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Truth and Consequences at Pregnancy High

Marilyn Martinez, 18, with Martha.

(Photo: Clémence de Limburg)

The nursery is a clown’s paradise, brightly painted and well outfitted with funds donated by makeup artist Bobbi Brown. (In addition to the traditional high-school curriculum, Jane Addams teaches a number of vocations, including cosmetology, which Grace is studying.) Grace and Iruma each commandeer a crib and begin to strip down their daughters to their underwear, so that a caretaker can check the children for marks. Then the mothers fill out a form about when their child last ate, the child’s mood, how the baby has been sleeping. Just before the bell rings for second period, they leave the nursery and head upstairs to school. For the next seven hours, they’ll get to be kids again themselves.

Grace got pregnant in January 2006, less than a month after her 14th birthday and soon after she lost her virginity to a 15-year-old boy from the neighborhood named Nikko Vega. He was the only person she’d slept with, or even wanted to. After he broke up with a girlfriend (“A ho,” Grace sniffs), she began cutting her eighth-grade classes to meet him at his apartment. Even then, she had full curves and a round and inviting face. She was normally sweet, but if pressed, she could fire off a string of expletives so fast the words blurred together. Nikko liked that about her. One day, the two of them found themselves playing more than Nintendo, and they just let it happen.

“It was heat-of-the-moment stuff,” Grace says of having sex for the first time. Getting pregnant wasn’t even on her mind. But it was on Nikko’s: “A couple of hours after, I was thinking, like, Damn.” He eventually asked Grace if she should go on birth control, but they knew that would make her mom suspicious. They decided to take their chances, though it bothered Nikko to be so reckless. “A lot of people I knew had kids young, and I didn’t want to be one of them,” he admits. He had hoped to go to college on a football scholarship, had even made a pact with his friends to put off fatherhood. “Like, ever since we were younger, we all spoke about, ‘No kids.’ All of us.”

“It didn’t work,” Grace says archly. “Everybody he grew up with has a kid now.”

Grace didn’t know she was pregnant for months. She didn’t get morning sickness, headaches, or cramps. She still did step dancing, played football after school, rode roller coasters when her mom took her to a theme park, fit into her regular clothes. She hadn’t been having her period long enough for its absence to be a major cause for concern. When she went to a neighborhood clinic to get tested, just in case, and the results came back positive, she was shocked. “I didn’t really know what to do,” she says. “I didn’t know what to ask. I was just like, ‘What?’ ”

When she told Nikko, he walked away without saying a word, but a couple of hours later, he returned, driven back by the hangdog devotion he has for Grace and by fear of her disapproval. She told him that she wanted to keep the baby and that she was happy about the decision, “in a sad sort of way.” She loved babies, but she wasn’t sure what she was getting into. To the extent that he could be there for her, an extent that even he understood to be meager, Nikko said he was onboard.

It took Grace a month to work up the nerve to tell her mother. When Mayra came home from work one day, Grace, her older sister, Samantha, and her cousin were sitting in front of the building waiting for her “like there was a funeral.” In the elevator ride up to the apartment, Mayra looked from one girl to the next. “Which one of you is pregnant?” she asked. She thought Samantha would answer, but when she didn’t, the realization set in that it was her younger daughter who was in trouble.

“How could you?” Mayra screamed, standing in their living room, shaking with anger. “How could you? You see our situation, you see what I have on my plate. How could you be so selfish?”

Grace ran to her bedroom, sobbing. Mayra stayed in the living room, sobbing. Mayra’s own mother walked in the door and demanded to know what was going on.

“Your granddaughter,” Mayra wailed, “your 14-year-old granddaughter decided you needed to see a great-grandkid.”

“Oh my God,” the old woman said. “¡Ay, Dios mío! ¡Ay, Dios mío, ayúdenos!”

For a month, Mayra cried every day. Having gotten married at 16 and had Samantha at 17, she was loath to become a grandmother at 36. She had asked Grace repeatedly if she had started having sex, and the girl had always denied it. Between her parents and her own children, the apartment was already overcrowded, and money stretched thin. She threatened to send Grace to live with her father, who had left the family a decade ago. For years, they hadn’t been able to track him down. Now he had a new family in Philadelphia, and Grace had been in cautious contact. But when they called to tell him about the pregnancy, he made it clear that she wasn’t welcome. Grace hasn’t spoken to him since.