Chapter 1: you can't stand inside with me, but the reverse of me is where you must be
She kept expecting her sister's car to pull into the driveway.
It was getting close to 6 pm, the time Betty knew Polly would usually come to pick up her two children, Juniper and Dagwood, from their parents' house.
Elm Street was empty.
Betty stood on the porch, her back leaning against the double red door. The sun was strong in the sky, despite evening slowly approaching. The late March air was chilly. The looping transition from winter to spring. She folded her arms over her chest, shivering in the oversized Yale sweatshirt she'd found in one of the boxes stacked neatly in the closet of her old room.
She'd arrived in Riverdale earlier in the afternoon. The flight from London to Newark had landed in the morning and then she'd immediately boarded a train upstate. Her father had picked her up at the Centerville station. He'd hugged her bone-close and lifted her two heavy suitcases into the trunk of the car. Betty didn't feel like talking, didn't even know what to begin to say, but her father tried to fill the ride with mindless chatter about his latest articles. She'd nodded and imagined fiddling with the radio, changing the dial away from the classical station Hal stubbornly insisted on playing during every car ride.
After about an hour on the road, they finally made it to Riverdale. She'd wheeled her suitcases into the house, lugging them up the stairs to her childhood bedroom. It looked the same as she remembered it. The full bed covered in the thinning floral blanket from her childhood, literary quotes and pictures of her high school friends taped to the mirror, the bookshelf overflowing with novels and poetry manuscripts from her college courses.
She zipped open the suitcases but otherwise didn't start unpacking. She couldn't quite let herself believe this wasn't just a visit. That she was simply here, with no fixed return date.
She could hear her mother calling her down for lunch and she descended the stairs before taking a seat at the kitchen table. Her mother tried to fuss over her, spooning a large portion of food on her plate and raving about the softness of the new towels she'd bought in preparation for Betty's arrival. They could both tell the effort was half-hearted. Betty picked at the macaroni and cheese Alice had prepared, her stomach still queasy from the eight-hour flight. Truthfully, she hadn't had an appetite in weeks. Even for comfort food.
She asked about her niece and nephew. Alice sighed and began to complain about how difficult it was for two adults nearing sixty to take care of five-year-olds. Betty gulped in a breath of air to hold in preparation for when her patience to listen inevitably wore out. She let out the breath when Alice moved on to the lack of help from people in the community, yawning in the process.
"You should rest, Betty," her father cut in. "We go to pick the kids up at 5."
Betty nodded, standing up. She went back to her room, walking around the suitcases on the middle of her floor, to the small bathroom attached to her room. She peeled off the leggings, tank top and zip-up sweatshirt she'd worn on the plane, folding them into a pile on the sink. She ran the water, waiting until it was scalding hot before entering. She stood ramrod straight, letting the water wash over her body, her eyes glazed against the glass pane of the shower. She felt numb.
After drying herself, she pulled out her other pair of black leggings from her suitcase. She put them on along with a plain white t-shirt. She was tired, but she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep. Plus she was determined to beat the jetlag. She turned instead to the boxes in her closet. They were filled with the belongings from college she hadn't brought with her when she moved to London the summer after she graduated, nearly four years before. She looked through them listlessly, touching each item, but not removing them, except for the old cozy Yale sweatshirt. She pushed her arms and head through it, enjoying the brief moment of warmth enveloping her.
She contemplated texting Adam to tell him she'd landed, but thought better of it. She didn't know if she even really wanted to receive his perfunctory response. It was after 8 pm in London, around the time he usually got home, if he didn't stop for a drink at the pub near his office with his fellow investment bankers. Only a few short months ago, that had been her life. Arriving home at 5:30 pm from her job as a copy editor at an international law firm to the sleek modern apartment he'd rented. Cooking casserole or lasagna for dinner and leaving it in the oven to warm. Curling up on the couch with CNN International on silent in the background, pawing through a book, waiting for him. It seemed like a different reality entirely.
