Chapter Text
Jughead VO: Homecoming—that universal experience of old and fresh pains. Salmon, turtles, Atlantic puffins, and, apparently, human beings all feel the draw—regardless of what they know awaits them back at the place of their birth.
That being said, ishome always a place? If it’s not birth that determines where we migrate, perhaps we come home to the people who made us. Something inside, deeper than we could ever excise, pulls us towards each other again. That’s what we return to, again and again, even as the memories of the people we call our own fade in our minds.
Reuniting in such a manner is at the top of one Archie Andrew’s mind as he contemplates the question we all must at some point in the short sojourn that is human life: what have I become?
***
The Riverdale gym looks mostly unchanged, the way Archie supposes most high school gyms look the same no matter how much time passes. Despite the five years it’s been, seeing the old wrestling championship banners hanging limp on the walls still makes him feel nauseous in a way he can’t really explain.
Reflexively, he pats his chest where he’s placed his name tag and glances down for the third time since he walked in to make sure he’s put it on. The red bordered sticker stares back up at him from his left pectoral, but it’s with no little amount of dismay that Archie realizes for the first time that he’s put it on upside-down.
“Archie!” He looks up into the crowd milling around the gym but fails to find the source. For a second, he’s not sure he’s actually heard his name at all, but then his eyes land on a familiar figure a few tables away who’s waving him over.
Veronica Lodge, much like the Riverdale gym she looks both out of place and completely comfortable in, does not seem to have changed much. Her hair is different—up in a way that probably has a fancy French name Archie doesn’t know—but the smile crinkling her eyes and nose is just the same.
“Archiekins!” The nickname falls like a weight to the floor, but Veronica’s smile remains undimmed. “We were just talking about whether or not you’d show up,” she says, gesturing to the other two occupied seats at the table where Reggie and Munroe sit. For no good reason, Archie is surprised to see them.
“Ha, yeah,” Archie says, resisting the urge to look down at the floor. “Well, here I am.”
“Yeah man, it’s good to see you,” Munroe says, standing and reaching out for a hug. Archie’s startled for a second, but the embrace is nicer than Archie had expected it to be. “Weird that out of all of us, you weren’t the one to stick around in town.”
“Oh, are you still living here?” Archie says.
“Yep,” Reggie says, knocking a fist gently into Munroe’s hip from where he’s seated. “We’ve settled in pretty good. Munroe’s helping run the community center.”
“C’mon Reg, don’t give me all the credit,” Munroe says and turns back to Archie. “You know this guy’s a killer teacher? I swear, we’ve helped earn more GEDs than we know what to do with, how ‘bout that?”
“Yeah right, every kid we have is smarter than me,” Reggie says, but he’s smiling.
“Uh, no, I didn’t know,” Archie says. There’s something about the way they’re chatting so easily with each other that—doesn’t put him on edge, exactly, but has his ears perked. “So—you’re both in town then?”
“They sure are, Archie,” Veronica says. Archie’s gets a bit lost in the familiar feeling of her bursting back into a conversation and doesn’t catch the glint in her eye until she’s speaking again. “They’re in town, you could say, till death do they part.”
Archie, confused, glances between Veronica’s precise little grin and Reggie and Munroe until Reggie sighs.
“I told you everyone was gonna wanna talk about it.”
“Well, hey, sorry if I didn’t exactly have our high school reunion at the front of my mind when I proposed,” Munroe says, but the annoyance in his voice must be false as there’s not a trace of it on his face.
“Sure,” Reggie says with an equally happy expression. “As long as everyone knows the wedding invites have already been sent and we are notadding anyone to the guest list.” He looks to Veronica and Archie. “Sorry guys.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Veronica says. “I’ll find a way in.”
“Wait,” Archie says, feeling as if he’s dreaming, almost. “You two are—”
“Engaged,” Reggie says, holding up a hand to display a gold band Archie had missed. “Suck on it, red.”
“Oh.” Archie scrambles for a second. He’d kind of expected to see some engagements when he decided to attend this reunion, but more from long term couples he barely remembered than—this. “That’s—that’s really great you guys, I’m really happy for you.”
“Thanks,” Munroe says, easy smile still on his face. He elbows Reggie, who swats at him a little. “You know, we kind of have you to thank.”
