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apocalypsosOkay, so I'm bored out of my mind at my parents's house while I wait to see if my dad can get my Zen to work. So I may get a little spammy in the next few minutes, because I want to make sure I save all of my Yuletide fics from this year on here and I might as well do it now.
Title: You Can't Take Him Anywhere
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Drop Dead Fred
Rating: PG
Pairing: None
Summary: Polly Cronin has never had a best friend.
*****
You Can't Take Him Anywhere
*****
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Elizabeth who lived in a big white house with her daddy (until he left) and her best friend Fred (until he was sent away) and her mommy.
And then one day Elizabeth went away, leaving her mommy all alone.
That’s okay, though. Nobody ever really liked her mommy anyway.
*****
Polly Cronin always kept all of the doors locked at night.
Oh, it was a lovely neighborhood, of course. Polly would never have stood to live in a neighborhood with even the hint of impropriety or criminal activity and she and Nigel had been to three different streets with the realtor before they’d settled on buying this particular house. It was close to a good elementary school, although Nigel hadn’t stayed around long enough for that to be any of his concern, and far from the nearest high school, which meant a lack of unseemly garbage left behind on the yard by loud teenagers.
In other words, Polly felt perfectly safe leaving her doors unlocked at night.
She simply didn’t.
It didn’t matter that Mr. Buttons down the street had never brought back the casserole dish she’d taken over to him when his mother had passed away fifteen years ago and would take the rest of the fine china if given the opportunity. And it wasn’t a problem that Mrs. O’Malley’s breath always smelled faintly of alcohol and Polly kept a close eye on her when she came over for tea. It wasn’t even a concern that she was a beautiful elegant woman all by herself, alone in a large quiet house, no husband to speak of and a daughter who hadn’t called her in weeks.
Polly kept the doors locked because …
Well, because of times like this, she supposed.
“What in the world?” she asked softly, standing in the entrance to the living room in her pink silk bathrobe with the mingled stench of fertilizer and dog mess clouding the air.
Something about this whole scene, Polly thought, was terrifyingly familiar.
*****
When Elizabeth left her mommy behind, she gave her mommy a hug and told her she should go make a friend.
In retrospect, perhaps she should have been a bit more specific.
*****
“Elizabeth? Did you do this?”
At the other end of the phone Polly could hear groans and mutterings, and for a brief instant she wondered if perhaps she should have waited to make this particular phone call until the morning. Michael had work in the morning, she supposed, and there was a child in the house. But the entire downstairs stank of … well, things she’d rather not think about right now. It wasn’t exactly as if she was thinking all that clearly.
Elizabeth finally sighed on the other end of the phone and said, “Do what, Mother?”
“Foul the carpeting in the living room again,” Polly said. Her voice trembled when she spoke, though that could just be because the soapy sponge clenched in her hands was scrubbing at the carpet with a force she rarely used and the barely restrained yet still frantic movements of her arms were affecting her speech.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Elizabeth said.
Polly highly doubted that. This whole situation reeked of Drop Dead Fred.
Well, primarily of dirt and dog mess, but still.
“Mrs. Cronin,” Michael said on the other end, after some loud fumbling with the phone that made Polly’s jaw tighten, “Lizzie’s been here all night long, so I don’t know --”
“Thank you, Michael, but this is none of your concern,” Polly said, then hung up the phone before Michael could pass the phone back to her daughter. She didn’t think there was any chance of her getting a straight answer from Elizabeth now any more than there had been months ago when she’d had to deal with --
The air before her sparkled and shimmered before a red-haired man in a green suit appeared in its wake.
He bent down before her until his face was right in hers, beamed and said, “Having fun, snotface?”
Polly shrieked and tumbled backwards onto her backside.
She figured, later on, that that was possibly the most dignified response she could have come up with under the circumstances.
*****
Elizabeth used to have a best friend whom no one else could see. His name was Drop Dead Fred and he was much more fun than anyone else she knew. They made mud pies and played cops and robbers, and Fred made all sorts of lovely breaking noises that made Elizabeth laugh with delight.
Fred never liked Elizabeth’s mommy, and Elizabeth’s mommy never liked him.
But when Elizabeth didn’t need Fred anymore, he went where he was needed, like it or not.
*****
It took three hours of having snots flicked at her face and mud dumped onto her pristine white carpeting before Polly got frustrated enough to acknowledge the existence of the strange red-haired man who pranced after her and claimed to be Drop Dead Fred himself. He spoke with a British accent, a fact that grated across a frayed nerve she either hadn’t realized or remembered she possessed, and he seemed rather intent on breaking everything capable of it that wasn’t tied down.
The more she ignored him, the more he continued to prattle on incessantly in that voice that made her feel a foreign desire to throw the glass vase on the kitchen counter at his head.
“-- oh, look at you, in your fancy pink shoes!” He waved his hands at the expensive pumps she’d picked up last weekend at Bergdorf’s and made a face. “I hate pink. Hey, I know! Let’s go next door and dye the neighbor’s dog pink! I’ll bet he’d love that.”
Polly brought the dish she’d been drying down on the counter a bit harder than she would have liked, wincing as she swore she hear it crack. “We will do no such thing,” she said to him, although she didn’t bother to look at him. Maybe if she didn’t look at him she could pretend he was simply a voice in her head, and voices in your head could be treated easily enough with appropriate medication and the right sort of music.
“Great!” he shrieked all of a sudden. “She speaks! I was beginning to think your voice had been eaten by some disgusting troll or something, snotface.”
“Why must you call me that?” Polly said, sounding twice as exhausted as she felt.
This time she did look at him, a mistake she regretted the instant he nodded, said, “Excellent point,” and reached into his nose with one long finger to retrieve something he preceded to smear on her cheek.
Polly spent five minutes in the bathroom scrubbing her cheek before she realized her herbal soap had been replaced sometime since yesterday.
