A part of her childhood she could have done without, Cheryl thinks nowadays, is going through that whole phase where she wanted to be like Baby in Dirty Dancing so bad that she told everyone who would listen that'd she'd never find a guy as great as her dad, before growing up a few years and realizing she had actually been telling the truth all along and karma sucked, big time.

    That's the long way of saying that Cheryl's a giant lesbian with a giant gay obsession with her best friend, hurray. Thanks, life.

    The thing is, Cheryl is not a nice person. Neither is Toni, really, when you get right down to it. And sometimes they don't even like each other. People call them frenemies, and while Cheryl loves a good turn of phrase, she doesn't think that's the right term for it. At least not where she's standing, high up on Mount Pathetic Lesbo.

    (Speaking of pathetic, the latest development of Jughead Jone's monster crush on Archie now that he is dating said frenemy. Cheryl, at least, has yet to sink that low.)

    Every good story has a flashback, Cheryl knows from watching all those hideous hetero chick flick's at Toni's insistence, so here's theirs:

    The first class they ever sat together in was homeroom, the first day of fifth grade, and not even by choice.

    Cheryl's only semi-friend in the room had been Betty Cooper, her cousin, and so she took the seat next to hers at first. Betty never stopped talking for a whole three minutes Cheryl sat next to her, the climax of when Toni Topaz walked in and sat a couple rows over. Apparently Toni had made out, with tongue, with Betty's not-so-secret crush over the summer, and she was nothing short of murderous.

    And so it was with an ironic sort of relief that Cheryl had finally collected her books and moved to her assigned seat next to Toni, as per the teacher's request. If she had to hear one more word about the evils of girls who hit puberty before middle school, she would have stabbed her with a pencil.

    As she sat down, Toni gave her a look that made it clear she heard Betty talking. "Sure you can handle the stress of sitting next to the school slut?"

    Cheryl gave her a distinctly unimpressed look. "'School slut,' puh-lease. Obviously you haven't seen what the dance team walks around wearing. At least they know how to own it. Privately, Cheryl had thought Toni kind of knew how to own it too, but as long as they were both being rude to each other, she wasn't going to say it.

    "I'm not a slut because of what I wear, you idiot," Toni shot back. "I'm a slut because I date a lot of people."

    Cheryl stared pointedly at Toni's fifth grade cleavage.

    "Okay," Toni muttered. "Maybe it's a little because of what I wear."

    Points for honestly. And since Cheryl has always been nothing if not a strong supporter of Hammurabi's Law, she said, "I'd wear that shirt too, though. If it was my size."

    Toni snorted. "You don't have the boobs."

    "One day," said Cheryl flatly, and Toni giggled suddenly.

    "You don't care, do you?" she asked.

    "No," Cheryl admitted, and they laughed, and the teacher gave them a scary look, that they laughed some more.

    So those were the simpler times.

    Nowadays their friendship mostly consists of Cheryl trying to keep her thoughts PG while watches Toni dance around her room singing "Womanizer" horrendously off-key. And yeah, if someone had told Cheryl in middle school she'd fall in love not only with a girl, but with a girl who religiously listens to Britney goddamn Spears, she would have laughed in their face and possibly punched them. But here she is.

    Less than a week into their relationship, Jughead and Toni start spending lunch periods all but publicly undressing each other.

    Cheryl, on the other hand, starts bringing Aspirin to school. Somehow, her stomach always gets a sort of nasty feeling around that time of day. She also makes her customary jokes about hormones and the like, because what else can she do. Archie just wears his usual rainbow of various hurt expressions. Someone needs to teach that boy to mask his emotions with sarcasm, like a normal miserably-closeted gay teenager.

    God, Toni and Jughead barely even touch their lunches. How do they do that?

    "How gross did the tomato soup taste today?" Toni asks her one day on their way to toss their trays. It's an old inside joke from back in elementary school, when anything with tomatoes in it consistently tasted like nicotine.

    "It was fine," Cheryl responds, refusing to play along as Toni dumps her own untouched bowl in the trash. Then, because Toni looks like she might press the matter: "How did Jughead's tongue taste today?"

    Which does the trick.

    A week or two passes, and fairly quick at that. Cheryl hadn't thought the Toni/Jughead thing would last as long as it has. And yet every day, she pals around with Toni until dismissal, and every day she watches her disappear through the school doors with Jughead, palms mashed together and the dumbest of dumb sunny expressions on both their faces.