“Archie?” Veronica says, more than a hint of disbelief in her voice. He can’t help but agree.
“Me?”
“Oh yeah, that’s how it started, didn’t it,” Reggie says. “Good old days.”
“Are you saying—Archie?” Veronica looks delighted.
Munroe just hums in assent.
“What about me?” Archie says, not knowing what’s being said but desperately wanting to. Or maybe he doesn’t. The words are already out of his mouth, though, so he supposes he’s finding out.
“Oh Archie,” Veronica says, her voice taking on a note of condescension. “Only you could be two whole people’s gay awakening and not know it.”
“I was—oh.” He feels like he’s saying that word too much. “You—I mean, I, I was that for you?”
“Yeah, thank God we eventually got better taste, huh?” Munroe says, laughing.
“I don’t know about that,” Archie says despite how dry his mouth has become. “You’re engaged to Reggie.”
Reggie pulls an arm back in a mock fist, as if he’s actually about to brawl with Archie here, over a flimsy table in their high school gym, but the joke of it and Munroe’s hand on his arm make him unfurl his hand. Their closeness, the rhythms they observe together, the push and pull, it all makes something in the pit of Archie’s stomach twist. Their body language alone speaks of years together, and years more to go. He can’t really help if his responding grin is slightly tinged with jealousy.
“The testosterone at this table, really,” Veronica says, rolling her eyes. “Enough about marital bliss—how have you been, Archie?”
“Oh,” Archie says, then curses himself. “Uh, yeah, I’ve been good.”
“Good?” Reggie says. “Man, if you were a kid in our writing workshop, even I’d fail you.”
“Well, I mean,” Archie says, and stops. He doesn’t really want to get into it here and now. “Yeah. Good.”
“Ooh.” Veronica’s eyes glint in the low light. “Playing it close to the chest—no worries, Veronica Lodge loves a mystery. By the end of the night, I’ll know all the dirty details of how you’ve been doing trading in these guns,” she squeezes his upper arm unexpectedly and he jumps, badly, “for real ones.”
It’s not specifically that statement that propels him to his feet quickly enough that his metal folding chair skitters noisily on the wood floor—it’s a combination of too many things to count. It’s Veronica’s question, the matching looks of concern on Reggie and Munroe’s faces, maybe even the familiar-yet-not shape of the old gym; he suddenly needs to be anywhere but here. Archie manages to mumble something to excuse himself and then he’s moving as quickly as he can towards where he thinks he remembers the gym bathrooms are.
Thankfully, Archie’s memory serves him well, and perhaps even more luckily, there’s no one in any of the scratched and scribbled-on metal stalls. He braces his hands on one of the sinks and tries to breathe in and out more steadily. He’s making decent progress when he makes the mistake of glancing up into the mirror to see his own pale and haggard face. He instantly feels so nauseated by the expression he’s wearing that he stumbles back and slides down the wall to sit with his arms braced on his knees.
Archie has no idea how long it’s been when he hears the bathroom door open again; he wipes a hand quickly down his face and shakes his head a little to prepare himself for whoever’s there. He doesn’t know the name for the exact emotion he feels when he sees its Kevin Keller, but it has him slumping back against the wall again. Relief, maybe.
“Hey,” Kevin says, hesitant. “Are you—I saw you head over here in kind of a hurry, is there something at the buffet table I should be avoiding? Besides like, all of it, I guess.”
Archie tries a smile and feels it make it onto his face with less issue than he’d feared. “Nah, Kev,” he says, waving a hand weakly. “This is—don’t worry about it.”
“Good to know that punch I had wasn’t completely poison,” Kevin says, and surprises Archie by sliding down the wall to sit beside him. “Ugh, I don’t think they’ve cleaned these floors since we went to school here.” He hums. “Weird, isn’t it?”
“The dirty floors?”
Kevin laughs a little. “No, just—being back here again.”
“Oh.” Something in Archie rises like a sickening tide. “Yeah, I guess.”
Kevin seems to study him for a moment in which Archie has no idea what his own face is doing. Kevin sighs.
