Chapter 1

This was far from the smartest thing she'd ever done, Betty Cooper reflected ruefully as she hunched over the steering wheel of her tiny hybrid, peering myopically – and uselessly – into the night beyond her windshield. Her wipers, cranked to their top speed, slapped uselessly at the snow that continued to accumulate faster than they could clear it. Not that a clear windshield would help her in any meaningful sense, of course. If she switched on her headlights, they reflected back off the driving snow, blinding her. And if she used fog lamps instead, they were no match for the darkness of a country road on a cloudy night.

If she'd had what her grandfather would have called "a lick of sense," she'd have postponed her drive the second she saw the weather forecast. She was a confident winter driver – she'd grown up in upstate New York, after all – but, like anyone who knew the true ferocity of intense winter weather, she had a healthy respect for it. When it got really bad, she saw no shame in staying home until it settled down. Her childhood neighbour, Fred Andrews, had had a pickup truck with a winch, and she'd spent far too many winter mornings as a teenager helping him fetch hapless tourists out of ditches the day after a bad storm – and had sung at too many funerals for high school classmates who'd thought they could make it to the mall, or the dance, or the date, despite the weather – to treat a genuine blizzard lightly.

So when she'd seen the borderline Apocalyptic predictions for today's weather, she'd actually called her parents to let them know she'd be leaving tomorrow – or the next day, depending how quickly the snowplows got the roads opened when things calmed down.

45 minutes later, her ears ringing with her mother's reproaches, recriminations, and criticisms, she'd sullenly thrown her bag and a laundry basket full of presents into her trunk (along with a bag of gravel for traction and a foldable shovel, because she didn't actually have a death wish, despite having decided that the risk of dying in a fiery crash was still preferable to listening to her mother for another minute now) and gotten on the road.

How could she be so selfish, her mother had hissed repeatedly, as to risk ruining her twin niece and nephew's first Christmas?

The fact that it was only December 22nd, and that she could easily be back for Christmas even if she didn't leave for another two days, was dismissed as irrelevant… or rather, was used as an excuse for a renewed attack. Are you seriously trying to pretend that showing up on Christmas Eve is sufficient, Elizabeth? Are you trying to tell those poor darlings that they aren't important to you?

"They're three, Mom," Betty had tried next. "This is not their first Christmas!"

"It's the first one they'll remember," Alice Cooper countered in a shocked tone that seemed to imply it was utter sacrilege that Betty had failed to recognize this herself. "It's the one that counts!"

Betty had been tempted to point out that each previous Christmas of the twins' lives had also been portrayed to her as occasions that only a monstrous disappointment – such as herself – would miss. But before she could even debate with herself whether to open that particular can of worms, her mother had launched into a tirade on how Betty's failure to recognize the developmental significance of age three in the life of a child demonstrated her unfitness to be a mother herself… and how that unfitness was the leading reason (among many) for why Betty was still, shamefully single at the advanced age of (gasp) 27… and how her failure to find a husband and produce babies was the leading reason (among many) that her parents were so deeply disappointed in her. (If I'm so unfit, Mom, why would you want me to have babies, Betty longed to ask. But it wasn't worth deepening the Hell she found herself in.)

And so, Betty had spent the past nine-and-a-half hours making what should have been a five-hour drive. She'd white-knuckled it since 20 minutes after leaving the New York city limits. She'd turned down the music to help her see better an hour later (reflecting grudgingly that she was older than she'd thought, if that made sense to her) and turned it off completely well before she hit Rochester and began edging her way west towards Riverdale, the hometown where she hadn't spent Christmas since her senior year of high school.

She'd been back, of course, over the years. She'd attended her sister's wedding. She'd been there for the twins' birth, and their christening. She'd spent a week or two with her parents every summer… had been there for, probably, one Thanksgiving out of every three. She'd come for a long weekend last April to help her father pick out another car to restore (after he'd sold the 64 ½ Mustang he'd been working on since she was a teenager).

