The thing about travel is that the it looks the same all across America: unending achromatic concrete cutting through green planes or through skinny brown woods or through cities you'd never hear of if not for the exit signs. Every gas station and convenience store yield the same selection of chocolate bars and cheese chips. Chain restaurants appear in California exactly as they do in Maine and all the space in between. On the highway, though, race bored or angry or inspired or indifferent passengers, a different story in each car.
Tonight, the highway was silent and empty, save for Betty Cooper staring out the open window of Cheryl Blossom's cherry red roadster, blonde hair coming loose in fierce wisps from her ponytail, the fanciful analog clock on the dashboard ticking idly ticking toward the twelve, signaling that the first official day of spring break was about to begin.
Spring break. Every other year, for Betty, it had meant retreating from school and math and novels and homework back to her friends, her family. It had meant long nights watching movies and new television shows with her sister Polly in the basement; admiring the trees and the flowers all throughout the town of Riverdale with Archie Andrews, her best friend; tagging along with her mother when she had to run errands, waiting in the car in front of the Riverdale Register with her ear to the phone, Kevin Keller excitedly filling her in on all the town's latest gossip.
What could she have done this spring break? With her family in shambles, with her long-lost brother creeping further and further into the darkness, with her sister gone and her parents working overtime at the Register, trying to pin the town's troubles on everybody else.
The Coopers had never gone on vacation during spring break, that was reserved for Christmas and summertime, and truly, Betty had never minded. But now the idea of staying in the house was unbearable. Even going out and spending the days with her friends was a dreadful thought.
Jughead Jones, her boyfriend was out of the question. Too painful. He was there for her, covering for her the night she hid the body. And he didn't even really know why. Hell, she didn't even really know why; she was just being loyal. And he was, too, so they were all tied together in a fat, ugly knot of crime and danger and gangs and blood and blood and blood.
There was something unsettling about seeing her best friend Veronica Lodge, too, even if this was her first spring break from Riverdale High. She was so enthralled with Archie as of late— which largely eliminated him from her options as well. There was something going on with them. Something dark. Something she didn't want to get involved with. Something she simply couldn't get involved with.
And the town itself was a nightmare. It had been since the night of the back-to-school semiformal: Riverdale was a place where bad things happen, where children are murdered by their own fathers, where serial killers terrorize the town in the name of goodness and righteousness. Where her boyfriend joined a gang, where she had almost been forced to bury her childhood best friend alive, where her life was threatened, where her sister was threatened, where her family had imploded and then quietly put themselves back together if only at surface level.
Where she'd hidden a goddamn body.
Riverdale's dark roots reached through every streetway, into every cookie-cutter house, seeped into the town hall, the high school, the supermarket…
Everyone had been walking the dark side since Jason Blossom's murder. Since the arrival of the Black Hood.
It was too much. It was too much with her mother and Chic and Jughead and FP and with high school, but it was far too much for Betty Cooper to handle without Polly or the distraction of schoolwork, the vision of a far-off future at a college outside of Riverdale.
Spring break, Betty feared, would force her to sit down and digest the horrors all around her.
To digest poison, because lately Betty hadn't been dealing with anything in a very healthy way.
So, when the school bell rang and Betty left the high school with a bag full of less homework than she would have liked and cut through the cafeteria to catch up to Kevin.
Kevin was left mostly unscathed in the aftermath of Riverdale's suburban horror story, having only suffered the loss of his (Serpent) boyfriend Joaquin, who'd been enlisted to help clean the murder site by Jughead's (Serpent) father.
How history repeats itself.
The common denominator meant, of course, that her own Jughead was doomed for prison or for death or God-knows what else, but Betty tried not to think about that.
"Hey, Kev!" Betty called, picking up her pace as not to lose him in the crowded hallway.
"Betty!" Kevin turned to greet her with a usual smile, genuine and kind. "Are you psyched for break or what?"
"Um, yeah, I guess," Betty said unconvincingly, eyes on her feet steadily making their way toward the grand doors of Riverdale High. "To tell you the truth, I'm not sure how I'm going to fill the days."
