Beautiful Boy by David Sheff Read Free Book Online

lap.
    "So, class," she says, "what does the
Dick and Jane
story mean to you?"
    A little girl with plaited hair and large blue eyes says, "The house is the mother."
    After a series of similar comments, a serious, dark-haired boy asks, "But what about Spot?"
    Nic raises his hand and the teacher calls on him.
    "Nicolas?"
    "Spot's the id, the animal force, searching for release."
    A girl with big brown eyes, her hair in a bouncy ponytail, rolls her eyes and shrugs. "Leave it to Nicolas to invoke Freud," she says, grumpily placing her chin on her fist.
    The final scene shows the kids at the end of the school day. They run out of the building to their parents' cars, lined up out front. Nic leaps into the backseat of a Honda and his mother asks, "What did you do at school today, Nicolas?"
    He answers, "Oh, same old stuff."
    A month or two after the commercial begins airing, we are at the movies. A man wearing a studded leather jacket and pants and black motorcycle boots recognizes Nic. "Oh, my God," he squeals, pointing. "It's Nicolas!"

    In May, Karen and I are married under roses and bougainvillea on the deck of her parents' house. With his skinny arms and neck jutting out of a short-sleeved oxford shirt, Nic, now nine, is nervous, though we try to reassure him. In the morning, however, he seems hugely relieved. "Everything's the same," he says, looking from me to Karen, around the house, and back to me again. "That's so weird."

    "Miss Amy, she was a mean old bitch. Stepmothers always were." Truman Capote summed up the popular view of stepmotherhood. It's not a new sentiment. Euripides wrote, "Better a servant than a stepmother." And yet Karen and Nic grow closer. Am I seeing only what I want to see? I hope not; I don't think so. They continue to paint and draw together. They are always doing "together drawings," where one adds something and then the other, back and forth. They look at art books and discuss artists. Karen takes him to museums, where Nic sits on gallery floors with his pad on his lap. He makes feverish notes and sketches inspired by Picasso, Elmer Bischoff, and Sigmar Polke.
    She teaches him French—grilling him on his vocabulary as they drive in the car—and they are very funny carrying on conversations about their shared favorite books, the kids in his class, and movies, especially ones starring Peter Sellers and Leslie Nielsen, the Inspector Clouseau movies,
Airplane, Naked Gun,
and its sequels. For some reason, for four consecutive evenings they watch
Pollyanna,
trying to get through it, but each time they get too sleepy and shut it off. On the fifth night, however, they finish it. After that, the movie is a shared language they speak together. "Karen, you have a stuffy little nose," Nic will say, imitating Agnes Moorehead.
    Nic tries to get me to play a video game called Streetfighter 2, but I quickly tire of the bashing, head-butting, and biting. Karen,
however, not only enjoys it but is good at it, beating Nic. She also loves Nic's music and, unlike me, never tells him to turn it down.
    Karen and Nic tease each other. Relentlessly. Sometimes she teases him too much and he gets mad. When we go out to eat, they always order milkshakes. He slowly savors his, but Karen drinks hers down quickly and then tries to steal Nic's.
    They play a word game and laugh their heads off.
    Karen says "Dave."
    Nic says "has."
    Karen says "a."
    Nic: monkey
    Karen: butt.
    I look up from my magazine. "Very funny," I say.
    Nic says, "Sorry. There."
    Karen: was
    Nic: a
    Karen: man
    Nic: who
    Karen: said
    Nic: that
    Karen: Dave
    Nic: has
    Karen: a
    Nic: monkey
    Karen: butt.
    They play it, and variations, over and over. I roll my eyes.
    Karen works a lot and resists doing motherly duties, but she starts driving carpool sometimes and, one evening, makes a meat-loaf for dinner. It's terrible and Nic refuses to eat it. Karen starts telling Nic to put his napkin on his lap, which makes him furious. She enlists him to help around