When I walked into Pop's, my eyes drifted over the aisles of booths. But it didn't take more than a second's glance to spot Cheryl's flaming head of hair. She sat in a booth near the front, in the center row, with her back to the door. I went down the aisle and dropped into the booth seat opposite her. She startled a little, but recovered with her usual amount of grace and poise. "Diana," she said, sounding a little surprised. "I didn't know if you would actually come."
"Why wouldn't I?" I asked, curiously.
"I don't know. I mean, you've just been busy lately—starting your new job and moving and all."
She shook it off with a casual shrug and light smile. But it didn't seem like I was talking to Cheryl. It was like I was talking to some kind of body double. Someone pretending to be Cheryl, inside Cheryl's body. It only made me more curious, but I didn't get a chance to ask before she changed the subject. "So, how are things at the trailer park?" she smiled, her arms folded on the edge of the table.
"They're great, actually. Cash can't get enough of Jughead. Killer is making the whole place smell like one giant dog. But it's great—we're all a lot closer," I replied.
Her smiled widened as she nodded through my words. "That's so nice. And how are things with your mystery beau?" I hadn't known Cheryl was so acutely attuned to the changes of my life. We talked about things over text a lot. But I never told her that. All she did was make a pfft and playfully nudge my arm from across the table at my slight surprise. "Please. We've been friends for how long now? You can't keep tall, dark, and greasy a secret from me."
I tried to smile back, against my body's anxious restrictions. "Things, as you call them, are fine. But...are you okay, Cheryl?"
"Yeah, why wouldn't I be?" she asked, obliviously.
"You made it sound like an emergency on your messages," I explained, as neutrally as possible. Her expression dropped a flicker, and she sat back in her booth, eyes downcast. "And you're being uncharacteristically interested. I was a little worried, Cher."
"Well, D, you mustn't be. Everything's fine," she perked up, plastering her smile on again.
I'd shrugged it off then to the best of my abilities. Everything was obviously not fine. Cheryl Blossom had a gruesome life of mental and somewhat physical abuse. If she was having a bad day, or had a bad night, and just wanted a friend—I would give her that. After all, a part of me still felt guilty for Jason's death. No. Jason's murder. And I owed it to Jason to keep an eye on his sister.
I slid my tray onto the lunch table to the left of Veronica and dropped onto the bench seat. As usual, I'd come into the group a bit late. But they had no trouble filing me in the day's events. Apparently Mayor McCoy wanted Archie and Betty apart of the Jubilee ceremony. But Betty turned her down because I apparently couldn't be involved. My eyebrows drew together, speaking around a mouthful of my sandwich, "What?! You turned down a speaking part at the Jubilee over me?"
It was a drastic surprise. And I was pretty sure I was flicking Kevin—sitting across from me—with sandwich, but I wasn't paying much attention. Betty looked surprised by my surprise. "Well...yeah," she replied, refraining from taking a bite of her apple to answer me. "I mean- you practically solved the case. You were the one that found the drive and exposed Cheryl's dad. You're the real hero here."
"No, Betty, I got to the investigation late and stumbled onto the drive through my own stupidity," I corrected, only partly sarcastic.
"Either way, you should be the one speaking," Betty was adamant.
I'd let it go with a sigh, moving my eyes back down to my sandwich. There was no point arguing with her over it. Then the conversation turned to a topic more personal for me—FP. I'd perked up at Archie's question to Jughead, "How's your dad? Did you get in to see him?" and my eyes went straight across the table, to the right, and up to Jughead's face in one swift swipe. Jughead's eyes shifted toward mine, catching them for a second in an almost guilty expression.
Jughead had gone to see FP and didn't tell me? He immediately sighed, looking to me fully. "I'm sorry, Diana. I was going to tell you this morning, but you weren't at the trailer," he explained, apologizing. Then he turned to Archie to answer his question, "Mayor McCoy wants my dad to name names in exchange for a lesser sentence."
"What? Whose names?" Betty was quick to ask.
I leaned forward onto the table with folded arms, "The Serpents?"
It was completely rhetorical, with a sick feeling in my gut. Jughead nodded knowingly, and I sat back, shaking my head. "Sheriff Keller thinks they're the ones dealing the drugs that Clifford Blossom brought into the town," he answered, for everyone else's sakes.
"My dad says more and more drugs are hitting the streets," Kevin piped up, as if it were a proper justification.
"Kevin, relax. This isn't The Wire," Jughead snapped back, silencing the Sheriff's son.
