Chapter 2

He'd done a lot of stupid things in his life, Jughead Jones reflected ruefully as he tried to keep his father's elderly pick-up truck on a road that he hadn't been able to see in at least two hours. But tackling this drive, in this weather, was arguably the stupidest. He supposed he deserved some credit for at least leaving his motorcycle in the garage back in Toledo, rather than attempting to pilot it on the winter roads all the way to Riverdale. That hardly seemed adequate, though, as he struggled to keep the patterns of snow in his headlights from mesmerizing him right into an early grave. And he hadn't really had much choice, either. He'd borrowed the truck several months ago, during an unplanned visit home to attend his father's arraignment on a number of petty charges, and he needed to return it before his father was released from jail – again – on New Year's Eve.

Since high school, he'd only ever come home at Christmastime… or when his father was either standing trial, or getting released, which tended to happen at least once every two or three years. Forsythe Pendleton Jones Junior, better known as FP, wasn't a hardened criminal. He wasn't even a particularly bad guy. He was simply a man with limited education and few options, who still struggled with sobriety even after attending almost a decade's worth of AA meetings. When he was sober, FP worked hard anywhere he could find that would hire him. In a small town that had watched him struggle his entire life, there were plenty of people who wished him well, but fewer who'd actually put him on the payroll at this point in his checkered career. When he fell off the wagon, though, he'd fall out of work pretty quickly, too. And then he'd go back to boosting cars or dealing dime bags behind the pool hall or pilfering from the tills of various businesses until he ended up back in jail, where he'd sober up and make another stab at putting his life together.

Jughead couldn't really explain why he always went home for Christmas, even when that meant spending a week at the trailer alone and driving over to see his dad at the country jail or the minimum security penitentiary just outside town. It had never been a particularly magical time for his family, even before his parents' messy, inevitable divorce when he was in middle school. Money had been too tight for much in the way of presents, or even of decorations. His parents' addictions had made it as likely as not that at least one of them would end up passed out on the lawn, or the living room floor, before the day was over. And they weren't a religious family, so there was no special or mystical significance to the day for him to transcend the lack of gifts or tinsel or chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

But he'd always tried to make the day special for his little sister, Jellybean, at the very least. He'd saved up money from his allowance – when he got one – and from his paper route and odd jobs and returning bottles he found in ditches for the refunds, so that he could fill a stocking for her and put a present or two under the tree. And there was always a tree. His best friends, Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper had seen to that. As kids, they'd get Fred Andrews to drive them in his truck, and they'd pick up him and Jellybean on the last weekend before Christmas and drive out to the woods to cut down a tree that wouldn't cost a thing (so long as no one caught them). Fred would wait in the truck, drinking coffee from a thermos, while Archie and Jughead flailed uselessly with Betty's hatchet, while Betty and Jellybean gathered fallen branches and loaded them into the back of the truck. When the boys finally admitted defeat, Betty would take over and fell their chosen tree neatly – she'd always been the only one of them with the faintest clue how to use the hatchet effectively, even on the tiny trees they had to choose in order to fit in the Jones' trailer's living room – and then they'd drag it back to the truck. When they got it back to the trailer, Fred would help them wrestle it inside, and then would drive away.

Then, Betty would take charge yet again, first directing them in standing the tree up in a bucket of wet sand, and then putting them all to work improvising decorations from whatever was available. They'd pop popcorn for garlands or make coloured paper chains from construction paper or magazine pages or the comics pages of the local newspaper. One year, she'd produced a shoe box full of foil gum wrappers that she'd been saving for months to make silvery links to loop around and around the tree. Another year, she'd helped Jellybean to fashion a fluffy white dress out of toilet paper to dress her second-hand Barbie doll. They'd added a pipe cleaner halo and wired the doll to the top of the tree as an angel. Once, she'd brought a bag of outgrown sweaters that she'd rescued from her mother's "donate" bags, raveled them down to yarn, and set Jellybean and the boys to work making pompoms that they tied all over the tree. No two years were alike. But every year, they managed to decorate the tree without spending more than a dollar or two, despite the fact that the Joneses had no room to store decorations from year to year. When they finished, Betty and Jellybean would tackle the fallen branches they'd gathered and fashion them into a wreath to beautify the front door. And to this day, Jughead had never seen a tree that looked even half as good to him as those shoestring productions he and his friends had made for and with Jellybean.