*****
First Elizabeth’s friend Fred went to see a little girl named Natalie, who didn’t really need him quite as much as Elizabeth had.
And then a boy named Roger, whose daddy found the television much more amusing than his son until Roger and Fred decided it would look much better covered in a four-foot-high pile of chocolate pudding.
And then a girl named Tara, whose mommy had much better things to do than spend time with her daughter like manicures and bikini waxes and something involving a vacuum cleaner and a bag of fat that made Fred grin mischievously and make all sorts of wicked plans.
And then Elizabeth‘s mommy.
Elizabeth’s mommy didn’t quite fit the height requirement to have an invisible friend, but that certainly wasn’t about to stop Fred.
*****
Polly was on her fifth dash of astringent and fourth swipe of face cream when the doorbell rang. She stalked through the dining room just barely managing to ignore Fred’s, “Well, don’t we look like a pinched little blueberry?” and cracked open her front door to see Elizabeth standing on the other side, her arms crossed. She looked tired and put upon, but Polly supposed that must be what happened when one was helping to raise another woman’s child.
“Mother, what --” Elizabeth took one look at her mother’s face and gaped.
Polly felt a familiar thrill at her shock that faded as soon as Elizabeth bit her bottom lip in that way that warned she was seconds from breaking out in laughter.
“What did you do to yourself?”
“Myself?“ Polly hissed. “What makes you think I would do something like this to myself? And get in here before the neighbors see, Elizabeth.”
She reached out to pull her daughter into the house, barely opening the door any farther than she had to and wincing when she saw a little blond girl sitting in the red convertible Elizabeth had gotten in the divorce from Charles. The girl licked happily at a chocolate ice cream cone, and Polly made a face at the damage she could only imagine was being inflicted to the poor upholstery.
“Mother, your face is blue,” Elizabeth said.
Polly sighed and plastered a tight smile across her face as she shut the door behind her. “Yes, Elizabeth, I know that. Would you care to explain why?”
“How would I know why your face is blue?”
“Well, you hired him, didn’t you?”
“Hired who?”
“Me,” the red-haired man said suddenly from behind Polly. She gasped loudly and clutched at her heart, just waiting for the heart attack she was inevitably going to experience. Glancing over her shoulder with a scowl, Polly found herself confronted with a wicked grin. “Not very smart, is she?”
“Him,” Polly snapped, waving her hand towards the man. “Is this some ridiculous sort of revenge?”
It was then that Polly noticed the look on her daughter’s face, an odd sort of shock dawning in her eyes. “There’s no one there,” Elizabeth said, and the twinkle in her dark brown eyes made Polly pause.
It was almost as if …
Why, it was almost as if her own daughter was laughing at her.
“Hey, how’d she get so stupid? You have to train her from birth or something?” the red-haired man said. “Maybe drop her on her head a few times?”
Then he knocked over the vase of gladioli on the side table.
Elizabeth was as amused as she could be, it turns out, considering she spent the next five minutes alternately giggling and sneezing as if she were about to eject a lung through her nose.
*****
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Elizabeth whose invisible best friend started to visit her mommy. And when Elizabeth told her mommy that she couldn’t see the strange annoying man who was standing right next to her, her mommy did what any sane woman would do in her situation and called the police to have him arrested.
So Elizabeth did what any other sane woman would do and sat down to watch the results, because this was going to be good.
*****
“Officer, you can’t tell me that you don’t see him.”
The police officers who had arrived at the Cronin home exchanged a look that made Polly’s rising frustrations grow even worse. Obviously this was some sort of elaborate trick that Elizabeth and that crass friend Janie had planned out so that she’d be seen as just as mentally unstable as Elizabeth had been before the divorce when she’d been sinking houseboats and ruining carpets that had been recently shampooed.
Either that or the more likely answer, which was that the local police force needed to update their psychological and eyesight testing for their inbound recruits. It was clear that these two particular men would have both failed catastrophically on both counts.
Polly swore she’d fill out the proper paperwork with their supervisor just as soon as they stopped looking at her as if she belonged in a room heavily padded with rubber and fully stocked with crayons and paste.
“Ma’am, there’s no one there,” the shorter one said as she pointed towards the spot where the man who claimed to be Drop Dead Fred continued to examine the items neatly arranged on her writing table. She could almost see the mischief in his eyes, knowing full well that if she didn’t have him arrested on the spot and removed from her home he was going to write something vile on her white carpet with the inkwell.
If nothing else, this had now become a matter of rescuing her interior decorations.
“Of course there is,” she said, walking past them both to grab onto Fred’s wrist. “He’s right --”
“Hey,” he yelped, “I was using that hand! How would you like it if somebody just started yanking your arms around like this?”
He grabbed onto her free hand with his and swung it up in the air, flailing it around as if she were pretending to be an amateur beauty queen waving badly during a parade from the backseat of a cheap convertible.
Elizabeth choked on something in the foyer and coughed into her hand.
Polly pulled away from him with a grimace before he could do something awful like rip a seam in her best blue silk suit. Smoothing down the front of her suit jacket, Polly took a deep breath and said, “The joke’s over, officers. I know you may have all thought this was amusing before but I can assure that it most certainly is not now. I want this man removed from my property as soon as possible.”
The two officers stared at Polly.
Polly stared right back, waiting for them to do something.
Then the fatter officer looked over at Elizabeth and said, “Will she be okay if we leave her in your custody, ma’am?”
Polly gaped.
Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t quite the “something” she expected them to do.
*****
Elizabeth loved her mommy very much.
No, really. You can’t believe everything you hear.
And because she loved her mommy very much, she left her alone with a man no one else could see who was intent on destroying her carefully ordered life.
She was also nice enough to double-check her mommy’s supply of cleaning products before she left, though, because her mommy was most definitely going to need every one of them.