Immediately I felt eyes on me. Only upon looking up did I know to whom they belonged—Archie Andrews. He'd leaned forward around Veronica to see me, only furthering my stomach's notion that this conversation was going more South than the Serpents of topic. "Hey, Diana- what does Sweet Pea say about all this?"
He'd sounded genuinely curious—as if Sweet Pea somehow had to have golden insight no one but me knew about. And right then all eyes flicked to me almost simultaneously. Kevin and Jughead didn't look surprised. But they did look a little shocked it came up. Like Archie had uttered the forbidden words. Betty and Veronica only looked intrigued and semi-confused. I'd shrugged, playing it down, before clearing my throat.
"He thinks it's all bull. Serpents don't deal in hard drugs—FP made sure of that. I mean- he was threatened and coerced into at least taking the blame for the murder. How do we know he wasn't threatened to facilitate it as well?" I proposed the thought, standing on a high soap box with a hushed but still risen tone. "If you want hard drugs on the South side, you'll find them in a back alley with some grease monkey whose too high to count the bills. Not with a Serpent—period."
Veronica turned toward me a bit, "And how exactly do you know this?"
"Yeah, Diana. How do you know?" Kevin sat forward a little, giving me a knowing look.
My eyes narrowed at him, but he only raised his brows expectantly, causing me to exhale heavily. "My father's a Serpent and so is my boyfriend—you should know a little something about that one, right, Kev?" My voice was patronizing, sickeningly so. But Kevin was unwavering. I'd heard Joaquin left town after talking to me and Sweet Pea. By the looks of Kevin's attitude, I'd say he wasn't over it quite yet.
Betty frowned. "Your father...is a Serpent? What about the car accident?"
I looked right at Kevin with a steely glare but he ignored me, stirring his salad with a grin. Getting off on just how in-hot-water I was. Which made my skin crawl with anger and annoyance more and more each second. "Diana and I are half related," Jughead spoke up, coolly, causing me to look to his end of the table in surprise. "My dad slept with her mom—long story."
"And the punchline? Now that I know, FP's in jail. Just my luck, I guess," I smiled placidly through my dry sarcasm.
"Oh, boo hoo," Kevin sneered, looking up from his tray at me.
My eyes turned on him, "What is your problem, Keller?"
"My problem?! My problem is that you and your mountain of a boyfriend drove mine out of town. And now I have to sit here and listen to you whine about your problems like you've got it so much worse than everyone else here," he answered—brutal, but honest. Everyone at the table was shocked. Everyone but me. "You get to keep your boyfriend, your best friend, your dad's in jail but he's still around. This whole time you're playing the victim while simultaneously sporting snake ink and wearing leather after dark. You're a bold-faced liar, Diana. That's my problem."
Everyone had been shocked into silence the moment he opened his mouth. Now, too many questions swirled for anyone to settle on just one in order to open their mouths. Kevin's eyes bore into mine with such heat and intensity—I swore I could physically feel my eyes start to melt from their sockets. Eyes were on me. Eyes were on Kevin. It was anxious, but I moved carefully.
"I'm sorry, Kevin, I really am. But if the only thing I've done to truly offend you is expose Joaquin for using you, then, be my guest. Hate me. But it is not on me," I replied, with a calmed but angered tone.
"No. It's on your dad," Kevin nodded, digging in his jab.
My eyebrows popped with a singular nod, in a duh gesture. Then I leaned forward into the table, hushing my voice, but drenching it with venom. "If you wanna play ball, Kevin...let's play. But don't, for one second, think you know a thing about my life or who I am," it was a snarl, an intimidation tactic. But he needed to get the point. "Make that mistake again, and you'll find out- this snake? It bites back."
Kevin looked like he'd seen a ghost. All color drained from his face, eyes slightly rounded, pupils dilated. Silence thicker than butter followed my words. Unwavering from my stance in the topic, I promptly excused myself from the table and relinquished my tray to the trash receptacle.
Knowing our little circle of 'friends' knew what I was—who I was—wasn't what plagued me the next day at school. It was the shunning. All were staring, whispering, avoiding. Making it to my locker was the easiest it'd ever been, given the fact that no one dared cross my path. But I had no idea why. As far as I knew, the news of me being a Serpent stopped at the lunch table. As I found out, I was wrong.
My locker was adorned with a blood red S. I could ignore it. But when I opened my locker door, a slew of rubber snakes came tumbling out. Nothing but more red smeared on the inside of the door left in their place. The red was swirled into letters. Something I vowed never to repeat. But the gist was that I—apparently—colluded with FP to kill Jason. The biggest word on the locker door was MURDERER.
