musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire."
Anne Sexton, "The Kiss"
Betty Cooper doesn't hate people. At least, not outwardly.
Yes, there are people she vehemently dislikes. That she curses under her breath when she's sure no one is watching.
Bullies. Slow walkers. So-called nice guys.
But she would never dare admit this distaste out loud. Or ever show it.
She doesn't think she has the luxury.
An attractive blonde woman in her 20s from a small town working in the cutthroat world of New York City journalism has to be careful. She doesn't want to make enemies, or needlessly step on toes.
Not before she's earned the respect of her peers. Or amassed a large enough safety net to fall back on.
So, the sweet girl-next-door image she's had drilled into her since childhood remains as constant as ever.
Balanced on suppressing any negative thought. On swallowing irritation down her throat like a bitter pill. And turning each subsequent grimace into a powdered sugar smile.
"You catch more flies with honey, Elizabeth," she remembers her mother telling her as she fastened her pink patent leather shoes the morning of her first day of kindergarten.
As insane as her mother's relentless obsession with social niceties drives her, it's good advice. She believes it.
But, then, her mother has never met Jughead Jones.
Jughead Jones is different.
Jughead Jones gets under her skin.
Tuning her nerves like a violin's strings.
Making her blood boil hotter than an August afternoon.
Scorching to the point she can't think.
All it takes is one little drop of sarcasm falling from his soft, pillowy lips.
Just the sound of his pretentious, know-it-all voice mocking her, and the capillaries behind her emerald-green eyes are ready to burst.
And if that isn't hate, she doesn't know what is.
Joining The Easterner is her biggest accomplishment.
A prestigious national magazine with both a print edition and an accompanying website.
It's a dream come true for a girl whose earliest aspiration was to become a reporter.
Even though it meant following in her overbearing parents' footsteps, there really is no better way to combine her natural curiosity for solving problems with her passion for words.
And she's worked hard to earn her place as a staff writer on the magazine's culture desk.
Long summer days spent interning at the Greendale Register, the hometown daily run by her family.
Four years on the staff of her award-winning high-school paper, The Blue and Gold, two of them as editor-in-chief.
Double majoring in English and Journalism at Yale University and earning a near perfect 4.0 GPA.
Securing a coveted spot on the Yale Daily News, the oldest college daily newspaper in all of the United States.
But even with that resume to recommend her, breaking into the professional media industry had not exactly been a Cinderella story.
The only paid job in journalism she could find upon relocating to New York City after graduation was as a lowly editorial assistant at Chic, a women's fashion and entertainment magazine.
For two years, she'd busted her butt proving herself—no task too small or too menial—finally working her way up to the writing staff.
It took six more months from there until she advanced from authoring dating tips and make-up recommendations to reporting on the juicier social and cultural subjects that actually interested her.
After close to another three years, Betty knew it was time to think about spreading her wings. So she'd put feelers out for a more substantial publication.
And by chance, The Easterner was hiring. And interested.
Although she recognizes her talent and efforts, it's still a struggle for Betty not to think winning her dream job after five years at the type of "fluff" magazine serious print media generally looks down on isn't a fluke of fate. Or at least a simple stroke of good luck.
That she'd just happened to throw her hat in the ring at the exact moment The Easterner was searching for younger voices, in an effort to beef up readership.
It's always been hard for her to accept that she's fully deserving of what she wants.
Which makes her doubly determined to prove herself.
Still, she's proud. Over the moon, even.
She has to pinch herself that at only 28 she's working at the same 150-year-old magazine her father spent her entire childhood citing as an influence on his great-grandparents' own journalistic pursuits.
The very reason they supposedly decided to open the Register for their burgeoning upstate New York hamlet in the early 1890s.
It's almost too insane to believe.
Even now, after eight months of employment, Betty thanks her lucky stars each day when she walks through the thick glass doors that lead into the magazine's spare, modern offices.
Enough so that the Monday mornings the rest of the white-collar workforce seems to dread don't bother her in the slightest.
In fact, she kind of likes them. The promise of an entire week, with fresh topics to probe and new, exciting ideas to explore.
She adores her job. Plain and simple.
The only thing she decidedly does not love about it is the man sitting at the computer desk next to hers.
Betty's fingers curl inwardly against her keyboard as she hears the crinkle of aluminum being squashed into a ball.
The telltale sign Jughead has finished eating his breakfast.
He does this purposely every morning, she's sure. Despite knowing how much she cringes at the sound. It gives her the chills.
Shivering, she turns toward him. Immediately, her nostrils are assaulted by a whiff of smoked salmon.
Even smashed to crumbs in the tin foil, the remnants of his cream cheese-and-lox bagel are stinking up the air between their desks.
It's been like this for months.
