, he reminded himself-was a problem too beyond his caring at the moment. He had other, blonder, more attractive fish to fry.

"Keep your cookie, Thaddeus. You might wanna just head home early tonight. I think you're done here."

"Nice try, Romeo, but I won't step a foot towards sanctuary until she acknowledges me." Thaddeus' eyes narrowed behind his narrow frame glasses.

"Rhonda?"

"Wellington Lloyd," Thaddeus finished. "The one and only. I didn't drag my expensively manicured ass all the way back to this sorry slum just to have her cold shoulder me all night. A courteous hello would be peaches and cream."

Again with the dessert references. I wish I had read more Freud. Arnold regarded Thaddeus carefully. Somehow, somewhere in that vicious, baked-goods focused shell of a man was the boy he remembered. Even if he was buried deep beneath expensive clothes and a career in callous evil, Curly still wanted attention from the one person who was virtually guaranteed to never offer it up.

"I think if you want to get Rhonda's attention, you're going to have to drop the act, Curly."

"Act? Arnold, who exactly do you think you are?" Thaddeus sneered at Arnold, an ugly expression on his sour face.

"I'm just saying, the odds that Rhonda will respond positively to you go up exponentially if you don't act like such a stuck up horse's ass." Arnold didn't mind being candid with Curly. Curly clearly didn't mind being candid with him.

"Wake up call, Shortman. You've been gone for ten years. Not just any ten years, but all the important ones. You have no idea who I am, you don't know anything about me or what's happened to me or where I've been. You think you can just march up to me like when we were kids and set me straight? There's nothing to straighten out. I'm Thaddeus Maplethorpe, young and rich and powerful, and I don't answer to you or Rhonda. You insult and belittle me with your false concern and prettily painted up advice. Go moon over Helga like we all know you're here to do, and get out of my life."

Stubborn prick. Arnold couldn't decide if he had the patience to set Thaddeus straight, help him see the gross and insidious way he'd chosen to live his life, or if he should just write the whole situation off and go back to the kitchen to wait for Rhonda and Gerald.

The old, younger Arnold would have opted to try to help. The newer, older Arnold didn't have the patience.

"Alright, Thaddeus. I don't mind leaving you to your money or your misery. I'm headed back to the kitchen to wait for Rhonda and Gerald. You enjoy whatever it is you enjoy, and have a nice life. I certainly won't be in it any more." Arnold walked away, just barely catching the sad, disappointed look on Curly's face as he pushed past Harold and Patty, now thoroughly entwined in a passionate, extremely public dry hump, and disappeared back into the crowded kitchen.

---

Arnold sighed patiently, trying not to sound so tired to the sweet girl on the other line. Lila was silent. She's heard the exasperation, but chose not to comment on it.

"Look, Lila, I'm just going to a party with all our old friends, and it's just going to be a nice night. There's nothing to worry about." Lies in his mouth, spoken to Lila, tasted like old stale citrus.

"You say these things to try to console me, in your ever so sweet way, but I'm not naive and I'm not stupid. Arnold, there's going to be a lot of pent up emotion at the party - I just want you to be extra careful."

"I'm sure everything will be just fine." Arnold had been telling himself that every moment since his fateful chat with Helga days before. He almost believed it.

"I'm ever so hopeful you're right. Are we going to talk about Helga at all?" Arnold winced. Helga was the one topic he didn't ever want to discuss with Lila.

A long pause while he tried to calibrate what he wanted to day was filled with the ambient sounds of street symphonies of traffic and humanity outside his boarding house window.

"I just don't know what there is to discuss anymore."

"Well we can talk about how I've got your ring on my finger, but she's still on your mind. An awful lot. She's why you're there. It is uncomfortable for you to talk about, but I know there are a lot of ever so confusing unresolved issues from your past with her. I'm here though, I can talk to you. You can talk to me, even about her."

Arnold wasn't so sure, and also intensely uncomfortable. He deeply cared about LIla. He loved her, powerfully, and was fiercely loyal to their history and to her bright and impossible-to-defeat spirit. Where Helga had written him but a single letter of pithy, forgettable content, LIla and Arnold had become pen pals of legendary frequency and intimacy. Hundreds of thousands of words had been exchanged between them over the years: confessions of fears, loves, dreams, and ambitions; detailed accounts of their daily lives; meaningless small talk of the local weather exchanged like two old men in Central Park; and finally, once things became serious, heartfelt words of affection and tenderness, slowly built into Lila's roaring devoted passion and Arnolds quiet supportive doting. Arnold and Lila knew each other perhaps better than Arnold and Gerald, and their bond had grown to become something resembling siblings, in Arnold's eyes, yet something more that mixed into the confusing territory of lovers.

The untimely and sudden death of her parents at her farm home had shattered the bubble Lila had been living in. At Arnold's suggestion, she came to visit him. And that's when the accident happened. And that's when he promised her to always be by her side. The ring had been a formality; already in his heart Lila was married to a piece of his soul, and would remain buried there always.

Even if Helga had been buried there first, deeper and more profoundly.

"It just hurts to talk about, Lila. I don't like making you upset. And besides, I already talked to Helga and nothing happened."

"Oh but I recognize that tone, Arnold. You're ever so upset and conflicted that nothing happened. If I heard relief, I'd say 'come home to me, hurry,' but all I hear is hesitation at an open door. But it's okay, I understand, Arnold. She's a very big part of you. She represents everything you miss about your life in Hillwood, but she's also someone you miss very much. It's okay. You have every right to get closure. I trust you to behave like the perfectly oh-so gallant gentleman you are. But I don't think I trust Helga very much, I'm sorry to say."

Arnold was not convinced there was anything to worry about for Lila. Nothing in what he had experienced in the last ten years matched up to the childlike fantasies he'd entertained in lonely nights, on hot days, or even in the middle of conversations. Helga vibrated inside him with an energetic harmonics that was troublesome for its persistence. Once he had figured out how he felt, and had accepted what she was to him, there wasn't anything he could do but love her. But now, he was nervous and sick to say, it seemed to have all been a fantasy built on ghosts and shadows and smoke. What did he have left, except a closed chapter in his life he needed to discard, and move forward with Lila?

