Betty stood frozen in time when the disembodied voice of The Sandman drifted away into nothingness. While her body stood frozen, her spirit spun itself into a frenzy. "I want to finish what we started," the voice threatened, cutting through the healed scars of her youth. Betty could not even imagine what The Sandman might have in store for her this time around. A decade ago it was fear. The bad man had only touched her the first time he visited. After that it was just voices from the closet, easy enough for her parents to shrug off as an over-active imagination. Her parents kept telling her it was all in her head for long enough that she eventually began to believe them. That was likely why she began to associate the voice with her father's. If this was all in her head, then the voice would have to have been familiar. Surely her father would not be so mean to her, which left the only logical conclusion to be that this was all a dream. A dream featuring a familiar voice.


Shaking her head as if trying to dislodge The Sandman's presence, Betty's mind flashed back to the first official day of summer. It seemed so long ago. Memorial Day 2016 had been a special day for Riverdale. It was the 50th anniversary of the founding of their Town with Pep. Each year, a large festival was held in the middle of Picken's Park, the sight of the truce between the natives and the explorers. There had been 8 days of fighting, started by explorers who disturbed a peaceful town. As with any story, there were two sides. The most popular one followed the narrative that the explorers improved the lives of the natives vastly, what with all their modern ideas and conveniences. The natives' stories were not so warm and fuzzy, however. This particular year, Betty Cooper was hand-picked by Mayor McCoy to give a speech celebrating 50 years of new Riverdale. McCoy hoped to use Betty's innocent voice to push her agenda of gentrification. An agenda featuring the white-washing, so to speak of the Southside.

I have a dream. Betty paused for effect, as Mayor McCoy had instructed. If we all work together, the entire town of Riverdale can be reborn, as One. Northsiders helping Southsiders, all working together. Riverdale exudes so much pep, so much potential. Together we will bring more to the world than gangs and turf wars. Southsiders, let the North lead you to greener pastures.

***A camera flash distracts Betty, and things get weird***

Predictably, however, the Northsiders, will push like Hell to rid the town of what they call scum. The Southside is more than just gangs and drugs, like the Northside would like us all to believe. The heart and soul of Riverdale reside south of the tracks. We all must work tog-"

"Let's give it up for Betty Cooper," upon the unscripted detour of Betty's speech Mayor McCoy stalked onto the stage, gently guiding the unassuming poetic terrorist out of the spotlight. "Have you lost your damn mind, Betty? The Southside is the scourge of Riverdale. The entire purpose of the SoDale project is to cleanse the town of the deplorables living south of the tracks," McCoy growled menacingly.

Immediately after the Jubilee speech Betty was forcefully escorted home whereupon her mother berated her for the unexpected plot twist and surprisingly her father stood up for her. Normally Alice Cooper was one for free speech, but apparently not when it came to pointing a shining light upon her old stomping grounds.

The following day, Betty sat alone in a booth at Pop's, numbing herself by drinking an entire vanilla milkshake in one breath. The brain-freeze was a welcome relief from the chaos of her mind; it allowed her to stare into the abyss behind her eyelids without distraction. Suspiciously soon after her speech gone wrong, her friends had gone their separate ways for the summer. Betty hadn't even had the chance to say goodbye. It would have been nice for them to at least tell her they'd be leaving. Archie was off to stay with his mom in Chicago, Kevin joined an ROTC trip to Bahrain to visit with his mother, and Jughead was on his way to Toledo. Apparently FP had some business to attend to, and thought it best if Jughead was nowhere near Riverdale. Would it have killed her friends to tell her they'd be gone? Why the hell did that information come from her parents?

The ringing bell from Pop's front door had brought Betty out of her frozen-brain focus. She looked up to see Fred Andrews pick up a paper bag from the cashier. Betty tried to get his attention, in hopes of piecing together why Archie seemed to be running away for the summer. As soon as she opened her mouth, however, the front door slammed open. A man dressed in dark clothes with a black hooded mask over his face stepped calmly into the diner. She watched as Fred Andrews dropped his quarter and two nickels on the counter as the hooded assailant caught his eye. The air inside Pop's somehow took on another dimension, thereby slowing the passage of time, or so it seemed to Betty. Moments before it happened, she saw the gun emerge from the hooded man's pants. The bullet shot out from the barrel of the gun and seconds later Betty heard the blast. Despite her ability to see the unfortunate events before they happened, she wasn't able to see far enough ahead to do anything about it. As Fred dropped to the floor, Betty turned an ran out the door after the shooter. Motherfucker was surprisingly fast, however, and she quickly lost his trail. She kept running though. Along the river, across the tracks, towards nowhere in particular.

