Just the Two of Us

Chapter Four: Misery Be Damned

Misery can be defined simply as: a state or feeling of great physical or mental distress or discomfort.
It is exasperatingly more than that.
       It is a deep dark well untouched by light and contentment. It is heavy, crashing waves that swallow a person whole, leaving behind no trace of the person before. Misery wrenches you only deeper and deeper with every shallow breath, the more you think of its cause or reasoning the more it drags you further into its deep excavation. Misery, alike fear, the more you avoid the more it detains...

          Jughead glowered in his Misery; Betty was sunlight, Betty was rain, Betty was the dewy Sunday mornings that never last. And now she was gone.

Fuck her. He thought. Fuck the party, fuck everything!

          He was very passionate in these moments...

However, tormenting him was the want of her, the want to be in her presence again, the need to have her by his side always; the habitual and fulfilling need of the necessity of that woman. But she threw him this damn party, when that is the last thing he could ever want. Why couldn't she see that?

          Misery damned its waves on him again; his Caulfield heart capsizing deeper into its trenches.
Hotdog, the dog, nuzzled into his side.

        Misery be damned.

To witch point, Archie bellowed through the basement door frenzied and drunk. "Dude, Valerie just got here—do you think she wants me back?"

        Jughead bewildered in his drunken narcissism.

"Archie, as my blood brother it was your soul responsibility to ensure something like this never happened on my birthday." He mortified. "Now we're here; in the middle of a Seth Rogan movie."
Archie groaned, "This was Betty's idea okay, I just went along with it."

           Jughead frowned, submissive to hormonal anger, and blinded by his own inability to see what was right in front of him. The party wasn't just a party. Something called to him from his past screaming "GET OUT!" "GET OUT!" get out before she leaves you, get out before she breaks your suffering little heart. Before that ponytailed wonder destroys you.

           "It's so not me." Jughead sighed. In what universe does she think I'd ever want a party?!—

"Doesn't matter Jughead." Archie said. Calling him by his full given name birthed the unspoken tension and frustration buried beneath their somewhat light-hearted dialogue. "You're her boyfriend now." He continued, though his speech was a slight disarray of drunk, his eyes burnt with irritation.

            Taken-aback and fueled with more aggression Jughead rolled his eyes, "what does that even mean?" phrased less a question and more an accusation.
Archie bewildered; a head slap seemed necessary. "It means you're getting a birthday party weather you want one or not." Archie tiffed.
          Jughead shook his head emitting a sound of ignorant disapproval.

A knock on the door.
          FP Jones waltzed in with much caution.
Bitter and disappointed was the way Jughead felt whenever his father entered a room. Bitter because of the tortuous ways in which Jughead received so much suffering from him, how his childhood was just broken pieces of glass that need be glued back together again.
         Disappointed because he could always smell the whisky on his ice cold breath.
"Dad, hey." Jughead got up, this time his father had a present. He increasingly seemed happy.

        His father smiled with an intimate serious quality in which was usually saved for sex talks he already knew everything about, or the no-drinking-till-your-twenty-one talk which was rendered fucking useless anyway. "Happy Birthday, Jughead." FP said.