Page 105 of John + Siena: The Complete Duet

“Do you tell people that often?”

John shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the way people look at me after—you can see it in their eyes. Crazy. You know, my family doesn’t even use that word to me. Crazy, I mean. It’s been pretty much banned in the context of saying it to me like it’s a slur, or whatever.”

“Yeah, I get that. I mean, before someone would have said bipolar and I would have thought, high and low. You know what I mean? Up and down constantly. I didn’t really know much about it at all.”

“Rapid cycling,” John said.

Siena’s brow dipped. “Pardon?”

“When someone goes from high emotions to low emotions like it’s a roller coaster on a regular basis, it’s called rapid cycling. It’s actually more common in women than men. I mean, I have high and low moments, but I don’t rapid cycle, and I fall more in spells of one or the other.”

“Like a long bout of being high.”

“Or a long bout of being low,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, like that. My first episode came when I was thirteen. I never went into full blown mania back then, but the shit I did was sketchy. I was all over the place, and it was … a bad time for my family.”

“Probably would be. You would have been, what, just going into puberty?”

“Just after, yeah,” he confirmed quietly. “I went back and forth from what they call a hypomania to depression, and then back again. A cycle, but for a long spell with each, and not a quick up and down. Nobody thought something was wrong up in here.”

He pointed to his head, and shrugged, adding, “Everybody just thought I was difficult, and a little too wild for my own good. It always felt like I was bulletproof. Nothing was ever going to hurt me, and I could do anything I wanted. And then it would change—I would be shattered glass. Broken with sharp edges, and cutting everyone who came too close.”

“That’s what it feels like?”

John laughed darkly, but sobered quickly. “No, only sometimes. Bipolar feels like … everything all at once. It doesn’t give me time to process one thing before something else decides to wreck me. Mania is all of that, but times ten or more.”

“I’m sure that word scares people, right?”

“Mania?”

She nodded.

John scratched at the underside of his jaw. “It’s a good word for it, though. Manic—because that’s what it’s like. You just go, and go. The more you do, the better you feel. Sometimes my mania manifested physically. Things like fighting or sex. Sometimes it focuses on the shit around me. People I don’t trust, or my work. It’s a lot. It’s everything. It’s—”

“I get it,” she interjected softly.

He frowned. “Then when the mania breaks, the cycle hits its peak before it goes way low.”

“Depression?”

“Yeah.” John sighed, and dragged a hand through his hair. “But I never went into full blown mania until I was seventeen. I disappeared for three weeks, and showed up in an ER. I had no idea how I got there, and I had so many different drugs in my system that I could have been a pharmacy. It was bad.”

“But that’s when you finally got diagnosed?”

“Around then, yeah. I found out after that there was someone else in my family history with the same disorder, so it showed a genetic link, too.”

“Who was that?”

“She would have been my biological grandmother—my father’s real mother. I’m named after my dad’s father, actually. Johnathan Grovatti. Lina was my father’s real mother. She was Johnathan’s mistress, though, so a lot of stuff about her was destroyed after she was killed. It took some digging by my father to find the information on her.”

“I’m sorry.”

John smiled. “Don’t be. I was in the height of mania when I went at my cousin three years ago—the whole shit that got me put away.”

Siena’s brow furrowed. “But if you were sick, then—”