Out of Sight, Out of Mind//A Beetlejuice Fanfiction

||Chapter Five|| Sweet Release of Friendship

Lydia opened the door and immediately noticed that her family was chilling on the couch and acting weirder than they usually did. What could have happened whilst she was at school all that day? She laughed as she put her school bag on the counter and made her way over towards the couch and sat herself down in between Adam and her dad, resting her arms around their shoulders and leaning back to relax.

"What've you guys been up to while I was gone?" Lydia tease-asked, pretending to be the grown up of her family for once.

"Nothing. We just had a fairly normal day," all four of them lied at once. Lydia looked over at Adam and Barbara and let out a chuckle. Transparent. She knew something was up and she didn't know what it wa-

A crash sounded from upstairs, from Lydia's room.

Lydia stood up and glanced up at the ceiling for a while before shaking her head and starting on her way over towards the stairs to go and check it out. Behind her, her family was making gestures at her to not go upstairs at a time like this but she was far more focused on finding and checking out the source of the crash she'd heard. Once upstairs, she pushed open her bedroom door to find...

Her chair toppled over and Betelgeuse laying on the floor a few feet away from it.

She didn't seem surprised to see him there. Suppressing a giggle, she simply walked over and helped her best friend (or should he be considered her ex-best friend? She wasn't quite sure yet) up, moving him over to her bed and sitting him down. She went over and picked her chair up, rolling it over to the side of the bed where Betelgeuse sat facing her and sitting down. He looked down and nervous, not wanting to maintain eye contact with her like he was a troublesome child and she was the angry parent. He felt like she was as angry as the rest of her family was and try to attack him like they did.

"What's wrong?" she asked, the first words spoken after a few minutes of silence.

"Nothing," he admitted. Now he decided he would look over at Lydia and the teen saw clear ghostly tears in his eyes.

"You're back," she said. "I guess wishing for your best friend- oh, I don't know if I should keep calling you that after what you did- to come back or making any wish at all isn't a silly story after all."

"It's okay if you don't want to refer to me as your best friend, Lydia," he replied, once again glancing down towards the ground. "I don't care."

"What happened downstairs that made my family act like nothing was up?" asked Lydia out of confusion. In a way, she was concerned. Betelgeuse had seemed to have summoned more clothes to wear once Lydia had asked that unnerving question. "Beej, is something wrong?" She stood up and moved a scarf he had used to cover his face out of the way, spotting a clear bruise on his face. "Betelgeuse, how did you get that? I didn't even know that demons could bruise. Can ghosts bruise easily too?" Okay, now she was getting too curious.

"No," he said. "Demons are different from ghosts. While demons like me bruise easily and feel pain, ghosts can't feel any pain so they can't get injured. And I kinda made your family attack me."

Lydia adopted a panicked look on her face. She needed to talk to her family about this and she needed Betelgeuse downstairs as well. Of course, she could run the risk of her family maybe getting mad all over again and attacking Betelgeuse but what's the worst that could happen?

A/N: This chapter may be short but I decided to release another chapter because I felt like it.