Grotesque Grace: A Beetlejuice AU

Chapter 2

She did not.

Two days after being assigned to her, Beetlejuice helplessly followed Lydia and two of the friends she had been sitting under the bridge with, and watched her, with growing anxiety, break into some suburban families home.

She did it with two boys, one of which sat outside, hiding in the shadows and keeping a lookout for the family who lived there, while the other one broke the back window and helped Lydia flounder inside.

After several minutes of sifting through cabinets and drawers, pocketing whatever she deemed valuable, the boy who helped her in the window started frantically alerting her before running off. Lydia gasped and followed suit, crawling through the window and running after the dark silhouettes of her friends. From behind, only a few feet away, she could hear a car come to a stop in the driveway and a man clamber out and shout at the fleeing teens.

Beetlejuice floated alongside Lydia, glancing around nervously, squinting through the darkness and trying to keep an eye out for anything that could even hint at the possibility of danger. He fazed through a fence and watched Lydia attempt to jump it, only to get her foot caught in the wire and fall flat on her face. The boys, shouting meaningless apologies over their shoulders, continued to run from the scene and leave her behind.

After a trip to the police department and a few hours spent in the freezing holding cell, Charles got her. Beetlejuice had been expecting to hear an earful about it, but Lydia's father just muttered, "three charges of breaking and entering. Un-fucking-believable." The rest of the car ride was uncomfortably tense.

Third times the charm though, because Lydia was so furious with her friends for leaving her behind that she refused to go with them on any of their other little heists. Instead, Lydia spent a lot more time in her room with the curtains drawn and the lights off, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Beetlejuice's throat itched and his chest felt stuffy after just ten minutes of sitting in the compact, unventilated room, but he preferred this in comparison to being dragged around by some kid trying to get an adrenaline rush by kicking down doors and stealing TVs. He simply cracked open the window when Lydia wasn't paying attention and let the smoke slowly filter out.

Two weeks after visiting the county jail, Lydia still hadn't made any attempts to meet with her buddies. Either that or none of them had invited her out again. Beetlejuice couldn't be sure, all she did was text and he wasn't super comfortable reading her messages over her shoulder. Although, one thing he was sure about was that Lydia had become increasingly depressed the longer she stayed in her room. At one point he had tried to entice her out, slowly cracking open her bedroom door to get her attention. It took several minutes until she reacted to it, putting down the book she had been reading and making her way out of her room and down the hall. Originally, he had been glowing with the feeling of success, but the moment Lydia entered the living room her father began to sneer.

"Look who decided to come out of her room," Charles scoffed. "Did you get tired of hot-boxing in your room? Are you bored of peeling my wallpaper and staining my fucking ceiling? What, costing your hard-working dad hundreds just doesn't do it for you?"

Lydia chewed the inside of her cheeks, holding her hands behind her back and picking at her fingernails. "Just wanted to see what you were doing," she commented with an agitated sigh.

"Well I'm trying to watch the news, but it's hard to do that when I can smell my daughter one room over wasting her life and destroying my house," he chastised, picking up the remote and turning up the volume. "God, your mother would be so disappointed if she could see you right now."

Lydia inhaled sharply and Beetlejuice could feel the pressure on the inside of his cheeks grow. She didn't stand there long, quickly taking the silence as an opportunity to turn around and walk back into her room, shutting the door behind her. Beej stood in the hall for a second, casting a glare in Charles direction. In response, the lounge chair he was sitting in whipped backward and threw Chuck off of it. He quickly clambered to his feet and looked around in shock, which put a satisfied smirk on the angels face as he floated through the wall and back into Lydia's room.