*****
As soon as the officers left, Elizabeth headed back out to her car with an barely restrained smile and the solemn promise that she would return the next day to make sure that Fred hadn’t blown up the house and left a crater in his wake.
“That’s not funny,” Polly said.
“Oh, I was serious,” Elizabeth said from the doorway, then leaned forward and asked in a conspiratorial whisper, “Where is he now?”
Off in the kitchen something that sounded suspiciously like the entire shelf of drinking glasses hit the floor.
Elizabeth grinned. “Ah. Gotcha.”
Polly had heard that old saying that you learned something new every day, but she’d never been quite so sure that was true until she was standing in the foyer of her home with a crazed Englishman destroying her kitchen learning that it might in fact be possible to grind all of your teeth to dust simply by trying.
Forcing her best smile onto her face, Polly ignored the banging of what was presumably the kitchen door and said, “Are you sure you can’t stay a little longer, dear?”
“Mother, I have Mickey’s daughter in my car and my agent to meet with in an hour.”
“Your agent?”
“About the book,” Elizabeth said.
It took Polly a long moment to remember. Ah, yes, the children’s book, the one Elizabeth had written about a little girl and her imaginary friend. Polly had kept her opinion to herself, but she’d thought the story had no place being published. Just what small children needed -- more ideas about how to escape blame by pointing fingers at invisible men who weren’t really there.
A foreign voice in her mind pointed out that perhaps those invisible men really weren’t there because they were in her kitchen smashing all of her everyday dishes, but if she wasn’t about to acknowledge the odd man leaving a path of destruction through her home she most certainly was not going to acknowledge any strange thoughts wandering haphazardly through her mind.
No, no matter how correct they might be.
*****
Elizabeth’s mommy had never had a best friend. In fact, a lot of people who had met her prided themselves on the fact that they’d managed to avoid being considered her friend.
They weren’t the only ones. She was rather glad they’d never become her friend, too.
After all, if that had happened she might actually have to talk to them.
*****
“You can’t ignore me forever,” Fred said.
Polly firmly believed him on that count, if only because it was blatantly obvious that he wasn’t about to allow her to do so. So far he’d turned her house into a disaster area and, when he’d realized that freezing that annoyed expression on her face wasn’t half as much fun as he’d thought it would be, he’d gone out into the neighborhood to wreck more havoc that she’d done her best not to witness from the safety of her own home.
She was fairly certain Mr. Watson’s sheepdog would grow its fur back, but since the bothersome thing barked loudly at all hours of the night she found herself not caring all that much.
“I said --”
“I heard what you said,” she snapped, stalking ahead of him on the sidewalk. A little girl passing by with her mother gave her a confused look, but Polly decided that taking in the Laura Ashley dresses hanging in the window of Closet Robbers was much more interesting than … well, something.
Fred sniffed and shoved over a bag of groceries carried by a older man passing by. Oranges went everywhere, rolling across the sidewalk in all directions and bouncing in one or two occasions over the toes of Polly’s shoes. The Laura Ashley dresses continued to be inordinately fascinating.
“Could have fooled me,” Fred said. “That’s it, just pretend I’m not here. Oh, no, sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t know who could have possibly scratched up your brand new car -- what do you mean, are these my house keys --”
“You will do no such thing,” Polly whispered harshly past lips she tried desperately not to move. She forced a tight smile and clenched her fingers in an iron grip around the strap of her purse. This wasn’t the best part of town by any means, and any purse snatcher was sure to head directly for the woman talking to herself.
“But I’m bored, snotface. It’s not like you’re helping. You can always smash something, you know. If you want, I’ll even lie and say that I did it.”
“There will be no smashing of anything, is that understood?”
Fred’s smile fell. “Not even that window?”
“What window?” she asked, and turned around.
The front window of Closet Robbers fell to pieces before her with a great shattering crescendo as if on cue.
Polly flashed Fred a glare that could have melted glass -- a talent that might have come in handy five minutes earlier, she realized, although she wasn’t quite sure how -- then stalked down the street to her destination.
The office of Doctor Ryland.
*****
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …
Sorry, wrong story.
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Elizabeth whose mommy didn’t like invisible friends. No, not even the one she had.
However, there was an easy enough way to get rid of him.
You know, if you were willing to suffer through the shame of a roomful of other mommies thinking you were deranged.
*****
Elizabeth arrived for lunch the next day with a portfolio under one arm and a curious expression on her face as if she really had expected to find the house in smoldering ruins with Polly standing in the midst of the wreckage, trying in vain to style her smoking hair. What she obviously hadn’t thought she’d see was her mother standing in the foyer, her makeup and clothing pristine, the downstairs clean and not smelling of anything disgusting, and a hot lunch set out on the dining room table.
Polly made a point of taking one of the green pills as soon as Elizabeth spotted her and smiling.
“Mother!” Elizabeth said. Polly couldn’t decide whether she sounded disappointed or shocked, but didn’t much care either way. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“She’s killing me, that‘s what she‘s doing,” a voice called out from the living room.
Where everything goes to die, Fred had sneered when they‘d returned from the doctor‘s office, right before he’d tipped over the inkwell.
Which Polly would point out to anyone would listen -- and no one would listen, which was rather the point of taking the pills at all -- was right before she’d taken the first pill.
“I am getting rid of a nuisance, that’s what I’m doing.” Polly gave her daughter her best smile, in spite of the fact that her stomach had begun an ominous rumble she didn’t much like, and gestured gracefully towards the portfolio. “Is that your book?”
“My --” Elizabeth glanced down at the portfolio, almost as if she’d forgotten it was there. “Oh. Yes, well, I thought you might want to … Mother, maybe taking those pills is not the best idea.”
Polly sighed and smoothly took the portfolio from Elizabeth’s grasp before she could protest. “I assure you, Elizabeth, if it makes that man go away, it is most definitely not a bad idea.”