When Jughead's mother left, the fall he was in eighth grade, she took Jellybean with her. He'd been too miserable to even imagine trying to do Christmas without his adored little sister. But Betty had alternately bullied and cajoled him into planning gifts for Jelly as usual, and had offered to pay to ship the box to Jellybean in Toledo as her gift to him. And she and Fred and Archie had showed up as usual, and massacred another tree and made it beautiful with trash, as usual. And he'd never again tried to skip their Christmas tradition.

As they got older, the only change that occurred was that Fred stayed home on those snowy, Saturday mornings before Christmas, and Betty drove his truck. Archie always grumbled that it was his father's truck, and he should be the one to drive. And Fred always replied that he loved both his son and his truck too much to ever allow that to happen. He felt safer, he insisted, knowing that his most prized person and his most prized possession were in Betty's hands. Honestly, Jughead couldn't blame him, although he'd always tried not to let Archie know how he felt. Betty was both an excellent driver, and the epitome of level-headed responsibility. Archie, on the other hand, was neither of those things.

Even in junior year, when Archie started dating the new girl in town, Veronica Lodge, neither he nor Betty – who'd become fast friends with her more or less instantly – suggested adding the impeccably dressed heiress to their tree excursion. They'd met up with her later at Pop's for hot chocolate garnished with real whipped cream, and a massive plate of fries, but their traditions had remained unchanged and unimproved by Lodge family money.

Of course, none of those traditions had occurred even once since high school had ended. Archie's parents had announced they were divorcing a week after his graduation, shocking the town first with the news of their divorce, and then with the utterly amicable way they carried it out. Since then, Archie had spent Christmases in Chicago with his mother. He and Jughead had stayed in touch through their first few years of university, had managed a handful of weekend visits back and forth, but eventually their contact had dwindled. They still exchanged texts now and again… usually called each other to say, "happy birthday," always intended to get together "sometime" but never quite managed to do so. They were friendly, if not exactly friends. But they hadn't celebrated Christmas together in years.

Betty, on the other hand, had more or less disappeared from his life the day she left Riverdale to begin university. He knew for a fact that she hadn't been home a single Christmas since their high school days, although he wasn't sure why. She had a family that was well worth avoiding, it was true. Her mother was a vicious and controlling Stepford wife, her father a passive pawn, her sister embroiled in a life-long game of social climbing and sibling rivalry that lost none of its vitriol from the fact that Betty never really participated. But he'd heard from his father over the years that Betty had been home at various times, so she clearly wasn't evading her family altogether. FP would bump into her at the hardware store or the garage or the pool hall when she came back… just never at Christmas. And, he supposed, it wasn't entirely fair to say that Betty had dropped out of his life immediately. She'd answered his first few emails… had called him on his birthday and on Thanksgiving. And then… she'd drifted away. She'd sent him a postcard from New York City that first Christmas, and one from Paris the next. Since then, he hadn't heard from her.

It was surprising, really, how much he still missed her after all these years. And it wasn't just at Christmas, when he always thought he should get a tree for the trailer his dad still lived in, but could never face the drive to the woods without his friends, or the thought of trying to improvise decorations for it alone. He missed her all year round, in a variety of situations. He missed her when a classic movie came on television late at night, and he wanted to discuss film-making and script writing and the golden age of cinema with her in whispers while Archie snored on the couch between them. He missed her when a terrible B film came on even later, and he wanted to mute it and improvise silly dialogue with her while Archie continued to slumber. He missed her when he rolled his eyes over a typo in the local newspaper, remembering her fierce editorial pen on the school paper, or when he deleted a semicolon from his own latest manuscript and remembered how she'd pushed him to be a better writer. He missed her when his bike made a worrying noise, and he wished he knew how to fix it – as she would – or at least how to talk to the mechanics at the garage, so they wouldn't look down on him.

