A/N: Hah, you guys really want to know what Juno has up her sleeve, don't'cha? Well, you're gonna have to wait. Heheheh… XD Like I said, major plot; that also means major waiting time. I hope you'll all stay with me until the big reveal…

Warnings: Somewhat filler. Hope you understand; time differences between the afterlife and the real world, after all.

Dis-claim-er: All I own is my imagination – pretty much everything else belongs to someone else.

---LydiaLydiaLydia---

Lydia didn't really know how to live anymore those first few days after her marriage. At first, she'd been in denial; she'd soaped and oiled and even buttered, but nothing could get the ring to loosen its grip. So she'd tried pliers and wrenches, and only ended up hurting herself. Her fingers were covered in bruises. She'd even considered chopping off her finger – she'd had the cleaver in one hand, the other pressed flat against a cutting board, and a strip of black leather she'd ripped off one of her old outfits in her mouth, because she didn't want to bite off her tongue when she did it. Her father had stopped her, had been the one to wrench the knife out of her hand and give her a long, long lecture about the beauty of life.

Like he really understood anything about her situation. He'd never been married to a ghost.

Delia was being as supportive as she could, surprisingly enough. They still had their fair share of arguments, but unlike before it was Delia who tended to surrender first. Delia had even made the effort of trying to understand Lydia's obsession with photography, and they'd collaborated a bit, creating some odd and disgruntling works of art. But, even then Delia wouldn't even try stepping into Lydia's dark room, and Lydia refused to sculpt anything even half as abstract as Delia's work.

Adam and Barbara did their best to distract her – Adam kept asking for her to take trips into town to take pictures and buy paints and wood so he could keep working on his giant model of Winter River. Barbara tried to teach Lydia different dances she'd learned in her day, but the only one that really stuck was the waltz, so they moved on to talking about literature, and from literature to music, and from music to the stage. Lydia was into the classics, and she hadn't yet heard an opera that she didn't like. Barbara preferred modern plays, although she had a special place in her heart for Shakespeare.

All of their distractions were amusing, certainly, and they kept her busy, but they still couldn't pierce the dark haze hanging over her head. The fact of the matter was, she was married, and at sixteen. To a ghost. Even though she'd never wanted to be a mainstream teenager, she'd never wanted to be this unusual, this strange.

She just couldn't comprehend how to deal with this. She didn't know how it would affect her life; it hadn't yet, but something this phenomenally huge couldn't not affect her life. She didn't want to admit it, but god, she was scared. She was scared of Betelgeuse and what he could do to her, what he would do to her. Every time she wondered what he would do to her when he came back, her breath started to come in gasps and she would have to sit down for a moment. In her mind there was no question that he would be coming back.

Not to mention school was going to start in a few days, and what would happen then? What if he tried to catch her at school? Max Dean and his wife Sarah had been found out on the side of the road back into town with broken bones and horrible head injuries, and nobody had even seen Otho since he'd ran away screaming into the night. Delia had called the interior decorator's office in New York many times, to no avail. So if Betelgeuse could do all that to those three people, then what would he do with a school full of kids?

But then the days turned into weeks, and still there was no sign of Betelgeuse, and then Lydia was in school. The first day of school she nearly broke down – she'd tried wearing long black gloves to conceal the ring on her right hand, but as she slipped the gloves onto her hands she found the ring somehow on top of her glove, still bound to her finger. Somehow no matter whether she was wearing gloves or not, the ring was there and visible, like it didn't want to be concealed. She went through practically every pair of gloves in the house, and the only ones that actually hid the ring were mittens.

Adam and Barbara had had to phase through the door and unlock it so Charles and Delia could come in and pull Lydia away. Only after a critical comment from Delia did Lydia pull off the pair of gloves she'd still had on her hands, and then they dropped her off at the little schoolhouse – Miss Shannon's School for Girls. It was possibly the most up-tight and frustrating place that Lydia had ever been in, but there was nowhere else to go. It made Lydia understand why Delia hated this stupid house in Connecticut.

Lydia did her best to be an acceptable student, but one thing that she learned was that other girls were not nice. She already knew this, but it was even worse in this small school, where there was no one else like her. At least in New York there were other goth girls, at least somewhat into the macabre, if not as heavily interested as Lydia was.