She'd met Adam in college her junior year and had been swept away fast. He was a year older, British, sophisticated. She'd had little experience with guys, aside from a traumatizing, short-lived relationship with her high school crush the summer before college. Days after declaring them official, Trevor left her hanging on a string, ghosting her for days at a time, before finally ending things, leaving her to stew for two years in inadequacy and insecurity about boys. Adam put the pieces back together, she thought. She was so enamored with him, so eager to keep him happy, that she followed his whims willingly. She'd agreed to an open long-distance relationship when he graduated and returned to England (not that she actually ever dated anyone else). Then, after buying her a ticket to visit him over her final winter break, he slowly started to convince her to give up her post-graduation plans of moving to New York City to live with her childhood best friend and finding work in the publishing industry to move across the Atlantic to be with him. She was so young, only 21, and naively thought their college puppy love was built to last. She'd made the leap, submerging her anxieties and second guesses in the excitement of solidifying their relationship and living abroad. But as exotic as it sounded to be living in a foreign country, experiencing a new culture and new people, Betty soon learned it was supremely isolating. Even after almost four years, she still couldn't really say she ever felt a part of her adopted country or that she had a life outside of Adam. She had work colleagues she was friendly with and whose company she even enjoyed on the few times she met them outside the office, but no one she really considered a friend. No one she could rely on. As for Adam's friends, it felt like they merely tolerated her, openly snickering at her Americanness and cheerful sincerity each time they got together. Adam refused to acknowledge the problem, claiming it was her fault she wasn't good at making friends, all the while seeming to block her from getting close to anyone that wasn't him, especially other men.
Betty clicked open her phone, relieved that before boarding the flight at Heathrow she'd had the foresight to change her background from a picture of the two of them to a generic image of a cat. There were no new texts.
She didn't know when their relationship had started to feel like a chore, like she was a mechanical doll performing the role of dutiful girlfriend, while inside she was screaming for him to see her, to realize she didn't want to be a dependent burden on him. She just wanted an equal partnership, like she thought they'd had in the beginning, when the only thing that could stop their long, pseudo-intellectual conversations was his inability to keep his hands off her. But he didn't look at her that way anymore. She was just his pretty, non-threatening American girlfriend who didn't have an ambitious job and would one day make the charming housewife he needed to succeed in his upper crust, professional milieu. She probably would have continued to the darkest depths of that life, sublimating herself into Adam's version of a perfect Stepford wife, if Polly hadn't gotten sick. His reaction to her sister's sudden hospitalization had been so cold and clinical, so antithetical to what Betty needed emotionally in every way. And when the point came that she knew she had no choice but to come home, he told her in not so many words maybe she should just go alone.
Betty put off returning when Polly first went into the hospital in January. Travel restrictions made flying difficult and Adam had told her she was overreacting and there was no justification for taking unlimited time off her job. Part of her accepted his reasoning because she also hadn't wanted to believe at first it was serious, that there was a possibility Polly wouldn't pull through, despite the grave, anxiety-inducing looks of the doctors on all the video calls. She'd booked a flight in advance for a three-week spring holiday and figured even if Polly was still recuperating in the hospital then, she could help her parents with taking care of the twins.
Her sister died two weeks before she was scheduled to arrive.
When she'd gotten the news via a text message from her mother at work, she felt frozen, immobile. It all seemed far away enough not to be real. That if she closed her eyes and opened them Polly would be back in her apartment waking Juniper and Dagwood up to go to school, not waiting in a hospital morgue for her body to be collected. Eventually she'd called Adam. He was in the middle of a meeting and didn't answer. So she left her office without saying a word to anyone, taking public transportation back to the apartment, anemically listening to John Frusciante's "The Will to Death." It was the most interminable ride of her life.
The funeral would be in a few days, but her parents told her just to come back to Riverdale when she could. They didn't want to wait to bury Polly. She didn't argue and impassively agreed to get her things in order and keep the original departure date. She asked to take a leave of absence from work, closed her bank account (transferring the money to the account she still maintained in the US), and canceled her return ticket back to England. Adam acted indifferently the whole time. He'd held her as she cried that first night, but didn't offer anything else, didn't suggest coming to the US with her, didn't ask what she needed or wanted from him, didn't try to make their last weeks living together in the apartment easier. She guessed he never contemplated her actually leaving him, on an open-ended ticket no less, despite her obvious obligation to her family now. She realized he didn't really know her at all anymore, had become accustomed to the idea of her as a meek, subservient little girl perpetually deferential to him, and there was nothing tethering her to England aside from a life she had never particularly wanted beside a man a younger, naive part of her still loved but whom she had seriously come to dislike.
