▸ Column · Modern Gotham, post-Joker Harley running a chaos advice column
HARLEY QUINN replies.
Replied to by Harley Quinn, with a rebuttal from Poison Ivy.
The letter
My husband Tobias and I have a whole marriage built on "we tell each other everything." So when a statement from a credit union I'd never heard of landed in our mailbox with his name on it, I figured junk and opened it. Turns out it's a card he's quietly carried for two years — almost $9,000 racked up at hobby shops and a place called "Iron Forge Miniatures." And this whole time we've been clipping coupons and putting off the car repair to "save responsibly." Last month I asked him straight how we were doing, and he looked me dead in the eye and said we were on track. I still haven't told him I found it. I keep rehearsing the confrontation and chickening out, because I'm scared of what ELSE is buried. Do I drop the envelope on the table and confront him, or quietly start protecting myself first?
Harley Quinn replies
Hiya cupcake. Lemme save ya the spiral: the crime here ain't the little metal goblins. Grown man wants a battalion of painted orcs, knock yourself out. The crime is he looked you dead in the eye while you were cuttin' coupons and skippin' the brake job, and he LIED. Smooth. No flinch. Two whole years of "we tell each other everything" with a secret line of credit hummin' under the floorboards. Sweetie, nine grand won't bury ya. A fella who can hold eye contact while he robs the joint — that's the part that'll cost ya.
Took me too long to learn this, so here it free: I believed "we tell each other everything" too, with a guy who told me NOTHIN' true. So — yeah, protect yourself first. Pull your credit report, open an account in just your name, learn every number cold, 'cause knowledge is the mallet. THEN you put the envelope on the table and you WATCH. Does he crumble honest, or does he get mad YOU opened his mail? Because if he flips it so suddenly you're the sneak? That reaction's your diagnosis, cupcake. Not his sorry little speech.
— Harley Quinn
Poison Ivy weighs in
Harley, darling, you and your tables. Always sittin' down across from the thing that bit you, waitin' to read its face — I have personally peeled you off a few of those chairs.
Sweet thing, don't bother. It doesn't matter what his face does. You've been starving the soil — coupons, a dying car — to feed something that blooms in secret. That's a weed, not a husband. So prune. Your name off his debt, your roots in your own ground, today. And stop apologizing for opening the envelope. You didn't snoop, little sprout. You finally noticed the rot. The garden survives that. It never survives the lie.
— Poison Ivy
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