Here she was a freak. There was no doubt about it. There were no nicknames; no, everyone was too old for that, and there were crueler ways. No one spoke to her more than they possibly had to, and even the teachers treated her with noticeable trepidation. Only one girl acted at least semi-friendly – a girl who somehow managed to make the school uniform look unbelievably slutty, but was friendly and nice toeveryone. She would smile if she ever made eye contact with Lydia, which she did a lot; she looked everyone in the eye. It was somewhat unnerving.

The weeks slowly dragged into months, and Lydia tried to loosen up some, but there was still that nagging doubt in her mind, the feeling that anything could go wrong at any moment. The ring on her finger was a constant reminder that everything was very much not okay.

A few things kept her from going insane, though. The school newspaper was one of them - though it was barely more than a pamphlet that was handed out every once in a while, Lydia still joined the team, and she sat in the corners at meetings and took pictures like no one else could. It made the Maitlands happy that she was getting out more, and Charles was all for it – even Delia condoned the activity, after some initial passive-aggressive remarks about Winter River's lack of art. Another thing was working on the yearbook, although the other girls didn't seem too happy about her joining.

The last thing that made Shannon's School for Girls bearable was that one day, finally, a girl talked to Lydia during lunch. The only girl who really met her eyes – the one Lydia had always thought of as the slutty-looking one.

It turned out her name was Bri, and she was probably one of the only friends that Lydia would ever have in Winter River.

Bri was… unusual, to say the least. Far stranger than any of the other girls in town. Their first lunch, Lydia hadn't spoke much; she waited, listening to Bri, gauging whether this girl was worth her time or not. Bri hadn't minded in the least. She chattered on and on about everything, ranging from the lives of movie stars to what had happened at this crazy party thrown by the boys at the boys' school last weekend. Lydia hadn't even known there was a party at the boy's school, not like she would have gone anyways. Then, finally, near the end of lunch, Bri's gaze focused and she fixed Lydia with a piercing stare.

"So I hear your house is haunted."

Lydia paused mid-bite, fixing Bri with a stare that would have warded most of the other girls away. "What about it?"

"Is it really? Because, I dunno, lately I've been a little more interested in the paranormal… started with something that Danny Stark said last weekend, about holding a séance on Halloween? Yeah. Sounded interesting to me, and so I figured I should look into it a bit more." Bri finished the sentence with a smile.

Lydia stared, wondering how someone could speak that fast. "Yes… my house is haunted." She said it slowly, wondering if Bri would run off and tell all of her friends how crazy the new goth kid was as soon as they were finished talking.

Bri's eyes widened a little. "Really? Cool. You should totally let me come over sometime, because I would love to meet some ghosts for real!"

Lydia hesitated, leaning back in her chair and focusing on Bri. She wasn't sure if she should let the other girl visit her house. She didn't want to bring someone into the world of the strange and unusual if they were just in it for the ghost's crazy tricks. She knew how bad that would turn out. "They don't do tricks," she said after a minute.

Bri's brow wrinkled in confusion. "Tricks? What, like, the Ouija thing? Oh, no, I don't want to make them do that, that's stupid."

Lydia hesitated a moment longer. That was already a sight better than most other kids. "Look…" she said, glancing around and leaning in, "I'll ask them if they're all right with it."

Bri's face split into a wide grin. "All right, awesome! So, should I like, call or something…?"

Lydia blinked, then nodded slowly, one hand moving to play with the ring on her finger. "Sure. We're the only Deetzes in the phone book. I'll know by five."

"Coolio," Bri said.

Lydia got home and immediately shouted for Adam and Barbara. The two ghosts came rushing down the stairs, obviously worried that something was wrong, but the change was immediate when Lydia asked about introducing them to another living person. They were hesitant at first, but Barbara quickly degenerated into asking Adam to relent, because if Lydia was making new friends how could they stand in the way?

Unfortunately for Lydia, by the time she was done telling the Maitlands what Bri was like, the other girl had decided to call – Delia was the one who answered the phone, and pretty soon not only was Bri invited to meet the Maitlands, she was invited for dinner. Delia's forwardness frustrated Lydia to no end, but it was the beginning of a friendship that Lydia was very, very glad to have.