For one, he had the nagging persistent doubt that Helga had not been telling the truth. He knew it wasn't Helga's actions that had hurt and haunted him so thoroughly since his fateful return, it was his brain's stubborn reaction against it.

"Helga won't do anything, Lila. Helga had ten years to do something. She had the coffee shop to do something. She's had days since to do something. It's over. After the party, I'll help settle the affairs at the boardinghouse like I planned and come to the farm. We'll talk about what comes next then, and get ready for Christmas. Together."

Lila sighed longingly. "You know I love you very much."

"I know. Thank you," Arnold quietly replied, staring up at the dusk sky streaking reds and oranges across a deepening blanket of purple overhead through his old room's skylight.

"Just try to have fun, but be ever so cautious. For my peace of mind at least."

"You keep saying be cautious, and I keep telling you that there's nothing to worry about." Arnold snapped, getting exhausted of this circling conversation.

"Arnold, there's no need to get cross." Lila's voice was remarkably stern. "I'm partially paralyzed, not made of glass. If you don't stop tiptoeing around me, I shall go absolutely bonkers. Be honest with me, Arnold, please."

"Alright, fine," he huffed. He couldn't identify why she was making him so frustrated. It was an itchy thing, a wiggling feeling in his chest, where guilt usually lurked, but in this moment he felt only bitter resentment. It made him want to vomit.

"Do you intend to confront Helga again, or do you expect she will attempt to confront you?" Lila was remarkably calm when she asked the question. Something high in the way she asked him made Arnold uneasy; something was hidden in her tone, and to Arnold, it meant she was hiding something at all. It was thoroughly out of character for her.

"Maybe."

"Maybe to both?"

"Maybe." Arnold felt his jaw grinding.

"I think I would be much more comfortable if you tried to get closure as I have suggested in a much more public, less alcohol-lubricated environment. But short of growing wings and flying up there, it doesn't seem like I can do very much to stop whatever will happen." Lila sounded sad, but Arnold also heard the hint of a confirmed fear in her small voice.

"Lila, nothing will happen that you need to worry about. I keep saying that."

"Try to see it from my perspective for a second, Arnold. My fiancé is going to a big party thrown in his honor where his longtime fantasy girl and boyhood crush will be, probably drunk, and when only days before the two of them had a painful reunion that left said fiancé with ever so many questions and suspicions that he won't talk to me about."

Acid anger jolted through him, and Arnold felt the tension, confusion, and anxiety about the party boil into words in his mouth, word that coiled around his tongue and teased it into motion. A surprised gasp filled his lungs with reluctant air and the panic of this immediate bolt of heated bitterness pushed those fateful words out, cruelly pinning them in the air to hang with echoing, gravity-defying audacity.

"I just don't know what I want anymore!"

Silence. Arnold heard the wind rustle something on Lila's end. She was outside, probably on her porch alone at sunset. He pictured her holding her phone to her face, looking in pain up at the hateful orange ball of the sun as it grew engorged with the last ghosts of the day and sank beneath waving, scarlet-lit fields of grain that stretched out forever in front of her. A sea of bitter magenta that mocked her with every beauty she couldn't appreciate for the words he had let loose from their awful cage.

Arnold's phone lit up with a notification against his face. He turned the screen to look at it, the call still proceeding in grim silence as he checked the text he had just got. It was a number he didn't recognize.

A square picture-probably Instagram filters, Arnold recognized-filled the messages window in a text from a stranger. In sepia tones, a pink shoebox with what looked like "Important" written on the side, the top open. Empty. A pink ribbon rolled up next to it.

It was from Helga. The hot sick feeling in his chest he got when he realized that alarmed him.

Arnold closed his messages app hastily and brought the phone to his face. Lila still hadn't said a word. He had to fix this, no matter how much it hurt them. There wasn't any other honest way to face what needed to be faced. Anything else would be callous, treacherous.

"Lila," he began hesitantly. That picture confused him. He couldn't divine the meaning, but he knew it was significant. She was trying to tell him something about the party he was going to be at in a few hours.

"Yes, Arnold?" Lila finally answered him, taking nearly as long to respond as he had taken to speak first.

"I don't know what I want anymore. You should take that ring off your finger until I figure it out. It's not fair to either of us that it's there while this is going on. I will find out. That much I know. I can't promise anything to anyone anymore, I just can't. We're in frontier. But I will keep the first promise I made to you, no matter what happens. I will always be by your side, no matter what happens at this party or the next party or anything else in life."

Emotion choked Lila when she pushed his name through her lips. "Arnold."

"I'm sorry, Lila. We both know I'm right."

"Arnold, please, wait." She was choking back a lump in her throat, her voice cracking.

"I love you very much. I always will. I'll be able to tell you if that means I can be your husband soon. Someday, soon." Arnold held back the feelings of panic and uncertainty. He had to do this. The feeling he got when he saw Helga's picture confirmed the worst for him.

"Arnold." All Lila could do was say his name. Arnold felt his eyes sting with guilty, angry tears. He hated that he had put himself in this awful position with his stupid reckless need to fix everyone broken. He had done this. He had to fix it. He had one more thing to fix before he could be with anyone. Before he could be himself again. His life had been on hold for ten years because of this mess, and he needed an empty slate to put an ending to the story once and for all.

"I love you Lila, but we're broken up. I'll call you tomorrow morning. I love you, I love you, I love you. Lila Sawyer, I love you." It all gushed out of him, pushed from him by a sudden tsunami of memory, every happy moment he'd ever had with her, every loving letter, every fragment of joy she had given him. Ripping it out of himself was the second hardest thing he had ever done.

"Goodbye, Arnold," Lila choked out. The line went quiet. She hung up first.

Arnold set the phone on his bed and held his face in his hands.

He looked at his hands with disgust. I'm so fucked up.

---

"There you are, man," Gerald rushed up to Arnold, a grin on his face. "Rhonda told me you'd be in the kitchen. Couldn't sit still for just a second could ya?" Gerald was in a red satin shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a skinny black tie clipped to the scarlet garment with a silver tie clip. He wore a white belt looped into fine black trousers. Arnold was impressed. Gerald cleaned up well.

