Beautiful Boy by David Sheff Read Free Book Online Page A

the house, hiring him to kill slugs in the garden. He's paid ten cents a slug. Nic puts them on a shovel and flings them over the fence into the woods.
    Karen, whom Nic calls Mama or Mamacita or KB (she calls him Sputnik), admits that it is not a natural relationship for her. Once, in the car with Nic and Nancy, Karen's mother, Nic, tired and frustrated over nothing in particular, starts crying. Karen is amazed
and asks Nancy, "What's wrong with him?" She responds, "He's a little boy. Little boys cry." Another evening, they are together at her parents', and Karen notices that as they sit around the television, Nancy pulls Nic close to her and rubs his back. He seems completely contented. Karen tells me about it as if it's a revelation. She says that at first Nic seemed foreign to her; she had not been around children since she was a kid. "I never expected this," she says. "I had no idea. I didn't know what I was missing."
    She doesn't always feel this way. On occasion Nic is churlish—toward me, too, for that matter—but the larger problem is inherent to the position of stepparent. Sometimes Karen says that she wishes she were Nic's real mother, but she is realistic about the fact that she isn't. He has a mother whom he adores and to whom he is devoted. Karen is frequently reminded that a stepmother is not a mother. She has much of the responsibility but not the authority of a parent. Sometimes I'm quiet when she gets on his case about having his elbows on the table, but though I always encourage her to say what is on her mind, I often rescue him. "His manners are fine," I insist, before I realize that I've undermined her again. The worst for Nic may be that he feels guilty about a close relationship with someone who is not his mother, which is typical, according to one of the many how-to-stepparent books Karen keeps on her bedside table.
    Sometimes we all acutely feel Vicki's absence. When Nic misses her, the telephone helps, though after hearing her voice he can be sadder. We encourage him to visit her whenever possible and to call her as often as he wants. We try to get him to talk about it. It's all we know to do.

    I sense that Nic is undergoing a fitful transformation, as if a tug of war is being waged inside him. He holds on to his stuffed crab and the pandas, but he has taped a Nirvana poster on his bedroom wall. Though he still often rebels against conventional habit and taste, more and more he succumbs to peer pressure. He is trying on an awkward preteen skulk, and he often wears grungy flannel and shuffles around in a pair of clunky Doc Martens. His bangs hang Cobainlike over his eyes, and he hennas his hair. I allow it, but
not without considering whether I should, and meanwhile I force haircuts, even though he becomes furious with me. In choosing my battles, I weigh the relevant factors. Nic is occasionally moody, but not more than other children we know. There are minor reprimands—for writing "Sofia sucks" on a notebook, for example. (Sofia is a headstrong girl in his class.) Once he has to write a note of apology for interrupting Spanish class. For the most part, however, Nic continues to do well in school. In a report card, a teacher writes about his "burgeoning sense of kindness and generosity" and concludes, "I wonder at the gifts he will undoubtedly bring to the world."

3
    What is now the town of Inverness on the Point Reyes Peninsula, an hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, was, a few million years ago, in Southern California. The arrow-shaped landmass still creeps north-ward at the unhurried pace of an inch or so a year. Inverness and the surrounding ridges, hillsides, and valleys, and miles of ranch-land and shoreline, will, in another million years, be an island floating off the coast of Washington.
    Inverness is separated from the rest of the continent by the twelve-mile-long Tomales Bay, which cuts a jagged line to the ocean directly over the San Andreas Fault. The submerged border may