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Pigtails	By : CeeCee Category: Comics > Archie & Co. Views: 11153 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own the Archies fandom. This is a work of fanfiction for entertainment only, and I'm not making money from it.

Chapter List
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Author’s Note: This is a gift fic for Honeybeez, a talented artist on my DeviantArt watch list whose Archie sketches I really enjoy. I haven’t forgotten about my Ethel story, I promise, but this has been plaguing me.

Betty was so intent on tying her spare scarf around the neck of her snow woman that she didn’t hear the whistling rush of air behind her soon enough to move.

The mound of wet, cold snow crystals exploded against her temple, sending blobs of it down her jacket collar. “GAH! OH! YUCK!” She scrubbed at the sting with her mitten, trying to clean off her cheek. She removed her hat and shook out the offending snow that crept under the band.

“Now you won’t need a shampoo!” crowed a familiar, hated voice behind her. Betty spun around and glared into Reggie Mantle’s leering face.

“You creep!” He rocked back on his heels and clapped, chortling entirely at her expense. “That wasn’t funny!”

“Awwwww, whatsamatter, is lil’ Betty gonna cryyyyeeeee?”

“No,” she snapped, tugging her hair back beneath her wool knit cap that her mother made. Her expression was indignant. “You’re a jerk, Reggie Mantle!”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” He sneered at her masterpiece. “Nice snowman.”

“It’s a snow woman,” she sniffed.

“She’s awful flat,” he accused.

“REGGIE! That’s so gross!”

“She needs boobs,” he added, bending to roll another mound of snow into a tightly packed ball.

“Don’t you dare!” Betty was already backing away, not wanting to get hit again. Reggie’s snowballs hurt.

But he took aim at a different target, winging a large missile at Betty’s sculpture. “NO!” It hit its midsection dead on, exploding against it and taking out a chunk of snow instead. “DON’T!” Betty attempted to defend it, bending to gather up some snow, but her mittens made it difficult. Reggie was wearing a pair of ski gloves that looked expensive and that made his job easier. He was already packing another perfect ball from some crusty old snow beneath a large fir tree, studded with acorns and twigs. His laugh was nasty and smug.

“Heh, heh, heh, heh!” He put sinister emphasis on it, like his favorite cartoon villains. Betty despised him, but never more than right now. She flung her wobbly snowball at him, but it deteriorated mid-flight because it was too soft.

“Oh, I’m so scared!” he claimed before hurling his own snowball at her snow woman again. It shuddered from the impact and the pebbles Betty used for eyes fell off.

“Leave it alone! Get out of here, Reggie!” She ran at him, and this time he stood his ground, waiting til she came within a few feet of him.

Her face was red with anger and her blue eyes shone with the beginnings of tears. He relished that look, signaling he’d gotten a rise out of her. He lived for it.

Betty Cooper was just too easy.

She was also relatively quick. He backpedaled, whooping and taunting the whole way. “Uh-oh, too slow!”

“I’ll get you,” she huffed, bending to scoop up another lump of hardened snow. She flung it at his retreating back and only managed to hit the back of his jacket. He hardly felt it, and he turned around to stick out his tongue. Frustration reddened her cheeks. She continued to chase him around the field, and he darted around in a broad circle, then zig-zagged just a few paces ahead of her to throw her off and wear her out.

“Nice outfit on your snow woman,” he added, running back to the crumbling sculpture. He tugged off the half-knotted scarf, doing the final damage of knocking her head off. Betty shrieked.

“REGGIE!” He held it up in triumph.

“Oops!”

“GIVE THAT BACK!”

“Finders, keepers!” He resumed his flight, running off with it. This time she picked up her speed, pounding through the snow in her heavy galoshes. She caught the end of her scarf, almost tearing out the fringes, but it pulled her closer to him, and he was begging for a pounding when she got her hands on him.

“Give it BACK! I’ll tell your mom!”

“Go ahead,” he scoffed, even though his grin faltered when she tried to jerk the scarf from his hands.

“You’re stretching it! You’ll ruin it!”

They engaged in a tug of war, and Betty gave a surprisingly impressive struggle.