Chest moving a bit rapidly to keep up with my veins, I tried to calm myself by taking deep breaths. Blood painted on my locker to spell out murderer, an enlarged S on the front, with a few dozen rubber snakes. It was petty. Juvenile. But half the student body was murmuring, the flash of cell phone cameras illuminating my shadow on the locker beside me. "Diana," a familiar male voice came from my right—Archie. He sped in, sliding to a stop beside me, talking fast. "I'm so sorry, I tried to warn you—you weren't answering your phone-"
As I turned toward him, I spotted Kevin. He stood on the other side of the hall with Veronica, obviously having come from the other end of the hall with her, still in conversation. They were oblivious to my rage. I inhaled deeply, my fingers curling into fists. "Did you know?" I shouted just a little, enough for him to hear.
Surely enough, Kevin looked up, caught my eyes. "What?"
"Did you know?!" I repeated, angrier, louder.
His eyes fixed on the locker behind me, and his face dropped. But my mind didn't see it. My feet carried me across the hall in an instant. I grabbed Kevin's shirt collar and pushed him back into the lockers, his books scattering to the floor in a mess, and the poor kid nearly dropped a brick. He was too in shock to fight back. "So, what? Your 'boyfriend' didn't actually love you so you decide to ruin someone's life?" I spat in his face, though I was honestly about to cry.
It was hard to keep it together, as the implications of this moment began to fill my mind and swirl, tangling into a mess of anxiety—bringing a new level to my personal hell. "D-D-Diana, I swear! I had nothing to do with this!" Kevin quickly shook his head, eyes wider than a full moon. "I didn't tell anyone! Yeah, I was mad at you. But I would never-!"
"Let him go, Diana!" Archie's voice came from behind as I felt his hands grip my arms.
He pulled, hard, and my grip faltered in my own emotions, letting him tug me away from Kevin. More white flashes than before were blooming up out of seemingly nowhere, like the entire student body got an invite to my social demise. And, maybe they did? Maybe that was the plan all along? My first reaction was to blame the only person I knew for sure had a grudge against me. Then Archie all but dragged me to the Blue and Gold's office.
Shutting the door, he let me go, and I walked further into the room to hide my tears of embarrassment. "Diana, it wasn't Kevin," Archie spoke his words carefully, hesitantly. "It was Betty. She wrote an article for the paper about FP's innocence and she mentioned some things she shouldn't have. She got hit, too—pretty bad."
I leaned my palms into one of the tables to hold myself upright, sniffling hard. "Betty did this? Why?"
"I don't know. But we can go talk to her together-"
"No," I shook my head, wiping my cheeks with my shirt sleeves. Then I turned around to face him. "I'm done. With this school, with these people—all of it. Ben signed the paperwork this morning. I transfer to South Side High effective immediately. This little show is just a reminder of why I wanted to leave in the first place."
I dug my phone from my pocket, then opened the string of text messages between me and my snake emoji contact. Telling my Serpent boyfriend to come get me when I was literally being run out of the school by a bunch of Serpent haters wasn't the best idea for my image. But I didn't care. Not anymore.
ME: Wanna skip school?
SP: Babe, do you even have to ask?
ME: Come get me.
SP: Everything okay?
ME: Just hurry.
Archie was rambling on, trying to convince me of something. I'd tuned him out many minutes before my head snapped up from my phone, ears finally tuning into the monologue he was free-styling. "...you don't have to go—this isn't the end!" he said, now standing two feet in front of me, speaking adamantly. "Since when has what people say bothered you anyway?"
"Since there are people getting hurt on the South side because everyone's blaming the Serpents for hell itself—and I just got lumped in with them publicly. Know what that means? Cash is now a Serpent in their eyes. She's a target. I need to leave," I replied, with a seriousness that actually seemed to get through to him. His shoulders dropped, and he didn't protest or try to hold me back when I let myself out of the small office. I had a minimum of five more minutes.
So I went straight to my defiled locker. I'd elbowed through the piranha still lingering. As if these kids didn't have class. Or something better to do than post on social media that I was a Serpent, smearing it around a few million times for good measure. You know, just to make sure everyone knows. It was repulsive. Looking past the blood smears, I put my books in my bag as it hung on my shoulder, and stuffed anything else I didn't want to leave behind in along with them.
