A/N: I DON'T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE. ITS BEEN OVER A YEAR SINCE THE LAST CHAPTER. WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING. THE BEACH HOUSE IS NOW ? CHAPTERS LONG. FUCK.
Keeping Arnold: Chapter 21, Beach House Part 2: The Roses Don't Know Which Side You're On
"It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend." ― William Blake
Helga yanked a yard of brown packing tape free of the roll with a deeply resonant tearing roar of plastic and glue. The first box was packed. It hasn't been easy to decide where to even start, such was the overwhelming task to build her Ark. Memories like raindrops fell in a deluge when she was squatting among the scattered and discarded bric-à-brac of her room like a treasure seeker among archeological relics. Touching each item in turn, and moving them between hands to ascertain the most efficient way of parceling them for easy categorization, Helga was forced to confront the gravity of her decision with each object. A tiny ghost dwelled within every piece of detritus.
Even the road of pilgrimage looked like an oncoming storm to the anchored moorings stitched in the memory fabric of home. That Helga was venturing on a new destiny once thought entirely, deliriously impossible to her mattered little to the simple, perfect melancholy of moving away from the only home she'd ever known to deserve that name as such.
And yet with ferrous determination, she sealed the box of comfortable memory shut with the length of tape she had pulled, putting those yesterdays into the dark, mortgaged for a frightening, uncertain new future.
A future far away from here. A future far away from the apartment she shared with Brainy. A future far away from Hillwood.
The surprise snap of a September's pre-Autumnal cold sucked a sudden squall onto the entire length of beach, and the sky opened up and curtained the horizon away behind the uncertainty of the torrent. The sudden rain put quite the damper on the first day, sealing the early arrivals of PS118 indoors with naught but their tribulations and hastily gathered distractions to confront them. It certainly stalled the barbecue plans, which were postponed for a day when the rain wasn't being howled into the side of the sturdy raised structure of the beach house.
After an hour or so of video games and idle chit chat, the occupants were becoming notably restless. A tension palpably hung in the air while people rummaged for snacks, drank available alcohol to loosen up, and tried to avoid discussing anything that had happened in the last ten years or so.
Which was, of course, right where Arnold wanted everybody.
He had finally seen first hand how distant and awkward his friends had become around one another, with the barriers of social lubricant and plausible deniability were stripped away. Rhonda and Nadine tried to stay on the opposite side of the large living room space from both Sid and Eugene, who in turn tried to keep themselves apart as well. Gerald and Phoebe sat together, Phoebe reading a book (she still had to keep up with her studies despite the prolonged sabbatical), and Gerald keeping Helga busy with competitive video games.
Overall, it seemed like any other boring day indoors with a surplus of snacks and illegally obtained alcohol. Arnold wasn't about to let the planned confrontational catharsis escape him, however.
"So...you guys wanna hear about my time in South and Latin America?"
Arnold posed the question while he sat alone at the kitchen bar, halfway through his third Dos Equis and affecting his speech with the slight accent he'd picked up after a decade in mostly Spanish speaking countries.
Helga kept playing her game even when Gerald turned to regard him. Almost everyone was turned to look at him.
"Oh my god, finally." Rhonda gasped. "We've all been dying to hear what you did for ten years down there."
"Yeah Arnold, spill your guts. All that adventure had to be pretty cool," Sid said with surprising interest. Arnold made note of that.
"Oh goodie, we get to hear La aventura de Arnold en el Sur," Helga scoffed sarcastically. Arnold was surprised she rattled off Spanish so easily. He made note of that as well.
"Hush, Helga, we've all been waitin' for a damn long time to hear this," Gerald scowled. "And I know you been waitin' too, so don't even play that."
"Hah! I know the story well enough. Traveling the jungles, righting wrongs, general obnoxious do-goodery at his own expense, dangerous life or death knife fights with Cartels" Helga paused, turning to look Arnold square in the eyes. "Waterfalls."
Arnold winced. Won't be telling that story, he internally confirmed.
"Perhaps it would help pass the idle time we seem to find ourselves suddenly possessing in abundance, if we allowed Arnold the much needed opportunity to tell his tales." Good old Phoebe, voice of reason.
Helga tossed her hands up in defeat. "Fine! Let Footballhead enthrall us all with the absurd adventures he had galavanting around the jungles. Who cares?! I'm gonna make a stiff drink and then drink that drink."
"It's almost like you don't want to hear how positively gallant our Arnold has been all these years. Helga, I'd say I'm surprised at your rudeness, but a lifetime growing up with you has afforded me little from you that I find surprising."
Helga stalked angrily to the bar, flicking a glance at Arnold that spoke of frustration, desperation, and bile. "Shaddap. So I don't wanna hear all the many ways my idiot boyfriend risked his stupid life while he was gone. I'm sensitive. I'll have nightmares all week of his stupid handsome face getting bitten off by jaguars."
"C'mon Helga, let the man speak. He's been all silence and mystery since he showed up and only paid you the time of day since." Gerald sounded more exhausted than annoyed.
Helga just grumbled while she mixed a drink, though Arnold saw the way she still tried to sneak glances at him, obviously always hungry for more details about his mysterious time away. Arnold figured she was more curious than upset, so he pressed on.