“Fine, here, cry baby!” He let go of the end of the scarf, and Betty’s momentum carried her backward. She landed on her bottom, and the cold snow seeped all the way through her layers of corduroy slacks and winter stockings. “Ha, haaaaah!”

“I HATE YOU, REGGIE MANTLE!”

He huffed. “So?” He stood over her with his hands on his hips, leering at her with laughing brown eyes. “I don’t care.”

“You should care,” she snapped as she struggled to get up.

“Why should I care what a cry baby like you thinks? Cry baby. Poor Wetty Betty,” he added, seeing the damp spots on her pants. He followed her to the edge of the field. “Aw, c’mon, gonna run away?” He made his voice into a girlish croon. “Gonna run and tell your mommyyyyyy?”

She got on her bike and decided not to look back. Betty rode off, and his taunts were snatched out of the air by a strong wind. Her damp scarf tails whipped out behind her.

“I’m not a cry baby,” she muttered to herself, but a tear tracked down her cheek, leaving her flesh chilled. “Stupid Reggie.”

He watched her go, not sorry in the least, but then he realized he was all alone in the field.

It wasn’t any fun playing by himself. He needed someone to hang out with and decided to go heckle Archie and Jug for a while.

But the sight of her anguished face and the echo of her words stayed with him.

*

Betty skidded to a halt in her driveway and promptly shoved her bike inside the garage, closing the door with a slam. Her mother waited by the front door for her, standing just inside the screen.

“That sounded awfully harsh.”

“Sorry,” she muttered pitifully.

“Awfully long face, too,” she offered, stepping back as she let her daughter inside. Alice noticed the suspicious red mark across her cheek and the sodden state of her clothes. “Were you rolling down a hill? Why are you so wet?”

“I got into a fight,” she admitted as she hung her scarf on one of the pegs of the coat rack.

“Uh-uh. Let’s take that to the kitchen. Leave your boots on the mat.” Betty obeyed and ran to the kitchen in her stocking feet. Alice turned her oven on low and let the door hang open while Betty hung her jacket and scarf over a chair to let them dry. She added her hat and mittens to the pile and sat down while her mother poured her some milk. She also set out a small dish of Oreos, sensing a treat was in order.

“You never let me have cookies before lunch,” she pointed out, but she unscrewed one cookie and licked the center.

“Sometimes we women need thinking food. So what’s new, kiddo? What’s on your mind?”

“Awww…my snow woman got knocked down.”

“Oh, no!”

“I hate Reggie Mantle!”

“Oh, Betty, hate is such a strong word. We don’t hate people. It’s okay to dislike someone.”

“I can’t stand him!” Betty insisted, dunking her cookie disconsolately in the milk. “He always acts mean to me, and I didn’t even do anything!”

“He’s a boy. Trust me, at your age, Betty, boys aren’t very nice. They just don’t know any better when they’re around girls.”

“Why not?”

“Sometimes they love to show off.”

“Hmmph…” she grumbled. “That’s all he does. He always pops wheelies on his bike whenever Ronnie shows up. He and Archie are always having spitting contests and the one where they find out who can burp the loudest. Or fart.”

“Goodness,” Alice chuckled, appalled.

“He always pulls my hair and trips me and steals my snack from my desk. He pretends to pick his nose and wipe it on me in the lunch line and tries to cut. He’s a jerk!”

“Sounds like he’s trying pretty hard to get your attention.”

“I don’t want his attention,” she griped. Alice ate one last cookie herself and headed to the stove. She warmed up a can of tomato soup and made tuna sandwiches on toast.

“Sometimes boys don’t know how to talk about what’s on their minds. Girls are better at that. Boys love to play rough and show off with each other, and they don’t always know how to stop acting like that around little girls.”

“He threw snowballs at me.”

“Did you get to throw some back?”

“I tried. I’m no good at snowballs.”

“It takes a good, hard pack. You’ve really got to get a lot of snow and smush it together so it really sticks. Get some of the snow that’s kind of hard, too. If it’s too powdery, it doesn’t work. My brothers taught me that when I was a kid.”

“Wow,” Betty said. “I didn’t know that.”

“That’s the stuff that’s good to know. And they were boys. They’re experts on snowballs and other sneaky stuff.”

Even as Alice reassured her daughter, there were times when she didn’t miss being seven years old.
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Pigtails