Teen Mom Confidential: Secrets & Scandals From MTV's Most Controversial Shows by Ashley Majeski, Sean Daly Read Free Book Online Page A

board, telling the newspaper, “It was just the perfect situation. It just happened a little sooner than we expected.”
    At 18, Amber was the oldest girl chosen to appear during season one of 16 and Pregnant . She may also have been the saddest. "She told me, 'I was stuck in a dead-end situation at school with no desire to study, a dying father and a mother who chose her boyfriend over me,'" Franco said. MTV cameras captured her dropping out of Anderson High School but made no mention of the fact that Amber had recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. (She would later also be diagnosed with dissociative disorder, which caused her to “black out.”) producers left out many of the details of Amber's early life and her father's struggle with alcohol. (Her mother also had problems with booze, causing her to be arrested on Christmas Eve, 2007 for driving while intoxicated.)
    On the day she was sentenced to five years in prison for her crimes, Amber told the judge she wished she had never agreed to do the show.
     

    MACI WAS A CHEERLEADER, SOFTBALL STAR
    Maci Deshane Bookout is a second-generation teen mother. Her older brother Matthew was born just weeks after mom, Sharon Galbraith, graduated from Hixon High School near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Against tremendous odds, Sharon - who married Maci's dad, Billy “Gene” Bookout that same year - managed to juggle two kids and college, eventually earning a Bachelor's degree. She quickly became Maci's biggest inspiration.
    “I think Maci, in her mind, thought that she could do it, because we did,” Sharon revealed during the Teen Mom Farewell Special in 2012. The Bookout kids, just three years apart in age, were both popular with their classmates and involved in various sports. Maci was a cheerleader in middle school, rode dirt bikes and competed in beauty pageants. But softball was her true passion. She continued to play right up until becoming pregnant at age 16.
    By the time MTV cameras set up shop at the family's Tennessee home in September 2008, Maci was already well into her eighth month of pregnancy. “At first, it was extremely awkward having people constantly hanging around the house,” she told students during a 2012 speaking engagement at Slippery Rock University. “In the beginning, I didn't understand what the big deal was because I'm just Maci. I never thought I was that interesting.”
    Audiences disagreed. Her episode of 16 and Pregnant - and future installments of Teen Mom - were chock full of drama between the pretty strawberry blonde and her always complaining ex-boyfriend, Ryan Edwards. One of the most popular guys at Ooltewah High School, Maci considered Ryan to be quite a catch and many of her classmate were green with envy. “Ryan...was THAT guy in high school,” classmate Melissa Powell wrote on her personal blog. “He was absolutely beautiful, I remember that clearly. I'm pretty sure he drove a huge, lifted truck. He played football. He was friends with the 'popular' people. Maybe he was the popular one.”
    Like most girls at O.H.S., Maci was infatuated with Ryan from the start. “He was so cute, and I just wanted to look at him all the time,” she confessed to the Slippery Rock students. “He had a really pretty truck and, you know…the things that are just so important in your partner when you're 16.”
    It took Maci just three short months to be overcome with passion and move their relationship into the bedroom. “I was the one who talked him into having sex with me,” she said. “Apparently, since I was a virgin, he was scared of me. I thought there was something wrong with me. But, you know, I finally talked him into it.”
    What Maci forgot to talk about was birth control, and soon she began her journey into unplanned parenthood. “If you think of how cool it's going to be that I get to get married, and move out and have a family…[I] just look at the bright side,” Maci revealed in the casting tape she filmed for 16 and