"Ready? Perk up your ears, because the story I'm about to tell is insanely exciting, packed with enough information to make your little heads explode like eggs in a microwave."
"Yes, I'm the girl known as the one who can break through walls. I can see and hear you. Maybe it's one of my schizophrenia symptoms, maybe it's some amazing superpower, but that doesn't matter. What matters is how the story goes."
"So I'm starting? No interrupting. All right, Harley! Heehee!"
"Once upon a time—not actually that long ago—there was an amazing girl. She had no home, yet the whole world was her home. Her name was, ta-da! Harleen Quinzel!"
"Okay, it's me. You already knew that. Great job. But no more interruptions from here on out."
"Anyway, I wasn't much like the heroine of a traditional fairy tale, because I lied. I wasn't a Gotham native. I was an outsider who moved into the city at thirteen. The little town where I used to live was called Aishole, or Aishole Town."
"With a name like that, it might as well have been called Hell. A place like that wasn't going to produce any fairy-tale princesses. My mom always said demons were everywhere in the human world."
"My father was Dash Alabaster Quinzel. He was an auto mechanic and a good man. He never swore, always smiled and worked hard, and once promised to get us a new house, one with a swimming pool and an inflatable alligator. He had beautiful hopes for life and believed in the goodness of humanity."
"So he got killed. When I was four, someone shot him dead in his repair shop because the killer liked the baseball cap he wore while working."
"People had to eat to stay alive, and Mom worried about that