"Well, that's the beauty of it, right?"
"Not if your long-lost brother is lurking in your house every hour of every day and you're not sure how to fill the cavity left by your runaway sister and your gang-running ex-boyfriend."
Kevin's smile faltered, and he lowered his head as if to help him hear, the way he like to whenever conversation got serious. "Are you okay? If you need to get out or get away, you know my dad and I always welcome you at our house—"
"That's so sweet," Betty said with a fake smile. The offer was well-meaning, but Betty knew that Kevin's father—Sheriff Keller—probably wouldn't be too happy with her presence since she'd suspected him of being a serial killer in a completely justified investigation.
"In fact," Kevin said with a smile, "I'm going to call Archie and Veronica and the four of us can all do something tonight. And Jughead, too, if he doesn't have other plans."
"Yeah. If he doesn't have other plans." She tried not to sound sad or resentful, but Betty Cooper had never had a good poker face.
"I have a, um, thing to do right now," Kevin said vaguely, "but I'll text you as soon as possible, okay? We can all see a movie."
"A thing?" Betty inquired with a sly grin.
"Yeah. A thing with Fangs."
"Fogarty?"
"Yeah."
"The Serpent Fangs Fogarty?"
"Guilty," Kevin beamed as he turned a corner and vanished into the crowd of students eager to start break.
Betty sighed. Kevin would never learn his lesson, but the sight of Jughead wrapped in a leather jacket making his way to a meeting of the Swords and Serpents club— whose body consisted exclusively of Southside gang members— reminded Betty that she would never learn hers, either.
Betty pushed her way outside.
Free at last, she should have thought.
/
Getting an early start on your homework is good. Reading the entirety of Oedipus the King within the first three hours of being out of school because you don't want to face your family issues is not.
Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day, count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.
Heart in her throat, Betty stuffed the fat textbook into her backpack and grabbed her phone. No word yet from Kevin.
She did have a text from her mother, though, that said she'd be home a bit late, but would you please take the chicken out of the freezer, sweetie? They were going to have a big family dinner that night.
Great.
Aimless, Betty turned her screen off and dropped the phone to her stomach, staring up at her ceiling, letting her back feel every ridge of the quilt on her bed, the springs underneath.
Her mind wandered back, as did all too often, to the body on the floor of her kitchen, drenched in blood, the bullet hole still fresh in his forehead. How could her family have gone this bad?
As Riverdale sailed deeper and deeper into the evening, Betty's powder-pink ceiling turned to red, the swirling wine red of the blood wet on her kitchen floor, her slowly closing eyes not unlike that had been closed forever by her own family's hand. Somewhere outside, the Andrews' dog, Vegas, was barking and the wind was cradling the trees back and forth against Betty's bedroom window.
In that moment between sleep and sleeplessness, Betty too far gone into the throes of dreaming yet still aware that her head was on her pillow, there was no past, no death, no killers, no crazy mothers or Serpent boyfriends. There were the sounds of the branches against the window and there were a thousand answers but not a single question.
And Betty was standing and she was breathing, the air fresh and salty—she must have been standing by the seaside— and there was nothing but the breeze in her hair and the undeniable ground beneath her bare feet.
But that moment, that place between two spaces, between being awake and dreaming, it could never last.
And like so many dreams, the picture of a carefree teen in her yard eroded away, slowly, almost undetectable, to a nightmare.
/
Betty woke up with a jolt, images from her distorting and disturbing dreams already fading fast. Nightmares could be forgotten when reality was just as scary.
She sucked in a breath, like she had in her almost-dream, but the air wasn't salty or fresh. It was stiflingly sweet from the fumes of the remains of the Blossom maple farm that hadn't been squelched out of existence just yet. Betty shuffled to her window and opened it a crack, not wanting to cool the warm room, and took in a breath of the outside air.
It was good. Not as good as in her dream, but such is to be expected. She pushed the window shut and moved on down to the kitchen to take the chicken from the freezer.
She'd neglected to turn the lights on, because the fading of afternoon to evening was so gradual, and she didn't even think of it now, groping in the dark for the handle to the freezer.
