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Riverdale gets blown up, hit by a comet, swallowed by the earth, hit by a tsunami, and vanishes into thin air. It doesn’t matter how far Archie gets—when he gets the news, it’s only a matter of time before he wakes up in his bedroom the morning he was supposed to get married.
There’s no escape. The answer, he knows, could only be in Riverdale. After all, Riverdale is the epicenter of everything; sometimes, it’s difficult to remember that there’s a whole world out there past the sign that marks the start of Greendale once you get past Sweetwater River.
Which is how he ends up in front of the original Pop’s diner, inexplicably still standing and unchanged. The paint on it is unusually bright, like it was given a fresh coat earlier the same week, and the lights of the window signs burn as neon as ever. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly demonic about it at all, which is maybe even more frightening than the alternative.
Archie opens the door to the diner and steps inside—Betty Cooper’s bedroom. He almost has half a mind to step right back out the door and write it off as a hallucination, but the bedroom door is half-open behind him, revealing only the Coopers’ upstairs hallway, and he can see his own room through her window.
“You’re not supposed to see the bride before the wedding,” Jughead says, glancing up from the book he’s reading. He’s sitting on the bed with what looks like a magazine—oh, it’s a comic book, Archie realizes—in his lap, but he closes it as Archie steps forwad, setting it on the bedside table. “Isn’t that how the superstition goes?”
“I don’t believe in those things,” Archie says. “I’ve got bigger problems.”
“You don’t say,” Jughead says dryly.
Archie really, really doesn’t have time for this. He’s lived through this day about a hundred times already, and while not one of them ended in the town of Riverdale, every single one began again with him opening his eyes to his suit hung up on the back of his bedroom door. “Which one are you?” he asks, even though he thinks he already knows the answer.
“Writer. All. None.” Jughead shrugs. “I told you you had to make a choice eventually,” he says. “Believe me now?”
“I guess,” Archie says. He surveys the walls: all the pictures look identical to the ones that were up back when they were all in high school, but then again, even years on, Betty hadn’t changed a single thing upon returning. Like most things, her childhood-turned-adult-bedroom has been frozen in time for years, like they’d never left, like no one had grown up at all. “Betty’s room?” he asks. “Really?”
“It used to be mine, once,” Jughead says. Archie distinctly avoids mentioning how not a single thing had changed when Jughead moved in—it was still just Betty’s room. “Besides, I needed somewhere no one would look, and I didn’t feel like living in yours again. Or the garage.”
“Whatever,” Archie says. He doesn’t suggest the bunker as another option, partly because he hates the bunker and partly because when he’d driven back into town after one last failed escape attempt, Fox Forest had almost completely been swallowed by the same emptiness that engulfed the road behind him. The bunker probably doesn’t exist anymore. It’s probably for the best. He focuses in on an old school newspaper clipping pinned to the wall, an article declaring that Riverdale’s very own Betty Cooper will be working at an exclusive internship in Los Angeles over the summer. The first time she’d told him about it, she’d said it changed her life. After that one night, she’d never mentioned it again, like she’d forgotten it ever happened.
“It’s kind of like Donnie Darko,” Jughead says, breaking the silence.
“What?”
“I’ve definitely made you watch it before,” he continues. “In one timeline, where everything was set just past the turn of the millennium, we went to go see the premiere at the Bijou.”
“Is that what they are?” Archie asks absently. Betty’s bedside table fades away and leaves a distinct nothingness in its place. The fading, at least, is familiar—it’s starting. “Timelines?”
“So you don’t remember?” Jughead presses.
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not. It’s all jumbled. I don’t think I know which parts are the real me and which parts aren’t.” Archie pauses. “What’s the end of Donnie Darko like?”
“Well,” Jughead says, looking outside, “as far as I can tell, a vortex hasn’t formed over Riverdale, so. Maybe not like Donnie Darko.” He considers something for a long second. Archie watches an old pink stuffed rabbit and a cherub-shaped nightlight fade out of existence. “I mean, he dies.”
Archie doesn’t remember why he’d asked in the first place. He’s not a movie person, and he doesn’t remember a single minute of the film, even though he’s apparently watched it. “Well, real life isn’t like the movies,” he says finally. “We can find a different solution.”
“This isn’t real life,” Jughead says. “Don’t you get that? None of this is real. You aren’t real.”
Archie frowns. That can’t be true. “And how would you know that?”
“Because I created you,” Jughead returns. “Everything you want, everything you do, all of that—it’s because I wrote it.”
“So?” Archie says. “Doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
“Jesus,” Jughead mutters.
