The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers (Chapter 48) - 08-25-25 -- (Author) ABDeLane

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 1, 2024 at 2:36 AM
Content: The one thing Madelyn desires most in the world is to wear diapers again, and she is prepared to do anything to make that wish come true.

As inexplicable as that desire is for a twelve-year-old girl, it is one she has obsessed over for the past three years. Ever since Madelyn tried on a pull-up that a distant cousin had used for bedwetting, the thought of what it would be like to forego her underwear for that padded, crinkling sensation between her legs has been a desire she has been unable to shake.

Every other plan to get her hands on diapers or pull-ups has failed up to now. But this time it is going to be different. This time it is going to work. This time she isn’t going to back out at the last minute.

The plan is simple. All Madelyn has to do is intentionally begin to wet the bed at night. Then, her parents will have no choice but to get her the diapers she so badly desires.

What could possibly go wrong?

Hi everyone! Have lurked on and off around ADISC for a decade plus. Glad to finally be sharing one of my stories here.

I've been posting this story elsewhere in the vast expanse of the internet. I had meant to start posting it here but hadn't gotten around to doing it yet. I've got forty chapters completed so far, so will probably post four to five a night until I'm caught up. At that point, I'll be posting new chapters about once a week.

Hope you enjoy it! Comments are always welcome.
Chapter 1: Daydreams in Class
I will not chicken out this time.

That was what I had told myself two days ago. That was also what I had told myself yesterday. Third time was the charm, right?

It was easy to put a bold face to my latest harebrained scheme to acquire diapers from the safety of my daydreams. It was much harder when the time came to actually carry out the plan that had been brewing in the back of my mind for the past year – one I had finally decided to put into motion this week.

Why would a 12-year-old girl want to wear diapers in the first place? I don’t know.

All I know is that for the past three years, nothing I have done has been successful at getting this obsession out of my head.

I certainly didn’t have any interest in being a baby. My younger brother, Jackson, is only six years old. I discovered where Mom kept all his old baby stuff long ago. I’ve tried his old pacifiers, bottles, and sippy cups. None of those items held any appeal for me.

I can’t stand kids’ TV shows. I can’t color to save my life. And don’t get me started on dollhouses, barbies, and whatever other toys babies like to play with. In every aspect of my life other than this strange desire for diapers, I wanted to act my age.

My latest plan all started a year ago with a magazine and a desire to procrastinate on my homework.

There had to be some level of irony to the fact that this latest idea came about when I was seated on the porcelain throne. Mom had almost a dozen different magazines she subscribed to. Most of them found their way to the bathroom, which was also probably the only circumstance where I would have even considered reading them in the first place. I was already finished doing my business, but leaving the bathroom meant needing to continue a homework assignment I’d been slowly picking away at for the past hour.

The only reason I even bothered to pick up a copy of the Reader’s Digest on that day about a year ago was for the few sections where it had funny jokes and stories. That, and I had left my smartphone in the bedroom. I really didn’t know how my parents managed when they were my age.

I skimmed through the first section of jokes. Whoever had put together this edition of the magazine had totally mailed it in. There was a completely unoriginal one about redheads and souls that had me tempted to toss the magazine in the garbage. I mean, with how many magazines Mom had, would she even miss it?

Redhead jokes get old really quick when you’ve had people telling you them your whole life. It has been forever since I’d been told one I hadn’t heard before. And even longer since I’ve been told one that was actually funny.

Maybe I would have better luck with the second humor section toward the back of the magazine. I flipped through the pages casually when one of the advertisements caught my eye.

I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. There it was. Right on the page. An exact replicate of the pull-up I had briefly stolen from a cousin two years ago. But there was more. That pull-up from two years ago had been the boys’ designs. This ad showed that there were ones for girls as well. And even though I’d had a pretty good growth spurt in the past two years, the product info indicated that I wasn’t even close to being too big to wear them.

I didn’t tuck the magazine in the trash, but I did take it with me from the bathroom, burying it deep inside my box of miscellaneous things in my bedroom. I’ve looked at that page at least once a day for the past year.

“Earth to Maddy. Earth to Maddy. We’re calling in.”

My head jerked upright from the hard wooden desk in my math classroom to the sound of laughter.

“Here!” I called back to our math teacher.

“Well, thank you for joining us again, Maddy. Now,” he said, pointing to a cluster of numbers, letters, and symbols on the whiteboard, “that we’ve isolated ‘x’ on this side of the equation. Can you tell us what it is?”

I had enough trouble paying attention in classes that I liked. For ones I hated? The temptation to daydream was hard to resist.

And I hated math class. It was hard enough when we were dealing with regular numbers. I would be lucky to scrape by with a “B-” on my report card.

But now, with the end of the school year in sight, my math teacher had ever-so-helpfully decided to give us a sneak peek of some of the things we got to look forward to learning next year in eighth grade.

I sucked at long division. But it at least made sense conceptually. The numbers were real, even if doing the work to get the answer was tedious. But now there was this thing the teacher called Algebra, where we were supposed to be adding up letters as well as numbers, which was beyond my ability to comprehend.

Every “x” and “y” on the whiteboard seemed designed to taunt me. May as well put a “D” or a “C” on the board, as that was about what I could expect on my report card next year if this was what was in store for me.

I stared blankly at the whiteboard with the sinking feeling that even if I had been paying attention for the past five minutes, I wouldn’t be any closer to understanding what was going on.

“Um,” I said, picking at my nails while I continued to stare ahead. I had to at least give some kind of guess. But my brain and my mouth sometimes aren’t exactly in sync with one another. “The spot.”

“I’m sorry. What was that?” Mr. Thompson asked.

“You know, the spot. Like, ‘x’ marks the spot.”

The classroom was full of laughter again. This time with me rather than at me. I made eye contact with one of my friends, Angie, who turned to look back at me from the front row. We shared a smirk at the joke.

Mr. Thompson sighed. “Everyone settled down, please.” He gave me a look that suggested he might be once again telling my parents about how I had apparently been disruptive in class. “Now, Maddy, if you had been paying attention as we worked through this problem, you would know that the answer was actually…”

I didn’t even manage to pay attention long enough to get to the answer to what ‘x’ happened to be or what sorcery had been used to arrive at that conclusion.

I fixed my eyes on a spot on the whiteboard, a method I had mastered to trick teachers into thinking I was actually paying attention to their nonsense when I’d rather be daydreaming. My thoughts slipped back toward my plans for this evening.

The third time had to be the charm, right? It wasn’t really my fault the first two attempts at wetting the bed had failed.

The first night, I had simply been too tired. We’d had an exhausting soccer game that evening that had gone on to overtime, and we’d been shorthanded, so I hadn’t spent almost any time on the bench. I had fully intended to stay up past midnight but had used the excuse of being tired to back out of it. Instead, I let myself drift off to sleep without wetting the bed.

During the second night, I’d managed to stay up until 1 a.m., but I had found it impossible to make myself pee. I simply hadn’t had enough to drink. I had considered simply pouring water on my bed, but I was worried that might not be convincing enough should my parents make a closer examination of my bedding. I could have snuck off for a glass of water in the kitchen and stayed up another hour, but again, I chickened out and pushed the plan off to another night.

But tonight was going to be different. I was going to be drinking as much water as I could tonight, and I would skip going to the toilet before going to bed. Plus, tonight was Friday, which meant it was pizza night, so as long as I picked out a caffeinated soda, I should be able to keep myself up late enough for this plan to work.

I realized that I was likely going to have to keep this up for multiple nights. One random night of bedwetting — after having never wet the bed since I had been potty trained at the age of two — wouldn’t be enough to convince my parents to take action.

But if I could have the courage to keep it up long enough, they would have no choice but to purchase the pull-ups shown on the magazine page for me. I would make sure to leave that old magazine out in a way that would get Mom to see the advertisement.

It was a desperate move, but I couldn’t wait any longer for the pull-ups. I knew from other advertisements I’d seen that these pull-ups were sold in stores. Had there been a store close by that I could bike to, I might have considered going out and purchasing some for myself on a day when I had been left at home on my own.

But that wasn’t an option for me. I still had over three years to go before I would be old enough to get my own driver’s license. I had already waited three years for this. I couldn’t possibly wait three more.

“Maddy. Earth to Maddy. Hey!”

There was the sound of hands clapping together a single time. More laughter. I blinked rapidly, adjusting my gaze over to Mr. Thompson, where he was standing at the front of the classroom with his palms still pressed together from making the noise he had used to so rudely interrupt my daydreams.

“Maddy, please just take one of the homework sheets and pass the rest behind you.”

I looked straight ahead, where Chloe was holding a stack of papers with her arm stretched out toward me. She rolled her eyes at me as I grabbed them from her. In a rare moment of self-control, I did not stick my tongue out at her.

I took one of the homework sheets and passed the remaining one behind me to where one of my two best friends was sitting. The three of us had initially been seated next to each other. But Mr. Thompson decided a few weeks into the school year that doing so was too much of a distraction.

Emma, who had been seated to my right, was switched to the seat behind me. Angie, who had been on my left, had worse luck. Not only was she moved to the front of the class, but she had to sit next to Ryan, who had the disgusting habit of picking his nose in public.

But that was OK. We’d have the whole weekend together. Tonight was the beginning of the playoffs for our U13 soccer team. We’d had a moderately successful season, meaning we’d managed to somehow win more games than we lost over the past several months. It was disappointing that the spring soccer season was so close to coming to an end, but we had the opportunity to keep it going this weekend if we could manage to string a few victories together.

The bell rang as the final class of the week came to an end. Mr. Thompson belted out more instructions about the homework as I slid the piece of paper, with all its archaic symbols and equations, into my backpack. I’d just ask Angie and Emma later to see if there was something I’d missed in his instructions.

I joined my two friends in the hallway. We all lived in the same neighborhood, so we rushed off to catch the bus together. They chatted excitedly about the game tonight, but I walked alongside them in silence. My thoughts were somewhere entirely else.

My mind settled on the image of the pull-up I had held in my hand three years ago. The few minutes where I had examined it thoroughly, my fingers tracing over its whole surface. How it had felt to wear it for a couple of minutes before I was forced to set it aside, not knowing the opportunity was one I wouldn’t get again for years.

Should everything go as planned, I would be wearing a pull-up again in less than a week.

But to accomplish that, I needed to wet the bed tonight – on purpose.

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Three years ago

If there was a single moment that perhaps best defined the last three years of my life, it was that day three years ago when it all began. The day I first laid eyes on a simple object that would become an obsession I would never be able to shake off.

I didn’t cry at the funeral.

I knew, intellectually, that this was what people were supposed to do. But even the sight of my aged great-grandfather lying in the open casket hadn’t moved me to tears. It wasn’t as though I wasn’t sad, but it was a more abstract kind of sadness. That kind that has someone thinking heavy thoughts about what happens after death, not that kind that leaves someone bawling on their knees.

I had no memories of the man lying in the casket. My parents said I had met my great-grandfather three times. But I had been too young to have any memories of those visits.

My older sister, Grace, on the other hand, was devastated. It was her first funeral as well. She had memories of her great-grandfather. The man in the casket was not an abstract concept to her, but the ghost of someone who had played with her and held her in his arms.

Jackson cried as well, but that was just because he was a baby. You could never exactly tell what it was that they were upset about most of the time. The three-year-old boy likely just needed a nap.

But the funeral home wasn’t where that pivotal event in my life transpired; it was merely marked the event that gave cause for all my distant relations – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – to join together from where they were all scattered across the country.

The reception after the funeral was where the fateful moment occurred. The adults ate, drank, and smoked while kids split into playing games with others of their age.

There was a cohort of preschoolers huddled around a TV, watching stupid kids’ shows. On the other end of the spectrum was a collection of angsty teenagers Grace had abandoned me to hang out with. They weren’t particularly welcoming of youngsters, and my normally friendly sister had shooed me off after I attempted to tag along with her.

Not that I cared that much. Other than my sister, teenagers made me a bit apprehensive. Besides, there were a half-dozen other kids my age to hang out with.

My mom introduced me to two boys shortly after we arrived at the house for the reception. One of them, Alex, was eight. Though he made clear he would be nine in a few weeks, which would make him as old as me. His younger brother, Timothy, was seven.

The boys were distant cousins from half-way across the country. There was some technical term Mom used for exactly what type of cousin they were to me — second cousins, twice removed. That didn’t mean anything to me. All that mattered was that they were my age and more than open to finding some way to play in order to pass the time while the adults did whatever adults did.

We hit it off immediately. We did what kids that age normally do. We fell into the habit of playing simple games with each other as if we had been friends all of our lives.

The two brothers were staying at the house where the reception was being hosted, so it was only fair that they gave me a tour of the massive building. We explored the expansive backyard, winding our way through the adults in the garden until we were shooed away.

We played in the basement for a while, which had foosball and ping-pong tables before the teens decided that was where they wanted to be hanging out instead.

But there was still plenty of house to explore. Alex and Timothy led me up a winding staircase to some rooms upstairs, where they had been sleeping while their family stayed with the relatives who were hosting the reception.

That’s when I stumbled across a stunning revelation. One that would shape my life for the next three years. Haunt my dreams. Hound my thoughts. Practically drive me crazy as I was often left incapable of thinking of anything else.

There was something out-of-place sitting in the corner of the room on top of a pile of discarded laundry.

I tended to usually say the first thing that came to mind without regard to whether it was socially appropriate to do so. I wasn’t any better at that at the age of nine.

I pointed at a blue undergarment in the corner that didn’t exactly look like a normal piece of underwear. It was not as though I didn’t have a good suspicion of what it was. But I wanted confirmation. “What is that?”

Timothy walked casually over to the corner and picked it up.

“Oh, that’s my pull-up.”

I looked at the item in his hand. He was seven. That couldn’t possibly be his. I felt sure I was the subject of some kind of joke. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You’re too old to wear pull-ups.”

“Older kids sometimes need to wear pull-ups,” he said, still holding the item in his hand.

His defiance left me no less confused. I rolled my eyes. “I doubt that even fits you.”

I hadn’t intended in any way to dare them to put the pull-up on. But that must be how that statement had come across. Alex snatched the pull-up out of his brother’s hand and tugged it on over his dress pants.

“See,” he said. “It fits. We wear them ’cause we still wet the bed.”

They were bedwetters. And they weren’t the least bit ashamed of it.

That was at least a topic that I understood. I had no intention of teasing or bullying them. While neither my brother nor I were bedwetters, my older sister had wet the bed up until a year or so ago.

Why hadn’t I put together a connection between pull-ups and bedwetting? Come to think of it. I wasn’t even sure if Grace had worn pull-ups during her bedwetting phase. She had her own room, which I was very much forbidden from going into, so if she had, there wasn’t any way I would have known about it.

When I had first learned of my older sister’s predicament, my parents had sat down with me and calmly explained what bedwetting was and how I was to never shame or tease her about it. And given how privately they had handled her condition, and the fact that it hadn’t ever impacted my life at all, I truthfully hadn’t ever given her bedwetting much of a thought.

Alex mistook my pensiveness while considering my sister’s bedwetting to mean that I was still confused about the topic. He launched into a long explanation with words like enuresis, explaining how bedwetting was just a medical condition that he and his brother would grow out of.

“Do you wet the bed?” Timothy asked me.

“No,” I replied. I came close to continuing my reply and accidentally outing my sister, but I would never do something that mean to her.

Alex still had the pull-up around his waist, completely unconcerned with how silly it looked. The pull-up had a picture of Spiderman, my favorite superhero, on the front.

I pointed that out, which led to another conversation about which Marvel superheroes we liked best. Timothy was big on Iron Man. But Alex insisted that Batman was better than any of them.

My eyes kept glancing down at Alex’s waist. I found myself unable to look away from the pull-up for long.

The sight of the pull-up around Alex’s waist raised another thought. That pull-up would fit me just as well. My distant cousin and I were both about the same size, after all.

I didn’t question the desire to wear the pull-up. Once the impulse had taken hold of me, there was little else I could think of as I distractedly continued the conversation with my cousins.

Our parents called us down for dinner. Alex ripped the pull-up off and tossed it back in the corner of the room before we retreated down the stairs.

I was unable to concentrate during dinner.

Alex and Timothy were across the table from me, and it was all I could do to keep my mouth shut about what I had just witnessed. I was filled to the brim with questions, most of which I would have to keep inside unless I were presented with another chance to have a private discussion with those two bedwetting cousins.

But there was one question more important than any of them. One perhaps best answered on my own rather than by asking them. What did it feel like to wear a pull-up?

While the adults were content to sit and chat around at the table long after their plates were clean, that wasn’t the case for us kids, and soon we were back to running around; Timothy, Alex, and I were joined by another four cousins.

Big houses and hide and seek go hand in hand together. We agreed that hiding upstairs in the house was against the rules for the game of hide and seek. That meant that the upstairs room where the pull-ups were waiting for me was technically off-limits.

But I didn’t care one bit about the game. Anyway, making the upstairs rooms off-limits had been my idea. An absolutely brilliant stroke of genius for a then nine-year-old girl. In one move, I’d ensured that no one would be up there when I went looking for the pull-up and that I would be safe from anyone following after me.

I took quick glances in both directions as I stood at the base of the stairway. Perfect. There were no other kids in sight. I leaped up the stairs, skipping two steps at a time with each upward lunge until I was safely around the corner and out of sight.

I encountered my first problem when I made it to the bedroom where Timothy and Alex had been sleeping. I had somehow assumed that the pull-up Alex had ripped off could be fixed. I seemed to recall that the pull-ups my brother had worn a year ago had Velcro sides. But that wasn’t the case with these bedwetting pull-ups for some reason.

But there had to be additional pull-ups elsewhere. There couldn’t be any way that the boy’s parents would risk them peeing all over the bed while they were spending the night as guests.

I didn’t have any luck in the first suitcase that I looked through, nor the second, but the third one was where I struck gold. There were more than a dozen pull-ups tucked into the side of the suitcase. Surely, they wouldn’t notice if one of them happened to go missing.

I grabbed a pull-up and bundled the pull-up into a ball, tucking it into the waistband of my skirt. I was sure that was not nearly as discreet as I thought it was at the time. But, to my good fortune, I was able to make it to a nearby bathroom without being caught. The adults were busy downstairs, and my cousins, who were playing hide and seek, were doing a better job than I was at abiding by the rules.

I locked the bathroom door behind me. I double and triple-checked to make sure the door was actually locked.

I removed the pull-up from under my skirt and held it in my hands. I didn’t stop then to think through how bizarre the whole situation was at the time.

I think I must have stood there looking at it for several minutes. Feeling how it crinkled beneath my touch, testing out the sides to see how far they could stretch, rubbing my fingers down the padded interior.

I was completely and utterly fascinated by it. The desire was no more explainable than a moth being drawn to a flame, a kitten to catnip, or a raven to a shiny object.

I cautiously slid my arms through the leg holes, stretching the pull-up out in front of me. Not only was it more than stretchy enough for me, but it could probably fit a kid twice as wide as I was.

Now came the moment of truth.

I removed my skirt and underwear. The pull-up had a side that was helpfully labeled as the back, so I knew which way to put it on.

As I brought the pull-up into place around my waist, it was like sliding the final piece of a puzzle into place.

I turned around so that I could look at my reflection in the mirror. I lifted up the front of my skirt so that the whole pull-up was in view. It practically came up all the way to my belly button.

There was something about the way it hugged my sides, the way the soft padding pressed against my skin as I sat down on the toilet lid and the way it crinkled quietly as I paced across the bathroom that left me completely enamored.

There was just one thing left to do. And I didn’t have much time before everyone noticed that I was missing. I lifted up the lid of the toilet seat and sat down while still wearing the pull-up.

One of my deepest regrets was that I had went to go potty right before the game of hide and seek began, meaning there wasn’t anything waiting to come out of my bladder at the moment.

I tried. I really did. I wanted to know. I had to know. What would it feel like to pee into a pull-up? It couldn’t be bad. Alex and Timothy hadn’t seemed to be put off at all by waking up in a wet pull-up every morning.

But nothing happened. The timing was off. My bladder wouldn’t cooperate. And time was up. I needed to be out of the bathroom in a couple of minutes.

I considered it a radical idea. What if I put my underwear and skirt over the top of the pull-up? I could continue to wear it until I actually needed to pee.

I nearly did it. I really, truly, honestly nearly did it.

But then I chickened out. The same way I would, time and time again for years afterward. It was too risky. A small trickle of shame was diluting my euphoria. I knew that despite how ecstatic I was at my discovery, the reality of anyone else discovering this secret — and the relentless shame and teasing that would follow — would be devastating.

I wasn’t like Alex or Timothy. I didn’t have the veneer of bedwetting to hide behind as an excuse for wearing a pull-up.

I slid the pull-up off of my legs. I intended to put it back in the suitcase. Then it would be like nothing had ever happened.

That’s when I encountered a second problem. Apparently, I had gone potty in the pull-up after all. Not a lot, just the teensiest of tinkles. But it was enough to leave a tiny yellow patch the size of a quarter smack dab in the middle of the pull-up.

I breathed a sigh of relief that I had even noticed it in the first place. That would have made for an awkward situation for Alex and Timothy had I put the pull-up back in the suitcase.

I peered into the trash can. I was in luck. I could make out two pull-ups at the bottom of the small trash can. One had been turned inside out, the color of its interior leaving no doubt as to the truthfulness of Alex’s description of his and his brother’s bedwetting.

I bunched up the pull-up and tossed it in the trash can. I didn’t think it was likely that anyone would be paying too much attention to notice the addition of one more pull-up in it.

My curiosity sated, I returned to the game of hide and seek, pretending that I had been expertly moving in between hiding places to avoid being spotted.

I didn’t think anymore about the pull-up until later that evening when we were lying in bed at the hotel.

Jackson was little enough that he could sleep on a padded mat and sleeping bag on the floor while Grace and I shared a bed – an experience that hadn’t gone well the past couple of nights, as it had been interrupted by midnight accusation of blanket theft.

If it had just been Grace and me in the room, if Mom, Dad, and Jackson hadn’t been around to overhear it, I might have worked up the courage to ask my older sister about her bedwetting. I wasn’t even sure if she knew that I knew about it. But I had to know. Had she worn the same pull-ups as Alex and Timothy? Was there perhaps a style that came in colors and designs for girls?

But we weren’t alone, and those questions went unasked.

The drive home wasn’t any easier. I didn’t touch my tablet, which had been my constant companion on the trip here. Instead, I stared out the window. But I wasn’t paying any attention to the passing cities and landscapes.

Instead, my mind was replaying the events of the previous day, in particular, the few precious minutes when I had my hands on the pull-up.

I was filled with a deep sense of longing and regret. Why had I thrown the pull-up in the trash? Why hadn’t I put it back on beneath my skirt? I would have had it with me now. I could have been wearing it now.

Of course, I did know better. I would have had no issue wearing the pull-up out of the house, but once we had gotten to the hotel, there wouldn’t have been any realistic way for me to have kept it concealed.

But the acknowledgment of that reality did nothing to lessen my longing for the pull-up.

I had nothing but time as I began to scheme up all the different ways I could get my hands on another one, or better yet, an actual diaper.

What would I have done if I had known the wait was to be measured in years rather than days, weeks, or months?

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 1, 2024 at 2:56 AM
Content:

DLFez said:

Fun to see you here - I clicked on this all ready to jump to Minnesota Writer's defense .

[End of quote]

Thanks!

Yeah, that is the complication of not having the same username on all the sites I post on. I actually am getting it set up so that it's set to A.B. DeLane everywhere I post, since that's what I use for my Amazon pen name.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 1, 2024 at 3:23 AM
Content: Chapter 2: Fully Prepared
I tilted my head back, forcing myself to finish each drop of water from the twelve-ounce glass that I had filled to the brim.

I had just come home from school, but it wasn't too early to begin working on getting myself as hydrated as possible for what I was planning on doing tonight. Plus, I had a soccer game to play in a couple of hours. It wouldn't hurt to be prepared for that, either.

Grace was already home when the bus dropped me off halfway down the block in our suburban neighborhood. It was easy to get lost in the neighborhood if you didn't know what street you were on. Development in the neighborhood had just finished when we moved in a decade ago. The cookie-cutter homes all looked the same – houses painted with a repetitive palette of bland colors, a scattering of barely mature trees dotting the front yards.

I waved goodbye to my two friends, Angie and Emma, as I got off the bus, knowing that I'd be seeing them again in a few hours. Angie was three blocks down from my house. Emma was on the opposite side of the sprawling neighborhood, about a half-mile away. We'd put a lot of miles on our bikes once our parents had decided that we were old enough to make the trek back and forth between our houses unsupervised.

Emma's parents were going out for the evening, so she would be hitching a ride with us to the game this evening.

My stomach felt uncomfortably full after downing so much water so quickly. I belched.

"Well, excuse you," my older sister called out from the living room, where she was reading a book on the couch.

I probably should have taken it a bit slower, sipping on the water over the course of a few minutes rather than trying to chug it down all at once. But I couldn't help myself sometimes. I was very much an all-or-nothing type of person, and I wasn't going to allow myself to waver the slightest bit in my commitment to finally wetting the bed tonight.

Grace always arrived home from high school before the bus dropped me off. In a few minutes, she would walk to the end of the block to pick up Jackson when he was dropped off from elementary school.

It was nice to have some freedom between the time I got dropped off by the school bus and the time when my parents returned home from work. Yes, Grace was left in charge, but my older sister was more focused on making sure Jackson wasn't getting into trouble than worrying about me. The most she would ever do would be to remind me to do my homework, which was better than getting a lecture from my parents for not having gotten started on it before dinner.

I set the empty glass on the counter next to the sink and retreated to my bedroom. I should have been starting on my homework. Any assignments from school were supposed to be done before I could have any time to myself, but I had no desire to even try to begin working on the Algebra sheet that I had been sent home with.

I shut the door behind me as I entered the bedroom. Grace knew better than to barge in on me. We had a well-established quid pro quo about staying out of each other's rooms. I knew she wasn't going to barge in on me announced.

Jackson, on the other hand, had about as much respect for boundaries as one would expect from a six-year-old boy, which is to say that he really didn't have that many. I had to be a lot more careful when he was around.

My bed had a set of dressers underneath it, most of which I used for storing various odds and ends. My clothes went into my regular dresser and closet.

Buried beneath a pile of old books and notebooks in the bottom middle drawer under my bed were some of my most treasured possessions. I had three copies of Reader's Digest. After the first time I had come across the ad for the nighttime pull-ups on it, I browsed through all the magazines my mom hadn't managed to throw out yet. A few had the same ad, so I didn't bother keeping them, but I did get lucky enough to find one with a different ad. Then, for the following year, I kept a close watch on the new magazines that were arriving in the mail.

Mom thought it was nice that I was doing so much reading. But I was just carefully scanning all the ads, hoping to get another glimpse of the object that had been the focus of all my desires for the past couple of years.

A couple of months later, I was in luck. There was a new ad in the magazine, one that noted an upgraded absorbency for the pull-ups. I waited a couple of weeks to be sure that Mom was finished reading the magazine before squirreling it away at the bottom of my dresser drawer.

There was a reason that I maintained this paper collection.

My dad was an IT network administrator. The very first lesson I got from him about the internet was that absolutely nothing that happened on it was truly secret. Yes, there were layers of secrecy you could hide behind, but if someone was looking and knew what they were doing, they could find it out. The next lesson was never to talk with adults or strangers online. And the third was never to put my personal information where people could easily access it.

I don't think he had intended it to be a veiled threat that I should be careful about what I was doing on the internet, but I had taken the message in that direction anyway. It had taken all of my self-control to not Google the name of the pull-up brand that I had seen in Reader's Digest a year ago. The ad even had a website listed for the product. I knew there had to be better pictures on there. I wanted to look at it so badly, but there would be no good explanation of why I had visited that website.

My smartphone, which I had gotten as a gift at the start of middle school a couple of years ago, had come with a parental control app on it.

My mom had been reluctant to have me get a phone in the first place. My older sister had been made to wait until the start of high school. Grace had been a bit salty at how I had been allowed to get a phone a lot earlier than her, though her attitude changed when she realized Mom and Dad were going to be monitoring it.

I didn't like having the parenting software on my phone, but it was the compromise Dad had reached with Mom, which had been the only way she would have agreed to let me have a phone before high school.

My sister – set to graduate high school in two weeks – had a lot more freedom with how she used her electronics. Maybe I could convince Mom and Dad to let off the restraints some when I started high school.

I pulled out the most recent magazine from the drawer and flipped it open to a dogeared page marking the most recent pull-up advertisement. If Mom hadn't been aware that these pull-ups were a thing when my older sister had been a bedwetter, she surely was aware of it now. I knew for a fact that she read these magazines cover to cover.

I wondered. How many nights in a row would I need to wet the bed before she was to go and purchase the pull-ups for me?

Knock. Knock. Someone was tapping on my bedroom door.

"Anybody home?" Grace called out, knocking again.

I hastily pulled back the sheets on my bed slightly, tossed the magazine under them, and pulled the sheets back on top. It really wasn't unnecessary. Reading a magazine shouldn't be suspicious in any way, but I nonetheless felt compelled to hide it, as if having it in view when Grace opened the door would somehow give me away.

I rolled my eyes. I wasn't going to play along with whatever stupid knock-knock joke Grace was trying to make.

"Just come in," I yelled back.

Graced opened the door just a couple inches, enough for her to stare at me through the hallway. There was no mistaking us for sisters. As I could tell from family photos, I was a spitting image of her when she was my age, from our red hair to green eyes to the expressions we made on our faces.

"I'm walking over to wait for Jackson. Why don't you get started on your homework?"

She didn't even wait for a reply; she just turned right around and headed back down the hallway. She didn't even bother to close the door behind her, probably because she expected that I'd be leaving my bedroom to get started on homework right away.

I knew better than to be annoyed at her. If not for the reminder, I probably would have completely forgotten about my homework.

My parents knew me too well. I was not allowed to do homework in the bedroom, especially not with the door shut. That my parents had good reasons for that decree didn't mean that I liked the rule.

<><><>
The homework sheet sat in front of me. I'd been seated at the kitchen table for ten minutes and hadn't yet written anything down with my pencil.

Next to the paper was a glass of water – I'd only filled it halfway up this time – that I was periodically sipping once a minute. The water was not helping me concentrate. Each time I took another sip of water, all I could think of was what I was going to be doing tonight. I didn't need to pee yet. That I had a strong bladder was probably one of the reasons I hadn't taken after my sister's bedwetting.

I heard the sound of the front door opening in the distance, followed by the sound of running feet and my sister's voice calling out after them.

"Hey! You! Get back here. No shoes in the house."

Jackson raced down the hallway, past the kitchen, and into the family room. Watching TV was his typical routine when he came home from school.

Grace followed after him, an irritated look on her face as she went to get him to take off his shoes.

I wished that I could say that the arrival of my siblings had interrupted my train of thought, but there hadn't even been one to begin with as I stared back down at the sheet of homework yet again. I tried to think back to what Mr. Thompson had been saying about how to start the process of solving these equations, but I had been far too distracted earlier this afternoon in class.