Neither of them had officially said it was over when he'd hugged her loosely before she got into the cab, but Betty knew. In truth, she'd known for months. Even before her sister's illness, they'd been a couple surviving on autopilot. And then, when Polly was hospitalized, Adam simply retreated so Betty also slowly started to disengage. All her energy was absorbed by researching liver disease and transplants and trying to get a hold of doctors. No room was left to keep up the pretense of their carefully constructed but hollow gingerbread house. And so it crumbled in on itself. If she had any space now to grieve beyond the enormous sense of bereavement weighing down on her at losing her only sister, it wasn't for him, but for the years she felt she'd wasted. Still, she'd cried all the way to the airport, her cheek like a windowpane in the rain.
If he had ever put some brokenness inside her back together, it was with cheap, shoddy glue, and she felt more splintered now than ever before.
Betty tinkered around her room for another hour, trying to distract herself by running down lists in her brain of the less sentimental clothes and books and knickknacks she'd left behind and if it was even worth it to ask Adam to ship them to her (although she'd already thought ahead and dutifully packed them into boxes). She couldn't maintain the trick for long. Her mind flitted to thoughts about the funeral she'd watched over Zoom, the eulogy she'd given, written in an uninterrupted haze on her phone the night of. She couldn't outrun the thoughts.
Surrendering, she headed downstairs. She could hear her father in his basement office, working. In addition to owning and running the local newspaper, the Riverdale Register, with her mother, Hal taught history courses at the college in neighboring Greendale. Although Alice had clearly decided not to go to the Register's offices on Betty's first day home, Hal didn't understand the meaning of a day off. She noticed her mother in the living room, sitting on the couch with vacant eyes watching an old black-and-white movie playing on television. She sat down next to her, staring blankly at the screen. They sat like that in silence for nearly an hour, until she heard her father's footsteps ascending and he declared it was time to pick up Juniper and Dagwood.
She went with Hal to collect the twins from the aftercare program at their kindergarten. Their excitement at having their aunt visiting brought the ghost of a smile to her face. It was hard to really look at them though, as much as her heart twitched with the instinct to give them all the love in the universe. Their features were so similar to Polly's, just with their father's coloring.
Jason Blossom had been Polly's boyfriend on-and-off since high school. Despite all their drama and back and forth over the years, Betty knew Polly had really cared for him. They'd become pregnant with the twins not long after Polly had finished her college culinary program and Jason had taken over his parents' local maple syrup empire. Although not officially together, they were co-parenting Juniper and Dagwood for the most part until the accident. Betty closed her eyes remembering getting the news three years ago, when she was already living in London. Jason had been driving to a business meeting in Centerville when a truck plowed him off the road. He was killed instantly. The twins were only two-years-old.
Polly had never really recovered, her behavior becoming even more erratic and her demeanor more irritable in the years since. Her sister had always been something of a wild child, but if Betty had to guess, Jason's death was the catalyst to her drinking becoming more than just simply recreational. None of them had known to what extent, though. Betty could feel her heart beat faster and beads of sweat form under her arms as she felt the newly budding anger toward her parents for being caught so unaware of Polly's addiction. Of turning a blind eye because they were too busy working or didn't have the emotional bandwidth to help her. Her anger turned inward as her father's car took the last turn from the elementary school to their street. She'd always guessed there was a reason Polly was still so financially dependent on her parents, despite having worked in restaurants throughout college and then landing a full-time job as the assistant executive chef at a convention center in Greendale. It didn't shock her when she found out about the drinking. But she hadn't explicitly known either. She knew rationally she shouldn't blame herself. Communication was a two-way street and Polly had always been good at hiding the darker truths of her life. But the guilt gnawed at her, chewing her up from the inside. What if she'd called more often and asked Polly how she was doing? What if the few times she'd visited the US in the past few years, she'd actually tried to engage her in a real conversation. Maybe Polly would have opened up. Maybe Betty would have been able to help her. The what-ifs swam around the ocean of her brain like a school of fish on steroids and if it hadn't been for her dad's car pulling up the driveway and the twins screaming to be released from their car seats, she'd have probably hyperventilated and broken down right then. She blinked away the teardrops that had involuntarily formed and opened the passenger door.
After she'd unbuckled them, Juniper and Dagwood raced out onto the lawn, throwing their backpacks onto the grass and starting to toss a bouncy red ball back and forth. "Betty, play with us," they demanded and she took a deep breath to steady herself, before jogging down to the lawn to play catch with them. She could hear her father shutting the front door after him as he went into the house, and she rolled her eyes at his obvious pawning of the kids off on her. Although she'd known this would be the case when she decided to return indefinitely to Riverdale, it didn't alleviate the sting of annoyance she felt at his actions. She tried her best to brush it aside and focus on her niece and nephew, soldiering on past the overwhelming fatigue that had snuck up on her to run around outside with them for a half hour. Eventually the kids got tired and said they wanted to watch TV before dinner. She opened the door for them and put on a PBS kids' show. She could see her mother puttering around in the kitchen, turning when she heard the sounds now emanating from the television.
