Epilogue

There's an old saying in the military that goes something like this: No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Basically, what that means is that, no matter how well you plan something, unforeseen circumstances will rear their heads and fuck things up.

The first evidence of this in this little family's new arrangement can't honestly be called a "fuck up", in that it didn't require any changes to the formula to be made. On the other hand, it was the very definition of "fuck up".

It happened when Karen went to the doctor to get a prescription for birth control pills. The doctor said he couldn't prescribe them to her, because she was already pregnant. The subsequent discussion, plus tests he ran, established that her probable date of conception was late July, earlier that year. Her due date was set in April of the following year.

While this did not require modification of "the plan" as it was referred to, it did speed up the wedding a bit, and it brought a whole new significance to the dating other people thing. Now that was very serious, and had to be done in a convincing manner, because the wedding was going to take place the day before school started.

Basically, Mandy and Jack were going to return to school as step-siblings.

In one sense, though, it made it easier to get the whole scam off to a great start. Mandy was able to deliver the news to her friends that her father had "saddled her" with Jack Ross as her new step brother, and commiserate with them about her misfortune. When one of the girls said, "I think he's kind of cute," that allowed Mandy to say, "Well, you can have him. He farts and eats all our food and leaves his stinky shoes lying around."

Likewise, when Jack got back with his friends, he was able to say, "I thought having Mandy for a sister would be cool. You know, like I might get to see her running around in her underwear or something? But man, what a bitch she turned out to be! Everything is hers, and she thinks she can order me around."

Gradually, as a few weeks passed, and then a month, and then two months, they found it was easy to act like step-siblings at school, calling each other brother and sister and achieving a sort of public level of peaceful coexistence with each other. People expected them to learn to get along, so they gradually did that. But it was clear to their friends that their relationship was based on the tolerance required of two young people who had been forced into close contact. They were, as things turned out, both good actors.

And then, when they got home, behind closed doors, Jack mounted his lover and rodded her long, deep, and continuous, as they reaffirmed their undying love for each other.

Both Bob's and Karen's parents had passed on, so there was a small, hastily thrown together wedding to which some teachers, some auto parts store employees, and some volunteers of the Boggy Creek Restoration Project were invited. Karen and Bob settled into married life with very few bumps. Their primary concern was that there wasn't enough room in either house for both teens to have their own room, much less have a room to use as a nursery for the baby. To that end, they worked with a realtor in town, putting both their houses on the market, and looking for something bigger. There were a number of suitable properties on the market that would fill their needs nicely, but the economy in that part of the world was depressed. While that meant it was a buyer's market for them, not many people were interested in buying either Bob's or Karen's homes for their full worth. Taking a leap of faith, they decided to rent out their old houses and buy a new one, a bank forclosure, which they got for a song.

As things turned out, they were able to charge rent that was almost double what their old mortgages were, and that paid for the new one. It meant they were landlords, but that was manageable because the new house, while just outside of town, was close enough they could keep a close eye on the rental properties. Bob was handy, and thought he could take care of most upkeep issues in the rental properties.

For Jack and Amanda, the subterfuge of being lovers privately, while pretending to have no interest in each other publicly, became a game that was great fun. That first year, while they were juniors, their dating patterns were those of kids who want to have fun, but not get tied down. Because of that it seemed normal to their peers that they went on a lot of group dates. Twice they were on a group date in each other's company, though ostensibly with other partners. But that was the thing about group dating. Unless couples were already formally going together, the group was usually comprised of kids who just wanted to hang out and have fun together. There were a lot of kids, as it turned out, who didn't want the drama of a "real" boyfriend or girlfriend. There were some individual dates, primarily to school dances that year. Prior to going on those dates, the young couple would lie in bed, either making love or after finishing that pursuit, and talk about what was going to be okay and not allowed when they went out with other people. Both trusted each other enough to allow more latitude than their parents would ever have believed.