Their corner of the office might as well be the company cafeteria for how often it smells like the greasy food he's always shoveling into his mouth.
Betty has no idea where it all goes. Jughead doesn't strike her as the type of man who's ever seen the inside of a gym. And yet, here he is, reed thin.
Goddamn him and his terrible office etiquette. And his perfect metabolism, to boot.
She shoots him a death glare, but to no avail. He's not paying her any attention.
His gaze is focused on his Dell computer screen, his long, ring-clad fingers pushing back the errant black curls falling across his forehead.
He has beautiful, thick hair, she grants. And inky blue eyes. Gorgeous enough to get lost in. If she ever wanted to let herself.
It's too bad, then, that his personality is so noxious.
Betty's eyes scan over his desk, once again.
With the exception of the squished-up bagel and a dull pencil teetering on the edge of a new hard-cover biography of Picasso that's resting against the white surface, it's as bare as a light bulb.
She'll never understand his penchant for sparseness. And letting dust collect.
Unlike his work area, her space is pristine. Decorated neatly, but stylishly. A stack of colorful neon post-it notes and a pile of plastic paperclips in a pale pink desk accessory tray. A mixture of pens and highlighters in a matching cup.
She has personal touches, too. A white multi-picture frame of snapshots with her best friends. A set of three small succulents in mint green ceramic pots.
Betty remembers him scoffing in distaste when she'd unpacked those items her first week.
Although her withering glare was enough to silence him from commenting.
She assumes Jughead is allergic to anything verging on trendy or sentimental.
That doesn't mean she wants to hear his opinions.
Apparently, the feeling is mutual.
He's still refusing to meet her eye, only pushing the foil ball closer to the gap where their desks meet.
Betty sighs and turns back to her own screen.
She hits save on her latest draft—an examination of the mainstream studio death of the romantic comedy.
Betty loves anything she gets to write for The Easterner, but this article she's particularly excited about. It's her first to be featured in the monthly print edition.
So it almost hurts to take a break from inputting her editor's comments.
But it's already ten minutes to 11, which means the weekly pitch meeting is starting soon.
She reaches into her pastel blue Dawson backpack with brown leather straps to pull out the classic Moleskine notebook where she jots down most of her story ideas.
It's always good to take a few minutes to prepare.
Unlike a certain neighbor and reporter on the books desk she can think of, who frequently seems to be winging it.
When Betty looks up, she's met with the friendly hazel eyes of Kevin Keller, a member of the Talent & Culture (read: HR) team and her favorite co-worker.
He's hanging over the edge of her desk, an elbow propped on the light gray partition.
"Hey Bettyboop, we still on for drinks with Ronnie tonight?"
Ronnie is Veronica Lodge, the consummate Park Avenue princess she was fortunate enough to be roomed with her freshman year of college.
If Betty is like two scoops of vanilla ice cream with a maraschino cherry on top, then Veronica is a rocky road sundae with extra whipped cream.
She has no idea how the two of them became best friends. But she's grateful.
Veronica is as generous as she is fierce.
There's no way Betty would have been able to afford her half of the rent on the spacious two-bedroom apartment in Yorkville they moved into several years prior, without Veronica cutting her an initial discount.
At first, she'd been resistant. But Veronica simply assured her their millennial Sex & the City experience did not involve budget-friendly Queens.
It was Manhattan or bust. The Upper East Side specifically.
No one has persuasion skills like Veronica. Her fellow traders at Mason Henry don't call her the She-Wolf of Wall Street for nothing.
So with a promise to do most of the cooking—which she's dutifully kept, even after long since stabilizing her finances—Betty caved.
Five years later, she can't picture life in the big city without Veronica as an apartment-mate and all-around sophistication guide.
And when Betty hit it off with Kevin at work, he quickly became the newest addition to their friend crew.
She shoots a warm smile up to him now.
"Yes, she said she'd meet us at La Bonne Nuit at 7."
The cocktail bar in the West Village has been one of their favorite hangout places for years. And not just for being close to equidistant between their respective workplaces.
Kevin mock-groans. "You mean I have to stay at the office past 5 pm?"
"How about I bring us cappuccinos later to keep up our strength?" she offers.
Kevin brightens.
"Yes," he exclaims, clapping his hands together. "Have I told you lately that you're the best?"
Betty giggles, tickled by how easy it is to boost her flamboyant friend's mood.
As she's about to answer, Jughead finally looks in her direction, his eyes sharp on her face.
She feels herself tensing, bracing for the inevitable barb.
"Much as I hate to interrupt your scintillating conversation," he spits out, loudly, "some of us are actually trying to work here."
A rash of scarlet spreads over her cheeks at his prickly tone.
She knows he's just being obnoxious. That she and Kevin are not really bothering anyone by exchanging a few lines of chit-chat.