"Well, first of all, while I did spend a lot of time in jungles, especially in San Lorenzo, I am just going to set the record straight that South and Central America is not one continuous rainforest. It's an entire continent, one of the big ones, and it's just as, if not more ecologically diverse as the North American continent."
Everyone sort of stared at him.
"Just getting that out of the way. I spent a lot of time in deserts, mountainous steppes, tundras, and, yes, even rolling grasslands the kind you'd expect to drive through in Kansas. And urban metropolises as sprawling and complex as anything here."
Arnold set his beer down, pushing his fist into an open hand for emphasis. "It's a common - and frankly ethnocentric and racist - misconception that everything south of the Rio Grande is third world nation deserts until you hit third world nation jungles. Mexico is the 10th largest country by population, and 15th by economic output. Brazil is even bigger. Argentina, Peru, the list goes on. I just wanted to demystify and debunk some of the assumed misconceptions before I start."
"Thank you for the third grade report, Footballhead." Helga snickered into the rim of her red solo cup, which smelled strongly enough of liquor that Arnold could catch the intensity from where he sat six feet away.
Everyone chuckled a little at her joke, but he decided to let it roll off his shoulders. You can't let teasing of that sort bother you if you are dating Helga Pataki.
"So...what did you do?" Rhonda asked, rolling a pointed finger delicately, as if to indicate the general region Arnold occupied was mystery enough without all the pageantry of his introduction.
"A lot of travel, mostly. Mom and Pop don't put roots down for too long, because there's always the next big project to chase. That's one reason why they never...contacted me."
"Yeah, hold on," Gerald interjected. "Why didn't they try to contact you? For like nine damn years?"
"Well, it's complicated, Gerald. But basically, it was too dangerous. Any correspondence out of their inner circle was being watched by La Sombra and his cartel connections. I was safer in Hillwood. If they tried to visit, they could have been followed, anything like that. They sat me down and explained it all to me once I finally realized I was angry at them."
"You were angry?" Rhonda again.
"Yes. Furious was a better word for it. It took me a couple of years to figure it out, actually. Once the initial euphoria of finally finding them and convincing them it was safe enough for me to go with them wore off, things got really tense and difficult. Lila helped me figure it out, funny enough."
"That's not funny," Helga sneered.
Arnold looked at the audience before him regard him with barely contained disgust.
"Look...elephant in the room," he started, but Helga interrupted him.
"Nope. Not right now. You're telling us about your trips, not her. Stay focused." The basalt tone in her voice betrayed a barely contained outrage at this attempt to discuss her.
I guess that will have to be later, Arnold relented.
"Right...sorry. Anyway, once I figured it out, I...confronted them."
"How did they receive such a confrontation?" Phoebe watched him wide-eyed. All of his friends were watching him. They clearly had no idea his life was this complicated. It occurred to Arnold that they had no idea how insane his own life had been away from Hillwood, to an even greater degree than he was clueless about theirs.
"With practiced, measured compassion and reasoning. I wouldn't hear it at first. I was so furious they'd abandoned me, and chose some tribe of people over their own son. Worse, nobody had written me any letters in a few weeks at the time, and I felt so alone. That was the only time I almost came back."
"Whoa you almost came back?!" Helga's voice rose an octave, and she set her drink down to slap both of her palms down on the counter with surprise.
With icey trepidation, Arnold hesitated in answering her. Would it help or hurt their relationship if he told her how badly he had missed her those awful nights? And how much he yearned to see her, and hear her scolding voice to bring him back down to Earth. It had been a struggle to be so far away from her - from everyone, really - and to feel so absolutely isolated in the jungles of San Lorenzo, away from everyone. He couldn't even pick up a phone and call Grandpa Phil - he was hundreds of miles from the nearest phone that didn't require a satellite signal.
"Yes. I almost came back. I had my bags packed and everything."
"What kept you?" She searched his face, eyes as crystal blue and large and pretty as he'd ever seen. Something in him wanted to disappear in that gaze, to shrink and reduce until he no longer existed, swallowed up in the infinity of the shores of her searching.
"We all know what," Gerald replied. "His family."
"Right...well. After the initial arguments, they sat me down and explained everything. What they were doing, their work, their decisions, and the tough calls they had to make for the good of the family and the people they were helping. It wasn't an easy conversation. I still disagree with a lot of what they decided to do. But, when I really looked at it, hadn't I done almost the same as them? Opted to stay with one thing I loved over another? Can anyone really say they'd make the right call with that kind of pressure?"
"I'm sure it was an unfathomably difficult decision, or else why would they have opted to leave their only son? I don't think any of us are in any position to place blame at the feet of your parents, Arnold." Always cool Phoebe, evenly dispensing wisdom when the topic was clearly torturing Helga.
"Right, well, weren't we listening to the stories of his adventures or something," Helga hastily, shakily thrust in. "Who cares about all this parent bullshit. We all know why he left. We all wished him well and sent him off. M-moving on."
Arnold knew this would be tough for Helga. How do you confront the single most painful memory of your life without experiencing some of that pain a second time? And though he didn't wish, in any fiber of his being, to inflict harm on Helga, sometimes to help someone you love, you have to hurt them just a little.