Arnold exchanged his secret handshake with Gerald automatically, smiling back at his friend. He has no idea about Lila. Arnold knew that Gerald and Phoebe had gone to talk to Lila without telling him. Lila had told him, but didn't tell him what they talked about. That meant it was either about him and Lila, or about him and Helga.

Either way, it appeared that Lila hadn't contacted either of them since earlier. Arnold moved out of the way of someone trying to get past him, stepping closer to Gerald and taking the opportunity to whisper conspiratorially.

"So where's Helga? I'm tired of bumping around all these strangers. I wanna get this over with"

"Get what over with, my man? The party? No way, man, I put this shit together in your honor. Not about to end the night before the main event." Gerald wagged his eyebrows at Arnold, his smile wide.

"Yeah but what even is the main eve-" Arnold started, before someone bumped into him hard, pushing him away from Gerald and nearly knocking him from his feet.

Arnold grunted, getting his balance and watching Gerald lift Eugene up by the hand. "Eugene!" Arnold's smile was wide, his joy genuine. "Eugene, are you alright?"

The skinny boy turned his undercut-shaved head, a curly pompadour swooped back over his ginger eyebrows. He smiled his too-wide smile, a dappling of freckles crinkling up in his nose and cheeks. "Arnold! I'm okay!" Eugene fell into Arnold in a hug, warm and affectionate. Arnold couldn't help but notice how little he was.

Eugene pulled away, still smiling, and getting a good look at Arnold in his pink and creamsicle-colored flannel shirt with pearl snap buttons, the sleeves rolled up to expose his tanned arms. Arnold thought he saw Eugene bite his lower lip, before Eugene gasped up at him, "You look amazing. Just the same."

Eugene had come out to Arnold in a letter. Arnold had been one of the first people Eugene had told, and had been honored and touched at the gesture of confidence and kindness Eugene had paid him. He'd never forget the words Eugene wrote to him.

"The courage you taught me as a young boy gives me the confidence to be who I am as a young man."

Nothing had gone right for Eugene since the day he'd come out, although anyone could argue that nothing had gone right for the unfortunate young man since the day he was born. It wasn't because of any unfortunate bigotry that Eugene suffered, though. It was his blind optimism that had done him in.

Not long after Eugene had come out to his friends and family at the age of 18, he had fallen in love with the school's drama instructor. The affair was brief. Everyone knew the sad tale now, and it pained Arnold to recall the way that Eugene's name had been dragged through the mud by the man when their passionate affair came to light. Eugene, ever kind and incapable of any cruelty whatsoever, silently accepted every accusation slung his way, and watched his future at Theater School dry up and disappear.

Now he worked at the town's only magic shop, still dreaming of a day when his name didn't carry the stain any longer.

Arnold smiled with kindness at his old friend, hugging him again. "It's really great to see you again, Eugene. I really wanted to see you."

Eugene smiled up at him, shrugging his thin shoulders under a brightly colored, peacock-patterned keffiyeh that was draped over a simple cream-colored deep v-neck t-shirt. He wore slim, white and yellow plaid chino shorts, and small white flats. Arnold thought he looked like a little candle, a bright color in a dark room wherever he went.

"Gerald, has he seen Helga yet?" Eugene turned to Gerald, a curious expression on his face.

"Everybody keeps asking me that," Arnold grumbled. "I would like to see everybody else, too."

"Oh, I know, Arnold. But we're not why you're here. It's okay, everybody knows. We threw this party for you two," Eugene smiled simply, sunnily. "She's in the living room dancing. We should go watch." Something glittered in Eugene's smiling eyes.

Gerald laughed a little bit. "All right, why not? It's about damn time anyway."

Arnold looked at the two of them, who were standing expectantly before him, waiting for his decision.

"Okay. Let's go." Arnold's friends grinned at him, leading the way through the kitchen to the main room where Brainy's DJ table was set up. Where Helga was dancing.

What is happening to me? Arnold couldn't recall ever feeling the intense anticipatory buzz in his head, the frantic excitement that was like a freeform jazz heartbeat. He'd never been this excited in his life. Every step behind him seemed to blend into a vague narrative, and in every instant he was aware of what piece of spacetime he occupied, without any understanding of how it was he arrived there. He simply seemed to be getting pulled towards an inexorable future by an unseen destiny. Keen awareness sharpened every detail while he floated downstream in this karmic boulevarde. Now he was stepping into the living room. Now he was turning his shoulders to squeeze between two separate groups of people, backs building barriers of their unseen bubbles. Now he was looking at Brainy, who was playing Air's "Electronic Performers" and bobbing his torso to the immaculate beat. Now he stood between Gerald and Eugene, transfixed by the ghostly spectre of every instant and moment of his past manifest in the moving, twisting shape of Helga Pataki. Now he was here. Before he was not as close to her as he was now. In his future, another step he would forget would bring him even closer. He had no idea how many it would take, or what path the impossibly-defined, ever-disappearing history of his passage would shape. He simply saw the terminal point of the journey, and there she was.

Helga didn't notice Arnold. He was grateful for the blessing, unsure how he would manage an interaction now. He knew for one thing that he finally knew what he wanted. How strange, he felt, that the mind can tell you what the heart wants, and then offer no insights in this necessary acquisition. If the mind was the heart's way of grasping needful things, then it was a blind guide, driven by unshakable ambition yet lacking the essential tools to arrive at the finish line.

Gerald nudged Arnold, a knowing grin on his face. "Take a picture, Arnold, it'll last longer." Arnold's face pinked, aware of how he was gawking without needing Gerald to point it out.

"He's just taking her all in, Gerald. Helga can be quite the performer." Eugene slipped a small hand around Arnold's bicep, pulling him forward. "Let's get a closer look."

Arnold didn't move at first, but Eugene's gentle tug put a step behind him, and then another. A dozen steps glew like beacons behind him, alighting the past where he was further away from Helga. He thought he could see the unearthly glowing response of the steps he would take before him, pulling him forward.

