Foster's

Babs 2

Because she was still on leave, Angelica really didn't have a lot to do. So she had been spending a lot of time at home.

Some days she didn't get out of her pajamas. Some days she didn't even get out of bed.

She had read all the books she had put aside when she was too busy to read them. She made all the recipes she said she would one day make when she had the time. She played games with Kyle, had less than intellectual arguments with Chad over what channel they'd being watching, and got lessons on monsters from Kevin.

And she was still bored.

After a week of being off she had nothing better to do than to stay in her pajamas all day and pray that she got a positive update on when they thought it would be okay to come back to work. According to the last update they were currently still interviewing people, and they were being held up because Christina was suddenly very hard to pin down.

So it wasn't entirely surprising when she had basically all but forgotten about the surprise visitor and her brand new clock.

At lunch she went about making nibbles for her monsters. She sent out crackers and cheese for Kevin so he wouldn't pick off of her plate, and then popped a frozen pizza into her oven for Chad and Kyle to share.

She sat down at the couch to turn the TV on, managed to find a channel that both her and Chad were good with, took a bite of cheese and cracker and the alarm suddenly went off.

Angelica jumped, cheese and crackers flying everywhere. Chad scooped all of them up almost immediately and then nosily went about eating them.

Angelica turned to her desk where the brand new alarm clock was sitting and ringing for no apparent reason.

She went to it, pressed the snooze button. Once the ringing had stopped she picked it up and looked it over, she wasn't sure how to turn off the alarm, or even unset it. But she found a little dial, figured out that if you pull it back it's no longer set and then figured the problem fixed.

She put the clock back down, aligned back up to where she wanted it to be on the desk, then went back to the kitchen. She checked on the pizza, still cooking, then made her more crackers and cheese. That time, when she sat down on the couch, she put the cheese and crackers on the coffee table in front of her.

She got a good ten minutes of concentrated silence as she sat snacking on cheese and crackers and Chad had a tentacle wrapped around her ankle.

Then the alarm went off again.

Yes, Angelica jumped again but it wasn't that bad that time, she was just annoyed.

She got up that time, pressed the snooze button looked the clock up and down, engaged the alarm and turned it off again before putting it back.

That time when she went into the kitchen the pizza was done. She took it out, cut it in half and then distributed both half onto the plates.

The first plate was put down on the coffee table by her plate, the second one was put on the floor.

"Don't eat the plate this time," she warned Chad and got a series of gurgles from him that she figured meant that he'd try.

So far he had chipped three plates, cracked two, and took a whole bite out of one. She wasn't even sure what she could serve food to him on that he couldn't eat. Cause he could bite through plastic, metal and china.

She wasn't about to buy diamond plates to see if that was the one thing that Chad couldn't bite through.

But no sooner did she sit down did that stupid clock start ringing again.

Now Angelica was pissed.

She got up. Snoozed it again, put it down, and the ringing started again. She picked it up, snoozed it once more and then sat down at her desk with the clock in her hand.

She dug through her drawers until she found the screwdriver and then she went about unscrewing the back. She found what seemed to be a loose pin and then carefully put it back into place before screwing the back back onto the clock.

"Next time you ring I'mma smash you with a hammer," she growled to the clock and then put it back down. She stared at it, eyes boring into it, daring it to ring again, but it thankfully stayed quiet.

She got up and found that Kevin had his head hanging out of the chimney again his brown eyes boring into her again.

"You shouldn't have brought it inside," Kevin said as he nibbled on a cracker. "It's too late now but you'll learn I suppose..."

"What does that even mean?" Angelica cried but Kevin climbed back up into the chimney and wouldn't come back out.

For the rest of the day Angelica was seeing things. Movements out the corner of her eye, shadows playing tricks on her.

She swore she saw a mouse scurrying in the corner, a cockroach climb up her sleeve. She saw faces in her windows, thought she heard footsteps upstairs.

She had Kyle and Chad check every movement, every glimpse, every noise she heard, and they always came back saying the same thing. There was absolutely nothing there.

Angelica was starting to think she was going crazy, like properly and for real this time. She was clearly spending way too much time inside. Tomorrow she'd have to go out, get herself some fresh air. Go grocery shopping, go to a toy store to pick up more games to play, maybe hit up a book store or a craft store to get herself a hobby. Something, anything, to keep her mind from playing tricks on her.

So she decided to go to bed early. She apologized to Kyle who had wanted to play a game with her, asked Kevin if he'd be okay to sub in, which he was, and then that was her heading off to bed.

When she was ready for bed, when she had just got herself tucked in, the alarm went off again. Angelica stormed down those stairs, grabbed the clock, opened up the back again and disabled the ringer. She didn't even put the back back onto the clock. She simply put it back down and headed back up to bed.

Clearly she was going to have to add going to a repair shop to her list of places to go tomorrow. If they couldn't fix the clock she was going to just have to junk it.

She was not going to follow in the previous owner's footsteps. Not sleeping because of a clock and driving who knows how far to drop it off at a stranger's house.

Though she was starting to understand that this clock was clearly a problem. She already had too many problems to deal with, so if this clock continued to be one she was just going to get rid of it.

But she figured, at least for now, she didn't have to worry about it.

But then she woke up to a woman standing over her bed and she knew she was wrong.