"Well, hold on, just a second, Helga." He calmly said. "I want to say one more thing about leaving."
Helga looked at him with an expression he couldn't place, but recognized as hurt.
"I just wanted to say," he began calmly, "leaving Hillwood was easily the most difficult, painful, and confusing thing I've ever done. Maybe ever will do. There's not a day that I don't wonder if I did the right thing, if everything would be different if I had stayed. But, I know, at minimum, that everything happened the way it did for a reason. And I came back for a reason."
Everyone turned to look at Helga, though she didn't notice for how focused she was on what Arnold said.
"Helga," Arnold said with a shrug, putting to rest once and for all, to everyone, any ambiguity about their relationship or history. Rhonda clicked her tongue appreciatively, and Sheena smiled fondly. Phoebe let out a breath, and sighed happily, squeezing Gerald's hand. Arnold watched them all respond warmly, and positively, even Sid, who rest his chin on his hand and grinned over at Helga despite himself. Even Thad, who was nodding with approval.
Helga just looked at him with pain, and stood up.
"Well, gee, Footballhead, it's awful s-sweet of you to go to such lengths on my account," she mumbled, rubbing her cheek dry with a thumb. "But that's enough mushy shit for the day, eh?"
"Actually, I second that," Sid said. "No offense or anything. Can we skip to the rest?"
"I think what Sid is trying to say, is we are already familiar with the backdrop and circumstances of your return. We want to hear the parts we don't know." Rhonda, surprisingly offering Sid a benevolent clarification.
"Right, of course," Arnold said. They're all very different.
"Like, what happened to the Green Eyes?" Gerald asked.
"Well, a lot actually. For the most part, things are settled down. They are still very secluded and reclusive, but the good news is Sombra won't be bothering them any time soon."
"That's a relief to hear," Rhonda surprised Arnold by saying. He didn't think she'd cared much one way or another how anyone that wasn't in her direct field of vision fared.
And so Arnold caught his friends up on the various deeds and adventures he'd struggled through with his parents in the Southern Hemisphere. He'd surprised them all with a few tales, and confirmed for most of them what they already knew: he was a verifiable saint, and a hero. He didn't speak those exact words himself, of course, but he didn't have to. Everyone thought so.
It all took a few hours to get out. Long after the storm had slowed to a basic drizzle, the brunt of the squall having slid inland with inevitable force, Arnold was wrapping up a story about a particularly volatile monkey, when there was a bit of an urgent rapping at the screen front door. The wood rattled abruptly against the sea-air-loosened hinges, shook by the insistence of a meaty hand.
"Who in hell is that," Helga scoffed, lounging on a couch with her ankles crossed and feet propped up on a table.
"I'll see," Gerald said, and went to answer the door. He swung it open, and Arnold watched and wondered.
"Oh, shit, you guys," Gerald spoke into the unlit, damp darkness of the porch entryway. "Shit, come in. Y'all look soaked to the bone."
Standing aside, Gerald allowed Harold and Big Patty to squeeze past him and stand dripping in the entryway, backs packed with huge travel and hiking packs. They smelled of rain and sweat and the road. Patty's short babydoll bangs were plastered to her flushed face, broken out in mild acne. Thick eyeliner was running at the corners of her eyes. She locked eyes with Arnold and an awkward, mostly apologetic smile slid a seam through her cheeks.
"Hey, Arnold," she said as she shrugged her pack onto her shoulder. "Mind if we stop in?"
Harold was already moving to the kitchen and, presumably, the fridge, before Arnold could confirm.
"Actually, Patty, we have extra rooms. You guys can stay if you like."
"Oh for real? Hot damn, thanks Arnold." She looked relieved but also as if he'd confirmed something for her she already knew. "It's mighty upright of you to offer. My feet could use the break."
"You sure, man?" Gerald asked Arnold across Patty, skepticism clearly on his face. Arnold saw Thad squirming uncomfortably in the far corner before he made a subtle exit up the stairs. Helga was examining her fingernails, and clearly had no opinion one way or the other. A rarity.
"Yeah, Gerald, of course. They're friends. PS118 alumns and it's storming out. Besides we have enough food to feed twice our number."
"Not with me around, AH-nold," Harold squawked. He had pulled an entire link of sausage from the fridge and was taking thick bites off it like a stick of candy. "But it does look like you got a pretty good spread."
"Yeah," Sid jumped in. "We even got a brisket we're gonna grill up real nice tomorrow."
Harold stopped chewing and put the sausage down, swallowing his mouthful of morsels before speaking. "Grill a brisket? Grill a brisket? You don't grill a brisket." His unusually nasal voice was shaking with intensity.
"Well what the hell you suggest we do with it, man?" Gerald was helping Patty out from under her wet hiking pack, but still clearly invested in the conversation.
Harold's face grew red and he shook with something Arnold was guessing was outrage, trying to make sense of what Gerald even asked him.
"You-YOU SMOKE IT! Or cure it for pastrami! Oh my god you fucking idiots were going to ruin a packer brisket on a goddamn grill! You stupid fucking morons!"
"Hey," Sid interjected, stepping forward. "Watch it! What's the fucking difference anyway?!"
