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It was Archie who came for Jughead during the raid on South Side High. He explained everything as he dragged Jughead away, and Jughead tried to listen even as he kept seeing Sweetpea and Toni—his friends, he acknowledged—handcuffed and led away because the North Side had to scapegoat the South Side for everything bad that happened in Riverdale. It was hard to look at Archie's open, earnest face and not see that blame, that hostility. Only the years of friendship allowed Jughead to look past it, and he thought maybe he finally really got how generations of bad blood kept people from being able to understand each other.
And maybe, for the first time, he didn't care. He had learned to like these South Side Serpents, learned to be one of them. It made his blood boil to see them punished for something they hadn't even done.
"Jughead, calm down," Archie urged him as he paced the aisle of Pop's.
"Calm down? Archie, Riverdale just became a police state!"
"McCoy said it's the Serpents are the ones dealing Jingle-Jangle."
That even his own best friend believed that just made Jughead more angry. "Serpents don't deal that stuff. The Ghoulies do."
"So tell Mayor McCoy that!"
"Oh, Mayor McCoy. Do you mean McCoy, the one that just arrested all my friends for no reason?" He saw that strike home with Archie, but swept on anyway, too angry to stop. "Why do you care, anyway? I thought you and Betty wanted nothing to do with me. Right?"
"I'm sorry about what happened, and how it happened. And as for Betty—you should maybe talk to her."
Fortunately, before Jughead could respond to that patent absurdity, his phone chimed. The Serpents were looking out for their own. And as Jughead left Pop's without a backward glance at Archie, for the first time, he truly felt that he was their own. He was a Serpent now, truly and completely.
Betty left the meeting at her mother's with a new determination to retake her life. The Black Hood wanted her? Well, he would have to accept that he couldn't have her all to himself. Her life was important—her friends were part of that life, and she wasn't accepting this division any longer.
She took the first possible opportunity to talk to Veronica. Before she could say anything, Kevin, at his most spiteful, cut her off. "Don't even try, Benedict Betty."
"Chill, Kevin," Veronica told him. Her eyes were hard; she wasn't feeling particularly forgiving, Betty could see. "She's not worth it."
And they walked off, even as Betty's phone rang again. She ducked into an empty classroom as she answered it. "I've done everything you've asked. Why can't you leave me the hell alone?"
"Because we're not finished. I spared Nick's life. Because of me, you don't have his blood on your hands. If you don't help me, you'll be responsible for far worse. Riverdale's streets will run red."
"Help you how?"
"While Keller and his men hunt for low-level dealers, we will go after the real sinner: the drug-maker. Someone who hides behind a name. The Sugar-man. The corrupter of children, who deserves swift and brutal justice."
"The fact that you're asking me to find him means that you can't," Betty argued. "I'm a school newspaper reporter."
"Who also happens to be friends with the daughter of the Sugar-man's former supplier. Clifford Blossom. I'd start there."
"And if I find him? What will you do to him?"
"Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to, Betty," the Black Hood told her. "Bring me the identity of the Sugar-man and I will put down my sword."
"And if I don't? If I refuse?"
"Someone will be purified. Don't test me on that."
The call ended, leaving Betty as enmeshed in the Hood's snares as ever—and more alone than she had ever been.
Betty had tracked down Sheriff Keller, hoping to get answers regarding the identity of the Sugar-man, but the sheriff was less help than Cheryl had been—at least she recognized the Sugar-man as a childhood bogeyman her mother had used on her. The sheriff just brushed Betty aside, not knowing how real the danger was if the Sugar-man wasn't found.
When the sheriff left Pop's, Betty was starting to consider her next move when a familiar voice cut into her thoughts. "Drafting your next savage takedown?"
She turned to see Veronica sitting at the nearest booth. "I don't expect you to believe me, but I didn't mean what I said. There's no sane excuse."
"No. There isn't." Veronica's voice was hard, uncompromising, so it surprised Betty when she closed her notebook and rested her arms on it and looked up at Betty. "So, tell me, Betty—what's the insane excuse?"
Betty sank into the booth seat across from her friend. "The Black Hood."
"The Black Hood? You mean, you're so afraid of him that you want to distance yourself from all us sinners?"
"No! No, nothing as simple as that. The Black Hood—he calls me. He …" She wanted to explain it all to Veronica, who had, after all, seen Betty's darkness herself, but she couldn't quite bring herself to put it all on the table. "I'm hoping if I string him along I can find out who he is, but he—he watches me. And he told me to distance myself from my friends. He wanted me alone, and vulnerable."
"Betty, what? You're right, that's insane. But it's the most believable explanation I've heard yet."
Pop put a milkshake down in front of Betty and she slurped it up, hungry for the first time in days, while she filled in the details and Veronica processed the situation.
At last she leaned forward. "So, to recap: You're talking to a serial killer on the reg, and he's been puppet-mastering you?"
"I'll never forgive myself for what I did, V. To you, to Jug, to my mom. Hell, even to Nick St. Clair."
"Girl, I would have given Nick's name and then happily treated myself to a facial. I still may," Veronica added. "But yes, you're in a toxic relationship with the Black Hood, and you need to break up."
"Maybe I can turn the tables on him, V. He says he'll go away if I do one last thing: Find out who's behind the Jingle-Jangle. There's some creep called the Sugar-man."
"Okay, so what's the problem?"
"If the Sugar-man exists and I find out who he is, I can't just give up his name. The Black Hood would kill him! And, drug dealer or not, he's still a human being."
Veronica muttered, "Barely."
"I'm so close, V. Will you help?"
After a moment's thought, Veronica nodded. "I'm in."
Betty couldn't help smiling. It felt so good to be V and B again, to have an ally she could count on.
