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He is one man who will always be painted red in her memory. Not the scald of blinding anger, no, the pinkish hue of youth; the way the sky deepens in the sunset over Sunnyside, the way the clouds lightened over Riverdale High’s football field the morning after their first homecoming dance. Her dress lavender, matching with her eyelids and the lovebites trailing down her neck that early morning. Alice finds lavender to be divinity, and dresses her daughters in it every Easter. She feels the color red as how she felt her childhood bleed out of her in the seventh grade, twisting her insides and staining those khaki Calvin Klein’s she’d saved all her money on. Red burns, just as Forsythe Pendleton Jones, who happens to be sprawled out on the sidewalk in front of her.
“Jug left today.”
Jack Daniels clings to his voice tighter than the jumper she wore the first day they had met. Clad in the same outfit her grandmother had bought for the first day of kindergarten, Alice was seven years old with nothing to her name but ill-fitting clothes and a scowl when FP shot his way into her life: the messy haired boy had been playing around with his father’s shotgun and blew out the window in both his and her adjoining trailers. They met screaming: two kids, two sets of broken glass, two parents without a clue as to how to forgive or put a Band-Aid on. The night air was cool when it blew against her pink pillow that night. There was the boy again, his head peering into her the shattered window; two kids with too many bruises to count.
“Where’d he go?”
“Dunno. Away from me, I guess.”
She now tightens the scarf around her neck despite spring melting at her feet, not too far from where her first love lays ahead of her. He’s wandered up too far North this time and they both know it, know that the clock struck midnight a lifetime ago. The evening is dying and there will be no lavender, only the grey of the lingering winter in a couple hours. She wishes now that she could remember his boyish excitement catching minnows in the river or even the look of faint terror when he received his first motorcycle, but as Alice watches him fade in and out of consciousness, all she sees is red. Red as the stockings he’d thrown up all over the first time he did this: MTV vaguely playing in the background, two brand new teenagers getting drunk for the first time. Afterwards, just as the moon was giving up its fight with morning, she’d seen FP wash out his mouth with more clear sin and felt her stomach sink. He hadn’t grimaced even once.
“You’re far from home, Jones.”
“Hmh.” A cough, then a snort, “You too.”
Perhaps she knew enough at thirteen to be afraid for him, but with time seeming half frozen, she doesn’t know what to feel for him at all. He lays on his back with a dazed look in his eyes, almost like he was nine and gazing for stars before they faded away again. Old Jack Daniels is tucked in the crook of his arm, in his breath, burning his stomach lining and threatening to make a reappearance in front of them. He wears only an unbuttoned flannel, stained jeans, and only one of his boots has laces, the other one gone completely missing. Wood chips from the adjacent playground encrust his hair, his clothes, and Alice too as she joins next to him. She pretends not to be aware of the dirt staining the cream color of her coat— Hal does not approve of off white, only the most pristine hue to it. Hal smells of bleach and sunscreen, men’s hairspray, never of leather or liquor, never grime. Perhaps Hal will ask what happened and she will say she slipped in the driveway, but only if she shows up to the office and only if he even notices the coat. It is more likely, she thinks, that he will nod to her once in their office and pretend neither tonight’s fight nor her long walk ever happened.
There are no children yet on the adjacent playground, a single swing creaking as it sways alone. They never saw playsets this nice growing up in the Southside.
“What did him in?”
He smiles a predatory, wolfish grin. “Old Jack. Always getting me into trouble, huh, Ali?”
Out there is his son, drifted off somewhere in the remnants of snow bales. She can't seem to imagine what the face of the third Forsythe Pendleton could look like, only coming up with a curly haired infant and a young boy with tear stains and his father's shotgun in hand; children of empty and broken glasses. She thinks of Betty and the pink flannel pajamas that keep her warm on nights like these, Polly lying awake in the other room without the comfort of a door. Polly likes to test her, traipsing around in her blue cheer outfit and red lipstick. Blue like both of her daughters’ eyes, bluer than the sky ever gets south of Pop’s. Girls who wear red lipstick do not get the privilege of privacy.
You will not be red with anger, she wants to scream. I have laid every stone in this fortress and you will not be burned.
He doesn’t know that Jughead has been following the train tracks all night, his hair wet and his lips blue. He doesn’t know that Jughead didn’t stop walking until he reached the town limits and found that his legs can’t move anymore. When the midnight Greyhound drove by, the image of Gladys and Jellybean flashed in his mind for only a second, followed by the image of his helplessly drunken father. The boy hasn’t graduated the eighth grade yet but makes a nest under a tarp in the woods and curls into himself, into the invisibility his dad tries to drink.
“Gimme back the bottle, Ali—” He reaches, but it’s too far and his eyes won’t focus.
“Not tonight.”