Eugene slipped from his side, pulling around behind him. He felt two small hands slide onto his back and rest there for a moment, before he was pushed fully forward. He looked behind him in a brief half-panic; he couldn't see Gerald or Eugene any longer. Wherever they were in the crowd, it didn't matter.

Helga Pataki was dancing right next to him. His body responded automatically, a rhythm within him lifting his limbs, placing them here and there, shaking his hips and rolling his shoulders. Somehow, Arnold found that he wasn't just dancing next to Helga, he was dancing with her. A fierce and hot blush reddened his tanned features, but he couldn't tear his gaze from Helga's closed eyes, wondering what she would do if she opened them to find the male body she was energetically dancing with was him.

He got his answer as her large blue eyes opened when his hand found itself on her hip. A spark of surprize started the flash-fire of hot anger on her face, but when their eyes met, her mouth hung open and no sound escaped. She didn't stop moving, she didn't look away. Arnold's mind was a sick riot, alarm bells and warning sirens in his imagination blaring. Escape. Get away. She is the Death of us.

Helga bit her lower lip, and turned her face away as she kept dancing. Their bodies were close, and his hand felt like it was made of flame where it sat on her hip. He could smell her. The warmth of her body and the delicate floral scent of whatever perfume she was wearing fogged his mind. Helga is dancing with me willingly. Arnold could hardly believe the moment he was sharing with her. Only in fantasies had he shared a passionate salsa with her, chest to chest, or escaped to a New Orleans jazz club together for a night of frenzied swing. Here was the real thing, though, and she was pressing her back against his chest, her hands touching his legs tentatively. He felt the furnace of her palms trace along his hips and touch his belly. His face was fire.

The song suddenly transitioned to something much more fast paced, the beat pounding up into a staccato frenzy. Helga's head whipped around, a sloppy grin on her face that she was trying to make fierce with an angry, high arch of her eyebrows. Her hip moved, and she was no longer being touched by Arnold. She put distance between them, brought out of the spell by the sudden change in the music.

"Wh-what's the big idea, Football head? Who said you could d-dance with me?" her voice wavered, almost shaking. She had stopped dancing, and stood holding her arms, wrapping herself in their strong cage walls. Parting the two of them.

"I, uh," Arnold's throat was dry. He couldn't explain in this crowd what he was doing when he barely knew it himself. "I just saw you dancing alone and-"

"And you thought you could just jump in?" Helga shot back, her face still very red. He noticed the sparkle of makeup on her eyelids, the glisten of gloss on her pouty lips. I've never seen makeup on her before. A new surprise. Helga was full of firsts tonight. He wondered what surprises were still to come from her.

"Well...to be fair, you danced back with me." Arnold could barely think, could barely breathe. "You were practically in my lap." The words fell out of his mouth as he watched, helpless.

Helga's eyes narrowed. "It could have been anyone-I was just dancing, it's not like I had any fun because it was you." Helga's voice became sharp and clear, no hesitation.

"I...need to go back outside," came his reluctant reply. A hot cloud in his mind threatened to totally envelop him. Helga's surprise was obvious, but she didn't try to stop him.

"Fine, do whatever pleases. I have to get on stage anyway." Helga's blush faded, and she waved away the moment between them with a hand.

"Whatever you say," Arnold smiled as he repeated his familiar childhood mantra. "Helga." Somehow it caught her by surprise. He watched her stare back at him with a confused and angry and slightly disappointed look on her face. The steps behind him, closer to her. The steps before him would bring him back to her again, he knew. All of life's paths took detours now and then.

---

Arnold folded his arms and leaned against the tree, watching from only six feet as Brainy meticulously checked and re-checked every instrument on the outside stage in the back yard. His retreat had been fortunately timed. He'd managed to get a perfect spot to watch Helga's band play, comfortable against a tree and slightly to the left of the stage. He'd get to see Helga right up front, without any distractions.

Oddly, he couldn't see any of the rest of PS118 out in the backyard where the rest of the entire party had started to gather. He was more and more glad for his early spot grab as time progressed, because the press of people that began to collect up front would have made it impossible for him to find a decent position now.

Eugene and Sheena-Sheena! Arnold smiled with surprise. She looks vibrant in her sun dress!-appeared on stage with Brainy, each holding a corner of a big white sheet. Sheena stood on her tiptoes, lifting the corner of the sheet into the canopy of trees above the stage, and clipped it into place. Arnold's breath held in his throat as he watched Eugene shakily climb one of the tall amps in the back, finally getting on top and clipping the sheet taut into place. The sheet now stretched from one side of the stage to the other, behind the drum kit. Eugene flashed a thumbs up towards the house, grinning, and a bright light shone on stage.

Arnold turned to see Phoebe guiding the beam of a projector on the roof of the house down towards the sheet. The light shifted and shook as she adjusted the angle, and finally shone a haunting blue on the stage, illuminating Brainy as he tuned a guitar.

Are they all in on this? Arnold couldn't help but wonder what else would happen tonight. It wouldn't be unlike the kids of PS118 to work together on something like this, but it was certainly odd that it would be for Helga.

Arnold could barely hold in the shout of surprise that leapt out of his throat when Gerald stepped on stage, picking up the bass guitar and shouldering the strap calmly. Gerald, too?! Arnold gawked, watching Gerald pluck a few strings and test the tension in the neck with his strong fingers. Gerald noticed Arnold's stare, and flashed him a wink and a grin. Arnold barely registered the surprise when Stoop Kid stalked out in a sleeveless tuxedo and sat at the drum kit.

Lila was right to be suspicious, Arnold realized. This was planned - it reeked of one of those crazy all-or-nothing plans they used to cook up as kids. As he watched Gerald move around confidently on the stage, illuminated by the ghostly blue of the projector, he was sure without doubting that it was his best friend who had been part of this. Gerald was on stage with Helga's band; there simply wasn't any way he would consent to such a thing unless it matched up to some plan.

The three boys nodded to each other, and among the milling riot of conversation in the backyard, the amplifier began to ring out a ghostly, metallic note that reverberated hauntingly. Arnold's eyes narrowed, trying to make out the fine details on the stage in front of him through the billow of a smoke machine which had just started up. In his periphery he saw Stinky's face over the large fan at stage right, sporting a curled up handlebar mustache and tending to the machine with a wide smile.

