AN: This is irreverently and totally AU. For my purposes, i have saved the lives of the Maitlands and shuffled them off to some obscure corner of the town. It isn't that i don't like them. It's just that i don't have any use for them. Don't you wish life were more like that?

Background: Written within the rules of the actually ghost hunting community, more or less. At least for the first part. BJ can't just chat from the model graveyard—he is well and truly bound, unless Lyds decides to set him loose. Or she happens to fall asleep…

Premise: The Deetzes come to Connecticut to get away from the stress of the city, and to pull their daughter out of the private city schools to something more provincial. But the house is already occupied by a cranky poltergeist who wants his privacy, and is determined to get them out in personal record time. He decides the Lydia is the weak link, but soon finds himself locked into a battle of wit and wills with a formidable opponent: a seventeen year old girl who just isn't all that impressed.

Ties: Completely unrelated to everything else I've written. The premise is not original, and has been done well by many. I like it because it gives the characters room to strut their stuff without the confines of a predefined plot.

Disclaimer: Beetlejuice and all related characters belong to Warner Bros. I wouldn't take responsibility for BJ if you paid me. No way, baby.

Nuff said-- Iechyd da!


Chapter One: Smudge

"Lydia, I just don't understand it. I thought you cleaned the lens. Didn't you clean the lens?" Delia Deetz rubbed at the smudge at the corner of the picture that partially obscured Lydia's face.

"Delia, it's in the picture, not on it. And of course I cleaned the lens," Lydia said a little impatiently. She flipped through the rest of the pictures, all of their first day unpacking in the old farmhouse. "This is okay… okay… okay… ha! You look goofy in this one." Delia quirked an eyebrow at her own mouth-half-open-and-eyes-half-closed expression. But then she pointed to the top corner.

"There it is again! How annoying." Lydia squinted to see it better. "Well, that's the last time I use the locals to process the film." But Lydia was holding the negatives up to the bare bulb hanging in the living room.

"No, it's in the negs, too." She stared at the frames, and counted four with the odd smudges. "That's not the fault of the lab. These are processed automatically, and if they screwed up, it would be in all of them. But it's not." Her voice trailed off. She stared for a moment at a shot of herself in front of the mirror in the front hall. It almost looked as if... but no. Just a smudge. She handed the pictures back to her stepmother, who shrugged and tucked them back into the paper folder, and set them on the table.

"Well, what's for dinner tonight, Lydia?" Lydia raised an eyebrow and thought about it for a moment.

"If it's my turn to cook, we're eating takeout. I can run down and pick up from that little Chinese place?"

"Okay, but no getting out of it next time. You need to learn to cook if you are going away for college, dear." Delia gave her stepdaughter a pat on the cheek and Lydia scowled at her.

"You never learned to cook…" she muttered under her breath.

"I heard that!" Delia singsonged as she swayed out of the foyer and down to the basement, where her studio was going to be. Lydia preferred the attic, and was planning to annex it for her own work. She walked upstairs to set down her book bag in her room, and then trotted back down, poking her head around the corner to shout down the basement stairs.

"Delia, do you have the A/C cranked or something?"

"No, dear, it's still broken. We're having someone come and fix it tomorrow," Delia yelled back upstairs.

"Huh. That's weird." Lydia peered back up in the direction of the upstairs. "My room is freezing."