She placed the portfolio down on the table and unzipped the sides, opening the covers to be confronted with a drawing of a little dark-haired girl and a man walking hand-in-hand through the black-and-white off-kilter foyer of a strangely familiar house. The man wore a green suit and his garish red-orange hair stuck up in a dozen different directions, and it was entirely possible Polly had gone twice as mad as shed already been as soon as she’d seen the drawing.
She narrowed her eyes at Elizabeth and said, “You said you couldn’t see him.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“No, she can’t,” the voice from the living room piped up, complete with a particularly coarse hand gesture that Elizabeth could have spotted yet didn’t react to. “See?”
“Then how do you explain this?”
“That’s the cover to the book,” Elizabeth said, then pointed at the red-haired man. “And that is what Drop Dead Fred used to look like.” She flashed Polly a look so purely innocent it had to be faked and said, “If that’s what the man you keep seeing --”
“Shall we start lunch before it gets cold?” Polly blurted out.
She reached for the lid to the serving dish and lifted it dramatically into the air, expecting the warm and delicious scent of her grandmother’s beef stroganoff recipe to fill the air.
Instead a cascade of piping hot mud oozed from the side of the serving dish and soaked the white tablecloth, causing Elizabeth to sweep her portfolio into her arms and give her mother an odd accusatory look.
“I … I didn’t do that,” Polly said.
An arm raised into the air in the living room.
“I did,” that increasingly annoying voice said.
Polly scowled and downed another pill.
*****
Elizabeth’s mommy always thought she had a very bad daughter. She thought that Elizabeth was badly behaved and rude and far too shy for her own good, and that perhaps if Elizabeth had been more of a model child Elizabeth’s daddy might have stayed.
However, it turned out that Elizabeth was a much better daughter than her mommy gave her credit for.
That was why she waited until her mother had taken the tablecloth to the laundry room and flushed the contents of the pill bottle down the toilet before she left.
*****
Polly searched for the bottle of pills for the rest of the afternoon, positive that she’d simply stumble over them within a day or so. They’d be out in plain sight and she’d wonder where her head was at, and then Drop Dead Fred would say or do or break something and suddenly she’d remember exactly where her head was at.
When bedtime had rolled around and she had yet to find the bottle of pills, she was as close as she’d come in the last two days to panic.
“Well, I’m feeling much better,” Fred announced as she readied herself for bed. “Not that those nasty green pills could have hurt Drop Dead Fred.”
“Unfortunately,” Polly muttered, dragging her brush through her hair again.
“Oh, listen to you, always whining,” Fred said, making faces and waving his hands in the air behind her as she sat at her vanity table. “Oh, there’s a strange man in my house smearing poo all over my fancy carpet! You’re such a girl! Say, I’ve got an idea. Let’s go next door and glue your stupid carpeting to all of the spots on Bucky that I shaved off.”
“Is it entirely possible that you could be quiet for more than five seconds?”
“Sure,” Fred said, and zipped his mouth shut.
Polly gaped and dropped her hairbrush. Well, that was unexpected.
Then Fred unzipped his mouth and flopped down on her bed. “’Cept I don’t want to be quiet, so I won’t. Might as well do something I want to do, since all I want to do is leave and I can’t because you’re just big and fat and old and lonely.”
Polly forced a smile. “I’m not lonely.”
“Well, you’re not a social butterfly.”
“But I’m not lonely.”
“Fine,” Fred said. “Name three acquaintances you like to have around for tea and I’ll just be on my merry way.”
Polly opened her mouth to answer, then reluctantly shut it again. She certainly couldn’t say Mr. Buttons or Mrs. O’Malley or Mr. Watson, and she wasn’t quite sure she’d invite Elizabeth over for anything other than a profound makeover if she weren’t her daughter. Charles was much too busy to spend time with his ex-mother-in-law, and Michael was, in her honest opinion, as dim as a post and about as interesting as a conversationalist. And Nigel was … well, she wasn’t quite sure where he was and wasn’t all that eager to find out.
“See?” Fred said. “Lonely.”
If this time his voice was softer and kinder than it had been since he’d first appeared before her, she tried not to acknowledge it.
He moved from the bed over to her side, crouching in front of her as if he were about to tell a great secret and she cringed backwards. Considering the things he’d threatened to do, the bodily noises he’d made and the vile substances he’d wielded in the past few days, the smell he might be giving off was too horrible to contemplate.
“Would it be so bad? Having a friend?”
“If it’s you?” she said. “I think so, yes.”
She tried to stand up, but he grabbed onto her knees and held her down. “Oh, knock it off, snotface. I can’t leave until you grow up and learn how to make a friend, and you might as well start with me. I’m not that dreadful.”
“I beg to differ,” Polly said.
Fred groaned. “Fine, I’m awful. I’m a no-good, rotten, smelly, gross, disgusting moron, but at least I’m not a megabitch.”
“I am not --”
“Oh, you so are,” he sneered, right before his expression softened once again. “I’m not so bad.”
“You’re terrible,” Polly said. “You’ve ruined my home.”
“I ruined your house. You ruined your home.”
Polly frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Fred sighed, a put-upon sigh that made Polly feel far more ashamed than she thought he could ever make her. “If you don’t know, then I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.” He held up a hand, one pinkie extended, and said, “Come on, then. Friends?”
It took her a long moment to realize what he was doing, and what he was implying. Someone she could complain about the neighbors to. Someone who would completely agree with her that Mr. Buttons was really a no-good thief and Mrs. O’Malley was a drunk. Someone who would take that information and go do something useful with it, like steal back her serving dish from the Buttons residence or refill the O’Malley liquor cabinet with tea and flat soda or do dreadful things to Bucky the dog that would probably send the poor thing into veterinary therapy.
And Polly Cronin wrapped her pinkie around his and smiled.
An honest, genuine smile.
“Friends,” she said, and maybe she actually meant it.
At least until the next morning when she found hunks of her own hair clipped from her head and scattered across her pillow.
