Things Change
They've been on the internet and they've seen the fanfiction.
They thought it was funny when they were still poor and in Riverdale and they heard some people commenting that the Archies might be gay. It was partially funny because Veronica's G-String had been seen by more people than the Pussycats' guitar's had, and partially because Reggie and Archie were nothing if not flamboyant in their love, and had been turned away from Pop's faster than you can say "Sugar Sugar" after a particularly flamboyant dance to "Dude Looks Like a Lady."
They'd thought it was funnier still when people said that DuJour might have been gay, because despite the feather boas and the lady-like "faces" Marco seemed to enjoy, it was common knowledge that their bastard offspring was just as "Around the World" as the band had been.
But this simply takes the cake.
They all remember when Josie and Alan M. broke up. That was the start of everything. It had been her instigation, and her choice entirely. He had stared at her and asked her why everything was over and she had only been able to say "things change."
Things had changed.
Sure, Alan M. was boring. Sure, he was somewhat stupid and his hair was too shaggy and he was, overall, two-dimensional.
But that had never not been the case.
Things had changed.
Josie had, for the first time in months, felt free. She re-dyed her hair a brighter red and made a point of not putting on any makeup. Then Mel came home from visiting the puppy shelter, and she and Val insisted on a makeover party to make Josie feel better, so she put on makeup again, but at least other people did it this time.
They got the computer- three of them, actually; brightly-colored iMacs that let them do cool things like check their E-Mail, draw three-dimensional rainbows, and download illegal remixes of their own songs- as incentive from their new record label to sign. It was pretty and shiny, which Mel enjoyed, and newer than anything the Cabots owned, which made Alexandra jealous and thus pleased Val and Josie immensely.
They all remember going online, checking the fan sites, looking at the way people drew them all together with bad computer programs, the way people with some talent manipulated the images that had them all hugging to make it look like they were kissing, the way people manipulated the images that had them dancing to put them together in bed.
They read the fanfic and they liked it.
They loved when people wrote about Josie and Alan M. after their first stadium concert. They loved when people described, in painstaking detail, how one of the Pussycats would fall madly in love with a young, pimply boy or girl from the middle of nowhere who was in the last row in the middle at one of their concerts, and they would culminate with a kiss.
But mostly, they loved when people tried to put them together.
They loved when writers described their cascading curls, their perfect skin, their voluptuous breasts, and the hair trimmed to just the right length in a perfect upside-down triangle. They loved the words that sounded like they came from bad porn movies and the names people had for how they grouped them; there were catfighters and glitterazis and purrfectionists and all sorts of crazy names. They loved how, in everyone's imaginations, they shared one bedroom with three twin beds and loads of purple and glitter. They loved non-subtle double entendres about where exactly the name Pussycats came from.
More than anything else, though, they loved that people didn't realize just how right they were.
Yeah, things had definitely changed since they lived in Riverdale.
But sometimes change is for the better.