"Th-the difference? The difference?! Oh, just everything! What are you, stupid, Sid?!" Harold whirled on his friend, pointing a stubby finger. "If I see ANY of you idiots put a packer brisket cold on a hot grill I will personally fuck you up! You'll destroy the entire thing! It will be inedible! You don't grill a cut of meat that big!"
"So we'll cut it into pieces, whatever man." Sid waved his hand, and Arnold watched with amusement as Harold nearly turned purple in Rage.
"CUT IT INTO PIECES?!" He nearly shrieked. Helga, who had been chuckling at the exchange, was outright cackling, holding her belly in laughter.
"That's it!" He roared, and slammed his hands on the counter. Everyone jumped at the thunderous strength in the blow.
"Calm down, baby," Patty soothed.
"No way! These idiots are lucky we decided to visit. I'm taking over all grilling, smoking, and cooking of any meat whatsoever. They can't be trusted. Where's the smoker? I have to get started now."
"Now?" Gerald scoffed. "Dude it's like, ten at night. What are you gonna do now?"
"Get the firebox started, DUH. I doubt this place has any of the stuff I'd use in a competition, but I can still smoke a packer."
Arnold stood up. "I can show you the grills. We have some wood, too, actually. We were going to make a bonfire of it all."
"A bonfire? No way, i'll need it all. Patty, babe, I'm gonna need like, fifty beers."
"You bet, babe." She was smiling with a glowing pride at Harold, who seemed to be in his element.
"Fifty? Why so many," Phoebe sounded concerned.
"Cause i'm gonna be up allll night making sure this thing smokes right. Briskets smoke for hours and hours. I haven't even trimmed it yet or got it to room temp-ah, shit, where is it?! I have to see it."
"In this cooler," Sid stooped and pulled it out. He'd gotten over being offended, it seemed, and was just interested.
Harold slid the long, oblong cut of beef from the cooler, about as long as his thigh and nearly as thick. It had a pronounced thick cap of fat along one side, and was run throughout with veins of white connective tissue. It glistened in the plastic wrapping as Harold turned it over in his hands, inspecting it.
"Hmmm, not bad. Good cap, half decent marbling. It'll do just fine." He slapped it out onto the counter.
"Leave this out while I'm getting the smokers ready. Nobody touch it, or i'll fucking sit on you."
Arnold chuckled. "Nobody will touch it. Let's go get the smoker ready. Gerald can you help Patty take their bags up to a spare room?"
"Yeah sure, I guess."
"Don't be long, football head." Helga interjected. "I got plans for you tonight."
"Ooooooooh," Harold luridly crowed. "What ever can she mean, I wonder?"
"Fucking, mostly," she snickered, and Arnold blushed and scowled.
"Helga," he groaned. "Come on."
"What?" She fluttered her eyelashes innocently. "It's what we'll be doing. They'll hear us anyway."
"Ugh, you're so impossible," he shook his head. "No tact or decorum. And i'm the one that was in the jungle for the last decade."
"It's one of the reasons we all bear her such a great affection," Phoebe said, lifting her head up from her textbooks. She was studying, naturally.
"Speak for yourself," Rhonda scoffed. She and Helga exchanged an amused, but irritated glance.
"You coming, Arnold?" Harold asked, expectation and anticipation in his voice.
"Yeah, I'm right behind you."
They stepped into the darkness of the drizzling evening together.
Brainy watched Helga with the ubiquitous silent reverence that was characteristic of their relationship as she struggled to write their first set list on a scrap of paper, shaking hands simply unable to complete the titles of the songs they would play for their very first show together. A few years of practices, writing, and obsession bearing fruit in the tiny six song set list that Helga was hotly debating with herself.
"Diamond Mine first? No, no, that's n-not right," Helga mumbled to herself. She crossed out the latest iteration of the set list with a big pronounced cross of her sharpie, and Brainy chewed his inner lip. Unfortunately, they were about to play, a house party at Rhonda's place, and the time for this debate was pretty much long since passed. Yet Helga continued to growl and spit while she hemmed and hawed over what precise order the only six songs the two were confident enough to play might get performed. And at this rate, neither might get the chance. A raucous crowd stomped and shouted for the performance they were promised.
Brian and Helga crouched in the back bathroom where they had holed up as a shanty backstage, their gear more or less unpacked to the main room they'd play in but the husks and shells of their instruments stacked in the bathtub like coffins. Brian kept catching his expression in the mirror: anxious.
"Shit, what do you think, Brains?" Helga looked up at him, her huge dangly sparkling star-shaped earrings clattering together off her large earlobes. She had her hair pulled up and back in two high ponytails to keep it out of her way. She wore her lucky pink shirt and the same ratty pair of jeans with holes in the knees she wore practically every day, and a pink cotton beanie pushed her soft feathery bangs in front of her big prominent unibrow. He searched her face, suddenly aware how deeply he loved her.
"Well," he began to speak, but the bathroom door clicked open. They both whipped their head around like the sound was a gunshot.
Lila crept in, closing the door behind her in the tiny cramped bathroom choked with teenagers and anxiety.
"Lila?" Helga grimaced. "What are you doing in here?"
Brainy caught Lila's conspiratorial glance and slightest twitch of the side of her thin lips. A tell he'd come to recognize as the slightest smirk when she was about to cause trouble for him.
