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Jughead asks her on Thursday afternoon, as they’re packing up their things in the Blue and Gold office, the other students already gone.
He stands on the other side of the desk where she’s zipping up her backpack, and clears his throat. “So, you probably don’t know this, because I don’t tell anyone, but it’s my birthday on Saturday.”
It’s equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking that Jughead thinks that Betty doesn’t know his birthday. She’ll have to give Archie a pat on the back for his skills of deception the next time she sees him, because apparently Jughead actually believes that the single chocolate cupcake Archie gives him on his birthday every year is a product of the Andrews’ kitchen.
“Oh,” she says.
“Archie always goes to a double feature with me at the Bijou,” he forges on, his hands gripping the straps of his backpack. “But his mom just surprised him with a plane ticket to Chicago for the weekend, so he can’t come. And I already bought the tickets, so…I was wondering…would you want to go?”
“Yes.” The word is out of her mouth before he’s even done asking the question. Betty ducks her head, pretending to futz with the zipper tab on her backpack. “Um, I mean, what time?”
“Starts at eight.”
“Okay.” Betty nods, like she’s thinking it over. “I think I can do that.”
She told Veronica during lunch today that she could come over for a girls’ night on Saturday, but mani-pedis can wait.
Jughead’s shoulders visibly relax. “Cool. It’s The Wizard of Oz and Wild at Heart, which is kind of a perfect pairing.”
“Awesome,” Betty agrees, though she doesn’t know why they’re a perfect pairing; she’s never heard of the latter, and the last time she saw the former, she was young enough that the scene with the flying monkeys sent her into a hysterical crying fit.
“Cool,” Jughead says again, a hint of a smile on his face. “It’s a – plan.”
“It’s a plan,” she echoes.
It is not a date, Betty writes in her diary that night, underlining not with a firm stroke of her pen.
But, she reasons, they should probably go to dinner first. She’d googled the films he mentioned, and put together, they were nearly four hours long. Surely a tub of popcorn and some candy weren’t enough to sustain Jughead Jones through four hours of movie-watching.
She finds him at his locker on Friday morning, and tries to act casual about it. “I was thinking, maybe we should go to Pop’s first?” She leans against the locker beside his, tilting her head up at him the way Veronica does when she wants to convince Archie to do something.
Jughead looks surprised, like the idea of eating dinner before a movie has never occurred to him before. “Me and…no, yeah. Sure. That seems fine.”
It’s not a particularly enthusiastic yes, but she’ll take it.
“Great,” she says, and then a thought occurs to her. “Do you want me to drive?”
“Oh. No, I’ll just—”
“I don’t mind. Your place is on the way,” she points out.
Jughead’s head disappears into his locker for a moment. “Okay,” he says, voice muffled. When he emerges again, he looks at her, his cheeks slightly pink. “Thanks.”
Betty reaches back to tighten her ponytail and, as if by rote, begins to braid her long, blonde hair. It’s one of the techniques her therapist taught her to use in moments when her fingers were tempted to curl into her palms: occupy them with something else, like braiding hair.
It’s been a while since she clenched her fists that way, but she’s found the method useful for times when her hands are itching to do other things she doesn’t want them to. Like touch Jughead’s handsome, blushing face.
“Of course,” she says. “I’ll pick you up at six.”
We’re getting dinner and a movie, she writes. She’s curled up in her window seat, a pile of pillows at her back, and the night sky is clear enough that she can see a handful of stars bright enough to outshine the mild light pollution that’s part and parcel of living in a town like Riverdale.
I know it’s not a date. She underlines know.
But…
Even though it’s the weekend, Betty wakes up at six-fifteen the next morning – the same time she gets up for school each day – and bakes the same batch of chocolate cupcakes that she bakes every year on October 2nd.
Only one cupcake had to be set aside for Jughead, and Betty was a prolific baker anyway, so her parents had never caught on to the fact that their daughter had been making a specific cupcake for a specific person on a specific date year after year, ever since she’d grown old enough to operate the oven without supervision. Polly knows – but Polly is off at college now, so Betty makes her cupcakes in relative peace, her father commenting that the kitchen smells good as he pours himself a cup of coffee.
