Disclaimer: Recess was created by Paul Germain & Joe Ansolabehere, and is owned by Disney. Gretchen's mother is telling the story.

Gretchen's Conception

A Story By Skatole

My parents were old-fashioned. They thought that I was too young to know what love is - so when I told them, just after my sixteenth birthday, that I wanted to marry Paul, they sneered the idea. They wouldn't give permission for us to marry, and banned me from seeing him. That didn't stop us. Paul would sneak out of his house and into mine, and we'd sit in my bedroom, just being with each other.

A few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I was walking home from school and a man dragged me off the path. He put his hand over my mouth and told me to shut up. He dragged me into an overgrown lot and attacked me. I laid still, hoping my non-frantic reaction would make him go away, but he did it anyway. He ran off afterward. I walked home and had a shower.

My parents thought I was being cold to them because they wouldn't accept that I was going to marry Paul when we were eighteen.

Paul knew there was something wrong. I admitted it to him, then I begged him not to leave me. He just looked at me, the hurt in his eyes pierced my soul. How on earth could I have thought that about him?

We - Paul and I - went to the doctor the next day. They called the police. Then there was the examination, the taking of clothes, the talking.

And then the doctor asked if I wanted an abortion, in case I became pregnant.

'We've already decided we're going to keep the baby, if there is one,' I told him.

The doctor was surprised; he urged me to have an abortion, but Paul and I were adamant: neither of us planned having a baby - Paul hadn't even been part of it - but we were going to keep it, and we were going to rear it as part of our family.

My parents went wild when I told them I was pregnant with Paul's child.

'Don't you ever come to this house again,' my mother said.

Paul's parents welcomed us; we lived in their spare room until Paul got a job that would allow us to rent an apartment.

Trips to the ante-natal clinic soon took up a lot of my time. At seven months, I was so big that Paul's father joked they'd have to replace the doors if I got larger!

The baby decided to be born less than a week after Paul got the keys to our apartment. He was there when the baby came into the world, and his smile was like a rainbow when he handed the baby girl to me.

We named her Gretchen, after Paul's grandmother.

My mother and father have only seen Gretchen once; Paul and I walked out of the supermarket, two-year-old Gretchen in the trolley's baby-seat. My father gazed at the baby with a longing expression on his face, but he was snatched away by my mother. Reconciliation came at my mother's funeral. My father was part of Gretchen's life until she was fourteen.

I hope with all my soul that Gretchen's smartness comes from the books and science sets from her grandparents (Paul's parents and my father); I hate thinking that perhaps she inherited something from that man who attacked me. The police never did find out who he was, although they did a brilliant job of investigating.

Paul was reluctant for us to tell Gretchen how she came to be. He was afraid she would reject him, like those children on television chat shows.

But we did tell her. She sat in silence, digesting the information, and then said it made no difference.

'We're a family,' she stated, the love shining in her eyes.

Paul cried that night. The next day he went out and brought home a brand new computer; he couldn't tell Gretchen how much he loved her, so giving her a brand new computer was the next best thing.

Thank you for taking the time to read this story. Please read and review : )

PS - If the rape aspect of this story has affected you in any way, a good site to visit is .org.