So, the chicken was placed dutifully on the counter and the Cooper kitchen was dark and still.
No body on the floor, no body on the floor, not tonight, not tonight, not tonight, no body…
Betty held her breath.
Outside, a car rolled up and its headlights lit up the kitchen.
The shadows, Betty reminded herself, were just shadows. Not pools of blood. Not growing pools of smeared and spattered blood.
Just shadows.
But the headlights didn't move, kept the kitchen in long shadows and yellow light.
Perhaps her mother was home earlier than she'd let on?
Betty willed herself to the front door and threw it open to face the strange. The blinding headlights, which exaggerated the shadow of every leaf on every tree, every blade of grass, her own towering silhouette halfway in the foyer and halfway on the front stoop. She squinted and realized, with a guilty sense of relief, that the headlights don't belong to her mom's slate little homely car, but a sharp and sleek red convertible.
The top is down and inside sits none other than Cheryl Blossom, head crooked at an angle, eyeing Betty across the yard.
"Cheryl?"
"Betty!" Cheryl's voice is light and carefree, the way it gets when she's plotting something especially devious or prying to get on your good side. "What are you up to? Are your parents home? Is your brother?" With every question, her head tilts to the other side, but from the glare of the headlights, Betty can't make out the expression on Cheryl's face.
"Not too much." Betty shut the front door and stepped down from the stoop. "Nobody's home, so I was working on homework."
"Already? Betty, we have a week for that shit," Cheryl said with a chuckle.
"I know. Thought I'd get a jump start on it though." To keep herself from looking entirely lifeless, Betty said, "I am going to Kevin's tonight. To hang out with Archie and Veronica."
Cheryl nodded. Betty could tell she was only pretending to listen, waiting for her turn to speak again.
"Say, dear cousin, do you want to get in the car?" There's a lilt in Cheryl's voice, as if all Betty's problems could be solved with a night drive around Riverdale.
"Not really." Betty backed toward the house.
"We could drive up the highway…"
Betty's hand was on the knob.
"Could drive all night if wanted to. We could get pretty far."
"What are you talking about?" Betty said over her shoulder.
"We could be out of state before anyone even realizes we're gone."
Betty turned to face the street again, where beyond a thousand other cars were rushing from point A to point B, the interconnected web of roads spanning coast to silvery coast, the night stealing away everything but the fleeting concrete that passed under headlights. Somewhere on the road a car was probably flipping, someone was dying because of someone else's carelessness. Someone was going to be late for the night shift, someone was staring blankly at the fenceposts that passed, someone else turning the volume up as the radio played their favorite song, just for them, just for them.
Somewhere, someone was standing at the coast and breathing in the salty sea air, someone who had never heard of the sleepy town of Riverdale or the deviant Southside Serpents or the tragedy that was Jason Blossom or the grisly Black Hood murders.
"I want to go to the beach."
"The beach?"
"Like the ocean."
"Yeah, I know what the beach is, Betty. I think that can be arranged. We could make it to the Atlantic by tomorrow afternoon, I think, if we were to head straight east. Would take us significantly longer to go west, but…" Cheryl trailed off.
Betty realized that she had walked away from the house entirely, that she was feet away from the car and Cheryl Blossom was staring her dead in the eye.
"So, do you want to get in the car?"
Betty took hold of the car door handle and pulled it open.
No sooner had Betty buckled her seatbelt than Cheryl put her foot on the gas and the car lurched across the residential road ten miles over the speed limit.
They were bound for the highway, nothing but road between Cheryl and Betty and the sparkling blue coast, nothing but the gas pedal between their feet and the sand.
"Before we're out of town," Cheryl began as she pulled into a gas station, "let's pick up a few things. Like snacks and drinks and shit."
"I don't have any money," Betty said, feeling stupid when she realized that all she had brought with her were the things in her pocket: her phone, an old tissue, and a tampon she thankfully wouldn't need for a couple of weeks. But no money. Not enough to break even for gas or for snacks or meals… "Can we turn around? I didn't bring my wallet and I don't have my card or any cash or—"
"I know." Cheryl smirked, flashing a wad of bills. "I've got you covered."