The rest of the day passes slow as molasses, right up until it’s time to get ready. Betty frowns as she stares into the mirror, dissatisfied with every hairstyle she tries: she ties it up in her usual ponytail, shakes it out loose around her shoulders, pulls it into a topknot, and eventually lands on a half-up style she recently wore to her baby cousin’s baptism. From there she’s only got enough time to waffle between two outfits – a casual polka dot dress, or a sweater and jeans – and she goes with the dress, grabbing a cardigan on her way out the door in case it’s cold at the theater.
She makes it to Jughead’s just a few minutes before the agreed-upon time, and takes a deep breath on the stoop outside his front door before she knocks.
Jughead’s still buttoning up his flannel shirt with one hand when he answers the door. “Hey,” he says, stepping aside to let her in. “You look nice.”
“Happy birthday,” she says, and holds out the cupcake that she’d kept balanced in her lap on a paper plate on the way over.
He freezes, looking at the cupcake. “Wait. I thought…”
Betty presses her lips together, trying – unsuccessfully – to suppress a smile.
“Oh, my god. I’m an idiot.” Jughead looks almost awed as he accepts the plate, turning to set it onto the little round dining table just a few feet from the door. “Archie can barely boil water, why did I think he was making me cupcakes every year?”
Betty laughs, trailing after him into the trailer’s tiny kitchen. “I don’t know.”
She watches as he pulls a knife from the drawer beside the sink, and then proceeds to cut the cupcake in half. He holds the plate up for her to take a piece. She shakes her head.
“It’s for you. It’s your birthday.”
“It’s for many years of unsaid ‘thank you’s,” Jughead insists.
Betty relents, even though she’s already eaten two others today – she makes really good cupcakes, in her defense.
“Your hair looks different,” Jughead mumbles through a mouthful of cake.
She touches the ends of her hair self-consciously. She no longer wears it in a severe ponytail every single day – the stylist at the fancy new salon Veronica had dragged her to six months ago had told her that was a great way to induce both headaches and premature hair loss – but it’s not like Jughead would notice that. “I can’t tell if that was supposed to be a compliment or not.”
He swallows, and when he grins there’s a tiny crumb of cake stuck between his two front teeth. The fact that she thinks it’s endearing, and not totally gross, is just too much for Betty to think about right now. “Your hair looks pretty,” he corrects himself.
Betty grins back (but only after she’s taken a second to suck the crumbs out of her own teeth).
They snag their usual booth at the diner, and Pop drops four plastic menus onto the tabletop a moment later, as if he doesn’t already know precisely what each of them is going to order. “You kids want to order now, or wait for your friends to join you?”
Betty meets Jughead’s eyes for only a second before she looks up at Pop with a smile. “It’s just us tonight, Pop.”
“Oh.” He picks the menus back up. “The usual, then?”
“Yes, please,” Betty says, and Jughead nods.
After he leaves, there’s a beat, and then Jughead says, “He probably thinks we’re on a date or something.”
Betty forces herself to laugh. “That would be kind of a bad date. We come here all the time.”
Jughead shrugs uncomfortably. “Veronica and Archie go on dates here.”
“I mean like, for a first date.” Betty pauses, and shakes her head. “I don’t know why I said that. Pop’s is fine for a date.”
“I guess I wouldn’t know,” Jughead says, leaning back in the booth a bit, one arm coming up to rest on the back of his seat. His foot brushes against her ankle as he adjusts his legs; unintentionally, she reminds herself. “Never having been on one.”
“Never?”
Jughead looks amused. “Betty, who would I have gone on a date with?”
She racks her brain but comes up with only one real answer, an answer she can’t say out loud: me?
“Ethel.”
He rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. “Please don’t start.”
“Start what?” Betty asks innocently. “Oh, you mean talking about the time she asked you out in gym class and you reacted by tripping and falling halfway down the bleachers?”