That is how she found herself reading a comic book on a bench outside the bus station on the Southside. The Sigil it was called. It appeared to be a sheaf of hand-drawn nonsense and scribbled words, but the images were mesmerizing and the ideas genius. Somehow, the book appeared to have been written for her. The author, some Santino Perez, had to have known she'd be stopping on this particular bench, at this particular time.

The Sigil is a comic book

Featuring a heroine who doesn't feel like herself, ever.

Confusion is everywhere.

The practice of Chaos Magick enables her to operate outside the bounds of consensus reality.

That is her super-power

The Sigil featured a young heroine with the capability to organize and partition her schizophrenic brain utilizing the concept of sigils. A sigil, Betty read, was a symbolic drawing charged with the will of its creator, whatever the hell that meant. But maybe, just maybe, this book of cartoons and weird ideas would help her indulge and understand the non-Betty parts of herself. The parts that didn't shine like the girl next door, the parts that scream only at her because Betty knows she can't let the dark edges of her persona be known to the outside world. Polly was sent away for not fitting the mold, and Betty refused to let that happen to her.

Betty read The Sigil, reread then red again. She spent hours at her desk sketching images, writing words and meditating ferociously until she experienced her first astral projection. Her mind stilled and she saw herself as a faceless individual shrouded in darkness. She felt an eerie calm while at the same time ready to burst from ecstasy. It was mild experience by a gurus terms, but a hell of a high for a novice. A week after picking up the comic, Betty wandered into a thrift store over on the Southside. She picked up a black wig along with a few changes of clothes - in blacks, dark purples and fire-engine red. Armed with her new wardrobe she meandered through the Southside to the edge of Fox forest, to an abandoned house. No one has lived there for years, but there is a dresser and mirror. She entered the house as Betty, exited as Lizzy, thus beginning the process of compartmentalizing her dual selves.


Crossing the railroad tracks was a symbolic ritual for Betty, wherein she left the persona of Lizzy and fell back into the picture of purity known to the world as Betty. This evening, when she crossed the tracks Betty's focus was on finding answers, on putting the dark cloud of chaos in her mind into a logical order. The Sandman was a distraction, and so that thought was put to rest. Without actively focusing on it, her mind was able to compartmentalize itself as the heroine in The Sigil had done to neatly catalogue all the voices in her head. When Sandman was safely stowed away in the recesses of her mind, she was free to consider the curious conversation with her colorful friend.

"I'll let Mia and Sonny know you're still alive." Kirk had said.

Sonny. The name rang a bell, but there was no face. Betty was overcome by yet another feeling that defied words. Furious pain and loss. The faceless name had been a large part of herself, a large part of Lizzy she was sure. But she couldn't remember how, or why. Losing the face of this guy might be the worst thing that came from the hard-core tranquilizers prescribed by the Sisters. The drugs were part of Alice Cooper's plans for Betty. Plans which did not allow the existence of Lizzy. Betty, however, could no longer deny a such large part of herself. Lizzy was everything that Betty was not, in the same way Betty was everything Lizzy was not. Without warning, another memory came barreling to the forefront of Betty's mind.

Her body lay comatose in a dark room at the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. They told her it's "hallucinations" and "delusional mania," but Betty knows what they'd found. What they'd known immediately. Is was on the way downhill after paying respects to the fallen Roman tower at the top of Mt. Infinity. The sky was bluer and the air was sweeter than it had been on the way up. Still entranced from the incantation atop the mountain, Betty'd almost tripped on the feet with hairy toes that were sticking out from under a blueberry bush. Jason Blossom was no longer missing. Jason Blossom was dead and here lay the body. When she screamed, Sonny immediately reached out and placed his hand on the small of her back. She whirled around, on edge from finding the body and startled by the hand on her back. Sonny wrapped his arms around her as she turned and buried her face into his chest. Despite the situation, she felt safe. Wrapped in Sonny's arms she could hear his heart beating, as if only for her.

Betty felt her spirit return, dropping into her body like a ton of bricks. Each time Sonny inhabits a vision, she feels one step closer to seeing his face. If only she could walk backwards through her missing memories to find the source of the visions, then maybe she could find him. See him. Feel him.

Walking quickly as she tended to do when deep in thought, Betty walked past her street. There was no way she was ready to return to the girl next door. Betty made a quick left turn and pulled out her phone to avoid running into Mayor McCoy, who was on the street discussing something intently with Sherriff Keller. The encounter with McCoy spurred another vision. This time, the vision she had when first strapped to a bed at the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. It is a vision of the scene outside Smokin' Joes the day after their hike.