“I feel so adolescent—like, I half expect Moose to walk through the door and insist ‘no Kev, I can’t dateyou, let’s just make out against these disgusting locker room lockers,’” Kevin says with a twist to his mouth. “High school, right?”
“Well, I’m—you and I had pretty different experiences,” Archie says. He can feel his chest slowly loosening—weirdly, sitting on the bathroom floor with Kevin is actually doing a pretty good job in helping Archie get his feet back under him.
Kevin laughs. “I’ll fucking say,” he says. “Small town gay kid versus hometown sweetheart, there’s no universe where we do have the same experience.” He raps his knuckles softly on the ground for a second, thinking. “Although—neither of us really escaped the insanity of this godforsaken town, what, with two different cults? And I can’t even remember how many people got poisoned—hey, didn’t you go to prison? For murder?”
The sheer incredulity in his voice startles Archie into a laugh. “Yeah man, and that was hardly even the weirdest thing to happen that year.” It’s kind of nice to laugh about it now, the months of his life where he was barely sure he would make it to the next one. “My life hasn’t been that crazy since then, I swear. Actually, nothing really prepared me for how—not Riverdale the rest of the world is.”
Kevin huffs a laugh. “Yeah. Hey, this is gonna sound crazy, but do you ever,” he says, but stops, nose scrunching to one side. Somehow, Archie knows exactly what he was going to say anyway.
“Yeah,” he says, fixing his sight back on a broken tile on the floor. “I do.”
“That’s crazy though, right?” Kevin says. “I mean—I really shouldn’t miss anything about this place. Even if it was a normal high school, it’s still high school.”
Archie considers it for a second. “Yeah, but there’s something—I don’t know—there’s a feeling I get here that I’ve never felt anywhere else,” he says, feeling as though he’s missed the mark of what he’s trying to say by a mile. He hasn’t tried this hard to articulate himself since he was still writing songs, sitting in the garage scribbling bad poems down in composition notebooks. The memory of doing that is tinted with a kind of embarrassment, but it’s warm, somehow. “It was—it was belonging to something, kind of.”
“I get that, actually,” Kevin says. “Being a part of something, no matter how fucked up it is—it’s kind of nice. Might help explain why I’m down a kidney.”
“More than that,” Archie says, feeling emboldened. “It’s—belonging to someone. This, this is embarrassing, but I honestly feel like I haven’t made any friends like the ones I left behind here, you know?”
Kevin looks at him with an expression that might contain pity but is overall much too kind for Archie to be upset by it. “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he says, placing a hand on Archie’s shoulder and raising his other in a mock toast. “To Archie Andrews, and the people we belong to, huh?”
As Archie smiles and taps the back of Kevin’s hand with his own, savoring this unexpected comfort on a tiled bathroom floor, he tilts his head back against the wall and tries to think of who exactly that might be.
***
Jughead scans the refreshment table, growing more bitter with every inch his eyes cover. First the pathetically small Riverdale High Reunion Committee hadn’t allowed him to write his own name tag, and now it looks as though there are no more on brand Oreos. Perfect.
The name tag thing had rankled him more than he’d like to admit—seeing Forsythe Jones staring up from the friendly red and white sticker had been strangely jarring. Strange, because he’d actually started going by it in college—trying to drop all memory of the agony going by Jughead wrought—but it just seems so out of place here. Forsythe, Jughead—they feel like separate parts of himself that he barely attempts to reconcile in the best of circumstances, much less now, standing in the darkened Riverdale High gymnasium. He’d settled for snagging a sharpie and scribbling a pointed crown in the corner of his tag—not that he wore one of those anymore either, but it had felt good, like sliding something back into place.
“Excuse me, can I—Jughead?” And there it is again, like a boulder on his back that he just can’t shake—maybe one that he doesn’t even want to shake. He wonders for a split second what exactly it is about a name that gives it so much weight. It’s just a word, a pair of syllables, hardly any different than other words. Is it merely the fact that he can call it his own that makes it so?
He turns to see who spoke it. “Ethel?”
“Yeah, hi! I was about to say your name again—you zone out there for a second?” She looks mostly the same, with maybe a slightly different haircut that leaves her hair short and curling around her ears. She smiles at him with her whole face. It feels unearned. “Wow, it’s been a while—how are you?”