I was so going to fail my math class next year.

I was not looking forward to the start of high school. All my teachers kept stressing how our grades would actually really matter starting then. It felt like grades mattered plenty already, with how my parents reacted to my report cards at the end of each semester.

But if getting my report card was what I would need to endure in order to begin my summer break, then that would be a fair tradeoff.

There was the pitter-patter of running feet again, but this time, it wasn't quite as loud. Jackson sprinted past on his way to the front door. This time, his sneakers were in his hands rather than his feet.

Grace came into the kitchen to get a snack for my brother. She stopped to peer over my shoulder.

"Algebra, already?" She sounded a bit incredulous. "I don't think I started for you until next year."

I explained how Mr. Thompson had been so evil as to have us working ahead, all in the name of having us ready for next year.

"That's nonsense," Grace said. "Like anyone in your class is going to remember that after summer break."

She went and grabbed a bowl from the cupboard and filled it with some trail mix that she carried over to Jackson. I wasn't hungry, but I realized it might be a good idea. Something salty to eat would help make me thirty enough to continue drinking more water.

Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to procrastinate more on my homework. I was sorely tempted just to make up some numbers on the assignment. It wasn't like it would count for much, and I probably wasn't going to get that good of a grade in my math class, anyway.

I found myself staring up at the wall while I munched on the salty snack, leaving my homework sheet ignored on the table.

How long was it going to take for this plan to be successful? Would I have pull-ups by tomorrow night? That wasn't likely. I couldn't imagine a one-off event leading to that purchase. Two nights in a row? Maybe. But it was more likely than not that I was going to need to keep this up for a while.

I was pretty sure I could keep my bedwetting secret from Jackson. He wasn't observant enough to notice anything that didn't directly impact him. And there was no way Mom and Dad would be telling him about my accidents. They hadn't even told me about my sister's bedwetting until that one time I had accidentally stumbled across her secret.

There would be trouble if Jackson did find out. Sure. Mom and Dad would tell him not to say anything, but I couldn't trust him not to accidentally let it slip when my friends were around.

Grace, on the other hand, was probably too observant. There would be a lot of laundry needing to be done before the pull-ups were purchased, and even if she didn't notice on the first night, she was bound to catch on. But I felt I could count on her discretion, given that she would know all too well what it was like to be dealing with that issue.

We had actually never had a conversation before about her bedwetting. I had never been bold enough to bring it up with her. And it was one of those random topics that never had a natural chance to be asked about. She would have been sure to wonder why I was interested in it all of a sudden.

"You're looking a little lost there." I snapped out of my daydream. Grace was standing next to the kitchen table again.

"I'm fine," I lied. "I, um, I'm just working it out in my head."

Grace stared down at the empty worksheet. "You don't know what you're doing, do you?"

I sighed. "Not one bit."

Grace pulled up a chair and sat down next to me. Her voice switched to an awful, gravelly Italian accent.

"I can do that homework for you, but someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me."

I stared at her blankly. What kind of drugs was my older sister on?

Grace sighed and rolled her eyes as she leaned back in her chair. "The best movie quotes are wasted on the young."

That still didn't make a lick of sense.

"Look, I'll give you the answers," Grace said. "That wasn't fair to give you this hard of an assignment. It's nearly summer. It's time to relax, but there might be something I'll need you to help me out with later."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Don't know yet. But if there is, you need to do it for me, OK?"

I looked at her a little suspiciously. Grace wasn't one to play pranks on me. At least, not on any day other than the first of April. But the fact that she wasn't willing or able to tell me was slightly ominous. On the other hand... I looked back down at all the still unanswered questions. It would be nice to get an "A+" for once.

I reached to hand Grace the pencil, but she waved my hand away.

"Oh no. You still need to write the answers down. Has to look like you actually did it."

Further proof that Grace was the smart sister. She had a valid point. My handwriting was like chicken scratch compared to her elegant calligraphy.

Grace walked me through each of the half-dozen Algebra questions. She didn't just spit out an answer for me right away, even though it was clear that this assignment was as easy for her as it would be for me to go back to doing my third-grade math homework.

"Let me see your nails," Grace said.

I held out my hand. She placed hers next to mine. The difference was night and day. The edges of my nails were rough and uneven, a result of how I often picked at them mindlessly during my classes or other times when I was bored. Her's were perfectly manicured, colored with lavender nail polish.

"You need to stop picking at them like that," Grace said, taking a close look at my fingers.

Embarrassed, I pulled my hand away from hers. "I can't help it," I muttered.

Ten minutes later, we were all done. I couldn't wait to see the look on Mr. Thompson's face when he would have to hand the assignment back to me with an A+ written on it.

"Thanks! You're the best," I said, as Grace got up from the table. I gave my sister a hug.

"Not a problem," Grace said. "Just don't forget your side of the deal."

All the water I had drunk was beginning to have its desired result. I made it to the bathroom with plenty of time to spare. I sat and peed for what felt like forever. I remembered reading something about how the color of your urine could determine if you were hydrated enough. Mine was practically clear from how much I'd had to drink.

I wished more than anything that I was peeing into one of those pull-ups instead. I tried so hard to imagine what it would feel like. None of my attempts at makeshift diapers had ever been remotely successful, so I was left to ponder what that experience would be like. I hopefully wouldn't have to wonder about it for much longer.

As long as I continued to drink up through my soccer game and the rest of the evening, I would be fully prepared to wet the bed tonight.

Now I just needed to figure out what Grace wanted from me in exchange for doing my homework.

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 1, 2024 at 3:25 AM
Content: Chapter 3: Point of No Return
Past the point of no return

The final threshold

What warm, unspoken secrets will we learn

Beyond the point of no return?

The music Mom played in the car always had to be educational. She had been a theater actress until Grace was born, when she’d traded that for the stability of a tedious office job. Even after all these years, she still had a thing for musicals.

We’d been listening to The Phantom of the Opera on car rides for the past week and a half. It had been a desperate effort to keep Mom from singing along to the lyrics while my friends were in the car. It was one of her favorites; Mom had parts in the musical as a high school student and later as a professional actress.

Thank goodness the musical was nearing an end. But that raised the uneasy question of what Mom would have us listening to next.

Grace and Jackson had the two bucket seats in the middle row of the van, while I sat between Emma and Angie in the back row on the way home from the soccer game.

There were few things capable of fully distracting me from my years-long quest to get my hands on pull-ups or diapers, but soccer was one of them. And our season wasn’t over yet. Emma had scored the winning goal with five minutes remaining, heading the ball into the net after I lofted a pass into the penalty box.

Mom was driving us home so that Dad could put in an order for pizza. Dad leaned over to tilt his head and look at us from the front passenger seat. “We need to figure out what kind of pizza to order.”

That led to an immediate clammer of responses. I wasn’t particular about my toppings. But my siblings and friends all had strong preferences.

“Hold up,” Dad said. “One at a time. Tell me what you’d like when I say your name.”

After getting each of our answers, Dad determined that we’d need cheese, pepperoni, and BBQ chicken pizzas to have something that would be suitable for everyone’s palates. He placed a delivery order on his phone. The pizzas would arrive ten minutes or so after we made it home.

We pulled into the driveway. The ignition was turned off. The music came to an abrupt end just as the chorus was repeating.

Past the point of no return.

My efforts at being hydrated for tonight had continued throughout the soccer game. Playing midfield was hard work, so I didn’t have any difficulty going through a couple of bottles of water.

This would be it, though. Once I began to wet the bed, there would be no going back to the way things were before. There would be no hiding that I was wearing pull-ups. Not from Mom and Dad. Most likely not from my sister. I felt confident I could keep my secret from Jackson. And there was absolutely no way I was going to allow my friends or anyone at school to discover it.

Could I live with that? Could I live with my parents and sister, thinking I was a bedwetter? Was that a fair price to pay for finally getting what I had been seeking for three years?

I tried to push those worries to the side. My sister had been a bedwetter, and she had turned out completely fine. Pretending to be one couldn’t result in things going any worse for me. Besides, once I was old enough to be able to get pull-ups on my own. I could slowly stop wetting the bed, pretending that I had grown out of the issue.

I made my decision. I unscrewed the lid to the half-full bottle of blue Gatorade sitting in my lap and drank another few ounces. If the amount of liquids I’d been drinking so far this afternoon and evening had stood out to anyone as odd, no one said anything about it to me.

Emma and Angie left their sports bags in the trunk as we got out of the van. Mom would take them home after dinner.

Something wet and rough began to lick my leg as I sat down on the couch. “Shoo!” I gave Chester a mostly gentle push away from me. The cat flicked its tail in annoyance. He jumped up on Angie’s lap instead.

I had thought it was cute when our cat had first licked my legs after returning home from a soccer game one evening a couple of years back. I just thought it meant that he really liked me. Leave it to Grace to spoil the mood. She had informed me it was probably only due to my skin being salty from sweating. Chester didn’t love me. He wanted to eat me. And if I were to suddenly keel over and die, he probably would do just that.

It’s hard to look at your beloved pet the same way again in light of that information.

Yes, a family of redheads had, of course, adopted an orange cat. The jokes practically wrote themselves, and Angie and Emma had been more than willing to make them in the three years since our family had adopted that orange menace.

The doorbell rang. Dad went to the front door to get the pizzas. Mom went down to the basement to grab some soda for us.

I followed my friends and siblings to the dining room, where the three pizzas, as well as cheese bread and dipping sauce, were laid out on the table. I was just about to pick up a plate to put some slices of BBQ chicken pizza on when Mom called me over from the kitchen.

“Madelyn, can you come here for a second?” Mom was waving at me from the kitchen. I set my empty plate down.

That Mom was using my full name wasn’t a promising sign about where this conversation was heading.

Maddy – with a “y” – was what I usually preferred to be called. When a new teacher was going through the roll call for the first time at the start of the school year, I would make sure to let them know that I preferred my nickname rather than Madelyn.

Sometimes, Grace and my friends would tease me and call me Mads, especially if I happened to already be irked by something. That could get annoying pretty quick, even if I had to admit that it was rather funny.

Mom and Dad were usually good about calling me Maddy, except for when I had done something wrong. Then I was Madelyn. But what exactly had I done wrong?

Mom was still holding the two-liter Mountain Dew that she had brought up from the basement. That was going to be key to the success of my plans tonight. Plenty of caffeine and sugar to keep me up later, and I would be well-hydrated before going to bed.

“Maddy, look at me.”

“Huh?”

“Did you not hear a word that I said?”

I looked down at my feet. Had Mom been talking? “Um. Maybe not.”

Mom sighed. “I noticed that you hadn’t cleaned the cat litter when I went to grab the soda. Can you please go and do that now?

There weren’t a lot of chores that I had to do, but one of them was that it was my responsibility to clean the cat litter every day when I got home from school.

The chore had completely slipped my mind. That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. It wasn’t like I was intentionally trying to avoid it. I didn’t like scooping the cat litter, but it beat washing dishes, which was one of the things my older sister was tasked with helping out with.

“Now? But I’m hungry? I’ll go do it after dinner. Promise.”

“It needs to be done now, Madelyn. We don’t need the basement to get all stinky.” There was a subtext beneath her calm but firm tone, one that suggested something both Mom and I knew. If I didn’t complete that task right now, I was likely going to forget to do it until tomorrow. And Mom wasn’t going to be all that happy about it.

Besides, I didn’t have anyone but me to blame for needing to do the chore; I had been the most vocal proponent of getting Chester a couple of years ago.

The sound of my feet against the wooden stairs echoed noisily as I descended into the basement. Mom wasn’t wrong about the litter being stinky. I wrinkled my nose as I went about the unpleasant task of cleaning up after the cat as quickly as possible.

<><><>
We brought our food into the family room, where a trio of couches formed a half-circle facing a large, flat-screen TV.

Grace had retreated to her bedroom to eat her pizza in solitude. Her tastes in TV shows were a lot different from my friends’ and mine. She pretty much avoided Emma and Angie when my two friends were over. To be fair, I gave my older sister’s high school friends plenty of distance as well.

Being the last to fill my plate and cup had come with its advantages.

With everyone else already in the family room. I filled my cup to the brim with pop, drank half of it, and then filled it up again. I would need to brush my teeth extra good before bed tonight. That is, if I remembered to do so. That was another task I had a hard time keeping track of, much to my parents’ – and dentist’s – annoyance.

Angie – short for Angelina – had only cheese pizza on her plate. She was the pickiest eater I had ever met. I didn’t know how she managed to get enough calories each to subsist.

The girl with dark brown hair done up in a ponytail eyed my BBQ chicken pizza as I took a seat next to her on the couch. She looked quite put off by it.

“I don’t think that counts as pizza,” Angie said.

Emma rolled her eyes from the other couch she was sitting on by herself. “Says the girl who won’t even eat pepperoni and sausage.”

“Hey, I saw a documentary about how they’re made,” Angie retorted.

On that topic, I did actually take Angie’s side, though, unlike her, I wasn’t well on my way to becoming a vegan. “She does have a point, though,” I said to Emma while taking a bite of my chicken pizza. “I don’t really care for mystery meat.”

We were streaming a show on Netflix while we ate our dinner. I wished my parents had been willing to pay enough to avoid ads, but instead, we were getting interrupted every fifteen minutes by commercials. My parents had left the room shortly after finishing their pizza slices, leaving control over what was on the TV to us.

I usually looked down at my phone during the commercial breaks, but this one caught my eye. It was something I had never seen before on the TV: an advertisement for the very product I was trying to get my hands on by becoming a bedwetter.

There were a bunch of boys and girls dressed in pajamas for a sleepover. There was a narrator talking about how two of the kids had an embarrassing secret they needed to hide from their friends.

“Wait, are those diapers for teenagers?” Angie asked as the ad showed a boy and a girl, not all that younger than ourselves, putting on a pull-up.

Pull-ups, I thought silently. Those are pull-ups. If they were diapers, they’d have those sticky tapes to attach them around the waist. That was not a distinction I was going to dare bring up to my friends, though, so I had to sit silently as they gave their loud observations about the commercial.

“What kind of loser would wear those?” Emma said as the ad broke away to show a picture of the product and its packaging.

I stared straight ahead at the TV, not because I wanted to watch the advertisement while my friends were present, but because I wasn’t sure how successful I was being at putting on a poker face.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of how unusual my desires were. There was a reason I had confided in no one over the past three years. There was a reason that all my attempts to fulfill it had been conducted in utmost secrecy.

I knew my friends would find the idea of someone their age being a bedwetter to be strange or weird, but to hear the venomous ridicule coming out of their mouths was something altogether different. It raised the stakes of what I was about to do tonight.

“Yeah, that’s really gross,” I added, pretending to share their disgust over the topic as well.

There was a sudden realization in the middle of the conversation. I needed to pee. Badly. I didn’t leap up from the couch. I needed to preserve at least some of my dignity, but I did walk out of the room rather quickly, that walk turning into a jog to the bathroom as soon as I was out of sight.

I pulled down my underwear, wishing it was a pull-up I was removing instead. But if it had been a pull-up, I wouldn’t have needed to rush off to the toilet in the first place.

My urine was even clearer than it had been before dinner. The plan of getting extra hydrated was working. I would have no issues peeing in bed tonight.

Everyone was still focused on the TV when I returned to my place on the couch. Nothing more was said about the ad for pull-ups for bedwetters. It was long forgotten as the drama of the TV show continued. Our next soccer game wasn’t until Sunday, but we’d already made plans to meet up at Angie’s place tomorrow after lunch.

We watched two episodes before it was time to say goodnight to my friends. The word was one that was difficult to say in light of the advertisement on TV, and I nearly stuttered over it as I waved goodbye to Angie and Emma as they followed Mom out the door.

<><><>
I picked up Chester off of the bed, set him down in the hallway, and made sure the door was actually shut securely behind me before I returned to bed.

For a cat as dumb as he was, the fact that he had learned to open my bedroom door in the middle of the night was a source of endless annoyance for me and plenty of amusement for my siblings. For whatever reason, he had decided that I was his person, and therefore, my bedroom was the one that he wanted to be spending the night in.

The problem was that my bedroom door didn’t always close all that securely, so if that fat orange cat were to push hard enough against it, he could get it to open enough to slip through and come sleep on my bed.

I wanted no part in waking up to his butt being planted on my face. Not again. No, thank you. Tonight, of course, I had bigger concerns about him being in my bed than where he would plant his behind. It wouldn’t do to have the cat get caught up in the bedwetting that was set to happen in less than an hour.

I looked at the digital clock on my nightstand as I returned to bed. Still, thirty minutes to go until midnight. I’d been in bed for almost an hour now.

Since it was still technically part of the school year, I had a bedtime, even on weekends. Normally, I would have been annoyed at being sent to bed at 10:30 p.m. this close to summer break, but tonight, I did so without complaint, though I still had to be reminded by Mom to make sure to brush my teeth.

Midnight was the earliest I could attempt to wet the bed, but I still had to wait to make sure everyone else was asleep before I began.

Jackson, being six, got sent to bed right after dinner, around 8 p.m. He was an extremely sound sleeper. Nothing was going to wake him until he got up to zoom around the house and watch Saturday morning cartoons around 7 a.m.

My parents were still up watching TV at the moment. This was their chance to watch the shows that Jackson and I hadn’t been allowed to see yet and ones that Grace had no interest in. But their evening schedule was at least predictable. Give them another ten to fifteen minutes, and they’d be brushing their teeth and taking out contact lenses. I’d likely be able to hear my dad snoring from the hallway before midnight.

Grace was the wildcard, but whether she was asleep or not was less of a concern. She tended to seclude herself in her bedroom on weekend evenings.

The main problem was that I was already beginning to feel a fairly strong urge to pee. As the evening wore on, my trips to the bathroom had become more and more frequent. I wasn’t sure how much I had drunk since coming home from school, but I was sure it had to be some crazily excessive amount, much more than whatever was recommended for staying hydrated during the day.

I turned my phone’s flashlight on and retrieved the magazine once more from the drawer in an attempt to distract my thoughts from my bladder for the moment. I buried myself beneath my covers so the light wouldn’t be noticeable from outside in the hallway. I read through each line of the advertisement again and again. At this point, I could recite it from memory, the pictures of the pull-ups and the words used to describe them crystal clear in my mind’s eye.

But there was something different about being able to hold it in my hands. It made it tangible. This wasn’t just something I had dreamed up. These pull-ups were real. And soon, they would be mine.

I heard some faint noises in the distance and hastily shut off my phone. Mom and Dad were getting ready for bed. I could hear the sink running off in the distance in the bathroom as they brushed their teeth.

I listened with bated breath as the sounds of them getting ready for bed continued. After a sprinkling of footsteps, their bedroom door clicked shut, and there was silence.

As much as I wanted to resume my examination of the magazine, I couldn’t risk getting it ruined in the bedwetting. I carefully put it back in its place in the dresser drawer. I wouldn’t need it anymore once I had actual pull-ups to look at and wear. Would I toss the magazine out, then? Or would I keep it as a memento of the journey that had gotten me to this point?

The clock silently struck midnight.

I cracked open my door, doing so cautiously in case Chester was in the hallway waiting to come in.

To my right was my sister’s bedroom on the opposite side of the hallway. The light was off. The same was true of my brother’s bedroom on the opposite side of the hallway to the left. I couldn’t make out my parent’s bedroom door, which was down to the left on the same side of the hallway as mine, but, as I had predicted, the sound of Dad’s snoring was proof enough that at least one of my parents was still asleep. I’m not sure how my Mom managed.

I shut the door and tiptoed back to my bed, sliding beneath the cover and sheets.

Unlike last night, my bladder was now aching, giving me clear signals that it was time to go to the toilet.

I lay sprawled out under the sheets of the queen-sized bed. I now had to convince my bladder that it was perfectly OK to empty itself in this position instead.

I held my breath. There would be no turning back when I did this. No way to hide the wet bed or the questions it would raise for my parents. But if I wasn’t going to do it now, when was I ever going to do it?

I strained my bladder, trying to get myself to pee for several minutes. Nothing came out.

I hadn’t considered how difficult it was going to be to wet the bed intentionally. My bladder was desperately telling me that it needed to go, but it was like there was some sort of mental block preventing me from going while I was still in bed.

I had experienced a similar problem once before. There had been that time I had attempted to create a makeshift diaper out of plastic grocery bags, toilet paper, and duct tape. I had found myself unable to pee into it until I had sat on the toilet. In retrospect, that had been a good thing because the makeshift diaper had ended up leaking heavily into the toilet.

I had figured that the problem then had been that I simply hadn’t waited until I was desperate enough to pee.

Though, come to think of it, I couldn’t recall a single time that I had ever wet my pants from reaching that point of desperation since being potty trained. That had to be somewhat unusual. I could recall plenty of times when classmates in preschool through elementary had endured the humiliating experience of wetting their pants in class.

Then there was Hannah, who had wet her pants during third-grade recess. I felt bad about it now, but we didn’t let her hear the end of it for the rest of the school year. That matter was mostly long forgotten now. Jokes about that situation had long lost their effectiveness.

The urge to urinate was now almost painful.

I rolled from my back to my stomach. Still couldn’t pee. I shifted to my side. Waited another painful minute. Still couldn’t get my bladder to release. Then I was on my back again. Still nothing. My bed was completely dry.

I needed to go so badly now, but my body was telling me the only place it was going to do so was the toilet.

I stood up from the bed. This was clearly stupid. A twelve-year-old girl wasn’t supposed to be peeing in her bed. What in the world was I doing? I began to hobble toward the closed door, both hands clutched between my legs.

I made it halfway to the bedroom door when the image of the pull-up re-entered my mind. Was I really going to give up this easily after all my plans and preparations?

Yes, someday, I would have the freedom to go and purchase those pull-ups for myself. But that would be ages and ages from now. I already knew what three years of waiting felt like. I couldn’t do it again.

If not tonight, when was I going to do it? It was the same pattern, over and over again. My pent-up desire was foiled by my unwillingness to follow through when the time came to actually have the ability to put into motion a foolproof plan to get what I wanted.

I returned to bed, but I didn’t lie back down. I had a different idea to try to trick my bladder into letting go. I pulled back the covers, so that I was sitting on the sheets in the middle of the bed, where my waist otherwise would have been had I been lying down.

If I couldn’t make myself pee while lying down, perhaps I could do so while sitting on my knees.

I tried to get in the right headspace to get myself to urinate. I thought of roaring waterfalls, trickling brooks, the pattering of rain outside my bedroom window, my hand reaching out to test the water pouring out from the shower, finding that the water was just the right amount of warmth to step into.

Something began to stir in my bladder. The front of my pajama pants was warm and wet, and it was only getting warmer and wetter. It was all I could do to keep my hands from reaching down to the front of my pajamas. No point in getting them wet as well.

My intention had been to make only a small accident. Enough that there wasn’t any question about what I had done, but not something super crazy that would be a pain to get cleaned up.

I had figured that it would be easy to control how much I peed. I was wrong.

There was simply no stopping the warm flow of urine that ran down my legs and onto the bed. Ten seconds passed. Then, twenty seconds. Then, thirty seconds. Then, forty seconds. Then it finally came to a stop.

Even in the darkness, I could make out that the wet spot on my mattress was ginormous. It wasn’t so much a spot as it was a massive puddle covering a sizeable portion of the bed.

I was past the point of no return.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 1, 2024 at 3:47 AM
Content: Chapter 4: Unless I Knock
I really hadn’t thought this through as well as I should have.

I continued to stare down at the massive wet spot underneath me on the bed. The urine had spread out in a puddle around me. I could feel the wetness beneath me from my knees to my toes as my bare skin pressed against where the urine had soaked through the sheets.

It was still warm, though not quite as warm as it had been in the seconds after I had finished peeing. I couldn’t bring myself to move. I had attempted to inch away at first, but that only accentuated the feeling of the wetness against my skin. I did not like that sensation at all.

I drew in a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. I had done it. Actually done it. I hadn’t chickened out this time.

This next week was going to be the worst of it. I was going to need to keep doing this until my parents decided to purchase pull-ups for me. And that was something that had to be their decision. No twelve-year-old, even one who would be far better off wearing pull-ups to bed, would be actively asking their parents to purchase them for her.

That meant Mom and Dad would need to arrive at the decision on their own, without anything but the most subtle of hints from me.

As I sat uncomfortably on what couldn’t actually be described as an accident, I now fully understood why my two younger cousins had no issues with their parents buying them pull-ups to wear to bed. For the longest time, I had struggled to understand why someone who was just a regular bedwetter – not someone like myself who actually wanted to wear diapers for the sake of wearing them – would be OK with doing so at night.

The proof was right underneath me. There couldn’t be any way that someone would prefer going through this every night rather than wearing a pull-up or diaper to bed. There couldn’t be any question that having an accident contained in a pull-up would be preferable to having to deal with soaked pajamas and bedding in the middle of the night.

I couldn’t just continue to sit in the middle of the bed. I inched over to the side of the bed, leaving a trail of wet spots across the sheets as I moved away from the nucleus of the fake bedwetting accident.

I reached to the side of the bed, where I could barely make out the outline of the lamp sitting on the nightstand. My hands fumbled across it in the dark for a few seconds before they came across the light switch. I averted my eyes, shielding them from the blinding light with my arm.

Then I opened my eyes again.

The damage was far worse than it had appeared when I had wet the bed in darkness. My light pink sheets only made the location of the accident more apparent. And I had indeed left a trail of wetness over to where I was sitting next to the lamp.

The bottom of my light blue cotton pajama shorts were completely soaked, as was the underwear beneath them. Even my T-shirt hadn’t been completely spared. The bottom of it must have touched a wet spot on the bed as I had gone to turn the lamp on, as there were some wet spots on the bottom of the shirt as well.

I had known the process of faking bedwetting to get pull-ups wasn’t going to be pretty, but even then, the reality of what it was going to entail hadn’t really sunk in until now.

But now what?

My initial plan had been to wet the bed in the morning, but I had worried that might not be a good idea. There were several problems I found with that option. The first was that all the wet spots on the bedding would still be warm; it would look a lot more like I had peed a few minutes ago than having had an accident in the middle of the night. Too suspicious.

The second issue with that idea was how it would be much harder to conceal the bedwetting from Grace and Jackson. They would both be awake, and it would be much more likely that they would come across wet laundry being hauled down to the laundry room or eavesdrop on a conversation about bedwetting between me and our parents.

That meant that a nighttime accident was necessary, and I would need to proactively inform my parents about it.

How in the world was I supposed to begin that conversation? Hey, Mom and Dad, it’s me. Maddy. You know, your twelve-year-old daughter who has never wet the bed before. About that. I just pissed all over my pajamas and bed just now while I was asleep. Sorry about that. Can you help me get cleaned up?

Just another thing I hadn’t thought through. But I was going to have to do it, and soon. I stifled a yawn. I couldn’t risk falling asleep and being forced to attempt to stealthily hide my wet bedding from my siblings while also informing my parents of the accident.

I just had to trust that my parents would show the same amount of discretion in handling my bedwetting as they had done for my older sister.

I grabbed a dry portion of the bed cover and used it to wipe off my feet and legs before getting off of the bed. It wasn’t super bad to walk in wet shorts, but the wet underwear beneath them clung to me uncomfortably as I retrieved my phone, turning on its flashlight function as I turned off the bedroom lamp.

I had to nudge Chester back into the hallway with my foot as I creaked open the door. The stupid cat would probably accidentally end up in my wet bedding if I let him in. It was bad enough that I was probably going to need to get in the shower. The one time we’d had to bathe that poor cat gave me no desire to have to do it again.

I shut the bedroom door behind me as I entered the hallway. A few seconds later, I was standing in front of my parents’ closed bedroom door.

I couldn’t bring myself to even gently tap on the door, let alone knock on it enough to wake them up. But the longer I waited, the more likely it was that one of my siblings might get up to use the restroom or get a late-night sip of water.

I silently went through a half-dozen variations of what I could say to my parents. I wasn’t happy with any of them. The truth was that I wasn’t going to find the right thing to say. There wasn’t any possible way to explain the situation to my parents that wasn’t completely and utterly humiliating.

My thoughts drifted back to the magazine under the bed. This was the price I had to pay to get my pull-ups. I hoped it would be worth it.

I reached out and pressed the palm of my right hand against the door. The door wasn’t locked, but I knew better than to open it without their permission.

I pulled my hand back a few inches and then did what could be most accurately described as a few soft pats on the door.

In the silence of the night, the sound of my palm on the wood door seemed to reverberate through the hallway. But I knew I hadn’t actually made enough noise to wake anyone up, whether that was my siblings or my parents.

I closed my hand into a fist. I couldn’t bring myself to knock on the door.

I thought of a desperate plan to turn back. I could sneak down to the basement. I knew for a fact that the washer and dryer weren’t audible from the second-floor bedrooms. I could get everything washed and dried. I could remake the bed. No one would be any bit the wiser to what had occurred.

I would be exhausted the next morning. But it was Saturday. I could sleep in.

I shook my head. That was how this always went. I couldn’t let myself get turned aside, not after everything I’d done.

I tried to build an image in my head of what my life would be like next week. Mom would have purchased a small package of pull-ups for me. I would have pretended to be embarrassed about using them, but would have reluctantly agreed to do so in the end. I would be lying in bed, wearing them in place of my underwear. I certainly wouldn’t have any pajama shorts over them. No, I would want to be able to see the colorful design, run my hand against the crinkly exterior. Even three years later, I could still longingly recall exactly how that had felt, along with the padding that so comfortably fit between my legs.

And then, when I was wetting myself in bed, it would all be contained.

I wanted ever so badly to know what that felt like.

None of that was going to happen unless I knocked.

No matter how embarrassing the next week was going to be, it would all pass. And I would get what I wanted.

I rapped my knuckles on the door several times. I winced at the sound it made, but there was no way around it. I paused, listening first for any sounds from behind the door and then from further down the hallway where my siblings were sleeping.

Nothing from either one of them.

I rapped my hands again on the door. This time a little harder than before. And this time, there was a result. I thought I heard something creaking from beyond the door. Then a hushed conversation. Then a couple of footsteps. Then the door opened.

I didn’t have to fake the shame and embarrassment I felt as the bedroom door creaked open to reveal Mom standing in front of me in a nightgown, with the dim light of my phone illuminating her face.

My hands were trembling as I looked at her. Through the gap in the door, I could see Dad, who was still in bed. He was also craning his head to get a look at me.

“Is everything alright?” Mom asked. She didn’t sound as though she was fully awake yet.

“I… I…”

The beginning of my planned response drifted off into nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.

It turned out that I didn’t have to. My face burned as Mom’s eyes drifted away from mine and down toward my waist.

There was no immediate verbal reaction to what she was seeing, but her eyes told the story that her lips didn’t. Her eyes blinked rapidly a couple of times and then widened, staring at my shorts for several seconds before breaking away to look back at me.

I couldn’t meet her eyes this time. I focused instead on the sash of her nightgown.

Mom turned around and motioned for Dad to get back into bed. “It’s OK, honey. I’ve got it.” She stepped out next to me in the hallway, pulling the bedroom door shut behind her.

