A Boy's Life: Michael Beros

The sixth-grader at University School tries to read at least one hour every night before going to bed. His favorite books, like the Michael Vey series by Richard Paul Evans and the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz, revolve around adventurous kids who are trying to save the world while coming to terms with their identity. His mother works as a college counselor at University School and his father works as an independent business consultant, but Michael is paving his own path — one that will take him out of this world.

I like reading because it tells me stuff I don’t know about. I wasn’t very familiar with the country of Taiwan until I read the fourth Michael Vey book. It explained a lot of the background history on the country. It’s always fun to learn about interesting things. In the country of Nicaragua, they eat guinea pigs, which I know sounds kind of mean to eat guinea pigs in the United States because they’re cute and cuddly creatures. Everyone is like, “Oh, it’s so weird,” but it’s normal to them. They eat a lot differently than we do and their diet is a lot different.

I think I really want to be an astronaut when I grow up. I wouldn’t necessarily want to go up into space, but be in the International Space Station. It would be really fascinating to go look at the Earth from a different angle than how we look at it. I find space exploration really interesting because we keep discovering things, and it’s only really come around in the past century that we’ve had all these great technological advances. You know the space telescope, Hubble? It’s a deep-space camera. We’re actually sending a version of that called Voyager 2, and it’s going to visit Pluto and take pictures in 2022 — that’s when it’ll arrive.

I kind of have a fear of the dark, but I’ll get over it probably when I get older. It just scares me at night because I always know something bad is happening somewhere in the world and I just don’t want it to happen near me. Recently there’s been terrorist bombings and school shootings and my parents get really scared when that happens. They don’t want me turning into one of those kids.

I don’t really like when people do stupid stuff. Like, “Do you want to go sledding down that hill?” And there’s no snow. Or like, “Do you want to do those crazy bike ramps?” or “Do you want to ding-dong-ditch people?” Like, Why are we doing this? That doesn’t do anything. It’s not comfortable to me. I don’t want to make trouble — I want to stay away from it. — as told to James Bigley II

[Editor’s Note: As an extension of the “A Boy’s Life” feature in Cleveland Magazine’s March issue, we will be publishing additional boys' stories on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the month. For all these stories, click on the “A Boy's Life” tag.]