Carmelo

This girl in my school Jenna had a kid with this guy Ricky when she was 15 and he was 17 or 18.  Her parents seemed to really hate her so they made her keep the baby and she had to keep going to school through the whole pregnancy.  Jenna was pretty psyched about it.  She was pretty over high school at that point and was always bragging about how she was going to drop out as soon as her parents let her.  Ricky thought the whole thing was pretty funny.

Jenna told everyone that she and Ricky were going to raise the kid together and they'd get married in a couple of years, even though it was obvious to everyone that that was never going to happen.  Ricky stopped talking to her pretty much immediately after he found out she was pregnant, although I don't think they'd really been talking to each other before very much either, it's not like they were dating or anything.  One night a few of Ricky's friends went to spraypaint "MOTHER" all over Jenna's house, but they got the address wrong and ended up tagging this really old couple's house.

Anyway she had the baby in like March I think.  She named him David Robert, but Ricky named him Carmelo.  He claimed he'd been at the hospital when the baby had been born and got the birth certificate from the nurse and filled it out himself while Jenna was still knocked out, but Jenna said he was lying.  Nobody believed Ricky but everyone called the kid Carmelo anyway, or just Melo.

Jenna brought the baby into school at least once a week.  The dumber girls would all crowd around her and play with it and tell their boyfriends they wanted babies too, maybe over the summer, and the boyfriends told them to get real and called Jenna slut and things like that.  She'd just laugh like she knew better.  Ricky's friends would all try to swipe the kid when Jenna's back was turned.  They'd grab him and run down the hallways with him and hold him over a trash can and threaten to drop him in.  Jenna never chased after them, she just stood there and whined until a teacher walked by and made the kid give Jenna her baby back.  One time Jenna didn't know where Carmelo was for like four periods.  Some kids took him into the weight room but then got bored of him and just left him there for a while.  Jenna got better at watching him after a while, so the guys would just go up to it and scream in its face until it started crying.  Ricky never did any of that stuff but he always watched it and laughed and never did anything to stop it, and whenever anyone asked him if it bothered him that his friends were terrorizing his son he just shrugged and said he didn't care.

Towards the end of the school year Ricky started complaining that Carmelo was autistic.  He said Jenna had done a bunch of pills when she was pregnant and had turned Carmelo's brain to mush.  Jenna said the baby wasn't stupid, he was just young, but he definitely had a sort of glazed-over look in his eyes and after a couple months he stopped reacting when kids screamed and crashed cymbals from the band room in his face and throwing chewed food at him in lunch.  Teachers by now were sick of dealing with the baby, so they either pulled Jenna aside and told her to find a nice daycare for Carmelo's good, or just told her to leave class whenever the baby made a noise, so Jenna spent a lot of her days just wandering the hall complaining loudly about how difficult it was to be a single mother and disrupting things.

The next September, Ricky sued Jenna for custody of Carmelo.  He told everyone that once he won he was going to sell him to a rich, barren couple somewhere and use the money to buy a new truck.  He said he'd been researching it and he was going to give Carmelo gender reassignment surgery because girls were more valuable than little boys.  Ricky's family was rich so they hired a rich lawyer who just filed a bunch of nuisance suits against Jenna and her family until she gave up.  Jenna wasn't that bothered, she said she'd just have another baby with a way smarter father who wasn't such a dick, but no one would touch her at this point.

Ricky started bringing Carmelo into school every day, but he wouldn't let Jenna see him.  When he was carrying a lot of books or something he'd put Carmelo in his car seat and kick him down the hall.  Carmelo flipped over a couple times but he didn't seem bothered.  Ricky bought a little helmet for him.  I heard Ricky used to take Carmelo around to parties and try to show him off and get him drunk, but the kid slept a lot, more than most babies, so it only worked once or twice.

Finally Ricky wrapped his old truck around a pole and went into a lingering coma for a while before his family pulled the plug.  Carmelo was in the truck with him, but they never found him -- his car seat had flown out of the truck, but it was found empty and unbuckled.  Everyone said he probably crawled away after the crash and hid into the woods, to get as far away from his shitty parents and doomed life as possible, but Jenna said she knew Carmelo better than anyone, and she was absolutely sure that he was definitely dead.