— Fiction —

Excerpts from the Future Tell-All Autobiography of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Unborn Child

Chapter 3: Sibling Rivalry

… These days, few people remember just how cute Maddox was in the mid-00s. His hair shorn on the sides, leaving tufts of a Mohawk sprouting from his round, Cambodian head. His pudgy, Asian cheeks made him the most photogenic child around. A lot of people ask me what happened to him. How did he go from privileged prodigy to getting discovered in the bathroom of a Hollywood Boulevard hourly motel with an Australian hermaphrodite? It’s a tough transformation to explain. Maddox wasn’t unloved. If anything, he was too loved. The boy was showered with gifts. When he wanted his first tattoo, Mom went with him and got one of her own. The piercings followed shortly thereafter. Ears, nose, face, nipples. Without getting too graphic, he used to dance around the bathroom screaming about his Prince Albert in the can.

Dad got back in touch with Aunt Jen when Maddox was about 12, which Mom couldn’t stand. Maddox loved Aunt Jen though, and within a few months, he was doing lines off CD cases with her …

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Chapter 9: Trouble in Paradise

… I was only about four when things started getting really bad between them. There were the fights. Oh, God, the fights. The late-night knocks on the door from the Los Angeles Police Department telling us that they’d gotten some calls from the neighbors and asking if everything was O.K. Mom and Dad usually fought fairly, but Mom would also scratch the shit out of his face. Every time they really started getting into it, she went right for his eyes. Dad would put some make-up over the scratches and show up to work the next day as though everything were fine. But that didn’t stop the people from talking.

When these fights would happen, the kids would all get into bed together, pop Mr. & Mrs. Smith into the DVD player and remember happier times to the soundtrack of shattering dishes and other porcelain vessels …

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Chapter 16: Home for the Holidays

… I hadn’t seen Dad look this good since he stopped drinking. The color was back in his face and he was beginning to put some of the weight that he’d lost back on. He was even wearing the reindeer sweater that I’d bought him when I was seven. It was a gag gift, even back then, but before Dad had really lost control and was putting back a bottle of Jim Beam a day, he wore it every Christmas. The thing was an eyesore, but Dad loved to make a fool of himself around us kids. Maddox, Zahara, Ruutu, John, and I were entertained for hours on end when he’d put on a Santa suit and a vial of blood around his neck and run around the living room screaming that he was Billy Bob Thornton and that he wanted some “French-fried potaters.” Eventually, even Mom came to love these holiday antics.

They turned scary when Mom’s career went on the decline and Dad had to pick up the slack. Eventually, pressure from being forced to take the lead role in big-budget family comedies directed by Steve Martin caught up to him, and he hit the bottle pretty hard. Everyone knows the story about Dad at the Cheaper by the Dozen 3: Rumble in the Jungle after-party when he was famously hospitalized for “exhaustion.” He was paying the dry-cleaning bills of guests for six months after …