Jughead paced back and forth in front of Archie, unable to stop thinking about the meeting he'd just had with Tall Boy. Ally with the Ghoulies? For what? For solidarity against the North Side? Become everything the Serpents had always held firm against being just because they were afraid?
"This isn't an alliance with the Ghoulies," he told Archie, "this is a hostile takeover. God, who knows how long Tall Boy has been planning on betraying us! I have to stall, just until Sweetpea and Toni get out. I just hope they'd rather go to war with the Ghoulies than start …" He shuddered. "Dealing Jingle-Jangle."
"Jughead, you joined the Serpents to keep the peace," Archie reminded him.
"My dad would never sit back and let this happen, so neither will I. So unless you have any better ideas …"
"Not me." Archie sat forward. "But, dude, what you just said."
Looking at his friend, Jughead remembered his ace in the hole. His dad might be in prison, but he was still the leader of the Serpents.
So they made a late-night trip to the prison, managing to talk their way in to meet with FP, to tell him everything. His dad was less than thrilled that Jughead had joined the Serpents, although he understood why when Jughead explained it to him, and he didn't like the idea of allying with the Ghoulies any more than Jughead did.
FP called on Jughead to outthink the Ghoulies, to challenge them to a street race for control of South Side High.
It all came together in the Ghoulies' basement, where Jughead and Archie were trying to tempt the Ghoulie chief into the race, and Veronica and Betty were hauled in by Reggie's drug dealer, caught while trying to follow him to find a lead to the Sugar-man.
The Ghoulie chief loomed over Jughead. "So these are your bitches?"
"I beg your misogynistic pardon," Veronica snapped.
"You two take your skanks and get the hell outta here. Until you make me a better offer, there'll be no race."
Jughead was desperate, and so angry with Betty for trying to ruin what life he had left that he wasn't thinking straight. "If you win, we'll give you the White Wyrm. You can expand your drug dealing horizons and upgrade out of this literal hellhole."
"We'll take the Wyrm—and Sunnyside Trailer Park."
Backed against a wall, Jughead nodded. "Deal."
Betty agreed to do the repairs on the car they intended to use. In another life, Jughead would have wanted to know why she knew about cars, to ask her to show him what she knew. He would have found the sight of her working so intently with wrench in hand unbearably sexy. But today, he wanted nothing to do with her, and would far rather not have had her involved. But Archie had pleaded that Betty was much better at this than he was, and all but forced Jughead to stand here and play assistant.
"God bless Reggie Mantle and his inferiority complex," she said, delving underneath and moving parts around. "His car's a lot like him: It's beautiful to look at but not much going on under the hood."
Jughead ignored her, leaning against the car with his arms folded.
"Um, crescent wrench, please?" she asked softly.
He handed it to her, she thanked him, and he continued to ignore her. He only wished he couldn't smell her shampoo, that he didn't remember what it had been like to kiss her, trust her, love her.
"So this is what Serpents do for fun, huh? Street-race rival gangs?"
"Just go ahead and say it, Betty." He turned on her and she straightened up, meeting his eyes briefly, before her gaze faltered.
"You said you weren't gonna join them, Jug," she said at last.
"And you said you loved me, and then you dumped me. Via Archie? Which, by the way, way worse than via text." He hadn't intended to go all the way to that point so quickly, but the words were out before he could stop them.
"I'm sorry, Jughead." Her eyes were filled with tears. "It won't make any sense, but everything around us was imploding, and I did it to protect you."
"Betty, you did the one thing that could actually hurt me."
"I will explain everything to you, Jug. I will. But right now I just want to get you through this race."
He returned to his position at the corner of the car, his back to her, but there was something in him that hadn't been there before this conversation. He despised himself for it, but it was there. Hope. Hope that maybe there was an explanation, that maybe they could be friends again. Farther than that, he didn't dare think.
As the guys prepared for the race, Betty debated whether to say something to Jughead, and if so, what to say. Whatever happened today, she decided at last, she didn't want Jughead getting into that car thinking she had dropped him like second-period geometry. She wanted him to know, if not the whole truth, at least more of it.
She approached him while Veronica and Archie were having their good-bye kiss. He slammed the hood of the car down and came toward her, although it was clear she was the last person he wanted to see right now. He avoided looking at her in a way she had come to recognize as self-preservation, his defense against something he thought was going to hurt him.
"Before you get in the car, I need you to know. I never stopped loving you, Jug." He snorted and looked away from her, but Betty didn't let that stop what she needed to say. "I'm not sure I can." She didn't want to wait for a response, to leave open a chance for him to say something they would both regret later, so she hurried to add more practical advice. "Also—don't ride the clutch, and don't let it slip between gear shifts. Okay?"
For a moment, she thought he might push past her without a response, but he looked at her with some of that precautionary hardness erased from his face. "You're an enigma, Cooper."
Then he and Archie got into the car, and Betty clenched her fists, trying to remember to breathe … and trying not to think about how good Jughead looked in Serpent black.
When it was all over—when Archie had pulled the parking brake to take their car out of the race, when the police had raided, rounding up the Ghoulies, when his best friend made it clear that he was a naïve fool who had thought getting the Ghoulies arrested for street racing would solve the problem instead of adding a whole lot more—it didn't surprise Jughead at all that Betty Cooper was suddenly riding shotgun in his car.
Or was it her car now? She had done the lion's share of the work to make it worthy of street racing.
But he couldn't talk to her now, not when so much had gone so wrong.
He dropped her off at Pop's.
"Jughead …"
"Not now, Betty." Maybe not ever, he thought, but he didn't say that. He couldn't quite bring himself to imply that the door was closed between them, because who was he kidding? It wasn't, and maybe it never could be.