Chapter 25

CHAPTER 25

“How long have you been lying to me?”

Maddy is sitting on the couch, looking up at her sister. Emily is standing on the other side of the coffee table, still wearing her caramel leather jacket and shoes, so upset she forgot to take them off at the door. Arms crossed and eyes locked, Maddy doesn’t answer right away. It’s a loaded question, one that she doesn’t want to agree to because it positions her squarely as the bad guy on the losing side of this argument. But Emily’s tone leaves zero room for any other starting point.

“Since I told you I started working two to eight.”

“Jesus, Maddy.”

“I’m sorry. I am, but I couldn’t think of any other way. I knew you and Mom wouldn’t go for it.”

Even if Maddy hadn’t been diagnosed with bipolar, Emily and her mother would probably assume she’d have to be crazy to want to do stand-up. Their expectations of her are the same boxes Emily has already so effortlessly checked or is poised and eager to. Go to college and graduate. Get a respectable job and marry a respectable man. Buy a house in a nice suburb with good schools and raise a family. There are no boxes on Life’s Checklist for Successful Women labeled B ECOME A STAND-UP COMIC or G ET DIAGNOSED WITH BIPOLAR DISORDER .

“Do you have another contract with Netflix?”

“I knew you were going to accuse me of that.”

“It’s a fair question.”

“No. I’m not delusional. This is real. I just did eight minutes of stand-up tonight, and that’s a lot. I’ve been writing every day. Look.”

Maddy lifts the couch cushion next to her and pulls out thirteen composition notebooks. She stacks them in her hands and holds them on display as evidence of her honest and diligent work. Emily’s eyes widen, but not with the impressed approval Maddy had anticipated. Emily lifts her hand and covers her open mouth.

“No, this isn’t mania,” says Maddy. “I promise. You have to believe me. This is the process. It’s how I find the jokes and create my material.”

She extends her arms, offering the pile of notebooks to Emily so she can see for herself. Emily looks at Maddy as if both she and her thirteen notebooks are radioactive, visibly uncomfortable standing this close to something so hazardous. Maddy waits, and finally Emily dares to take the contaminated top notebook into her bare hands.

She flips to a random page and begins reading, her head tilted to the right, a mannerism she either inherited or learned from their mother. Emily and their mother also share the same laugh, a lilting melody punctuated with a pretty sigh. Maddy’s laugh is an open-mouthed jagged tune, loud like a jungle bird. She’s not aware of owning any gestures or idiosyncratic ways of moving or sounding in common with their mother. Maybe everything she owns comes from her father. She waits, watching her sister’s eyes as they travel the page, listening hard for the first sign of her sister’s laugh, barely able to withstand the suspense.

“This isn’t funny,” Emily says as she looks up from the page, her eyes flooding with tears. “It’s just a bunch of random thoughts.”

“You’re reading the stuff that doesn’t work. You throw out, like, ninety percent. That’s normal.”

Maddy sets her stack on the coffee table and snatches the notebook from Emily’s hands. She flips until she lands on a page wearing mostly yellow.

“Here. Read the highlighted parts,” says Maddy, passing the opened notebook back to Emily.

Emily reads, but her expression doesn’t budge. She’s not getting it. Frustration saddled with panic begins to gallop through Maddy’s body like a spooked horse.

“You have to hear and see it. You need the right delivery for it to sing.”

“I don’t know.”

“I wish you’d seen me tonight. I had the whole room laughing, over sixty people. One woman said I was her favorite comedian of the night.”

“How do I know if I can believe anything you’re saying?”

“Ask Simone or Max. They’ll tell you.”

“Who’s Max?”

“The tall guy you saw at the table with me. He’s also a comedian.”

“Is Simone a comedian, too?”

“No, she’s an actor.”

“Does she really work at Starbucks with you?”

“Yes, of course she does.”

“I’m just trying to figure out what’s real.”

“ This is fucking real!”

“I’m sorry, it just doesn’t make any sense. Where does this even come from?”

“It comes from me.”

Maddy smacks her hand hard against her chest and holds it there, as if she were pledging allegiance to the flag.

“I just don’t get why you would want to do this.”

“I don’t get why you want to get married.”

“Maddy—”

“It’s the same.”

“It is not.”

“Why does anyone want to do anything? It calls to me.”

“Like how Taylor Swift was calling to you?”

“No, not like that.”

“Then like what?”

“When I’m up there, and it’s working, when I can make people laugh, when I make that connection, it’s the best feeling I’ve ever had. I feel alive. And I’m getting better at it. I’m getting good at it.”

Emily reads the yellow page again, her mouth and nose contorted as if she were being forced to smell an opened carton of milk gone bad. Shaking her head, she closes the notebook.

“I think I have to tell Mom.”

“No, please! She’ll make me go back to Connecticut. I’ll lose everything I’ve worked for.”

“Dr. Weaver said that having unrealistic thoughts about comedy is one of the signs that you’re in trouble.”

“But this isn’t unrealistic, Em. Things are really starting to happen. I’m going to be the opener for a twenty-college comedy tour.”

“Oh my God. Can you even hear yourself? That can’t be true.”

“It is, I swear it!”

“Show me.” Emily drops the notebook onto the coffee table, pulls her phone out from her back pocket, and offers it to Maddy. “Show me the website where I can buy tickets, where I can see tour dates and your name.”

