On Thursday, as he prepared for a moment he once figured would never arrive, the kid sits in his mother’s Denver apartment watching sitcoms with his uncle and laughing his head off.
It is the last day, he says, of his childhood. And good riddance.
Over the next three months, Andres Magana, barely 18, will marry, become a father and join the Navy — not necessarily in that order.
He and his girlfriend could have become just another statistic — even some family members had pegged them that way. He was, after all, a kid who had dropped out of Thomas Jefferson High and just drifted.
And then one day, accompanying his mother to church, he met Monique. He fell hard.
She was a student at Hope Online Learning Academy, a Douglas County Schools charter where his mother teaches. He enrolled, most think because of Monique.
Late last winter, Monique, now 17, discovered she was pregnant. She presented him ultrasound pictures of his son.
“I just stood there and cried,” Magana recalled. “The baby made me grow up on the spot. Most guys I know would have run. It made me a man.”
He rid himself of every friend he thought he had and focused on school. He knew he couldn’t support a family while in high school.
Yet if he wanted to graduate on time, he needed to complete six classes in four weeks.
He told his supervisor at King Soopers what he faced. His boss told him the store would accommodate him.
“There were days when I thought I wasn’t going to make it,” Magana said. “And then I would think of the baby.”
He got through the first four classes just fine. The last two — psychology and sociology — “just kicked my butt,” he said. He arranged with the school to get a key to work through the night.
“I didn’t have a computer, and the libraries would close,” he said. “I had to cut back on work and took a huge pay cut. I didn’t care. I did it for my son.”
Thursday night, Andres Magana walked in a cap and gown down the aisle of the Metropolitan State College Event Center to receive his high school diploma.
He had already put in his paperwork with the Navy. At 5-feet-8 and 205 pounds, he is being made to lose 15 pounds before induction.
“I’m already in training,” he said. “I know that the Navy, with its housing and benefits, will set me, my wife and son for life.”
He is determined not to be like so many of his former friends, he said, who have children they do not know.
“I’ve got a cousin, only 16, who has a baby. She doesn’t know the father,” he said. “Any fool, I figure, can make a baby, but it takes a man to raise one.”
He rarely sees his own father. Magana virtually raised the last two of his four sisters.
“My son, I want him to have everything I didn’t,” he said. “I’ve lived a tough life, but I am a good kid who has never done drugs or been in a gang.
“I will tell you, though, I never thought I would graduate, never thought this day would actually come. It’s another step, but it is a big weight off my shoulders.”
Monique, due to deliver Aug. 27, was at her parents’ home, making him a graduation cake.
“I love her so much,” Magana said. “I just want to marry her and take her and my son and build a good life for them.”
I love this story.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
