🔪 Revenge for Dummies 💋
jomeg fic - 10k - rating: T - high school AU - 2stab2fest - read on ao3
“You said it yourself that being lesbian has novelty value! So it is a popularity move!” Meg shrieks. With blood smeared across her face and eyes wild with the power of standing on a table in two inch heels, she looks demonic. She looks incredible, Jo thinks. She looks like royalty. “We are being QUEERBAITED."
Jo is the queen bee of Midwest High, all until Meg steals the throne by claiming Jo is queerbaiting the school. What follows is the epic tale of Jo’s homoerotic revenge mission. It’s about girlhood and popularity and lesbianism and being a batshit insane 16 year old—with a knife!
written for the brilliantly run 2stab2fest and accompanied by gorgeous art from @keikakudom !!
chapter 1 of 5 below cut!
High School 101
Though it might’ve come as a shock to her 10 year old self, at 16, Jo Harvelle’s life is one long chick-flick moment. We’re talking resident queen bee of Midwest High with a side-dish of blonde bombshell best served hot. She rules alongside her best friend and loyal confidant Claire Novak, and their passionate alliance is founded on the fact they met in the opening weeks of middle school, when Claire found Jo reading Beginner’s Book to Blade Wielding in the quietest corner of the library and asked if she could read it with her.
It therefore may come as a surprise to some that Jo and Claire have ascended the ranks of social status with such ease and grace. Stabby lesbians with dearly departed daddys don’t often tend to work the runways of high school popularity, after all, but the facts of the matter fall like this: Jo has always been an outcast, but now she gets to be distant in the way royalty is and not in the way lepers are. Like, untouchable, but make it chic.
The lesbian thing turns out to be pretty helpful too. Jo and Claire are known for their Biker Barbie lesbian swag, which, at Midwest High, provides the perfect intersection of gender. The boys are into their leather jackets, but Jo and Claire don’t want them back, and the girls crave their nonchalantly fashionable attitude, so Jo and Claire can bask in their heterosexually-awed stares. It’s a perfectly measured concoction of being the most beautiful girls in the whole school but not doing it for the guys. Jo and Claire simply aren’t like other girls, and so all the other girls want to be like them.
So animal skin, pop-punk listening habits, and blonde hair. Paired with the incomprehensible fact they are two sapphic best friends who aren’t in love with each other, the whole school is pliant under their sweet and unbothered thumbs. Claire even had the incredible idea to glue Biker Barbie in pink rhinestones to the backs of their matching leather jackets. They are an inseparable gang of two and they rule the school, stomping past lockers and lesser students in matching black leather jackets, ripped jeans, and gleaming Doc Martens.
And it’s a fucking difficult life.
That’s Jo, right there, the protagonist of our Riverdalian love story.
Yeah, hi, it’s me. And let me tell you, the pressures of being the lesbian leader of hundreds of high school aged monstrosities are pretty near infinite. Firstly, I’m 16. I’ve never even kissed a girl, and somehow being one of the first kids in my grade to come out means I’m some dykey messiah. It’s a pretty impressionable age to be seen as a sexuality first and a person second.
Secondly, everyone in this place is like, stinking rich. Yachts and lawyers and mansions abound and so nobody can ever know me and mom scrape by living above a literal bar. All the rich kids have aloof, only vaguely invested parents, so they can do what they want, but I’m cursed with a mom who loves me and so is ridiculously interested (read: controlling) in my life. It’s just a shame my dad makes up for this by not being interested enough, in that he is dead.
Finally, amid the other infinite reasons why maintaining my monarchal image is hellishly hard, I’m not obliviously iconic like Cher from Clueless. I’m not just some dumb box bleach blonde—I’m the girl who’s making ‘freak with the knife collection’ work for her. That’s a hard line to walk. It’s a fucking tightrope. And I’ve been walking it for years.
On the topic of walking, another of our story’s featured cast is now strutting into view. We’re alongside Jo and Claire in the cafeteria at lunch, gazing down on the masses of normies from the heights of the exclusive Royal Banqueting Table. Popularity is performance, and so the Royal Banqueting Table is the only one in the cafeteria on a raised bit of floor. It’s a stage, essentially; it’s like sitting in the royal box or the back of the bus.
And through the maze of tables, past the nerds and the basketball team and the theater kids—this is a high school, after all—Meg Masters and The Rubies are winding their way towards Jo and Claire. Jo’s hackles raise at the sight of them, and she points them out to Claire with a nudge and a roll of her eyes.