*****
Elizabeth’s mommy didn’t want a best friend.
On the other hand, she was lonely.
Besides, no one ever said a person couldn’t have a best enemy.
Title: You Can't Take Him Anywhere
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Drop Dead Fred
Rating: PG
Pairing: None
Summary: Polly Cronin has never had a best friend.
You Can't Take Him Anywhere
*****
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Elizabeth who lived in a big white house with her daddy (until he left) and her best friend Fred (until he was sent away) and her mommy.
And then one day Elizabeth went away, leaving her mommy all alone.
That’s okay, though. Nobody ever really liked her mommy anyway.
Polly Cronin always kept all of the doors locked at night.
Oh, it was a lovely neighborhood, of course. Polly would never have stood to live in a neighborhood with even the hint of impropriety or criminal activity and she and Nigel had been to three different streets with the realtor before they’d settled on buying this particular house. It was close to a good elementary school, although Nigel hadn’t stayed around long enough for that to be any of his concern, and far from the nearest high school, which meant a lack of unseemly garbage left behind on the yard by loud teenagers.
In other words, Polly felt perfectly safe leaving her doors unlocked at night.
She simply didn’t.
It didn’t matter that Mr. Buttons down the street had never brought back the casserole dish she’d taken over to him when his mother had passed away fifteen years ago and would take the rest of the fine china if given the opportunity. And it wasn’t a problem that Mrs. O’Malley’s breath always smelled faintly of alcohol and Polly kept a close eye on her when she came over for tea. It wasn’t even a concern that she was a beautiful elegant woman all by herself, alone in a large quiet house, no husband to speak of and a daughter who hadn’t called her in weeks.
Polly kept the doors locked because …
Well, because of times like this, she supposed.
“What in the world?” she asked softly, standing in the entrance to the living room in her pink silk bathrobe with the mingled stench of fertilizer and dog mess clouding the air.
Something about this whole scene, Polly thought, was terrifyingly familiar.
When Elizabeth left her mommy behind, she gave her mommy a hug and told her she should go make a friend.
In retrospect, perhaps she should have been a bit more specific.
“Elizabeth? Did you do this?”
At the other end of the phone Polly could hear groans and mutterings, and for a brief instant she wondered if perhaps she should have waited to make this particular phone call until the morning. Michael had work in the morning, she supposed, and there was a child in the house. But the entire downstairs stank of … well, things she’d rather not think about right now. It wasn’t exactly as if she was thinking all that clearly.
Elizabeth finally sighed on the other end of the phone and said, “Do what, Mother?”
“Foul the carpeting in the living room again,” Polly said. Her voice trembled when she spoke, though that could just be because the soapy sponge clenched in her hands was scrubbing at the carpet with a force she rarely used and the barely restrained yet still frantic movements of her arms were affecting her speech.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Elizabeth said.
Polly highly doubted that. This whole situation reeked of Drop Dead Fred.
Well, primarily of dirt and dog mess, but still.
“Mrs. Cronin,” Michael said on the other end, after some loud fumbling with the phone that made Polly’s jaw tighten, “Lizzie’s been here all night long, so I don’t know --”
“Thank you, Michael, but this is none of your concern,” Polly said, then hung up the phone before Michael could pass the phone back to her daughter. She didn’t think there was any chance of her getting a straight answer from Elizabeth now any more than there had been months ago when she’d had to deal with --
The air before her sparkled and shimmered before a red-haired man in a green suit appeared in its wake.
He bent down before her until his face was right in hers, beamed and said, “Having fun, snotface?”
Polly shrieked and tumbled backwards onto her backside.
She figured, later on, that that was possibly the most dignified response she could have come up with under the circumstances.
Elizabeth used to have a best friend whom no one else could see. His name was Drop Dead Fred and he was much more fun than anyone else she knew. They made mud pies and played cops and robbers, and Fred made all sorts of lovely breaking noises that made Elizabeth laugh with delight.
Fred never liked Elizabeth’s mommy, and Elizabeth’s mommy never liked him.
But when Elizabeth didn’t need Fred anymore, he went where he was needed, like it or not.
It took three hours of having snots flicked at her face and mud dumped onto her pristine white carpeting before Polly got frustrated enough to acknowledge the existence of the strange red-haired man who pranced after her and claimed to be Drop Dead Fred himself. He spoke with a British accent, a fact that grated across a frayed nerve she either hadn’t realized or remembered she possessed, and he seemed rather intent on breaking everything capable of it that wasn’t tied down.
The more she ignored him, the more he continued to prattle on incessantly in that voice that made her feel a foreign desire to throw the glass vase on the kitchen counter at his head.
“-- oh, look at you, in your fancy pink shoes!” He waved his hands at the expensive pumps she’d picked up last weekend at Bergdorf’s and made a face. “I hate pink. Hey, I know! Let’s go next door and dye the neighbor’s dog pink! I’ll bet he’d love that.”
Polly brought the dish she’d been drying down on the counter a bit harder than she would have liked, wincing as she swore she hear it crack. “We will do no such thing,” she said to him, although she didn’t bother to look at him. Maybe if she didn’t look at him she could pretend he was simply a voice in her head, and voices in your head could be treated easily enough with appropriate medication and the right sort of music.
“Great!” he shrieked all of a sudden. “She speaks! I was beginning to think your voice had been eaten by some disgusting troll or something, snotface.”
“Why must you call me that?” Polly said, sounding twice as exhausted as she felt.
This time she did look at him, a mistake she regretted the instant he nodded, said, “Excellent point,” and reached into his nose with one long finger to retrieve something he preceded to smear on her cheek.
Polly spent five minutes in the bathroom scrubbing her cheek before she realized her herbal soap had been replaced sometime since yesterday.
First Elizabeth’s friend Fred went to see a little girl named Natalie, who didn’t really need him quite as much as Elizabeth had.