Still, the mere thought of being seen as noisy and distracting in an office setting is enough to make her blush in embarrassment.
It's not something she'd ever want to be caught doing. People-pleasing is too ingrained in her.
He must know that.
She hates that his words have this magic effect on her. The ability to flay open her skin and lay bare with perfect accuracy all her carefully guarded insecurities.
It's uncanny. And annoying.
Betty grits her teeth as she glances at Jughead, her smile falling.
"Lucky then we have a pitch meeting in five minutes."
Her voice is strained. The edge in her usually agreeable cadence obvious.
Jughead narrows his blue eyes into a smirk.
"I guess that depends on how you define luck, Cooper."
She blinks in confusion.
Half of everything he says to her seems like some type of a riddle and she's never felt so stupid as she does in those moments when searching for the right retort.
"Whatever, Jones," she mutters.
His smirk widens, mocking her.
It infuriates Betty.
She sits up straighter and tries again.
"By the way, could you maybe please not eat salmon at your desk at 10 am? It's rancid."
Jughead's upper lip quirks up, as if he's suppressing a snicker.
"It's never too early for protein," he quips, patting his stomach. "Don't you like fish, Cooper?"
"I like how quiet and unobtrusive they are," she swipes back.
Jughead snorts. "Wow. Good one."
His blue eyes twinkle as he makes a show of scooping up his discarded breakfast.
Before Betty can form a response, he's already headed in the direction of the meeting room.
Kevin offers her a commiserating grimace as she exhales the swell of irritation rising in her chest.
She's sure if reincarnation exists, Jughead Jones will come back to this earth as a cactus.
"Coming up to the elevatorher smell hits me
she was first here
It's too early for her smell
I think
That mix of coconut and sweetness
Never loved a smell like that before"
Charles Bukowski, "Going Mad"
Jughead Jones is undeniably a misanthrope.
He has been since discovering at the tender age of 10 that humanity is, in general, a cesspool of awful.
You could chalk his cynicism up to watching his father's descent into alcoholism after losing his job on a construction crew. Followed by the swift implosion of his parents' marriage.
Or all the crap he's witnessed after spending his formative years living in a dilapidated trailer park and attending a drug-infested high school in the seedy south side of Riverdale, New York.
But Jughead likes to think his damage only reinforces the person he was always meant to be.
A self-proclaimed weirdo who takes comfort in sarcasm.
Or better yet, a brooding writer who, despite possessing endless reserves of insight into why people do what they do, can't actually stand most of them.
He makes no real bones about it, either.
Wearing his grumpy, sardonic demeanor openly on his wrinkled flannel sleeve. Dark and stormy for the world to see.
In fact, he may as well be a vampire for how much he hates sunshine. The physical phenomenon and the so-called disposition.
Which makes Betty Cooper such a conundrum to him.
One the one hand, she's sweet. Too sweet. Like a Starbucks latte even without the added sugar.
Not that he would ever reduce himself to drinking that mass-market slop, or anything besides a straight black Americano.
His coffee habits aside, however, Betty Cooper is still much too chipper.
Which would normally be enough for him to tune her out entirely.
Gruffly nod his head to her overly cheerful morning greeting and otherwise treat her with a chilly, albeit polite remove like he did the rest of his colleagues.
Unfortunately for him, though, she's also whip-smart. Keen and inquisitive.
And beautiful. Like a Botticelli goddess come to life.
This vexing fact is impossible to ignore. It slaps him in the face every day.
He remembers the initial moment he saw her. In the Midtown East skyscraper's shiny silver elevator on her first day of work.
Her nervous excitement was bouncing off the mirror like a zap of energy. The scent of her coconut shampoo intoxicating him with its sweetness.
"Oh," she'd exclaimed with a bright smile when she realized they were both headed to the 21st floor.
For a moment, he'd actually smiled back in her direction, finding himself uncharacteristically amused by her bubbly charm.
Not to mention enamored of her open and pretty face. And the legs for days stretching out from under her mustard corduroy skirt.
He honestly didn't think he'd salivated so much since the last time he'd held a Pop's burger in his hands.
Until she promptly mistook him for a delivery guy.
Knocking the wind right out of his sails.
Jughead escapes his less than stellar upbringing by the miracle of perseverance.
Putting his head down and ignoring the various biker gangs that populate his high school.
Throwing himself into his studies and his reporting for the skeleton crew that makes up South Side High's newspaper, The Red & Black.
In addition to his own private extracurricular writing.
Composed over an endless parade of late nights camping out in his favorite booth at Pop's Diner.
He can still conjure that scrawny teenage boy in a ragged gray beanie, threadbare t-shirt, and second-hand sheepskin coat.
Capitalizing on the free coffee refills and a plate of fries he makes last for several hours.