Meg Masters is just like the other girls. She wears tight dresses and little tops and buys all-natural avocado shampoo which has the word ‘organic’ on the bottle but which her daddy flies in from Hawaii. She is rich rich, with the kind of house so big her parents keep their sailing boat in the front garden. But with the hordes of hell hounds baying for blood at the grand entrance of the passcode protected gates, it’s not like anyone at Midwest High has ever gotten the chance to really see it.
Well, anyone at Midwest High apart from Jo.
Because Jo and Meg had been best friends once upon a time, back in kindergarten and elementary school, in that squishy age where time isn’t real but friends are. They had been everything to each other, vowing solemnly at sleepovers never to lose the friendship which was blossoming so pure between them.
It wasn’t pure, Meg dropped me the second she got the chance to. The instant we reached high school, the ties were cut.
Jo doesn’t remember exactly how their friendship ended, she just knows it hurt her more than anything else ever has.
Shut up, I remember it. Meg was a bitch. I guess some girls are just built different: she went out shopping with her flaky new rich friends, and me and Claire built a small empire.
It is perhaps pertinent to mention here that while Jo is a very self-aware lesbian, she hasn’t quite mastered the art of feminism yet. She is only 16, after all.
Meg has equipped herself with new friends since the disintegration of her friendship with Jo, and these new friends take the form of The Rubies. If Meg keeps hell hounds at home, The Rubies are the demonic little chihuahuas who cling to her heels at school. Ruby 1 and Ruby 2 are essentially indifferentiable apart from the fact that Ruby 1 is blonde, with mean little bangs, and Ruby 2 is a pissy brunette. Underneath the skin they are both the same: shallow, devilish girls who delight in igniting chaos and looking good while doing it. So while the words Meg and The Rubies sound like a spunky indie girl band, the reality is that they are beautiful, invulnerably rich teens who love nothing better than making everyone else’s life hell.
“Meg and The Rubies at 12 o’clock,” Claire announces to the table.
The royal court of Bela Talbot, Rowena MacLeod, and Billie (nobody knows their last name, in the same way nobody knows Adele’s or Madonna’s—you simply don’t need to) chorus a sympathetic sigh. They are staples of the Royal Banquet Table, being more loyal to the power of The Table than to the current monarchy itself, and so Jo and Claire tolerate them. Rowena’s basically a witch, and Bela’s English, and Jo is pretty sure Billie could strangle her with their bare hands and she’d say thank you, so. It’s not like they’re unattractive company.
Besides, there’s another member of the table Jo is more concerned with.
Dean Winchester leans over to Jo, and in a rarely captured example of sensible advice, says, “ignore them, Jo, they’re not worth your time.”
Dean Winchester is different to Bela, Rowena, and Billie. He makes Jo’s very lesbian brain come to an unwilling and baffling stop. She looks into his dewy green eyes and she hears white noise. He’s a senior, and he exclusively wears his dad’s too-big leather jacket because he thinks it makes him look cool (it kinda does) and Jo would die before admitting that sometimes it feels like no one else’s opinion of her in the whole world matters apart from his.
Hey, fuck off! My feelings about Dean Winchester are perfectly normal.
“Yeah, you too,” Jo replies to Dean. And conversation is a subjective artform, but that is not the correct response to Dean’s previous statement.
Dean smiles at Jo anyway, like she’s somehow fun to be around, and she’s glad that if being the Teen Queen of the school gets her anything, it’s this. Dean hangs out with them some days, when he feels like it. Mostly he hangs out in the school’s garage working on cars, and more recently he’s been spending time in the gardens with the new transfer student Clarence.
My gaydar senses something is up there, by the way.
Jo is at least right about that.
Noice.
But as much as Jo tries to take Dean’s surprisingly sensible advice to ignore Meg and The Rubies, this is proves a lot more difficult than expected when Meg stalks over to the Royal Banqueting Table, steps up on the bench and onto the table itself, and lands the heels of her two inch stilettos right into the bread of Jo’s sandwich.
Jo peers up past the ankle—plump and solid—up the shin—shaved smooth and speckled strawberry—to the thigh—soft and fleshy—and then almost but not quite up her teeny tiny silky skirt.
“The fuck are you doing? Get your weirdly impractical shoes out of my sandwich stat, Masters,” Jo growls.
“Sorry, Josephine, no can do,” Meg says, her dainty lips curling maliciously around her words.
