The Day Before

by Micol Ostow

  “Bright side,” he countered. He was trying so hard! “Bright side: You’d have to be one all-powerful superhero to have attracted such an evil archnemesis.”

  I sighed and crossed my arms over my chest. “That is one hell of a stretch for a bright side.” I slumped into the chair next to him and swiveled so we were facing each other.

  “So what if we have to postpone dinner? So I can rewrite the article. I just … it’s such a huge opportunity, and I really don’t want to let Rebecca down.” There was the Toni Morrison event to think about, among other things, after all.

  “We can make it a working dinner,” he offered. “I’ll grab us pizza.”

  I almost melted, he was being so sweet. “And you’ll just sit here while I’m writing? That’s no fun for you.”

  He held up his phone. “I’ve got Two Dots. And Netflix. I’m good.”

  I touched my forehead to his. “You are good. The best. And I’ll make it up to you.”

  He waggled an eyebrow at me, teasing. “I like the sound of that.”

  “Don’t be gross.” I waved a finger at him. “Well, maybe a little dirty is okay.” Seeing as how he was currently in the running for Most Amazing Date Ever.

  It was enough to make a girl forget about a certain red-headed neighbor some three thousand miles away.

  (Or did the mere fact of thinking that mean I hadn’t forgotten? Whatever—I wasn’t going down that rabbit hole right now.)

  My phone buzzed. I glance at the incoming message.

  And just like that, my blood ran cold all over again.

  Flip-flop. It was that kind of day, I guess. One where everything can turn on a dime. In a breath. A heartbeat.

  “Betty? You’re making that Hulk face again. What’s going on?”

  I turned to Brad, stony. “That was Rebecca,” I told him, struggling to keep my voice even. “I don’t need to rewrite the story. We can go out to eat after all.”

  He tilted his head curiously. “And yet, it’s seeming like this is somehow not the good news one might expect?”

  “I don’t need to rewrite the story,” I explained, so calm and restrained that my organs were quivering, “because it’s been killed. They’re not running it. They don’t want a piece on Veronica Lodge right now, after all. It’s been bumped by something bigger.”

  Something bigger that I wasn’t going to write.

  “Oh man. Betty, that really sucks,” Brad said. He reached an arm out to console me. “But there’s still a bright side here—you wrote that piece on the, you know, the wallpaper, and your boss is, I guess, ready to start seeing you as a writer—”

  “DON’T ‘BRIGHT SIDE’ ME!” I screamed, deep and primal, loud enough that I startled myself.

  Brad gave me a look and inched back. It only infuriated me more.

  “Damn it!” I pounded my fists on my desk again, feeling the phone crack in my hands. “Crap!” I threw the phone across the room as hard as I could, watching it smack the window and bounce to the floor.

  “Betty.” Brad spoke softly again. He took my hand, the one that had slammed the phone. “You’re bleeding.”

  I looked down. I was bleeding, bright red rivulets forming road maps along my palm, dripping to the desktop in a macabre spatter.

  “There’s a first aid kid in the break room,” I said numbly.

  Brad looked doubtful. “Are you sure? It looks like it might need a stitch or two. Maybe we should go to urgent care just to be safe.”

  “It’s fine.” Apparently I was insistent enough that he didn’t bother to suggest it again. He stood up, presumably to hunt down the first aid kit. But first he picked my phone up where it had landed across the room.

  “There’s another message,” he said, looking at it. “Your sister. I can … read it for you?”

  “Whatever,” I said, too worn out to think about it. “We’ve been playing phone tag all day. I’ll just call her tomorrow.”

  Today had been nothing but rapid ups and downs, ridiculous drama beyond anything I could possibly have imagined. So whatever it was that Polly was texting about, it could wait.

  Whatever it was, it could certainly keep another day.

  JUGHEAD

  Onscreen, an alien mothership with one-fourth the mass of the moon had just entered the Earth’s orbit. As you might imagine, the general public was not exactly chill about it. On the one hand, to the casual, rational observer, this made perfect sense. But casual and rational wasn’t really where I was at, just then.

  My father. Serpent king. No wonder Mom left, no wonder he was drinking … and no wonder Fred Andrews had to let him go.

  I’m not an idiot. I know that everything that happened to my dad, happened because of him. Because of his choices and his behavior. He wasn’t some innocent victim.

  No, he wasn’t innocent. But he was my father, and despite all the BS, I still loved him.

  So you can see where, for me, the idea of an alien invasion going down was sounding kind of appealing, right about now. It was definitely a potential improvement on my current situation.

  I’d been hiding in the projection booth, not wanting to have to interact with actual people, but for once, the small, cramped space actually felt as small and cramped as it was. So I came outside for a breather, only to be immediately reminded of why it is that I go so damn far out of my way to avoid actual people as much as possible.

  The lot was packed. Independence Day itself wasn’t such a big draw, even ironically speaking, but then again, there weren’t a ton of other options in terms of Riverdale nightlife. “Independence Eve” at the Twilight was sort of a tradition, like maple syrup or telling campfire stories about Sweetie, the Sweetwater snake monster.