"I was just coming to check on you both, I was ever so worried since it's been quite some time since you were supposed to start. Is everything okay?"
Her voice was syrupy like the most decadently plush Belgian waffle. Helga and Brainy simultaneously pulled a face like they smelled someone stepping in dog shit.
"Yes, everything is fine, what's it to ya?" Helga stood up, hands on her hips. Her wiery teenage frame looked awkwardly long and stretched from behind, a long torso terminating in a skinny butt and even longer legs. A growth spurt last summer stripped her of all her body fat but left her with the template for an unbelievably womanly figure to come.
"Rhonda sent me," she fired back, and Brainy knew it was a lie.
"Well tell miss fussy Wellington-Lloyd that we'll start when we are damn good and ready. I don't have time to get checked up on by a bunch of randos."
"Understood, Helga!" Lila smiled cheerfully and turned around, saluting Helga with a snappy gesture. She reached for the doorknob and stopped, however, turning slowly towards Brainy and away from Helga. He saw her expression slowly slide as she turned, her back to Helga in that brief instant, a predatory, narrow-eyed sneer that melted into naked cheer and concern. The experience flopped his guts, because he knew he could never ever warn Helga. Not after the deal he struck with Lila.
"Oh! That's right one last thing…" Lila began to draw the weapon she had no doubt sharpened to vorpal sharpness beforehand, and Brainy watched he brandish it with practiced balance and form. "Someone asked if we should film this for Arnold to see, since he is missing your first show and everything. It would be ever so tragic if he never got to see it at all."
Helga froze, staring at Lila but also through her. Of all the things she could have said, this was undoubtedly the most cruel, the most painful. This was psychological torture, opening a wound Helga had nursed and nursed but never let heal.
Brian said nothing. He could have stopped her, in that room, stopped her dead in her tracks, and confessed everything. He could have given Helga all she needed to end Fuzzy Slipper's reign of terror right then, even told her how Lila kept a copy of her book in her purse she carried at her side right then in that very moment. He didn't.
Instead, he let Lila torture his best friend and girl he loved, for fear the alternative would damage his relationship to Helga and alienate him further from all his friends. He was an accessory to Lila's crimes, had even helped her on multiple occasions. Maybe some of their closer friends would understand, but, the damage would be severe.
Helga might not ever trust him again. She might never forgive him.
So he kept obediently quiet while Lila viciously disemboweled the woman he loved right in front of him.
"Wh-what do I care," Helga stammered with a dry rasp of a wrecked throat. She'd be lucky if he could sing tonight at all.
"Well it would only make sense, given what the three of us in this room know about how you feel about him," Lila shrugged. "And the rest of our friends from PS118 for that matter." There it was. The sword flashed and buried itself in Helga's chest.
"Wh-what? They know?" Helga blinked, her face breaking into blotchy spots and sweat dewing on her forehead, plastering her bangs in place.
"Oh, was that, is that not something you knew?" Lila blinked in surprise and put a small hand to her growing chest. Brainy held his breath. How much damage would she inflict here?
"No," Helga hissed, and clutched at her chest. "S-Since when?!"
"Probably since San Lorenzo, I would guess?" Lila shrugged. "I'm ever so not sure when it became common knowledge. I'm sure everyone figured it out in their own way. But everyone knows, Helga. For years, really."
Helga slumped back against the toilet, falling into the small spot between it and the wall, wedging herself up to her chest against the porcelain.
"Are...you okay, Helga?" Lila asked.
Helga's pupils were completely dilated, and she held her hands to her face. She was close to hyperventilating, a rapid pant of breath as she struggled against a panic.
Brian stared at Lila. Lila dared to drop her mask for an instant, returning his gaze steadily with a challenge bared in her eyes. Go ahead, she seemed to dare him. Stop me, she narrowed her eyes and sneered.
He didn't. Instead, he crouched down, putting his hands on Helga's shoulders and shaking gently. "C'mon," he urged.
"I'll leave you two, I'm ever so sorry, I thought she knew," Lila hurriedly explained. "Do you want me to tell Rhonda you can't play?" The question hung in the air. And then Brian knew exactly why she came in here.
She was obeying the exact letter of their agreement. Lila had promised to never go after Helga through Fuzzy Slippers. And she wasn't. This was Lila, going after him. She was testing him. Nothing she was saying or doing had any connection to the wicked alias she used to hide her wicked misdeeds, this was absolutely something Lila and Helga could talk about, in private, without the need for any subterfuge on Lila's behalf. It was Lila putting Brian where she wanted him; cowed and obedient.
He looked up at her with gruesome horror. Lila stared back down at him with an expression that he was shocked to realize was disappointment.
"I knew you didn't deserve her," she mouthed to him, just loud enough that he could make it out, but quiet enough that Helga couldn't make it out above her own panicked sucking for air.
"I'll go break the bad news," she quietly added, touching the door knob with her hand.
Helga shot out a fist. "Wait!"
Lila stopped, a curious and twisted expression disguising the surprise. Brian stared at Helga in a semi-disbelieving awe as she shook herself steady, taking breaths that gulped the cramped air between them. She pressed a hand to his shoulder, and staring up at Lila, grim and determined, pushed herself upright.
