Joan Kelly

## Gallery

**Joan Kelly** is the town's only Medical Examiner and the mother of Reese Kelly.

## Description

Joan is a middle aged woman with slightly greying brown hair tied into a ponytail. She wears a red flannel tucked into blue jeans with her sleeves rolled up, and wears a white undershirt. She occasionally wears a lab coat over the outfit.

Joan's personality comes off as very brusque, though she doesn't mean to come off as rude. She developed this attitude after discovering Reese's transformation, and has most likely become guarded to protect their secret. In the past, she used to be a lot more friendlier with others, and she views the memories of Stella, Kaneeka, and Reese together fondly.

## Biography

Joan wasn't seeing anyone when she had Reese. According to her, she had just woke up one day pregnant, though she kept having weird romantic sleep paralysis episodes, she insists they were just dreams. When she found out she was pregnant, she was terrified, and didn’t know if she was ready, but Reese made her love being a mom.

Joan discovered Reese's condition a little after he hit puberty, with the usual changes, but a few extra: “Thickened nails, sharp teeth, elfish ears.” She had him checked out at a few specialists but there was nothing obviously wrong with him. Soon after they had an argument, and he changed just a couple inches and facial abnormalities enough to be noticeable. Joan was scared and Reese saw that and stopped. By the second time, it wasn’t as subtle and it didn’t go away as easy. A total of three or maybe four incidents occurred and Reese didn't seem to understand at first that he looked different, so Joan made sure to stay on top of his dosages so he rarely did. Despite this, she has been preparing for the inevitability, as seen with the old x-ray room and tranquilizers. Having to keep a secret for so long, she became paranoid and isolated, and whether she consciously did wanted to or not, didn't want to be alone anymore. So she got sloppy and left clues to her secrets around, slowly testing the limits of how obvious she was before someone could put two and two together.

She started medicating him with increasingly high doses of Klonopin when he was twelve, but his body kept adapting and the symptoms would come back, particularly whenever they fought. Since she couldn’t keep ordering all the drugs, due to it being suspicious and could risk losing her license, Sybil approached her with a solution to give his son Ricin and began "poisoning" her son at fifteen. DK has been “dealing with the emotional and mental consequences of that decision ver since.” She particularly does not trust Sybil either. Joan saw it as her duty to protect her son, as well as protecting the world from her son. However, this caused her to become incredibly strict and controlling over her son's life, resulting in Reese's outbreak in Chapter 4.

Joan's fate at the end of Chapter 4 has a variety of possibilities: tranquilizing Reese enough to be able to lock him up in the safe room, letting Tabitha shoot Reese enough to give them a chance to burn him to death, letting Reese kill and eat her, and convincing Reese not to kill his mother and let him run away.

## Trivia

* Joan was friends with Vivian when they were growing up. She liked that she was sarcastic, but nice, and often joked together how Pearlanne was the evil twin.
* Though Joan has been creating Reese's medication, she's not a pharmacist and isn't supposed to be making medicine. She receives her orders from a pharmacist in Brevard.
* Stella calls Dr. Kelly the Scarlet Hollow coroner, though she denies.
* Joan's romance route was previously locked to the Hot trait.