“Did you hear Esme is pregnant?”

A pregnancy is more than just an announcement. It is a stomach convex in a shape that draws a lot of attention. It is an expectant parent or two with surges of different emotions. After a while, the announcement becomes known everywhere.

Sometimes that isn’t always a good thing. Especially when the mother is in high school. When the news spreads, people start to look at the mother and see her stomach and nothing else. People start to think there is something wrong about the her situation. Perhaps they thought the girl was “smarter than that” or they “weren’t expecting it” from her.

Details get misconstrued and rumors surface. But rumors have to start somewhere. By the way, did you hear Esme is pregnant?

Senior Esmeralda Mora participates in Mariachi Huenachi and works hard on her school projects. Her Introduction to Early Childhood Development class gave her a project idea larger than life, or in this case, two lives. One life real, one life not so much. It was originally an assignment about anything related to pregnancy. At first, Mora’s idea was to do the project on how a baby’s life was affected by a young mother. But the Lifetime movie, The Pregnancy Project, changed everything.

The movie follows a true story in which Gaby Rodriguez, an 18-year-old high school student from Washington, pretends to be pregnant to address stereotypes and prejudices against teen mothers at her school. Mora had finally found her perfect project idea.

“I wanted to show how Wenatchee High School stereotypes kids,” Mora said. “I wanted to show how teen moms are capable of doing things other moms can do.”

The first thing Mora did was talk to her boyfriend, junior Christian Rivera, about her next steps. Originally, Rivera “didn’t want to do it at first” and was afraid of what people would think. But after her discussion with him, Mora went on to plan with her Introduction to Early Childhood Development teacher, Kathy Sadler. The two brainstormed ideas and laid out a plan.

The first step was to get the entire class in on it. The class had one job: start the rumor. Mora told the class to inform people of her pregnancy by saying: “Did you hear Esme is pregnant?” and not add any more details.

“I supported her 100 percent,” Sadler said. “It was really cool how the rest of the class had gone along with it too.”

If her classmates were to hear anything about her, they would write it down and report the things they heard back to Mora. At first, Mora didn’t think anything was going to happen, but then she started receiving text messages regarding her pregnancy. A flurry of different rumors circled her as well, including false accusations of the baby being someone other than Rivera’s.

“It made me feel weird that people thought that she was with someone else,” Rivera said. “It was just more concerning that people thought she was like that.”

Classmates also had a difficult time hearing what others had to say about her.

“It was hard for me to keep the secret because everyone was talking rude about her. Esme is not that kind of person,” classmate senior Emily Johnson said. “I’ve known her since freshman year so hearing people talk about her like that… made me mad.”

Another instance occurred where Sadler was walking in the hallway with a male student and they passed Mora in the hallway. The male student expressed his disappointment in Mora to Sadler, saying how he never thought “she would throw her life away.”

Besides the rumors, Mora felt another change in the people around her. Their eyes focused on one thing only: her stomach. A stomach that was attached by athletic tape at the top and bottom of the stomach and grew by adding T-shirts in between. The project began at the end of November and continued until the end of first semester, and the stomach continued to grow throughout the time period.

Equipped with the stomach and the rumors flying, Mora got a first-hand experience of what it is like to be pregnant in high school. Especially when it came time for her unknowing friends to hear about her pregnancy. Mora said she found herself arriving at school early enough and stay there until five minutes before the light to avoid people.

“It was really sad; it was hard to go through,” Mora said. “When I was going through the planning I was like ‘I can do this.’ When I was wearing the belly, I just wanted to hide. I felt embarrassed to be in school because I was pregnant.”

Mora originally told her mother that she was actually pregnant and her mother began to cry. After a week, she told her mother it was an experiment. Mora never told her father about it, but she figured her mother told him. Rivera did not tell his parents about the experiment. Mora’s friends did hear news about the pregnancy, but they did not know it was a project.

Her close friends found out about the experiment when they all went out to eat at Applebee’s. Her friends had been planning a baby shower for her before they found out that she was not actually pregnant. Mora said it was “hard to lie” her friends about the experiment.

After experiencing the different reactions of many people, Mora had one thing in mind during this time period.

“I wanted to demonstrate that we shouldn’t put teen moms in little boxes,” Mora said. “Just because someone is pregnant you shouldn’t look down on them.”

So now that the rumor is debunked, did you hear Esme isn’t pregnant?