Chapter 5

The problem was that Mandy loved Brad. And she loved having Brad's hard penis in her. And she loved the feel of his hot cum washing into her pussy.

Well ... the real problem was that she loved all those things at the same time she wasn't very good at paying attention to her menstrual cycle.

Of course, when you fuck like a bunny every night for two months, the chances of one of those wriggling sperm cells to penetrate an egg get way up there.

But she didn't think of that. Like at least forty thousand teenaged girls every year, she just didn't think that a boy, in this case her twin brother, who she shared a womb with, could fill her own womb with his baby.

But he could.

Her mother noticed first, because as she was cleaning the toilet in the kids bathroom one day, she noticed the same tampon lying there that she had seen at least a month ago. It had fallen out of the box, and Mandy hadn't replaced it. Margaret Jenkins was a very direct woman. When Mandy got home from cheer practice that night, her mother invited her into the master bedroom, and sat her down on the bed.

"When was your last period?" she asked, being very direct.

Mandy's eyes went out of focus and she looked up at the ceiling.

"I don't know. It was a while ago."

"Have you been having sex?" asked the most direct mother on the block.

Mandy's eyes got back in focus quickly. She didn't have to answer. Her mother saw it in her face.

There was a short recess, during which Mandy and her mother went to Walgreens and purchased a home pregnancy test. Mandy was instructed to read the directions carefully, on the way home.

Margaret was sitting on Mandy's bed, waiting, when the girl came out of the bathroom. Again, the look on her face told her mother what the results were.

"Who did this to you?" asked Margaret, wishing she wasn't quite so direct. She was pretty sure she wasn't going to like the answer. There wasn't a boy out there who deserved to have her baby girl like that.

Mandy was her mother's daughter. She could be direct too. She knew she could try lying, but that sooner or later they would be found out. So she just fell on her sword, so to speak.

"Brad," she whispered.

It takes parents a little while to get over big things that happen with or to their children. If a child dies, sometimes the parent never gets over it. A terrible injury may be the same way, unless full function returns. Even then, parents will be gun shy for years, worried that something else will happen.

That's with most things. But sometimes, parents can adjust a lot more quickly. A lot of that depends on how the parent views the child.

Butch and Maggie Jenkins had always known their twins were close. They were proud of that, actually. Their kids didn't fight like other kids. Their kids weren't surly like other kids. The twins got good grades, and did their chores. They were just good kids, and their parents felt lucky to have such wonderful children.

And when the full story came out, and Butch Jenkins found out why Brad had made the decisions he'd made, and why Mandy had pulled her brother on top of her like she had, he simply left the house and drove away. Margaret thought he was just blowing off steam. He thought things out while he drove around sometimes.

But that's not what Butch Jenkins was doing. Butch had boxed in college, and Butch demonstrated that fact to Paul Riley ... in person. Linda called 911, which was fine with Butch. He didn't kill the man who had planned on raping his daughter, but Paul would never walk the same again. He was sterile after that too.

Of course Butch was arrested, but he had plenty to make a deal with, and he shared it all with the prosecuting attorney, who happened to be a woman, who happened to have been a cheerleader, and who still loathed the sexism she had suffered while pursuing that activity.

Mandy and Brad were interviewed separately, but they already knew what they were going to say. They held nothing back ... about that night. Mandy described in vivid detail being made to fellate her brother, and hearing different boys saying "I'm gonna get me some of that," as well as other things that were said. Brad described what Dumbrowski had said, including the part about how Chad and Erica Strauss were having sex too. They knew they were going down, and they decided not to go down alone. After all, what had happened to them would never have happened if there had been no sleepover, or if the coaches would have been ethical and moral in their dealings with the kids.

It turned out two other girls were also pregnant, and then it surfaced that three girls had had abortions. The news became something that couldn't be contained or managed, and five girls in college came forward to claim that they, too had had abortions. People remembered other girls who had turned up pregnant, and whose families had moved away.

State investigators got involved, because things had happened on school grounds.

It was ugly, and sensational, and of course the news media ate it up. Almost everybody was grinding their teeth because they all knew there was tons of incredibly juicy stuff there, but nobody could get to it because the participants were all juveniles. They couldn't even interview the students.