  Some people seemed to be having genuine, relaxed fun—over at the front of the lot, I saw Moose and Midge parked with Kevin Keller in their backseat. I guess three isn’t always a crowd? They were laughing and tossing popcorn at the screen any time anything cheesy happened, which was basically every four seconds. I’d have to clean up the mess, I knew, but at least some folks were enjoying themselves.

  By the concession stand, though, a small crowd had formed. Josie, Val, and Melody were gathered, Pussycat ears in place and T-shirt sleeves rolled up. Josie was passing around a phone for some rubberneckers, one of whom was Cheryl Blossom.

  “A new tat? Isn’t body art last century’s rebellion?” Cheryl was saying.

  To her credit, Josie just rolled her eyes. I never did understand why those two were friends, but somehow, it seemed to work. “Scoff all you want, Cheryl, but it’s our thing. We Pussycats howl the night before a gig. Sometimes that includes body art, and Val found this amazing sketch that we all agreed on.”

  “What, is it, like, the Chinese symbol for ‘meow’?” Cheryl sneered.

  “Jealousy is unbecoming, dear,” Josie replied.

  “So what’s the rest of the plan?” Ethel Muggs was asking shyly.

  “Some of it is classified info,” Josie told her. “But, you know, we like to raise a little hell. And send a little psych-out message to our opening act so they know we’re going to blow them off the stage.”

  “Like last time, we graffitied the door of their practice space—” Melody started, before Josie shut her up with a glare.

  “Then there was the time you challenged me to a drag race,” Reggie said, stepping into the conversation.

  “And won.” Josie smirked.

  “Wanna go again?” he asked.

  “You already lost to us once,” Josie said. “Sloppy seconds—not my thing.”

  Reggie’s face went rigid. “You know, I’ve been busting my ass for you all day, trying to line up a gig—a good one! Better than anything you’ll get in this crappy little town. And you’re just completely ungrateful.”

  “I don’t owe you anything, Mantle,” Josie said, stepping forward. “Certainly not gratitude for something I never asked you to do. How many times do I have to tell you: We don’t need a manager.”

 
; “Enough already, Reggie,” Val said, more tempered than Josie was being. “It’s obvious you’re only doing this because of your feelings for Josie.”

  “Feelings for Josie? What are you talking about?”

  “Come on,” Val said, still more kindly than I would have been about it. “It’s not like we forgot about that time you made up that story about having a terminal disease, just so Josie would go to the middle school dance with you.”

  “That was sixth grade!” Reggie sputtered. “And the Josie thing was just a small part of it. I wanted to see how badly I could scam the rest of you. And by the way—pretty badly, was the answer. Wasn’t it Ethel who set up an online donation site to collect money for my ‘treatments’? ” He sneered at Ethel, who blushed and shrank up into her shirt collar.

  “Only a sociopath would do something like that just for fun!” Josie said. “Is it really any huge surprise I wouldn’t want you as a manager—or as a boyfriend?”

  Reggie clenched his jaw. I didn’t think he’d hit a girl, but the way he was looking, I wasn’t sure. As much as I wanted to stay out of it, I couldn’t stay silent.

  “Come on, Reggie,” I said. “People are just here for the movie. Relax. You don’t have to freak out on Josie for wanting to do her own thing.”

  “Shut up, freak!” he shouted. “Who the hell asked you?”

  No one. No one asked me. And yet, I am a glutton for punishment, I thought, walking away from the group.

  Cheryl put up her hand. “Reggie, the girls don’t have time for this. But believe it or not, this little melodrama is not the center of my universe tonight. There are crises in motion elsewhere, as we speak, that need my attention. So”—she turned to Josie—“beloved companions and”—she glanced at Reggie—“fellow classmates, you’ll have to excuse me now. I have elsewhere to be.”

  She stalked past the crowd, signature red boots cutting a swath like a warning sign. Very deliberately, she stomped directly into Polly Cooper, who was waiting in line for popcorn with some of her cheerleader friends. “Be gone, she-devil,” Cheryl hissed. “Jay-Jay is finally free of you, and I’m thinking the rest of us deserve the same privilege.”

  Polly just shook her head. “I’m going to give Betty one last try,” she said to her friends, and moved to a quieter corner farther from the movie screen. “Don’t worry about Jason and me,” she said to Cheryl as she walked off.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not!” Cheryl called after her, irate.

  With no one left to focus her anger on, she turned to me. “Don’t you have a bridge to be sniveling under, troll?” she spat. I ignored her, thinking it was finally time to go back to my “cozy” projection booth. There was a reason I’d come up with my whole “hard pass on other people” stance, even if I sometimes temporarily forgot about it.

  As I turned to go, though, Reggie grabbed me. His fingers dug into my shoulder as he pulled me around. “The lady is talking to you, freak,” he said.

  “Thanks, but I don’t need a translator,” I told him. “Especially not a mouth-breather who barely has a handle on the English language.”