“You know that’s not my name.”
“Oh, is it not? That fact must have walked out of my brain the day you walked out of my life.”
Jo scoffs. “The day I walked out on you?”
“Okay, Meg, get off the table and stop making a scene,” Dean cuts in, trying to stench the flow of petty words before the drama dam bursts. He is unsuccessful.
Meg smiles. “Sorry, Deano. I have an announcement to make, and this table is my stage.” Her voice is rich as honey but dangerous as dart frog venom.
It is then that Jo sees the Gucci megaphone clutched in Meg’s perfectly manicured hands.
This is so not groovy.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” she begins before Claire can swipe the megaphone out of her hands and Dean can try and defuse the situation further. The Rubies are now standing either side of the Royal Banqueting Table like femme-fatale bouncers, effectively immobilizing the royal court.
The whole cafeteria falls obediently silent. Somewhere among the fringe groups, a phone buzzes, and is quickly stifled.
“I know we’re all obsessed with Jo and Claire, our Biker Barbies. They’re the reigning queens of our little high school, right? And what do we love them for? Their cutesy little rhinestone jackets, their perfectly blonde hair? Their lesbian swag?”
Jo and Claire exchange perturbed looks. Around the cafeteria, students are nodding affirmatively; if this is Meg trying to start a Les Mis style anti-monarchy rebellion, she’s gonna have to go a little more opera.
“But what if I told you that having matching Hobby-Lobby jackets isn’t the flex you think it is? What if I told you that they bleach their hair to make it that color?”
An uneasy muttering sweeps across the hall, and Jo suddenly realizes: Meg is working up to something.
What if she tells them about how I live above a creepy bar? What if she tells them about the dusty-ass van mom drives me halfway to school in? What if she tells them about how invested my mother is in my life and wellbeing and how weird it is that there’s only a twenty year age gap between us and that sometimes I feel more like I’m living in a documentary about troubled young women rather than a chick-flick movie?
“What if I told you that little Joey here isn’t a real lesbian?”
Jo almost spits out her water, the laugh comes out of her so hard. “What? Come on, jello-head, I’ve been averting my eyes from lingerie stores since I came out the womb.”
“Is that so, Harvelle?” Meg sings, and her eyes flash obsidian. “Because I have it on good authority that you, self-proclaimed cowgirl and lover of posse, have a crush on Dean Winchester.”
Suddenly everything about the situation is a lot less funny. The room erupts riotously, screeches of jeers and laughter echoing across the hall. Jo feels the blood rush to her face hard and fast, much like how she imagines an erection might feel if it was brought on by intense shame. Next to her, Dean’s minty eyes are wide and staring. She flinches away from him like his touch might corrupt her all-important lesbianism.
“No, I don’t!” Jo cries. Her voice goes unheard over the chaos of the hall.
“Awh,” Meg sighs, pouting down patronizingly at where Jo is now shaking with rage in her seat, “that’s exactly what someone with a massive crush on Dean Winchester would say.”
“You can’t just say she’s not a lesbian, only she can say that!” Claire screams indignantly. She scrambles up beside Meg before The Rubies can pull her down and wrestles the megaphone from her hands, giving her a solid elbow to the nose as she does so. Meg’s head ricochets back and her nose bursts, bloody in her hands.
“Shut up!” Claire bellows into the megaphone. Her cry rebounds across the far wall of the cafeteria at such a volume several kids covered their ears, and the hall falls sheepishly silent a second time. A few whispers snake across the air, though, and Jo feels her kingdom slip a little further from her grasp. “Use your brains, boneheads. As if Jo would lie about being a lesbian. Where’s the fun in that? This butt-crazy bitch just wants what we have and you can’t let her lap it up.”
“You can’t call me a bitch, that’s misogynistic!”
“You can’t call Jo straight, that’s homophobic!”
“You said it yourself that being lesbian has novelty value! So it is a popularity move!” Meg shrieks. With blood smeared across her face and eyes wild with the power of standing on a table in two inch heels, she looks demonic. She looks incredible, Jo thinks. She looks like royalty. “We are being QUEERBAITED.”
Oh, fuck. As much as I like to channel Taylor Swift, I don’t think I can come back from the Q word like she can.
And so that is the day that Jo and Claire lose the Teen Queen crown; that is the day the Biker Barbies’ heads feel the cold sharp cut of the guillotine. Meg and The Rubies are the new reigning monarchs of Midwest High.
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