“Let’s go and get everything cleaned up,” Mom said as she began to walk toward my bedroom.

Even though I’d had some light from the lamp and my phone, my eyes still weren’t prepared for how bright the room suddenly got when Mom flipped on the light switch to my room.

Mom took a deep breath as she surveyed the bedroom. “You have one of those dreams where you thought you were sitting on the toilet?”

“Yeah,” I muttered. I didn’t even know that was a thing. But it seemed like a believable lie to go along with.

“Well, it happens,” Mom said. She didn’t sound upset. Just tired. “I’ll take care of getting the bedding in the wash, but you need to get yourself cleaned up as well once you’ve helped me get the bedding stripped.”

I tossed all of my pillows to the floor. They, thankfully, had been completely spared. Mom didn’t say anything further as she helped me strip the bed.

The cover hadn’t gotten all that wet, just a little bit from where it had gotten tossed in the wet bedding and used to dry myself off.

The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the bedding. The sheets were very soaked. There was a thin cotton mattress protector beneath the sheets. Also soaked. And then there was the mattress itself. The wet spot on it was as bad as I had feared, considering how wet all the bedding had been. I really hoped that I hadn’t ruined it. Though, on the other hand, that type of damage might spur my parents on to get me pull-ups a lot more quickly.

Mom had wrapped the sheets and mattress protector in the much dryer cover and was holding it all in her arms.

“One more thing, Maddy. I need to wash your clothes as well. Just take them off in the bathroom, and then you can inch the door open a little bit to hand your wet pajamas to me. I need to put them in the wash with all of your bedding. And you need to get cleaned up in the shower before getting dressed again for bed.”

I hastily grabbed some underwear and clean pajamas from the dresser and retreated into the bathroom.

I grimaced as I pulled off my wet shorts and underwear. I had forgotten how much I disliked the sensation of wet fabric on my skin. Per Mom’s instructions, I slid my wet clothes through a slightly open door. I winced at the thought of Mom having to pick them up as if she wasn’t already holding plenty of evidence of my supposed bedwetting accident.

I turned on the shower, adjusting the shower head so that the water was coming out at an angle that would allow me to step into the shower and wash my midsection without getting my hair wet.

I hated going to bed with wet hair, and I wasn’t going to use a loud hairdryer at this time of night. There wasn’t much that could wake up either Jackson or Grace, but the hair dryer might be loud enough to do so. The last thing I needed was for either of them to be wondering why I had been up taking a shower at this time of the night.

Since I wasn’t washing my hair, it only took me a couple of minutes to get scrubbed down. I washed as thoroughly as I could, eager to get every trace of urine off of my skin.

Once I had pull-ups to wear to bed, that wouldn’t be a problem. Those would actually be able to absorb everything.

I could see the light coming into the hallway from my open bedroom door as I stepped out of the bathroom. I walked slowly through the hallway in a conscious effort to not create any more noise than I had made already.

Mom was patting the mattress dry with paper towels. There were two bottles of cleaning sprays on the nightstand, along with a rather sizable pile of wet, discarded paper towels.

A bit of guilt ran through me at the sight of Mom cleaning up after my mess. None of this was fair to her. I grabbed a handful of paper towels off of the roll and leaned over the mattress next to Mom, pressing the towels against a wet spot that now gave off the harsh scene of cleaning chemicals.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled as I pressed another wad of paper towels into the mattress.

Mom took a break from patting the mattress dry and rubbed my back. “Don’t worry about it, Maddy. You were asleep. It wasn’t your fault. Besides, it’s not like it is the first time I’ve had to clean up a mattress in the middle of the night.”

I knew she was referring to my older sister, but as eager as I was for more details about Grace’s past bedwetting, I couldn’t bring myself to ask Mom some more questions. Besides, I doubted I would get any more answers than on that day when I had accidentally found out about my sister’s bedwetting.

We went through a couple dozen more paper towels before Mom stepped back from the bed and turned to look at me. “Well, I think your mattress will survive. But it still needs to dry some more. I set up your sleeping bag on the floor.”

I had been so focused on helping Mom clean the mattress that I hadn’t noticed the dark purple sleeping bag that had been unrolled at the foot of the bed. It was all set up for me to crawl into. And, of course, Chester was already curled up on top of it. For a dumb cat, he could be pretty perceptive sometimes.

I knelt down and slid into the cool sleeping bag, careful not to displace the cat.

“I wouldn’t get too worked up about it,” Mom said quietly to me as she went to turn the light off. “I’m sure it’s just a one-time thing.”

Her hand touched the switch. I was enveloped in darkness. If only she knew.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 2, 2024 at 1:46 AM
Content: Chapter 5: About That FavorI woke to the sound of claws being dragged across wood.

Chester was scratching at the door, his paws all the way past the doorknob. The cat was a master of breaking into my bedroom. Getting out of it, not so much. He dropped his paws to the ground, turned around to glare at me, and let out a loud, high-pitched meow.

I rolled over as if to move to the side of the bed, only to find myself completely tangled up in a sleeping bag.

I looked around for my friends – Angie and Emma – but they were nowhere to be found. But I was on the floor in a sleeping bag. And I only slept in those during sleepovers. So where exactly were they?

Oh, wait.

The events of last night came back to me. The struggle to get my bladder to release. The flooded sheets after I had finally managed to trick it into letting go. Having to knock on my parents’ door to inform them of the supposed accident. Mom setting up the sleeping bag for me on the floor.

Chester meowed loudly at me again and then resumed his scratching at the door. It was only slightly better than having to listen to chalk on a blackboard.

I scrambled out of the sleeping bag. Better to let him out quickly than have Grace, or worse, Jackson, open the door for me and discover that all my bedding was missing. I’d have a hard time coming up with a good explanation for that, along with why I had ended up on the floor in a sleeping bag.

I cracked the door open just enough for Chester to squeeze through into the hallway and then closed it right away. I stretched my hands in the air. I always felt so stiff after sleeping on the floor. How long had I slept in, anyway?

I grabbed my phone off of where I had left it on the floor next to the sleeping bag. I tapped the screen. Already 10 a.m. I had really slept in. But that made sense with how late I had stayed up.

I scrolled through my notifications. There were a half-dozen messages from Angie and Emma, ribbing me for how late I had slept in. Both of my friends had been up earlier, discussing what our plans would be for the day. They had come to the decision that they wanted to go to the mall. I agreed that it sounded like a bunch of fun, but aside from needing a ride, none of our parents were going to let their middle schoolers stay at the mall unchaperoned.

I highly doubted that any of our parents wanted to spend time at the mall this weekend.

And there weren’t any other good options at the moment.

Emma’s older sister would sometimes be willing to go along with us, but she wasn’t getting back home from college for a few weeks. Angie didn’t have any siblings at all, so that wasn’t of any help. And Grace, well, she worked very hard to avoid spending any more time around my friends than was absolutely necessary. I wasn’t even going to bother asking her.

In most other things, Grace and I were on good terms as far as sisters with a five-year age gap between them could be.

We both had inherited our parents’ red hair, and I was practically a younger mini-me of my sister, everything else diverged from there.

I was the athlete of our family, taking more after my dad in that regard. I mostly stuck to playing soccer, at least competitively, but I was always the first girl picked for any of the activities during gym class. If only I had managed to get Dad’s brains as well. I wouldn’t have any trouble doing math at all.

Grace was much more artistically inclined. She planned to major in graphic design at college. I did like to doodle myself, but only as a distraction during boring school lectures; nothing that ended up in my notebook could exactly qualify as art.

I grabbed a change of clothes so I could get dressed in the bathroom after the shower. Jean shorts and a tie-die shirt were the plan for today.

Even though I had showered in the middle of the night, I still needed to shower again this morning, as I had only gotten under the water to briefly clean off the urine that had gotten all over me from intentionally wetting the bed.

I texted my friends that I would check with my mom about the possibility of going to the mall but told them to not get their hopes up. I suggested going over to Angie’s place, which was closest to the neighborhood park, to kick around a soccer ball for a bit if the mall plan didn’t work out.

With my clothes in hand, I hesitated in front of the bedroom door. Now was yet another moment of truth.

I would have to walk out into the house with the full knowledge that Mom knew that I had wet the bed last night. There wasn’t any reason to think that Dad didn’t know either. If he somehow hadn’t managed to get a glimpse of my wet pajamas last night, Mom would have certainly filled him in on all the details of what had happened.

I’d vastly underestimated how uncomfortable that would make me feel. But I could at least take solace in the fact that Mom hadn’t seemed upset at me in any way, and she had handled that late-night bedwetting episode with the expertise of someone who wasn’t out of place in that situation.

I stepped out into the hallway. No one was in sight. I speed-walked toward the bathroom.

<><><>

There was a lingering smell of scrambled eggs when I walked into the kitchen, but any hopes for a late breakfast were dashed by the empty pan on the stove.

“Good morning,” Mom said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee and a now empty plate of scrambled eggs set to the side of the book that was propped open in front of her.

“Morning,” I replied.

“I had meant to save you some,” Mom said. “But I think your father ate them. He thought you were going to sleep in all the way till lunch at this point.”

“That’s fine,” I said, even though my stomach was telling me that it would have liked some scrambled eggs.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about that brief exchange, but something still felt off between us as I left the kitchen and walked over to the family room.

Mom knew. She didn’t know the real secret. But she knew a secret. It felt as though that one act of pretending to wet the bed had irrevocably altered things between us, a situation that made me feel more uncomfortable because it couldn’t be acknowledged at the moment.

“About time you’re up,” Grace said as I walked into the family room. My older sister turned to look at Dad. “You always give me such a hard time about sleeping in. And I’m always up in time to at least eat breakfast.”

Dad opened his mouth slightly and then bit his lip. Yeah, he definitely knew as well. I had already come that close to having my secret come out.

“Good morning to you, too,” I muttered to my sister as I sat down on the couch and slid my phone out of my pocket.

I sent a few more texts to my friends while trying my best to ignore the show that Jackson was watching on the TV. Mom joined us a few minutes later. She gave my sister a look, and Grace went off to the kitchen. Dishes were her chore, after all.

Mom glanced to make sure that Grace was out of earshot before turning back to talk to me. “There’s some laundry for you to grab from the basement.”

“OK.” I figured that’s where my bedding would still be, as Mom had taken in downstairs to get washed last night.

I went back to looking at my phone.

“Maddy,” my dad said.

“Yes?”

“Your mom asked you to do something.”

No, she didn’t. She just said my bedding was in the basement. Oh. It hadn’t dawned on me immediately that she had said that to let me know she expected me to go and deal with it right away. Why couldn’t she just tell me what she wanted directly?

“Oh, yeah. I’m on it.” I stood up from the couch. Then, I remembered there was something I had told my friends I was going to ask Mom. May as well get it over with. “Hey, Mom, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“We were wanting to go to the mall after lunch.” Mom didn’t need an explanation of who I was going to be going with. That could only mean Angie and Emma. “You think you could take us?”

“Sorry,” Mom said. “But I’m taking your brother to a birthday party for one of his friends from school. Maybe another time.”

I looked over at Dad.

“It is a nice day out.”

I just stared at him. That wasn’t an answer.

Dad finally elaborated on his response. “That means I’m sure there are better things to do than stay inside all day.”

“Fine,” I said in defeat. I trudged off toward the laundry room.

“Oh, and Maddy, don’t forget to clean the cat litter while you’re down there,” Mom called out after me.

<><><>
I decided that I was glad we only had one cat as I finished scooping out the litter box. I wrinkled my nose as I tied up the bag and tossed it into a garbage bin. Still, it certainly beat having a dog. No way was I going to go around picking up poop off the ground every day.

With that chore done, I turned to the more embarrassing task.

My bedding was still in the dryer. It must not have finished long ago, because the sheets were slightly warm as I scooped them up into my arms.

Grace was still washing dishes when I came up from the basement. Thankfully, she was too focused on her task to turn and look at what I was doing. I knew that part of the family room was also visible from the top of the basement stairs, but I intentionally didn’t look in that direction. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with my parents, not as they knew exactly why all the bedding had needed to be washed this morning.

Jackson was too busy watching Saturday morning cartoons to pay any attention to me, and he was too young to draw any inferences from seeing me carry my bedding back to my bedroom so soon after having gotten out of bed.

I walked as quickly and as quietly as I could to the staircase that led to the second floor. I shut my bedroom door behind me and dropped all of my bedding in a heap on the floor.

I breathed a sigh of relief. How many more times would I need to go through this charade? Were my acting skills up to the task?

I think I had Mom and Dad fooled so far. I’d gone off script last night with my inability to tell my parents that I had wet the bed, but that only added to the obvious shame that I had to have been showing. They had to have believed it was a real bedwetting accident.

But how many nights and days were going to have to pass before this could settle into what would be a much simpler routine? Faking bedwetting while wearing a pull-up was going to be a lot easier.

These late nights and sneaking around to bring my laundry back to my bedroom weren’t going to be sustainable.

I needed pull-ups. And I needed them now.

A thought did cross my mind. Maybe after one or two more nights of bedwetting, if my parents hadn’t purchased pull-ups for me by then, I could go ahead and ask them to get some for me.

But that wasn’t going to happen. If I wasn’t even capable of verbally admitting that I had wet the bed, there was absolutely no way that I could somehow manage to ask them to purchase pull-ups for me. Besides, I had already ruled out that course of action. I couldn’t give them any hints that I somehow wanted to wear pull-ups.

But there wasn’t any other option of getting pull-ups other than the path I had already set myself on last night.

Plus, the worst of it was already over.

I wasn’t going to have to do anything tonight that I hadn’t already proven that I was capable of doing. I knew I could make myself pee in bed. I knew I could endure the humiliation of walking over to my parents’ bedroom to inform them of the accident. I knew I could get past the embarrassment of having to help my mom strip off the bedding and hand her my wet clothes to bring down to the wash. I could deal with needing to bring my bedding back to my room while trying to avoid catching my sister’s attention.

All I had to do was keep my eye on the prize.

I crawled onto the uncovered mattress and leaned over to where I had peed on the bed last night. There didn’t appear to be any obvious stains. I leaned in and took a sniff. Didn’t smell bad, either. Whatever cleaning stuff Mom had used obviously worked well.

What was it that she had said last night? Oh yes, that it hadn’t been the first time when she had needed to get up in the middle of the night to deal with a wet bed.

I suspected some of the cleaning solutions might be leftovers from when Grace had been a bedwetter herself.

I had just finished making the bed when there was a knock at the door. I knew it was my sister. Jackson would just burst in right after knocking, and my parents would announce that it was them.

“Come in.”

“I can take you to the mall,” Grace said as she peered her head in through the open door.

That got my attention. But that raised a whole host of questions. Chiefly, why in the world would my older sister volunteer for a task that she disliked so much?

Grace stepped into the bedroom and shut the door behind her. “So,” my older sister said, lowering her voice to just barely above a whisper. “About that favor I wanted from you yesterday.”

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 2, 2024 at 3:46 AM
Content: Chapter 6: Not Going to Happen AgainThere had to be some kind of catch.

I looked at my older sister in astonishment after hearing her spell out the favor she wanted. I really hadn’t had a clue about what the favor was going to be, but what she was asking wasn’t anywhere close to any of the guesses that had been swirling around in my head since she had done my homework for me yesterday in return for a then-secret favor.

I guess I had just figured that it was going to be something a little bigger than what she had asked, or at least something that I otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to do for her. But this? It would be a piece of cake.

Grace was taking us to the mall. She was supposed to stick with us as a chaperone the whole time. Instead, she was going to drop us off at the mall and return to pick us up four hours later. All I and my friends had to do was not say anything about it.

“Well,” Grace said with a hint of impatience in her voice.

Oh, yeah. I suppose she needed me to answer her and not just stand around gawking at her. “Yeah, of course.”

And that was the end of that discussion. Grace left to head back to her room. I texted my friends the good news.

I made no mention of the favor in the message to them. Nothing done on a phone was secret, after all. I really didn’t think that my parents looked through my text messages, but I wasn’t confident that they didn’t have the ability to do so if they ever wanted to.

I still couldn’t help but question the situation. Grace was a good older sister, but her altruism had never extended this far before. What was in it for her? She would get four hours to herself, four hours when her time would be unaccounted for by our parents.

What could be so important that she’d risk the fallout of her plot being discovered?

For me, I couldn’t see any downside to it at all. Four hours by ourselves at the mall. That was going to be an easy secret to keep; it was not like I would have any incentive to tattle on my older sister.

There was one other benefit for Grace, which I noticed once I went back downstairs. I suppose it didn’t hurt my sister that her willingness to take me and my friends to the mall also got her in Mom’s good graces. Mom was practically gushing about how much of a good older sibling Grace was.

That was true, just not in the way that Mom was thinking.

<><><>
When my parents upgraded to a new minivan last year, they handed down the old one to my sister. The silver Toyota Sienna wasn’t the most fashionable of vehicles for a teen girl to be driving around. My sister had nearly thrown a fit when our parents told her that it would be her vehicle after she got her license. But a car was a car, and having one was a lot better than not having one.

Grace skipped the turn that led to one of the two massive parking ramps on either side of the three-story mall and instead drove us right up to one of the entrances.

“You guys have fun,” Grace said as she pulled over to the curb and put the van into park. “I’ll be back to get you right here at five. Any problems and you call me right away, OK?”

I got out of the passenger seat, and Emma and Angie joined me on the sidewalk, but not without a little confusion.

“We’re getting chauffeur service now?” Angie asked as Grace pulled away.

Grace and I hadn’t said anything about the favor on the way to the mall. I had almost thought she had either forgotten about it or had decided to backtrack. And I hadn’t wanted to bring the topic up in front of my friends in case Grace had somehow decided to change her mind.

“Oh no,” I replied. “We’re on our own today.”

Emma and Angie both stared at me.

“How in the world did you get her to do that?” Emma asked.

I told them about how Grace had done my homework for me the other day, using that assistance basically as blackmail to get me to lie to my parents about the trip to the mall.

The rules at the mall were that kids under the age of sixteen couldn’t be left unsupervised after 5 p.m. But all of our parents were stricter than that. We’d never been left on our own at the mall before.

“You cheated on your homework?” Emma asked indignantly. She was a stickler for following the rules.

I didn’t think that accusation was all that fair. “You heard what Mr. Thompson said. That’s for eighth grade. It’s not like we were supposed to be learning about it this year, anyway.”

“Fine,” Emma said, her hands on her hips. “But what exactly am I supposed to tell my parents?”

“You’ll tell them that Grace did an awesome job of taking us to the mall,” I said.

“You’re saying I should lie to them?” Emma asked.

“Do you want to go home?” Angie asked. “You don’t need to be specific. Just say Grace took us to the mall. That’s technically the truth, after all.”

Emma sighed in defeat. “Fine.”

“Then come on,” Angie said, heading toward the mall entrance. “What are you waiting for?”

<><><>
“I need to pee quick,” I said, excusing myself at the sight of the first restrooms we passed. The two full glasses of Kool-Aid I’d drunk with my lunch of leftover pizza had been a lot, even for my typically strong bladder.

The restroom was nearly deserted. I stepped into a stall near the end. Staying hydrated like this was getting to be a nuisance. It would be so much easier to fake my bedwetting once I had pull-ups.

I would need to have another conversation with Emma and Angie once I got back out to the hallway. Angie seemed on board with keeping the secret, but I needed to make it crystal clear to Emma that she had better be on the same page with us.

My phone buzzed. I reached down to get it from the pocket of my shorts.

It was a message from Mom sent to the group chat that we shared with her and my sister. She had asked how we were doing at the mall. Grace had already replied a few seconds later, saying that we were having a good time and had gotten there OK.

I thought about joining the conversation but decided that the less I said, the better. Best to keep things simple if we were going to try to keep our stories straight.

I started to head to the sink to wash my hands – which usually meant running them through the water for a few seconds – when something near the restroom entrance caught my eye.

There was a woman leaning over a girl on the diaper changing station. That wasn’t an uncommon sight at the mall, and normally, I didn’t pay much attention to it, but this was different.

The girl looked only a little younger than Jackson. Maybe old enough to be starting kindergarten next fall. She was certainly old enough that she should have been potty trained already. She barely fit on the diaper changing station indented into the bathroom wall.

I walked over to the faucet that was the second closest to where the change was taking place.

I usually rushed through washing my hands, but this time, I worked to scrub them as thoroughly as possible, taking slight peeks to the side every few seconds. There could be no mistaking what I saw. The pull-ups the girl was being changed into matched the designs on the ones I had seen in the magazine I had under my bed.

This was a new idea, one that hadn’t even occurred to me before. The pull-ups were advertised as nighttime underwear designed for kids who wet the bed. But here was a girl who was wearing them during the day.

I hadn’t even considered that possibility before, which made me feel a bit stupid. There wouldn’t be any reason why a pull-up worn at night also wouldn’t be effective during the day. It wasn’t like a pull-up would be less absorbent while the sun was out.

But a girl not potty trained at that age? What was wrong with her? I figured it probably had some sort of special needs situation or disability.

But as I continued to wash my hands, I caught snippets of the conversation between the mom and daughter: just idle chit-chat about what they were planning to do and see at the mall in what was an otherwise normal conversation for a kid that age, nothing different from conversations I’d had with my brother when he’d been that age.

I averted my eyes – focusing on putting some more soap on my hands – as the mom finished putting a clean pull-up on her daughter and helped her to her feet.

There wasn’t anyone else in the restroom when I at last finished washing my hands. I grabbed a large wad of paper towels to dry my hands off.

The used pull-up was staring right at me on the top of the nearly full garbage bin as I went to discard the paper towels on my way out of the restroom. I paused for several moments as I stared at it. The questions it raised were ones I couldn’t even dare to let myself think about, let alone answer, for fear of the possibilities nibbling at the far reaches of my brain.

I stopped at a drinking fountain after leaving the restroom, taking a few long sips of water. Had to keep up my hydration, as annoying as it was.

I snuck up on my friends, both of whom were glued to their phones. I peeked over Angie’s shoulder silently to watch the videos she was scrolling through on TikTok.

Dad was adamant that Grace and I shouldn’t use that app. He called it poorly disguised Chinese spyware. I couldn’t see why a foreign government would care about funny dancing videos. But he was the IT expert, so there was no changing his mind. I had to make do with gleaning information from my friends about what the latest social media trends were.

“Boo!” I tapped Angie on her shoulder.

She jumped and nearly dropped her phone. “You’re such a creep sometimes,” Angie said.

“So, what should we do first?” Emma asked.

“You decided that you’re good with being at the mall without Grace?” I asked. There needed to be no question about that before we did anything else.

Emma bit her lip. “I won’t say anything. I promise. Let’s just not make a habit out of it.”

“What do you think Grace is hiding?” Angie asked. “Has to be something she doesn’t want anyone finding out if she’s going to go to all that trouble to keep it secret.”

“Maybe it’s a boyfriend,” Emma said.

That didn’t seem likely. Grace had someone she’d gone out with for about six months during her junior year. Michael had been a bit of a jerk to me, though, so he wasn’t missed. “No,” I said. “Remember that boyfriend she had? She wouldn’t need to hide it.”

“So, a girlfriend then?” Angie asked.

That was an interesting question. But I thought of all the posters of boy bands that covered my sister’s bedroom walls. No, it was pretty clear where her interests lay. “No,” I said confidently. “That’s not her thing.”

We considered a few other options, but nothing seemed to fit for Grace. We set the mystery of what Grace was up to aside, as there wasn’t any obvious answer we could find for her decision, and set off to explore the mall.

As we walked down one of the mall’s many corridors, I thought back to that commercial that had aired on TV the other night. How my friend had laughed and mocked the idea of someone our age needing to wear pull-ups to bed.

Their reaction hadn’t dissuaded me from going forward with the fake bedwetting, but it had reaffirmed the need to keep it secret at all costs.

There were going to be a lot of sleepovers happening over the summer. My fake bedwetting shouldn’t be a problem as long as Mom had gotten me pull-ups by then.

The ad on TV did tout the ability of the pull-ups to be discretely concealed beneath pajamas, but I wasn’t going to be taking that risk around my friends.

I wouldn’t even have to wear the pull-ups to bed. I could just tell Mom that I did and then pretend that I must have had a rare dry night. So even if I was staying overnight at one of my friend’s houses, it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

Bam. Someone’s shoulder hit me in the face, and I fell backward onto the hallway floor. A man standing over me cursed and then looked down at me. “Stupid kids, watch where you are going.”

“Seriously, Mads, you need to pay attention to where you are walking,” Emma said as she gave me a hand and helped me to my feet.

“What do you even spend all your time daydreaming about, anyway?” Angie asked.

My mind immediately went back to that day three years ago. The way the pull-up felt around my waist. The way my reflection looked in the mirror. The never-ending longing to be able to finally relive that moment.

“You look so adorable when you blush like that,” Emma said.

“Shut up,” I muttered. I started to walk down the hallway, paying more attention to my surroundings this time.

“Is it boys?” Emma asked as she caught up to me.

“No, gross. Why would you even say that?”

“Yep, definitely boys. I think someone doth protest too much,” Angie said.

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. That was better than my friends knowing what I was actually daydreaming about. But not much better.

As we made our way to the massive M&M candy shop on the far side of the mall, I had to endure their theories about which boy in our grade I must have a crush on. They went through practically every boy that was in any of my classes, weighing the pros and cons of each option, before settling at last on Ali, who was in my math class and was on the boy’s U13 soccer team for our soccer club.

“Am I right,” Angie asked.

I didn’t really feel like indulging in their game any longer. “No comment.”

We had arrived at the candy store, which had every possible variation of M&M candies that one could want, and quite a few that I couldn’t see anyone ever eating. We filled a bag of custom flavors to share and munched on the chocolate candies while exploring the mall. We walked in a loop around each of the three floors in the three-story complex.

We knew every spot in the mall that gave out free samples. There was a hot sauce place that Angie preferred. I only dared to sample the mildest flavors. I didn’t need any further motivation to drink more water. The beef jerky shop next door was my favorite. They even had alligator jerky for sale. Thankfully, there weren’t any samples for it. Besides that, we managed to get some samples of honey, chocolate, and sports drinks.

We spent the rest of the time trying on a bunch of clothes. None of us had a bunch of spare cash to make any big purchases, but we had fun squeezing into changing stalls and taking videos and photos for Angie and Emma’s social media accounts.

Dad probably wouldn’t approve, but he hadn’t ever explicitly forbidden me from appearing on my friends’ social media pages, and I had been smart enough to make sure that I never brought up that topic with him.

Grace did a good job of covering for us with Mom. She texted me a couple of times to ask what my friends and I were up to, and then she dutifully used that information to update Mom about what we were doing.

And when we were ready to leave, Grace was right on time to pick us up at five p.m. I took a look over at the dash in front of the steering wheel. My sister must have spent a sizable amount of time driving while we were at the mall. The gas tank was a lot less full than it had been when we’d left home.

<><><>
“How was your time at the mall?” Mom asked a few seconds after we had stepped in the front door.

This was where I needed to live up to my end of the favor. I could see Grace giving me a look out of the corner of my eye, one that told me I better stick to our agreement or else.

“It was great,” I said, giving my sister a smile as I looked in her direction. “It was really nice of Grace to take us.”

And that was that. There wasn’t any interrogation of what we had done at the mall. That’s one benefit of being a kid who usually has a very difficult time with lying to their parents. Mom didn’t have any reason to suspect that anything was off.

It wasn’t quite time for dinner. I grabbed a book I had gotten from the library, one about teenagers struggling to survive in a far-off dystopia, but I wasn’t really paying much attention to what I was reading.

Outside of asking me to retrieve my bedding from the basement, my parents hadn’t even made the slightest hint at what had happened last night with the supposed bedwetting.

That was both a good thing and a problem.

It was good because I was supremely embarrassed by the situation. I still couldn’t get over the look on Mom’s face when she noticed my wet shorts while I was standing at her bedroom door or how Dad had craned his head around in bed to try to see what was going on.

I was going to need to somehow work up the courage to do that again tonight.

But there was a downside to their seeming indifference. Yes, it was only one accident, and they wouldn’t have any reason to expect that it was anything other than a one-off event, but the way it had been seemingly brushed off and forgotten about didn’t bode well for convincing them that pull-ups were going to be the solution to this bedwetting problem.

And that assumed that they would know that the pull-ups were an option for me.

I still didn’t know if they had ever had my sister wear pull-ups to manage her own bedwetting. I couldn’t imagine having to wash bedding every single day. The problem was I had been too young at the time to really recall if I had noticed anything out of the ordinary with my sister.

It wasn’t impossible to believe that Grace had worn pull-ups and that my parents had gone to great lengths to keep the situation discreet. And by the time I had any interest in the subject, she had already long been toilet trained at night. I had secretly searched her room multiple times but had never found even the slightest bit of evidence of pull-ups.

I made sure to finish my whole glass of milk with dinner. I didn’t get a refill. Having to drink one glass of it a day was bad enough. Usually, I would try to sneak into the kitchen and pour some out at the end of dinner. Mom gave me a brief smile as she noticed that both my plate and glass were completely empty as I went to drop them off on the kitchen counter near the sink.

Dinners were a family affair. Grace probably would have eaten hers in her room if she had wanted to, but that wasn’t allowed. Still, she hid herself away in her bedroom, saying she wanted to work on some graphic design projects on her computer as soon as she had finished doing the dishes.

That meant that game night was just me, Jackson, and my parents. He was old enough to understand the rules of Uno, but not quite old enough to handle having to draw four without coming close to throwing a tantrum.

Dad took Jackson upstairs to give him a bath while Mom and I switched to playing a round of the card game Canasta.

I was on pins and needles throughout our conversation as we chatted during the game. There were so many secrets that I was juggling. My desire for diapers. The fake bedwetting. My algebra homework. Grace leaving us at the mall. I tried to keep a straight face through all of it, but I must not have succeeded.

It was Mom’s turn, but she set her cards down. “Is everything OK?”

What did she suspect? Did she know? A wave of guilt ran over me. I came perilously close to blurting everything out right then and there.

Mom reached forward and touched my hand. “You don’t need to worry about what happened last night. You remember how I told you that your sister used to struggle with wetting the bed? And that was several times a week for quite a number of years. It’s not something you can control. That’s why it’s called an accident. We never punished or embarrassed Grace for it, and it’s not going to be any different for you.”

“Yeah, it’s just…” I struggled at trying to figure out what I was supposed to say.

“Don’t let it bother you.” Mom said. “You’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight, and it will be a distant memory in a couple of days.”

That made me feel quite guilty. My sheets weren’t going to stay dry tonight. That was out of the question now. If I were to convince Mom and Dad to get me pull-ups, it would take a lot of consistently wet nights.

Plodding footsteps coming down the stairs told us that Dad was done getting my brother ready for bed. That meant the upstairs bathroom was ready for me. I was extremely glad the conversation about bedwetting had wrapped up before his return.

“Make sure you brush your teeth for two minutes,” Mom said. “Oh, and Maddy, don’t forget to use the toilet as well.”