And then a boy named Roger, whose daddy found the television much more amusing than his son until Roger and Fred decided it would look much better covered in a four-foot-high pile of chocolate pudding.
And then a girl named Tara, whose mommy had much better things to do than spend time with her daughter like manicures and bikini waxes and something involving a vacuum cleaner and a bag of fat that made Fred grin mischievously and make all sorts of wicked plans.
And then Elizabeth‘s mommy.
Elizabeth’s mommy didn’t quite fit the height requirement to have an invisible friend, but that certainly wasn’t about to stop Fred.
Polly was on her fifth dash of astringent and fourth swipe of face cream when the doorbell rang. She stalked through the dining room just barely managing to ignore Fred’s, “Well, don’t we look like a pinched little blueberry?” and cracked open her front door to see Elizabeth standing on the other side, her arms crossed. She looked tired and put upon, but Polly supposed that must be what happened when one was helping to raise another woman’s child.
“Mother, what --” Elizabeth took one look at her mother’s face and gaped.
Polly felt a familiar thrill at her shock that faded as soon as Elizabeth bit her bottom lip in that way that warned she was seconds from breaking out in laughter.
“What did you do to yourself?”
“Myself?“ Polly hissed. “What makes you think I would do something like this to myself? And get in here before the neighbors see, Elizabeth.”
She reached out to pull her daughter into the house, barely opening the door any farther than she had to and wincing when she saw a little blond girl sitting in the red convertible Elizabeth had gotten in the divorce from Charles. The girl licked happily at a chocolate ice cream cone, and Polly made a face at the damage she could only imagine was being inflicted to the poor upholstery.
“Mother, your face is blue,” Elizabeth said.
Polly sighed and plastered a tight smile across her face as she shut the door behind her. “Yes, Elizabeth, I know that. Would you care to explain why?”
“How would I know why your face is blue?”
“Well, you hired him, didn’t you?”
“Hired who?”
“Me,” the red-haired man said suddenly from behind Polly. She gasped loudly and clutched at her heart, just waiting for the heart attack she was inevitably going to experience. Glancing over her shoulder with a scowl, Polly found herself confronted with a wicked grin. “Not very smart, is she?”
“Him,” Polly snapped, waving her hand towards the man. “Is this some ridiculous sort of revenge?”
It was then that Polly noticed the look on her daughter’s face, an odd sort of shock dawning in her eyes. “There’s no one there,” Elizabeth said, and the twinkle in her dark brown eyes made Polly pause.
It was almost as if …
Why, it was almost as if her own daughter was laughing at her.
“Hey, how’d she get so stupid? You have to train her from birth or something?” the red-haired man said. “Maybe drop her on her head a few times?”
Then he knocked over the vase of gladioli on the side table.
Elizabeth was as amused as she could be, it turns out, considering she spent the next five minutes alternately giggling and sneezing as if she were about to eject a lung through her nose.
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Elizabeth whose invisible best friend started to visit her mommy. And when Elizabeth told her mommy that she couldn’t see the strange annoying man who was standing right next to her, her mommy did what any sane woman would do in her situation and called the police to have him arrested.
So Elizabeth did what any other sane woman would do and sat down to watch the results, because this was going to be good.
“Officer, you can’t tell me that you don’t see him.”
The police officers who had arrived at the Cronin home exchanged a look that made Polly’s rising frustrations grow even worse. Obviously this was some sort of elaborate trick that Elizabeth and that crass friend Janie had planned out so that she’d be seen as just as mentally unstable as Elizabeth had been before the divorce when she’d been sinking houseboats and ruining carpets that had been recently shampooed.
Either that or the more likely answer, which was that the local police force needed to update their psychological and eyesight testing for their inbound recruits. It was clear that these two particular men would have both failed catastrophically on both counts.
Polly swore she’d fill out the proper paperwork with their supervisor just as soon as they stopped looking at her as if she belonged in a room heavily padded with rubber and fully stocked with crayons and paste.
“Ma’am, there’s no one there,” the shorter one said as she pointed towards the spot where the man who claimed to be Drop Dead Fred continued to examine the items neatly arranged on her writing table. She could almost see the mischief in his eyes, knowing full well that if she didn’t have him arrested on the spot and removed from her home he was going to write something vile on her white carpet with the inkwell.
If nothing else, this had now become a matter of rescuing her interior decorations.
“Of course there is,” she said, walking past them both to grab onto Fred’s wrist. “He’s right --”
“Hey,” he yelped, “I was using that hand! How would you like it if somebody just started yanking your arms around like this?”
He grabbed onto her free hand with his and swung it up in the air, flailing it around as if she were pretending to be an amateur beauty queen waving badly during a parade from the backseat of a cheap convertible.
Elizabeth choked on something in the foyer and coughed into her hand.
Polly pulled away from him with a grimace before he could do something awful like rip a seam in her best blue silk suit. Smoothing down the front of her suit jacket, Polly took a deep breath and said, “The joke’s over, officers. I know you may have all thought this was amusing before but I can assure that it most certainly is not now. I want this man removed from my property as soon as possible.”
The two officers stared at Polly.
Polly stared right back, waiting for them to do something.
Then the fatter officer looked over at Elizabeth and said, “Will she be okay if we leave her in your custody, ma’am?”
Polly gaped.
Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t quite the “something” she expected them to do.
Elizabeth loved her mommy very much.
No, really. You can’t believe everything you hear.
And because she loved her mommy very much, she left her alone with a man no one else could see who was intent on destroying her carefully ordered life.
She was also nice enough to double-check her mommy’s supply of cleaning products before she left, though, because her mommy was most definitely going to need every one of them.
As soon as the officers left, Elizabeth headed back out to her car with an barely restrained smile and the solemn promise that she would return the next day to make sure that Fred hadn’t blown up the house and left a crater in his wake.
“That’s not funny,” Polly said.
