𝐅𝐄𝐄𝐋 𝐒𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 | Riverdale

𝐎𝐍𝐄. bereavement

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐋𝐀𝐂𝐊 𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐃 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊. He had made his move during the school's musical production of Carrie, slaughtering Midge during Opening Night, haunting and terrifying every innocent soul who had just longed to calm down and watch a musical production. Alas, in Riverdale, that was hardly possible. The Bulldogs had been acting the most riled up out of everybody; they had been storming across corridors, searching up and down for the slaughterer of Midge Klump. Nobody believed it was the real Black Hood. I mean, nobody saw him, right?

However, they had continued to mourn, and Aria Queens had been one of those grieving students. She had been quite close with Midge; almost best friends. She had been absolutely devastated and scarred for life when she saw Midge's body limply hanging from the back wall of the stage, blood splattered everywhere. It had been a moment she would never forget, and not in a good way either. Aria had been wishing she would awake the next morning, to find she had been suffering with a terrible nightmare. However, it had been a week since she was killed, and she was still returning to school with the thought of Midge's death hanging over her shoulders, like some sort of... burden.

However, nobody was more scarred and horrified than little Elle Queens, Aria's younger sister. At just ten years old, the girl had witnessed a girl's body stabbed up and bleeding during a theatre production. Elle hadn't been sleeping, and Aria would awake during the middle of the night hearing her younger sister scream, overwhelmed by the horrors. It had kept everybody in the Queens household up at night, and Aria had sometimes found herself sneaking out for a midnight run to try and clear her head. She would hardly go far, the furthest being to Pop's Chock'Lit Shoppe to grab a to-go coffee, and settle down with a banana-flavoured milkshake. Most of the nights when she slipped inside a booth at Pop's, with beads of sweat dripping down her body, she would call her other close friend, Toni Topaz, for a late night conversation.

Aria had found herself confiding in Toni much more since the death occurred, even if it had only been one week. Toni, being her best friend, had always comforted her, in person and over the phone. When she had late shifts at the White Wyrm, Sweet Pea and Fangs would speak to her over the phone also, trying to comfort the strawberry-blonde friend of theirs. Nobody would've thought - taking a swift glance at the princess-looking youth - that she was close with Southside Serpents. Judging by her strawberry-blonde curls and braids, and her preppy pink outfits that almost screamed Northsider, you would assume she was a River Vixen. That she was a girl with a huge crowd of popular girl friends and a footballer on her arm, yet, she was almost the opposite.

 

The only close friends on the River Vixens of hers were Midge Klump, before the tragedy, and Betty Cooper, whom she had lived opposite since they were in diapers. Sure, she spoke to Veronica Lodge a few times, however the girl wouldn't start a conversation with Veronica or make the effort to be her friend. It was nothing personal against the girl; she was just a person who needed to have known a person for a while to connect with them. Take the serpents, for example - her aunt and mother were once part of the gang, and at one point, her aunt had an affair with FP Jones. However, her mother had dropped her serpent reputation around the same time as Alice Cooper, or Smith at the time. Her aunt was still a member of the gang, and she is the reason Aria had met her serpent friends.

Growing up, Aria loved her aunt. She would always make visits when she was old enough, and when she was fourteen, she had met Toni, Sweet Pea and Fangs in the White Wyrm. She had only been playing a game on the arcade machine, and they asked to play. A cute story for the light-hearted. And as the football arm candy, Aria was dating a bulldog. Reggie Mantle, to be exact. However, they were in a rocky relationship which had became distant, and Aria, truthfully, was thinking of ending their relationship. However, the girl couldn't bear to imagine the boy's reaction - would he flip out and cause a scene? Would they let each other down slowly? Will they part ways and ignore each other for the rest of high school?