Red moons ---Beronica (Riverdale's, Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge)

Chapter 5: fake

Give Veronica Lodge any piece of jewelry and she'll be able to tell you how much it's worth within five minutes of holding it.

Give her gold and she'll know right off the bat if it's 24 carat or if it's lumped in with something else.

Give her a diamond and she'll tell you everything about it. She knows the difference between an ideal and a fine cut. She knows how to check for blemishes. She steers clear from I1s; she only has eyes for Fs. Flawless.

And don't even get her started about pearls (If they're not from the South Sea or Tahiti you can forget it).

Veronica Lodge can spot a fake from a mile away. You can say she has a sixth sense for it.

So you can only imagine the field day she's been having ever since she moved to Riverdale.

This town is full of fakes. Fake friends. Fake families. Fake backstories. Fake perfection. Fake happiness. Fake relationships. And she thought New York was superficial.

It had only been a little over a month since Veronica moved here and she had already been forced to put up with more drama and plot twists than the sixteen years she spent in the big city. This small town had anything but pep, like its welcome sign implied; it was filled to the brim with secrets, so many secrets that Veronica was having trouble keeping track of all of them.

Where to start?

Jason's funeral, wake, whatever the hell it was, was nothing short of a hot mess. Cheryl inviting her over to a sleepover offered a brief reprieve from everything - which shocked her, because she initially thought it was going to be a disaster - but it didn't last long. Penelope and Clifford Blossom were the very definition of demonic, and only added to the Crimson Peak-esque horror story that was Thornhill.

At least she now understood why Cheryl was the way that she was. She couldn't help but feel more pity than hatred at this point, because now she knew why Cheryl needed to be a pain in the ass all the time. Thornhill was chaos, and it's the one place Cheryl should feel safe in, but she doesn't - so she seeks control and consistency elsewhere: School. The River Vixens. Relationships. After living a life of not feeling like she can own up to anything, she craves validation. She craves to be on top. She craves feeling important. So she yells at her Vixens for the smallest, most insignificant mistakes. She flaunts a new Hermès bag - one for every day of the week - as she saunters towards her locker in the morning. She kisses the cutest boy in class, right in the face of every pining girl.

None of this excused Cheryl's behaviour, but it provided an explanation, and that's all Veronica can ask of her right now.

So, what else?

There were her parents and their involvement with the Southside Serpents. Apparently Hiram wasn't as innocent as Veronica thought he was. She was so quick to believe he was framed for his crimes, but now she wasn't so sure. Since when did Daddy associate himself with thugs?

And since when did her mother think it was okay to forge her signature and throw herself into some stupid whirlwind romance with Fred Andrews behind her and her father's back?

Oh, speaking of Andrews...

Archie "sensitive-singer-songwriter-slash-varsity-football-star-athlete" Andrews getting himself tangled up with his music teacher in the back of her rusty Volkswagen? Gross. She didn't need or want to divulge in the details.

She thought she would have been able to find solace in the one good friend she made here, but even Betty Cooper had skeletons in her closet (She should have figured that out sooner; perfect girls next door are rarely perfect). It had been a few weeks since the Chuck incident but memories of that night still sift around in her brain when she least expects it: The hot steam pillowing her face, the stink of chlorine, the clinking of ice in a glass, the clop of Betty's heels against the floor, the globs of maple syrup cascading down Chuck's horrified face...