Brainy was playing his guitar, the single note he was picking out ringing out in the hot late Summer evening, bringing the crowd to a consensus of cheer. People whooped and whistled, but the crowd was uniformly bent in anticipatory cheering for the band.

Brainy's arm went wide and he strummed a large note, high and pretty, and shook his guitar gently to reverb the note. Arnold felt the hair on his arms stand up when Gerald started in with the bassline, solid and complementary to the alternating, wavering fragility of Brainy's haunting notes.

For several long bars, they held the duet, Gerald walking them through a playful bassline, Brainy embellishing the journey with whimsy. Stoop kid started in, a very simple 4:4 beat with alternating snare and kick drum accents. The three of them concentrated on their instruments, the song continuing but not progressing or alternating from the same four bars played over and over.

Arnold's breath caught in his teeth when she stepped out onto stage, a blonde spectre floating to her guitar and shouldering it quickly. Behind the roar of excited blood in his ears, he heard the crowd begin to cheer with enthusiasm. Without taking his eyes off Helga, he heard people in the crowd call out her name, and something else.

"Orphan!"

Helga paced nervously from end to end of the stage, not yet playing but looking back and forth from out into the crowd and back at Brainy. Her pacing betrayed her heart to Arnold; she was nervous. Extremely nervous. Helga stopped in front of the microphone, pausing for a moment before shaking her head and moving away, saying something he couldn't hear to Brainy. Brainy, Gerald, and Stoop Kid repeated the same measure they had just played, extending the introduction of the song while Helga gathered herself.

Arnold's eyebrows went up when he watched her pull a beer from behind one of the smaller amps, pulling from it deeply before she walked back to the microphone, scanning the crowd for something. For someone. For him.

When her eyes landed on his, her hand automatically struck her guitar, an ethereal, chrome-steel sound screamed from her amp, gently reverberating and pouring through the soundscape Brainy and Gerald had put into place. Someone in the crowd hollered, a high whoop of joy at the beauty of the sound. Helga strummed her guitar, pulling from those strings the strange phantoms of smoke and steel that tugged Arnold's eye contact with her deeper.

Without breaking that intimate stare, Helga's mouth opened and her smokey, passionate voice sang out, landing on the right bar with the sweet distortion she bent with her guitar and that Brainy and Gerald mixed with steady story-book music.

"Baby, I get nervous,
Just a-being in your service.
Words are full of indecision,
They evince the troubled nimble wit,"

Arnold's chest tightened, and his breathing stopped. Helga's voice was beautiful. Within the shaking, nervous tremble she wove the heartfelt sweetness he'd always seen in her, edged with the dangerous scratch of a lifetime of troubles. As she confessed. As her ribcage opened and exposed in front of everyone they knew and more besides the contents of her heart.

"Oh, nothing in return
But storm and pessimism 'stead of dreamin',
Being good for me and
Just a-standing in your pretty prison.
You're standing here,"

Helga's voice rose and fell with the gentle rocking of the melody, accompanied by the impressively thickly layered sounds that Brainy poured out to join Helga's high, ghostly sounds. She paused her, half a bar passing before she closed her eyes, squeezing them shut as if looking at Arnold was a painful ordeal that she could no longer withstand.

"You think you love me,
Don't you?"

She held every long vowel, pulling the question out from her lungs, high and sweet as Spring, a gentle tremble of fear behind it. The line was long, and soft, and she opened her eyes slowly as she sang, shaking her head sadly while she posed the question.

"Maybe you're the presence
That begs needing other reasons.
I got "Summer still looks pretty,"
I got hungry for the hungry seas.
Oh, living for the people
That have nothing but their blues,
And I have nothing to be nervous about,
Hungerin' over you"

Stoop Kid's steady rhythm, tirelessly drummed out, counted the beats that Arnold's heart managed to click out as Helga's song pinioned him where he was, helpless. He'd never imagined that he would hear sounds so wonderful, so massive from a four piece band composed of his old friends. He'd always known Helga was a genius, brilliant beyond anyone he'd ever met, and her creativity and passion for art had always been one of the most attractive things about her. But he'd never put something so fragile, so fine, so silvery-hued and white in his mind as the song by Helga's band that filled the air above the trees.

"In the same rich path
You and I align."

Helga held her vowels again, the last verse pushed up from her tiptoes to throw out above the crowd, out over the building, casting her wish up into the night sky. Arnold's chest heaved, the breath finally rushing from him in desperate need. He had chills, his skin pricked and risen where Helga's voice had touched it. He had never felt as sorry as he did when the song came to its slow conclusion, Helga bent over her guitar and coaxing a last few notes from the precious instrument of her expression.

He felt his hands obey the slow command to clap along with the rest of the gathered party, who so emphatically showed their approval for the offered song that it drowned out the last few seconds of the piece. Arnold watched Helga find his gaze again, a red flush on her cheeks.

She flashed him a confident smile, grabbing the mic and looking back out to the crowd.

"Thanks, thank you, you guys are awesome. We're Orphan, and we're super pumped to see all your faces out there tonight," Helga called out confidently. A few voices whooped their encouragement out to her. Someone whistled. "Aw you guys are too sweet. Keep it in your pants," she sneered, and the audience laughed. Arnold found himself laughing along, somehow unbelievably proud of her in this moment, as if he felt some shared sense of ownership over the whole thing. Helga turned back to the band, saying something outside the range of the mic, then turned back to the crowd with a smiling snarl.

"This is 'Tibetan Pop Stars.'"

Her hand savagely strummed the guitar, a low and dirty chord ripping from the amp and shocking the vestigial pleasant syrup of the previous song from his bones. This was a different style of song all together, reminiscent of 90's grunge or girl rock. Right away, he felt like this suited her more. Perhaps she chose to open with that far more sensitive, revealing song as a way to communicate something. That first and foremost were those sweet feelings, tender and difficult to express for her, that she could confess to him. Feelings of nervousness, of being unsure, but of being hopeful and reverent of the dream of being with him.