    (Cheryl knows she's not being fair. For God's sake, throughout their whole friendship she's not even asked Toni if she was straight. And if she really like Jughead, well. It's going to end bad, obviously, but who is she to interfere?)

    (Although she isn't sure whether sticking her nose in their business or staying out of it would make her a worse human being.)

    Anyway, they all go on another group date, like total weirdos.

    Going bowling was Toni's suggestion. Not because it's sexy or anything, but just because she loves bowling and has always loved bowling, and apparently, can't fathom why anyone wouldn't love bowling. This is the kind of Toni that Cheryl likes best. Even though this kind of Toni can be both nerdy and sort of obnoxious.

    The two of them sit on the lobby bench lacing up their bowling shoes. One of Archie's shoes had an absolutely revolting moldy spot on it, and so he and Jughead are up at the counter getting in line to have it replaced. Or, at least, trying to get in line. Jughead seems unable to stop himself from chasing around Archie with the contaminated shoe, which makes it hard for them to hold a spot.

    Cheryl glances at Toni and wonders how she can possibly remain so oblivious.

    Toni looks up like she feels Cheryl's eyes. She grins. "Last time, we were here. You actually beat me."

    "Hell yeah I did." She'd forgotten that. "I smoked you."

    Toni leans in, close enough that Cheryl can smell her normal lavender-y scent hiding under the fruity stuff she sprayed on earlier for Jughead's benefit. "Want to know a secret?"

    It's all Cheryl can do to keep her voice from going breathy and hushed. "What?"

    "I let you win," Toni tells her evilly, before bouncing off the bench to join the boys.

    Cheryl, naturally, objects to this statement vehemently and frequently over the course of the night. If she were totally delusional, she'd say that Toni's eyes light up just a little brighter with each protest, but in the end whether they do or not really isn't her call to make.

    And while Cheryl wholeheartedly disapproves of the whole 'group date' concept, that one actually ends up being pretty fun, more like friends and less like one handsy preteen couple and their two depressing tagalongs. But it's also the last fun date for a while. So there that is.

    Thanks to Toni, Cheryl hasn't gotten an uninterrupted full night of sleep in weeks. It must be a statement as to Toni's somewhat corrupting nature that every single dream swims with her glowing smile, her wild hair, and that every night Cheryl's eyes will fly open mid-slumber and she will staring at her bedroom ceiling for hours, for ages, until Toni's image blinks itself away. It's all those times that Cheryl is most prone to self-honesty. So, therefore, it's at those times where she really kind of hates herself.

    (In her dreams, Toni's eyes are full of roses. The two of them always sit together on the end of a wooden dock that juts out over an empty sky, and just as they turn to each other, a hole opens for Toni to fall through, leaving Cheryl's hands and cheeks and mouth with just a kiss of empty air.)

    "Are you going to Josie's birthday party?" Toni asks her while they're doing homework together on her front lawn the next day. She rolls onto her stomach and swings her legs.

    "Nah," Cheryl replies, subtly angling her head so Toni's figure is no longer in the field of vision. "You probably shouldn't go either. She says she doesn't want anyone to come because it'll be dumb."

    "I wasn't gonna go," Toni says defensively. It's quiet except for the lawnmower noises from down the street until she starts laughing. "Remember what her parents did last year?"

    "Oh my god," Cheryl says, suddenly giggling hard enough that she topples over sideways in the grass. "I forgot about that."

    "Freaking black streams," Toni says.

    "Stop," Cheryl begs her.

    "Because it was the only color they could find," Toni adds.

    "Shut up," says Cheryl, now half-laughing, half-coughing violently.

    "Tapped all over the outside of their house." Toni giggles at the new bout of laughing this final statement inspires, then flops down next to her.

    "Go die," Cheryl tells her fondly.

    "Then you'd have no friends," Toni reminds her. Fair enough.

    They lay there as the sun sets and the lawnmower peters out, until Cheryl sits up.

    Toni struggles upwards. "What?"

    Cheryl grins at her. (Toni has grass in her hair and her shirt is wrinkled weirdly and in an alternate universe Cheryl would look at her for as long as she wanted, just look.) "Call Josie. I have, like, the best idea."

    Something between them is off the night they sneak off with Jughead and Archie. They snipe at each other all evening, shooting mean little pointy-edged things back and forth, stuff that probably seems normal to the boys but means much more to the two of them.

    Archie is on the edge when he joins their little raiding party, but he loosens up as they fool around outside Josie's house. By the time they decide on a park to hide out for a few minutes in, he's cheerful enough to spend the ride there surreptitiously trying to run Jughead's bike off the road, laughing and swerving away when Jughead takes a swipe at him.