I got up to head upstairs right away, much faster than I normally would have obeyed a request to go brush my teeth. I hoped Mom wouldn’t see how badly I was blushing at her reminder to pee before going to bed.

I hadn’t managed to drink quite as much water as I had done yesterday. That, combined with the fact that I didn’t even need to pee nearly as much as I had at this point last night, meant that it would probably be best to get some additional liquids in me before I retreated to my bedroom.

I could have drunk some water from the bathroom sink. That would have been the discrete thing to do. But I hated the taste of the tap water at our house. It was bad enough that I needed to brush my teeth with it. That was the main reason I often tried to skirt that nighttime responsibility.

Instead, I tiptoed down the stairs. Mom and Dad weren’t in sight. They were probably watching one of their more adult shows in the family room.

I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and pulled out a filtered water jug from the refrigerator. I filled the glass about halfway up. That should be enough to ensure that I’d be more than able to pee on the bed in a couple of hours.

I raised the glass to my lips, taking a few long sips of the cool water. It was a much better choice than trying to drink from the bathroom sink.

“Maddy,” Mom said in a tone that suggested she wasn’t that happy about what I was doing.

I lowered the glass from my lips. Mom was standing at the entrance to the kitchen.

I looked down at the nearly empty glass. “What, I’m thirsty?”

“You probably shouldn’t be drinking that much water right before you get into bed,” Mom said. “That doesn’t help with staying dry at night.”

“Oh,” I said, trying my best to pretend that I hadn’t even thought ahead to the possibility that drinking more would cause me to wet the bed.

I set the glass down on the counter. I would have preferred to have finished it. I would have to settle for a few sips of tap water upstairs instead.

I put on what I thought was a good display of confidence. “Relax, Mom. It’s not going to happen again.”

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 2, 2024 at 5:25 AM
Content: Chapter 7: Bedwetters
Six years ago

The concept of bedwetting wasn’t something that had ever crossed my mind as a young kid. I had been dry at night nearly immediately after being toilet trained during the day. There wasn’t a distinction between being potty trained during the day or potty trained during the night. If someone was potty trained, that meant that they never wet their pants at all. Period.

That changed when I learned my sister was a bedwetter.

In retrospect, the signs of Grace’s bedwetting were practically everywhere.

But when I was six years old, the idea of my older sister peeing in her sleep was so completely inconceivable that I would never have entertained it. All the indicators that Grace was a bedwetter went completely over my head. And, looking back at it, there were many.

While the washing machine and dryer were inaudible from all the way up in my bedroom, the kitchen was close enough to the basement staircase that the rumbling sounds from either machine could be heard every morning during breakfast.

The distant sound of laundry tumbling in the dryer was a consistent part of the background noise in the house as I ate my regular breakfast of cereal. But I didn’t think anything of it as I munched on my Captain Crunch pieces. I was more concerned with making sure I ate them before they got soggy than anything else that was going on around me.

Besides, I hadn’t known a time when the dryer wasn’t turned on around the time that I was eating breakfast, so I paid it no more heed than to the sound of Dad watching the morning news in the other room or Mom scurrying about the kitchen, prepping our lunches to take to school.

A family of four shouldn’t produce so much laundry that the dryer would need to be run every day. But that wasn’t something I’d have considered at that age.

The dryer simply ran nearly every morning, and that was that.

If I had paid attention, I would have been tipped off by the times Grace had tip-toed past me while carrying a bundle of freshly cleaned bedding.

But even when I did notice, I didn’t think much of it. Laundry was just one of my sister’s chores at the time, and chores were a topic I didn’t want any more familiarity with.

Chores were a concept my parents had introduced to me last year, complete with a magnet chart on the fridge for documenting my progress toward earning various rewards. For me, that meant making sure all my toys were put away each evening, making my bed in the morning, and other random age-appropriate tasks around the house.

And then there was the question of pajamas.

Grace usually showered and changed first thing in the morning, so I didn’t often see her in her pajamas after I had gotten out of bed myself, but there were times when she was wearing a different set of pajamas than what I had seen her in when she had been brushing her teeth in the bathroom the night before.

I certainly noticed, but it would never have occurred to me that she would have changed pajamas because she had peed on her first pair of them. I just figured she must have gotten uncomfortable in the middle of the night.

Then, there was the fact that my sister never had any sleepovers. My first sleepover actually came before she had a chance to do one.

My first sleepover had come a week into the summer after graduating from kindergarten when I’d had Emma sleepover at my house for the first time. It was another few years before Angie’s parents would allow her to join in on our sleepovers.

Looking back on it, the fact that Grace hadn’t complained at all about not going on sleepovers when I was allowed to have one was another sign that she had been perfectly comfortable avoiding spending the night with friends, likely out of fear of her bedwetting being discovered.

My sister’s room was very much off-limits, especially when my friends were over. I was sure there were plenty of reasons that a twelve-year-old wouldn’t want their six-year-old sister snooping around, but in retrospect, I wondered if I would have found evidence of her bedwetting had I searched then rather than waiting another three years until after Grace had learned to stay dry at night.

Grace took the privacy of her bedroom very seriously. The door remained shut at all times, even when she wasn’t in it. She even went so far as to put a “keep out” sign on her door. She had even tried to get Mom and Dad to let her put a lock on her door, but that request had gotten shut down right away.

Then there were the reminders to use the toilet before bed. Something that got said a lot more to Grace than to me. There had been times in the evening when Grace had asked for something to drink, only to have Mom or Dad tell her that it was too late for that.

Watson might have declared the evidence to be “elementary” at this point, but Sherlock Holmes I was not. My six-year-old brain lacked the necessary deduction skills to put it all together.

That was until the proof of my sister’s bedwetting became undeniable.

<><><>
I groaned as I opened my eyes. It was still dark out. Very dark out. It was such an inopportune time to wake up. I had been rudely pulled out of the most fascinating dream involving panda bears, a field trip to the art museum, and a boy band my sister liked.

Why was I even awake now in the first place? I swallowed. My mouth felt dry. It was enough of a nuisance that I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep until I’d gotten something to drink.

A year ago, I would have called out to Mom and Dad until one of them had woken up to get me a glass of water. They were usually reluctant to give me anything more than a couple of sips. That annoyed me, but I understood later why they were so insistent on limiting fluids.

They soon got tired of getting me something to drink, and I was informed that I was a big enough girl to get out of bed and get a glass of water all by myself.

But this situation was a little different.

It would have been one thing if we had been at home. There, I knew the contours of our house well enough to navigate downstairs without needing to turn on any lights. But here, in the guest house we were staying at while visiting my grandparents, I didn’t even know where the light switch was, let alone the doorway.

I sat in bed for several minutes while my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark; it was a moonless night on a rural property, so even then, I could only barely make out the outline of where the bedroom door might be.

I nearly fell off of the bed when I rolled over onto my side. I had forgotten that it was only half the size of the bed I had back in my bedroom. I took cautious steps in a straight line toward what appeared to be the bedroom door until, at last, I had my hand on the cold doorknob.

I expected darkness when I swung open the bedroom door, but there was a hint of light from the end of the hallway, coming from the stairs that led down to the main floor. That was where I needed to go. There weren’t any glasses in the upstairs bathroom.

There were two upstairs bedrooms, one for me and one for my parents. My older sister was sleeping downstairs on a pull-out sofa. What was she doing up this late?

The door to the bedroom my parents were using was open. I peeked inside it. It was only Dad in there. That explained the downstairs light. Mom must have gotten up with my six-month-old brother to feed him. At least that meant that there was a light on, so it would be easier to find my way to the kitchen.

As I approached the top of the staircase, I heard some voices. It was my mom and my sister, interspersed with some soft crying from Jackson.

I got the sense that this somehow wasn’t a conversation I was supposed to be listening to, but curiosity got the better of me. I tip-toed quietly down the carpeted stairs and then inched along the hallway until I could see into the room where my sister had been sleeping.

I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t in some sort of strange dream.

My sister was wearing pajama pants that were paired with one of those extra-long T-shirts she always wore to bed, the kind that could practically double as a dress.

It wasn’t the type of pajamas my sister was wearing, but their condition that caught my attention.

There was a large wet spot on my sister’s pajamas.

My initial thought was that Grace must have accidentally spilled water on herself. But that didn’t track.

She seemed rather upset. I looked up at her face and saw that she was crying. No reason to be that upset over a spilled glass of water. Mom, who was holding Jackson, was standing close by. I wasn’t able to make out the expression on her face, but the tone of her voice suggested she wasn’t all that happy with my sister.

Then, there was the location of the wet spot on her pajama pants. Yeah, it definitely wasn’t water.

“I told you that I had packed it for you, Grace.” Mom said. “Why didn’t you—”

“Mom,” Grace interrupted. “I told you already. I just forgot about it. Anyway, I’m not a baby.”

“I’m not saying you are,” Mom said. “Which means you need to be more responsible.”

Mom looked down at where Grace had been sleeping. I couldn’t see from here, but I guessed that the accident had gotten all over the bedding and perhaps the couch as well.

“Just go hop in the shower,” Mom said. “I’ll try to figure out how to get this cleaned up. There have to be some cleaning supplies somewhere.”

That was my cue to skedaddle. But with Grace now headed in my direction, I belatedly realized that there wasn’t any way to get up the stairs without her noticing me. Instead, I back away into an adjacent room, hoping to keep out of sight of my sister and my mom.

Once Grace was heading up the stairs, I peeked out again and got a good look at her pajamas.

There could be no disputing it. My sister had peed herself.

I really didn’t know how to react to this revelation.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen a kid wet their pants before. That had happened to other students on three occasions during my kindergarten year.

But that was different; those kids had either been too scared of the school restrooms or too scared of their teacher to ask for permission to go potty.

This was my sister. She was about to be a teenager. And she had peed herself despite the fact that there was a perfectly good and accessible toilet only a few feet away from her.

How? Why? It made no sense. It was just confusing, and I wasn’t quite convinced that I wasn’t still dreaming up this wacky scene.

“Madelyn.” Mom’s voice was hushed, but I could sense her irritation through the use of my full first name.

It turned out that my hiding spot wasn’t quite as hidden as I thought it had been.

“What are you doing up?”

“Um, I woke up. I was thirsty and wanted something to drink.”

There was simply no way I could hold the question inside.

“Did Grace pee her pants?”

Mom glanced toward the staircase before answering me. “For some kids, like your sister, their bladder sometimes forgets that it is supposed to hold their pee in while they are asleep. It’s not your sister’s fault she had a bedwetting accident. Some kids, like you, grow out of it right when they are potty trained. It takes a lot longer for other kids.”

That was a lot to take in all at once. Bedwetting. That was a new word for me. Perhaps it helped to define what was happening to my sister as something separate from toilet training.

“Hey,” Dad said. He was not using his nighttime voice. “Heard that there was someone in the shower and then saw that no one was in bed.”

“Grace had a bedwetting accident,” Mom said.

Dad turned to look at me and then back at Mom.

Mom sighed, adjusting her grip on Jackson, who was beginning to squirm. “Maddy already knows now. She found out because she was getting something to drink.”

Dad completely brushed off the news about the bedwetting as if it was something that was completely normal and expected. “Do we think that getting something to drink is a good idea?” He asked.

“But I’m thirsty,” I complained. My mouth was still very dry.

“Drinking lots of water at night can sometimes lead to bedwetting accidents for kids,” Dad said.

“But I don’t ever wet the bed when I drink water at night.”

“Maddy does have a point,” Mom said.

“Fine,” Dad responded. “But if she ruins a mattress, you can explain it to your parents.”

“Go on,” Mom said to me.

I went off to the kitchen but only took the tiniest sip of water. Despite my protestations that I had never wet the bed before, I was now suddenly very concerned that it could happen if I were to drink too much. I set the glass down without finishing it off and began to walk toward the stairs.

“Hold up,” Dad said. “There’s something we need to talk about first.”

I paused at the foot of the stairs.

“While it is normal for some kids to have bedwetting issues, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t embarrassing or that other people who aren’t nice might tease your sister about it. You are not to tell anyone else that your sister wets the bed. That’s a private issue, not to be shared with anyone other than our family. Secondly, you aren’t to mention this at all to your sister. Not to tease her. Not because you’re curious. Not at all.”

I understood from the way Dad’s tone had changed that this was a very serious request. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

The shower was still running when I slipped past the upstairs bathroom on my way back to bed.

<><><>
Present time

I had figured that wetting the bed a second time would be a lot easier. I was wrong.

Like last night, I was waiting anxiously for the clock to strike midnight.

Unlike last night, the urge to pee was present, but not nearly as overwhelming. While I still had drunk more liquids than normal over the course of the afternoon and evening, I hadn’t been as thorough in my hydration as yesterday.

It didn’t help that Mom had caught me drinking water in the kitchen. I had planned to drink some water from the bathroom sink, but all it took was one sip of unfiltered water to deter me from doing that. I wanted pull-ups, but not that badly.

Her concern over what I was drinking in the evening could turn out to be a problem, especially as the bedwetting would be turning into a pattern rather than a random one-off occurrence. Perhaps I would be able to get comfortable enough with peeing myself so that I wouldn’t need to drink excessive amounts of water to do so.

I’d been lying in bed for about an hour and a half now. The first twenty minutes of that had been spent listening to Chester paw at my door. The cat’s efforts at opening the door had thankfully proven to be unsuccessful. He’d probably gone back downstairs to bother my parents. That was followed by the sound of my sister leaving her room momentarily to brush her teeth.

I’d picked one of my least favorite pajama outfits for the night. It was a hand-me-down shirt from my sister. This one had a bit of special significance. It was the same T-shirt she had worn that night when I found out about her bedwetting. That was paired with some pink pajama pants with hearts on them. I wouldn’t mind if either the shirt or pants got ruined because of the bedwetting.

I had kept the promise I had made to my parents six years ago. My lips had stayed completely shut. As far as I knew, Grace had no idea that I had ever known about her bedwetting. I hadn’t even brought up the subject again with our parents.

If I could make it through the next week or so without Grace catching on, I’d be able to keep this bedwetting secret from her as long as my parents purchased pull-ups for me. I thought back to all the signs that had been present when Grace had been a bedwetter. I knew what I needed to avoid if I were to keep my own secret safe.

That night at my Grandparents’ house had been the only time where I had stumbled across evidence of my sister’s bedwetting. That raised a lot of questions. Was her bedwetting something that was super frequent at that point, or had she, at the same age I was now, already been outgrowing her bedwetting phase?

But there were other questions that remained unanswered. The fact that there had been laundry washed every morning suggested that Grace either hadn’t been wearing pull-ups to bed or that they had been totally ineffective in keeping her sheets dry. Did my parents even realize that pull-ups were an option for my older sister? Or had they – or she – decided that pull-ups weren’t how they were going to manage her bedwetting?

But what about that time at my grandparents’ place? Yes, Grace had wet the bed on the first night, but as far as I knew, there hadn’t been a repeat during that week-long stay. Was it possible that she had worn a pull-up the rest of the nights there?

A lot of those questions could have been answered if I had ever managed to work up the courage to ask my older sister, but a promise was a promise, so I followed my parent’s rules even after they had let me know that Grace’s bedwetting phase had ended – a move they made one vacation when they had Grace and I share a bed for the first time. I had been greatly reassured, knowing that my sister wasn’t going to pee all over me in her sleep.

The telltale signs of Mom and Dad heading to bed had passed twenty minutes ago. It was likely that they were both already asleep by now. Dad’s snoring wasn’t quite as loud as last night, but I could still make it out occasionally.

But all the certainty leading up to this moment was again beginning to fall away.

Until last night, the idea of pretending to wet the bed had been a fantasy. It had been a fun thing to think about as I went through how different scenarios might play out in my head, all of them ending with Mom bringing me aside for a private conversation where she would reveal that she had purchased pull-ups for me to wear to bed. It had been a constant daydream over the past year as I slowly worked up the courage to finally act on my desires.

But now I knew what the reality of bedwetting was like. And it wasn’t quite like how things had gone in my daydreams. Bedwetting sucked when doing it while not wearing pull-ups.

It was one thing to have to inform my parents of the accident; there was no getting around that if I were to convince them that pull-ups were needed, but it was something else to have the evidence of my wet pajamas and bed displayed right in front of them. I could picture the expression on Mom’s face from last night, and I dreaded having to see it again.

I nearly faltered. I nearly got up and walked to the bathroom. I nearly convinced myself that I could call it quits. But there was one thing that was stopping me.

The one reassurance was that I could always stop. If faking the bedwetting got to be too difficult or too embarrassing, if I somehow found that the pull-ups didn’t live up to my expectations, all I would have to do was stop wetting the bed. I could end it as easily as it was beginning.

But the one thing I couldn’t do was go through my plan only halfway. I needed to either be fully committed to it or not do it at all. The bedwetting had to be consistent and frequent if I was going to get my parents to buy me those pull-ups.

I kept trying – and failing – to get my bladder to release while I was lying down in bed. I wanted the accident to look as natural as possible, but no matter how I positioned myself – lying on my side, front, or back – I was not able to get myself to pee. But there was something other than just making sure my deceit wouldn’t be found out by my parents. I wanted to know what it felt like to have an actual bedwetting accident, not just squat over my sheets and pee.

But another five minutes passed by without any results.

I yawned. I had two options. Figure out a way to pee or go to sleep.

I got up on my knees the way I had done the night before. I turned my mind to thoughts of things that were wet. A minute later, there was a wetness and warmth in my underwear, followed by the sound of urine streaming onto the bed, proof that the method I had discovered last night had worked again.

Like last night, once I had started peeing, I found it impossible to stop once everything was out. And also, like last night, the feeling of the wet clothes against my skin was barely tolerable.

I picked up my phone and turned the flashlight app on. The wet spot wasn’t as big as last night, but it would more than do. It was time to get the hard part over with.

So there I was, still in my soaked underwear and pants and my slightly wet shirt, staring right at my parents’ bedroom door. I’d turned off the flashlight app on my phone once I’d gotten out to the hallway. I didn’t need to make my accident any more obvious than it was already.

I tried to knock. I really did. I must have raised my hand up a half-dozen times, but each time, I held my fist aloft in the air for a few seconds before letting my arm drop back down.

I thought about how Mom had reacted last night. She hadn’t been upset at me, but I could tell that having to get out of bed that late had been a nuisance, especially with how she had needed to get the laundry started and clean up the mattress.

Even if I had experienced a real bedwetting accident, I would have felt bad about having to make Mom clean up after me like that. If I had made a mess in the house any other time during the day, I’d be expected to clean it up on my own without any assistance. Why should this be any different?

Besides, all my parents needed to know was that I had an accident. Maybe there wasn’t a need to wake them. All the bedding in the washing machine would be proof enough of that in the morning.

That was a much better idea. I would change out of my wet pajamas and then take all of my wet clothing and bedding down to the basement. I could at least get a washing cycle started, and then it all could be moved to the dryer in the morning.

I wouldn’t need to hide the bedwetting from my parents, but it would be much less humiliating to tell them in the morning, or perhaps they would figure it out on their own by the fact that I was doing laundry, which would make a difficult conversation a little easier.

That meant I was going to have to figure out how to clean the bed. I guessed that if I were to check the closet, I would be able to recognize the cleaning solutions Mom had used last night. In less than twenty minutes or so, I’d have everything all cleaned up, and I could be tucked into a sleeping bag on the floor.

I’d made my decision. Waiting until the morning for my parents to find out about this latest bedwetting accident would make things a lot easier.

I was right about to head back to my room when Grace’s bedroom door swung wide open, and she stepped out into the hallway. I could have sworn that she was asleep already. I hadn’t noticed any light coming from under her door, and I had heard her brushing her teeth in the bathroom shortly after I had gone to bed myself.

I stood frozen in place. There was no escape. The light from her bedroom illuminated the hallway, reaching out all the way to where I was standing. My hands slid down in front of my waist, but even had they been able to completely obscure the wet spot before Grace had a chance to see it, just the motion of hiding that part of my body would have been enough to arouse her suspicions.

We locked eyes. She appeared just as surprised to see me as I was to see her. Neither of us said anything.

Grace’s expression changed from the casual surprise of seeing me to concern over what must be the obvious embarrassment showing on my face.

I watched in horror as my sister’s eyes drifted down to my waist, her pupils expanding as she took in the sight of my hands held in front of my wet pajamas.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 3, 2024 at 12:12 AM
Content:

Growler0128 said:

FYI:: COFFEE AND TEA are both diuretics, meaning that they cause you to pee so drinking these would help her out.

[End of quote]

They certainly would. Though both are things that a 12-year-old may not be as interested in drinking.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 3, 2024 at 12:13 AM
Content: Chapter 8: EqualsGrace clasped both of her hands over her mouth, holding back a muffled reaction that might have otherwise woken up the rest of our family.

My hands remained on the front of my pajama pants, as pointless as it was to remain in the posture as I wasn’t able to fully conceal how I had peed myself. Neither of us moved. I couldn’t take my eyes off of my sister.

As much as I had worked to avoid it, I had known that it was a possibility that Grace might find out about my faked bedwetting. As a former bedwetter herself, my older sister would be attuned to the signs that something might be off about me. And it was certainly better than having my younger brother or friends discover this secret.

But of all the ways Grace could have discovered my fake bedwetting, this had to be among the worst. I had anticipated something much less dramatic and certainly much less embarrassing.

I couldn’t stand in front of my parents’ bedroom door forever. That was not a feasible plan.

There were only a couple of directions I go could. Returning to my room wasn’t an option. Doing so would require going toward my sister.

I was definitely not going to do anything to wake up my parents at this point and turn my bedwetting incident into a whole family affair. Running down the stairs in the dark wasn’t an option, either.

That left the bathroom.

I dashed inside it with a few quick steps, closing the door as gently as I could while also shutting it quickly.

I was safe. Safe, but trapped.

I listened at the door, hoping that Grace would go back to her room and give me some privacy to get back to my bedroom and get cleaned up. At least let me change into a dry set of pajamas. I was having no such luck.

I flipped on the light switch. Even if I hadn’t peed quite as much as last night, my pants didn’t appear any less soaked. Enough time had passed, and the wet clothes were already beginning to get uncomfortable as the initial warmth faded away.

The expression on my older sister’s face had left no doubt that there had been enough light in the hallway for her to notice how wet my pajamas were. And she had been a bedwetter. If it had been Jackson instead, I perhaps could have tried to say I had just spilled a glass of water on myself. My six-year-old brother might have been gullible enough to fall for that, especially if he was still a bit drowsy.

But Grace? No, she knew exactly what wet pants looked like from having wet the bed.

I heard footsteps in the hallway. I held my breath. Then there were two soft taps on the bathroom door. There was some faint whispering from the other side of the door, but I couldn’t make out what was being said.

I breathed out. Grace wasn’t going to let me avoid having this conversation. I leaned forward and pressed my ear up against the door in an attempt to make out what my sister was saying.

There was another series of soft taps on the door, followed again by my sister’s voice. This time, I could make out what she was saying, if just barely.

“Is everything OK in there? I can help. Promise I’m not going to judge you or anything.”

If I hadn’t known about my sister’s previous bedwetting, it might have been harder to trust that statement. But I figured that I could. She had actually gone through what I was only attempting to fake. I stepped back and pulled the door open.

Grace at least had the courtesy this time to not stare down right at the wet spot on my pajama pants.

But what was she thinking as she was looking at me? Did Grace see a reflection of herself from six years ago? If I were to go back and look at our old family photo albums from that vacation, it would be plain to anyone that I was almost an exact carbon-copy of her when she was my age. I realized that I probably looked the same to her as she had looked to me when I had watched her walk up the staircase in her wet pajamas six years ago.

“I can help you get things cleaned up, but I really need to pee first.”

I had been so absorbed in my own embarrassment and concern about what my sister was seeing and thinking that I hadn’t noticed how she was a bit fidgety herself. Had she perhaps woken up just in time to avoid having an actual bedwetting accident herself?

Graced squeezed past me into the bathroom as I stepped out into the hallway and made a beeline back to my bedroom.

That we hadn’t woken up our parents or Jackson was a minor miracle with how we had been going back and forth in the upstairs hallway.

I used my shirt to pat myself dry after taking off my pajama pants and underwear. It wasn’t nearly as good as hopping in the shower to get myself washed off, but it would have to do for now. I turned and stared at my wet bedding. I just had to remember that it wasn’t like Grace hadn’t seen anything like this before. This had been her own nightly reality for years.

The toilet flushed in the distance.

I kept my back to the bedroom door. My hands were starting to shake. I tried to keep my mind focused on the prize at the end of the road. Soon, I’d be wearing pull-ups to bed each night. I’d only have to endure the embarrassment of peeing on the bed for a short while before I’d get those pull-ups. And then it would be incredibly easy to discreetly continue faking the bedwetting.

The handle on the bedroom door rattled behind me as Grace made her way into the room, shutting the door behind herself. This was rare territory for my sister to be in. We typically respected the privacy of each other’s rooms, only opening them a bit if there was a message that needed to be passed along.

Graced walked up beside me with her eyes fixed on the aftermath of my fake bedwetting incident. “Do you need a hug?”

I nodded, leaning in toward my sister as she pulled me into a firm embrace and rubbed her hand on my back. My hands were no longer shaking a few seconds later.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Grace said. “I promise I’m not going to tell anyone about it.”

I waited expectantly. Surely, if there was any time for her to bring up her own history of bedwetting, this would be it. It would make sense for Grace to use that as a way to try to comfort me. And that would be my chance, the chance to ask all of the questions about her bedwetting that I had been dying to ask the past few years.

But, for whatever reason, Grace didn’t seem willing to bring that subject up.

“So,” Grace said, her gaze again turned toward the bed.

I thought back to the question Mom had asked me the other night. She had asked me if I had a dream about going to the toilet while I was asleep. That seemed like a plausible excuse to give to my older sister, though I provided more embellishment than I did with Mom last night.

I described an elaborate, made-up dream to Grace, one that I hadn’t thought was a dream at the time, so when the urge to pee happened, I hadn’t realized that I needed to wake up to avoid peeing the bed.

“So yeah,” I said, concluding the tale. “I thought I had made it to the toilet in time, but then I felt something wet, and I woke up.”

“You probably had too much to drink this evening.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Grace gave me a bit of side-eye. “I recall that someone refilled her glass a couple of times at dinner.”

“Yeah, that’s just the stir-fry was spicy.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad. So, anyway, were you going to tell Mom and Dad about the accident?”

There was a truthful answer for me to give to that question.

“I… I was going to ask for help with getting things cleaned up. But I decided I’d rather take care of it on my own.”

“I can help bring things down to the laundry room. But you can’t go to bed before getting the mattress cleaned up. I’ll have to see if there are some cleaning chemicals that would work for it.”

I helped Grace strip the bed. Like last night, there was a sizable wet spot on the mattress. The thin, cotton mattress protector wasn’t up to the task of handling things when an entire bladder was emptied onto it.

There was no sign that Jackson or our parents had been disturbed from their sleep as we ventured out into the hallway and made our way down to the basement. Grace was carrying most of the bedding while I held my wet pajamas in one hand and my phone in the other to light the way down the stairs.

How would I be reacting if I had actually wet the bed without intending to do it? I decided to try to play down the bedwetting accident.

“I really don’t know what happened,” I said as I tossed my wet pajamas into the washing machine. “I’ve never had anything happen like this since like when I was a baby.”

Grace gave me that look. The one that said she knew that was a terrible liar, which, a lot of the time, was true. “You didn’t wet the bed last night as well?”

I tried to make my response sound as indignant as possible. “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Grace put her hands on her waist. “So, all of your bedding was in the dryer before breakfast for no reason at all? Like I said, it’s not a big deal. You don’t need to lie about it.”

My face suddenly felt rather warm. Here I was, thinking I had been quite sneaky in managing to get my bedding back up to my room without being caught. And Grace had known about it all day long and hadn’t said a single word to me.

Grace’s curiosity was beginning to get annoying. Time to turn the tables on her.

“So what? You were a bedwetter until you were my age.”

Grace’s face momentarily blanched, and then she regained her composure. “Me, no. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

It was my turn to get annoyed at my sister for not being truthful with me. “It’s not a big deal. You don’t need to lie about it.”

It was Grace’s turn for her face to go as red as mine had a few seconds earlier. “How? That was forever ago?”

I recounted the tale about how I had accidentally stumbled across the scene of her having wet the bed that time we had been visiting our grandparents six years ago, from overhearing her conversation with Mom to watching her walk up the stairs in obviously wet pajamas.

The expression on Grace’s face told me that she remembered that fateful night as well.

“Mom and Dad caught me after you went upstairs. They made me promise to not tell anyone about it,” I said. “They said I wasn’t to ever say anything about it to you, either.”

My voice dropped off at the conclusion of the tale, and we stood silently as the washing machine begin rumbling after having filled up with water.

My shame at having my bedwetting discovered had dissolved now that I had forced Grace to admit her own bedwetting past. We were equals now.

I was now burning with curiosity. There were so many things I wanted to know. Chief among them was if Grace had ever worn pull-ups to bed. I desperately needed to know if that was something my parents had ever used with her.

But there were other things I was curious about as well, such as information that could help me better fake my own bedwetting in the coming weeks. How often had she wet the bed? Did it typically happen at certain times of the night? Did she usually pee a lot or a little when it happened?

It was as if Grace could read my mind. “I don’t want to talk about it, OK?” she said. “Let’s just get your mattress cleaned up, and then we can get some sleep.”

I silently accepted her refusal to say anything further on the matter. With our secrets now revealed to each other, perhaps I’d get another chance to talk with Grace about it once she had gotten over the fact that I had known about her bedwetting for the past six years.

We returned to my bedroom, stopping at a closet while Grace showed me which cleaning supplies would be best for removing the urine stains and odor from the mattress. She walked me through the process of drying and cleaning the mattress. That was going to be helpful for future nights when I would preferably be handling this process all on my own.

“That should do it,” Grace said as she finished dusting the wet spot with baking soda. “That will need to be brushed or vacuumed off in the morning.”

She turned around after taking a couple of steps toward the door.

“You really should hop in the shower before you get in the sleeping bag. Otherwise, you’re going to wake up smelling like pee.”

I suspected that this was advice Grace had learned from experience.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 3, 2024 at 2:42 AM
Content: Chapter 9: Running DryMom’s eyes went back and forth between the sleeping bag on the floor and the uncovered mattress still covered in baking soda.

Like yesterday, I had slept in much longer than intended because of how late I had finally fallen asleep after cleaning up after the fake bedwetting incident. Unlike yesterday, Mom had come to investigate why I hadn’t gotten out of bed at a reasonable time.

I had woken up to the sight of her standing over me at the foot of the sleeping bag. The second night of waking up on the floor was less disorientating than the first. I knew right away both where I was and why I was there. I had intentionally peed on the bed, and Grace had helped me clean up.

I stretched my mouth open in a wide yawn and rubbed my eyes.

This was not how I had intended for my mom to find out about the bedwetting. I would have preferred a discreet conversation once I was fully awake rather than be wakened to her witnessing the aftermath of it. I had less control of my secrets than I thought I did.