Though his eyes are still pointedly turned up to the ceiling, his shoulders shake with laughter. “Stop.”
“And then when you got back up she just looked at you and said, ‘Nevermind’?”
He covers his eyes with his hand, full-on laughing now. Betty giggles, too. At the time, she’d been sort of jealous of Ethel; not because Jughead had any interest in her, but because Ethel knew what she wanted, and went for it. It took Betty another whole year to finally get to that point with anything in her life – starting with tryouts for the River Vixens at the beginning of tenth grade.
But there are still some things she’s just not willing to reach out and take quite yet, some things that are far too precarious, should she misjudge her aim. One of them is sitting right across from her, just an arm’s length away.
Eventually Jughead pulls himself together, and moves his hand away from his face, wiping a stray tear from under his eye. He looks at Betty, one last giggle slipping out, and then he tilts his head slightly to one side. “What’d you do to your hair?”
She follows his gaze to her left shoulder, where a series of tiny braids have appeared amongst the long, wavy strands. She hadn’t even realized she’d been doing anything with her hands.
“I’m braiding it,” she says, nonchalant.
“Why?”
Betty shrugs. “Just something to occupy my hands. I don’t even think about it.”
“Fascinating.”
She snorts. “Not really.”
Jughead leans forward, resting an elbow on the table. “Give yourself some credit. I have no idea how to braid hair, and you do it without even thinking about it.”
Betty makes a face. “You don’t know how to braid? You have a little sister.”
“I tried to do J.B.’s hair once when I was like, eleven,” he says, grinning again. “And it went so badly my mom literally had to chop it all off.”
Betty gasps. “No way.”
“I mean, she wasn’t bald,” he admits. “But she’d murder me if I tried to touch her precious hair again.”
“Well, it’s a basic life skill,” Betty says. “Here, I’ll show you.”
Before she can think better of it, she slides out of her side of the booth, and into his.
Jughead scoots further into the corner to make room for her. He sits up straight, eyes oddly bright, and she avoids his gaze as she tugs the rest of her hair out of its half-ponytail.
“So you just take three pieces, like this.” She slips her fingers between the locks of hair over her right shoulder, showing him. “And you cross over the middle one from one side, and then from the opposite side, and you just keep going.” She braids it all the way down to the end, fastening it with her hair tie, and only then lifts her eyes to his face.
He’s looking right back at her, a small smile tugging at his lips. “Very impressive.”
Betty holds her breath in her chest, and shifts so that her other shoulder is closer to him; it requires bending one leg up onto the seat between them, her knee coming to press lightly against his thigh. “Now you try.”
Jughead lifts her hair off of her shoulder so gently one might think it was made of spun gold. He fumbles his way through the braid, muttering “shit” under his breath when he drops one of the strands, and then drops it again just a few seconds later. It takes much longer than it should.
But Betty doesn’t care, she thinks, as the back of his hand grazes her neck. Take as long as you want.
“Ta da,” he says finally, lifting the braid in front of her face. It’s lumpy, the three sections clearly uneven, and so loose at the bottom it’ll come undone the moment he lets go.
“Amazing. Such a quick learner,” Betty giggles, and they’re still sitting like that, facing one another in the booth with her hair in his hands, when their food arrives.
She stays on his side of the booth while they eat, and when their server drops the bill on the table, she snatches it out of his hands.
“You bought the movie tickets,” she says.
Jughead sighs. “Pop’s going to think I’m a terrible date.”
Betty’s stomach twists. “Girls can pay for a date. And besides, this isn’t a date,” she points out.
“I know, but he thinks it is. And he’s gonna think I wouldn’t even split the bill with you.”
“Well, we’ll have to come again and prove him wrong.” She turns away to wave down the server.
The sun has almost set by the time they step outside, and the temperature’s dropped by at least ten degrees. Betty shivers, and pulls her cardigan tight around her middle, thankful that she thought to bring it.
Without warning, a warm weight settles over her shoulders. Jughead’s put his jacket around her. Her heart climbs up into her throat.
