The Words We Keep

“What is she doing here?” Alice glares at Micah.

“I should go.” I scoot my chair back. It screeches across the ground, and everyone turns to stare at me. Micah puts his hand on my arm.

“Stay.”

He and Alice are having some sort of silent eyebrow battle. Apparently she loses, because she huffs into a chair and murmurs to a girl next to her. A man in an afghan-style poncho with his hair wrapped into a man-bun steps up onto the small stage at the front of the room. I laugh when everyone else does, except I’m not really listening, mostly deliberating ways to implode into stardust each time Alice shoots me serious side-eye.

But now the poncho man is saying Alice’s name, and she stands up and walks to the stage. Micah’s smiling at me, mischief in his eyes as Alice takes the mic.

“So, I want to talk about being crazy,” she says, her voice slightly unsteady. “And no, I’m not talking about that one jerk who always says he’s bipolar when the word he’s looking for is jackass.”

The room titters with laughter. What is going on here? Since when does Alice do stand-up?

“But I was crazy before crazy was cool.” She looks down at me and hesitates. “I’m bipolar. When my doctor told me my diagnosis, I said, ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.’ And she said, ‘Exactly.’ ”

The room busts into laughter. I do, too. Alice smiles, wide and bright like the big sister of my childhood, and she stands a little straighter. She paces across the stage, easy, like she belongs up there. When the spotlight catches the waves in her hair, she looks exactly like Mom.

“I spent some time recently at a treatment center, which usually makes people feel sorry for me. But maybe we’re not the crazy ones.” She stops midstage and taps her finger on her head. “Three meals a day and all the craft glue and glitter you can eat? Sign me up!”

She’s incredible. Working the room like so much clay in her hands. Micah looks at me, eyebrows raised like What do you think? I shake my head to say I can’t believe it.

“And you want to feel like the best stand-up comedian in the world? Give your show in front of a bunch of girls hopped up on happy pills. Instant. Ego. Boost. I mean, really, there’s a lot of great things about being bipolar. Like one time, my boyfriend said, ‘We’re breaking up. I don’t love you anymore.’ ” And I said, ‘Wait ten minutes. I’ll change!’ ”

The guy behind us laughs so hard, water comes out his nose.

“On a more serious note,” Alice says, lowering her voice. “Mental illness affects one out of four Americans. So think of your three closest friends. You picturing them? Now, if they all seem stable, I hate to tell you this—” She holds the mic close, breathing into it ominously. “You’re. The. One.”

She waves to the audience. “Thank you all. You’ve been great.”

The crowd claps wildly as she steps down. The girl at the table squees and side-hugs her. Part of me is jealous of the girl, hugging my sister. But another part, a much bigger part, is mesmerized.

Because for the first time in forever, Alice is…Alice.

—

We end up driving home together, thanks to some tricky carpool maneuvering by Micah. As I’m getting into her car, I whisper to him, “It’s not going to work.”

He feigns innocence. “I have zero idea what you’re talking about.”

“She does not want to talk with me about this.”

“Then don’t talk about this,” he says. “Just talk.”

In the car, the Alice from the stage has vaporized into the universe, her laugh bouncing somewhere along the Milky Way, her jokes sucked into a black hole. At a stoplight, she turns toward me, her face tight.

“Why did you come?”

“Micah brought me.”

“Look. You’re hanging out with Micah, fine. But I don’t need you coming into my world. Into the one place where I can be myself.”

“You can’t be yourself around me?”

“You’re joking, right? I see the way you all dance around me. You’re always watching my every move, playing mental-health detective from across the room. Dad wants to, like, cocoon me in Bubble Wrap, and Staci thinks she can yoga me better. But with my friends—I’m not broken. I’m just me.” The light turns, and she slams her foot down hard, lurching us forward. “But now Mr. Fix-It Micah and his compulsive need to meddle in people’s lives has gone and messed it all up.”

“Is this where you’ve been going at night?”

“You got it, Sherlock. My friends from Fairview have been helping me practice my act.”

I have so many other questions I want to ask now that the topic is out there, ripe for the picking.

What does bipolar feel like? Do you have panic attacks? Circling thoughts? What about scratching your skin until you bleed? Is that part of it?

Or is that just me?

What’s me and what’s the disease

and what’s you

and what in the hell is normal?

But Micah’s voice repeats in my head: Just talk. So even though I want to spew my questions at her rapid-fire, I choose my words carefully.

“You were amazing up there.”

“Thanks,” she says dismissively, pretending to be enormously interested in a left-hand turn.

“How did you learn to do that?”

“We had a performance club at Fairview.”

“Well, seriously, you were hilarious. This guy behind me literally spewed water out his nose. I’m not even kidding.”

“I saw that!” She un-tenses slightly but still doesn’t look at me. “I could barely keep it together.”

“You couldn’t tell. You were a pro. And you seemed really happy up there.”

“It’s a pretty big rush.”

Alice sneaks a quick glance in my direction. “That’s it? That’s all you want to know?”

“Yeah. I know you didn’t want me there, but I’m glad I got to see that.”

We drive in silence until we reach the house. Alice pulls the car into the garage, and neither one of us makes a move to get out. We sit until the lights blink off.

“I guess—I guess I didn’t want you to see it because I thought it might be strange, hearing me make jokes about it after, well, what happened. But it helps me, I don’t know, deal. But maybe that’s weird for you.”

“Alice.” I turn in my seat to face her. “Things couldn’t possibly get any weirder between us.”

She fiddles with the keys on her lap, not looking at me. “I’ve kind of been an ass since I got back, haven’t I?”

“No.” I shove her softly in her shoulder. “You were an ass way before you left.”

She laughs a big, boisterous Alice guffaw, and as soon as I hear it, I realize how much I’ve missed it. She shoves me back.

“Well,” she says, “as much as it pains me to admit it, I guess it wasn’t so bad having you there tonight. Not that I will ever tell Micah that.”

I laugh. “Oh, trust me, I have a pretty strict policy to never tell Micah he’s right.”

“Right? Cockiest bastard I know. And remind me again, you and he are—”

“Project partners,” I say, even as the memory of how he looked at my lips tonight, the nearness of his body, rockets through my nerve endings. Alice nods like she’s buying it, but I know she can see right through me, because her face turns somber.

“He’s one of the good ones, you know?”

I nod. “Yeah. I think I do.”

And even though there’s still a million miles between us, the distance feels smaller somehow. Afraid this moment of candor will end when we open the car doors, I add, “Alice, I just want to say, seeing you up there, it was like…like…” I can’t find the right words, but I try anyway. “I’ve just missed you, that’s all.”

Alice smiles at me through the dark.

“I’ve missed me, too.”

Breathe

Through the waves

she

reaches

me

I didn’t know

how far I was

or how long I’d held

my breath

until

she

finds me

grabs me

holds me

and I can breathe again