He’d held the whiskey out to her and she hasn’t given it back since, stealing two gulps and examining the label carefully. The burning sensation in the back of her throat is welcome; it itches the scratch she holds for cheap liquor, the one she never lets herself give into. Each night, Alice pours another glass of pinot noir from France (maybe Italy, one of those damn countries), and lets the wine stain her lips purple. You earned this, an inner voice soothes, but Alice knows it sound too much like her mother’s. At least she can remind herself that red wine was never her mother’s style— they could never afford it, and her mother preferred her substances to be injectable anyhow. She throws the bottle against the plastic slide, indifferent about broken glass littering a children’s playground and FP’s loud cursing.
“God fucking damnit!” He’s angry now, snarling like an animal up at the sky. He yells again, coming out more as a howl, and punches the cement when he realizes he can’t even sit himself up. Jones trails off, finding tears in place of rage.
Lips tightly sewn together, she doesn’t try to respond. It takes her a moment to realize he’s asking for Jughead, Jughead, just Jughead.
Dawn seems to be arriving late. Though she can’t bring herself to leave yet, Alice stands up somberly and makes her way for the swing set, trying to remember when Polly was young enough to play here. Again she thinks of Jughead, wherever he is, and feels a pang in her chest. He is young, but she knows that he has never been young like Betty, they have that in common. His father belches loudly from the sidewalk and her teeth clench in anger. There is an urge to scream at him, remembering the fits she used to throw in high school. People would stand in their front doors shamelessly to watch the two go back and forth on a Sunday morning in the days of ripped fishnets and half-committed mullets; children of leather jackets, arguing till their throats went raw and all she could do was slam doors and kick his trashcans over. This girl of red rises in Alice’s throat but makes no sound.
“Gonna gloat with me all night, Ali?” He rolls onto his side, voice hoarse. “I still know where your snake tattoo is, y’know. N’matter what you write in those papers.”
“And I still have your virginity. Fuck you.”
Her rings scrap against the weather-worn chains when she squeezes them, the rust staining her palms a dirty russet. Her feet drag across the woodchips, making small patterns as she swings lightly. It is easy to hate him from behind her desk at The Register. Watching him roll in broken glass and dirt, however, feels somehow worse. She remembers a similar feeling waking up next to him that first time, unruly hair spread across his pillow and her body trapped under his newly tattooed arm. She hated pretending to be a virgin for Hal months later, but didn't know how to feel sneaking to the trailer over in the same night.
“You drove him away then. Just like me, you know.”
"Just like you.”
You let me, she thinks but does not allow the words to form on her tongue. The disgust she feels rises again, her hands clutching the swing tighter; you let me go, her mantra. None of the passion from their after school arguments, no broken glass, Alice left Sunnyside and the Serpents with packed a bag and a heavy secret at seventeen but FP Jones was nowhere in sight. The boy had turned into a man, taking up his father’s affliction and letting the liquor baptize him. It was too late, however: two months went by and no blood, soon enough she found herself donning a red cardigan and grim smiles from Hal Cooper’s parents. She threw away her red lipsticks, the red stockings and skirts, hid the black leather, and tried to shed her skin just as easily as he seemed to put his on. A chameleon, Alice Smith morphed into Alice Cooper: mother, writer, Northsider. She became cardigans and flats, baking and Sunday dinners, lavender daughters and ice-eyed husbands. For someone who saved herself, Alice has never forgiven FP for any of it.
At last, she stands up just as the stars seem like they are ready to fade. Scoops Jones up by the elbow, careful not to graze his hands with hers. He doesn’t protest as she sits him on his own bike, not even when she gets in front. Dawn brings the sky to a brighter grey as Alice speeds them down dirt roads, the ones carefully far from her own sleeping household, yet the sun is not yet in sight when she halts at the train tracks. She will go no further.
He doesn’t know what to say, unwilling to get off the bike until she dismantles herself from it first. For a moment, he sits still and wonders if her lingering scent is a hallucination. But Alice Cooper has her gaze on him, hard and composed, and he already knows. The night has expired.
“Go bring him home, FP.”
Graditude is on his tongue but pride rises in his throat and he ends up saying nothing. Perhaps she knows. He hopes she does. His voice is gruff, “Give one to old Hal for me. G’on now.”
“I know my way home.” It must be a trick of the light or Jack still in his system—Alice’s iron composure couldn't lapse in that microsecond.
So it goes, she turns her back and leaves just the same. Time still moves in dreamlike fashion, watching her fade immediately when he crosses the tracks. It takes FP closer to three hours pushing his bike in the middle of the streets before he finds his son huddled up under the tarp. It guts him the first time to see Jug trembling asleep in the snow, having to double take if his dad really came back for him, the feeling sinking even lower when FP finds himself too drunk to maintain a balance on the motorcycle. Little Jug knows how to ride them both home.
His son’s lips are blue and her daughter’s are red still in the morning. There isn’t one damned thing to do about it.