"Dinner's at 6:15, Betty," her mother reminded her.
Betty nodded, tilting her head so her mother couldn't see her roll her eyes again. Dinner had been at 6:15 probably since before she was born. She didn't need a reminder. Betty sighed. Her grief coupled with her anger at her parents over Polly had her on edge and even more impatient than usual with their old tricks. At the same time, she couldn't help but feel these flashes of hatred at herself, inwardly thinking of herself as a brat, even if she hadn't outwardly sassed her parents. She knew they were hurting deeply too, in a way she couldn't understand, and they were trying to cope the best way they knew how—taking comfort in the familiar, running away to work. It bothered her, though. She couldn't help it. They had their usual routine to return to, even with Juniper and Dagwood now under their custody, but she was untethered. She had flown here, giving up an entire life she'd built alone, to do the right thing and support them, and they were still treating her alternately like a child and hired help.
Feeling restless and annoyed, she checked her phone again. Still nothing. She wanted to hit herself. Adam wasn't going to write and she didn't even really want him to. She was being ridiculous and obsessive. Taking a deep breath, she called out, "I'm getting some air," and slipped out the front door to the porch.
And so she stood there shivering, the sweat and adrenaline she'd worked up playing with the twins long passed. The feeling of disbelief overtook her again, the expectation Polly would pull up in her blue car growing stronger and stronger. Although part of her brain knew she wouldn't, another part couldn't make sense of it. None of this made sense, Betty thought. Her 27-year-old sister was dead. Simply gone. It felt as if the universe had been shaken loose from its axis and all reason, all logic had vanished. Everything that was rational had been erased and all that was left was an unending void.
The sound of a car screeching to a halt next door shook her and she felt herself shaking. It wasn't Polly, but she'd recognize that old truck anywhere. She watched Archie Andrews, her best friend since childhood, step down and move to the passenger side to open the door for his fiancee, Veronica Lodge.
Archie was Polly's age, two years older than Betty, but only a grade above, thanks to Betty skipping kindergarten at her pre-school's recommendation. They had grown up next door to each other and had been friends since she was at least four. Archie was the closest thing she had to a brother. They were fiercely protective of each other, each in their own unique way. Although Archie wasn't the most eloquent or open with his emotions, he let her rant her anxieties without judgment and was always a willing ear. She, in return, was patient as he endeavored to articulate what he was feeling, not pushing him but consistently present. She managed a smile remembering how each of his numerous girlfriends in high school had run to her trying to get insight on what he was thinking. It had been exhausting, Betty thought with a small laugh. Thankfully that had changed when he'd met Veronica in college at NYU. He was completely smitten with the sophisticated New Yorker, gushing about her intelligence and beauty to Betty on their weekly phone calls. They'd lived in the city for a few years after college, before Archie proposed and finally convinced Veronica to try small-town life. Last August, they moved into his parents' old house. After separating when they were in high school, Archie's parents, Fred and Mary, reunited several years later and Fred left Riverdale to join Mary in Chicago. Archie had happily taken over his father's construction business, as well as gotten a second job as Riverdale High's gym teacher. Veronica, meanwhile, had taken the money she'd earned as the self-proclaimed she-wolf of Wall Street to open a successful boutique in downtown Greendale. From the conversations she and Archie had over the last few months, she knew the couple was content in Riverdale and looking forward to their wedding the coming September.
Betty felt the tension she'd been carrying in her shoulders for months relax slightly as Archie caught sight of her. He was the only friend she'd really been in close contact with since Polly got sick, writing to her every few days without fail to check in. He was her second call that awful day, after Adam didn't respond. Archie was one of the few people she knew she could rely on no matter what, one of the few she even thought she could bear being around right now. She walked toward him, falling into his embrace, his familiar scent and height reminding her of so many moments from the past when he'd comforted her—after the break-up with Trevor, after another stupid fight with her parents. He held her a few beats longer than usual before releasing her slowly from his muscular frame. Veronica now stood next to him, smiling softly, wrapping Betty in a hug of her own.