And while law enforcement did interview the students, the results of those interviews were kept closely under wraps.

The charges laid against the Riley couple only fueled the fire. The arraignment was closed, because of the information about juveniles that would be presented, but the charges were a matter of public record: Rape ... Conspiracy to commit rape ... Contributing to the delinquency of multiple minors ... Providing alcoholic beverages to under age persons ... Indecent assault ... Indecent exposure ... Corrupting the morals of a minor.

Paul was charged with so many offenses that, if he was convicted of only half of them, he'd be in prison for 300 years or more. And his wife was a either a perpetrator or co-conspirator in everything, so she was facing just as much.

The paparazzi showed up, and there were people with cameras trying to take pictures of everything and everybody. They were reminded that publishing any pictures of underage victims was against the law, but their intent was merely to take the pictures and sell them. Whether or not they were published was somebody else's problem. And that meant that your picture could be taken any time, any where, and through any open window.

And of course the photographs of the children's parents were completely legal to publish.

Incredible sums were offered as bribes for information that couldn't be gotten from official sources.

Of course, the more sensational the information was, the more one got paid. Which meant there was motive to provide extra juicy information ... which might not be true.

Greedy publishers started publishing "details of the orgy" which had taken place. The names of students were not used, but photographs of their parents were linked to various bits of information. Lawsuits proliferated, both against publishers, and against parents of children involved, who appeared to be profiting from the situation.

Pretty soon, nobody knew what to believe, and that turned out to be important, because while Brad and Mandy's parents never whispered even one word of who had made Mandy's belly swell, rumors grew that it was an incest baby.

And, other than the kids at the party who had seen Brad on top of his sister ... almost nobody believed that those two kids were involved in incest. It was too juicy. It just couldn't be true.

It was a toxic environment, and with all the heat, Butch and Maggie Jenkins decided to get their children out of it.

Mandy and Brad were sent to their Uncle Bob's ranch in Wyoming.

Uncle Bob was a Republican. He owned thirty or more guns. He bought only American cars and trucks, and while he hired immigrants to work on his ranch, he took pains to make sure they were legal. He believed the death penalty was as valid as the need to shoot Old Yeller. When he sold cattle, he required the buyer to sign legal documents guaranteeing that the meat would be processed in America, and sold to American outlets. A buyer had ignored that, one time, and sold a load of beef to China. Bob had sued him and won. A more conservative man would be hard to find.

So it's pretty easy to understand why Butch and Maggie thought their children would be in good hands with Maggie's brother.

But Bob was also a philosopher, and living on the ranch, during the long, cold winters, there wasn't much to do but read and think. And while Bob thought in conservative terms about most things ... he didn't think in conservative terms about every thing.

Maggie had tearfully told him who the father of Mandy's baby was. She was still agonizing over whether or not to get Mandy an abortion. She was clearly worried that the baby, if allowed to come to term, would have two heads.

So the first thing Bob did, when the kids got there, was to sit them down for a little chat.

"I understand you two made a baby," he said, bluntly.

Both kids' faces flamed red. They hadn't really had time to get to know him yet. The last time they'd seen him was almost ten years earlier. Ranchers don't get a lot of vacation time. In the spring, summer and fall, there's too much to do. And in the winter is when you do all the repairs needed to be ready for next spring.

"Is that true?" he asked.

Mandy stuck her jaw out. "Yes," she said. Both the look on her face and the sound of her voice were testy. She was tired of being judged. They hadn't started doing it on purpose, and their love for each other had overwhelmed their better nature. She knew they had screwed up. People didn't need to keep reminding her of the fact.

"So what do you want to do about the fetus?" he asked. He sat back and waited. Again, it was Mandy who spoke.

"It's a baby, not a fetus," she said, her voice quivering.

"Technically it's a fetus until it's born," said Bob.

"Nobody calls this a fetus bump!" snapped Mandy, running her hand over the gentle swell of her abdomen. She had just started showing.

"Point taken," said Bob, who now knew that she did not think of the thing in her belly as something distant. "The question is, do you want to have the baby or not?"

"Yes!" Now it was Brad who spoke. "That baby is a part of each of us. We can't kill it."