The Best Medicine
A Dark Knight-based fanfic dedicated to Heath Ledger. May he rest in peace with a smile on his face.
Chapter One: Do I Have a Problem?
XXX
"Hey, Joker! Who's laughing now?" I moaned, putting my hands up to my face. Blood now dripped from my nose. What a jerk. And I was almost home, too! Here's a translation for you. A punch in the face from Jake usually means a bloody nose and being called dumb names. (Hurray! I got an A in Jerkish Sign language!) I giggled and then sighed. And by the way, Joker isn't my real name. It's a nickname. My real name is Princess Cantaloupe Sparklemuffin. Not! Haha. It's actually Megan but I go by Meg.
You see, I have this weird... problem, if that's what you would call it. It's a laughing problem. Sounds stupid, right? Well it isn't. I laugh. A lot. And at the strangest moments. Like this one time, I was in class, and I laughed because of the word anonymous for forty seven minutes straight. (I should know, I counted.) Anyway, the teacher took me into the hall and was all like "blah blah disrupting blah class blah blah blah" - you know the deal – and that just made me laugh harder! It wasn't the first time that had happened, either.
I'm pretty sure it started around the time I hit puberty. 'Don't know why, I just know it happened. Almost anything can make me start to crack up, even if it's a bag full of dead kittens or something. That's why I'm called the Joker. Just like that one Super villain dude. Do you think I have a problem?
XXX
I finally got to my house. I walked up the driveway to the garage door and punched in the code to open it. 0915. My birthday. Which just so happened to be in three days. I would be turning sixteen. That's right, sweet sixteen. What a laugh. It wouldn't be very sweet, considering I belonged to a crap family. Ha. It consisted of an alcoholic father and a mother who was usually out working one of her three part-time jobs. And a stupid nineteen year old brother who refused to go to college and ate most of our food.
I walked through the garage which we used as a storage space and into what we called a house. It really wasn't much of one. It had two bedrooms, a living room-type space, one bathroom, and a kitchen. There was also a basement but nobody really went down there. That was a room that belonged to Ben, my freak of a brother.
"I'm home!" I called out. "Hey, Meg," my dad answered from the kitchen. Wow! He wasn't drinking for once! That made me laugh. I dropped my backpack next to our shabby couch and sat down to flip through channels on our junk TV, which I had named Ken because it was always broken. Get it? Hardy har har. I know. Terrible, isn't it? Hey, I was 8 when we got it – used.
So I sat there, bored out of my mind, when my mom came in the door. "Hi, honey," she said and kissed me on the forehead. Which made me laugh. Forehead! She rolled her eyes and went to the kitchen, presumably to attempt to make something edible. "What're we eating?" I asked over the noise of pots and pans. "Spaghetti." I smiled and giggled. "At least she can't mess that up easily," I said under my breath.
XXX
Dinner started out fine. Ben emerged from the depths of hell, listening to Metallica (ugh) on his Discman so loudly that I could identify what it was. We sat down in little plastic chairs around our little plastic table and began eating our spaghetti. The sauce reminded me of the bloody nose I had had (which had dried up before I got home, thankfully) and I smiled.
The only noise at the table was the buzzing of 'My Apocalypse' and the sound of chewing. Until my father broke the almost-silence. "Meg, Ben, your mother and I have news," he said. I looked up and Ben actually turned down his music to hear. Are they pregnant? I thought and then stifled a giggle.
"We've talked it over and decided to move." I bit my lip. There had to be a but. I was right. "But we'd have to use both of your kids' college money." "Why would we move?" I asked, trying to keep a straight face. "I just got a new job offer in Gotham so money wouldn't be a problem anymore," my mom answered with a grin. My brother raised an eyebrow. "We're going to let you two decide, seeing as it's your choice to go to college," she finished.
I took another bite of my so called 'food' (she even messed up spaghetti!) and thought this over with a small smile. Ben seemed to already have made up his mind to go. It didn't take me long to decide, either. "I'm OK with it," I told them after swallowing. They smiled. "Great! We've already told your school we're leaving so I suppose we can start to finish packing," my mom spoke, getting up from the table.
"Wait – how long have you guys been planning this?" I asked. I wouldn't really be leaving much. "About a month. The city has already offered to buy our house for land development," my dad told me. I thought about what they could build here and laughed. Not much. I took my dishes into the kitchen and looked to see that almost everything was in boxes.
"We already sent most of our things to the apartment we'll be renting," my mom said. I jumped. Somehow she had come right up behind me without me noticing. I guess I had been too lost in my thoughts to hear her. "We even packed Lancelot for you." I groaned but inwardly I was smiling. My stuffed bear, Lancelot, would be coming with me.
Yeah. I had been obsessed with the movie Labyrinth for a while. I walked into my room after grabbing my backpack and glanced around. All that was left was a set of clothes, my hair brush and toothbrush, and some books. They all just barely fit in my backpack.
Soon I was ready to go. And we did. That very evening.
XXX
End of chapter one! I hope you liked it! XD
Please leave a comment/question of some sort. Even if it's just one letter...
Oh yeah! Disclaimer! I pretty much only own Megan and her family. And Jake the jerk (who I probably won't even use again)
Thanks for reading!
Sakura