Shoulders hunched over his crummy, sticker-covered laptop, he would watch the comings-and-goings like a hawk. His curious ears picking up slips of conversation.
Salacious, mundane, it didn't matter.
Like second nature, his fingers would soon take over. Typing a mile a minute.
Molding his observations into stories about unhappy people in sad, forgotten little towns.
He doesn't share these stories with anyone, until it's time to apply for college writing programs. His singular dedication to getting out of Riverdale overpowering any inhibitions about literary merit.
Somehow, though, they're good enough to earn him a full academic scholarship to the University of Iowa.
He lives there for six years, finishing both his BA in English and an MFA in Fiction. Before deciding to move back East and try his hand at the New York City literati scene.
His first apartment is deep into Bushwick, near the border with Ridgewood. It has two bedrooms, each the size of a shoebox, and a shower that looks like it was made out of scaffolding.
He shares the dump with Archie Andrews, an old childhood friend trying to make it as a musician. And not a few mice.
But Jughead's ambitious and he knows how to hustle.
He accepts freelance jobs from every magazine that offers despite the shit pay, bartends at the local pubs Archie gigs at when he's low on cash, and writes and writes.
The hard work eventually pays off. A few stray pieces are published here and there, and then a few more, and four years later he has a book deal.
His collection of short stories is well-received by critics, although it isn't a best-seller by any means.
Still, the modest advance is enough for him to afford rent on a one-bedroom in a half-gentrified neighborhood in Flatbush. Without roaches. And within walking distance of Prospect Park.
Plus the exposure helps him make something of a name for himself in literary circles.
When The Easterner publishes an excerpt from what he hopes will become a novel, Rupert Chipping, the magazine's fiction editor, suggests Jughead might be a good fit to join the books desk.
He jumps at the chance.
A steady paycheck writing about what he loves, with enough flexibility to also work on his fiction. What could be better?
He's almost 29 when he gets the job and it's the first time in his life that he's ever really felt settled.
So, of course, with his terrible luck, karma comes to bite a year later upon the arrival of Betty Cooper.
Because if there's anything in the world that completely unnerves him, it's got to be this woman.
Jughead's confident amble slows to a stop as he approaches the office's largest meeting room.
It contains a long glass-topped conference table and 25 sleek, black swivel chairs. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Madison Avenue.
But it's not the street view he's interested in.
Nodding at the other staff writers starting to trickle in, he sneaks a look back at his desk.
He watches as Betty's dainty fingers twirl at the ends of the shoulder-blade-length blonde hair she typically keeps tied back in a ponytail.
She's still murmuring with Kevin, her usually milky complexion painted red in agitation. Probably complaining about how much of a dick he is.
He releases the heavy breath he's been holding in.
She's right, he berates himself.
He just had to go and make that snarky remark about her being loud, didn't he? Moron.
It's an all too familiar pattern, he knows.
The devil on his shoulder urging him to find a way to get her attention. To disconcert her.
And he falls prey every time.
Even when he could simply keep quiet and not comment.
In all honesty, he wishes he were capable of that. Of acting normally around her. Well, as close to normal as he gets.
But the dynamic between them has been set since that first fateful encounter.
Razor-sharp bantering that borders on hostility. Or maybe just hostility, from her perspective.
Although, as he often reminds himself, she engages just as furiously in their verbal sparring as him. Whatever that means.
In the end, though, he knows he's mostly to blame.
She'd made a silly mistake that first day. Not anything malicious. Hell, she'd even apologized for it once she realized he was a fellow writer.
But it rocked him hard in the moment.
Because despite all he's achieved, he's still overly sensitive about where he comes from. Of others looking down on him and seeing him as not worthy. Undeserving.
So being judged, even inadvertently, by a woman who may as well have been designed in a lab to cater to his ultimate Hitchcock blonde fantasy, hits him like a kick in the ribs.
In a split second, he reverts back to his curmudgeonly self.
Growling unintelligibly, and then deadpanning scornful comments.
He wants to despise her, too, and he does, for all of thirty minutes. Because somehow, improbably, she doesn't get intimidated by his rudeness when he calls her out for making assumptions about him.
Which, at first, surprises him. And then intrigues him.
It stirs a nonsensical desire to provoke her over and over again. To get a taste of the feisty underbelly she clearly keeps locked away beneath her blithe exterior.
Like an itch he just has to scratch.
It's been that way ever since. He can't control it.
Jughead knows he's acting like the worst type of grade school turned 90s teen movie cliche.
That he's become the walking embodiment of "if he's teasing you, that means he likes you."
The concept is nauseating.
But the sad truth is, he does. Like her, that is. He really does. A little too much.
Making him the absolute worst kind of fucked—a failed cynic hopelessly crushing on a woman who in all likelihood hates his guts.