"Joker?" Bella asks. "I suppose that goes with the thematic makeup."

"Mm-hmm," says the Joker. "So. How old's yourrr," he licks his lips again in that disquietly reptilian way, "friend?"

"Nineteen. Little older than me," Bella says. "And he goes by Alice, if you were wondering. Or sometimes Whistle."

"Alice," he says musingly. "Montreal?"

"Montreal?" Bella asks, puzzled. "If he's been to Montreal, I don't know about it."

"He told me it could've been any of a number of possible names," Bella says. "I think I may've been the first person to ask him what I should call him. Whistle, on the other hand, I made up. He needed a code name a while ago. Came in handy recently when there was another Alice around."

"How'd you kids meet?"

"High school gym class."

"Not quite a year ago, when I moved to the town he'd also recently moved to." And if that's not what he means: "February 2005."

"Occasionally," says Bella.

"Poor kid," he sighs.

"He quit showing up after I did," she says. "Of course, I went to college, and he didn't, but now I've dropped out to rule Mars instead."

"Thanks!"

Curiously: "What about his parents?"

"His father's in jail," Bella says. "I helped. His mother lives in a mansion in my hometown, with a housekeeper who I am trying to set up with my dad."

"Jail," he snorts. "Yeah, that'll work."

"Well, he hasn't escaped so far," Bella says, "and if he does, we have magic powers and he does not."

"I killed mine," he says offhandedly. "When I was, mm, fifteen?"

"That doesn't surprise me overmuch," says Bella. "Both of them or just him?"

To answer this question as concisely as possible, he makes a blowing-up motion with his hands and adds the appropriate sound effect.