    It's hard not to be jealous watching them, their dorky little friend group of two. They've only ever needed each other. Cheryl seems to need more and more people every day, people to keep putting between her and Toni and the ugly things she wants to say about Toni's other friends. Come to think of it, Jughead and Archie kind of are the first real friends she and Toni have ever had in common.

    Jughead and Toni disappear together at some point and Cheryl's stomach starts burning. It's something she should have foreseen. She wishes she'd brought an Aspirin or two in her pocket.

    Archie joins him on the bench. He's lucky it's her he keeps doing this kind of thing to. Any other girl would get the idea.

    "Where'd they go?" he asks with an affected casualness, and Cheryl stiffens.

    "Who knows." She doesn't know what makes her say it—probably the past six months or more of mooning pathetically over the so-called slut of the seventh grade—but all of a sudden she's spiting out with vicious resentment, "Maybe they're having sex," and Archie's eyes widen and she immediately feels bad.

    "They're having sex?" he says incredulously. (It's a mark of how much of a better person he is than her that he sounds more worried than jealous.)

    "Well, not yet, but Toni's dying to lose her virginity," Cheryl elaborates apologetically. "At least, that's what she told me." God, Cheryl, sound more obviously hurt about it.

    Then, because the look Archie is giving her is too empathetic, too knowing, Cheryl tries to kiss him him. And when he ducks away awkwardly she tells him, "You have a crush on Jughead." It puts it up between them like a shield, but it comes out sounding like a confession.

    She's wrangled her face back to its usual state of impassivity by the time the Happy Couple join them again. Jughead and Archie have their own passive-egressive mirco-fight, and then it's her and Toni's turn again, apparently.

    "Come on. My dad's got tons of booze." Not that Cheryl knows exactly what amount constitutes 'tons of booze,' but hey, she's willing to bet that none of her companions do either. "Let's break in and steal some."

    Toni looks amused. "You can't 'break in' to your own house."

    Archie and Jughead fight, exchanging uncomfortable looks with each other while Cheryl glares at Toni, who still refuses to do anything but smile condescendingly. "Well, he thinks I'm spending the night at your house." Which, by the way, is a situation that has by now probably progressive from awkward to downright torturous. "So it's kind of breaking in."

    "Except you have a key,"

    "Why do you gotta take the fun out of everything?" Cheryl demands. Toni looks wounded, then angry, then impudent, and she winds her fingers into the weave of Jughead's jacket like she knows, which is impossible of course, it has to be, since Cheryl can barely admit it to herself.

    Her stomach flips unpleasantly.

    Later, even as they troop into her house and she jokes about her mom being dad as a sort of backwards revenge for Toni not knowing, even as she takes a gulp of nasty, nasty liquid that at least manages to burn semi-pleasantly as it goes down, Cheryl is inwardly freaking out about the sleepover at Toni's house. What is Toni says they might as well just sleep at Cheryl's place? What if she goes home but to refuses to let Cheryl come with her because she's still angry from arguing? What if, worst of all, the sleepover actually happens? What then? They haven't had a sleepover in almost a year, and all those times in the past they always just shared Toni's twin-sized bed.

    Cheryl legitimately does not think her psyche can handle that.

    Maybe if she just gets really drunk. Maybe then she can drown out whatever messy, sticky feelings might threaten to surface later on. She's about to reach for the bottle again after Archie takes a swig and makes a face, Jughead giggling at him under his breath, but none of it ends up mattering.

    Because then her dad is standing at the foot of the stairs with a gun and her heart completely and utterly stops when he points it without looking and fires.

    She and Toni sit next to each other in the E.R. Waiting room. Archie is across from them, with his parents, his face making it clear to parents and paramedics alike that he's in this for the long haul. As opposed to Jughead's actual girlfriend, whose parents are on their way to pick her and Cheryl up right now.

    Cheryl's dad is in custody. The police assured her that it's all a formality, he turned himself right in, he'll be back by morning and is there another guardian she can call? She gave them her mom's number and it was eventually decided, in a roundabout sort of way, that the Topaz's would drive her home and her mom would meet her at the house.

    No sleepover after all.

    Cheryl is tired and bored and hungry and guilty, and even still, some small part of her can't acknowledge how pretty Toni looks even under the fizzling, white-hot hospital lighting. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Toni's pick itself up and move to the shared armrest. It sits there uncertainly for a moment, like it wants to go farther but can't quite make it. Like some part of Toni thinks they ought to hold hands like they did as fifth graders, nauseous with worry, on the city bus.

