About a Boy

When Nick was a sophomore, he cracked his leg playing football, then aggravated the fracture during basketball season, then shattered the bone while long-jumping and landed himself in a wheelchair. He'd grown up in a literary home. Two homes, actually: His parents -- Terry McDonell, managing editor of Sports Illustrated (which, like EW, is part of AOL Time Warner), and Joan McDonell, a writer and editor -- split up when he was in eighth grade. He'd always written, and when he was sidelined he wrote more. He started working on a story about a drug-dealing, Camus-reading prep-school dropout named White Mike. It became ''Twelve.'' He finished last summer and sent it to Grove. ''Grove was the obvious choice,'' he says, ''because of my father and Morgan.'' Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic, is fond of saying he's known Nick ''since he was 48 hours old.'' He bought the book instantly.

Back in May, at the publishing convention BookExpo, Entrekin sat on a panel about ''creating buzz'' and likened ''Twelve'' to Bret Easton Ellis' ''Less Than Zero.'' The next night, at a dinner party, Entrekin confided, '''Catcher in the Rye' is the comparison that I really wanted to make, but that would sound over-the-top.'' Nick is only slightly worried about the hype attending his debut, conceding it ''was pretty wack'' of him to offer musings about his generation's materialism in his publisher's PR kit. And he's not worried about reviews: ''I can't imagine what the worst thing they're gonna say to me is. 'Somebody else wrote the book' and 'Stay in school'? You know, whatever.'' Besides, his peers have already weighed in. ''My best friend doesn't like it very much, but I think he's misreading it,'' Nick says. ''The two comments my friends make are 'You don't know anything about women' and 'Your writing is surprisingly good sometimes.' They all agree that it's way cartoonish.''

The next night, at his mother's apartment, Nick engages in a standard bit of filial back-and-forth. (Son: ''I'll be back sometime tonight, Mom.'' Mom: ''Well, I should hope so.'') Then he puts his baseball cap on backward and heads downtown. A friend is running a hip-hop night at a poetry café. Nick gets there unfashionably early.

A couple of friends show up, and a couple of their friends too. They hang around outside. The depravities of ''Twelve'' to the contrary, it seems that when New York kids go out on Friday night, they mostly get on their cell phones to see what everybody else is doing. The boys stand around, a little bored, a little antsy. Because he can and because it's something to do, Nick does a back flip and livens things up. He's sure that it's fun to perform.