A Riverdale Story: Opposites Attract (Jughead x OC)

Chapter 6: She's So Gone

---Narrator POV---

Jughead Voiceover: 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 fact of his bloated, water-logged body, a corpse with a bullet hole in its forehead, and terrible secrets that could only be revealed by the cold, steel blade of a coroner's autopsy scalpel, or the telltale beating of a guilty heart.

Archie Andrews; sweating, anxious, guilty, restless. All those words described how he looked that Monday before the sun came out. He tried texting Betty or Cassie to talk about anything but Betty answered then ignored him and Cassie's lights were off so he assumed she was already asleep.

So Archie got up, pulled on some shorts and went out on a run to try and clear his head but soon enough he found himself at a place he frequented during the summer. Geraldine Grundy's house. Before even thinking he went up to her door and knocked until she answered.

"Archie, what are you doing here?" Geraldine Grundy asks after she opens her door early in the morning to see Archie Andrews standing there.

"It wasn't fireworks, Ms. Grundy." He says pushing into her house.

"You can't be here, Archie." Grundy tells him.

"On July 4th, it was a gunshot we heard."

"You can't come to my house." Grundy repeats crossing her arms over her chest.

"Probably the shot that killed Jason Blossom." Archie continues.

"We know exactly what the police know." She tells him for what felt like in her mind was the hundredth time. "That a gun was fired. That a boy was shot. We don't know by whom."

"We know when it was fired." He adds. "That's something the police still don't know." She sighs. "They're performing an autopsy. We could call them, anonymously."

"This is not a negotiation," She snaps. "Archie. This is our lives. If anybody knows that we were there, I could lose my job. You could be expelled. We could go to jail." She finishes leaving Archie to walk home still not sure weather not he regrets those nights with Ms. Grundy, or not.

---Cassie POV---

"Hey, girls?" Dad comes into Betty's room where we were getting ready for school that Monday morning after they found Jason's body. "We just wanted you two to know, it's gonna be a bit of a late night for us."

"It's going to be a lot of late nights for us." Our mom say excitedly. "I mean, an accidental drowning, who cares? But the sociopathic son of the wealthiest family in town, murdered? That's a national obsession waiting to happen."

"He's barely in his grave, Alice." Dad reminds her trying to make her more humanized after that disturbingly rude comment she made about the Blossom boy.

"Can you warm up the car, Hal? I'll be right down." She says trying to get rid of him and it works because he leaves the room. "Betty, you know what I love most about you? It's that you always want to see the good in people. Even people like Cheryl Blossom and Veronica Lodge and Archie Andrews." I roll my eyes. "But when they betrayed you this weekend, you saw their true colors, didn't you?"

"I did. I definitely did." Betty plays along.

"So no backsliding. No Cheryl. No Veronica and-"