She looks up at him with a question in her eyes, and Jughead lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “You looked cold.”
“Careful,” Betty says, their footsteps crunching against the gravel in sync as they make their way slowly across the parking lot. She nods towards a man leaning against the hood of his car, texting on his phone. “That guy might think we’re on a date, too.”
There’s a silence, a pause in which her stomach starts to hurt until Jughead says, casually, “So what if he does?”
She glances up at him again, but he keeps his gaze on the car ahead of them. She hitches his jacket up a little higher up around her shoulders. It smells like fabric softener, and pine needles, and him.
It becomes a joke, somehow.
“Sharing popcorn? Very intimate,” Jughead comments when Betty orders them a giant tub of popcorn, extra butter, just the way he likes it.
“I think this area is reserved for couples who just want to make out,” Betty notes as she follows him to a pair of seats in the very last row.
“It’s not too late to drive to Pickens Point instead,” he whispers as the lights dim and the audience grows quiet.
But a few minutes later, when his fingers brush against her own, lingering, as they both reach for the popcorn in the dark, she doesn’t say anything.
When she shifts in her seat, her knee coming to press lightly against his, neither does he.
Betty blinks open her eyes and yawns. She’s warm and cozy, tucked up in some kind of blanket, and…in an empty movie theater?
She bolts upright in her seat. Jughead’s jacket – decidedly not a blanket – slips to the floor. “Oh my god. Did I fall asleep?”
Jughead laughs. “Yeah, about thirty minutes into Wild at Heart. I think we gotta get out of here,” he adds, pointing to the usher sweeping a broom along the ground a few rows up.
“I’m so sorry.” She gathers her purse and his jacket, but he shakes his head when she offers it to him. “You should’ve woken me up.”
“It’s okay. You lasted longer than Archie usually does.”
It’s not until she’s sliding into the driver’s seat that she notices, catching a glimpse of her hair in the rearview mirror. There are three little plaits on the right side of her head that weren’t there when they got to the theater.
“Juggie. Did you braid my hair while I was asleep?”
His mouth moves silently for a moment, like he’s trying to find the words to deny it, but then he just shrugs. “I need practice. Like you said, it’s a life skill.”
“You’re so weird,” she giggles, but she flashes him a warm smile as she turns on the engine, so he’ll know she doesn’t mean it in a bad way.
When they pull up in front of the trailer, Betty turns off the car. Jughead steps outside onto the gravel, and so does she.
“Are you walking me to my door?” he teases.
“Yes.” Betty nods. “Just in case Pop’s watching. Or that guy from the parking lot.”
He stops at the bottom of the stairs, leaning a little against the railing as he turns to face her. His face grows serious. “Thank you for coming with me,” he says. “I’m…not a big fan of my birthday. But this was really fun.”
Jughead pauses, and then steps forward, his arms wrapping around her, pulling her in against his chest. Betty slides her hands up his back, resting them between his shoulder blades. His jacket is still draped over her shoulders, but even in the chilly night air, she can feel the warmth of his skin seeping through his flannel shirt.
When they pull away, she swallows, tucking her hair behind her ears. Her fingers brush against the little braids still woven through the strands. “It’s too bad you’re not into birthdays,” she says, “’cause I don’t know if you know this, but mine’s actually next Saturday.”
His eyes light up in a way that she knows he knows what she’s trying to do. Her stomach flutters.
(He knows her birthday’s not until March.)
“What a coincidence.”
“Yeah.” Betty takes a breath, and bites her lower lip with her two front teeth. “And I was thinking about going bowling, or roller skating, or something. But I don’t know if you’d want to come with me. Because…you know. Birthdays.”
Jughead looks like he’s fighting an uphill battle against the biggest grin of his life. “I don’t like my birthday. I never said anything about other people’s.”
“Oh. Okay.” Betty smiles back. “Then I guess...it’s a date?”
“It’s a date,” he echoes.
It’s definitely a date, she writes later that night, underlining definitely, enclosing the words in a big, blue-ink heart.