Faux pregnancy -- the reaction to the reaction

TOPPENISH, Wash. -- "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" emailed.

So did George Stephanopoulos and David Klawans, the guy who produced the movie "Nacho Libre" with Jack Black.

When Gaby Rodriguez revealed she spent six and a half months of her senior year pretending to be pregnant, the world weighed in, and media outlets from California to Canada, even overseas, wanted to retell her story.

Literary agents sent inquiries. Television and radio producers called.

And the 17-year-old Toppenish High School senior was caught off-guard.

"I completely had no idea that my project would get this much attention," Gaby said Friday, describing the last week and a half as "overwhelming."

"I just thought that I was going to be able to do my presentation April 20 and do my final project at the end of May and it was going to be over," she said. "I'm excited for all the opportunities but scared that something could go wrong in the end."

Five days after the Yakima Herald-Republic featured a front-page story about Gaby's social experiment, representatives from the three major national networks -- ABC, NBC and CBS -- made presentations at her school, vying for the chance to interview Gaby.

"Each network sent a closer," said Toppenish High School principal Trevor Greene, who has a stack of inquiries nearly 2 inches thick from reporters, producers, professors -- even a soldier stationed in Iraq.

"My reaction to the reaction is that I look forward to the day that I can sit back and have a reaction to the reaction," he said. "It's been going so fast and so consistent, there has been no time to think about anything except how to continue to protect Gaby and help her share her message in a way that it's not exploiting her."

He hasn't had time to respond to all the interview requests, which he's stopped counting. The farthest away, he said, came from BBC News in London and the Toronto Star.

Of all the attention, Greene said, "I think it's a tribute to her preparation," adding, "I feel like it's far from over at this point."

Gaby's slated to travel to New York City early this month, accompanied by her principal, science teacher, mom, boyfriend and possibly best friend.

She's looking forward to meeting John Quiñones, the Emmy award-winning co-anchor of ABC's "Primetime" whose work includes the series of hidden-camera reports called "What Would You Do?"

She said she decided to go with ABC for her first national network interview "because they have vast amounts of opportunities open for me, not just right now but in the future."

Gaby -- who has a 3.8 grade-point average and serves as president of her school's MEChA, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, Club, began wearing her homemade, basketball-sized, prosthetic belly to school after spring break. Before that, she wore baggy sweaters and sweatshirts to conceal her faux pregnancy.

Her supposed due date was July 27.

She came up with the idea during her sophomore year Advanced Placement biology class with Shawn Myers, the teacher slated to travel with her to New York.

This week, Myers said Gaby's project -- and the widespread reaction it garnered -- has been "very well received" by THS students and staff, many of whom are still "kind of shocked and amazed she was able to pull it off."

He's impressed, too: "The determination that it took and the focus that it took for her to stay in character was incredible."

When Gaby told people she was pregnant, she would get the same response, over and over.

"I constantly heard, 'It was bound to happen,'" she said. "We're looked down upon because Latinas are more likely to be pregnant."

The student body at Toppenish High School is 85 percent Hispanic.

Two weeks before she took off her faux baby belly during an emotional school assembly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that black and Hispanic teen girls are two to three times more likely to give birth than white teens.

"I definitely wish it was less," said Gaby, who wants to study social work or sociology in college. "The point I was trying to get across is that you have to take control of your life and not live your life in the shadows of stereotypes and rumors."

Only a handful of people -- her mother, 52-year-old Juana Rodriguez; her boyfriend, 20-year-old Jorge Orozco; and her principal among them -- knew Gaby was pretending.

Her teachers and fellow students, except for her best friend, didn't realize they were part of a social experiment. Neither did six of her seven siblings, including four older brothers, her boyfriend's parents, and his five younger brothers and sisters.

"She had everything planned out -- the months, the timeline, everything," said Saida Cortes, Gaby's best friend, also a 17-year-old Toppenish senior.

What she didn't plan on was all the attention.

The story sparked an influx of requests from media outlets from San Francisco and Miami to Boston and New York, the Lifetime Movie Network and Latina Magazine to Dr. Drew.

A television reporter even tried tracking down Gaby last weekend during her English class field trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore. It marked her first weekend of not faking a pregnancy since last October.

"I was able to enjoy the trip being me and not feeling like I had to cover something," Gaby said, adding she hid from the TV reporter. "I ran away and snuck into the theater while she was being sidetracked by my teacher."

Tuesday afternoon, moments before meeting with the television executives, both Gaby and Saida said they were surprised by the reaction.

"She never thought it would go so over the top," Saida said. "She just thought this was going to be something small."

But, Saida said, when she looked online, "It was her and the royal wedding."

In fact, Greene was returning emails and phone calls on Easter Sunday, even meeting with a television representative who flew in from Los Angeles.

By the end of the day Monday, he had received email inquiries from 62 separate individuals, some with up to seven replies.

That didn't include the pages of handwritten phone messages on a yellow legal pad. There were 29 just from last Friday, a day after the story first appeared.

"The impact it's had locally has been huge," said John Cerna, superintendent of the Toppenish School District. "It's big news. It's good news."

Cerna remains impressed with Gaby: "She did apologize for what she did, the deception part of it," he said. "She apologized to teachers; she apologized to her peers. Then she talked about how she needed to take care of herself before taking care of somebody else. It was so powerful."

"For her to have the type of courage to do something like that says volumes about her character," Cerna said.

Gaby also forgave peers and family members for the things they said about her while they didn't know she was pretending to be pregnant.

"My whole life I had to fight against stereotypes and the labels they gave me," she said. "Friends said stuff about me, but I just have to move on. I'm willing to forgive all of those friends because they were naive to the situation."

In the end, she said, "I got a lot of relieved faces and a lot of people telling me how strong I was to do this."

She also got a standing ovation from the student body of 681.

Now, there's talk of hiring an entertainment lawyer, maybe doing a book or movie. So who might play the principal?

"My mother would want Tom Selleck," Greene said. "My daughter would want Orlando Bloom. I don't think I'm going to make the cut. This is all about Gaby."

Her favorite actress, the one she hopes might someday play her in a movie, is Victoria Justice.

But, Gaby said, "That's in the future-future, not now."

* Adriana Janovich can be reached at 509-577-7653 or ajanovich@yakimaherald.com.