All through their childhood and teen years, Archie and Betty had been his best friends. But the truth was that Betty had been his best best friend, and Archie's gleaming, golden presence had made that friendship socially acceptable, shielding them from speculation or rumours about why Alice Cooper's pristine daughter was hanging around with "that Jones boy" from the trailer park. He'd always loved Archie like a brother – still did, despite their sporadic communication. But it was Betty that he still missed.

And, although his low self-esteem tried to convince him that Betty had forgotten him by now, he knew it wasn't true. He knew she always greeted FP when she bumped into him on her visits to Riverdale, and asked him about both Jughead and Jellybean's well-being. He knew she'd attended Archie's mother's second wedding in Chicago a couple of years ago, and had spent most of the evening reminiscing with Archie about their shared exploits. "Riverdale's own Three Musketeers," Archie had said she called them. He knew she'd sent a card and a gift to Jellybean for her high school graduation last June, and had spent more than an hour on Facetime helping her with the admissions essay that won her an entrance scholarship to NYU.

No, he knew Betty hadn't forgotten him.

Sometimes, he tried to convince himself she'd detected his long-standing crush on her, and had backed away from their friendship as a way of letting him down easily. But honestly, he knew that wasn't the truth – or not the whole truth – either.

Because he knew, in his heart of hearts, that he'd backed away from her friendship at least as much as she'd backed away from his. He hadn't known how to keep being friends with her, without confessing that his feelings for her went much deeper than friendship. And his deepest fear hadn't been that she'd reject him. It had been that she'd accept him out of pity, and he'd end up standing between her and something better for her life. Betty had made an angel out of a Barbie doll and wreaths out of fallen branches and Christmas beauty out of assorted trash that no one else wanted. He didn't want her to feel obligated to settle for rescuing him in the same way that she'd rescued so many unwanted things, instead of reaching for whatever it was she truly wanted for herself. She deserved the very best the world had to offer, and he didn't ever want to be the reason she didn't get it.

And so he'd made his emails just a little bit impersonal, knowing she was sensitive and perceptive enough to notice it immediately. He'd always waited an extra few days before answering her messages, letting it seem as if responding hadn't been important to him… as if he hadn't had pages and pages of text written to her, stored away on his hard drive as he wrote to her every day for years, knowing the messages would never be sent. He'd let her calls go to voicemail when he craved the sound of her voice too deeply to pretend casualness if he answered. He'd backed away from her, step after step, although tonight was the first time he'd been honest enough to admit it to himself. And he'd succeeded. Eventually, she'd stopped calling, stopped texting or emailing … and he'd continued to miss her for the past nine years.

And now, here he was on a dark, country road in a snowstorm that no sane person would drive in, on his way to spend Christmas alone (except for visiting hours, which he'd spend at the jail… again) in a trailer he hadn't liked even when it was his home, in order to prepare it for his father's next (but probably not last) release from jail.

When he saw the neon sign for Pop's, it felt like a sign from Heaven. Pop Tate had always been good to him, and his firm but loving advice over the years had nourished Jughead's soul while his burgers and shakes fed a young boy's always-hungry body. There was no need to rush to his father's empty trailer (and equally empty fridge). He'd stop for a bite to eat and a friendly word – and rest his eyes from the relentless strain of the past few hours – before rolling into the scene of his unsatisfactory childhood and possibly growing maudlin over the shadows of remembered Christmas trees. He signalled left into the parking lot, and pulled in, noticing only one other car in the lot. The tiny compact must have just arrived; the snow was only now beginning to accumulate on it as it cooled down.

Saying a non-denominational prayer that whoever owned the compact was not a talker – he was in no mood for small-talk with strangers desperate to drum up some Yuletide cheer – Jughead parked the truck, pocketed the keys, and sauntered up the snowy stairs.

As he stepped across the threshold, an aroma of homemade burgers, hand-cut onion rings, and fries with the peels still on greeted him. It was more familiar to him than his own reflection.

He was home.