The Silver Linings Playbook Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Mom is still stroking my hair.
    “How did you sleep?” she asks me, forcing a smile. Her eyes are red and her cheeks are streaked with tears.
    For a second it feels nice to be lying next to my mom, the weight of her small hand on my head, her soft voice lingering in my ear, but soon the memory of what happened the night before forces me to sit up—and then my heart is pounding and a wave of dread courses through my limbs. “Don’t send me back to the bad place. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please,” I beg her, pleading with everything I have, because that’s how much I hate the bad place and pessimistic Dr. Timbers.
    “You’re staying right here with us,” Mom says—looking me in the eyes like she does when she is telling the truth—and then she kisses me on the cheek.
    We go down to the kitchen, where she cooks me some deliciouseggs scrambled with cheese and tomatoes, and I actually swallow all of my pills because I feel I owe it to Mom after knocking her down and upsetting my father.
    I am shocked when I look at the clock and see it is already 11:00 a.m. So I start my workout as soon as my plate is clean, double-timing everything just to keep up with my routine.

The Dress-up Dinner

    Ronnie finally comes to visit me in my basement and says, “I’m on my way home, so I only have a few minutes.”
    As I finish my set of bench presses, I smirk because I know what that statement means. Veronica does not know he has come to see me, and Ronnie needs to keep it quick if he does not want to get caught doing something without Veronica’s permission—something like saying hello to his best friend, whom he has not seen for a long time.
    When I sit up, he says, “What happened to your face?”
    I touch my forehead. “My hands slipped yesterday, and I dropped the bar on myself.”
    “And it made your cheek all puffy like that?”
    I shrug because I do not really want to tell him my father punched me.
    “Man, you really have trimmed down and bulked up. I like your gym,” he says, eyeballing my weight bench and StomachMaster 6000, and then he sticks out his hand. “Think I could come over and work out with you?”
    I stand, shake his hand, and say, “Sure,” knowing the question is only yet another one of Ronnie’s false promises.
    “Listen, I’m sorry I never came to see you when you were in Baltimore, but we had Emily, and well, you know how it is. But I felt like the letters kept us close. And now that you’re home, we can hang out all the time, right?”
    “As if—,” I start to say, but then bite my tongue.
    “As if—
what?”
    “Nothing.”
    “You still think Veronica hates you?”
    I keep my mouth shut.
    He smiles and says, “Well, if she hated you, would she be inviting you over for dinner tomorrow night?”
    I look at Ronnie, trying to gauge whether he is serious or not.
    “Veronica’s making a big meal to welcome you home. So are you coming, or what?”
    “Sure,” I say, still not believing my ears, because Ronnie’s promises usually do not come with specific words like “tomorrow” attached.
    “Great. Be at my house at seven o’clock for drinks. Dinner’s at eight, and it’s going to be one of the wife’s formal candlelit three-course meals, so wear something nice, okay? You know how Veronica is about her dress-up dinners,” he says, and then hugs sweaty me, which I tolerate only because I am so shocked by Veronica’s invitation. With a hand on my shoulder, Ronnie looks me in the eye and says, “Man, it’s good to have you home, Pat.”
    As I watch him jog up the stairs, I think about how much trash Nikki and I would talk about Ronnie and Veronica ifapart time were over and Nikki was going to the dress-up dinner with me.
    “Dress-up dinner,” Nikki would say. “Are we in elementary school?”
    God, Nikki hates Veronica.

If I Backslide

    Knowing that if I wear the wrong thing, Veronica will say I have ruined her night—the way she did that one time when I wore Bermuda