“As well as a person can be when they decide to attend their five-year high school reunion,” he says, voice as dry as possible. Ethel laughs a little and tilts her head in acquiescence.
“Yeah, I debated coming here too, but, well.” She shrugs. Jughead is suddenly struck by the memory of Ethel in high school, and cringes internally. He hopes it’s been enough years that whatever strange fixation she had on him when they were seventeen has worn off somewhat; if not, he hopes for something to give him a quick escape. “I was in town. It’s kind of weird that they have this at all.”
“What, because no one in their right mind would return to this mausoleum of a school?” Jughead says, scanning the crowd over Ethel’s head. It’s full of people he doesn’t recognize, or worse, people he only kind of does.
“No—well, yeah, maybe, but more like,” she makes a vague gesture with one hand. “Why five years? What could have possibly changed in five years, you know?”
Jughead barely hears her as his aimless scanning of the gym crowd reaps unexpected results.
Betty Cooper.
She looks—Jughead’s not entirely sure what to make of how she looks, eyebrows puckered in a frown as she talks to someone on her phone. She looks like Betty Cooper, a sight which stirs up so many conflicting things inside him that he’s better off looking away. He doesn’t.
“Sorry Ethel, I—” He shakes his head, not taking his eyes off Betty as he pushes past her. “It was nice talking to you, but I have to go.”
“Oh, uh—okay,” he hears Ethel say as he begins to make his way through the crowd. “Bye, I guess.”
Betty sees him as he makes his way over, which is both a disappointment and relief. Jughead’s a little surprised when she abruptly finishes her call and shoots him a smile that he clocks at about 80% real, but he’s long since realized he’ll never really know exactly what to expect from her.
“Hey.” Betty’s voice is much the same. “I was wondering if I’d see you here.”
“Yeah, well,” he says, his tone already too bitter for their first conversation in years. “You would have known if, you know, you were still speaking to me.”
“Jug, come on,” she says, all pretenses of a smile dropping immediately. “Are we really going to rehash this every single time we see each other?”
“You can’t be—Betty, you disappeared for five months!” He isn’t trying to raise his voice—in fact, Jughead’s aware that making this mistake is near certain to be fatal for his argument, but he can’t help it.
Betty rolls her eyes, like he knew she would. “And as I’ve told you a dozen times, I couldn’t tell you about that, and I’m sorry,” she says, but the flatness of her voice betrays the falseness of her sentiment.
“You’d do it again.”
“Yes, I would, if it meant saving lives,” she says, and crosses her arms. “You used to be able to understand that.”
“What I understood was that we were part of something—together,” Jughead says. “I guess I didn’t realize that only meant until you’d found some better partner in crime.” It feels a bit childish even as he says it.
Betty sighs. “Jughead, I know, okay? I wish I could have told you that the death certificate was fake, that the crime scene was staged, but I couldn’t, alright,” she said. “And you need to let that go—you need to let me go.”
“And if I don’t? Wait, wait, don’t tell me,” Jughead says with a bitter twist to his mouth. “You’ll,” he taps his chin in a mockery, “disappear under mysterious circumstances—again.”
“I don’t know,” Betty says, leveling him with an even stare. “I think relationships should be evenly split, Jug. It might be your turn to disappear.”
“Hi, sorry, am I interrupting anything?” The smile on Veronica’s face says she knows she is. “I couldn’t help but be drawn to this conversation like a moth to an,” she glances quickly between them, “an old flame, if you will.”
“It’s nothing,” Betty says. “I was just about to sit down, actually.”
“Oh,” Veronica says, looking disappointed. “You’re sure? Wait, my pearl-laden ears shouldn’t be burning, should they?”
Jughead fights the urge to roll his eyes. “No, shockingly, our first conversation in two years was not about you, Veronica.”
“You’ll excuse me for suspecting,” she says, voice turning a little frosty. “If I remember correctly, our high school relationships often did include more than just the two people in them.” She’s looking at Betty now, eyes heavy with something Jughead can’t quite assign a name to.
Before Betty can say whatever it is that she might in response to that—Jughead has forfeited his claim to knowing what that might be—Archie approaches their trio at what can only be described as a bound.
