My Beautiful Failure Read Online Free Page B

against my headboard, under my two Escher prints, and looked again at the Listeners handbook. In addition to the four rules, they had provided sample conversations I could practice with. It seemed like a good organization. They had thought through every possibility, and aside from seating me with Margaret and Richie, they showed a lot of trust by putting me on the phones.
    I pulled out my copy of Your Mental Health: A Layman’s Guide to the Psychiatrist’s Bible , by Allen Frances and Michael B. First. It was like a big catalogue of all the things that can go wrong with a person’s mind. Mom had bought it for me for my last birthday, after I decided I would eventually become a psychologist. Mom hated doctors because when Grandma Pearl got cancer, the doctors kept treating her for way too long and wouldn’t let her die. So you might have thought she would shun my ambition. But she liked knowing that this subject would place me on a rigorous university track. And she was big on prestige.She would like seeing my name with two, three, even five letters after it. She would fondle my letters like jewels on a Mom necklace.
    For now I just enjoyed browsing and matching people I knew with the illnesses explained in the book. Mom’s uncle Jack, for instance, who hid from everybody when he returned from World War II: post-traumatic stress disorder . Dad’s old tennis partner, Richard Bramble, who did time for stealing from a sporting-goods store and then set up a fictional investment company to rip off old people: kleptomania and antisocial personality disorder . Uncle Marty’s former business partner at his bar/restaurant, who got so mad during an argument over the bookkeeping that he broke every glass in the place: intermittent explosive disorder. I also read the descriptions of the illnesses we heard about most in high school: substance abuse , substance dependence , substance-induced delirium , and the fat and thin eating disorders. The pages about Dad’s illness, major depressive disorder with psychotic features , were full of my notes and underlinings.
    It would have been tempting to use this book at Listeners, even to show it to Margaret and Richie. But the booklet said to think of our Incomings as individuals: living, breathing people with unique sets of problems, who were almost friends but not our friends, and never an agglomeration of illnesses.

13.
they are your friends
    I found a roll of Life Savers on my school lunch tray.
    “For you,” my friend Mitchell said, bowing slightly at the waist, enough to dent his rotund shape. “Gordy told us that you are a Life Saver now. Life Savers: The Candy with the Hole, Registered Trademark.”
    “Or,” Andy said, “just call him Hole for short.”
    “I am not going to call him Hole for short,” Mitchell replied. “For short I will call him Registered Trademark, or R.”
    I was pleased at first, but now it was clear I was being laughed at. “I don’t want your candy,” I told Mitchell. “Not if you’re not being serious.”
    “That’s right,” Gordy added. “You guys aren’t funny. I think what Billy is doing is admirable. I didn’t want to set him up to be ridiculed.” This was a perfect example of why I wasn’t close to Mitchell anymore. Only Gordy knew anything about last winter. Mitchell I never told, and Andy was Mitchell’s friend, not mine. I’d knownMitchell all my life (we were born on the same day) and I once valued his knack for making anything seem funny or stupid. When Dad got sick that knack held no value for me. Now Andy had become Mitchell’s acolyte. Andy was a short wrestler with a head shaped like a fire hydrant. He also loved ridiculing people but wasn’t quite as good at it as Mitchell.
    “Thanks, Gord,” I said.
    I moved down the table, leaving two seats between Mitchell and me. I focused on my lunch, the cafeteria’s signature dish of American chop suey. The class of 2005, spearheaded by a group of vegetarians, had decorated