    Eventually Toni does speak, but it's not to say anything Cheryl wants to hear. All the same, she can't be blamed for asking the normal questions: "Why would he do that? Why would you just shoot like that?"

    "My dad has anxiety," says Cheryl softly.

    Toni is quiet for a few beats. "What, like Ethel with taking tests?" she finally asks.

    "No, that's just Ethel being obnoxious," Cheryl replies automatically before taking a second to think. "It's more like—it's like a sickness. So that sometimes he can't do things, and sometimes he does the wrong thing."

    "Like tonight."

    When Cheryl sighs, she feels like she sighs with her whole body. She drops her chin into her hand to hide her face from Toni's searching eyes. "Yeah."

    They sit silent for a moment, and maybe Cheryl's new position doesn't hide her face as well as she thought it did, because right when hot tears start sliding into the crook of her elbow, she feels Toni's hand settle, unsteady but warm, around the crown of her arm. The sensation is gone almost before Cheryl even registers it, but there's no doubt that it happened.

    It's enough to stop the tears for a while.

    School is, Cheryl has to admit, weird without Jughead.

    Archie doesn't sit with them at lunch, though Cheryl does talk with him briefly in the hall. She offers to help him get in touch with Jughead, because she feels like she owes it to him, also because how could she not? As much as she denies it, the whole thing really kind of is her fault. And Archie's situation totally sucks, too. At least one thing she has going for her with the Toni issue is that neither of their parents are if they hang out.

    Toni consumes most of her lunch for the first time in, like, ages. They don't talk much.

    During ninth period, Cheryl gets a text from her, a half-hearted invite to hang out after she goes to apologize to Jughead (but definitely not to Mr. Jones, not if she can help it) with her dad. She texts back a yes. Why not> It couldn't possibly be more excruciating than wallowing at home in her room, avoiding her parents and trying not to count all the ways she screwed up.

    "How's Jughead?" Cheryl asks Toni as they wait out front of the school for their respective rides, scuffing yup their shoes on the cement and not making eye contact more than necessary.

    Toni looks up blankly. "I don't know."

    "He's your boyfriend."

    "Yeah, well, I don't know." She looks disinterestedly away again.

    Cheryl takes a deep breath. She manages not to think anything bitter or mean. They scuff their toes for a few more minutes.

    Toni breaks their silence, as is their usual prerogative. "I don't know that. About your dad. I mean, you never told me."

    Cheryl shrugs coolly. "You never asked."

    "Is that why you never let me come over?" Toni asks, looking almost relieved for some reason.

    Cheryl tries not to read too much into that. Instead, she shrugs and lies, "I guess. I never thought about it much." In actuality it's been plaguing her for pretty much the entirety of their friendship. Which has always been funny, because with all of the other friend Cheryl's had over the years, she's never cared who saw what her dad was like and what they thought, but right from the start it was different with Toni. Everything was always different with Toni.

    Which is a thought Cheryl has had many a time, but this particular time, it makes her angry.

    "How come you didn't tell me?" Toni presses.

    Cheryl angles her body away pointedly. "I didn't want to, I didn't not want to. I just didn't care."

    Toni remains noiseless for all of two blessed seconds before she says, "Okay, I mean, I get that it's personal and stuff—"

    "God, Toni, why does it matter?" Cheryl asks hotly, and Toni just shrinks slightly, just barely noticeable.

    Needless to say, Cheryl notices. The part she hates about it the most is that, for a second, she actually enjoys it.

    "Look, she proceeds more dully, "all I'm saying is—"

    "Don't do that," Toni says suddenly.

    Cheryl narrows her eyes. "Do what?"

    "You always turn off like this, when you're talking to me. I don't like it. Just don't."

    "Well, what else am I going to do?" Cheryl asks, which is the first thing she's said all conversation, apparently, that Toni doesn't have an answer for. "I have to go," she continues. "And I don't think I feel like hanging out either, so."

    "Okay," Toni manages, like everything is normal. "See you."

    Cheryl is already walking away. She pretends not to hear.

    Another set of days go by. Jughead returns to school. Cheryl sees him and Archie around, apparently having reconciled, but nowadays she's eating lunch in the darkroom to (avoid Toni) finish up her final project for Photographic design, so they don't speak.

    Veronica Lodge is there with her most days, actually. At first it made Cheryl nervous, but they both work in silence now.