Betty was intrigued but knew better than to ask where Cheryl had gotten the money from. "Oh… kay," she drawled. "What are we looking at? Candy? Granola bars? Soda? Water?"
"A healthy mix of all our options," Cheryl said, shoving a black credit card into Betty's hands. "Don't want to be boxed into one thing. You pick the snacks and drinks and pay and pay for gas, too, I'm going to pump our propellant."
"Okay." Betty flipped over the card. "Do I need a pin number? Or your signature or…?"
"Just go," Cheryl's said without turning from the pump, waving Betty off with a halfhearted flick of the wrist.
Cheryl had given no other criteria than a variety and Betty didn't know if they'd be on the road for hours or for days, so she scooped up one of each candy they had and three boxes of nutrition bars, plus a case of twenty-four bottled waters.
Struggling to lift the case with her one free hand, Betty staggered to the counter to pay, told the cashier she'd also like to pay for the gas outside. The cashier, whose nametag read "Gary", wordlessly scanned each item with a beep that sounded throughout the little corner store.
A six pack of cherry cola caught Betty's eye and, knowing it was Cheryl's favorite, Betty hoisted the cardboard package up to the counter and asked Gary to ring them up, too.
"Road trip?" Gary asked and his voice was hoarse.
"Something like that, I think."
The total was over a hundred dollars, which the card Cheryl had provided covered without issue, but still Betty hoped Cheryl knew how to budget.
Gary put the candy and the nutrition bars in a bag so Betty could, barely, carry all her stuff out of the store, balancing the soda and the bag's weights between her fingers in one hand, the water occupying all of her other hand and most of her arm.
"Took you long enough," Cheryl said dryly, perched on the door of the convertible, rather uncharacteristic red Converse resting on the driver's seat. She was wearing skintight jeans, too, which suited her well but were far from her usual choice of leggings. "What'd you get?"
"Water, soda, and assorted bars, ranging from vaguely healthy to distinctly unhealthy," Betty said exaltedly, unloading the bulky goods in the back, without Cheryl offering to help.
"Did you get any fruit?" Cheryl slid down into the driver's seat as Betty opened the passenger side door.
"No. Should I have?"
Cheryl shrugged. "It would probably go bad pretty quickly anyway." She revved the engine. "You ready to go, Goldilocks?"
"Yeah, here's your card back."
"You can just put that in the glove box. We're going to use cash for most of this adventure."
"Um, okay, why?"
"Because I'm paranoid. If we use the card, then my mother can track us and then we might have to abandon our quest for the open ocean."
"And you're sure you have enough cash?"
"Check my backpack, Cooper."
Betty twisted into the back to grab Cheryl's leather bag. She unzipped the front pocket to reveal an impressive wad of bills, ranging from ones to hundreds. "Holy…" Betty started. She knew better than to ask where Cheryl had gotten it, but in her disbelief the words slipped out. "How did you…"
"I stole it from my dear mother," Cheryl smirked dryly, "but please, please don't ask how she got it."
The convertible crawled out of the station and onto the road, yellow headlights cutting through the dark to reveal tree trunks shooting up from the edge of the road. Fox Forest, where Moose and Midge had been attacked, where Kevin had spent so many nights trying not to be alone, where the Riverdale Reaper had struck down a family, where the Black Hood had tormented Betty with her own goddamn reflection…
"So, I need to know now which direction to head," Cheryl said without taking her eyes from the road. "Are we going west or east?"
They were coming up on the sign that marked Riverdale's border, all greyed, dusty colors in the night, that said in lofty letters "Now leaving Riverdale, the town with pep!"
"West," Betty said definitively.
The bottom of the sign read: "Please visit again soon!"
"We're going far and we're going fast," Betty demanded. They had to.
How else would Betty escape that picture in her head, the image of her own face beneath the mask, of the Black Hood staring right back at her through a dirty old mirror in a death-cursed old house?
/
A/N: So I'm thrusting myself into a Riverdale multichap. Enjoy and please please please hit me with reviews or comments with your thoughts as I continue to update!