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Sweet Pea hears it from Fangs first, who heard it from Toni, who heard it when she asked Val what the hell she was doing in her bar when as far as anyone knew she had never once looked back after moving to South Fulton the summer after graduation: the love of his life took a direct flight from LAX to Hartsfield-Jackson, where she got a rental car expensive enough he could probably spot it from the other side of town. Because she’s in town.
Josie McCoy is back in Riverdale.
(Sweet Pea tries to picture her taking the Groome and snorts into his beer. Tries to picture her riding shotgun in his beat-up pickup, the one Toni’s spent the past three years joking he oughta just paint rust-orange and be done with it, and sobers real quick.)
“The fuck is she even doing here?” Sweet Pea asks, trying to look, like, unaffected and shit. Like he hasn’t missed her like gasoline, or sugar, or something else vital. Like a thunderstorm or an organ. Fangs shrugs, muttering something probably uncharitable—Pittsburgh stomped the sweetness out of him in a way small-town gang activity never did. Toni blames Northerners; wouldn’t know manners if they bit ‘em on the ass, she says. Sweet Pea blames Kevin.—and Toni sighs.
“I think she’s going through a lot,” she says, in that way she has, like, I know why you’re feeling like you wanna blow some shit up, but maybe at least consider a different perspective. It’s why she’s the best goddamn guidance counselor in the world, which Sweet Pea tells her regularly. Not that it’s a high bar; she puts the half-dozen or so who gave up on him ever graduating to shame.
“Yeah, well, maybe I was going through a lot, too,” he grumbles, but it’s half-hearted even as it’s true. All he wants to do now is, like, hold her.
“She’s staying at the Five Seasons,” Toni says what she must think is nonchalantly, doing that thing where she tries to look like she’s watching the bar top as she wipes it down but she’s actually watching his reaction through her eyelashes.
Sweet Pea’s frown deepens. “Yeah, they wouldn’t even let me in that place if I worked there,” he says, like that settles it.
(It doesn’t.)
He’s emerging from hanging out with Toni and Fangs, who generously let him mope the whole time, into the familiar neon light of Pop’s post-midnight when she walks in like a technicolor angel. Sweet Pea’s heart must start beating in surround sound, because he can hear it like it’s blasting through his truck’s stereo, and looking at her is like leaning out the open window until the air makes your face feel smooth. Makes him feel a little raw and a little at peace and more at home than he wants it to, because he wants to be mad at her, maybe, except she smiles when she sees him.
“Sweet Pea?” she asks through that surprised laugh, like she wasn’t expecting him to still be here seven years later, same truck and same trailer and same empty wallet and same haunts. Only difference is that now he can buy the beer legally.
(And that she’s not there singing, but sometimes, when he’s helping Toni clean, he’ll put on one of her albums and close his eyes and almost convince himself it’s the same thing. Toni, god bless her, never gives him shit for it.)
The one and only, he thinks, or, That’s my name, don’t wear it out, but one’s lame—okay, they’re kinda both lame—and the other’s a lie. Catch him at the right time and he’d give his last dollar to hear her say his name again.
“Hey,” he says instead.
“Hey,” she says back, and she’s still smiling. Sweet Pea thinks of Toni saying she’s going through a lot, and looks at her smiling, and does what he does best: Fuck it, he thinks.
I love you, he thinks.
He asks, “Can I, uh. Can I buy you a sweet tea?”