Mandy, for example, spent ten minutes kissing her date good night on the front porch after the Winter Wonderland dance that year. Karen "saved" her by turning on the porch light and opening the door. That young man went home with blue balls for sure. Jack also kissed some girls good night, but not with the interest Mandy did. She was intent on getting a few rumors started by the boys she kissed, and it worked. She never allowed anything more than kissing, though. And when the rumors included a little more than that, she didn't complain. One boy said he'd gotten in her panties, though, and she scorned him in public during lunch, yelling at him for being a liar. He didn't get any dates for two months after that.

Also to advance the theory that her brother was a pain in the ass, whenever Mandy had a sleepover, and there were half a dozen nubile young women cavorting about the house, Jack made a pest of himself. One time he knocked on her door and, when it was answered by a girl dressed in pajamas, Jack leered at her, before saying, "Tell Mandy she needs to do her chores, because I'm not going to do them for her." Mandy had reacted by yelling, "Go away, you dick, and leave my friends alone!" Bob showed up eventually and sternly reminded her that she would still be held accountable for her chores, before he ordered Jack to leave the girls alone.

They played their parts superbly, and no one in school believed there was any interest between them of an even faintly romantic nature.

Karen was one of those women who carry a baby easily, and even up into the eighth month she had relatively little discomfort. At home, her belly was a popular place for one or the other family members to rest their heads, talking to the baby in there, or resting a hand on her stretched skin to await movement. Only when her due date was two weeks away did she feel like a beached whale who had to waddle everywhere she went.

Her due date came and passed, but only by two days, before she gave birth to her second child, a girl, who they named Jennifer Lynne. Jennifer's presence altered things subtly, at first, primarily because of the noise she made in the middle of the night. But during the day she had lots of caregivers. Amanda in particular spent hours learning how to take care of her baby sister, thinking of it as practice for when she would get to let Jack make one of these precious things inside her.

Jack and Bob, for reasons unknown, both had the knack of rocking little Jennifer to sleep, even when she fought it.

That summer, after taking driver's ed, Jack got his license, and a job at the auto parts store, delivering parts to the various mechanics and garages in town.

During their senior year, after a year had passed while the marriage settled into something that could be defined as bliss, and the teens began to begin to truly understand what a marriage involved, the normal changes in any relationship resulted in things that were different from the previous year. As seniors, the kids felt like the future loomed a bit. Having something at home that very few teens get to have, the thought of all the changes that would result when they left home for college was a little worrisome. So, too, was the pressure for their relationships in public to become more serious.

After talking about this, Jack and Mandy agreed that something more than kissing might be required on dates during their senior year. That said, neither wanted to do more than was necessary to keep the fraud going. But even that ended up causing some difficulties. On one date with a boy named Reggie Cooper, Mandy's bullshit meter malfunctioned. She thought she liked the boy he pretended to be and his slick technique caused Mandy to find herself with his hand under her shirt and her own hand gripping the erection in his pants. It was clear Reggie was going for the gold, but she managed to extricate herself from that by telling him she wasn't on the pill and was terrified of becoming pregnant. He tried everything, from telling her he'd pull out, to swearing he could get her the morning after pill, but she insisted he had to take her home. He wasn't happy, but he didn't push it, no doubt thinking that he'd have better luck in the future, when he would be sure to have a condom with him. She didn't go out with him again, though, and told him point blank that the reason she was turning him down was because she wasn't sure she couldn't stop herself again.

With Jack, the problem wasn't what he wanted to do. It was what the girl who was trying to ensnare him wanted. And she wanted it all. He managed to resist her attempts to get him to fuck her by getting her off with his fingers and then taking her home. Later was it revealed she was already pregnant, and wanted someone to blame it on other than the boy who had actually gotten her that way.

He was sobered by what had almost happened to him. In a burst of what can only be called panic, he told some people at school that he was thinking about becoming a priest. The non-Catholic girls in school assumed he was Catholic and the Catholic girls lost interest in him completely, even though they never saw him at mass.