Because, as soon as I walked out those doors, I wasn't coming back. I made that clear to myself as I avoided eye contact with the masses, shoving through to get to an empty patch of hall to walk in, and headed for the exit. It was near the beginning of school. But the thought of missing a day for this didn't seem like much of a problem to me when I weighed my options. Sweet Pea was just pulling up by the front steps when I made it through the door.
It wouldn't have been hard to see something was wrong with me. I had a habit of making it painfully obvious. But I shook my head, taking the steps two at a time. "I'll explain later," I promised, jogging to his bike. His features were creased with concern, twisting to see me as I climbed on behind him.
"Do I need to beat someone up before we leave?" he was completely serious.
I sighed a little, "Not unless you want to take out the entire school."
Even from the angle I was given, I could still tell he was working it out in his head. Thinking up all the ways he could make it possible. But when I expressed the importance of leaving as soon as possible—what with the risen tension between North and South—he pulled himself from his diabolical plot of mass violence, and we sped out of the parking lot.
The snow was falling softly, visible through the window to my far left. But instead of being enamored with one of nature's greatest wonders, my eyes were stuck on the laptop screen just left of my hip, displaying only my favorite movie ever—Casablanca. It'd been playing for a while. Sweet Pea had been sitting beside me on the bed with an arm around my shoulders originally. But that somehow changed into his head on my chest, arms tight around my waist, his legs tangled with mine.
It was fine. And then he fell asleep just past the halfway mark. Snoring softly against my rib cage now. I'd gently slithered my fingers through his hair in slow strokes as I watched, too enthralled to move elsewhere, and it only seemed to keep him asleep. But I didn't mind. Not really. Yesterday was my first day at South Side High. It wasn't all that bad. Except for the fact that no one seems to actually put in an effort. And not to mention the creeps Toni called 'Ghoulies'.
What kind of name was that, anyway? It wasn't intimating. Just pathetic. I'd sat at the Serpent table during lunch with Sweet Pea, Toni, Fangs, and a handful of other Serpents. There were too many to remember their names just yet. That part would take a lot of practice. Either way, it was all-in-all a better, more calm experience than what I'd had at Riverdale High. Probably because I didn't have to hide who I was there.
I'd gone to school in black denim shorts, fishnets, and a navy blue crop top. But, most importantly, I wore my Serpent jacket. And it was the most alive I'd felt since this whole transition to my true self started. I could wear my jacket anywhere I wanted down here. On the South Side, that jacket meant no touching. If you try to touch, there's about a half a dozen other Serpents around the corner that can back me up, and will probably beat you senseless, too.
Knowing I had backup whenever, wherever, was a confidence boost. Especially since Fangs seemed to be taking a liking to Cash. The times I'd had to have Cash with me at Sweet Pea's because Jughead was out, somehow a beacon went up into the sky like the bat signal—and, magically, and wild Fangs appeared. Fully equipped and ready to play Battle Ship with a nine year old for the next two hours. Cash seemed to like him, too, so I tried not to get too much in the way.
A sudden, hard rap of beats echoed into the bedroom from the living area, and my body lurched in a startle. Sweet Pea's head shot up then, eyes squinted hard against the sudden change in light. "You okay?" he asked, groggily.
"Yeah," I exhaled, with a nod. "Someone's at the door."
His eyebrows drew together in question, and he twisted to look at the open bedroom door. Trying to think of who exactly would be banging on his door. Then another set of hard raps echoed in—slightly louder this time—followed by a familiar male voice. "Sweet Pea, is my sister in there?" It was Jughead, sounding completely unamused and slightly impatient. With a heavy groan, Sweet Pea rolled off of me and pushed himself up to stand in one fluid motion.
I clicked pause on the movie, then quickly crawled to the end of the bed, swinging my legs off before pattering after Sweet Pea into the kitchen. He'd already made it to the door, opening it as I came through, quickening my pace to reach the door. "What do you want, Jones?" Sweet Pea questioned, disinterested.
"Babe," I called, just before making it to the door, sliding into the opening. Sweet Pea glanced down at me as I continued, "I got this."
He didn't say anything in reply—he didn't need to. But he slid a hand onto my lower back, pulling me closer to him as he leaned down, pressing his lips to mine in a surprisingly deep kiss. When we parted, he sauntered back to the bedroom, and I could let my shoulders relax. Facing the open front door brought me face to face with a slightly annoyed Jughead. "What?" I asked, innocently, shrugging up a shoulder.
Jughead sighed, "Put some actual pants on. We need to talk."