17 and Pregnant.

About a week later, he came up to me during lunch, not bothering to even say hi and pressed his lips against mine. It felt so weird.

I had never had a boyfriend before him, so this was the first time I got kissed. Not only that I didn’t have any experience, but everyone watching creeped me out. After some seconds I started to kiss him back.

Our kiss wasn’t anything special, no tongues, just moving our lips against each others. It also ended pretty quickly. Only seconds, before he pulled me up and dragged me out of the cafeteria, asking me out.

This was the best day of my life, the day I really got to know Max.

We sat in the school's garden the whole lunch period, just talking, getting to know each other. Max told me so much about him then I was fascinated. Everything he told me was awesome, though didn’t match his character at all. At least not what had known about him before.

Max was loving and kind, he always helped others, when they needed him. Though at school he didn’t act like this. There he always pretended to be the tough one who hung out with the assholes. These were all the guys who picked on the younger kids, who weren't able to defend themselves. I never liked any of them, except for Max. Something told me he was different and I was right.

While we were sitting there Max even told me about his family, that he didn’t have any siblings, and about his father, who had died when he was three.

Back then he couldn’t understand what dying meant. He thought his Dad was going to come back, that he was going to be alright. He was too young to understand this. Cancer was something he only knew as the little red animals, that ran around on beaches. He didn’t know a person could've cancer, that it was an illness, that killed most of the people who got it.

The only way for him to imagine what the doctors told him about his father was that the man had one of these little red things in his body. He could only imagine, that it was eating him from the inside. That's what the doctors told him. Now that he was older, he could only laugh about the way he thought back then. When he was about twelve, he understood what cancer was. He pleaded for his Mom to tell him, why his father hadn't come back yet. By then, he knew he was dead, though he still didn’t understand why he was gone.

His father had died of liver cancer, a tumor that was building inside of him. At the age of twelve Max started to understand it. It was important for him to know why his father had died. Max never had a normal childhood. He was raised only by his mother. The other part was missing, though his Mom had had some boyfriends meanwhile, he couldn’t accept them as his father. They weren't, after all. They weren't his father. His father was dead, he was never going to come back.

Just like my Mom.