  “You don’t talk to me that way,” Reggie growled. He shoved me, hard, so I went back into the concession stand. Immediately, there was a rush of reaction—people calling out, that little zing in the air just before everyone goes completely ape—but right away, his Bulldog lapdogs pulled him back. “It’s not worth it,” one of them said, meaning me—I wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t offended.

  “You got lucky, Jones,” Reggie called as I pulled myself together and went back to the projection room.

  Yeah. Lucky.

  That’s just how I would have described it myself.

  There was a phone in the projection room, an old rotary model that you wouldn’t have thought worked, but it did. We weren’t really supposed to use it unless it was an emergency, but even if this wasn’t actually, technically an emergency, it suddenly felt like my entire world was imploding.

  I dialed slowly. I knew the number by heart, even though it was a fairly new one. It rang for what felt like years. I was just about to hang up when I heard the click of someone picking up on the other line. That click just then—it felt like a lifeline.

  “Hello?”

  Jellybean’s voice sounded different—deeper, a little more mature, even though, of course, she hadn’t really been gone long enough for that to be the case. Still, my own voice cracked when I spoke, and I struggled to keep it together, to be calm. “Hey,” I said, the word wavering. “It’s me.”

  “Jughead!” She sounded so happy to hear from me, it almost made up for the mountain of crap that’d been sliding downhill toward me since the second I woke up this morning. “How are you?”

  “I’m—good.” I forced the lie out. She didn’t need the full extent of my reality. “What’s going on in Toledo, Jellybean?”

  “It’s just JB now,” she said, indignant. “Jellybean’s so immature.”

  I smiled to myself. “Is that so?”

  “Mom’s not home,” she said abruptly. “Like, if you wanted to ask her something specific. But you can tell me!” she chirped. “I’m good at giving messages.”

  Do you miss me? Are you coming home? Can I come to you? What should I do about Dad?

  What am I going to do?

  No, I didn’t have a specific question for my mother. She wasn’t going to solve this for me, couldn’t solve this for me. If she could’ve, she would have taken me with her when she left.

  “Tell me about the friends you’re making, JB,” I said. I settled back in the rickety old chair in the room and listened to her go on, prattling away in that hyper-detailed way that kids do. While she talked, I took a good look around the projection room—the interior footprint, the electrical outlets, what sort of furniture could be shoved to one side to make room for a sleeping bag … if need be.

  It could work, I decided. It would have to work.

  I’d pack a bag and bring it over later tonight, after the movie, once the place had cleared out. I doubted anyone would figure me out.

  In order for someone to figure me out, they’d have to be paying attention in the first place.

  “Are you listening, Juggie?”

  “I am, JB,” I promised. “Keep talking.”

  From: CBlossom@MapleFarm.net

  To: HLodge@LodgeIndustries.net

  Re: No Subject

  My dear, after all this time, it pains me to send you this warning—your husband’s time has come. I’ve taken the liberty of including a link to the story that the Times will be breaking in just a few moments.

  From: HLodge@LodgeIndustries.net

  To: CBlossom@MapleFarm.net

  Re: No Subject

  Your sympathies are duly noted, Clifford. As are your loyalties—or lack thereof, I should say. Don’t for a minute make the mistake of thinking that this is the end. And don’t underestimate my husband—or me.

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  VERONICA

  To my absolute dismay (and chagrin), the nonsense at Barneys managed to take up my entire afternoon. After I was escorted to some secret military-torture-style closet of doom, no fewer than three separate security guards and one manager (Tamsin—who, it must be said, did not get any more pleasant with time) descended on me like loc
usts. It was incredible—they were treating me like a common criminal when, hilariously, the worst thing I’d done since arriving at the store was ask to buy some of their merchandise with actual money.

  Honestly, one wondered how they treated legitimate criminals!

  Anyway, there was an hour or so of berating me for the so-called “attitude” I took with the employees, which I suppose went on for longer than it should have because apparently I wasn’t contrite enough.

  (Of course I wasn’t contrite enough! There was nothing to apologize for! And I’m hardly the easily intimidated type.)

  At last, I suppose, Tamsin had had enough of her little power play (maybe something actually pressing arose somewhere else in the store, for once?), and they deigned to let me go. I assured them they’d be hearing from Daddy’s lawyers, and they laughed.

  I can’t recall when else I’ve experienced such deplorable customer service in my life.

  I insisted on buying the purple silk dress—not that they deserved to take any of my family’s hard-earned money, but at this point it felt like I should be getting something positive out of this whole horrendous experience. I’d already had to text Vogue and let them know I wouldn’t be able to come by with the props.

  (They were oddly understanding about it, I have to say.)

  And that should have been the end of it.

  Except, it wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Lodge, but this card has been declined,” the salesclerk told me when she tried to ring me up. She held my black American Excess card by one corner, like it was infectious or covered in poison.

  “That’s not possible.” That card has a six-figure spending limit, and not even I had done that much damage this month. “Run it again.”

  She rolled her eyes and swiped the card—aggressively, like the whole thing was a performance for me. The register gave a little beep of protest. She smirked at me. “Declined.”