"It's good to see you, B, even under the circumstances," the brunette said. They'd met several times before, first when Betty took the train down from New Haven to visit Archie her last year of college and then each time she'd come to visit the states. They were friendly, and Betty really liked her, but because of the distance, they'd never gotten the chance to become as close as they might have if Betty had stayed in the US.
Betty just nodded, overcome by seeing Archie face-to-face, the first person in weeks outside her family who actually knew Polly. She felt like she either wanted to vomit or cry.
"I'll give you guys a few minutes," Veronica said warmly, giving her arm a brief squeeze, before heading up the steps of the Andrews' house.
Archie looked down at her as they stood, almost awkwardly, on the patch of grass between the two properties. "How are you?" he asked.
Betty shrugged. "You know," she said. How could she explain feeling everything bad and also nothing all at once, even to her best friend? "Shitty," she finally added.
Archie gave her a sad smile, his warm brown eyes crinkling against the sun's rays. "Adam?" he asked.
Betty shook her head. She didn't need to explain. She could see from the way his eyes opened wider that he understood.
"I'm sorry, Betty," he said, his voice sincere.
She shrugged again, afraid if she gave in to what she was feeling, she would start crying and be unable to stop. "It is what it is."
"How are the kids?" he questioned next.
"They seem okay," she said, staring back to her lawn to the spot they'd been playing on not an hour before. "They were living with my parents when Polly was in the hospital, so I don't think they realize something is even more off."
Archie nodded. "Did they tell them?"
It was her turn to nod. "My cousin, you remember, Charles? He's a child psychologist. He told them after the funeral. I'm not really sure they understood, but…" she trailed off.
"That's tough," he said.
"How are you guys?" she asked, wanting to change the subject. "How are Kev and Reg?" she added, mentioning their other close friends from high school.
"We're alright," he said. "Nothing new you don't know about. Kevin and Reggie are good. They've been asking about you. We should meet at Pop's for dinner one of these nights."
"That'd be nice," Betty said, trying her best to smile. It would be good to see them, she hoped, even if nothing really felt good right now.
She heard a door open then and flinched at her mother's voice following. "Betty," she called, her voice quieting as she noticed the redhead standing next to her. "Oh, Archie, hello."
"Hi Alice," Archie said politely back.
"Come in when you're ready," Alice said, her voice sounding distant, faraway, and Betty let out the breath she was holding, glad at the reprieve she'd received despite being late for dinner. She nodded back to her and Alice shut the door softly behind her.
"I should go," Betty said, turning to look back at Archie, the words lacking any intention. She didn't want to go inside. She didn't want to move at all. All she wanted was to magically go back a decade in time. To be a teenager again visiting the Andrews' house on a weeknight evening. To sit with their group of friends on the living room couch drinking Dr. Pepper and eating pretzels while watching a football game. To be unmarked by the pain now pouring through her.
Archie nodded. He looked around the driveway, his eyes turning in thought. "It's so weird she's not here," he finally said. "She always showed up from the convention center around this time."
"I know," Betty whispered. The hurt engulfed her body once again, her chest constricting. At the same time, she felt a sensation of finally being able to breathe clearly, knowing someone was experiencing the same strangeness as her. "I keep expecting her to drive down the street," she admitted.
Archived smiled sadly at her. "We're here whatever you need. Okay, friend?"
"Thanks buddy," she said, smiling in spite of herself at their old lingo from grade school.
He turned to head inside and she walked slowly up the path to her own door. She watched Archie walk into his house, probably about to have a nice, quiet evening with Veronica. She longed for the simplicity of that small action, feeling as if her life from this moment on was bound with only heaviness. The weight of shattered expectations and petrifying unknowns. She couldn't pretend anymore, couldn't hold on to the irrational sliver of disbelief she'd been able to maintain for the last two weeks in England. She was home now and Polly wasn't here. She wasn't coming back. Betty wanted to cry. She wanted to break down totally, body and soul. To curl up in a ball in her childhood bedroom and just sob. To feel so sorry for herself, for everything that had happened to her family, that the pain was almost pleasurable. She wanted to dive straight into the wreckage and relish in its shadowy darkness. To feel as bad as humanly possible. She hugged her arms around herself and took another deep breath. There was just dinner and then the twins' bedtime to get through, she reassured herself. Only an hour or two to go until she could attempt to let herself fall apart. Withdraw to her room and succumb to the vastness of hurt begging for release. Empty like a pool until she couldn't feel anything else.