"We play. Don't you go tell nobody nothing or Betsy will see to it you regret blabbing your mouth." Her familiar fist curled in threat display; Helga seemed to have stolen her strength from some reservoir that was unknown to Brainy.
Lila's face melted into a pleased and relieved smile. Her hands clapped daintily in front of her face and she bounced on the balls of her feet in prim scarlet flats.
"Oh goodie! I was ever so disappointed that you might have fallen apart already, Helga!" Her voice sounded genuine.
"Stow the happiness, Sawyer, I'm just putting my big girl panties on finally. So what if the little secret is out - what do I care? He's gone anyway. Brian!" She shouted, grabbing him by the hand.
"Play fierce. Play loud. Old Helga ain't put to pasture by something this small." Brainy pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and nodded.
When he looked up, Lila was already gone. And yet her words remained within him, rattling around like a loose bolt in his engines: "I knew you didn't deserve her."
A perilous truth can make or break you; learning the limits of your own courage and where the gaps in your armor lie naturally set mortality into place amongst the forethoughts of worry. His boundaries tested, Brainy learned he had places he could not follow Helga in going, and the experience shook him.
Though he played their first show together perfectly, arguably with more passion and finesse than he'd ever managed in practice, it was for mourning his resolve to love Helga, and in obedience to the truth he never successfully found the courage to choose to fight instead of flee for her.
Harold had taken one look at the state of the smoker and snorted in disgust. Even under the shaded canopy of a large carport, and mostly in the leeward side of the house from the sea wind, you can't leave iron out unprotected, unused. The whole thing was a ruddy, sandy blush of rust, resembling the bacon-stripe canyon walls of Arizona more than the original pitch coal black of its forging. Gripping the blue tarp that had served as the grill's lonely weathering against Poseidon's breathy brine, Harold scrutinized the oxidized gaps in the metal pensively.
Arnold cleared his throat. It felt like Harold forgot he was there.
"So...you and Patty, huh? That's great. You guys go well together."
Harold thumbed his nose and grunted, "Yeah I guess. Hand me that scraper."
Arnold reached for a pale, wooden-handled brush, bristled in rust-resistant brass wire. The wood was dry as paper against his palm, and nearly bleached white from the sun. Harold took it from him and lifted the squealing hinge of the main firebox chamber door, revealing the red prison bars of the rusted grill surface. Harold cussed at what he saw, and leaned into scrubbing the rust off with both hands on the brush, his broad shoulders working.
Arnold watched him scrape the rust away from the grill in thoughtful silence for a few moments.
"I heard you guys were on the street. That have any truth to it?"
"We're between places, but it's none of your business." Harold's tone was sour. Arnold was familiar with the kind of faceless pride that prevented Harold from reaching out for help. He'd seen it in the stubborn faces of countless people before. People at the end of the rope they hung themselves, people who have watched the last inches disappear and done nothing. Arnold found that most of the time, a desperate person was the least likely to ever ask for rescue.
"You know," Arnold pivoted, having navigated these sorts of conversations countless times before. "I've never seen you so passionate as when you were giving us all the business in there. You really love brisket, huh?"
"Not just brisket, Arnold. All barbecue. All meat, ya know? I just can't let a bunch of idiots ruin it."
"I had some crazy good barbecue in Argentina. They have these street vendors that put any brick and mortar in the states to shame."
"Hah! I doubt it!"
"No it's true. Brazil, too. Their steakhouses are pretty popular stateside now, I heard."
"Sounds like hoity toity yuppie shit to me, Arnold." Harold delivered this with more venom than Arnold was anticipating.
Time to pivot again.
"Anyway I was just thinking, why not, like, do that. You know, barbecue or something. Open a food truck, something like that?"
Harold snorted in bleak amusement and shook his head. He opened the minion firebox hatch and got to work scraping that free of rust as well.
"Arnold, what business is it of yours what the fuck I do? Ain't you leaving soon?"
"Maybe. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea."
"Yeah well it is a bad idea. All that shit costs money, Arnold. And I gotta focus on how we eat."
"Let me help."
"Fuck off. Just let me clean this grill and get the firebox started."
"No, seriously. I've done this before. This is basically what me and my parents did. We helped people with passion and good ideas and no way to get off the ground. Starting co-op farms and businesses is like second nature to me now."
"No, seriously, fuck off. I'm fine. We're fine. I'll just keep living free with Patty and we'll be fine."
Harold started stacking wood into the minion firebox, his big greasy hands blackened from brushing all the rust and soot off the grill. He grunted as he moved from the big pile of ancient hardwood, stacked beneath a haphazard lean-to of palm leaves, and the rusty little barrel of steel.
"We didn't need nobody when we hit the road," he said, pushing a log into place over some of the ashen remains of a previous flame. "We sure don't need nobody now."
"Let's say I leave Hillwood. Who would know I helped at all? I won't tell anyone, I swear." Arnold searched for an angle to press against, questing for leverage against the bulky crust punk who was juxtaposed against this decrepit smoker and grill with the air of learned expertise.
"If you're leaving, like I said, why give a shit?"
"What about Patty?" Arnold probed, setting his attack down to measure Harold's response.
Harold tensed and barked out: "What ABOUT Patty?!"