“We’re people,” Archie says, desperate. It’s hard to grasp why Jughead doesn’t understand that very basic fact. “We have lives to live.”
“You don’t even have free will,” Jughead snaps. “You’re a two-dimensional character on a page, and the second I stop writing, you won’t exist anymore.”
The thought doesn’t deter Archie. If anything, it just makes him angrier—of course he’s real. He feels things. He knows things. He’s a person. “Well, then you have free will,” he amends. “You can let us all out of here.”
“It’s not that simple,” Jughead says. “It’s… the world’s going to be completely different. You won’t be yourself, as you know it.” He shakes his head. “I would know. I’ve written you, like, a thousand times.”
Archie tries to picture the words in his head being projected in there by a higher power. It seems kind of silly to imagine. “And just how much of it was you?” Archie asks. “I mean, are any of us…”
“You… exist,” Jughead says. “I mean, you were all out there before I started writing. But here you’re just a little… off. Background details smudged, concessions for plot purposes.”
“But our lives?”
“None of it. All of it. Whatever answer you like best,” Jughead says.
“My head kinda hurts,” Archie says honestly.
“I don’t know,” he says, “at first I was just a writer, but then I tried to become a leader—totally didn’t work out—and then I tried to go back, only you can never go back, so I just had to keep going bigger until.” He throws his hands up. “Well. Now we’re here, aren’t we?”
“What happens when you stop writing?”
“I don’t know,” he repeats. “The world could end. Or life could just keep on going. I have no idea.”
“Why don’t you try it?”
Jughead stares at him. Then he laughs, unnaturally loud. “Oh, that’s good. That’s a good one, Archie.”
“What? I’m serious,” Archie says. “Just stop writing. About Riverdale, at least. Write about something besides us.”
“Riverdale’s the only thing worth writing about,” he says.
“There’s so much more out there,” Archie says. “And I want to experience it. So do something else. Write something else.”
“I have!” Jughead says. “I have. I’ve written—gothic horror, and space operas, and romantic comedies. I’ve tried a million different genres, and no matter how much I change the stories, the people are always the same. Your lives, your motivations… they’re all fake. Limited. You’re a set of paper dolls that has to participate in whatever I write.”
Archie glances to the bedside table, at the comic book Jughead had been reading. The boy on the cover looks just like him.
Jughead follows his gaze, realizing just a second too late what Archie’s about to do. “Wait,” he starts, you can’t—”
Archie picks up the comic and rips it clean in half down the spine. He’s left with two halves of Riverdale Issue #001. “No more story,” he says decisively.
“Jesus,” Jughead says. “That was brutal.”
It doesn’t matter—it’s for the better. And Archie’s sick of reliving what’s supposed to be the so-called best day of his life, anyway. “We’re going to be different tomorrow,” he states, staring at the wall. On the pinboard above Betty’s desk, there are pictures of the two of them at fourteen, pink-cheeked and laughing. He thinks Jughead might’ve been behind the camera—he can’t imagine someone like Alice or Hal wanting to take them. He has a hard time imagining Alice and Hal, period. There are photos of Betty and Kevin, too, like when they went to homecoming together wearing all white and looked like one of those ultra-religious teen-married couples. As he watches, they fade away, leaving blank spaces in the wall behind the pinboard.
Those might’ve been real memories, he thinks. Probably. Archie thinks about sophomore year—the real sophomore year, or maybe not entirely real, but the one he remembers best: Gunshot wounds, serial killers, adults whose job it was to protect kids who only ever did the opposite. “I don’t want to be fifteen again,” he says. He doesn’t think he could live through it twice.
“I don’t think you will be,” Jughead says. “You’ll probably wake up twenty-something with new memories and new motivations. You’ll have lived a different life. Or maybe some of it will have been the same. I don’t know.”
“Will I remember any of this?”
“Maybe,” Jughead says. “I’m not sure. I remember everything now. But I wrote it. I guess everyone else will probably remember bits and pieces.”
Archie glances out the window that faces his bedroom, and there’s nothing there. His childhood home, erased from existence.
“Okay,” he says, mostly to himself, “I’m ready.”
“You’ll never be ready,” Jughead mumbles, lying down half-across the bed. He picks up the two halves of Riverdale Issue #001 , studying them for one last long second before sighing and setting them down.
“I’m ready,” Archie repeats. The edges of Betty’s room retreat into themselves, the familiar darkness of the last page of a comic book encroaching on her pink-patterned comforter. “I am.” He closes his eyes as the empty space envelopes the foot of her bed, mind stuck on the fact that somehow, he’d never actually made his choice.