“What happened?” Mom asked.

The question irked me. The answer seemed rather obvious. Why else would I be in a sleeping bag? And why else would all the sheets and blankets have been taken off of the mattress? Why was Mom insisting that I spell it out for her?

I didn’t bother describing the elaborate dream I had made up for Grace last night. “Um,” I said, my gaze fixed on Mom’s slippers rather than her face. “It happened again.”

Mom sighed. “I did tell you that you shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night.”

That was true. Mom had caught me in the middle of drinking one more glass of water before going to bed. I had worried that it would have caused problems with being able to pee on the bed, but I still had been hydrated enough to do so.

The last thing I needed was for Mom to be fixated on how much liquids I was drinking.

“I was thirsty. And it’s not like that’s caused problems before.”

“And it’s not like you’ve ever wet the bed before, much less two times in a row,” Mom said. “I think it would be good if you drank a little bit less in the evening.”

There wasn’t anything I could say to argue back against that. From Mom’s perspective, it was a completely reasonable request. From what I could recall, Grace had been under similar restrictions back when she was a bedwetter. I would just need to be more discreet when getting extra water to drink today.

There were footsteps in the hallway. Then Grace walked by, passing my open bedroom door on the way to her own bedroom. Mom turned around just in time to briefly make eye contact with Grace before my older sister scurried off.

Great. Now, Mom and Grace both knew that each other knew about my bedwetting.

Mom rushed over to close the door. “I’m sorry,” Mom said. “I’ll talk with your sister and make sure she respects your privacy. I should have closed the door behind me when I came to get you up.”

“It’s fine. She found out last night. She helped me get it cleaned.”

“Oh,” Mom said. “That was nice of her.”

“Yeah,” I said. Best to get the full truth out. “She knows that I know about her past bedwetting as well.”

“I see,” Mom said. “Still, I’ll have a talk with her later this morning. Did you start the washing machine last night?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, no one else has started on any laundry this morning, so it’s still in there. Please move it over to the dryer before you get in the shower.”

Mom left the bedroom without giving me any further instructions.

It was Sunday morning. That sucked cause it meant the weekend was already halfway over. The only good thing was that I only had one more week left of school before summer break. That also meant that our soccer tournament was continuing this afternoon. We had a game scheduled for right after lunch, and there would be another one early in the evening if we won. All that exercise would at least give me plenty of excuses to drink more water.

I rolled up my sleeping bag and tucked it back in the closet. I stood and stretched for a couple of minutes before heading downstairs to move the bedding over to the dryer. I wasn’t super sore from having slept on the floor, but I was beginning to notice the effects of having done so for two nights in a row.

<><><>
Getting hydrated was a lot more difficult when everyone was monitoring how much I was drinking.

My problems with getting enough to drink started as soon as I got home from the soccer match. I had gone through two bottles of Gatorade while I had been playing, but with how hot it had been during the game, I was sure I had practically sweated it all out.

We’d lost three to zero in the sweltering heat, and the score would have been even more lopsided if not for some heroic saves by Angie, who was the team’s goalie.

And that was the end of soccer – at least playing competitively on a team – until it was time to try out for the middle school team in the fall.

There were some summers when I had played in a summer league with Angie and Emma, but with the lengthy vacation my parents had planned to celebrate my sister’s high school graduation, that wasn’t an option this year. That had been disappointing, but Mom and Dad had made it up to me by signing me up for a week-long, overnight soccer camp instead.

After having taken a quick shower, I thought I had the kitchen to myself as I retrieved a plastic cup from the cupboard and grabbed the filtered water from the fridge. Still, it wouldn’t do to dawdle.

I needed to drink the water quickly. I lifted the cup to my lips and tilted my head back as I began to chug down the water as fast as possible. It wasn’t fast enough.

I had gotten halfway through the cup of water when I heard my sister’s voice behind me.

“Not sure that’s a good idea.”

The shock of hearing Grace’s voice, especially when I had been so certain that she had been tucked away in her bedroom, caused my hand to slip. Instead of continuing to pour the water into my mouth, I splashed a large amount onto my chin and T-shirt.

I turned to face my sister. “Seriously, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

Graced eyed the wet spots on my shirt as I wiped my chin dry on my sleeve. My face burned. It brought me back to how she had looked at me in the hallway last night when it had been my pajama pants rather than my T-shirt that had been wet.

Grace grimaced a little, as if she wasn’t entirely comfortable with what she was about to say.

“Look, I know from experience that, um, drinking as much water as you’re drinking right now isn’t always a good idea.” She looked around as if she was making sure no one was eavesdropping on the conversation and then leaned in closer to me. “Probably best to limit your liquids until bed unless you like waking up to change your sheets in the middle of the night.”

My chest froze at that last whispered sentence from Grace. What, why would she think that I – or anyone – would like waking up to a wet bed?

“What? I don’t like it.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “I know you don’t like it. It’s just a figure of speech.”

“But I can’t, like, not drink anything at all,” I protested.

“I’m not saying that you shouldn’t drink anything,” Grace said. “But, like, chugging a sixteen-ounce cup of water isn’t exactly going to make things easier on your bladder tonight.”

It wasn’t as if I could very well argue with her about that point. My older sister was the expert on bedwetting, after all. I emptied the remainder of the water from the glass into the sink. I would need to find other opportunities to stay hydrated. That proved to be difficult.

<><><>
Grace had helped Mom and Dad set the table for dinner. We always sat in the same spot around the table. Our parents sat on one end together, with Jackson next to Mom, so she could keep him in line. Grace sat next to Dad, and I was sandwiched between my two siblings.

The glass of water in front of my plate was technically full, but Grace had also filled it to the brim with ice, so there was only about half as much water in it as normal.

Not that I could say anything about it at the moment. The last thing I needed was for Jackson to find out about the bedwetting as well. He would not handle it as discretely as I had with Grace when I was his age.

I desperately wanted to excuse myself from the table to refill my glass of water, but I had a sinking feeling that Mom and Dad would definitely say something about it. They wouldn’t outright tell me that I should drink less to avoid wetting the bed – not in front of Jackson – but I suspected they would encourage me to drink less, and I didn’t want to deal with that embarrassing conversation.

I stared at the glass of ice as I took another bite of spaghetti, as if I could mentally make the ice cubes begin to melt a little bit faster.

By the time I was finished eating my spaghetti, enough ice had melted to allow me to have one more small sip before it was time to take the dishes to the kitchen for Grace to get them washed.

The rest of the evening didn’t go any better. It seemed like every time I got up to walk past the kitchen, Mom, Dad, or Grace were in sight. That was a problem. I needed them to think I was wetting the bed naturally, like whatever genetics had caused Grace to be a bedwetter was now doing it for me.

If my parents thought that the bedwetting was only due to how much water I was drinking, I worried they might focus on that rather than purchase pull-ups.

I managed to sneak in a few sips of water here and there, but it wasn’t nearly as much as I’d had to drink the other night. I also put off going to the bathroom. The last time I had peed had been shortly before dinner. Even without as much to drink, if I went from then until midnight, surely I’d need to pee badly enough at that point that wetting the bed wouldn’t be difficult.

<><><>
It was a school night, so I was sent to bed a bit earlier. I was in the middle of brushing my teeth when Mom peeked into the bathroom.

“Madelyn,” Mom said.

I took the toothbrush out of my mouth so that I could reply. “Yes?”

“Make sure you use the toilet before you go to bed, OK?”

“I will,” I replied, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. I didn’t want to be treated like a baby who had to be reminded to go to the toilet, even if Mom did think I’d had two actually bedwetting accidents so far this weekend.

I brushed my teeth for another ten seconds and then shut the bathroom door behind me. Was Mom still out in the hallway? I couldn’t tell if her footsteps had carried her all the way to the stairs or if she had just gone to her bedroom. There also hadn’t been a sound of any doors closing.

That was a problem. The bathroom wasn’t very soundproof. Mom might be able to notice if I didn’t pee at all, as should would be able to hear me if I did go like she had asked. I didn’t need to pee all that badly at this point, but I did need to go enough that I shouldn’t have trouble peeing as long as I was sitting on a toilet rather than in my bed.

I lifted the lid to the toilet seat, let my pajamas fall to my feet, and sat down.

I had to find a way to convince Mom and Dad that none of their other methods of getting me to stop wetting the bed – limiting fluids and making me use the toilet right before going to sleep – were working. I needed to reach the point where they would give up trying to stop the bedwetting and switch their focus to limiting the damage from it by getting me pull-ups to wear.

That meant that I needed to convince them that I was doing my best to avoid wetting the bed, so I would have to use the toilet now and try to figure out a way to still wet the bed later tonight.

I didn’t have any difficulty in getting my bladder to release. The sound of the urine streaming into the toilet was proof that I had done exactly what Mom had asked me to.

I had hoped that I’d perhaps be able to stop the stream mid-pee, giving myself a better chance to wet the bed later, but that wasn’t successful. Once my bladder started to empty, there was no stopping it until every last drop was out.

I took a peek in my parents’ bedroom after leaving the bathroom. Mom was lying in bed on top of the sheets, reading a book. That was a problem. There would be no sneaking any more drinks of water tonight, not even the yucky tap water from the bathroom sink.

The next two hours passed slowly. My eyes were sore from staring at my phone by the time I was certain that everyone was asleep. There had to be a better way of faking the bedwetting, but every alternative I’d considered so far had presented some sort of complication, something that would risk Mom and Dad – and now Grace as well – discovering that something was off about my bedwetting.

I had to stick to faking the bedwetting in a way that looked perfectly natural. There couldn’t be any doubt in my parents’ minds that it was real.

With the clock now past midnight, I still didn’t feel like I needed to pee at all, but I was determined to try either way.

I sat on my knees on the bed for about ten minutes until I could barely keep my eyes open. It was the same routine I had followed the past two nights. I strained as hard as I could, trying to conjure pictures of water and rivers and streams in my head.

It was no use. I couldn’t get anything to come out. My bladder was still too empty.

I nearly lay down in bed in resignation, but another plan to fake my bedwetting suddenly sprang to mind.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 3, 2024 at 2:43 AM
Content: Chapter 10: Change of PlansI fell asleep last night without pretending to wet the bed. But that was OK. I’d come to the conclusion that I was going to need to adjust my approach to bedwetting if I wanted to convince my family that the bedwetting was real and not going away anytime soon.

I was supposed to set an alarm on my phone before going to bed on a school night so that I would get up in time to get on the bus, but I rarely remembered to do so. That meant that instead of a buzzing sound from my phone, I was rudely awakened by Mom knocking on the bedroom door.

“Madelyn, I’m not going to say it again. You need to start getting ready for school right away.”

There were a couple more knocks on the door, followed by a longer pause.

I opened my eyes long enough to take a look at the digital clock in the room. It was fifteen minutes past when I should have gotten up to get in the shower.

For the first time in three mornings, I had woken up in my bed rather than in a sleeping bag on the floor. I closed my eyes again. I was too exhausted to even want to sit up in bed.

There was a reason Mom and Dad never let me stay up past midnight on a school night. These late nights were absolutely killing me.

The door creaked open and then clicked shut. I heard Mom’s footsteps as she approached the bed, but I kept my eyes closed. Just let me have a few more seconds of rest. Pretty please.

Mom sighed and rubbed her hand against my shoulder. “You really need to get up now, Maddy, or you’re not going to have time to eat breakfast before catching the bus.”

That would have been fine with me. I didn’t care to eat breakfast most mornings now if I could avoid doing so. But Mom and Dad usually insisted that I get something to eat before going to school. Sometimes, when I was running late, they’d just hand me an orange or a banana, which would often get passed off to one of my friends.

Mom rubbed my shoulder again. I opened my eyes. There was no use putting it off any longer. I glanced up at Mom.

“Looks like someone slept a lot better last night,” she said.

I didn’t agree. I opened my mouth in a wide yawn. “But I’m so tired.”

“But your bed stayed dry, right?” Mom asked in a whisper that was unnecessary with the door closed.

Oh, that’s what she was referring to. I rolled my eyes, attempting to be the perfect caricature of a soon-to-be teenager, annoyed that her mother would even dare ask that kind of question. “Of course it did.”

“That’s good,” Mom said, though she did take one more glance down at my midsection as she said so. “I think as long as you don’t drink too much and remember to use the toilet before bed, we shouldn’t have any repeats.”

I nodded in agreement. I could let her think she had won, for now.

With Mom now convinced that I was awake, she left the bedroom, leaving me to hurry through my morning routine. I tossed the covers off and went to select an outfit for the day to have something to change into in the bathroom once I was done showering. I grabbed a pair of black leggings and a light-blue T-shirt that had three ducks in a row on it – two yellow ones and one gray one.

I was much more awake the moment I stepped into the shower.

My change of plans had been the result of several realizations, ones that were even clearer after having a night to sleep on it.

The first realization was that I couldn’t just keep doing the same bedwetting routine night after night. It was fine to try to do the most normal type of bedwetting for the first couple of nights of faking the bedwetting, but I was going to need to risk mixing things up. Wetting the bed in the same way at the same time, night after night, would eventually appear unusual if I were to be following an exact pattern.

The second realization was that it was OK to have a few random nights where I didn’t wet the bed at all. I seemed to recall from the conversation three years ago with my bedwetting cousins that they hadn’t wet the bed every night, either. I didn’t know how things had been for Grace, but perhaps her experience had been similar.

The third realization was that I was going to need to follow all of my parents’ rules about limiting my liquids and using the toilet before bed. It was becoming apparent that pull-ups would likely be a measure of last resort, so I had to make it appear as though every other attempt at stopping the bedwetting was unsuccessful. If they were to catch me drinking too much water, they would blame it on that rather than considering other solutions.

I decided that, at least for this last night, I would let Mom, Dad, and Grace think that they’d won, that their efforts to curtail my liquids and ensure that I used the toilet before bed had been enough to bring this recent spate of bedwetting to a halt.

I would prove them wrong tonight. It would involve a little more risk, but I didn’t have any other choice.

There were several knocks on the bathroom door, followed by the sound of Dad’s voice, which was barely noticeable with the shower still running. “Maddy, you already were up late. You don’t have time for a long shower.”

That snapped me out of daydreaming about my new plans for faking bedwetting tonight. I rushed to finish cleaning myself up.

By the time I had finished showering and dressing, the bus was set to arrive in less than five minutes. Jackson had already gotten on his bus for elementary school, and Grace was driving to school, so she was still lazily picking through her breakfast while staring at her phone.

If the high school hadn’t been in the opposite direction from our house as the middle school, my parents might have had Grace drop me off on her way to high school, but even though I hated how long the bus ride was – and needing to get up extra early for it – the one nice thing was that it gave me time to spend with Emma and Angie before classes began.

And besides, the school year was nearly over. Just one more week. Just a bunch of final exams and standardized tests to wade through, and then I’d be free for the whole summer.

And there wouldn’t be any actual tests this morning. Monday was prep day, which meant teachers in each of our classes were doing final reviews before it would be time to take our final exams and other end-of-year tests.

Not that it mattered much. Even if, by some miracle, I were to ace all of my tests, it wouldn’t bring my grades up to where my parents wanted them to be.

That was the downside of having a really smart older sister. Grace had just had to go first and set a bunch of academic expectations that I wasn’t capable of meeting.

“Sleep well last night?” Grace asked as I sipped on a glass of orange juice that Mom had hastily poured for me.

This time, I caught on to the fact that my sister was really asking about the bedwetting, not whether or not I had gotten a good night’s worth of sleep.

“Yeah,” I replied, avoiding eye contact with her.

“Maddy,” Mom called out from the front room. “Your bus is at the other end of the street.”

I picked up my backpack and rushed to the front door. Mom placed a banana in my hand, which I knew right away was going to be given to Emma.

<><><>
Both Emma and Angie had already turned thirteen during the school year. I was a late bloomer. I wasn’t going to officially be a teenager for a couple of weeks.

My two friends didn’t hold their status as official teenagers over me. Well, at least not that much.

Emma accepted the banana from me as I took a seat next to her on the bus. That was good because I wasn’t all that hungry, and it would have been wasteful to just toss it out.

I spent the first portion of the bus ride describing the soccer camp my parents had signed me up for in great detail.

“Yes, yes, we get it. You’re going to have a fun time without us,” Angie said, after I had been rambling on the topic for about ten minutes.

I shut up at the realization that I had indeed been talking nonstop since I had sat down next to Angie and Emma.

“If you can stop being a chatterbox for a few seconds, we can start making some other plans for the summer,” Emma said.

The conversation turned to getting together for a sleepover. That was dangerous territory. I needed to get my hands on pull-ups before then so that Mom would feel comfortable sending me on the sleepover. I, of course, wouldn’t even take them out of my backpack, but Mom wouldn’t need to be aware of that.

The one good thing was that Angie’s parents were taking her on a road trip for a week right after school was let out. That would push off the first sleepover long enough that my parents should be getting me pull-ups after having run out of other ideas to treat the bedwetting.

“We could do the sleepover on your birthday,” Emma suggested. She turned to Angie. “You’ll be back by then, right?”

Angie took a look at a calendar on her phone. “Yep, we get back the day before.”

“I was thinking,” Emma said. “That we should do something special for it. How about pulling an all nighter?”

“No way, I’d be out of it by 2 a.m. at the latest,” Angie said.

Emma looked over at me. “Well, birthday girl?”

That was perfect. Even if I didn’t have pull-ups by then, I could convince Mom I’d be fine until after my friends left to go sleep things off for the rest of the day at home.

“That sounds like fun,” I said. “I can do it as long as I can have enough caffeine.”

“OK,” Angie said, giving me a look. “Now I really know that it is a bad idea. No way should you be allowed to have that much caffeine.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

Emma joined with Angie in staring incredulously at me.

“Let’s see,” Emma said. “There was that time in second grade when you had pop during the pizza party at school. Do I need to remind you what happened afterward?”

I blushed. I was very grateful that Emma hadn’t spelled out what had happened in that embarrassing incident. “That was ages ago,” I protested. “Besides, our teacher should have known that my parents didn’t let me have any caffeinated drinks when I was that young.”

“Well, what about that time Allen tricked you into drinking that energy drink last year?”

I groaned loudly. “That wasn’t my fault, either. How was I supposed to know that Starbucks’ lemonade was caffeinated?”

“I’m not saying it was your fault, just that maybe caffeine and you don’t mix very well,” Angie said. “You practically had the shakes, and you literally couldn’t shut up for hours. Mr. Gainwell had to send you to the nurse’s office until you could calm down.”

“That’s still different,” I protested. “I’ll be thirteen. I’ll be fine as long as I pace myself and no one surprises me with drinks secretly spiked with caffeine.”

“Fine, but we’re doing the sleepover at your house then,” Angie said. “Your parents can deal with you if you get too hyper.”

I agreed that this was a fair deal, though it might take some convincing for my parents to go along with it.

<><><>
I followed all my parents’ rules about limiting my liquids to the letter after I got home from school. I made sure to not drink too much, and I made sure that they could see that I was only filling my cup halfway up the few times I did have something to drink this afternoon and evening.

I didn’t get any further comments about limiting my liquids. I didn’t think that was because my parents weren’t paying attention, but because I’d given them no opportunity to complain, as I was following the directions without needing to be given any reminders.

Mom did end up reminding me to go and use the toilet before getting into bed, but I would have done so even if she hadn’t said anything to me.

The hardest part tonight was having to wait until I was certain that everyone was asleep. As the clock again passed midnight, I once again found that I had no need to pee at the moment, which wasn’t a surprise for tonight. But that didn’t matter.

The situation tonight was perfect. I’d done everything my parents had wanted me to do in order to avoid wetting the bed, so when I would trick them into thinking I had wet the bed anyway, despite all of those precautions, they would have no choice but to look for other solutions.

The plan tonight was simple, and there was only a tiny risk of being caught at the wrong time, so I figured I could pull it off.

I would do what I had considered doing the night before, but only this time, I would do it without wetting my bed in the first place.

I eased myself out of bed, turning on the lamp on the nightstand to let me see what I was doing.

I removed all the bedding into a pile on the floor. It was a lot to carry all at once, but it would be a lot less risky if I did it all in one trip. I went to open my bedroom door first, as I’d not be able to easily grab the handle with my hands full.

The only point where things could go wrong would be right now. I’d only be in the hallway for a couple of seconds, but if Grace were to come out of her bedroom and notice that none of the bedding I was holding was wet, that would out my plan then and there.

But it only took a few seconds to walk down the hallway, even while trying to do so quietly with a massive bundle of laundry in my arms. Soon, I was on the stairs and out of sight, letting me slow down lest I trip over Chester in the dark.

I deposited the bedding in the washing machine, added some detergent for good measure, and got the washing cycle started. There wouldn’t be any way to tell that I hadn’t actually peed the bed. It would just look like I had been responsible for taking care of the cleanup myself without waking Mom and Dad.

And there wouldn’t even be any need to say something to Mom directly. She would be sure to come across the full washing machine at some point after I had left for school.

I remembered to sprinkle baking soda on the bed before getting tucked into the sleeping bag on the floor.

My only regret as I was drifting off to sleep was how much it was going to suck having to take a bunch of tests tomorrow while being extra tired.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 4, 2024 at 2:18 AM
Content: Chapter 11: My Sister’s Room
Three years earlier

I had never liked road trips. That much time spent cramped in a tiny space was too much. My body would tell me that I needed to move, and then I couldn’t. But what made the drive home from the funeral take even longer was this new idea that I had become obsessed with. I needed more than anything to wear a pull-up again. All I could think of as the miles passed by were schemes about how I could manage to get my hands on one.

“Mommy, I need to pee.”

Ahead of me in the front row, my three-year-old brother was squirming desperately in his car seat. Grace and I had retreated to the back row of the van for the return journey home, mostly to give us some space from our annoying younger brother.

“Mommy,” Jackson whined again, his voice reaching a painfully high pitch.

Grace and I exchanged a glance. This scene with my brother had been a frequent occurrence on this road trip.

“The next rest stop is in five miles,” Mom replied.

As if that made any sense to a three-year-old. How was Jackson supposed to know how long that was going to take?

“But Mommy,” he whined as the squirming continued.

It was hard to know how serious of an alert it was from him. Despite all the whining for potty breaks on this road trip, my younger brother hadn’t wet his pants at all. He had been potty trained for a little over a year now.

Mom and Dad had gotten to work on it right away after his second birthday. My parents had tossed out all of Jackson’s diapers and made him run around naked outside for a couple of days that summer. I didn’t understand how that was supposed to help with toilet training, but it had worked, even if the process had grossed out Grace and me a bit.

That Jackson was fully potty trained was unfortunate. If Jackson hadn’t been potty trained yet, or had perhaps been a bedwetter like his cousins, that would have been another potential source of pull-ups.

I couldn’t recall what methods my parents had used to potty train me. But I hoped that was not how it had gone.

“Should have made him wear a pull-up for the trip,” Grace muttered softly next to me, making sure her voice wasn’t loud enough for Jackson to notice.

Wouldn’t that have been nice? That would have solved my issue of getting a pullup.

I tried my best to ignore my brother’s whining for the next five minutes. Having a now-potty-trained three-year-old on a road trip at least meant that we were making a bunch of stops. I’d get a chance to run around at the next rest area. Perhaps it would even have a half-way-decent playground to explore.

Like previously, we made it to the rest area without Jackson wetting his pants. As soon as Dad shifted the gear into park, Mom hurried to get Jackson unbuckled and out of his car seat. The rest of us followed behind at a much more leisurely pace as Dad then took Jackson off to the men’s restroom.

Mom would insist that Grace and I make a stop at the restroom as well, even if I protested that I didn’t need to go at all. I did manage to pee a little, but only just a little, before heading out behind the rest stop building to check out the playground.

The play area was a bit sad, designed more for toddlers than kids my age. The top of the lone slide was only slightly taller than me. The only good thing was that it had a two-person swing set. I pushed off to get myself started as my thoughts drifted back to my plans to acquire a pull-up.

Even though Mom and Dad had previously assured me that Grace’s bedwetting days were long past over – otherwise, I don’t think I previously would have agreed to share a bed with her at a hotel – I had nevertheless attempted to ascertain whether she was perhaps secretly wearing pull-ups under her pajamas.

I hadn’t dared try to check while she was asleep, but when we were getting out of bed, I laid on my side to watch my fifteen-year-old sister slide off of the mattress onto the floor. The brief glimpse under her short nightgown told me that she was wearing regular, big-girl underwear.

A disappointing result, but not all that surprising.

The question that lingered the most in the back of my head was whether my sister had worn pull-ups during her years as a bedwetter.

Grace obviously hadn’t been wearing a pull-up that night. I had stumbled across the aftermath of her wetting the bed. But I couldn’t take that as proof that she had never worn a pull-up before.

Could Mom’s annoyance at her that night have been because she hadn’t been wearing one when she should have been?

“You want me to give you a push?” Grace asked as she joined me out on the playground.

“Sure.”

She took hold of me and pulled me back super far. I hung on for dear life as I swung forward, my back nearly parallel to the ground. Grace took a seat on the swing next to me and pushed herself off as well, though she didn’t go quite as high in the air as me.

Mom tended to hang on to all of our old clothes. In the back and upper shelves of the two closets in my bedroom were boxes and stacks of old clothing. Perhaps Mom had been saving them for if Jackson had turned out to be a girl, and she had never had the time to toss them out afterward. Or perhaps there was still the possibility of another baby joining the family.

There were a number of options I had thought about for getting a pull-up. But one of them stood out above all the rest.

I was going to search my sister’s bedroom at the next possible opportunity.

<><><>
A couple of weeks passed before the perfect opportunity came up.

It was Friday evening in the summer, and Grace was having a sleepover with some of her friends.

Normally, that would have been a perfect opportunity to have Angie and Emma over, but their families had other plans this weekend, so I was left all to myself. Usually, that would have sucked. But this night, I planned to make the most of the opportunity.

My parents had hurried me off to bed a little earlier than normal. There was a TV show they wanted to watch, and apparently, I wasn’t old enough to be allowed to watch it yet.

I had gone through all the motions of getting ready for bed except brushing my teeth. I didn’t like brushing my teeth. And tonight, Mom and Dad were too busy with their show to check on me as I hurriedly got ready for bed.

Now, I was in my pajamas, standing at the end of the hallway in front of Grace’s bedroom door.

Jackson was sound asleep. My parents’ TV show had begun a few minutes ago; I had crept halfway down the stairs to make sure I could hear it playing in the distance. Grace was out of the house.

There would be no one to bother me as I explored my older sister’s bedroom.

Grace didn’t have the stereotypical “keep out” sign on her door. But it wasn’t necessary. Her room had always been off limits to me and Jackson. In fairness, the same rule applied to Grace for my bedroom, not that my older sister had any interest in entering it.

I reached my hand out tentatively to touch the handle, turning the doorknob and pushing in the door.

I took two cautious steps into her bedroom and shut the door behind me. I was standing on forbidden ground.

Our bedrooms couldn’t be more unalike. Grace had posters of bands and other artwork on the walls. In the corner was a fancy desktop computer, the kind with a glass side that lets you see all the components.

If Grace had worn pull-ups, and they hadn’t been thrown away, where would they be?

I opened each of her dresser drawers, sifting through them carefully. No pull-ups, only regular underwear.

But that made sense; the pull-ups wouldn’t have stayed in the dresser. Why would she want to see a reminder of her bedwetting every time she went to get dressed?

If the pull-ups were in her bedroom, they would be where Mom had tucked away the rest of my sister’s old things.

I slid open one of the closet doors. There were a bunch of boxes on the top shelf, but they were completely out of reach for me. I grabbed the chair in front of Grace’s computer desk and dragged it over to the closet. Even standing up on it barely allowed me to reach up and touch the boxes on the top shelf.

I pulled a cardboard box down and set it on Grace’s bed.

I didn’t find any pull-ups inside the box once I undid the cardboard flaps on top. But I did get a glimpse of some of the hand-me-downs that might be coming my way in a couple of years.

There were a bunch of old shirts and sweaters in the box that I remembered my sister wearing a couple of years ago. That meant they would be mine – if I wanted them – in a couple of years. Every year or so, Mom would bring some of Grace’s old clothes to my bedroom and have me sort through which ones I wanted to have for myself.

Mom didn’t make me keep anything I didn’t like, which was a relief, as our styles could be quite different at times.

But there were no pull-ups in this box. But that was OK. There were still six more boxes to check in this closet and then a whole other closet to look through afterward. I checked the time on the digital clock next to my sister’s bed. I still had another thirty minutes to go before I needed to be back in bed, in case my parents came upstairs immediately after their show was over.

The searches of the next five boxes proved to be as fruitless as the first. Not a single pull-up in sight.

I returned all the boxes to the closet. Time to check the next one.

Another ten minutes passed by, and my disappointment grew as the mundane contents of each box were revealed. That was followed by a cursory search of my sister’s nightstand drawers and some drawers at her desk, but that, too, was fruitless.

It wasn’t fair. I had gotten my hopes up so much over the last few weeks. I was so sure that I’d find some pull-ups. I was so eager to see what the girl’s version of them would look like.

There was, of course, always the chance to search my brother’s bedroom as well. But, to the best of my knowledge, my parents had never once bought pull-ups for him. He had gone straight from diapers to superhero-themed underwear.

Fitting into his pull-ups might have been a stretch. I couldn’t imagine a baby diaper fitting me. But I would still try to find a way to search his bedroom at some point, even if it was a disappointing plan “B.”

With my plan defeated, I walked over to Grace’s queen-sized bed. I still had another ten minutes to spare before I needed to be out of her room.

I sat down on Grace’s bed next to a few of the boxes I hadn’t yet put back onto the closet shelves. My bottom didn’t sink into the mattress like it did when I sat down in my own bed, and the motion of sitting on the bed was accompanied by some loud crinkles.

That was really strange. I patted my hand firmly on the sheets. Definitely firmer than my own bed. And it was still making that weird crinkling sound. I laid back on the bed. Not comfortable at all. How did my sister manage to fall asleep on this every night?

I got up from the uncomfortable bed. I wouldn’t have wanted to lie down on it for any longer than necessary. I admitted defeat in my search for pull-ups. May as well get back to my bedroom early. I nearly dropped the last box as I put it back into place on the closet shelf.

After doing one last check to make sure I had put everything back into place, I left Grace’s bedroom and headed to my own bed, sad that I hadn’t found any pull-ups, but happy that I had a much nicer mattress to sleep on than my sister.

I was going to have to get used to disappointment.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 4, 2024 at 2:19 AM
Content: Chapter 12: A New Solution
I woke up with a bunch of fur in my face.

I let out a loud sneeze as I shoved our orange cat off of me. Chester trotted halfway to my now open bedroom door – he must have snuck in while I was sleeping – and then looked back and made a chirpy meow at me. Yes, yes, I get it, cat. You’re hungry.

There was no choice but to get up and feed him. Not unless I wanted him bothering me until it was time to get up and get ready for school. My digital clock still said there was an hour-and-a-half left until it was time to get up for the day. I could probably even squeeze in another ten minute of sleep if I waited until Mom came to wake me up.