"She was fine when I dropped her off around 7 pm. I didn't think it was a good idea to leave her alone at that empty house but she insisted," Sonny wrung his hands as he recounted his last encounter with Lizzy the previous evening. Betty had convinced Sonny to drop her off at the house she was using to transform between Betty and Lizzy, but she couldn't remember how. Lizzy knew she was walking the razor's edge between worlds. Despite her feelings for the guy, she wasn't ready to expose Betty yet. According to Kirk, Sonny was the one who'd written The Sigil. Weird didn't even begin to describe the concept of the story, she recalled, but it resonated within Betty, gave a name to the darkness she'd not yet had the opportunity to explore. But still Betty wasn't ready to show herself. There was no way someone like Sonny would go for someone like Betty.

"Then sometime around 11 pm she called me frantically," Sonny continued. "I was half-asleep, still tripping, and couldn't tell whether or not the voice on the other end of the phone was real. I was too paralyzed to talk, and the longer she spoke, the more incoherent she sounded," Sonny had his head between his knees as he sat on his front steps recounting the previous evening to Kirk and Mia.

As she watched the faceless being of her beloved, Betty was able to see what Sonny could not.

After the hike to the Roman Tower, the girl stepped into the abandoned house as Lizzy, then exited as Betty. This time, however, Lizzy wasn't gone completely. Call it the mushrooms, the group magick atop Mt. Infinity, or maybe just a truer version of herself coming out from behind the Cooper façade her parents had spent the last 16 years painting. Betty felt like a new person, despite the dead body they'd found mere hours ago. As she crossed the railroad tracks after that fateful hike, the second part of her Southside Ritual, she got a message from The Sandman, who mentioned Jason Blossom's murder. They didn't tell authorities about finding the body because they were tripping. The call from The Sandman was enough to put her over the edge.

After Sonny had hung up, she tried to sleep it off, unsuccessfully. Instead she got up, pulled her makeshift altar from under her bed and opened her silk-wrapped package of black candles. No one had been home when she returned, but her focus prevented her from hearing her parents return. Alice lost her shit when she opened Betty's door to check on what she thought would be a sleeping daughter. Upon witnessing what she thought was some kind of devil worship, Alice pulled her tripping daughter down the stairs for an intervention.

Before her parents confiscated her phone, Betty managed to call Sonny again. This time he did not answer, so she left a disturbing message, telling him they were taking her away and that she loved him.

Sonny could hear she was scared as hell, but found the message confusing as fuck nonetheless. He played it for Kirk to get advice, wondering whether the girl was worth the headache. KIrk told him LIzzy was just suffering from the first break in the facade of reality - "don't you remember doing that?" Kirk asked. "It wasn't too long ago."

"Yeah, but it also wasn't nearly that severe," Sonny replied. "I mean, could she be faking it?"

"Doesn't sound that way. You can't fake a bad trip if you've never had one to begin with. And, in terms of severity, you know that has to do with Set and Setting. I think she's got an entirely different starting point, different mind set, so obviously she'll experience something totally different. I don't think you've tripped enough to have a strong basis for empathy. Do you know who she is?" Kirk asked, not wanting to spill the girl's secrets.

"Name's Lizzy - that's all I know," Sonny replied staring at the ground getting more uncomfortable by the second. He felt ashamed, scared, afraid of the intensity of his feelings for the girl. "Well I guess I oughta head home before my old man comes out looking for me."


Laying in bed, Betty gives herself a mental pep-talk for the first day of junior year. She will need extra focus to compartmentalize and keep Lizzy below the surface. She can't have a repeat of the uncomfortable night in Pop's. Also, Betty knows she has to behave if she wants to live outside of the Sisters, to retain a slight bit of freedom.

Before drifting off, she recalls the first-ever conversation with Kirk. Lizzy had walked into the gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes. They'd begun talking about GR and Jug's weird obsession with conspiracies. Lizzy had shown Kirk The Sigil which led to discussion on tips for compartmentalizing. Kirk had also read The Sigil and knows the author. He'd promised to introduce Lizzy soon.

As she fell into a deep sleep, the faceless name plastered again behind her eyelids. Sonny.

a/n: There is quite a bit of jumping around going on in this story, but that's how Betty's fractured mind operates these days. The summer before her junior year of high school was traumatic and in attempt to protect itself, her mind blocked out important details of her life. Hopefully the pieces are starting to fit together. Let me know what you think, or if anything needs further clarification. :)

Until next time…ever yours in chaos ~ Alice