Arnold wondered if he was putting too much thought into it for the briefest of moments before the song began, Helga's voice starting in a lower, grungier growl.

"How content are with ones with simple demands?
They meet their fiancés cherry picking out in Canada
While cursing the river, a seven fingered man
His three sleepless wives all equally sick of him"

Immediately, Arnold was thrown off balance by the cryptic and unusual lyrics. He could barely follow along, unsure of the meaning. Helga's lyrics felt obfuscated, hidden from immediate understanding. Her voice still carried that sweet undertone, but the overall delivery was harsh.

"Honey I left to see some action.
What's with all these swamps?
All I'm passing are hospitals and space-camps,
Nobody is asking me "What about your other?"
If they did I'd tell them you're a-

"Stranger in India.
I'm gonna be creeping on you so hard,
You're seducing Tibetan pop stars and
Wrecking motor-cars"

The lyrics unfolded, opening meaning to him as he patiently waited for the hook. The song was also about him, though hidden through so many layers of indirect meaning and reference it would make James Joyce quietly applaud. Specially, the song was about the bitterness she'd felt about Arnold's departure. The realization came subtly as he slowly peeled back the layers of misdirection and allusion. Helga wrote guardedly here, less accessibly opening the wound she'd kept hidden for ten years.

"I know its true,
This Is wrong love.
Why is everything so expensive?
Maybe in two years you can forgive me.
I'll be living kinder,
I'll have found my place as a-

"Stranger in India.
Doing OK so far,
I'm just waiting on the feathers and tar.
You are the only one!
You are!"

In the letters she wrote, what did Helga say to him? What did Helga confess, what did she conceal? Was she laid bare, all secrets left out in the open for Arnold to consider? Did she weave meaning in poetry as she did here, with verse and hook and chorus? As she concluded this most recent verse, her voice carrying the note on the final "are" for several beats, wavering and struggling to keep its strength, the chills on Arnold's arms and neck sharpened, spreading down his back as she lead, voice cracking, into the turn:

"Nobody deserves you the way that I do,"

Arnold's stomach flopped cold like a glacial stone. Her voice lifted the phrase up, bringing it from soft and sweet from the sighing "deserves" into a sharper point full of bite on the "do."

"Nobody deserves you the way that I do,"

Again she repeated the mantra, an almost sarcastic twinge in her voice, carrying the sour note of remembered loss within it as she re-locked and held eye contact. Suddenly, Helga and the band erupted simultaneously, her mantra repeated with every decibel of gravely and growling force she could muster:

"NOBODY DESERVES YOU THE WAY THAT I DO, AND,
NOBODY DESERVES YOU THE WAY THAT I DO!"

The terrific force of her. The terrible awe in Helga Geraldine Pataki. Arnold felt his teeth rattle in harmonic resonance to the rage the amplifiers burst. Behind her, the band ripped music from their instruments, pounded the cadence out with fist and foot, arched and bent in passion over the weapons in their hands. Helga's body arched as she played, not pausing for the slightest for Arnold's tempestuous heart keep up.

"Come home my stranger in India,
Because waiting on you is too hard!
The reason I haven't written back is because
I'm still doing all that bad shit I was."

There is what she meant to tell me in the cafe, Arnold recognized with a flip in his guts. She'd always felt this way. Helga never felt anything but what she felt now, and what she felt then. She had never been able to articulate it to him except once, under duress, and then she rescinded the confession the instant he applied pressure to see if she was being honest. Learning she had been caught up in the moment had left Arnold confused, sickened, sad, and tired. Something had just clicked into place when he considered her feelings for him. When he made his confession in the jungle, he extracted hers from her a second time. Now, he was listening to her third.

The song shifted, reverting back to the dramatic chords and calmer hook from before, the catastrophic climax of the song winding down to its simple denouement:

"My love is average.
I'll obey an average law."

Helga repeated the line twice, singing it the second time with her eyes closed and face squeezed tight in pain. It gored Arnold to see it, to hear her disregard her feelings as somehow less than spectacular. Once in a lifetime. Iconic for an era. He wanted to rush the stage, to grab her by her pigtails and bow and shriek how amazing she was to her. He wanted to fill her lungs with yellow, he wanted to pour into her eyes the flashing reflections of ponds in Winter, and scrape the sounds of the stars out of the sky for her to plug her earphones in. Her song made him feel weak, and small, and elevated within him the desire to break the limits of his mortal shell for her.

Arnold stood confronting the truth, the thing he had chased and known since he was nine. As he watched Helga and her band finish the song and begin right into an energetic, fast instrumental piece that engaged each member's whole bodies, he was forced to reckon with the facts.

He was in love with Helga, and had always been so, and would remain thus until breath no longer dragged from his lungs.

---

Several songs into their quite lengthy set, and Arnold had never been on such a wildly emotional and difficult ride in his life. Partly because he had the special awareness that he was the subject matter for most of the songs being played, but also because of the amazing revelation that Helga was having fun.

Has she always been this impressive? Arnold had always considered her to be extremely expressive, emotive, and passionate. He saw within her heart and knew the safeties she put in place to guard herself, and knew that even deeper still there were precious thing, small things of unspeakable rarity that had value beyond reckoning. And he knew her to be powerful, a veritable force of nature. From what Rhonda had told him, she was finally returning back to that old fire.

But the Helga on stage was commanding. Her presence on stage captivated not only him, but the entire audience. When she threw her head back, fingers madly noodling a blistering riff, people howled along to her pantomimed roars. When she cradled the microphone and cooed salacious words of leading some unnamed someone to the mattress for a desperate instructive lesson, Arnold felt the electric tingle of lust in the air palpably. He marveled at the woman so perfectly in her element. He felt proud of her, as well, an ownership of her accomplishments settling in his heart, neatly tucked against his germinating possessiveness.

And so through such dramatic upheavals Arnold felt every inch of him catch up for ten years lost. He felt as if every fiber of his being, every atom was in alignment, pointed at Helga. The thought that he was somehow quantum entangled with Helga brought him profound joy; to think that if an atom moved within him, in her, too, it also moved. The stupid overcomplicated romanticism of his audacious fantasies so immediately penned in the music-driven furor of his heart thrilled him. He danced to the pounding of his heart for her, the raw and visceral expressiveness of her music the backdrop to his inner performance. His blood danced interpretatively to the sound of her name in his mind.