I looked down at my pajamas as I got out of the sleeping bag. There was a clear and obvious problem. These were the same ones I had worn to bed last night. I had forgotten to toss them in the laundry with my bedding last night.

I took a deep breath. That was a close call. If Mom had caught me in these pajamas, it would have raised questions I’d be unable to provide a satisfactory answer for.

I changed into a new pair of pajamas and headed downstairs with my old ones. There wasn’t a need for the flashlight app on my phone as the first rays of sunlight were coming through the windows. I walked as quietly as I could. Chester trotted alongside me, chirping noisily. At least I’d have a good excuse for being up if anyone was awake when I was returning to my bedroom.

I filled up Chester’s food and water bowls in the laundry room. They hadn’t even been fully empty. The stupid cat couldn’t be satisfied with eating out of a bowl that was only half-way full.

Now I needed to deal with my pajamas. I turned on the faucet in the sink next to the washing machine and held my pajamas under the water until they were soaked. I twisted them in my hands to wring out all the excess water and then stuffed the pajamas in with the still very damp bedding in the washing machine.

There, now, when Mom moved the laundry over to the dryer, nothing would seem out of place.

<><><>
A yawn escaped me at the start of math class. Mr. Thompson was going around handing back our final homework assignment of the year before we got started on our final exam.

It had taken me about an hour to fall back to sleep after putting my pajamas in the washing machine. At that point, I’d only gotten another thirty minutes of sleep before Mom woke me up for school. From the look on her face, this most recent fake bedwetting incident had completely caught her by surprise. I suppose she had thought all the preventative measures she’d made me take would have been enough to bring the bedwetting to an end.

Mom had taken care of vacuuming up the baking soda on the mattress and moving the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. As far as I was able to tell, she hadn’t caught on to the fact that I had faked the bedwetting accident simply by tossing my bedding and pajamas in the washing machine.

Mr. Thompson handed the algebra homework paper to me as he passed by my desk. I stared at it in disbelief. The letter “C” was circled in red at the top right corner. I skimmed through the questions. Several of them had been marked as incorrect with red dashes through them.

That was a complete betrayal. It was totally unfair. I had held up to my end of the bargain in keeping Grace’s secret, and she hadn’t even bothered to deliver me a good grade. There was no way these questions had been too difficult for my older sister.

I tucked the assignment angrily into my backpack. I was going to have a word with Grace after school.

The next set of papers our teacher handed out was even less fun than the first. Our final exam for the math class was fifty questions long and would account for twenty-five percent of the grade for the year.

It was hard enough to do math when I was fully awake, but I was exhausted from the lack of sleep over the past several days. All the numbers and symbols seemed to dance around in front of me as I tried to work my way through each question. It didn’t help that I’d already had to sit through five different tests today, with each one seeming to go worse than the one preceding it.

It was no use. I gave up about halfway through, beginning to fill in the little multiple-choice circles with my pencils with my best guess after reading through the question once. At least if I finished earlier, I could find somewhere to sit and rest outside in the hallway.

<><><>
I struggled to pretend that the way my parents were limiting my liquids didn’t annoy me.

But it wasn’t fair. Mom had made fresh-squeezed lemonade to go with our dinner of hotdogs fresh off of the backyard grill, and I had been given a much smaller portion of lemonade than I would have preferred. Even Jackson had as much as me, and Mom was as careful with monitoring his sugar intake as she had been when I was his age.

But the amount I had to drink tonight was irrelevant. I intended to instead wet the bed closer to when I was about to get up in the morning, so long as I could figure out a way to be awake at least a decent time before needing to get up for school. No amount of restrictions on how much I was allowed to drink would change the fact that I would need to pee when I woke up in the morning. I wasn’t sure of all the specifics of the plan. I would simply need to improvise when the time came.

I watched as Grace quickly finished her meal, excusing herself from the table and heading off toward her bedroom. I hadn’t managed to corner her yet. She still owed me an explanation for the poor grade she had gotten me on the Algebra homework.

I finished my hotdog in a large final bite and washed it down with the remainder of my pitiful serving of lemonade. It was time to confront my sister.

I retrieved the mangled homework paper from my backpack in my bedroom, straightening it out before walking up to my sister’s bedroom door.

I knocked on Grace’s door. No response. I knocked again, a bit louder.

“I’m coming,” Grace said. “Yes, I know I need to still do the dishes.”

A few seconds later, her bedroom door cracked open a few inches.

“Oh, it’s you?” Grace said. “I’m busy.”

I shoved the homework paper in her face before she could shut the door on me. Grace nudged it aside with her hand.

“What are you so upset about?” Grace asked nonchalantly.

“I got a ‘C’ on the assignment. You were supposed to help me get all the questions correct.”

Grace rolled her eyes.

“Let me let you in on a secret of cheating on homework. Never get a score that would make your teacher suspicious. If you had turned in an assignment that had every single answer correct, that would raise a lot of questions. I doubt you’ve gotten an ‘A’ on any assignment in the class this year, and to do so on an especially difficult one would make it look really obvious that you didn’t do the work yourself.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t considered that at all.

“If I hadn’t helped, you probably would have gotten a zero on it,” Grace said. “So, you still came out well ahead. Now, if you don’t mind, I have things to do.”

Grace stepped back and shut the door in my face. I was left to wonder how she was so knowledgeable about cheating on homework.

<><><>
“Maddy, your dad and I need to talk with you about something.”

I could feel my heart begin to speed up. That phrase was never the harbinger of good news.

I looked up at Mom from where I was sitting on the couch with my phone. She was standing near the entrance to the living room. There was a serious look on her face, but it differed from the more annoyed expression that she wore when I was in trouble for something.

Jackson was oblivious to Mom’s request. He was sprawled out on the carpet in front of the couch, playing Minecraft on a tablet. Thankfully, Grace was nowhere to be seen. She was secluded upstairs again in her bedroom after having come down briefly to wash dishes in the kitchen.

What could I have possibly done wrong? The list of options was longer than I would have liked.

It had to be something more than just forgetting my chores. I would just be sent off to do them right away if that were the case.

The one thing that didn’t worry me was my end-of-year grades. They weren’t looking to be that good, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t be getting hold of them for at least a week or more. That could be dealt with later.

But there was the Algebra quiz. Had Mr. Thompson decided something was off after all and told my parents about it? Or had one of my friends blabbed about how Grace had left us on our own at the mall? Either of those would have me spending a sizable amount of time grounded at the start of summer break.

But as bad as either of those two outcomes might be, there were even worse possibilities to consider. What if they’d caught on to how I had been faking the bedwetting? If they questioned me about whether it was real, would I be able to lie effectively, or would I crumble under the pressure of that interrogation?

“Maddy, come on,” Mom said, giving her head a slight shake in the direction of the hallway.

I stepped carefully over my brother as I walked in a straight line toward the hallway. Regardless of what I was going to be disciplined for, I had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go down.

Unlike either of my friends, I had never been on the receiving end of a spanking. That didn’t mean that my parents’ disciplinary methods were ever enjoyable. In fact, there were a number of times when I think I would have rather endured a spanking than be forced to be grounded from electronics for a week.

As I followed Mom down the hallway, I was mentally bracing myself for the long lecture I was about to get, followed by being grounded from whatever my parents thought would best convince me to behave better in the future.

There wasn’t a specific location in the house where these conversations normally took place; it was always somewhere away from my siblings, so they couldn’t eavesdrop on the conversation.

I followed Mom to the entrance room, where Dad was already sitting on the right side of a small couch.

Dad patted the middle of the couch. “Why don’t you have a seat, Maddy.”

That was different from normal. Aside from the fact that these lectures usually began before being given a chance to sit down, there was the realization that neither of my parents had used my full name. That made me even more confused. So, I wasn’t in trouble?

I took a seat next to Dad, and then Mom squeezed in beside me to my left. There was barely enough room for us on the couch, which was probably only meant for two occupants.

I kept my mouth shut. Better to wait and see what exactly my parents were up to than guess and be wrong.

“We need to have a talk about what’s been happening at night,” Mom said. “About how we’re going to need to handle the bedwetting.”

There it was. I tried to get myself into the right mindset for this conversation. I had to talk as though the bedwetting was surprising and upsetting, that I wanted nothing more than for it to come to an end. And, if possible, I needed to find a way to discreetly steer the conversation toward the possibility of getting pull-ups without revealing how badly I wanted those specific undergarments.

“It is kind of our fault, in a way,” Dad said.

“And mine,” Mom added.

I looked back and forth between my parents. How in the world could it be their fault that I was wetting the bed?

“I read that if both parents had a history of wetting the bed as kids, then it meant their own kids have a three-in-four chance of being bedwetters themselves,” Dad explained.

Fractions always gave me a hard time. I tried to picture it in my head the way that my elementary math teacher had explained long ago. Leave it to Dad to turn bedwetting into a math problem.

“What that means,” Mom said, “is that since your father and I both were bedwetters when we were kids, that means that it was very likely that our own kids would have issues with that as well. We thought we’d dodged a bullet with you and Jackson, but I guess not.”

Wait. What? I conjured images of Mom and Dad as kids, drawing on old family photo albums I had gone through before. The idea of either of them waking up in the middle of the night to wet sheets was too much. I started to laugh. “No way.”

I looked back and forth at Mom and Dad again. Sitting sandwiched between them was making this conversation more difficult than necessary. “For real?”

“I think I wet the bed nearly every night until I was nine or so,” Mom said. “I remember I wasn’t allowed to go on any sleepovers until I stopped. It lasted a bit longer for you, honey?”

“Yes,” Dad muttered.

I’d never seen him look so flustered.

“Bedwetting didn’t stop for me until I turned fourteen. My siblings weren’t as, um, understanding about it as they should have been.”

“The point we’re trying to say, Maddy,” Mom said, “is that bedwetting isn’t a big deal. It isn’t your fault or anything you need to be embarrassed about. It’s something that lots of other kids have to deal with. I don’t think this bedwetting phase should last all that long, but we’ll be with you to help you get through it, no matter how long it takes.”

“And if you have any questions or anything you want to tell us,” Dad said. “I promise we won’t judge you for it. We went through the same things as you.”

If only I was bold enough to take Dad up on that offer. There was a question I wanted to ask really badly. Had either of my parents worn diapers or pull-ups to bed? Had there even bed ones available in their size that long ago?

But I had to work to hold myself back from asking about it. No kid my age was going to proactively seek out information about diapers. I had to remember that I was supposed to be feeling embarrassed and concerned about the situation.

“I just don’t get why it started all of a sudden.”

“I don’t know either,” Mom said. “We’ll worry about that if it keeps up. For now, I think we’re just going to focus on making things a bit easier to clean up if the bedwetting happens again. We are going to need to do something to make sure that your mattress doesn’t get ruined. Cleaning it up afterward is OK for the occasional accident, but not if you are peeing on it almost every night.”

I focused all my thoughts on keeping a straight face. This was it. This was when they would tell me that they had purchased the pull-ups so that the mattress wouldn’t be getting wet every night. I could hardly believe my luck. I would be getting pull-ups after wetting the bed only three times in four days.

“We’re going to switch your mattress for the one that Grace has on her bed,” Dad said. “It has a waterproof covering, which makes it a lot easier to clean up after bedwetting accidents.”

That was not what I wanted. There was no hiding the look of disappointment on my face. But it improved my subterfuge, as Mom and Dad took it to be a sign that I was embarrassed by needing a special mattress.

Mom began to rub my back. “I’m sure this bedwetting phase will run its course quickly enough, but until then, won’t it be a lot nice to not have to worry about cleaning the mattress in the middle of the night? You could swap the bedding out and go back to sleeping in bed rather than on the floor in a sleeping bag.”

“I guess.” Mom had a solid point. It would be nice not to have to spray cleaning solutions and then dry off the mattress with paper towels and sprinkle baking soda all over it. Faking the bedwetting would take a lot less work on my part.

“We better get that done before it’s time for bed. Why don’t we get that taken care of now?” Dad said.

I followed my parents up the stairs and to my bedroom. My room was a bit of a mess. I had some dirty clothes tossed on the floor that should have been put in the laundry hamper, there was a pile of unfolded laundry on my bed that I had been supposed to get put away before dinner, and then there was the fact that I hadn’t made the bed either like I was supposed to. I had just tossed the clean sheets and covers haphazardly across the mattress.

Mom examined the scene with a sigh. “We’ll talk about the state of your bedroom later. Why don’t you get everything off of the mattress and set it to the side while we talk with your sister about the mattress swap?”

They left me to it, shutting the door behind them as they walked over to my sister’s bedroom.

I picked up the dirty laundry and tossed it into the hamper in the closet, then went to tackle the mess that was my bed. After tossing everything unceremoniously on the floor, I heard some raised voices from out in the hallway. I tiptoed over to my door and placed my ear right up against it.

“You’ve been asking for a new mattress for a long time,” Dad said.

“Yeah, and you always told me that you weren’t quite ready to trust me with one yet,” Grace said.

Did that mean what I thought it meant? Grace had supposedly stopped wetting the bed when she was twelve.

“Seriously, it was only like once or twice a year at that point. Besides, it hasn’t happened for like two years now.”

That probably wasn’t without any close calls, though. The time Grace had caught me in the hallway a few nights ago, she had been in quite the hurry to go use the toilet herself.

“Exactly,” Mom said. “So now is the perfect time to do the swap because of how your sister has been wetting the bed a lot the past few days.”

“That’s gross, Mom. I don’t want Maddy’s mattress. Not after she’s peed all over it.”

“Hey,” Mom said. “It got cleaned up right away each time. There aren’t any visible stains, and it doesn’t even smell funny at all. Besides, it’s not like the mattress you are giving her hasn’t been peed on several hundred times.”

“Yeah, but it has a plastic cover. It cleans off without a trace.”

“Look, we’re doing the mattress swap. I’m sure Maddy will be done with the bedwetting soon. When that happens. She’ll have her old mattress back, and we’ll buy a new one for you.”

“Ugh, fine,” Grace said. “I’ll get the sheets off.”

I heard my sister’s bedroom door shut rather loudly. I retreated to standing back near my bed lest my parents returned to my bedroom to catch me eavesdropping.

Mom opened my bedroom door a few seconds later. “Are you all set, Maddy?”

“Yeah.”

“Good; why don’t you help me get your mattress off of the bed frame?”

The mattress wasn’t as heavy as I had expected it to be, but it was still a bit of work to lift it up and set it against the wall. Dad and Grace entered the bedroom a minute later, carrying a strange mattress.

It wasn’t a normal looking white mattress, like mine, and it also didn’t have a fabric exterior. It instead had a light blue vinyl exterior. It looked more like something that would be seen in a hospital than a bedroom. The new mattress fit onto the bedframe perfectly, which was the benefit of us both having queen-sized beds.

From how Grace was looking at my mattress, I could tell that she was trying to determine if there were any visible urine stains on it. I didn’t know why Grace had thrown such a fuss in the hallway. It seemed that she was getting the better deal out of this. She finally had a normal, comfortable mattress to sleep on.

“Well, that’s set,” Mom said. “Why don’t you get your bed made, Maddy, we’ll leave you to it.”

Dad and Grace grabbed my mattress while Mom went ahead and held the door open all the way so they could maneuver it out into the hallway and toward Grace’s bedroom.

Mom shut the door behind her, leaving me by myself. Once all the sheets and covers were back on, my bed didn’t look any different. At first glance, there wouldn’t be any way to tell that something was off.

The changed the moment I laid down on it, as it crinkled loudly, reminiscent of that time three years ago when I had snooped through my sister’s bedroom. Even shifting my weight ever so slightly caused more plastic crinkling sounds.

There was no question that it was a downgrade from my other mattress. It likely was going to take a while to get used to sleeping in it. Still, it couldn’t be argued that this was going to beat sleeping on the floor.

I tried to lie as still as I could, just to get a moment of silence. It wasn’t the pull-ups I had been hoping for. It was progress. Mom and Dad were now taking the bedwetting seriously, but was it progress in the right direction?

Had this been their sole solution for my sister’s bedwetting? What if they had never once purchased pull-ups for her? What if my parents didn’t care that my sheets and bedding got soaked with urine every night so long as the mattress was protected?

Could that be the reason I had never noticed Grace wearing a pull-up before bed? Was this why I hadn’t been able to find any evidence of pull-ups since that time I had searched her bedroom? Had my parents deliberately decided not to get her pull-ups, or perhaps had they not even realized that it was an option?

My sister had been potty trained around the same age as me, meaning she would have been about two when she was dry during the day. She didn’t stop regularly wetting the bed until she was twelve. Had she really gone through ten straight years of waking up to wet pajamas every night? Ten straight years of needing to change sheets and bedding in the dark, first with her parents’ help and then on her own? That sounded absolutely awful.

And that still left the question about what had happened on that vacation to my grandparents’ place six years ago. Grace had wet the bed that first night. And there had been no further evidence of accidents after that. Had six-year-old me simply not been all that observant? Or had something else been going on at the time?

I hadn’t even considered the possibility of different types of mattresses. I realized that there was still a lot about bedwetting that I didn’t know.

I checked my phone. It was about time to get ready for bed again. I went to brush my teeth and use the toilet.

There was nothing to do but keep pressing forward with my plan. My parents still seemed to think that the bedwetting would end soon. Perhaps if it didn’t, they might start to look at solutions other than the waterproof mattress. I set the alarm on my phone for forty-five minutes before I was supposed to be up for school. It wouldn’t do any good to have it wake anyone else in the house. But I had the perfect solution in mind.

As I laid back down on my now super crinkly bed, I plugged a pair of headphones into my phone. I tucked one of them into my right ear, making sure to lay down in a way that wouldn’t cause me to dislodge the headphones while I was asleep.

I would pee in the bed when I woke up early and allow Mom to discover me sleeping in a wet bed when she came to get me up for school. I needed to make the bedwetting as inconvenient as possible. I had to get to a point where my parents would realize that pull-ups would make managing it so much easier.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 4, 2024 at 2:20 AM
Content: Chapter 13: It Feels Good
I winced as I pulled the blaring earbud out of my ear. The left side of my head ached terribly. Perhaps that was the result of sleeping with an earbud all night long. Or maybe that was because of how unexpectedly loud my alarm had sounded when it had gone off like that.

With my earbuds now laying harmlessly on the bed, the blaring alarm coming from them was only barely audible. It certainly wasn’t anywhere near loud enough to be heard from outside of my bedroom.

I was almost stunned that my plan to wake up early had actually worked. And, with my alarm tied to my earbuds, I hadn’t woken up my family either.

I yawned several times. It was another early morning for me. But, unlike when Chester had woken me up early yesterday, this time, it had at least been intentional. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to feel the effects of less sleep, though. I had another long day of end-of-year tests, which I wasn’t looking forward to in the least. Well, it wasn’t so much the tests that I wasn’t looking forward to, but what my report card would be saying when my parents checked my grades online later.

The hard part was over, at least. I was awake. I had plenty of time until I was actually supposed to be up for school. All I had to do now was to wet the bed intentionally.

The one good thing was that I did need to pee. It didn’t matter that I’d had less to drink yesterday or that I’d used the toilet right before getting into bed. A nearly full night of sleep was still enough for my bladder to fill up again.

The need to go wasn’t super urgent. I likely wouldn’t have had an issue with going back to sleep and waiting to use the toilet when getting up for school at a normal time.

I remained under my covers as I rolled over to lie flat on my stomach. The noise of the bed crinkling beneath me served as a reminder of last night’s conversation with my parents and the mattress swap afterward.

For a few brief, wonderful moments last night, I had thought that I had managed to convince my parents to get pull-ups, but for whatever reason, they seemed to think this was a better way to manage my bedwetting, at least for now. I had to remind myself that I had only begun the bedwetting plan on Friday evening, and it was now Wednesday morning. Not even a week had passed. I had to admit that it wasn’t reasonable to expect pull-ups that quickly.

This new mattress had come as a complete surprise. That didn’t mean there weren’t some obvious benefits to the waterproof mattress. I wouldn’t have to work so hard to clean things up after an accident. No need to go and grab paper towels, cleaning sprays, and baking soda. I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about possibly ruining my mattress.

It also meant that it wouldn’t matter if the accident wasn’t cleaned up immediately. There wouldn’t be any worries about the urine soaking into the mattress, to the point of being impossible to get rid of the smell and stains.

I suspected that it wouldn’t be likely that I’d be able to fall back to sleep afterward, but I could at least feign sleep until Mom came to wake me up. I wasn’t looking forward to her seeing the result of the bedwetting – I had at least avoided having her witness my wet pajamas since that first fake bedwetting accident on Friday evening.

I had to make sure the accident looked natural. It was one thing for Mom or Grace to see my wet bed in the middle of the night, when they were probably groggy and their faculties may not be fully working. It was something else in the bright morning light.

The easiest way to do that would be to actually pee myself while lying down this time, rather than while lying down in bed, but to do that, I would need to get past whatever mental block had been making it difficult for me to urinate while my bottom wasn’t hovering over a toilet.

I still had plenty of time. There were another forty minutes until I was supposed to be up. And, if I pretended that I had slept past my alarm, that probably gave me another five to ten minutes past that before Mom would come in and check on me.

I rotated through a couple of different mental exercises as I attempted to convince my bladder that it was OK to pee. I tried thinking about rain, rivers, and dripping faucets, but unlike the two nights when I had been kneeling over the bed, that wasn’t enough, though I did feel my bladder getting closer to the point of release.

Next, I tried to picture myself seated on the toilet, thinking about the sensation of sitting on the cold plastic toilet seat, but I didn’t think my bladder found that mental image to be all that convincing while I was lying on my stomach.

I strained my muscles as much as I could. I came so close, but it still wasn’t enough to get the floodgates to open. Ten minutes had already passed by. I knew that in the worst-case scenario I would simply emulate how I had wet the bed those first to nights, but I wanted more than anything to do it the right way for once.

There was more to that desire than wanting to make sure my mom was convinced it was a legitimate bedwetting accident. I wanted to know what it felt like to wet the bed.

Perhaps the problem was with how I was lying on my stomach, with how my bladder was pressed up against the bed. But instead of sitting up completely, I slid my arms under my chest so that my waist was just an inch or two off of my sheets.

It was a small difference, but it proved to be exactly what I needed. I put all my concentration into getting my bladder to release, and a minute later, I began to pee. The warm urine quickly began to stream through my underwear and cotton shorts. A few seconds later, I lowered myself back onto the bed as my bladder continued to empty.

Like the other two times I had peed the bed, once I had started, there was no stopping it, not even after adjusting into a position where I had previously not been able to get my bladder to release.

It was a vastly different experience to wet myself while lying down rather than doing it while kneeling over my bed. My shorts and even my shirt got significantly wetter as the urine pooled beneath me.

This is where the difference of having a waterproof mattress became clear. As the urine wasn’t able to soak into the mattress, that meant it instead soaked further and further through my sheets and pajamas, in a large wet spot with my waist at the epicenter.

When I finally stopped peeing another twenty seconds later, I was wet all the way from my knees to the middle of my chest.

My previous attempts at wetting the bed had felt a bit awkward and embarrassing. This was different. My heart was racing, but not from being afraid. There was a sense of exhilaration. Why was that? Was it because I had wet myself in a more realistic way? It certainly felt more real to pee while lying down than to do it how I had done it before. The sensation of laying in urine-soaked pajamas and sheets should have been off-putting, but it wasn’t. The warm sensation surrounding me felt comforting in a way I couldn’t explain.

I laid as still as I possibly could under the sheets. I was left to ponder how it would feel when all of that warmth and wetness was instead contained by the pull-up.

<><><>
“Maddy. Maddy. It’s time to wake up.”

My eyes flickered open and then shut right away again.

I was in bed, but something felt really off. I turned my head to the sound of Mom’s voice.

Everything beneath me was damp and clammy. The exhilaration of the bedwetting incident had faded away along with the warmth. Given Mom’s calm reaction so far, the urine must not have soaked upwards through my sheets or cover. From her vantage point, everything must have appeared dry.

“At least you made it through the night,” Mom said. “I suppose we didn’t need the new mattress tonight after all, but still, it will be good to have it as a precaution until we’re sure this bedwetting phase is over.”

There was no escaping from Mom finding out about the bedwetting. I mean, she had to find out, but what was the best way to do it?

I didn’t want to be forced to tell her about it, but the alternative, throwing off my covers and revealing just exactly how big of a mess I’d made in bed, was embarrassing as well. I resisted her request to get out of bed and pulled the cover tighter over my body.

“Just a few more minutes.”

“Madelyn, seriously, you’re going to miss the bus if you don’t get your bottom out of bed right now.”

“But Mom…” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence, to admit having wet the bed.

Mom’s expression shifted as she walked back toward the bed. “Is something wrong?”

“Um.” What else was I supposed to say? But it didn’t really matter. I was sure my face was giving away how embarrassed I was feeling again.

Mom reached down and gave my cover and sheets a gentle tug that was enough to reveal the reality of what lay beneath them.

“Oh, Maddy.” Mom sighed as she looked down at me.

I looked away from Mom, down at the massive wet patch beneath me. It was even bigger than I had imagined in my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know it happened until you woke me up.”

“It’s alright,” Mom said. “Let’s just focus on getting you ready for school.”

I slid gingerly out of bed. I decided that as much as I liked the immediate aftermath of wetting myself in bed, I didn’t care as much for how things felt once everything cooled off. Mom gave me a careful hug, making sure to not press up against the wet spots on my pajamas.

“I’ll take care of getting everything cleaned up. Just toss your wet pajamas on the bed and head to the shower.”

Mom retreated to the hallway, shutting the bedroom door behind her and giving me some momentary privacy to get undressed.

I stripped out of my wet clothes and tossed them on the bed. How many more nights and mornings like this was it going to take?

<><><>
By the time I was dressed and out of the shower, all my bedding had been stripped and taken to the laundry room. The light-blue mattress was a strange look in the middle of my bedroom. There wasn’t anyway but to admit that it was an effective method for handling bedwetting.

Nothing further was said about the bedwetting incident. Mom handed me a cup of yogurt for breakfast. From the kitchen, I could hear the washing machine running down in the basement. If Grace or Jackson had noticed all the laundry Mom had taken downstairs, neither of them made any mention of it, either.

I finished off the small can of yogurt in record speed and then grabbed my backpack and headed toward the front door to wait for the bus. I would be able to see it coming off in the distance, so there wasn’t any need to leave the house until it was in sight.

There was a pile of mail near the front door that had been brought in last night that hadn’t been yet been sorted.

On top of it was another copy of Reader’s Digest. Recently, there was a new ad for the bedwetting pull-ups about every other issue. I had assumed that Mom must have seen the advertisement at some point or another.

I wasn’t as sure that she had ever used these pull-ups with my sister, but I had hoped that all the advertising would have given her the idea that this could be an option to use with me. But maybe she just skimmed past the ad without looking at the finer details. The size range for the pull-ups was in small print, after all.

There had to be something I could do to get her to take a closer look at the advertisement without letting her know that I was behind it. With the bus seemingly running a few minutes behind schedule, an idea came up for something I could put into motion before I headed off to school.

Everyone else was still in the kitchen. The bus wasn’t in sight yet. My affinity for the magazine was already well known by my parents. Since they viewed it as educational, it wouldn’t stand out as suspicious if they came across me reading through it.

I leaned back against the wall as quickly skimmed through the magazine. To my good luck, the ad for the bedwetting pull-ups appeared smack in the middle of the magazine. But how could I make sure it got Mom’s attention this time?

A few ideas floated in my head. I could slightly crinkle the edges of a few pages – the pull-up ad included – so that when Mom was skimming through the magazine, she would be more likely to stop on it. But that didn’t feel like enough to actually get her attention.

I could leave the magazine open to this page, but face down. On the opposite page was the start of a story I could plausibly be interested in. But would that be too much? I thought I could pass it off as believable. And I could always feign some initial discomfort at the idea of pull-ups when my parents did bring it up as an option.

I pretended to read the magazine, though really all I was doing was taking in the image of the pull-up on the page, reading through all the features — five-layer protection, double leg barriers, the ability to absorb three cups of liquid. That last bit of information seemed most relevant to my case. I had peed a lot in each of the bedwetting accidents, but certainly not much. It gave me hope that the pull-ups would work for me when the time to wear them finally arrived.

A minute later, I caught sight of the yellow bus off in the distance. I hastily set the magazine face down on the table, hoping that it would at last catch Mom’s attention when she opened it up later.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 5, 2024 at 4:28 PM
Content: Chapter 14: Let it All Soak In
I couldn’t fully blame my lack of sleep for how distracted I was from the standardized test I was taking.

I suppressed yet another yawn as I tried to recall all the advice Grace had given me about multiple-choice tests. There was the obvious – when in doubt, choose “C.” Then, there were other pieces of advice, such as working to eliminate wrong answers to make it easier when I still needed to guess.

On the geometry question I was staring at, I was fairly certain that “C” was incorrect, and I was skeptical of “D” as well.

That’s what made the whole thing suck even more. If I just had more time to work things through on a sheet of paper, perhaps I’d arrive at the answer, but I had a little over a minute for each question, meaning I had to just mark an answer and move on to the next one or risk not completely finishing the test.

I took hold of my pencil and filled in the “B” circle. At least I had narrowed that question down to having a fifty percent chance of getting it right.

Nine months of learning all boiled down to two days of filling in circles for hours and hours on end. I hated that this was supposed to somehow serve as proof that I had managed to learn anything over the course of the school year. Then again, it wasn’t as though my performance throughout the rest of the school year could have been regarded as spectacular.

If I had considered how tired the bedwetting was going to make me, I might have been able to exercise enough self-control to delay this experiment until after the school year had ended, but now I was stuck with the consequences of those decisions.

Still, I should have been able to do better on the test.

It was true that I was tired. It was also true that I had gotten significantly less sleep than normal since Friday evening.

But it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Even on nights when I didn’t get that much sleep, I usually was capable of summoning the willpower to stay on task for the first couple hours of school.

That wasn’t the case today. That’s because something else was on my mind. Something that challenged everything I had thought I had known about my pursuit of pull-ups over the past few years.

Despite my best efforts, my thoughts kept attempting to drift back to that scene in bed earlier this morning when I had peed in my pajamas while lying down on the bed. I had finally succeeded in coaxing my body to allow my bladder to release in a more natural sleeping position. The result had been a rush of exhilarating physical sensations and emotions that had taken me completely by surprise, especially as that hadn’t been the case the two other times I had peed while kneeling over my sheets.

There were a couple of things I knew were true about my interest in pull-ups.

There was something about the overall presence and feeling of wearing a pull-up that I found comforting, from the way the sides hugged around my waist to the softness of the interior absorbent padding to the way the bulky padding fit between my legs.

I could still recall the mesmerizing way the pull-up had crinkled as I had held it in my hands and slid it up my legs. It had brought a sense of calm and assurance that shouldn’t have been possible for just a change in undergarments.

