Have Your Cake, Helga! 🎂 | a Hey Arnold! Fanfic

Chapter 1

It's Big Bob's Beepers, he's the king, Big Bob's Beepers, ching-ching-ching, Big Bob's Beepers!

Helga awoke from her slumber. Every day. Every freakin' day, that horrible jingle acted as her alarm clock. Her wake-up call to the nightmare that she was constantly living.

She pushed the blankets and dirty clothes she used as warmth off the thinly-insulated sleeping bag she considered a mattress, stretched, and walked out the utility closet - aka her bedroom.

This was her new home Her old home, the quaint little townhouse that she grew up in for the first ten years of her life, had been repossessed, not too long after it was revealed that beepers were no longer raking in the dough that they used to. Now Helga and her family were evicted, and forced to grasp at some semblance of normalcy to avoid being vagrants; so it was business as usual and they ironically moved into the one place that was financially sucking them dry.

How Helga wished she could evict herself from her circumstances.

"Olga!" Big Bob bellowed from the other side of the Beeper Emporium.

Helga grumbled to herself as she walked over to where her father was sitting, on the ground, surrounded by boxes of unsold merchandise. "It's Helga, DAD. Always has been. Always will."

Big Bob waved off her tirade. "Yeah, yeah. Listen, I'm gonna need you to move some of these beepers today. I need that box to patch up some broken drywall. So why don't you stand in front of the mall for a few hours and see if you get any bites?"

"Why don't you stand in front of heavy traffic?" muttered Helga under her breath.

"What was that?!" Big Bob barked.

"In case you've forgotten, DAD, I have this little thing I have to go to for the next decade or so. It's called SCHOOL?"

"Hey, hey, hey! Don't talk back, lil' lady. Actually, that might work out even better. Try pawning them off to your little friends at school. Kids are into the retro thing nowadays, right? They think it's hip."

Helga rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Anyway, have you seen my backpack? I've got to get going soon."

"Huh? O-oh yeah -here, I'd been using it as a pillow," Big Bob leaned behind one of the boxes and pulled out Helga's backpack. He tossed it over to his daughter and she nearly dropped to the floor by its sheer weight."

"CRIMINY! This thing weighs a metric ton! What did you put in here?!"

"I stuffed it full of beepers, and saved you extra work. Now get on out there and if you want to eat dinner tonight you'll sell that stock!"

Helga dragged the bag behind her. "Thanks, BOB," she spat venomously.

As she walked towards the exit, Helga spotted her mother, Miriam, sitting behind a small table with a coffee machine beside her. Her eyes were closed, and a mug with liquid hung out of her hand. Helga took the mug and raised it to her lips...but then sniffed the contents, and sighed in disgust as her poured it on the ground. She took the coffee pot with her and drank from it instead.

---

Helga shed most of the beepers on her walk to school and was able to put the backpack on her shoulders by the time she ran into her best friend, Phoebe.

"Good morning, Helga," Phoebe chirped, much too cheerily for the start of the day. "Ready for another glorious day of academic discovery?"

"Pfft - is that what they're calling it nowadays?" Helga took a long sip from the coffee pot, now lukewarm.