Snakes and Ladders - Falice

All Summer Long

{A/N: this may seem random but i thought i should tell u all that basically 100% of all the young falice scenes in this book are based on my ex boyfriend and I and I completely based this entire chapter (save for the end - ie alice and fred's convo) on my own high school experience. In fact I wrote this piece for something else before and just modified the names and titles a bit so that i could make it about alice and fp}

It was 1989, my thoughts were short my hair was long; caught somewhere between a boy and man.

                    

жжж

            The Southside of Riverdale did not provide its suburban Friday nights. Especially not if a young Serpent by the name of Alice Smith had anything to do with it. She could talk her friends into just about anything. Riverdale was far too sleepy for the likes of her during the weekdays, thus why she insisted on blowing off some steam in ways that may not have been particularly respected by those living on the Northside.

            It all started with the fabled drag races that had been taking place on the Southside long before the current generation of Serpents and Ghoulies walked the earth. It wasn't always between those two gangs, most of the time it was just between friends for a bit of fun on a night that needed a little bit of action. Nonetheless, for the most part, those races were born out of amusement rather than actual competition.

            For Alice Smith, until she was thirteen, she'd only ever heard of the races and dreamt about them from safer places. Everything changed for her when she started high school and realized that there was more to life on the Southside than riding bikes with her young friends through the quiet neighbourhood streets and playing hide and go seek in the forest behind Sunnyside Trailer Park. They were not children anymore, they couldn't sit around each other's basements and dress up their Barbie dolls anymore.

                    

жжж

She was seventeen and she was far from in-between. It was summertime in northern Michigan.

                    

жжж

            She went to her first drag race on a hot September day during her ninth-grade year and from that moment on, she was hooked. She watched from the sideline as two cars took off down the road at dangerously high speeds while her and the other mere observers shared cigarettes and passed around bottles of cheap beer. If the rush that she got simply from watching the race was exhilarating, she could only imagine how it would feel to get closer.

            For the next couple years, she stepped into the position of the race-starter. She was so famous for it that everyone who knew about the races began to nickname her the "pistol" because, ultimately, that's what she was. She would stand in front between the two racing vehicles and give them the wave that would begin the race. She looked forward to it, it made her feel like she was a part of it. Closer to the danger.

            But, that was the thing about Alice Smith, she could never be quite close enough. She would always find a way to edge herself closer and closer, until there was no looking back. That's what always terrified FP Jones about her. Speaking of whom, he then came into the picture that was her life. With a devilishly handsome stature and brown eyes that she decided weren't worth looking into unless she allowed herself to get lost in.

            He was a driver. And suddenly, she was a passenger. He usually either rode a beat-up motorcycle that he fixed up in his spare time or his trusty old pickup truck. Not during the races. On those eventful weekend days or nights, he would borrow his cousin's old 1964 ½ Ford Mustang and really rip into his competition. He rarely lost. Not in that beautiful mahogany-coloured ride. When him and Alice started hanging around each other during their teenage years, she would sit right there next to him in the passenger seat as he raced through the streets of Riverdale. She'd roll down her window and let her hair fly in the wind as she held a cigarette between her fingernails that were painted a chilling colour of black while FP gripped the wheel with one hand and her thigh with the other.