I had always assumed that I would wet a pull-up when I got a chance to wear one next. That was what one did when they wore a pull-up. I had no idea whether that was something I was going to enjoy, but I was desperate to discover what it felt like. With the way my wetting experiment had gone this morning, I felt it was safe to assume that this was something I was going to enjoy.

What I had never expected was that I would now be desperately wanting to wet my pants again, not because doing so was part of a scheme to get my parents to purchase pull-ups for me, but because I enjoyed doing it in and of itself.

I looked up at the clock near the doorway to the classroom. How long had I been staring blankly at the next question? Five minutes.

I hurried through the new few questions, skimming them briefly before hastily filling in my first guess. Grace had told me a horror story about college prep tests where one would actually lose points if they got an answer wrong, meaning that guessing was risky business, as it was better for your grade to leave a question blank than to be incorrect. At least that wasn’t the case with this test.

I took a deep breath. I was still on track to finish the test on time. Just had to stay focused, remind myself that I would have all summer to experiment with these new desires. There were only twenty minutes left before it would be time to break for lunch.

I managed to get through three more questions before I once again succumbed to my daydreams, drawn in by other questions that I felt more strongly compelled to answer.

There were so many things I wanted to know now. What would it feel like to wet my wants while I was standing, with the urine trickling down my legs and onto the floor? What about when sitting down on a chair, where it would cause my bottom to get soaked rather than my front?

The best part of all was that I didn’t need any special undergarments to explore any of these newly desired experiences.

But none of this meant that my longing for pull-ups was, in any way, lessened.

I hadn’t thought that it would be possible for my desire for pull-ups to grow any more intense than it had already done in the past three years. But the revelation that I enjoyed peeing myself meant that there was even more to look forward to when I finally got the pull-ups.

But in the meantime, I was eagerly looking forward to when I would be alone in bed this evening, and I was already working out ways I could circumvent my family’s attempts to limit my hydration.

<><><>

The worst part about the standardized tests was that they were done in long sections. They made us sit at our desks for seventy-minute test sections. That was far too long to be sitting on an uncomfortable wood desk.

Angie and Emma weren’t even in the same room for me for the testing, not that it mattered, as we wouldn’t have had any chance to communicate, anyway. I joined my friends at a table in the cafeteria. Angie was already halfway through her lunch, and Emma had gotten a few bites into hers.

“Took you long enough,” Angie said as I took a seat across the table from her. “I was done fifteen minutes early.”

My face burned. I had used up every last second, filling in circles right up until the moment we were directed to immediately set our pencils down. I hadn’t done well at all. The worst of it was I’d left a handful of questions unanswered at the end.

“What did your mom say about the sleepover?” Emma asked between bites of her ham and cheese sandwich.

I had put off asking Mom about the sleepover. I had still been working on the best way to convince her that an all-nighter would not only be OK, but would be a good way to circumvent her concerns about bedwetting.

I gave an excuse that, under most circumstances, would have been the honest truth. “Uh, I forgot.”

Emma tilted her head back and rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Maddy, do I need to like text you a reminder to make sure you do it?”

<><><>

The copy of Reader’s Digest was still on the entryway table when I got home from school. Mom probably hadn’t had time yet to take a look at it before she went off to work. I left it untouched. I’d just have to wait for her to read it after dinner.

Grace was already home. Mom and Dad still didn’t allow me to have the house to myself for more than five to ten minutes at a time.

That had been different with Grace. By the time she was turning thirteen, they had not only entrusted her to stay alone by herself, but they had allowed her to be home with Jackson and me. I, on the other hand, apparently still required constant supervision. It would likely be another year or two before they finally moved on from that time when I had accidentally left the stovetop burners on.

I had the next few evenings planned out for if, when, and how I was going to continue the bedwetting. Tonight, Wednesday night, I was going to wet the bed for real again, but do it in the middle of the night, rather than early in the morning.

On Thursday, I would give the bedwetting a break, figuring that the occasional dry night would make the rest of the wet nights appear more natural.

On Friday night, or really Saturday morning, I would again wet the bed for real once I woke up in the morning.

Tonight was the trickiest, with all of my family members save Jackson paying close attention to my hydration and bathroom habits.

My phone buzzed. Emma had just texted me a reminder to ask Mom about the sleepover. I texted back to inform her that Mom was at work and that I would be asking her after dinner.

I headed off to the restroom at the urging of my bladder. I tugged down my pants to the disappointing sight of my underwear. Using the toilet had never felt so completely unsatisfying as it did right now. If only I could be going potty in my pants instead.

As I sat on the toilet, I tried to make sense of why this new desire had appeared.

I’d struggled throughout the day to understand the why of what had happened earlier. Was this tied to my desire to wear the pull-up again? Was it something altogether different, a new spark?

<><><>

Mom made me wait thirty minutes after dinner before she finally picked up the Reader’s Digest magazine. I hadn’t been able to witness the moment of truth, so I was left to guess whether the pull-up ad had caught her gaze when she had first grabbed the magazine.

She looked up from the magazine as I walked into the living room.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, what do you need?”

“My friends were wanting to do a sleepover for my birthday party.”

“Maddy,” Mom said. “Are we really sure that is a good idea right now?”

At least Mom had the courtesy not to mention bedwetting, as Jackson was still in the room.

“They suggested that we could pull an all-nighter. So, that way there won’t be any issues since I won’t be falling asleep until we leave.”

Mom frowned. “I’m going to need to talk with your father about that.”

That wasn’t usually a promising sign, as Mom tended to be more lenient than Dad when it came to giving me permission to do new things. However, the fact that I hadn’t gotten an outright no was at least encouraging.

My biggest problem would be trying to explain to my friends why I suddenly wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers anymore if my parents were to reject the all-nighter plan and not offer pull-ups as a solution.

I texted Emma to let her know that I had asked Mom and that I hadn’t gotten an immediate decision. Now, it was time to put my plan to get hydrated for tonight into motion.

I went upstairs to my bedroom and scoured through my closet, digging through boxes of old soccer equipment until I came across exactly what I was looking for. It was a water bottle I had been given at a camp a year or two back, one of the annoying ones with one of those spouts that almost made it feel as though I was drinking out of a toddler sippy cup.

With the rest of my soccer cups in the cupboard downstairs – Mom had insisted they be thoroughly washed with the soccer season over – this was the perfect find, as no one would have a clue that I was using it.

I waited until Gace had started her evening task of washing dishes. Yes, I could have done this while she was secluded in her bedroom, but I wasn’t going to take the slight risk of her coming out at an inopportune time and catching me in the process of filling up the bottle.

It was a twenty-four-ounce bottle. More than enough to get sufficiently hydrated to allow me to easily pee.

A few minutes later, it was full of yucky tap water from the upstairs bedroom, but it wouldn’t make any difference. My body would work to convert it to urine just the same as if it had been fancy filtered water. In the end, it all came out the same way.

<><><>

I squirmed underneath the covers as the clock moved ever closer to midnight.

This was partly due to the physical need to urinate. I had downed the whole water bottle in the hour before I had gotten ready for bed. But it was also in anticipation of what I was about to do. In my head, I kept replaying the moment I had wet the bed last night.

Thirty minutes to midnight. The sounds now coming from the bedroom told me that Mom and Dad were in the final stages of getting ready for bed. They always fell asleep quickly.

There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t wet myself now rather than wait until midnight. It wasn’t as though I was going to want to get up and get cleaned up right away. I wanted time to savor the moment I had been looking forward to all day long, let it all soak in.

I made a short and futile attempt to pee while lying on my back, but that was completely hopeless. It didn’t even feel as though I’d come close to getting my bladder to release.

That changed when I rolled over to my stomach, the mattress loudly protesting beneath me as I did so.

I didn’t bother with any more experimentation. I knew now what worked, so I followed the same exact routine. I slid my hands under my chest, raising myself up ever so slightly off of the mattress. My bladder emptied at the slightest urging.

I dropped down onto the mattress the moment I began to pee. The urine was streaming out of me so fast I could hear the sound of it as it came out. I hadn’t noticed how I’d been holding my breath. I breathed out slowly as my bladder emptied.

The expectations that had built up throughout the course of the day were more than exceeded. This was even better than last night, as the amount of water I had chugged before going to bed meant that I peed a lot longer. My sheets were soaked all the way past my knees.

The mental exhilaration of peeing myself like an actual bedwetter combined with the physical sensation of the intense warmth from the urine left me in a state of euphoria.

There was no sense of shame or embarrassment. It felt so good. It couldn’t possibly be wrong. My only regret was that it had taken me three years to realize that this was an option.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 5, 2024 at 4:29 PM
Content: Chapter 15: A Hard Pill to Swallow
I stumbled through the front door after being dropped off by the bus on Thursday afternoon.

I let my backpack fall to the floor with a loud bang as soon as I had shut the front door behind me. I was exhausted. It had been another seven hours of struggling to stay awake and focused through what had seemed to be an endless day of end-of-year exams.

The only relief was that I was finished with taking my last test for this school year. Now I had about a week of bliss before my end-of-year grades became available online.

Yes, I still had to go into school tomorrow, but that was just to wrap things up, clean out lockers, and have end-of-year pizza parties. I’d be free from homework, studying, tests, and early morning bus rides for the next three months.

Now, all I wanted to do was sleep.

Grace wasn’t anywhere to be seen. But I knew my older sister was home because the minivan she drove had been in the driveway when the school bus had dropped me off. I didn’t get what she did while she was shut away in her room all the time.

I took advantage of her absence to drink a glass of water in the kitchen. But with my recently discovered sports water bottle – tucked away in the deepest recesses of the bottom drawer of my dresser – sneaking around to stay hydrated enough to make myself wet the bed wasn’t going to be an issue ever again.

Angie and Emma had grilled me about the sleepover again during the ride home from school. That was annoying because I’d already told them yesterday that Mom had said she needed to think about the proposed all-nighter on my birthday a little over a week from now. I was hoping to get an answer about that from her tonight.

Neither of my friends were coming over after school. Angie was busy tonight with preparations for the vacation her family was heading out for as soon as school was out tomorrow. I would have had Emma over this evening, except that she had somewhere to be with her family.

I quickly cleaned the glass I’d gotten a drink from and then dried it off before putting it back in the sink, leaving no evidence behind.

Once in the living room, I kicked off my shoes and collapsed onto the couch.

<><><>

I woke up to Grace furiously shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes and looked up. She was standing over me with a panicked look on her face.

“Leave me alone,” I mumbled, rolling over to not be facing my sister. “I was just taking a nap.”

“What in the world are you thinking?” Grace said, her voice sounding rather agitated.

“What do you think? I was taking a nap ’cause I was tired.”

“And how do you think Mom would feel about you peeing all over the couch? That’s a lot harder to clean up than your mattress?”

I turned back over to look up at Grace. “I wouldn’t do that during a nap.”

“Well, that’s what I thought once, too. Just go to your bedroom if you want to sleep.”

I yawned and looked at my phone. It was about twenty minutes since I had arrived home from school, but I felt a lot better even after that quick nap. “I think I’m fine, now.”

That did raise another interesting question. Was it common for bedwetters to have accidents if they fell asleep for a brief nap during the day?

And then there was another thought, one I would have to consider later. If being a bedwetter meant sometimes having an accident during a nap, that could create an excuse for me to experiment with peeing my pants more during the day.

“Actually, since you are awake,” Grace said. “You should probably get the cat litter taken care of before Mom gets home. It was really stinky when I was putting clothes in the washing machine before you got home. And you can get your laundry out of the dryer while you're down there because I’m going to need to use it soon for my stuff.”

It didn’t matter that Grace was saving me a potential lecture from my parents about not doing my chores. It still was annoying that she was telling me to do it.

I stomped noisily down the stairs on the way to the basement. This evening couldn’t come quickly enough.

<><><>

Mom had apparently talked through the proposal for the all-nighter with Dad, and neither of them was enthusiastic about it.

“It’s simply too risky, Maddy,” Mom said. She was sitting next to Dad on the couch. It was just me and my parents in the living room. Jackson was playing with Legos in his bedroom. Grace was off in the kitchen with her after-dinner chore of washing the dishes. “What if you fall asleep on the couch or on the floor by accident? I’m sure you don’t want to have a bedwetting accident around your friends.”

I tried to get them to see my side, to no avail. “But that is why we’ll have a bunch of energy drinks. There’s no way I’m going to fall asleep.”

“Maddy,” Dad said. “I don’t think you realize how much more caffeine is in those drinks. Even one drink could have four to five times as much caffeine as a can of pop.”

“What’s this about energy drinks?” Grace asked as she walked into the living room. There was a splatter of wet spots across her shirt from when she had been washing dishes.

“Maddy wants to do an all-nighter for a sleepover on her birthday to avoid the issues she’s been having at night. I was explaining that having a bunch of energy to stay awake the whole night isn’t going to be a good idea.”

“There is absolutely no way I would want to deal with three girls all drugged up on caffeine and who knows what else in energy drinks,” Grace said. “Seriously, Maddy. You get shakes just when you have more than one glass of Mountain Dew.”

“But,” I said, trying to protest.

“It’s not going to work,” Mom said. “An all-nighter is simply not a good idea.”

But this left me in a bind. If I couldn’t have a sleepover, what was I supposed to say to my friends?

“But I can’t tell Angie and Emma that I can’t do any more sleepovers.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to,” Mom said. “There’s something else we can do – something we did with your sister – to make it so you can have a sleepover, so long as it is a normal one without energy drinks.”

Pull-ups. Please let it be pull-ups. Perhaps the advertisement in the magazine had been enough to remind Mom of what she may have done for my sister.

“Guys,” Grace whined. “Do you have to keep mentioning my own bedwetting?”

“It’s just to help your sister out,” Dad said. “We learned a lot about how to handle it with you, so of course, we’re going to try some of the same things with your sister.”

“When your sister was around ten years old,” Mom said, “our pediatrician, Dr. Mathorn, recommended trying a pill that would make it so she wouldn’t wet the bed, and it worked quite well.”

Seriously? It was as though my parents were doing everything possible to avoid the solution that seemed most obvious to me. But why did it take so long to get Grace the solution that apparently solved all her problems?

“Why didn’t she have Grace take those pills earlier?”

“I think she said it wasn’t as effective with younger kids and that bedwetting was fairly normal for younger, elementary-age kids, so there wasn’t any need to be concerned about it. We had Grace take the pill whenever she wasn’t going to be at home. It was very effective, so long as she also made sure to limit fluid intake and use the toilet before bed.”

Grace groaned softly off to the side. Her hands were covering her face. Obviously, this wasn’t a memory she wanted to be forced to re-live in front of her younger sister.

Mom continued her explanation. “Even after her bedwetting phased out, we will had her take the pill for sleepovers for the next couple of years, just as an insurance measure. We still have some, so we figured we’d have you try them the next few nights. Assuming they work as well for you as they did for Grace, then you’ll be able to have the sleepover without any issues.

“You really kept those pills?” Grace asked incredulously.

“I mean, it wasn’t really intentional. We didn’t think it was likely you’d need them again. They just got tucked away at the back of the medicine cabinet and were forgotten about. It’s probably about time to take them tonight. I’m going to go grab them now.”

Mom left to get the pills. Dad excused himself to go off and get Jackson started on his own bedtime routine, leaving me alone with Grace for the moment.

My older sister still looked a little irked that Mom had kept her bedwetting medication long after that issue had stopped. For all the ways my parents had allowed my older sister to be independent, bedwetting hadn’t been one of them, not when she had also been forced to continue to sleep on the waterproof mattress until a couple of nights ago.

I turned to Grace. “Was there a reason you didn’t take the pills every night?”

“I never slept well, and I often had really bad headaches afterward for the next day. It made school impossible.”

“Is that supposed to make me want to take them?”

“I mean, they do work. I never wet the bed once after taking them. And a terrible headache in the morning beats being known as the girl who still wets the bed at school. But there wasn’t any way I was going to take them every night; that would have been way too much.”

“But, like, how does it work?”

“I’m trying to remember exactly how the doctor put it,” Grace said. “Basically, it makes it so your body doesn’t produce as much urine while you sleep so that your bladder doesn’t fill up so quickly and make you need to pee.”

This revelation about the bedwetting pills was another nail in the coffin to the idea that my older sister had ever worn pull-ups to manage her nighttime condition.

I was fairly certain at this point that Grace had never worn pull-ups at home, not with how frequently the laundry was being done when she had been a bedwetter. And the pills meant that she wouldn’t have needed a pull-up any time she had been sleeping overnight somewhere else after she had turned ten.

Still, if she had started using the pills around when she was ten, there would have been a time before that when her bedwetting would have to have been managed somehow when she wasn’t at home.

I tried to think back to the trips we had taken, but I would have been a baby for nearly all of them, so I didn’t have the slightest recollection of what would have happened with my sister’s bedwetting. Had pull-ups perhaps been used only for those occasions? Or had we picked places to stay that had given my parents the ability to do the necessary amount of extra laundry that would have been required?

I’d held off on asking further questions about my sister’s bedwetting because I hadn’t been able to think of a way to ask about pull-ups that would work. I couldn’t have her thinking that I was at all interested in wearing them. But this new revelation gave me an opening to ask a question that could lead to the same answer without revealing exactly what information I was seeking.

“So, like, what did you do on trips before you had the bedwetting pills?” I felt quite proud of myself for how sneakily discreet the question was. Without even mentioning pull-ups, there was the possibility that she could give an answer on the subject.

“Why does it matter?”

“I don’t know. I just realized that I’d never noticed you wet the bed before.”

Grace glared at me.

Before my sister could say anything further, Mom arrived and answered the question for her. “Oh, we used a special, disposable, absorbent bedwetting pad on top of the mattress.”

“Mom, did you have to tell her that?”

“What? We’ve already discussed other stuff from your bedwetting.”

“It sucked,” Grace said. “It was like sleeping on a massive puppy pee pad. It crinkled worse than my mattress. I could hardly sleep.”

“Well, it did at least keep the bed dry while we were at hotels or staying with relatives,” Mom said. “Though it would have been pretty wasteful to use it at home when we had the ability to just toss everything in the washing machine easily.”

I finally noticed that Mom was holding a glass with a couple of ounces of water in it.

“We should give the pill a try tonight. We need to know if it is going to work before we can OK the sleepover,” Mom said.

“Are you sure it is fine to use without talking to a doctor?” Grace asked.

“Of course not,” Mom said. “I gave Dr. Mathorn a call this morning, and she gave the OK to have Maddy try the pills this weekend, and depending on how that goes, we can figure out the next steps during her appointment on Monday.”

Mom had already signed me up to go to the doctor? My brain started to get fuzzy at the thought of being poked and prodded in an uncannily sterile room. “But… but…”

“Dr. Mathorn helped us a bunch with your sister’s bedwetting. It’s not as though she is unfamiliar with the topic.”

Mom handed me the pill and the glass of water. “I know you don’t like taking pills. But this one is nice and small, so let’s just get it over with.”

I recalled that if I had been an actual bedwetter, I would have been eager about this new solution. I forced what I thought was a natural happy face as I tucked the pill under my tongue and rinsed it down with a swig of water. This was going to be a major problem.

“And this is really important, Maddy,” Mom said. “Grace’s doctor was very clear that once the pill is taken right away before bed, you aren’t to have any liquids until the morning. He said that is necessary to avoid some other harmful side effects.”

That sucked. I had only gotten half of the way through my water bottle full of disgusting tap water tonight. And the way Mom had phrased this request made it clear that disobeying it would be unwise.

I assured Mom that I would avoid drinking any more water and excused myself to head back to my bedroom. I needed time to think through what I was supposed to do next.

There were a number of things that I wanted.

I wanted pull-ups to wear. I wanted to continue peeing myself. I wanted my parents to think I was a bedwetter. I wanted to have the sleepover with my friends. I wanted to keep the bedwetting a secret from them. I wanted Mom to think that the new bedwetting pills she was giving me were ineffective.

I couldn’t think of a path forward that would allow me to accomplish all of that. There was no way I could stop wetting the bed, even temporarily, not when that would convince Mom that the pills were the solution to that problem.

But if the bedwetting continued, there wasn’t any way Mom and Dad would sign off on a sleepover. Succeeding in convincing them that I was a bedwetter would only result in them stopping sleepovers unless I could somehow get them to consider pull-ups as a solution.

At least with the latest information about my sister’s bedwetting, I was able to understand how she had avoided being made to wear pull-ups. My parents had found a way to handle her nighttime condition in a way that mostly worked without needing disposable undergarments, though in my opinion a pull-up would have worked better than a disposable, absorbent sheet on top of a mattress.

Did they not know pull-ups were an option? Had Grace simply outright refused to wear them? Or perhaps they just considered it too expensive or wasteful compared to washing sheets every night?

But the exact reason didn’t really seem to matter. What seemed clear to me was that there was no way my parents were going to get me pull-ups of their own volition.

I realized now that unless something changed before the sleepover, I was going to need to do the unthinkable. I was going to have to directly ask my parents to purchase pull-ups for me.

<><><>
A few hours later, I found myself laying awake under the covers. I’d gotten better at staying up past my parents’ bedtime without feeling tired.

I had been trying to pee for the past thirty minutes, but it was no use. I didn’t have the slightest urge to urinate. That little pill had worked extremely well.

I should have at least felt a decent need to pee at this point, as I’d managed to drink half the bottle before Mom had instructed me very sternly to not have any more water.

It was so not fair. The only thing that cheered me up was that it shouldn’t take more than three or four days to convince Mom that these pills weren’t worth the effort. I set an early alarm on my phone, putting in a single earbud so that I’d be the only person to hear the alarm in the morning. No matter how good the pill was, I’d surely have a need to pee in another six hours.

I would let Mom wake me up to discover a wet bed again. And in a few days, with every other solution having failed, perhaps it would be possible to convince them that pull-ups were a palatable option.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 5, 2024 at 4:30 PM
Content: Chapter 16: As AnticipatedIt was amazing how many things could get lost all year in a locker.

I stood in front of my locker with a backpack and a garbage bag in front of me on the floor, sorting out the contents of my locker one-by-one. Some of it got tossed in my backpack to keep. Most things went into the trash bag.

The locker was now about halfway empty. By the end of the school year, the locker had reached its maximum capacity. I had already tossed more than a dozen long-lost pens and pencils into my backpack. I was sure I’d find another couple dozen by the time I was through with emptying the locker.

There were a number of overdue library books I needed to bring to the school library before heading out on the bus, an inside-out, balled up jacket I had left once it had become too warm outside to need it. There were half-empty plastic water bottles, crumpled up papers from homework assignments, and textbooks that I thankfully would never need to ever open again.

“You’re not finished yet?” Emma asked as she walked up next to me and stared into the abyss that was my locker.

I shrugged as I tossed out a Spanish workbook that I wasn’t going to need again. It was true that my locker was fuller than most, but that hadn’t been the main reason for how long it was taking me to get it all emptied out.

The conversation about bedwetting with my parents and sister yesterday evening had given me a lot to think about. The pills had proved to not be much of a problem. Yes, they had made it impossible to wet the bed in the middle of the night, as I would have preferred, but I didn’t have any difficulty peeing in bed once my alarm had woken me up in the morning.

I was rather proud of how I had figured out a way to wake up early without disturbing the rest of my family. Waking up to an alarm blaring from an earbud wasn’t the ideal way to start the morning, but it gave me time to wet the bed and relax before getting ready for school.

However, despite needing to pee in the morning, the puddle that had formed on the bed around my bottom was a lot smaller than any of the other times I had peed in the bed previously, proof that the medication had done its job of limiting my overnight urine output.

Mom, of course, had been a bit disappointed when she woke me up. She made sure to clarify that she wasn’t unhappy with me in any way, but it was clear she had higher expectations for how the medicine would perform. She had very much been expecting to see dry sheets and pajamas in the morning.

“Eww, is that what I think it is?” Emma pointed to a discolored plastic baggie that had been revealed when I had taken the book out of the locker.

I grimaced as I looked down at what was likely the remnants of an unfinished lunch from months ago. That was one of the problems with my locker. I always intended to get stuff out again right away, but as soon as it became buried, it would slip completely out of my mind. Emma held her nose in disgust as I pinched the corner of the baggie and quickly deposited it into the garbage bag.

I hoped there weren’t any additional baggies like that in the locker, but I was beginning to dread what I might end up discovering closer to the bottom.

“So, about the all-nighter? What did your mom say about the sleepover?” Emma asked.

I sighed and rolled my eyes. It was apparent that my friends were going to keep interrogating me until they got an answer. I answered the first half of that question truthfully. “Doing an all-nighter is a no-go. My parents don’t want us drinking all that caffeine and going crazy.”

“That’s silly,” Emma said as she watched me continue to empty the locker. “We wouldn’t have any problem getting away with that at my place. My parents wouldn’t care one bit as long as we didn’t wake them up.”

“Then we can go that later in the summer. Just don’t mention it to my mom.”

“But, like, we’re still good for a regular sleepover next Friday on your birthday?”

I paused a second before answering her question. I didn’t want to say that Mom hadn’t decided yet. That would just be an open invitation to unwelcome questions about what could have changed to make it so I couldn’t have sleepovers anymore. Besides, I was sure that I’d have access to pull-ups next week, which would allow Mom to say yes to my friends spending the night. “Of course.”

“That’s good,” Emma said. “I’ll go let Angie know. She’s a lot closer to getting her locker cleaned up than you are. I’ll see you at lunch.”

I watched as Emma darted off around the corner, weaving through all the other students who were busy getting their hallway lockers cleaned out for the year as well.

Well, I was committed to the sleepover now, which meant I was going to need to get my parents to get me the pull-ups or risk an even more awkward conversation with my friends about how we weren’t actually going to have a sleepover next week.

But it wasn’t time to ask my parents about pull-ups yet. There was still the doctor’s appointment to consider on Monday.

That appointment had me worried. I didn’t like going to the doctor, even for normal yearly checkups. There was that weird thing they squeezed around my arm to take my pulse, which nearly sent me into a panic attack every time they did it. But apart from the normal poking and prodding, the worst of it was always the needles. At least this time, I could be confident that I wouldn’t need to get any new vaccinations.

But what would the doctor make of my bedwetting? I felt confident that I had fooled my entire family so far. They hadn’t expressed a single inkling of doubt that my bedwetting was anything other than genuine. The idea of someone wetting the bed on purpose had to be so far out there that it probably wasn’t ever a scenario they had considered.

But what would happen when I was examined by an actual doctor? What if there was something I had missed during my times of faking bedwetting, something I had gotten wrong that would indicate to them that something was not as it seemed?

What if they ran all of their tests and determined that they couldn’t find anything wrong with me at all? Would they chalk it up to just a random fluke of genetics? Or would they begin to think something was amiss?

On the other hand, the doctor’s appointment could prove useful to my quest to get pull-ups. Surely, they would be aware of that being an option for dealing with bedwetting. Perhaps they might even recommend it as a solution. That would be ideal. That way, I could still at least pretend that I wasn’t all that happy about wearing pull-ups. I had to keep in mind that I was supposed to be behaving like someone who wasn’t happy at all about having to suddenly deal with bedwetting.

I resumed my inspection of the contents of my locker. To my great relief, I didn’t find any additional bags of moldy sandwiches.

<><><>

Despite my older sister’s warning about the side effects she had experienced when she had previously been taking this medication for her own bedwetting, I had felt perfectly fine all day long.

I was tired after coming home from school, but that was just because I hadn’t gotten my usual amount of sleep. I hadn’t woken up at weird times in the middle of the night at all. Grace’s main complaint about the medication was that it had given her some extremely painful headaches. My head hadn’t hurt, and as far as I could tell, nothing else seemed to be off about my body.

That hadn’t stopped me from constantly wincing and rubbing my head all morning – especially when Mom and Grace were around. I needed to give them as many reasons as possible to stop with the pills and try to move on to another solution.

I continued with the act as Grace unlocked the front door to let me in. I groaned and rubbed my head as I eased my overly full backpack down onto the floor.

“You feeling alright?” Grace asked. “How did it go last night?”

I groaned again. “No, your stupid pills didn’t even work. The only thing they gave me was this lousy headache.”

“That’s too bad,” Grace said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck tonight. Oh, and Mom left a note for you in the kitchen. She wanted to make sure you got your laundry done.”

That was just great. Nothing like being reminded of additional chores the minute I was finally free from school and homework for the summer. Still, I knew better than to disobey, and this request suddenly gave me a good idea.

There were still about twenty minutes until Jackson got home from school, enough time to try out something new I had been wanting to experience.

I followed Grace as she walked up the stairs ahead of me. She’d be secluded in her bedroom again until it was time to walk over to the bus stop to collect my younger brother when he was dropped off later this afternoon.

I grabbed my full laundry hamper and hauled it all the way to the laundry room in the basement. Yes, this was going to be perfect. Ever since I had discovered how much I had enjoyed wetting myself in bed earlier this week, I had been desperately curious to see what it would be like to do that in different situations.

But there were a couple of challenges with trying out this new desire.

The first was that there were very few places where I could easily pee my pants without causing a massive mess. Most of our house was carpeted. I didn’t even want to think about how much of a pain it would be to try to clean up that much urine out of the carpet.

That left me with a few options. My bed, of course, worked perfectly because of the waterproof mattress. I considered peeing my pants with my clothes on in the bathtub but couldn’t bring myself to find that to be an acceptable option. It just felt too weird to urinate in a spot where I and the rest of my family would later be standing.

That left the laundry room in the basement. Its cement floor would make clean-up easy. Plus, there was even a drain on the floor, so if I were to pee myself over that, clean-up would be even easier.

That was far and away the best location, especially as I was not as likely to be interrupted, and it would be able to easily hear someone approaching from upstairs.

Having decided on a location, there was still another major obstacle, which was that I was rarely left at home by myself.

I was hoping that would change this summer now that I would be turning thirteen in a week.

In previous summers, Mom had put Jackson in a daycare-like summer camp that he would go to most days for the entirety of summer break. As for me, my schedule had varied. There were day and overnight camps that I would get signed up for. When I wasn’t doing that, I was often spending the day at one of my friend’s places if a parent or older sibling happened to be home.

But be allowed to stay at home all on my own? Absolutely not.

I wasn’t sure how many good opportunities I would get to experiment with peeing my pants during the day, so I had to be ready to make the most of them when they did show up.

The benefit of being in the basement was that I could easily tell where everyone else was in the house. I would be able to hear Grace’s footsteps the moment she started walking down the stairs to the main floor. I had to guess that she wasn’t going to be coming to the basement, but if she was, I would have ample warning to straighten things up quickly.

I had worked extra hard to stay hydrated the last couple of hours at school in preparation for this possibility, but now I was wondering if I would be able to pull it off.

I ran through the scenario once more in my head. I would change into an old pair of leggings from my hamper. I would stand in the corner of the laundry room where there was a drain in the floor. I would wet my pants there, where it would be easiest to clean up afterward. I would allow myself some time to enjoy the experience before using some of my other dirty clothes to dry off and mop up everything from the floor. Then, everything could be tossed in the washing machine, and no one else would have a clue what had happened once I had changed back into my regular clothes for the day.