The night was long. The set had been proceeding at pace for well on an hour now. Arnold was exhausted from tip to toe from the physical exertion of all the dancing he was doing in the crowd to Helga's music, and from the emotional trauma she inflicted on him so sweetly with the words she sang, screamed, shrieked, and simply spoke.

Helga was standing, sweating almost all the way through her hot pink top, face flushed and bangs pressed wet to her forehead.

"Well folks," she strummed her guitar, making a muted metallic noise scatter from the amps briefly. "It's been a blast pouring my heart out to you all tonight." She paused, smiling prettily when the crowd cheered for her and her band. "But we gotta get moving and wrap things up before the cops pepper spray the sorry lot of you."

Brainy lifted a hand up, gesturing with a fist towards Phoebe, who was still on the roof of the frat house with the projector, managing the light show. Arnold turned to look back at what she was doing, observing with keen interest as she swapped something in the projector out, plugging it into what looked like a MacBook.

"Please hold, we're having some technical difficulties." Helga casually turned to the rest of the band, who were moving amps and their instruments around on the stage, crowding in closer. Arnold watched with surprise as Stinky-Stinky! All tall and thin and long! In a ridiculous Canadian Tuxedo, denim from head to toe! Stinky! With a turquoise bolo tie!-strugged with the large metal form of a steel drum, rolling it on a corner next to Stoop Kid. He flashed Arnold a smile from on stage, settling down in front of the steel drum as Sid came out from behind him with a pair of maracas.

Eugene came out with a tamborine, and so did Rhonda. Harold peacocked onto the stage from behind the white sheet with a beat up looking, band-sticker festooned guitar, the overtightened strings hanging loose from the head. One by one, each of the kids from the class of PS118, minus Phoebe on the roof, a conspicuously missing Curly, and the totally absent Nadine, took a spot on stage, grinning with anticipation and gripping an instrument to play.

"Took you idiots long enough," Helga snorted into the microphone, smiling at the audience. "We're ready? Okay. So this is the last song. It's my newest; I wrote it a couple of days ago. It's about an old friend of mine, and regrets." Helga smiled again as the crowd cheered, a roar of excitement at the strange menagerie of people essembled on stage.

"Thanks, guys. You've been great. We're Orphan. This is 'Young and Happy!'" She pulled away from the microphone as she announced the song, shouting the title out with sudden bursting emotion.

At once, everyone with a guitar began playing in harmony, a tiered collection of remarkably different tones cascading suddenly from the stage in front of Arnold. Helga led the pack, turning to the gathered crowd of their childhood friends, guiding the transition from the harsh, busy intro, and nodding to the percussion section when it was their time to jump in.

Stoop Kid, Sid, and Stinky obliged, the eclectic and frenetic rhythm they pounded out joining Helga's chorus of guitars. Arnold watched with wonder as Gerald enthusiastically played along, his fingers rapidly plucking the strings on his bass. Sheena stood at a keyboard, playing big chords to round out the massive sound crashing over the party.

Helga turned to the microphone, her sing-song voice carrying a slightly country wash to it, the emotive force behind her smokey vocals still heard clearly over the cacophony behind her.

"Wild things talk.
Filthy reservoir, today you are
Twenty one, twenty one
This car's uninsured
I think it still knows how to run
Down to Savannah, Georgia
No sisters who came before ya
Were so true in all
The world going dark
And changing around you"

The band behind her played softer, in lower-tempo and with fewer of the gang joining in while she sang. As soon as she finished her first verse, however, they immediately jumped in, each individual, every friend from Arnold's past passionately writhing on stage to pull music up from the gravel in their guts.

"Someone we love hitched a ride to
Minneapolis, and it aged her too soon.
Someone, I never told you,
I turned my back on.
Now I think he hates me, hates me, oh!
To be a child again and easily forgiven!
But I've done my fair share to
Weaken the envied innocent"

Something about the way that Helga sang the last quartet of lyrics, wishing for an earlier time, a simpler time when they hadn't lost friends to distance and misunderstanding hitched a wad of emotion in his throat. The way all his old friends lost themselves in the frenzy of the moment threatened to overtake him. All of this was for me? He couldn't imagine the value of such a treasure.

Then, the light changed on the projector, and Arnold had to narrow his eyes to focus on the images being shone on stage and his friends alike.

An extremely quick slide show, each frame lasting no more than a second, flashed on screen. Each image was a picture of a page of a letter in familiar pink stationery in familiar pink handwriting, with a pair of familiar hands framing the page in the shot.

Words he couldn't quite catch flashed across the screen as his friends frenzied in their playing. Arnold. Miss you. Regret. Come home. Always. Love.

Recognizing the gift he was being given, Arnold slowly fell back onto the tree, leaning against it for support while he watched letter after letter flash across the screen in front of him.

Helga's voice returned, the band suddenly quieting as Sheena calmly played a few gentle chords. Her voice was quiet, sweet, and he paused trembling mid-way into her verse:

"At least with you
I got to be Young and-"

Suddenly every person on stage shouted with all the force they could muster in response to her couplet:

"HAPPY!"

Helga called out again, her hand still on her guitar and another holding the microphone tenderly.

"With you I got to be Young and-"

Again his friends called out, shouting with grins on their faces:

"HAPPY!"

Helga's voice cracked as she completed the call-and-answer, her voice rising high to a strained, difficult sustained note.

"Now think of all the strangers I've followed,
My hands empty!

"WITH YOU~!"

Helga sang those last two words, her voice trembling and rising and falling, until it gave out entirely at the end of "you," and she fell onto her guitar, hand rapidly shredding her regret from those steel and unforgiving strings.

At that time, Arnold saw curly emerge from the side of the stage in front of a large fan that was blowing cooler air on the crowded collection of musicians. he had a huge hefty bag in hand, and found Arnold's eyeline when he rounded the corner. As the band continued to play, he gave Arnold a slightly apologetic smile, and started to shake the bag.

