On the weekend of July 4th, Archie fucked up his friendship with Jughead who we had been around constantly since we were about 6 years old. Jughead and I had been somewhat close but as usual it was only because he was close with Archie. I had been home alone as I was doing much better recently, when Jughead showed up for the road trip that he and Arch were going to take. I heard a knock on the door and when I opened it I found Jughead standing there.

"Y/n, hi. Is Archie ready?", he said looking up the staircase behind me.

"Oh about that... Archie can't go with you, he says he's sorry but something came up.' I responded.

"What the hell could he possibly be doing at 6 am in the middle of the summer?"

"He just said something came up and left without another word." I said with a shaky voice. I knew exactly what he was doing and I had a lot of trouble lying to people. The only reason I could say this to Jughead right now was because Archie had actually done exactly what I had said he had done. Just got up and left at 5:30 this morning. That didn't mean I didn't know who he was going to see but this way I wasn't technically lying.

"Do you want to come in? We can hang out. We could go get takeout from Pop's, I'm fucking starving." I offered.

Jughead looked mad but when I mentioned Pop's his expression softened. "It's 6 in the morning, how are you hungry already?" he asked looking slightly amused.

I huffed "When am I not hungry?"

"I did always like you Y/N." he smiled. I smiled back. I had rarely seen Jughead give anyone a genuine smile and the fact that I had been the one to make him do it made me feel happier than I had in quite a long time.

That day, Jughead and I talked. We talked for a long time, which was weird because neither of us were very social at all. We talked about how much of an asshole Archie was for bailing on their road trip. We talked about the stupid things we had done as kids. We talked about books, which was something I had never had anyone to talk to about. Jughead discovered a little game he could play with me whenever he got bored. We had just finished making plans to go the drive-in when I started to stare off in the distance getting very quiet all of a sudden.

"Y/N/N? Y/N? You okay?" Jughead asked while waving a hand in front of my face. Jug knew that this was a regular occurrence and not to be to worried when I didn't respond right away. For a few seconds I could hear noise but it was just one of those times where I had too many thoughts crossing my mind and couldn't focus on the world around me. Suddenly one of the several thoughts disappeared giving my brain just enough room to realise that the motion I was seeing was being directed at me.

"Y/N?" he asked again.

I jerked my head up. "Yes?" I said really quickly. "Oh! Juggie sorry I just got a little... spaced out."

"That's alright, I get it... what were you thinking about?"

"What do mean? Do you want to hear all of it?"

"Well how much were you thinking about?"

"A lot."

"What was the main thing?"

Without thinking I immediately responded with the first thing that came to my head out of all the thoughts that had just taken over my mind, "Mercury."

He gave a confused look. "Mercury?" I nodded. "Like the planet or the substance?"

"The substance. It's so pretty," I said with a look of wonder on my face. Then I started to mumble as I usually did when an interesting topic was brought into conversation. "It's so pretty and shiny and it makes me want to touch it so bad, kinda like fire, fire is pretty too and all i can think when I see it is 'You can't touch it, it will only hurt you' but then I look and I just want to reach out and let the flame touch my finger and it looks like it's dancing, have you ever noticed how flames seem to be dancing and I don't really like dancing but fire dances and I like fire even though I hate dances and I usually don't go to the school dances but sometimes Betty makes me go and I end up in the back 'cause I don't dance and I don't' talk to people and I don't eat things that the school gives to me because I'm afraid I'll get sick but that's not just the school food, I don't eat anything at parties or dances unless I know that it's from a restaurant or something and I know that's weird but-" I stopped, out of breath.

I looked up to see Jughead with the biggest smile on his face. I just stared at him, wondering what he was thinking and then he started to laugh. For me, laughter is very contagious and pretty soon I was laughing a little bit with him.

When he stopped he looked at me and said "Honestly, I think you're the most interesting person I've ever met." I blushed at that. No one had ever called me interesting other than when referring to how strange I was. Not that me being strange didn't have anything to do with why Juggie was calling interesting, but for the first time, it sounded like a compliment.