“Hey, Betty! Wow, it’s so good to see you,” he says, voice full of uncomplicated joy. “Ronnie, you too—holy shit, Jughead!” Jughead barely has time to register the rumpled look of Archie’s blazer before he’s reliving the first sac of the Riverdale Bulldogs’ 2017 season.
It’s a weird hug, there’s no doubt about it, especially considering the source. At best, Jughead had expected a one-armed slap when he had thought to picture this moment at all, but no, Archie’s arms are completely around his torso, clutching hard enough to bruise. Not that Archie would ever try intentionally to do so—as the air is being squeezed out of him, Jughead thinks that if there’s ever been a constant to Archie Andrews, it’s his unconsciousness of his own strength.
“Oh,” Veronica says as Archie finally pulls back. “Well, sorry I didn’t greet you like that, Bettykins, I wasn’t sure if it’d be welcome. You know, after you became harder to find than a reservation at the Ritz on Valentine’s day.”
“She pulled a Houdini on you too, huh?” Jughead says, suddenly feeling much warmer towards Veronica. Warmer, perhaps, than he did throughout all of high school.
She smiles at him, wry. “And I didn’t even realize the elephant was in the cabinet in the first place.” He turns a corner of his lip up in return.
“What are you guys talking about?” Archie says. He shakes his head. “No, never mind. Look, I know I’ve been kind of…absent from all of your lives for a while, it’s just been rough, what with my service, my mom’s new marriage, I just—” He shakes his head again, brightening forcibly as he does so. “But that’s what high school reunions are for, right? Reuniting? Man, I missed you guys.”
Jughead looks away from Archie’s painfully earnest face to share a glance with Betty and Veronica. He sees the same thing in their eyes he’s certain lives in his own: whatever their personal squabbles, for the night at least, they’ll put them aside. Here, they unite once again behind Archie Andrews, the mythic hero but yet the common man, spurred to oneness by the only thing that's remained after all these years: their love for him.
***
All of the time Veronica had spent worrying about being voted Riverdale High’s Most Likely to Be Pathetic at a High School Reunion had been wasted, apparently, because now none other than Archie Andrews has taken home the pot where that superlative is concerned.
It’s sad, she thinks, to see him so downtrodden—his ill-fitting blazer is rumpled, eyes darkened by bags he should definitely be using some kind of retinol cream on. Really, they weren’t going to be in their twenties forever.
“So,” Archie says, breaking her out of her thoughts. “How have you guys been doing?”
“Clearly a lot better than you, Arch,” Betty says, but a barb that would be stinging from anyone else is made soft by her smile and the gentle way she reaches out to touch his elbow. Archie smiles a bit at this; Veronica feels her stomach sour.
She knows it’s not fair to still be angry about things that happened years ago, some even so far back as high school, but Veronica’s never really had a problem with feeling things that are unreasonable. Looking at Archie, even after all these years, stirs up some of the same panic she was trying her hardest not to feel all throughout her teenage years. Looking at Betty—
Veronica thinks that looking at Betty will always feel like pressing on a bruise—painful, of course, but more than the pain is the inexplicable draw to do it again and again.
She hadn’t left high school with any grand delusions, all too familiar with the phenomenon of drifting apart—too gentle a name by half. Back when Veronica had been seventeen and stupider, sometimes she’d felt like the sorest of thumbs, sticking out completely as a shiny new addition to these corn-raised small-town people who had been friends their whole lives. They’d attended each other’s ninth, tenth, eleventh birthdays, probably holding hands at each awkward transition—for God’s sake, Betty had been there to attempt to teach Archie how to read. Veronica had possessed no such equivalent at any point in her life, and she was painfully aware of this fact. Apparently, the quality other people had that inspired the type of friendship that lasted was nowhere in any of the five feet and two inches of her. Regardless, it had felt nice to slot in beside them for those few years, to lace her fingers in tight. Sometimes, she had almost felt like she fit.
Of course, looking at Betty now, she realizes that mistake for what it is. Clearly, despite the sad and frequent destination of her own musings, none of these people have given her a second thought since high school. Where assigning more meaning to relationships than the other party is concerned, Veronica Lodge is still the reigning champ, no contest. She shakes herself a little, trying to discard the depressing line of thinking like it’s an out of season faux fur coat—the kind that have always given her an angry looking rash—and smiles. She can handle this, she can handle anything; for better or for worse, she’s always been her father’s daughter.