Harold whirled around, soot and sweat clinging to his rain-slicked bulk.
"What do you know anyway?! Huh?! You just up and left us all! You were always there to, to fix things up for us and make it all right! And then when it really counted you were gone! Now you wanna put your nose in my business?! Who the fuck do you think you are, Arnold?!"
Arnold quieted. That was an argument he'd heard before. Too many times to count. I shouldn't have left, he realized. I should have stayed here the whole time.
"Yeah," he finally conceded with a bitter snort. "You're right about that. Listen, I'm your friend, and, and I just don't want to not do something when I could have. So, just consider it. It could be fun, so think of it that way. If you say no after this week, I'll back off. But give it some thought until then."
Harold rubbed the spot off his hands onto his shirt, where it disappeared into the rest of the grime he wore. Arnold saw years added to his face, hard creases where worry would go. A scar on his cheek, maybe from some past trauma. Arnold was once again struck with the stark reality that he had only the dimmest recollection of these people from a childhood they were as far away from as he had been from them.
The image of the Helga he knew now juxtaposed against the smaller silhouette of her at nine years old. The fierceness in her eyes changed but present, still.
"Yeah, fine. Okay, Arnold, if it'll get you off my ass. I'll think about it. You're a good guy, Arnold, sorry I lost my cool."
"Don't worry about it. I'm betting it will happen plenty more this week."
Arnold was right, but, he had no possible way to know the true extent of his soothsaying; there would be very little left in the wreckage of the week at the beach house.
Brainy stared through the tipsy fog of inebriation at the front stoop of the boarding house, the windshield wipers on his old beat up van swishing the sudden storm across his field of vision dizzyingly. He gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled hesitation, sensing the hydra lurking behind that unassuming front doorstep, waiting. For him.
One eye blinking slightly slower than the other, Brian reached for his door handle with mute discombobulation, the long noble fingers of his left hand grasping dumbly for the black time-smoothed plastic. The catch in the door clicked and he swung it open into the heavy downpour, a long leg swinging out after it to get immediately soaked.
A slow stumble up the stoop steps later, he had himself braced against the door frame with both hands, staring at the simple red paint of that fated threshold. Though it had taken getting drunk to do it, he'd come for the necessary purpose of finishing things with Lila, once and for all. Certain things required direct action, and the final meeting of the two who were Fuzzy Slippers was certainly one of those.
A great trembling of terror shook him by the bones, wracking the rain-soaked gangly young man from tip to toe. He didn't even know how to start, and his beer-addled brain was far from fight-ready. He just wanted to get this over with, but he knew something more than the end to all this mess was waiting for him. Lila wasn't just Fuzzy Slippers. She never had been to him.
Lurking in the shadows had always been his specialty. An enormous anxiety of the terrifying specter of Others kept him quiet and reserved. A torturous shyness had long chained him to the tenebrous distances from close friendships. Helga had been the shining light, a bright beacon of different to whom he clung his hopes and desires. Nobody knew Helga better than him, as a result, maybe not even Helga herself.
But nobody knew him better than Lila Sawyer.
At first, it had been stolen glances from the button-cute redhead in his direction, nine years old and obsessed with Helga. She seemed to be the only one who ever looked at him. Directly at him. And the look in her pitying green eyes wasn't revulsion or disgust, as he was used to, but rather, recognition. He avoided her at great lengths to flee the unknown danger of that particular glance.
He was just about to recollect on their first conversation, when the front door opened, swinging slowly backwards into the warm light of the boardinghouse and the fragrant smell of brewing coffee. Brian looked down at the person he'd expected to answer the door when he knocked, who instead had anticipated his coming and answered unbidden.
Lila Sawyer looked up at him from half-lidded green eyes, her bangs and hair loose and messy. She was in a simple grass green nightshirt and pajama pants. Her feet, slightly small and turned inward, poked bare from the pajamas and sat on the wheelchair rests with a doll's patience.
"Hello, Brian. I was expecting you," she said as she wheeled her chair backward into the threshold. "Come in, I have a pot of coffee on."
Of course she does. Brian somehow was always one step behind her, like everyone else. However, unlike everyone else, he knew she was a step ahead, and how to try to catch up. Lila was wheeling herself into the kitchen, so he followed obediently, stepping dripping wet into the boardinghouse. Not his first time here, but certainly the first under such pretenses.
"We'll need to get you a hot shower and a change of clothes," Lila absently spoke as she poured him a cup of coffee. A mug that said "World's Best Grandpa," with a smiling cartoon beaver in sunglasses giving a thumbs up. Presumably a gift from Arnold to Phil. "You can borrow some of Phil's. I know you prefer the look of second hand grandpas anyway."
Brian took the coffee cup offered to him, and blew into the steam absently. He stared at Lila, as he often did when they were kids.
She was pretty. That much was obvious to anyone who looked at her. Even as she was now, totally devoid of any makeup or mask, Lila's darling dimples, button nose, and confectioner's dusting of orange freckles simply endeared her to the senses. Auburn hair shot through with natural flaxen strands of highlights fell down slight shoulders and rest against prodigious, ample bosom. Her hands were small, but clever, delicate fingers careful and quick. Brian got caught staring, Lila's eyes meeting his and an expressionless chastisement passing from the wheelchair-bound woman.
