The boy in the River

~Intro~

Our story is about a town, a small town, and the people who live in the town. From a distance, it presented itself Like so many other towns all over the world...Safe. Decent. Innocent. Get closer, though, and you start seeing the shadows underneath and sometimes... They take over.

The name of our town is Riverdale.

And our story begins, I guess, with what the Blossom twins did this summer. On the fourth of July, just after dawn, Jason and Cheryl Blossom drove out to Sweetwater River for an early morning boat ride. The next thing we know happened for sure is that Dilton Doiley, who was leading Riverdale's Boy Scout Troop on a bird-watching expedition, came upon Cheryl Blossom by the river's edge.

Riverdale Police dragged Sweetwater River for Jason's body, but never found it. So a week later, The Blossom family buried an empty casket, and Jason's death was ruled an accident, as the story that Cheryl told made the rounds. That Cheryl dropped a glove in the water, and Jason reached down to get it, and accidentally tipped the boat, and panicked, and drowned. As for us, we were still talking about the "July fourth tragedy" on the last day of summer vacation, when a new mystery rolled into town.

And so, It wasn't one heart that broke that night. It was two. And the night was far from over. By morning everybody would be talking, texting, and posting about it. We'd all be feeling it. The world around us had maybe changed forever. That Riverdale wasn't the same town as before. That it was a town of shadows and secrets now. On Monday, the autopsy on Jasons body would take place. And on Tuesday halfway through fifth period, the first arrest would be made.

{Ep 2} I think many of us, maybe the entire town, had been hoping against hope that somehow Jason Blossom hadn't drowned on July 4th. That we'd come to school Monday morning, and there Jason would be. Or that we'd see him and Cheryl in a booth at Pop's. But that was before the undeniable, irrevocable factor his bloated, water-logging body, a corpse with a bullet hole in its forehead, and terrible secrets that could only be revealed, by a cold, steel blade of the coroner's autopsy scalpel, or the telltale beating of a guilty heart.

To someone on the outside, peering in, it would've looked like there were four people in that booth. But I was there, and I can tell you. Really, there were only three. A blonde girl, a raven-haired girl, and the luckiest red-headed boy in the universe. For one shining moment, we were just kids. Those bright neon lights of Pop's keeping the darkness at bay. Giving way, as all nights must, to a morning of reckonings.

Cheryl blossom: "That I'm guilty."

As shocking as those three words were, they were nothing compared to the secrets that Jason's body had given up during its autopsy. That Jason didn't die on July 4th, as we believed, but over a week later. 

{Ep 3} Guilt, innocence. Good, evil. Life, death. As the shadows around Riverdale deepened, the lines that separated these polar opposites blurred and distorted. "I'm guilty," Cheryl said in Biology class. But of what?

Cheryl: "To clarify, I didn't mean I was guilty of killing Jason. I loved him more than I do myself. But I am guilty of lying about what happened on July 4th."

The autopsy puts his death about July 11th. Good and evil. Light and dark. Betty and Veronica. Two sides of the same Janus coin. Given Betty's article, Weatherbee needed a sacrificial lamb. Needed to make an example of someone. So, after Hermione Lodge negotiated a lesser sentence for our two avenging angels...

Hiram Lodge: "Next time, Mija, you come to me first. You don't take matters into your own hands."

Coach Clayton, to save his job, to save the school's reputation, was forced to cut his own beloved son, and his goon squad, from the team. An action that, though none of us knew it at the time, would have terrible consequences in the weeks to come. We crave absolutes. They comfort us, but life is infinitely more complex than that. Despite all of our recent troubles, I would've done anything to protect Archie. But Dilton Doiley had just opened Pandora's box, and now, there was nothing I, or anyone, could do to save him.

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~To be continued~