What seemed like snow cascaded from the bag, caught by the blast of wind from the fan and scattered out across the stage and out into the back yard. Paper cranes, thousands of them, tiny and weightless fell like flakes of snow out over the party, landing in cups, getting caught in the tree, settling in outstretched hands.

Arnold's hand felt itself open, and catch a tiny paper crane floating delicately to him while the riot of emotion on stage savaged itself out.

Unfolding it, his breath caught in his throat, and his legs struggled to hold him up. It was Helga's letters. Not only did she put them on display for him, projecting her painstaking recording of them page by page with intimate photos, but here she was, discarding them to the winds. Letting all those unsaid words go, casting them out like lucky snow, paper cranes folded with care and then thrown away. Jewels of care and effort, beautifully sent out and away, saying goodbye to ten years of regret with a single gesture.

"Then the day came when I
Had to tell you a lie.
It was to protect you,
And that's another lie!"

Arnold watched Helga as she sang directly to him now, the barrier between them totally gone. There was no place in their world for walls, not when her every secret had just been literally scattered to the fickle winds. There was her apology for the cafe. There she stated her regret, and Arnold accepted her apology silently.

"In Savannah, Georgia,
Tired specters stretch their arms.
Couldn't you stay
If you looked the other way?"

Now she finally stated what she had meant to say for ten years. Helga's heart reached out to him, stranded on stage and exposed even as she had the support and backing of everyone they've ever known. Such a spectacle Arnold had never seen. Every nerve of his felt alive and painfully exposed. She wanted him to stay. Helga was begging him to stay.

"Oh and at least with you I got to be young and-"

"HAPPY!"

"With you I got to be young and!"

"HAPPY!"

"Now to think of all the strangers I followed!"

"YOUNG, AND HAPPY!"

"You~!"

Helga's voice cracked and failed her again when she completed the chorus and call, holding and sustaining the note of "you" as long as she could before raw emotion pulled her down.

In frustration, her face grimaced and squeezed wet eyes shut. Her hand attacked her guitar, and joining her was the total collapse of the harmony and rhythm of the collected band behind her. Every person's face contorted in concentration while they wildly shook and trembled with the overwhelming sensations their music was wrecking through them.

Arnold trembled and watched as the band's playing tore itself apart, each member's arms getting tired as they strummed, plucked, slammed, or shook. Brainy knelt in front of his amp, wildly shaking his guitar to force hideous distortion and feedback through the instrument, his shirt slick with sweat. Stoop Kid's arms where a white blur emerging from the visibly damp sleeveless tuxedo. Gerald's chest and arms were dark and damp, and he knelt on stage to keep his hand moving. Helga's hand was a blur, her body bent totally over and her teeth bared.

The audience was losing their minds. Arnold had never heard such cheering, such a roar. The riot chorus in the back yard joined the rabid musical implosion, eventually only Brainy and Helga managing to continue to play their instruments after minutes of frenzy. Then, Helga's arm hung limp while Brainy shook and shivered the distortion from the amp, piercing, dirty noise echoing out over the yard.

Helga grabbed the microphone, pulling herself upright, chest heaving while the distortion continued to howl out of their sound system.

"Oh at least with you, I got to be young and happy~"

The entire band leapt to life, suddenly grabbing their instruments in a last burst of energy, picking up their organized frenzy, each member attacking their instrument of choice with abandon. Helga ripped her guitar from her own hands and turned it by the neck, brandishing it like an axe. While the rest of the band very quickly lost energy and the song began to end, she roared in frustration and swung her guitar as hard as she could.

A shower of sparks and the loud digital roar of an amp exploded out over the stage, deafening in its finality. The crowd had shifted back suddenly, a wave of people moving to get a safe distance from the sudden fireball that surged out from the amp at its destruction. Helga perched on top of the ruined cube, panting, the band staring at her with shock and surprise.

A massive roar escaped the crowd suddenly, an actual breeze of hot air rushing past Arnold at the force of their exultation. People shrieked and whistled, whooped and howled. Arnold watched in a stunned daze as people literally threw their shirts and undergarments at the stage, people rushing the makeshift platform to touch Helga.

Pulling herself free from the cords and straps of the ruined guitar, Helga turned back towards the crowd, pushing against their outreached hands. Arnold moved towards stage with the wave of humanity, his hands reaching out towards Helga on instinct even as her hand reached out for his in return.

He felt himself pushed up from below, buoyed by the strong supporting hands of several people suddenly taking it upon themselves to hasten his reunion. Helga yelped in surprise when she was pulled down by several hands, propelling her forward on top of the crowd. Arnold laughed out loud, overwhelming exhilaration dizzying him, as the crowd surfed them towards each other. When their hands met, fingers clumsily and quickly lacing together, the crowd under them cheered. The applauding gathering of their childhood friends smiled and shouted encouragement that was drowned out by the roar of excitement under Arnold and Helga.

"What's happening?!" Arnold laughed as he shouted his question to Helga, who was gripping his hand so tight her hands were squeezed white.

"Bunch of nosey busybodies, if you ask me." Helga tried to sound tough, but the joy in her throat robbed any venom she could try to project.

The two of them laughed and cried out in surprise as they were passed from hand to hand, over the heads of everyone in the backyard, and spilled out onto the porch at the opposite end of the yard.

Arnold stood facing this sea of strangers, holding Helga's hand tightly. All of this for him. He couldn't ignore that the crowd had reacted spontaneously, literally pushing the two of them together and leaving an entire house to their care. Every face in the crowd stared back at him.

"Let's go inside, Arnold. They don't need to see what's next." Helga squeezed his fingers urgently, her voice tremulous and nervous. He looked at her sweating, flushing face, and for an instant could not for the sake of anything possibly recall what anyone else had ever looked like, or what anyone he had ever met was named.

Arnold recalled for a brief moment the instant he had stood at the threshold of the airport terminal, hesitant and unsure of his future. In front of him was the open door into the house, cool and dark and empty, and holding a promise of a radically different, unknowable future. Within were consequences.

Letting her pull him ahead into the house, Arnold tried to remember what it was like to feel anything other than this explosive joy, and was glad that he fell short.