It's a thief in the night to come and grab you
It can creep up inside you and consume you
A disease of the mind it can control you
I feel like a monster, oh

-"Disturbia", Rhianna

She said I don't smile enough.

That's the only thing she seemed to tell me. I don't smile enough.

I think I smile just enough. I think I smile more then people deserve too. What the fuck do I have to smile about?

But I always do, and it's far more then I need too.

But then she says to me, like she's known me for more then three days, like she knows all and sees all and I should have bowed to her in awe, "You know, you don't smile nearly enough."

Oh.

Her head warped, for just a minute, everything flashing red, and her face stretched and bended and contorted until it was a hideous, deformed, utterly terrifying monster that I wanted to grab and smash into the lunch table until I saw blood, then keep going until I saw organs. I wanted to twist it and watch it ooze between my fingers like silly putty. It was a monster, it would hurt me, it was a nightmare. I wanted to kill it.

Then the lunchroom chatter quiped, and red turned to disturbingly similar shades of pale tan and muave, and life went on. Her face was normal. Pretty, but not interesting. Not a hair out of place. A somehow knowing, conformed smile that I suspected melted every teacher's heart.

Even without the moments rage, I felt an itch at the plastic knife clenched between my fist. I should have told her to get fucked, or get bent, or get pregnant, or something of the such. But no, my deleriously, wonderfully hazy mind was disobeyed. My somewhat fevered body did the talking, asking her why she says this, what she wants, but in the most beautifully polite way.

She says I'm always frowning. Frownings not good for the soul. It takes more muscles to frown then to smile. All these bumper sticker quotes that make my stomach churn. I keep my face neutral, maybe even thoughtful, as though I'm taking her ramblings to heart. She stops, I thank her, tell her I'll smile more often. She herself grins like a baby, nodding and joining her little table of happy preteens, where they joke and laugh and playfully throw objects at each other and the girls sqweal while the guys slap hands and it goes back around.

I walk home that day and go to the kitchen and go to the sink and go to the drawer underneath the sink where a glaringly bright silver glints off the sun from the window above the same sink. I take one of the silver shining things, one that looks fine, one that looks beautiful, though I'm not sure why it did.

I run to my room and I shut my door and I look at it, look at it twisting and turning like the girl did, and my heart pounds inside my chest, and I feel it coming again.

I don't smile enough. I don't smile enough.

Smile, I tell myself, smile, or you'll pay for it.

Smile.

Smile.

Smile.

But I can't. God help me, I can't.

In the climax, the hieght of it when it's too much to bear and it hits so hard I know it will never stop, the silver shiny thing is against my cheek, and it carves it's intricate design, my fingers only a pedastool to it's canvas, and I know it will be just as beautiful.

Blood drips, but there's no pain. I feel myself smiling. I'm smiling.

And then I'm laughing.

I drop it, the beautiful silver shiny thing, and I fall to my knees, because I'm laughing now. Laughing to hard. Too hard to stand. To hard to breath. I'm laughing, I'm laughinglaughinglaughing and I'm laughing because I'm smiling, and it's funny but it's not, and bloods on my hands it taste bitter behind my tongue but I'm smiling and laughing and it's just hilarious.

A/N I kind of like the self-mutilation aspect of his two stories, just because the Joker hits me as someone who'd be born a little off-kilter. I don't know. It's possible. It was originally goning to be a, like, beginning of insanity type of deal, but this seemed kind of...appropriate.