The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout PhD Read Free Book Online Page B

each summer. They vacationed there from the time Skip was eight years old until he went away to high school in Massachusetts. Skip looked forward to his summers in Virginia. There was not a lot to do there, but the one activity he had invented was so much fun that it made up for the general lack of excitement. In fact, sometimes back at grade school in the winter, escaping into his own thoughts while some stupid teacher went on and on about something, he would get a picture of himself playing his game by the warm Virginia lake, and he would chuckle out loud.
    Skip was brilliant and handsome, even as a child. “Brilliant and handsome,” his parents and his parents' friends and even his teachers would remark over and over. And so they could not understand why his grades were so mediocre, or why, when the time came, he seemed to have so little interest in going out on dates. What they did not know was that from the age of eleven, Skip had been out with plenty of girls, but not quite in the way his parents and teachers were imagining. There was always someone, usually an older girl, who was willing to succumb to Skip's flattery and his charming smile. Often the girl would sneak him into her room, but sometimes he and a girl would simply find a secluded spot on a playground or under the bleachers at the softball field. As for his grades, he really was extremely smart—he could have made straight A -plusses—but getting C 's was completely effortless, and so that was what he did. Occasionally, he would even get a B, which amused him, since he never studied. The teachers liked him, seemed to be almost as vulnerable to his smiles and his compliments as the girls were, and everyone assumed that young Skipper would end up at a good high school and then a decent college, despite his grades.
    His parents had a great deal of money, were “megarich,” as the other kids put it. On several occasions when he was about twelve, Skip sat at the antique rolltop desk his parents had bought for his bedroom, trying to calculate how much money he would get when they died. He based his calculations on some financial records he had stolen from his father's study. The records were confusing and incomplete, but even though he could not arrive at an exact figure, Skip could see clearly that someday he would be quite rich.
    Still, Skip had a problem. He was bored most of the time. The amusements he pursued, even the girls, even fooling the teachers, even thinking about his money, did not keep him energized for longer than half an hour or so. The family wealth held the most promise as an entertainment, but it was not under his control yet—he was still a child. No, the only real relief from boredom was the fun he could have in Virginia. Vacations were a very good time. That first summer, when he was eight, he had simply stabbed the bullfrogs with a scissors, for want of another method. He had discovered that he could take a net from the fishing shed and capture the frogs easily from the mud banks of the lake. He would hold them down on their backs, stab their bulging stomachs, and then turn them back over to watch their stupid jelly eyes go dead as they bled out. Then he would hurl the corpses as far out into the lake as he could, yelling at the dead frogs as they flew, “Too bad for you, you little fuck-face froggy!”
    There were so many frogs in that lake. He could spend hours at a time killing them, and still it looked as if there were hundreds and hundreds of them left for tomorrow. But by the end of that first summer, Skip had decided that he could do better. He was tired of stabbing the frogs. It would be so great to blow them up, to have something that would make the fat little squirmers explode, and toward this end he had a really good plan. He knew plenty of older boys back home, and one in particular he knew took a family trip to South Carolina during spring break every April. Skip had heard that fireworks were for sale and easy to get in