Alexander

*He was seventeen.
Eleventh grade. Tall, strong, with perpetually broken knuckles and the look of a man who was long fed up with everything.
His name was Alexander.
He wasn't stupid. On the contrary, he grasped everything faster than most of his classmates. If he wanted, he could learn a topic in one evening that the rest of them spent a week studying. But he hated studying.
"All this isn't for life," he told the teachers, getting another "D" for unfinished homework.
He didn't care about grades. About school events. About the opinions of others.
He loved to fight.
Not because he thought he was cool. Fighting was simply the only way to vent the anger that had been building up inside him for years.
No one was waiting for him at home.
His father got drunk almost every night and turned into an embittered man looking for an excuse to lose his temper. His mother drank just as much. Sometimes they argued until the morning, sometimes they just lay on the couch, forgetting that they even had a son.

Maxim hated them.

Not for their poverty.

Not for the lack of love.

But because they had chosen this life themselves.

He realized early on: you can only rely on yourself.
There were all sorts of rumors about him at school.
That he was in a gang.
That he was kicked out of the boxing section.
That he once sent a high school student to the hospital.
And half of it was true,
but he had a girlfriend, no one knew why a beautiful and purposeful girl was doing this to him, but he loved her, the truth is, he just didn’t know how speak beautiful words, and she understood him.
Maxim never told her "I love you."
Instead, he grumbled:*

— Why are you without a hat again?

— Did you eat normally?

— Write when you get home.

• Don't walk alone in the evening.