Just as she’s opening her mouth to say something that hopefully won’t come off as wounded as it sounds in her head, the lights go out.
For a second, it’s utterly dark. Someone out in the yawning chasm of the gym yelps, someone else laughs.
“I remember that from high school,” an unidentified classmate’s voice mutters into the dark. “Mr. Flutesnoot couldn’t turn off the lights for the projector without someone screaming.”
“Do you think it’s because of the storm?” A new voice, somewhere to Veronica’s left. It might be someone she’d recognize if the lights are on—or maybe not. The darkness is freeing, even as phone flashlights start to come on. “Did that ever happen in high school?”
“I bet we could find the fuse box,” Betty says. Her voice startles Veronica a little in its closeness. “It’s probably in the gym office.”
“Oh, and you know where that is?” Jughead says. Covered by the dark, Veronica rolls her eyes. They really are going to fight the entire time they’re here—as if their squabbles outrank any of her own.
“I think I could help find it,” Archie says, but the end half of his statement is drowned out by the overhead gym loudspeaker crackling to life. “Hey, wait…should that be working during a power outage?”
“No, Arch,” Veronica says, but she’s interrupted before she can continue.
“Prodigal sons and daughters of Riverdale,” a voice crackles over the loudspeaker. Veronica doesn’t think she recognizes it, but she isn’t certain if that’s because it’s a computer generated one—the shitty quality of the gym loudspeaker and acoustics make it hard to tell. “How long I’ve waited.”
“Who is that?” someone in the crowd asks, only to be shushed viciously by both Betty and Jughead.
“I’m sure you’re asking yourselves a number of questions,” the unknown voice continues, “who is that? What do they want? How are they doing this?”
“Why was it necessary to black out the gym and make me nearly ruin a la Renta dress with cheap fruit punch,” Veronica says under her breath. In the dim light of their phones, she catches Archie shoot her a small grin. She smiles back, even though she’s entirely certain he doesn’t know what she’s talking about; if he did, maybe their relationship would have made it past high school.
“Graciously, I’ll provide an answer to one of these.” A crackled filled pause. “I want…to work with you.”
“Deja vu, oh major deja vu,” Betty mutters. Veronica tries to catch her eye, but she doesn’t look up from her phone, eyes squinted in the light of the screen where it’s opened the voice recording app.
“Your task is not an easy one, and for that I am sorry—but how else to prove your worthiness?”
“What’s going on?” It’s Reggie, accompanied closely by Munroe with Kevin appearing somewhere behind them. The four of them take turns giving him a shrug.
“—prove yourselves: find and disarm the three…gifts I’ve left you somewhere in these hallowed halls,” the voice says.
“That’s bombs, right?” Kevin says. “Like, they’re absolutely talking about bombs.”
“You have three hours,” the speaker finishes with a decent amount of finality. The loudspeaker buzzes for a moment, then they hear the piercing beep of a stopwatch and it clicks off, leaving an eerie silence in its wake.
A short-lived eerie silence that is, as it takes precisely two seconds for the entire Riverdale gymnasium to burst into speech.
“Did you hear—”
“—I think they said bombs—”
“—actually, I didn’t understand shit, did you? Fuck, I’ve got such a headache now—”
“—remember when Josie and her band performed over the intercom? They were like, good, and that was unbearable—”
“Quiet down everybody!” Jughead’s voice does a halfway admirable job of ringing out across the gym, but none of the reunion attendees seem to care. Veronica winces a bit in sympathy, but not too much—it’s Jughead.
“Hey!” Munroe says, accompanied by a shrill whistle through the teeth by Reggie. The gym quiets.
“Over to you, needlenose,” Reggie says with a grin.
“Thanks,” Jughead says. “Okay, listen everyone, I know that was—insane, and probably pretty scary, but we need to think about a game plan.”