But she hadn't been there for Christmas since she moved away to attend university.

In her first year at Columbia, her parents and her sister, Polly, had booked a suite at a luxury hotel and joined her in New York City for Christmas. It had been magical… right up until it became a disaster of epic proportions that made her swear never to subject herself to that again.

The year after that, she'd joined her high school best friend and current roommate, Veronica, and her family in Paris, France. That had been glorious, and had become her annual tradition until the twins were born and her mother shifted from low-grade complaining to a full-on attack to demand she spend Christmas with the family.

Thus far, however, "the family" had spent Christmas at an ostentatious lodge in Vermont owned by the twins' paternal grandparents, the Blossoms, whose wealth was eclipsed only by their self-satisfaction.

Betty had never understood what Polly saw in Jason Blossom, a pasty-faced trust-fund baby whose conversation was about as insightful and original as a Cornflakes jingle and who cheated on her flagrantly, frequently, and without compunction. But Polly seemed genuinely satisfied with the life she'd built for herself, despite the fact that it made Betty cringe reflexively when she even imagined it.

And there was no denying that Polly had never had to subject herself to the indignity of working for a living – or studying anything more strenuous than the sommelier course she'd briefly pursued before finding out she was pregnant – or that she genuinely adored being a stay-at-home mother (with the benefit of a live-in nanny, a housekeeper, and a cook to help her bear the strain).

But this year, the senior Blossoms were not opening the lodge. Betty wasn't entirely clear on the reason, which had been categorized under the comfortably broad umbrella of "business," but suspected their selection of Montenegro as a destination may have had more to do with its lack of an extradition treaty with the U.S. than with its culture, weather, or night life. The Blossoms were the Slytherins of Riverdale life; their ambition was unfettered by any considerations of love, duty, or basic morality.

All of which, once again, brought her back to the driver's seat of a car that was not meant for winter roads, on a night that was not meant for driving, en route to an event that was not meant for any human to withstand. Between her sister's wilfully ignorant privilege, her brother-in-law's bland evil, her mother's next-level malice and her father's hapless complicity, Betty essentially felt like she was driving towards the ninth circle of Hell… and looking forward to arriving, because her current situation was, inexplicably, worse.

She'd have pulled over an hour ago, except that, as bad as visibility was, she was concerned that the next, luckless driver would plough right into her, killing them both. Given the Christmas she was driving towards, that might have been a mercy for her. But she wasn't prepared to gamble that the next driver was cursed with an equally toxic family.

So, here she was, doing her best to keep her stupid little car between the invisible, but still treacherous, ditches and pointed in the right, general direction, without causing her own or anyone else's demise.

And then, like a Christmas miracle, she saw her salvation gleaming at her through the snow: a retro-style, neon sign that had been there so long, it had been futuristic when it was erected. A sign that read simply, 'Pop's.'

Pop's Chock-Lit Shoppe was the site of virtually all her happiest memories… a local institution since her grandparents had been teenagers. It was a haven of melt-in-your-mouth burgers and creamy shakes and vintage neon and childhood friends. It was where she'd had dates and breakups and friend hangouts and family celebrations and solitary all-nighters when on deadline. It was home, in a way that her parents' magazine-worthy home on Elm Street never had been.

And it was exactly what she needed before braving the drive across town to her parents' house, and the passive-aggressive Magnificat that would greet her when she got there.

Flicking her right turn signal – as if anyone could see it in the teeth of this storm – Betty turned into the driveway and parked just outside the entrance in a spot that was probably reserved for accessible parking… when anyone could see through the snow drifts to see the markings.

With barely a thought, Betty cut the ignition, slammed the door – locks were irrelevant in Riverdale – and darted up the snowy steps to the front door. As she stepped across the threshold, an aroma of homemade burgers, hand-cut onion rings, and fries with the peels still on greeted her. It was more familiar to her than her own reflection.

She was home.