“This just happened tonight. But my name will be there, soon, and you’ll be able to see it then. It’s real. I promise. That guy, Max, he’s the headliner, and I’m going to open for him. I can call him right now and you can ask him yourself.”

Maddy volunteers her cell to illustrate that she’s not bluffing. They stand in a phone face-off, Maddy’s unsteady in her turbulent hand, her head swimming in a tepid pool of tequila, neither sister backing down.

“If I read every word in these notebooks, am I going to find anything about Taylor Swift?”

“No, hand to God, no, I promise. I know that doing comedy sounds crazy, but I’m not crazy, Em. You have to believe me. Think about it—you have to admit that I’ve been good, right?”

“You’re sped up and agitated right now.”

“Because you’re threatening to blow up my life! I’ve lost a year of school, my boyfriend, my roommate, pretty much my entire identity. So yeah, I’m desperate not to lose this. Please.”

Emily studies her, moved but unmoving.

“This is fuckin’ bullshit,” says Maddy. “I go to work every day, get eight hours of sleep a night, I’m taking my meds, keeping all of my appointments with my therapist, I haven’t spent any money on clothes, I’m doing everything I said I would do—”

“You’re drunk right now and you said you wouldn’t drink.”

“Okay. You’re right. I admit I’m not a fuckin’ saint. But I did my first bringer show tonight, and I killed it, Em, and we got the news about the tour. We were celebrating. I deserve to celebrate good news like any normal twenty-year-old.”

“Normal twenty-year-olds don’t spend twelve days in a pysch hospital.”

Emily’s words hit Maddy like a missile attack she never saw coming, striking its targets dead-on, shredding her heart and lodging deep into the belly of her psyche, ensuring that she’ll be able to replay the devastation of that precise sentence for decades to come.

“Fuck you, Em.”

Maddy holds her ground, trembling with adrenaline, tequila, quetiapine, and lithium, gutted but determined to fight to the death. Emily turns her phone screen toward her face and starts tapping.

“No, I’m sorry! Please, don’t call Mom!”

Maddy darts around the coffee table and lunges at Emily, aiming to snatch the phone out of her hand. But Emily sees her coming and runs. Maddy chases her around the coffee table, but Emily’s too fast, and she’s unable to catch her.

“If you call Mom, there’s no way she’ll let me go to your bachelorette party!”

Emily stops running, and Maddy collides into her. Maddy waits, dizzy and breathing hard, both of them frozen in place, a momentary truce. Emily’s bachelorette party is in Nashville next weekend. She and her best friends from college and high school have been planning it for months.

“I’m your only sister,” Maddy continues. “And this is your one and only bachelorette party. I can’t miss it. Please.”

Emily sits down on the couch. Maddy sits next to her.

“Are you still taking all of your meds?”

“Yes. Every day. You see me take them.”

Emily says nothing for a long while. As they sit in silence, Maddy looks at the many towering stacks of UPS-delivered cardboard boxes crowding the apartment, gifts from Emily and Tim’s wedding registry. The packages have all been opened, but their contents—an air fryer, a Vitamix, wineglasses, a Belgian waffle iron—remain packed because there’s nowhere to put them. Emily and Tim are looking at houses in Montclair, Hoboken, and Port Washington, homes with enough kitchen counterspace and cabinetry to accommodate all the acquired goods of matrimony and enough bedrooms for their future children.

“You don’t really remember it like we do, what happened in November. It was really scary, Maddy. I just want you to be safe.”

Maddy replays that last sentence, I just want you to be safe , and she can feel her face flush, her entire body triggered, blood pumping fast and hot, as if her heart were a teakettle, her head about to whistle. While objectively it’s a caring sentiment, Maddy’s so sick to death of everyone saying this to her, she could scream. And coming from Emily in particular, it feels patronizing, as if wise Emily has everything all figured out. She’s only five years older, for God’s sake. She should worry about keeping her own shit safe.

“You know, if you think about it, being a wife is probably more dangerous than being bipolar,” says Maddy.

“What?” asks Emily, clearly confused.

“Something like one in four married women are victims of domestic abuse, and every day, women are raped by their husbands. It’s true, and if a woman is murdered, the first suspect is always the husband.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m just saying. Getting married is dangerous if you’re a woman, and no one is trying to stop you.”

Emily takes a deep breath.

“Tim is a great guy who has generously and without one complaint allowed you to live in his apartment,” says Emily, speaking slowly, her voice embodying a different persona, louder and more masculine.

“I know.”

“Then stop suggesting that he’s dangerous.”

“I’m just—”

“Right now.”

“Okay, I’m sorry.”

Maddy knows she has a point, but she surrenders the argument. She won’t even get into how dangerous it is to be a first-grade teacher today, how schools have become the unthinkable, preferred venues of mass shootings. She hangs her head, awaiting her sister’s verdict.

Emily sighs. “I’m going to need to see you do this.”

Maddy lifts her eyes. “Do what?”

Emily juts her chin toward the notebooks on the table. “Comedy.”

Maddy perks up. “And if it’s good, you won’t tell Mom?”

Emily looks into Maddy’s eyes, drilling deep, searching for something. Maddy holds her sister’s gaze, unblinking, praying she finds it.

“Please don’t make me regret this,” says Emily.

Maddy throws herself at her sister, wrapping her in an enthusiastic, grateful hug.

“You won’t. I promise.”