He sipped his coffee.
"We don't have much to discuss, do we?" Lila sighed, smoothing out the lap of her pajama pants.
Brainy shook his head.
"But we're going to anyway." She said with a hint of haughty victory. "About Arnold. About Helga. And about you and me."
Brian nodded his head.
"Get showered once you finish your cup. I'll be in the room right across from the bathroom. I'll set out some clothes for you on the dresser against the wall. Don't keep me waiting long." She passed him as we wheeled out the kitchen, off to carry out her promised courtesies.
Brian stood woozily while he stared at his coffee cup. He knew where this night was going. He could stop it. He should. But he also knew he wouldn't. This was something that was predetermined to happen, long ago, according to the secret shared intimacies between him and Lila.
His shower was brief, and deliriously pleasurable the way only a hot shower after standing drunk in a cold summer rain can be. His head swam with giddy delight at the feel of a hot stream of water almost painfully scoring into his face, standing an inch from the shower head with his eyes closed and mouth agape. The tiny bathroom, much too small to service the entire boarding house, steamed and fogged up with the snap change in humidity and temperature, an otherworldly mist through which he would bodily travel into a completely different future.
He toweled off without looking at himself in the mirror, and snatched the long trousers and simple white undershirt from the exact spot she said it would be. He left his wet clothes hanging, dripping with the gravity of what he would do tonight from the shower curtain rod, into the bathtub. The gentle plip of each droplet felt like a nail driven into his crucifixion.
He entered her room not long after, tentatively closing the door behind him as he stepped through that final threshold. A tiny room, a single bedroom with a small sitting area to the side, Lila's things packed in boxes and stacked nearly to the ceiling against the far wall. In her bed, Lila lay in waiting, hands folded on her stomach and staring up at the ceiling.
Brainy sat in her wheelchair next to her bed, quietly joining her with a sniff of his nose.
"We knew it could someday come to this," she somewhat sadly mused, turning her head to look at him. The way her fiery locks fiercely scattered behind her head, wavy and radiant, gave her the resemblance of a sun goddess to Brian. He nodded in mute response.
"Helga won't end up with Arnold, though," she added. "I planted the seed of doubt in them both, my final parting gift. I wish them well, and all the kindness in the world. That's exactly why they can't be together."
Brainy looked down at his hands, fingers stitched together in his lap like the quilt draped over Lila's legs.
"You know i'm right about that, don't you? The way things are, they can't end up together and be happy. The story ends with Arnold leaving Hillwood, without Helga. It isn't just something I've seen fit to ensure, it's the truth. Everything that has happened, there's no amount of grandiose spectacle or passionate reconciliation that could possibly underwrite the debt that they'd borrowed to buy some precious few weeks."
Lila put her hands to her face, pausing for a long time to leave them both breathing quietly in her room alone. Brian smelled her perfume, something floral and bright. He watched her wrists, the funny twitch in her pulse that reminded him she was just a person after all.
"Arnold leaves and maybe never returns. Leaving me behind. Helga stays in Hillwood for a short time, but she will leave eventually, too. Leaving you behind. And we stay in Hillwood. Anchored to the misdeeds of our past and the ghosts of the ideals we chased without success."
"You failed just like I did, Brian." She looked up at him, her hands back on the bed. Brainy briefly wanted to exact a terrible revenge upon her for everything she'd ever done to him, but the moment passed as quickly as it came, chased by the reality that he had perhaps done more than he cared to admit to her, in turn.
"Yeah," he said, and it was the first time he'd spoken since the day before.
The rain returned in force. Lila's first story window pitter-pattered quietly with the fury of the storm, the pane glass shuddering under the wind howling between the alleys of the boardinghouse and the neighboring structures. The lights briefly flickered and dimmed, and returned to their principal brightness with the merry effort of their duty. Brian and Lila stared at each other for the span of this brief interruption, before she said what he was waiting for, and she knew he was waiting for, and so carefully measured the time of his waiting to savor the hanging moment between them.
"Kiss me, Brian," she said, her long lashes lowering over her eyes to obscure the demure look of embarrassment. Tears were building in the well of her eyelids, the anticipation of that wet heat bringing her cheeks to a pink glow.
"We don't have anyone else."
His heart broke.
He leaned down to kiss her. Her arms went up, full of grace and understanding, to wrap around his shoulders and ease him into her embrace.
"It should have been you, Arnold," she whispered, against his mouth, and the lump of agony in his throat couldn't force itself past his tongue which slipped between her lips. Their soft, shared moans and breathing stood in substitute for the wracking sobs they wanted to lose themselves in crying. When Brain's hand was up the front of her pajamas against the bare skin of her chest, it was trying to reach through her ribcage to pull out her heart bare-handed. The touch of her hand on his belly, intimate, tender, was to stop herself from twisting his innards out of him and strewing them across the room.
He undressed her and she undressed him. They said other people's names and touched each other's bodies, hands and fingers moving to caress the spots they wished were caressing someone else.
But when Brian lifted her legs, which surprised him with their thin frailty, and moved up and into her completely, she bit her lip and whispered Brian's name.
And then he said Lila's.
And they were together then.
A/N: Expect long delays for the next chapter, apologies in advance.