“Oh, I was serious,” Elizabeth said from the doorway, then leaned forward and asked in a conspiratorial whisper, “Where is he now?”
Off in the kitchen something that sounded suspiciously like the entire shelf of drinking glasses hit the floor.
Elizabeth grinned. “Ah. Gotcha.”
Polly had heard that old saying that you learned something new every day, but she’d never been quite so sure that was true until she was standing in the foyer of her home with a crazed Englishman destroying her kitchen learning that it might in fact be possible to grind all of your teeth to dust simply by trying.
Forcing her best smile onto her face, Polly ignored the banging of what was presumably the kitchen door and said, “Are you sure you can’t stay a little longer, dear?”
“Mother, I have Mickey’s daughter in my car and my agent to meet with in an hour.”
“Your agent?”
“About the book,” Elizabeth said.
It took Polly a long moment to remember. Ah, yes, the children’s book, the one Elizabeth had written about a little girl and her imaginary friend. Polly had kept her opinion to herself, but she’d thought the story had no place being published. Just what small children needed -- more ideas about how to escape blame by pointing fingers at invisible men who weren’t really there.
A foreign voice in her mind pointed out that perhaps those invisible men really weren’t there because they were in her kitchen smashing all of her everyday dishes, but if she wasn’t about to acknowledge the odd man leaving a path of destruction through her home she most certainly was not going to acknowledge any strange thoughts wandering haphazardly through her mind.
No, no matter how correct they might be.
Elizabeth’s mommy had never had a best friend. In fact, a lot of people who had met her prided themselves on the fact that they’d managed to avoid being considered her friend.
They weren’t the only ones. She was rather glad they’d never become her friend, too.
After all, if that had happened she might actually have to talk to them.
“You can’t ignore me forever,” Fred said.
Polly firmly believed him on that count, if only because it was blatantly obvious that he wasn’t about to allow her to do so. So far he’d turned her house into a disaster area and, when he’d realized that freezing that annoyed expression on her face wasn’t half as much fun as he’d thought it would be, he’d gone out into the neighborhood to wreck more havoc that she’d done her best not to witness from the safety of her own home.
She was fairly certain Mr. Watson’s sheepdog would grow its fur back, but since the bothersome thing barked loudly at all hours of the night she found herself not caring all that much.
“I said --”
“I heard what you said,” she snapped, stalking ahead of him on the sidewalk. A little girl passing by with her mother gave her a confused look, but Polly decided that taking in the Laura Ashley dresses hanging in the window of Closet Robbers was much more interesting than … well, something.
Fred sniffed and shoved over a bag of groceries carried by a older man passing by. Oranges went everywhere, rolling across the sidewalk in all directions and bouncing in one or two occasions over the toes of Polly’s shoes. The Laura Ashley dresses continued to be inordinately fascinating.
“Could have fooled me,” Fred said. “That’s it, just pretend I’m not here. Oh, no, sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t know who could have possibly scratched up your brand new car -- what do you mean, are these my house keys --”
“You will do no such thing,” Polly whispered harshly past lips she tried desperately not to move. She forced a tight smile and clenched her fingers in an iron grip around the strap of her purse. This wasn’t the best part of town by any means, and any purse snatcher was sure to head directly for the woman talking to herself.
“But I’m bored, snotface. It’s not like you’re helping. You can always smash something, you know. If you want, I’ll even lie and say that I did it.”
“There will be no smashing of anything, is that understood?”
Fred’s smile fell. “Not even that window?”
“What window?” she asked, and turned around.
The front window of Closet Robbers fell to pieces before her with a great shattering crescendo as if on cue.
Polly flashed Fred a glare that could have melted glass -- a talent that might have come in handy five minutes earlier, she realized, although she wasn’t quite sure how -- then stalked down the street to her destination.
The office of Doctor Ryland.
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …
Sorry, wrong story.
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Elizabeth whose mommy didn’t like invisible friends. No, not even the one she had.
However, there was an easy enough way to get rid of him.
You know, if you were willing to suffer through the shame of a roomful of other mommies thinking you were deranged.
Elizabeth arrived for lunch the next day with a portfolio under one arm and a curious expression on her face as if she really had expected to find the house in smoldering ruins with Polly standing in the midst of the wreckage, trying in vain to style her smoking hair. What she obviously hadn’t thought she’d see was her mother standing in the foyer, her makeup and clothing pristine, the downstairs clean and not smelling of anything disgusting, and a hot lunch set out on the dining room table.
Polly made a point of taking one of the green pills as soon as Elizabeth spotted her and smiling.
“Mother!” Elizabeth said. Polly couldn’t decide whether she sounded disappointed or shocked, but didn’t much care either way. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“She’s killing me, that‘s what she‘s doing,” a voice called out from the living room.
Where everything goes to die, Fred had sneered when they‘d returned from the doctor‘s office, right before he’d tipped over the inkwell.
Which Polly would point out to anyone would listen -- and no one would listen, which was rather the point of taking the pills at all -- was right before she’d taken the first pill.
“I am getting rid of a nuisance, that’s what I’m doing.” Polly gave her daughter her best smile, in spite of the fact that her stomach had begun an ominous rumble she didn’t much like, and gestured gracefully towards the portfolio. “Is that your book?”
“My --” Elizabeth glanced down at the portfolio, almost as if she’d forgotten it was there. “Oh. Yes, well, I thought you might want to … Mother, maybe taking those pills is not the best idea.”
Polly sighed and smoothly took the portfolio from Elizabeth’s grasp before she could protest. “I assure you, Elizabeth, if it makes that man go away, it is most definitely not a bad idea.”
She placed the portfolio down on the table and unzipped the sides, opening the covers to be confronted with a drawing of a little dark-haired girl and a man walking hand-in-hand through the black-and-white off-kilter foyer of a strangely familiar house. The man wore a green suit and his garish red-orange hair stuck up in a dozen different directions, and it was entirely possible Polly had gone twice as mad as shed already been as soon as she’d seen the drawing.
