ｃｈｕｇｈｅａｄ ♡

a black dog drinking green water

credits to @ cassanovic via archiveofourown.

•••

Once, when Jughead went to a movie theater for the first time, across the river in Greendale, he came home to his house with his mom and his dad and his sister and felt moved to write about it. It’s like being in church, wrote Jughead, on the back of some receipt on the kitchen table, because he didn’t own a laptop. Rows and rows of soft red pews, and feeling things you could never feel alone. Watching a movie is like… falling in love.

The next morning, the television F.P. had bought and owned for exactly twenty-nine days had been returned and fully refunded by the electronics store, and the receipt was gone.

- 

Thornhill burns down – Cheryl Blossom burns down Thornhill. Spring comes. The air is flat and thin and dry. The sheriff discovers Grandpa Blossom’s bomb shelter when firemen brush away what’s left of the basement. Inside, it is very wet and soft, like a second underground Thornhill made out of tongues. There’s a half soil-filled den with a fat television, a long sunken rectangle that used to be a pool. Cheryl contemplates that – green pool water, her father taught how to swim or else kicked into the deep end by his father, smudged black-and-white pictures on the tv, anti-radiation foil in the drywall. A secret house for the atomic age.

Then Cheryl burns that down too. This time the fire goes from down to up instead of from up to down. Black mud seeps up through the ashes, staining the bottom of Cheryl’s really excellent pair of kitten heels. Firemen brush away more of what’s left – the sky goes from bright blue to blurry and white. The sheriff furrows his brow at the double Thornhill mansion, aboveground and below ground, all gone.

Cheryl’s mother is away, bathed clean of soot and of Cheryl, taking restorative naps in the second Blossom estate out near the mouth of the river. From there she can’t recommend Cheryl be put away in private school to get rid of her feminine psychosis, so Cheryl doesn’t go to school and instead takes long restorative walks in the woods.

On one of these walks the sun is a white disc, high up, burning its way through strings of clouds disemboweling themselves across the sky. The strange spring light edges around the leaves poking their way out of the joints of trees, curling and uncurling like fists. Cheryl finds a cluster of maples and sits between them. She admires the way the lace piping on her skirt looks as it settles down around the roots, like dripping sea foam. She lets her eyes close.

“Cheryl,” says a reedy voice. Cheryl unglues her eyes – it’s Jughead, crouching in front of her. The sun is low and behind her, and it lights him up into a series of points: the tips of the triangles on his hat, the shoulder seams of his fleece-lined denim jacket, his knees, pointing out on either side of him like a frog. The toes of his black sneakers. Despite the light, everything about him is still dark.

“What,” says Cheryl, sounding more scattered than she’d like. She clears her throat and tries again – “What do you want, F.P. Junior?”

It sounds considerably less biting than she’d like.

Jughead looks back at her with his black eyes. Cheryl sees him writing something frothy and romantic in his head, probably with the words beautiful and enigmatic and maple syrup princess/heiress.

“I don’t have to – want something,” says Jughead. “I was just out walking Hot Dog after dinner.”

Cheryl squints. Suddenly, it seems like, there’s a dog by Jughead’s feet, sniffing around her. Big, dark, vague thing. She holds a hand out to it. Him. Her. The dog sneezes on her. Cheryl inspects her hand distastefully.