“What? Why? Is he okay?” She looks at the ceiling and turns toward the stairs as if she’s going up to his room.
“I think so. I mean, he’s sleeping right now. I just wonder if maybe he should talk to someone or switch his meds or… I don’t know.”
“Suzette, if you know something, you need to tell me. Right now, baby.”
“I don’t know anything.” I feel gross about lying to her like this, on such a large scale, but I’d feel grosser if I told her what he and I talked about. “But Lionel isn’t himself. And I don’t think he should be feeling the way he does, even if he’s still getting used to the meds.”
“If you don’t know anything, then how do you know all this?” My mother doesn’t usually sound so stern, but she obviously knows this is serious, even if I’m not telling her everything.
“Because he’s my brother. I notice when something’s off.”
They take him to a different doctor—two different doctors, who both say they think his current depression, coupled with his episode earlier in the summer, is pointing to signs of bipolar disorder instead of ADHD.
He goes on different meds. He starts seeing a therapist, Dr. Tarrasch. He never says anything to me about why our parents hustled him to the doctor’s office the day after our talk. He doesn’t accuse me of betraying him.
But he doesn’t talk to me about the bipolar, even though he knows I’m aware of the new diagnosis. And he doesn’t seem that upset when I tell him Mom and Saul are sending me to boarding school in Massachusetts at the end of the summer.
I know what I did was right, that not saying anything would have been a mistake. But it isn’t lost on me that Lionel doesn’t share anything private with me for the rest of the summer—that in helping him, I’ve now caused him to alienate himself from the person he trusted most.
fourteen.
I cash in my rain check with Emil the night after I have dinner with Rafaela. It’s the same night she goes out with my brother, and that’s a coincidence, but once Emil and I are sitting across from each other at the sushi restaurant, I realize I couldn’t have planned it better.
I was up this morning before the sun peeked over the mountains. I barely slept last night, even after I saw Lionel with my own eyes and knew he wasn’t having an episode. He isn’t humming with extra energy, but he hasn’t slipped into the dark well of depression, either.
Yet.
He’s irritable. I stared into his eyes for so long that he turned away, told me I could get out of his room if I was going to keep treating him like he was sick.
I’m here with Emil, but I can’t stop thinking about Lionel for more than a few moments at a time. Emil fills those moments with kindness. He told me I looked pretty when he picked me up, just before he kissed me right by my lips but not on them. He opens my car door every time we get in and out but he doesn’t mind when I hold the door for him at the restaurant. His hand lightly touches the small of my back as we’re led to our table and it’s a small gesture, but I like that there’s no mistaking we’re together.
“I know you’re going to offer to pay half,” he says while we’re looking at the menu. “But this is my treat, so get whatever you want.”
“How are you so sure I’d offer to split it with you?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
He laughs. “Because you’re you, Suzette. You’re one of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met.”
“Me?”
He laughs again and takes a sip of water. “Come on.”
I lift my chin. “Give me one example of when I was being stubborn, Emil Choi.”
“Took you this long to go out with me, didn’t it?” He’s looking down at his menu, but there’s no concealing that grin.
“What? You never asked me out until this summer!”
“Suzette, you knew I liked you. I did everything but ask you out.”
“Well,” I say, and then stop. Because he’s right, and I don’t want him to be right.
“We’re here now,” he says easily. “That’s all that matters, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say, grateful that he’s not pressing the matter.
We order an unreasonable amount of sushi with a large bowl of edamame. I don’t realize how quiet I’ve been until Emil says, a piece of unagi roll balanced in his chopsticks, “Everything okay?”
His face comes into focus as if I’ve just noticed he’s sitting here.
“Yeah, sorry.” I swirl more wasabi through my bowl of soy sauce. “I…”
Lionel being off his meds is the biggest thing I’ve ever had to hide and it’s heavy, a weight that’s been stacked on my chest since the moment he confessed. I need to tell someone else. I need someone to talk to when I start to worry too much. And Emil seems safe. He already knows so much about my family, and me about his.
I take a quick breath. “Lion went off his meds a couple of weeks ago and I told him I’d hang on to them and he’s seemed fine, but last night…” I swallow, nervous that Emil is going to lecture me on how stupid I’ve been. “Last night, I was out and he asked for them and I didn’t see his text until it was too late.”
Emil’s eyes widen. “Too late? Is he okay?”
“Yeah, I mean, not like that. But now he says he doesn’t want to take them, that it was a false alarm. What does that even mean?”
“I’m guessing your mom and Saul don’t know about this,” Emil says, but he nods before I can answer him because of course they don’t know.
“I feel like I should tell them. Because of how Lionel was last year.… But then he’ll be so mad at me, and I finally feel like we’re back to where we were before I went away.”
“How has he been? Have you noticed anything different?”
“Nothing that makes me too nervous,” I say. “But it’s not always easy to know how he’s going to react or when his mood is going to change, and I’m scared. When things were really bad with him, when he was on the wrong meds and we didn’t know he had bipolar… he was saying some really scary stuff.”
“I didn’t realize things got that bad with him.” Emil sets down his chopsticks and looks at me, his face serious. “My parents didn’t tell me. They said he was missing so much school because he was sick. And it wasn’t hard to figure out that it was something with his mental health, but… I didn’t know any of the details.”
“I didn’t know about your Ménière’s,” I say after a pause. “Not until you told me.”
“Well… I asked your parents not to say anything.” He meets my wide-eyed stare with a sheepish look. “You were so far away and couldn’t see that I was mostly the same person and… I don’t know, I guess I didn’t want you to think I was weak, or whatever.”
“Do you think that about Lionel?”