She narrowed her eyes at Elizabeth and said, “You said you couldn’t see him.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“No, she can’t,” the voice from the living room piped up, complete with a particularly coarse hand gesture that Elizabeth could have spotted yet didn’t react to. “See?”
“Then how do you explain this?”
“That’s the cover to the book,” Elizabeth said, then pointed at the red-haired man. “And that is what Drop Dead Fred used to look like.” She flashed Polly a look so purely innocent it had to be faked and said, “If that’s what the man you keep seeing --”
“Shall we start lunch before it gets cold?” Polly blurted out.
She reached for the lid to the serving dish and lifted it dramatically into the air, expecting the warm and delicious scent of her grandmother’s beef stroganoff recipe to fill the air.
Instead a cascade of piping hot mud oozed from the side of the serving dish and soaked the white tablecloth, causing Elizabeth to sweep her portfolio into her arms and give her mother an odd accusatory look.
“I … I didn’t do that,” Polly said.
An arm raised into the air in the living room.
“I did,” that increasingly annoying voice said.
Polly scowled and downed another pill.
Elizabeth’s mommy always thought she had a very bad daughter. She thought that Elizabeth was badly behaved and rude and far too shy for her own good, and that perhaps if Elizabeth had been more of a model child Elizabeth’s daddy might have stayed.
However, it turned out that Elizabeth was a much better daughter than her mommy gave her credit for.
That was why she waited until her mother had taken the tablecloth to the laundry room and flushed the contents of the pill bottle down the toilet before she left.
Polly searched for the bottle of pills for the rest of the afternoon, positive that she’d simply stumble over them within a day or so. They’d be out in plain sight and she’d wonder where her head was at, and then Drop Dead Fred would say or do or break something and suddenly she’d remember exactly where her head was at.
When bedtime had rolled around and she had yet to find the bottle of pills, she was as close as she’d come in the last two days to panic.
“Well, I’m feeling much better,” Fred announced as she readied herself for bed. “Not that those nasty green pills could have hurt Drop Dead Fred.”
“Unfortunately,” Polly muttered, dragging her brush through her hair again.
“Oh, listen to you, always whining,” Fred said, making faces and waving his hands in the air behind her as she sat at her vanity table. “Oh, there’s a strange man in my house smearing poo all over my fancy carpet! You’re such a girl! Say, I’ve got an idea. Let’s go next door and glue your stupid carpeting to all of the spots on Bucky that I shaved off.”
“Is it entirely possible that you could be quiet for more than five seconds?”
“Sure,” Fred said, and zipped his mouth shut.
Polly gaped and dropped her hairbrush. Well, that was unexpected.
Then Fred unzipped his mouth and flopped down on her bed. “’Cept I don’t want to be quiet, so I won’t. Might as well do something I want to do, since all I want to do is leave and I can’t because you’re just big and fat and old and lonely.”
Polly forced a smile. “I’m not lonely.”
“Well, you’re not a social butterfly.”
“But I’m not lonely.”
“Fine,” Fred said. “Name three acquaintances you like to have around for tea and I’ll just be on my merry way.”
Polly opened her mouth to answer, then reluctantly shut it again. She certainly couldn’t say Mr. Buttons or Mrs. O’Malley or Mr. Watson, and she wasn’t quite sure she’d invite Elizabeth over for anything other than a profound makeover if she weren’t her daughter. Charles was much too busy to spend time with his ex-mother-in-law, and Michael was, in her honest opinion, as dim as a post and about as interesting as a conversationalist. And Nigel was … well, she wasn’t quite sure where he was and wasn’t all that eager to find out.
“See?” Fred said. “Lonely.”
If this time his voice was softer and kinder than it had been since he’d first appeared before her, she tried not to acknowledge it.
He moved from the bed over to her side, crouching in front of her as if he were about to tell a great secret and she cringed backwards. Considering the things he’d threatened to do, the bodily noises he’d made and the vile substances he’d wielded in the past few days, the smell he might be giving off was too horrible to contemplate.
“Would it be so bad? Having a friend?”
“If it’s you?” she said. “I think so, yes.”
She tried to stand up, but he grabbed onto her knees and held her down. “Oh, knock it off, snotface. I can’t leave until you grow up and learn how to make a friend, and you might as well start with me. I’m not that dreadful.”
“I beg to differ,” Polly said.
Fred groaned. “Fine, I’m awful. I’m a no-good, rotten, smelly, gross, disgusting moron, but at least I’m not a megabitch.”
“I am not --”
“Oh, you so are,” he sneered, right before his expression softened once again. “I’m not so bad.”
“You’re terrible,” Polly said. “You’ve ruined my home.”
“I ruined your house. You ruined your home.”
Polly frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Fred sighed, a put-upon sigh that made Polly feel far more ashamed than she thought he could ever make her. “If you don’t know, then I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.” He held up a hand, one pinkie extended, and said, “Come on, then. Friends?”
It took her a long moment to realize what he was doing, and what he was implying. Someone she could complain about the neighbors to. Someone who would completely agree with her that Mr. Buttons was really a no-good thief and Mrs. O’Malley was a drunk. Someone who would take that information and go do something useful with it, like steal back her serving dish from the Buttons residence or refill the O’Malley liquor cabinet with tea and flat soda or do dreadful things to Bucky the dog that would probably send the poor thing into veterinary therapy.
And Polly Cronin wrapped her pinkie around his and smiled.
An honest, genuine smile.
“Friends,” she said, and maybe she actually meant it.
At least until the next morning when she found hunks of her own hair clipped from her head and scattered across her pillow.
Elizabeth’s mommy didn’t want a best friend.
On the other hand, she was lonely.
Besides, no one ever said a person couldn’t have a best enemy.