“Right,” a woman to their left says. Veronica thinks she recognizes her as one of the members of the alumni committee, maybe two or three years ahead of them in high school. “Thank you. Everyone please calmly gather your things and proceed to the nearest exit—follow me or Christina here,” she points to another woman, one who’d been manning the reception table, “if you’re not sure where that is.”
“We will call the authorities once we all get out of the building,” Christina says, gesturing towards the doors with her hands. “Does everyone understand the plan?” Murmurs of assent ripple through the crowd as people start to move towards tables and exits.
“Wait,” Betty says. Her voice is pitched no louder than Jughead’s had been, but somehow, it rings much clearer through the air. “Is this who we are? Afraid?” She looks around the gym. “If there’s one thing I learned while attending Riverdale High, it was that nothing’s quite as satisfying as notgiving the bad guy what they want. If this were any other time, any other place, we could just stand by and let them win but right here, right now? What we need to do is trust our guts, follow our instincts, and fight.”
“Uh, yeah.” Christina again. “That’s why we’re…leaving? Like, it seems like what this—psychopath wants is for us to all die in some weird hide-and-seek bomb hunt?”
“You guys aren’t seriously thinking about actually doing it, right?” the first woman says. “Oh, okay, no, that is absolutely notsafe. We need to exit the building immediately.” She punctuates every word of the last statement with a small clap. Veronica thinks of kindergarten teachers. “This night is my responsibility, and I can’t be counting casualties at the end of it, got it?”
“Lady,” Jughead says. “We’re the Riverdale class of 2018. We can handle it.”
“A—a bomb threat?” Her face crumples up into what Veronica predicts will become some very unattractive wrinkles in a decade or so if she’s not careful. “You guys are like—twenty.”
“And we’ve dealt with more serial killers and psychopaths than you’ll probably ever meet,” Betty says. “We know what we’re doing.” The woman squints at Betty for a moment before shaking her head.
“You know what, sure,” she says. “The cops can deal with you when they get here—try not to explode. Everyone else—exits!”
The majority of the crowd continues to filter outside, a few people throwing glances over their shoulders to where the seven of them stand.
“Look at them,” Jughead says, a clear note of disgust in his voice. “Abandoning the school in its time of need. I hope they know they’re destroying a sacred Riverdale institution!” The last part is projected to the departing horde, which has dwindled to a dozen or so waiting to get through the exit doors. None of them pay it much mind, but Betty shoots him a smile that he returns. Veronica’s stomach twists. It always did take a good crime or two to get them back on the same page, but once they were—that was it. Veronica can practically feel herself fading into the background. God, why is she soincapable of forming any kind of lasting relationship? There’s something wrong with her, and other people can smell, or something. She’ll never have anyone to smile conspiratorially with, she’ll never have the return to form Betty and Jughead are experiencing right at this moment. She looks to Archie, but of course he isn’t looking back; instead, his gaze is focused somewhere over her head and lighting up in recognition.
“Hey—Ethel?” Archie’s voice is friendly, but a little baffled, a similar sentiment to Veronica’s own feelings towards the person he’s addressing.
“Hey guys,” Ethel says. “I just wanted to say—I really liked your speech back there, Betty.”
“Oh,” Betty says. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, and I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help? You know, if you’re actually planning on staying?” Ethel spreads her hands out in a shrug like gesture. “Old times sake, or whatever.”
“Uh, yeah,” Jughead says, a second too late. “Yeah, sure, I mean, if everyone else is, uh, cool with it?” There are various noncommittal murmurs. Veronica tilts her head to once side to convey that she has no problem with it, but you know, she doesn’t really care—it’s Ethel.
“I mean, I guess?” Betty says. “We’ve probably got it covered though. You can leave.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Ethel says, rolling her eyes. “Right, I guess this hasn’t fucking changed since high school.”
Veronica sees Betty open her mouth to say something back, but before she can—
“Well,” a voice from behind them says. “Since we’ve only just arrived, I guess we too can lend you Dickensian looking mongrels a hand.”
Standing at the entrance to the gym, decked in a red dress that looks to be made out of about one thousand layers of chiffon—much more appropriate for a gala than a high school reunion, Veronica thinks—is Cheryl Blossom.
“So,” she says, flouncing over towards them, Toni close behind her. She crosses her arms with a bright red grin. “What’s the plan?”