Title: Joan's Diary

Summary: This is the diary of Joan Girardi's life in Arcadia, starting the day that the Girardi children discovered they were moving.

Rating: T

Characters/Pairings: Sticks to the show. Mainly Joan Duh, with mentions of everyone else in her life.

Disclaimer: I don't own JoA. I'm writing this for pure amusement. Suing isn't cool.

Notes: I really don't know. It's been awhile since I wrote a JoA fic, unless you count the challenge one I did for Allie awhile ago... I though this would be fun, since we never really knew Joan before the series and I got to pretty much make her up in the first couple of months the diary covers. I also hardly write Joan herself, so it's sort of fun trying to get inside her head and spill it all out on paper.

June 10, 2003

Dear Diary,

So this is my first entry. I got this thing for my fifteenth birthday back in November but I never got around to using it with everything that was going on. Anyway, when I got home from school today guess what my parents announced? We're moving at the end of the school year. Unbelievable! Parents really live for messing up your life, right? I mean, I'm like a freshman and I've got friends here! Friends that I've known my whole life that I'm going to have to leave behind! And you'll never guess where dad said that we were moving to.

Maryland.

Seriously, what is there in Maryland? Nothing! Yeah, okay, he got this like awesome job offer or something and they think that maybe it will be a good opportunity for our family to get out of Chicago, start over and stuff. But some of us don't need to start over, okay? Some of us are fine where we are. Now I have to start sophomore year somewhere on the other side of the country where I don't know anyone and everyone probably just rides tractors for fun or something. Life is so unfair!

June 15, 2003

Dear Diary,

I hate being the middle child, it's not fair. Kevin gets all this attention because he's the oldest and he's popular and was this huge jock and yeah he had his accident and he needs the extra attention now because he's all depressed, reasonably, and Luke's the baby and my parents treat him like the baby. He's always getting me in trouble! I hate how close we are in age, he's always trying to hang out with me and my friends, whatever. And mom lets him! Because I'm the big sister and I'm supposed to be nice and mature, well why didn't Kevin have to live by the same rules? Whenever I tried to hang out with his totally hot guy friends he'd make fun of me and make me go away and mom would tell me to let Kevin and the guys be! It's like some kind of double standard or whatever.

June 17, 2003

Dear Diary,

Today was my last day of freshman year, last day at my old school. My friends were all really great, we all promised to stay in touch and they told me that they'd keep me up to date with everything I'm missing while I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Kara said that she would try to convince her parents to let me come out over the summer after we've settled in to the new house. Mom and dad said that they'd think about it if Kara's parents said that it was okay. How awesome would that be? It would be like we were actually sisters, living in the same house and everything. So much better than spending the summer stuck with my brothers in some new town.

I'm dreading this move so badly, I've made a name for myself here, and yeah it's mostly 'cause I'm Kevin Girardi's kid sister but people here still know who I am and I have the best friends here. Now tomorrow I'm getting uprooted and shipped out to Maryland. Fun.

June 19, 2003

Dear Diary,

Guess where I am right now? Sitting on the floor of my new bedroom in Arcadia, Maryland. None of my stuff is in yet because the guys we hired to move our stuff over here suck. We spent last night in a hotel because our flight was so late and we didn't have any furniture. My mom said that our stuff should be in today. I hope so, I don't want to be stuck sleeping on the floor.

The house is actually really nice. I feel almost guilty for liking it. There's stairs in the living room and in the kitchen, the ones in the living room are wheel chair adaptable. We've got this huge enclosed den that we could use as a guest room if we needed to and there's a bathroom off of it. The second floor is where my room is, mom and dad got the biggest room of course, parents always take the biggest room and let their kids fight over the other ones. We actually didn't have to do a lot of fighting. The attic was made over into a room buy the last owners and Luke was totally into that. I don't get him. I took the bigger room of the two that was left and Kevin let me. Weird. I can't wait to get my stuff in here and to paint, this room needs a serious make over, but I can so make it work.

June 21, 2003

Dear Diary,

Mom made me and Luke go out today. I've spent most of the past few days getting my room ready. I painted it and all my clothes are hung up and organized and my furniture is all in my room. I have a ton of boxes to unpack still, but whatever. Neither one of us really wanted to check out the town but we might as well get to know our way around so when fall comes we aren't totally lost and get stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Arcadia is actually a lot more small townish than I thought it was. Way more Gilmore Girls than Smallville, no farms or anything. We walked past the park and this house with all these really weird metal things in the front yard, I didn't want to know. We saw Arcadia High School, it's so much smaller than my old high school, it's going to be a breeze to navigate. There's this little bookshop and a coffee house, it's just got that whole small town feel to it. There's a community college that we didn't actually see but I read something about it on a bulletin board outside the coffee house.

The town seems to be decent. I guess it won't be that bad. We didn't really see anyone our age though so...