    Until one Friday, after school. Cheryl doesn't really need to stay, but she always liked getting her work done early, and she likes it in the darkroom.

    Or at least it is until Veronica Lodge who was the daughter of Hiram Lodge walks in and starts talking to you.

    Veronica casually says, like it isn't the kind of thing that threatens to stop the world from turning, "There's a girl in the hall looking for you, by the way. I told her she had to wait outside the darkroom, but she's probably going to come barging in here as soon as I leave, so." Veronica shoots her a quick smile, impersonal but somehow still all-knowing, and walks out.

    And in those few seconds of limbo in between Veronica leaving and the darkroom door opening again, Cheryl is an absolute wreck.

    She tries not to hope one way or another that the person waiting outside is or isn't who she's thinking of, because Mom (total hippie that she is) always tells her there's no point worrying about what might happen because what might happen is only going to happen anyway. But then the door lies open before she has much of a chance to convince herself of that.

    Yes, obviously it's Toni. Who else? Cheryl hates herself a little bit for the involuntary jump her stomach does when the two of them lock eyes.

    And then Toni says the absolute last thing Cheryl is expecting. "I'm sorry."

    Cheryl stares at her. "Sorry for what?"

    "For dating Jughead just to make you mad."

    Cheryl thinks her mouth might be hanging open but she can't really tell, since all of her extremities seem to have gone numb.

    Toni rushes on. "I thought that if I made you mad enough, you might do something dumb, like—like kiss me, or something. Because you do dumb things when you get mad. But I think I just made you hate me. Maybe Archie, too."

    "Archie doesn't hate anyone," Cheryl says, a knee-jerk reaction, before her mind processes everything else Toni just said. "Wait, kissing you would be a dumb thing?"

    "Well, I mean, I have a boyfriend. Had. I think. And you hate cheaters."

    "I do," agrees Cheryl absentmindedly, still struggling to comprehend what's going on. "So you mean you—you like me? In that way?"

    "I've liked you for a while. You don't care what people think, and you don't let me boss you around, and you understand things without anyone having to tell you, and you're funny but like in a quiet way. I like you," Toni finishes softly, staring down at her shoes with something like shame. Toni's got a lot of things to be ashamed of, Cheryl thinks, but liking who she likes is not one of them.

    This, as it turns out, is the leading factor in her spur-of-the-moment decision to dip her head and kiss Toni Topaz's downward-facing lips, lifting them up, trying to spell forgiveness out with every touch of her hands.

    "I'm sorry, I'm really really sorry," says Toni over and over again, but Cheryl just shakes her head and holds her tighter.

    Every day after that until the end of the year is her and Toni and Jughead and Archie, a plastic picnic table and atricious cafeteria lunches between them, and maybe this is how it was meant to be from the beginning.

    Somehow, somehow, everything ends up working between the four of them. Maybe this is due in part to the unprecedented absurdity of the situation they were all thrown into, and the sudden need for, at least at school, as many allies can be found. Maybe it's because of the partly apologetic, partly relieved way Jughead and Toni finally, officially break up, the promise to abstain from judging the other unspoken but nonetheless implied.

    Jughead and Toni on one side of the table with Cheryl and Archie on the other is how it's always been, and so that's how it goes for a few days, no one wanting to make anyone else uncomfortable. Eventually, though, it becomes nothing less than pure torment. For everyone involved.

    And so Cheryl makes a sudden frustrated noise, surprising even herself, and points at Toni, then Archie. "Switch places."

    Toni just stares, but Archie has stood up and picked his tray almost before Cheryl is done talking.

    As they make the switch and Cheryl scoots over to give Toni more personal space (but not too much), Jughead's eyebrows knit together. "I...thought you were pissed at Toni."

    "I'm only pissed at her when she has her tongue down your throat." She unwraps her sandwich calmly. "No offense."

    "Offense taken," says Toni, affronted.

    "I wasn't talking to you," Cheryl tells her. Toni squints at her and pinches her side, but lets it go.

    Cheryl makes the executive decision to eat her sandwich one-handed, the other hand resting on Cheryl's knee under the table, fingers tangled together. It's nice. Well, it's more than nice, really, but that's not the sort of thing she's ever been good at putting into words.

    Cheryl leans against her, just a little. A sliver of sun peeks through the gap between the two clouds.

    The kids at school are calling her dad a psycho and Jughead's dad an asshole, and they all hour have a long hard road ahead, but in the moment Cheryl can't possibly be anything but shatteringly happy.