“By the time Beetlejuice is done with the man, he’s a bloody mess, beaten half to death, and the outlaw takes a second, licks the stranger’s blood off his knuckles.”
“It’s a rough haircut, but it frees her from dangling there, in pain, and now these morons are really in for it, because Lydia Deetz, face red, tears streaming down her cheeks, eyes the angriest he’s ever seen- she’s joined the fray. And she’s out for blood.”
Slack Up Your Rope, Hangman by @bunnys-beetlejuice-blog
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on lydia’s past: 2. the group home
(part 1, information on her parents, can be found here)
the details of Lydia’s early history are a blur. she has a mother and a sense of security until she doesn’t. by the time she’s found by child protective services or police, or some officers whose role a small child couldn’t discern, she’s just old enough to write her own name in crayon—LYDIA. uneven, sloppy letters.
she is deemed an outcast by her peers the moment she enters the group home. it’s not the scottish accent she inherited from her immigrated parents, though it doesn’t help—it’s her inability to connect, the awkward silences and stares, and the overemotional way she reacts that deems her a target in her peers’ eyes.
autism spectrum disorder, after all, was highly underdiagnosed and not well-researched at that point—especially in little girls. what would’ve made sense as legitimate symptoms becomes a list of “weird” traits to make fun of. she gets laughed & prodded at in early childhood.
she learns how to mask—or tries desperately to, but her interactions fall short and any slight misunderstandings with other children or adults are met with tears. lydia is a miserable child. as she grows up, she loses the accent her parents taught her; she learns that avoiding social situations is the safest way to avoid making mistakes in those situations.
she lucks out with making the occasional friend or acquaintance, however. it’s not all bad; some of the girls are nice, or at least they pretend to be in order to get lydia to stop crying. there are staff who are kind to her, too—many are underpaid and lack the resources to care for lydia on an individual level, but she sees a counselor at the group home and it makes her childhood considerably more bearable. most of the nice girls get adopted out, of course.
her interests develop over time, too. she has a worn-out astronaut poster by her bed, saves up her allowance for a model train that becomes her favorite object in her childhood.
desperate to put an end to the bullying, lydia finds a more creative means to solve her problems—logistically. though she lacks charisma, she’s small & quiet; these are traits that lead to making it much easier to go unseen if she decides to take things that don’t belong to her. the bully has a hole in her shoe? lydia offers her an arrangement—leave her alone, and she’ll give the imposing girl a new pair. any of her peers in need of a new walkman, a pair of socks, mint condition baseball cards? she’ll get the items to them, whether through buying it herself or stealing it from someone. if they continue to be unkind to her after her peace offerings, she threatens to use evidence she’s gathered against them to get them in trouble with the group home’s staff.
lydia learns she has a passion for bringing things from point A to B, for appeasing the dangerous people in her life through material means, and she knows that it’s what she wants to do on a professional level. (by this point, she’ll go quite far for even a hint of feeling secure.) so, she puts her heart into highschool. she graduates early, finds a way out of the group home and into business school, and leaves that chapter of her past behind as soon as possible.
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