All so complicated. It would be a lot easier if I simply had a pull-up.

I took off my leggings and replaced them with another pair from the laundry hamper. That was one of the strange things about this new interest. I didn’t have any desire to pee myself without any clothes on. I wondered why that was?

With this new pair of leggings on, I positioned myself right over the small drain set into the cement floor. I listened carefully. There was no sound from my sister moving around upstairs.

This would be another first for me. I had never peed myself while standing before. I assumed that it would be easier to do than while lying down. I spread my legs apart slightly and focused on trying to get my bladder to release.

The bottom of my pants began to get warm, and then a warm, wet sensation began to run down both of my legs. It was exhilarating in a way I couldn’t define. Part of it was tied to the physical sensation of what I was doing, but there was something else as well. Was there a certain amount of excitement that came from doing something so socially forbidden?

Like always, once I started, there was no stopping it at all. Not that I in any way wanted it to stop. I wished that this feeling could go on forever rather than just the thirty seconds that it would take for my bladder to fully empty. It had been every bit as enjoyable as I had anticipated all day long. The only problem was that it was over far too soon.

I looked down at my feet. I knew I had forgotten something. I hadn’t taken off my socks, which were now soaked. For some reason, I had figured that the urine would just go straight through the bottom of my pants and stream onto the floor. I hadn’t considered that it my might run down my legs to my feet.

Even then, the drain had proven to be quite effective, as there was only a small puddle remaining beneath me despite how much I had peed.

With the sound of urine dripping onto the floor now over, I listened intently again for any movement upstairs. There was complete silence. At any moment now, Grace should head down to the front door to wait for Jackson.

I looked back down at the puddle beneath my feet. Again, this would have been so much easier if I had been wearing a pull-up. I wouldn’t have even had to sneak downstairs. I could have done this in the comfort of my own bedroom.

I thought back to that girl I had seen at the mall, the one who had been about Jackson’s age, getting her pull-up changed in the restroom. For a moment, I wished that was me.

Faking bedwetting was one thing. Pulling that off was easy, given my sister’s history of bedwetting. And wearing pull-ups at night would be an easy secret to keep, even from my friends.

But to have accidents during the day was something entirely else. That would call for a much more thorough investigation into what was going on with my body. Besides, I didn’t think I could survive the shame of having my parents, Grace, or Jackson, witness me wetting my pants during the day. And that would make my task of hiding pull-ups from my friends nearly impossible, not to mention what I would have to do at school.

No, that wasn’t an option, despite how much I would enjoy being able to wet my pants at any moment whenever I wanted to. But I consoled myself with the possibility that once I got my hands on some pull-ups to wear at night, I could get away with wearing them occasionally during the day.

The worst part of it was that I had to clean up right away, rather than continuing to stand in the corner in my wet clothes. The only good thing was that the mess was relatively easy to clean up. I wet some of my clothes in the sink next to the washing machine and used them to mop up the small puddle of urine that surrounded the drain.

Satisfied that I’d managed to get everything cleaned up, I tossed the rest of my clothes in the washing machine – along with a large amount of detergent – and got it started before changing back into the leggings I had worn to school.

The pounding of distant footsteps told me that Grace was now coming down the stairs to the main floor. I waited until I’d heard the front door slam shut before I made my way back upstairs.

My heart was still racing as I shut the door to my bedroom behind me. With all of these new things to explore, this was going to be the best summer ever. I retrieved an old magazine from the bottom of the drawer beneath my bed and flipped instantly to the right page, my eyes fixated on a pair of special undergarments.

If everything went right, in less than a week they would be mine.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 7, 2024 at 3:28 AM
Content: Chapter 17: Not a Baby
Three Years Ago

I didn’t let my failure to find pull-ups in my sister’s bedroom deter me. I scoured the rest of the house. Jackson’s bedroom seemed like a promising Plan B, but there were no pull-ups or even baby diapers to be found in there either. The same held true for the rest of the house.

But just because I didn’t find any diapers didn’t mean that there weren’t other discoveries that were made.

The basement was the final frontier of my search for diapers or pull-ups. It was where things that were no longer needed were tucked away forever, or at least until Mom decided it was time to pull them out for a garage sale or donate them to a thrift store.

I had to tug hard at one of the doors in the closet that ran the length of the shortest wall in the unfinished area of the basement that was adjacent to the laundry room.

The door finally opened with a rather large bang. I hoped that no one upstairs wondered what I was doing. It was Saturday afternoon, so everyone was home. It would perhaps have been wiser to hold off on the search until Monday, when it would just be Grace and me at home during the summer while our parents were off at work and Jackson was attending preschool.

But I simply couldn’t bear to wait any longer. I was so convinced that there had to be diapers or pull-ups somewhere in the house. The fact that I hadn’t found them yet just had to mean that I hadn’t looked in the right places.

But this first section of the closet didn’t yield the results I had been hoping for. There were a bunch of storage boxes, but the contents of the clear plastic bins were obvious. It was just a bunch of Christmas decorations, ornaments, lights, and an artificial Christmas tree that would need to be painfully reassembled next year.

The door shut with a firm click. That was OK. There were still four more sections of the closet left for me to check. The next two were also disappointing, especially as they all contained cardboard boxes that I had to drag out and open before determining that the contents – old keepsakes, games, clothes, and other odds and ends – were not what I was looking for.

My anticipation was turning to despair as I approached the second-to-last closet door.

I tugged open the door. And there it was. For a moment, I thought I had hit the mother of all jackpots.

The cardboard box of pull-ups was sitting at eye level with me on the shelf. I would have preferred to have discovered a box of my sister’s old pull-ups, but at this point, I was simply elated to have found anything at all.

It didn’t matter one bit that they were pull-ups meant for boys. I was so eager to finally try one on that I was willing to overlook that detail.

I pulled the box out of the closet and set it down carefully on the floor. I paused before opening it, listening for any sounds of movement upstairs. But no one was walking around at all, and there were definitely no sounds of anyone heading toward the stairs that led down to the basement.

I was relieved that the cardboard diaper box wasn’t taped up. All I had to do to open it was to unfold the top of it. My hands were shaking as I reached down and pulled the cardboard flaps on top of the box apart.

But it wasn’t diapers that I found inside.

Instead, it was an assortment of all the baby items that my brother had outgrown. There were bibs, bottles, pacifiers, an old diaper bag, tiny baby utensils, and sippy cups.

I closed my eyes and groaned. I had been so close. I hurriedly opened the last remaining closet door. Nothing. Just more clear plastic bins that very obviously did not contain any diapers or pull-ups.

My mind felt numb. I had been so sure I’d at least find something. Every other option I had considered for getting my hands on those pull-ups seemed so far off and out of reach at the moment. I wanted them now. The realization that I was being denied that instant gratification stung deeply.

I went back to look at the pull-up box that didn’t actually have any pull-ups in it. I no longer had any hope of finding what I was looking for, but I dug my hand into the box nonetheless. All I found was regular, hard plastic, not the soft, crinkly sensation of the pull-up I had held in my hands a little over a week ago. I again regretted that I hadn’t been able to work up the courage to sneak that pull-up home rather than toss it away in the bathroom garbage container.

Then another thought took hold of me.

If it felt that good to wear a pull-up, perhaps it might also feel good to try out some of my brother’s baby items. Perhaps this whole search wouldn’t end up being a waste of time after all.

I looked down at the contents of the cardboard box. It was immediately apparent what my first experiment should be. I plucked out a pacifier from atop an assortment of other baby items.

I held the blue pacifier in front of me. Mom had gotten Jackson to give up pacifiers about a year ago – shortly after his second birthday. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to have it in my mouth.

I examined the pacifier carefully as I rotated it a couple of times in my hand. How in the world was I supposed to tell which side was up? The clear, silicone part of the pacifier wasn’t uniformly shaped, so there had to be a right way to insert it into my mouth, but I was at a loss to figure out which way it was supposed to go. I tried to recall how it had looked in Jackson’s mouth, but I had never paid close attention to how he has used his pacifiers before.

But there was an incredibly obvious way to figure out an answer to that question. I flipped the pacifier over once more, opened my mouth, and brought the pacifier up to my lips.

I learned an incredibly important lesson when I put the pacifier into my mouth. It was very important to wash something that had been sitting in storage for a year before you put it into your mouth.

I spat the pacifier back out onto the floor. I had never in my life tasted something so gross. I felt as though I was going to puke if I didn’t immediately remedy the situation.

Water. I needed water.

The closest option was the laundry room sink. I raced around the corner to the laundry room, fumbling for the light switch so I could see the sink in the far corner next to the washing machine.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have taken a single sip of water from this sink or any other one in the house. I had never been able to stand the tap water ever since we had moved into the house when I was about five years old.

No one else in our family had that problem, but after several days of me point-blank refusing to take even the smallest sip of water, my parents had finally relented and purchased a filtered water pitcher for me to use.

The filtered water tasted so much better. I couldn’t understand how my family could claim that it didn’t taste different at all to them.

I had the same problem with water at restaurants. There was about a fifty-fifty chance whether I would be able to drink more than a couple of sips before insisting that my parents let me order juice, ice-tea, or even soda. At this point, they usually just ordered bottled water for me, if that was an option.

I looked down at the sink. Under normal circumstances, what I was about to do would have been unfathomable. But these were not normal circumstances.

I turned the handle for the cold-water faucet and cupped my hands beneath the cold stream of water before bringing them repeatedly up to my face for quick sips. This was probably the first time in four years that I had actually swallowed any tap water at this house.

I brought my cupped hands up to my mouth a half-dozen times before the awful taste left by the pacifier was gone. The tap water didn’t leave a good taste in my mouth, but in comparison to the aftertaste that had been left by the dusty pacifier, it was a massive relief.

That didn’t mean that I was in any hurry to drink more of it.

I paused at the sound of footsteps moving upstairs. It sounded as though someone was heading out of the living room, straight toward the kitchen.

I sprinted out of the laundry room, not bothering to shut the light off. I reached for the box of pull-ups and was just about to lift it up to return it to its place in the closet when the footsteps came to a stop right above me in the kitchen.

I breathed a sigh of relief. It was probably just Mom getting started on her dinner preparations. I’d be fine as long as she didn’t need to come and get anything out of the pantry.

I realized as well that I had completely forgotten about the pacifier that had fallen to the floor. The second or so that it had been in my mouth hadn’t been nearly long enough for me to decide on whether I liked it, as that moment had been spoiled by its gross taste.

My first thought was to wash the pacifier in the laundry room sink, but I immediately dismissed that idea. It was in bad enough shape that I was going to need soap. I tucked the pacifier into the pocket of my shorts. I would need to find a way to clean it later.

I looked at the size description on the side of the pull-up box as I put it back into the closet. The weight range that these pull-ups were supposed to fit was thirty-two to forty pounds. I knew from the scale in the upstairs bathroom that I was a good twenty-five pounds above that. Even if there had been some of these pull-ups left over, there wasn’t any way they would have fit me.

On the other hand, it was clear that the bedwetting pull-ups my cousins had worn must have had larger sizing requirements, as they had fit me without any issues.

But that was a question I wasn’t going to be able to get an answer to.

I didn’t have a smartphone. Grace, who was six years older than me, had just recently been allowed to have one for herself.

Plus, Dad had made it very clear that he was capable of seeing what things I searched for when I used the family PC or tablet. That was a lesson I had found out the hard way while searching for information on what should have been an innocuous topic, only to have to immediately advert my eyes at what actually showed up on the screen.

I had closed the web browser immediately, but somehow, I still ended up getting a lengthy lecture from my parents about internet safety, followed by being banned from using the tablet for several weeks.

A few loud thumps caused me to turn my gaze toward the ceiling. There was no doubt about it now. Someone was headed toward the basement stairs.

I hurried back over to the laundry room after shutting the closet door behind me, hoping that the pacifier would, in fact, be a good consolation prize.

I got on my knees and started opening some cabinets on the floor, pretending to be searching for Chester.

“Maddy, what are you doing?”

I turned around to see Mom standing in the laundry room doorway.

“I’m looking for Chester,” I said, giving the pre-made excuse I had prepared in case any questioned why I was spending time alone in the basement. We’d gotten the two-year-old orange cat several months ago. He was gradually becoming more friendly with us, but he still took to hiding in odd places around the house for hours at a time.

“He’s upstairs napping behind the couch in the living room,” Mom said. “But you need to leave him alone if he is hiding away like that. You can play with him when he comes back out again.”

“But, Mom.”

“If he doesn’t want to be bothered, he doesn’t want to be bothered. He’ll let us know when he wants to be played with again.”

Without any further excuse to stay in the basement, I watched as Mom grabbed a box of pasta noodles off of a shelf and then followed her back up the stairs toward the kitchen.

I made my way upstairs to the bathroom on the second floor of the house. I did need to use the toilet anyway, and this would provide the perfect cover for getting the pacifier washed. I hoped that the hand soap I was using to clean off the pacifier wouldn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth. I made sure to rinse it off as thoroughly as possible before placing it back into my pocket for the short walk down the hallway to my bedroom.

I took the pacifier out of my pocket and laid down on the bed. There was still plenty of time before dinner for me to see how using the pacifier would go. I cautiously slid the pacifier into my mouth. I had done a good job of washing it; there was no yucky taste of built-up dust or soap.

I sucked on the pacifier awkwardly, trying to figure out exactly how I was supposed to use it. There wasn’t any real taste to it, just the bland sensation of semi-squishy silicone. I felt really silly. It wasn’t doing anything for me. It wasn’t anywhere close to as fun as wearing a pull-up.

I used my tongue to rotate the pacifier in my mouth. Perhaps it had just been in the wrong position. Nope, it was still the same.

It wasn’t as though I disliked sucking on the pacifier. It didn’t taste bad or feel uncomfortable. But it didn’t do anything for me. It was nothing like the euphoria I had felt when I had been wearing a pull-up.

I tried, and failed, to imagine myself as a baby, sucking on a pacifier or drinking out of a bottle, but whatever had led me to be interested in wearing pull-ups again wasn’t in any way connected to other baby items. Having grown bored with this new toy already, I hid the pacifier in the bottom of my dresser, tucking it safely away until I would have the chance to return it to the closet.

Later that week, when I returned the pacifier to its place in the pull-up box in the basement closet, I also tried drinking from a baby bottle, which required me to be incredibly stealthy to clean and fill, even with only my older sister around at the time.

I managed to get away with it without being caught, but the result was the same, even though I had filled the baby bottle with my preferred filtered drinking water. Being a baby simply held no appeal to me. I couldn’t fathom wanting to suck on a pacifier or drink from a bottle for more than a minute or two. I certainly didn’t want to be a baby again.

But that didn’t matter.

As I had learned from my cousins, one didn’t have to be a baby to wear diapers.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 7, 2024 at 3:29 AM
Content: Chapter 18: Only One Step Remains
Friday night was pizza night, and it sucked as I wasn’t even being allowed to have any pop.

Mom, Dad, and Grace each had a full glass of ice-cold root beer to go along with their pizza dinner. Even Jackson got a small glass of pop, albeit with a bunch of ice, so there wasn’t actually that much for him to drink. Like I had been at his age, he could get a little too hyper if he had too many sugary drinks. Any time he was given pop, my parents made sure it was of the uncaffeinated variety.

But I was the exception. I had a glass of water. Not even tea or juice. Both of those alternatives had been vetoed by Dad because they contained sugar. And it wasn’t even a big glass of water at that. I hoped this practice of limiting my fluids wouldn’t be so strict once my parents surrendered to buying me pull-ups. I took the tiniest of sips from the glass of water before taking another bite of my pizza.

I was making as much of an effort as possible to ration out the sips of water as I tried to finish my two slices of pizza. The last thing I needed was to finish the water before I had finished eating my pizza. That would leave my mouth parched for the remainder of the evening, as Mom had strongly implied that I wasn’t going to be allowed to have any more refills.

How many more times was I going to have to fake wetting the bed before they realized that this all was pointless?

I stared down at my slice of sausage and pepperoni pizza as we sat in the living room and ate our meal on the couch. I didn’t feel all that hungry at the moment, even though I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch at school. Pizza just wasn’t as appetizing without a sugary, caffeinated drink to wash it down.

We were about twenty minutes into the movie my parents had chosen for tonight. The only good thing was that Jackson was at least old enough to be allowed to watch some PG movies, so we had something on to watch during dinner that was at least entertaining. The movie of choice tonight was “Spy Kids.”

I would have preferred to watch one of the Harry Potter movies, but Jackson still wasn’t old enough to start watching them, according to my parents, so that would have to wait for a time when he wasn’t around. It had been a lot easier in the few years when he had been too young to care about what was going on the TV. For now, I mostly had to stick with the books to get my magic fix.

Now everything that came on during the day had to be vetted to ensure that it was age appropriate for him. I knew Grace had her own shows that she watched on her computer in her room, but I didn’t have access to my own Netflix account like she did.

At least this was a movie I hadn’t seen before. We often got stuck watching a Pixar movie that I’d seen with Jackson a half-dozen times or more.

A line of dialogue from one of the parents in the movie caught my attention. The two adults – who were secretly spies – were expressing concerns about how their two kids were holding up without them.

“They can take care of themselves,” the mom said.

“They are still in diapers,” the dad said.

“Only one wears diapers. And only at night. It’s no big deal,” the mom said.

Jackson burst out laughing at that line of dialogue.

I did my best to continue focusing straight ahead at the TV. This was so embarrassing. Yes, having my parents see another reference to diapers being used for bedwetting could be helpful in my quest to get them to purchase those pull-ups, but it felt so awkward to have the possibility displayed right on the TV in front of everyone, especially as Grace was also aware of my bedwetting.

“That’s silly,” Jackson said. “Why aren’t they potty trained already?”

Grace, who was sitting closer to the TV on the same couch as me, turned back in my direction. From how red her face was, it was clear I wasn’t alone in being quite embarrassed by the scene in this movie.

“We’ll, they are old enough to be potty trained during the day,” Mom said. “But not everyone is able to potty train quickly at night. Sometimes their bladders don’t want to listen to them when they are asleep, at least not until they get older.”

My younger brother thankfully accepted the explanation without any other comments. I breathed a sigh of relief that Mom hadn’t decided to bring up the fact that everyone in our family, apart from him, was or had been a bedwetter at some point.

I tried to guess which of the two characters were in diapers at night. The oldest girl, Carmen, was the same age as me. Her younger brother in the movie, Juni, was nine years old. It really hoped that it was the boy who was the bedwetter.

Grace excused herself the moment she was finished with her pizza – if she had been allowed to take it to her room to eat, she most certainly would have chosen to do so – and left the room, presumably on her way upstairs to the bedroom. The only movies she enjoyed watching with us were animated ones. Grace always had a bunch of different facts on hand about the behind-the-scene details of how the animations for those films had been done. I wondered if that was something she’d be studying more in college in the fall.

Part of me wanted to get away from the movie as fast as possible. I had a sinking feeling that the topic of diapers was going to come up again at some point. There had to be a reveal as to which of the kids still needed them.

At the same time, I was curious about how it would turn out, despite how embarrassing it would be to have to sit around and be in the room when that scene played out on the TV.

I took one final sip of water and set the glass that was now only full of ice cubes to the side. With any luck, the ice cubs would melt enough by the end of the movie so I could get a few more sips of water. I still had half a slice of pizza left on my plate, but I didn’t feel like finishing it at the moment, not without something to drink to wash it down.

Beside that one oblique reference to diapers, the topic had been dropped off. I hoped that the audience would be left in suspense.

There hadn’t yet been any further conversations since this morning about the lack of effectiveness of the pill that was supposed to have prevented me from wetting the bed the night before

I had allowed my pretending about having a headache from the pills to drop off before Mom and Dad got home from work. I didn’t want to risk going too far overboard with it. I felt that my acting job from this morning had been sufficient to make them think that I was dealing with the same symptoms that Grace had when she had previously taken those pills.

Still, I wondered how many nights it would take for my parents to abandon the bedwetting pill as a solution to the nighttime accidents? I had to assume that as long as it wasn’t producing results, they would stop making me take it fairly soon.

I pulled my feet up onto the couch – which I now had to myself with Grace’s absence – and stretched out my legs. Chester hopped up on top of me a few minutes later and nestled in around my knees.

“Stop it, or I’ll call you names,” the younger brother, Juni, said, threatening his older sister during an argument.

“Go ahead, warthog. You got nothing on me,” Carmen replied.

I knew right away what was going to happen next. The writers had set Carmen up for a spectacular fall. Of course, it had to be the girl my age.

“Sure I do, diaper lady.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since forever. Mom made me swear not to mention it.”

Jackson was again laughing loudly at the scene. Why did everyone have to find the topic of older kids dealing with bedwetting to be so funny?

I really wanted to see the expressions on my parents’ faces at this moment. What were they thinking? Was this sparking an idea of something they could try if the pills stopped working? But I couldn’t dare bring myself to look back. I was both too embarrassed and concerned that they might get the wrong idea. I couldn’t have them thinking that I was either too eager for some nighttime protection or too embarrassed to be willing to try it. I wasn’t confident that I could work my facial expressions into an appropriate middle ground.

The movie continued for another half-hour or so, and it reached its conclusion without making any more references to the fact that the twelve-year-old girl still wore diapers to bed. Mom sent Jackson up to his room with instructions to tidy up his toys before it was time for his bath.

Now that it was summer, I still had a couple of hours before I would need to go to sleep. But this also meant that I was alone with my parents for the first time today.

The show had created a perfect opening for me to bring up the topic of pull-ups. But it was all too sudden. I hadn’t had enough time to figure out the proper way to word my request. And it was too important of a moment to try to do it impromptu.

Instead, I grabbed the third Harry Potter book off of the shelf and flipped to where I had been last reading it. It was my favorite of the series.

Mom preferred to read on her tablet while Dad was watching something on his phone with his earbuds in. It was probably a show that they didn’t think I was old enough to see yet.

I normally found it easy to get lost in the world of Hogwarts while reading, but I wasn’t able to concentrate on that tonight. My mind began to wander, wondering about how bedwetting would be handled in a magical world. I imagined there probably was a spell that would automatically dry off a wet bed.

Mom stepped out of the room for a few minutes. When she returned, she was again holding a small glass of water, and, like last night, I suspected she had those special pills in her other hand.

“Maddy,” she said. “It’s time to take your medicine again before bed.”

“Do I have to? It didn’t even work. And it gave me a really bad headache.”

“Why don’t we give it a try for a few more nights?” Mom asked. “If it doesn’t work, I promise I won’t make you take the pills again, OK? Perhaps there might be some other options your pediatrician can recommend on Monday instead.”

“Fine,” I mumbled. “A perfect way to ruin my first day off of school.”

It seemed like Mom meant other medications. I just hoped the doctor was familiar with nighttime pull-ups. Pull-ups. Mom. Why couldn’t she mention pull-ups? That had just been a subplot in the movie.

As if in reaction to my expression, Mom gave me a slight smile. “You don’t have to worry,” she said. “We never made your sister wear diapers to bed, and we aren’t going to do that for you.”

I did my best to put on a happy face. Someone my age who was actually a bedwetter would have to find a statement like that from their parents to be a relief.

But it was so hard to do so. With one single sentence, Mom had completely ruined all of my plans. I now realized that there wasn’t going to be any scenario where my parents were going to have me wear pull-ups of their own accord.

“Here,” Mom said, handing me the glass of water and the pills. “Best to get these down at least a little bit before you actually get to sleep.”

Still in a bit of shock from Mom’s pronouncement that she wouldn’t make me wear diapers, I downed the pills easily and then handed the empty glass of water back to her.

“Since you’re going back upstairs,” she said. “Can you please tell your sister that she needs to come down and do the dishes before she goes to bed?”

As I trudged up the stairs, my mind was in a state of complete shock as I tried to contemplate what I should do next. I had felt so confident over the past day that I was on a surefire route to success.

My mind kept replaying what Mom had said to me, parsing her words to try to find any wiggle room. She had made a small but important distinction. She had said that they wouldn’t force me to wear diapers, not that they didn’t believe diapers shouldn’t be used for bedwetting.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I reached the top of the stairs. There was still some hope for me, but I would have to somehow get it across to my parents that I would willingly accept wearing pull-ups at night and do so in a way that didn’t make it look like I was actually all that eager to wear them.

I needed to spend some time tonight thinking about how I was supposed to begin that conversation so I could be better prepared the next time that it came up. I silently chided myself for my lack of preparation. I should have been ready for that conversation tonight.

I was now standing at the end of the hallway. Like usual, Grace’s door was closed. I knocked on it a couple of times.

Unlike usual, there was no response from her. Not even a grumpy request to leave her alone. Somehow, she always seemed to know whether it was me or my parents knocking on the door. She would never be that sassy toward them.

I knocked on the door a second time. Still no response. Seriously, why was she not even bothering to answer?

I knew very well that I wasn’t supposed to open the door without Grace’s permission. She was not going to be happy with me.

But Mom had insisted that I pass along the message. Disobeying her was worse than bothering my sister.

I reached out and twisted the handle of the doorknob. I peeked inside as I slowly inched the door open. Grace was seated in the corner in front of her large monitor with her fancy computer box flashing all sorts of neon lights next to her.

I didn’t have a clear line of sight to what was on the screen, though it looked like she had one of her digital art programs open. Even from just inside the doorway, I could hear the faint sound of music coming from Grace’s headphones. The music had to be on crazy loud for me to be able to hear it from where I was standing.

“Hey!”

Still no response. I took another step forward. Still didn’t have a good view of what my older sister was drawing on her computer.

“Hey! Grace!”

There was a flurry of taps on the keyboard. The monitor flashed away to the home screen before I could get a good look at what she had been drawing.

Grace removed her wireless headphones and turned around to look at me. Her eyes widened. She glanced back at her monitor one more time before returning her gaze to me.

“What the heck, Madelyn. You’re supposed to knock.”

“I did knock. Mom sent me to tell you to come downstairs and wash the dishes.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “I haven’t forgotten. You’d think they wouldn’t care as long as I got it done before I went off to sleep. Just tell her I’ll be down in a bit.”

“You can tell her,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

I left Grace with her secrets and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

With a mouth full of sudsy toothpaste, I considered my options for tonight, now that I had taken the bedwetting pill again.

What I really wanted to do was pee in bed again while lying down, but there was no way I was going to be able to accomplish that until the morning. The pill was effective enough at limiting my body’s urine production to the point where there would be no way for me to pee at midnight while I was taking it before going to bed.

One option was to wait until tomorrow. There would be no rush to get out of bed on a Saturday morning. By the time I woke up, my bladder would be full enough to pee in bed. And unless I slept in way too long, Mom and Dad wouldn’t be coming in to check on me.

But that also meant that my bedwetting accident would be more obvious to everyone, as I would have to bring the bedding down to the laundry room while they were all awake. I didn’t care for that option.

That meant faking a late-night bedwetting accident was better than faking an early-morning one. But without the ability to make myself pee, I had to resort to the trick that I had previously used of just tossing my dry bedding into the washing machine to create the appearance of having cleaned up after a nighttime accident.

I waited for what seemed like forever, though probably less than an hour had passed, until I heard my parents finish getting ready for bed.

I emptied out the remainder of my secret soccer water bottle onto the middle of the bed. May as well have the bedding appear wet while carrying it downstairs in case I ran into anyone on the way. I had the feeling that Grace was still awake, though, with any luck. She would be far too distracted without whatever secret project she was working doing on her computer.

As I returned to my bedroom after getting the washing machine started, thought back again to what Mom had said regarding my sister. They hadn’t forced her to wear diapers. I wondered if they had suggested that option to her only for it to have been refused. Had she perhaps reacted in a way that was making them not want to broach the topic with me?

I finished putting a new set of sheets onto my bed, which crinkled beneath me as I tucked myself under the covers. I tried to focus on the one bright spot from this evening. My parents were completely aware that there were diapers that could be used by bedwetters my age.

I thought back to how much I had accomplished in the past week since I’d put this plan into action. I’d convinced my parents that my bedwetting was a real issue that wasn’t going away anytime soon. I’d managed to keep up the act despite their multiple attempts to find a solution. I’d discovered that they were informed about the possibility of diapers, even if it wasn’t something they were currently planning to have me use.

I’d made so much progress, and now only one step remained. I needed to convince them that I would be OK with wearing diapers again.

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 8, 2024 at 12:00 AM
Content:

Growler0128 said:

Let her get a really bad UTI infection that makes her pee without warning.

[End of quote]

I don't know if we want to be that cruel to Maddy.

Tina said:

I like the pace and think it's believable. A way how it maybe would work in reality. Not to fast. Wow a diaper story and in chapter 18 the protagonist still didn't wore a diaper and the story is anyway interesting.
That's an accomplishment I think.

Like it and would be happy to read more about Maddys journey.

Thank you for the efford and time you invest.

Greets Tina

[End of quote]

Thanks Tina, I'm glad you are enjoying it.

Ecchi231 said:

Glad to see you posting here! It became a lot harder to keep up with this story after Wattpad started removing ABDL content and pulled this series. I was current with this story up to that point, and look forward to reading the continuation once you get to posting the latest chapters here. Your writing is excellent, and if you have other ABDL stories that you'd like to post here, please do so!

[End of quote]

Thanks, I'm glad you were able to find it again. That Wattpad crackdown was incredibly annoying. I think at least with everywhere I've posted that I hope a lot of the readers were able to find me again.

But I won't be posting the other completed stories I had on Wattpad on here. ADISC's content rules for stories are stricter than most sites. Not something I have an issue with. Private sites have the right set their own rules.

diaperedinlongisland said:

I really enjoyed this so far
Can totally relate
Luckily I always had siblings or neices/nephews stashes to sneak from. eventually i had my own kids stash.
Def would have been easier to just wet the bed and get actually put into diapers.

[End of quote]

Thanks!

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 9, 2024 at 12:58 AM
Content: Chapter 19: Not the Same as MeI shivered as I held the ice pack against my forehead, but I had no one to blame but myself for the situation I found myself in on Saturday morning.

This morning, I had again kept up the pretense that the bedwetting pills had given me some annoying headaches. I had gotten out of bed just in time to snag the last of the pancakes that Dad had made for breakfast. From the look on Mom’s face as I entered the kitchen, it was clear that she had already noticed the sheets I had tossed into the washing machine last night. But with Jackson in the room, there wasn’t an opportunity to have a conversation about bedwetting again.

I groaned and rubbed my forehead frequently while eating my breakfast. It must have been a stellar acting job because no sooner had I finished breakfast than Dad had come up to me with an ice pack in hand.

The good thing was that my parents believed me. The bad thing was that they believed me and had offered me an ice pack to help dull the pain. I had no choice but to accept it, so now I was lying on my back on the couch, painfully watching the seconds pass by. I trembled a little as another shiver ran all the way through my body. A little bit longer, and perhaps I could pretend that I was cured for the time being.

Mom had promised to not make me take the pills for more than a few more nights if they continued to prove ineffective. I was going to hold her to it. I didn’t want to have to keep faking a headache every morning. It wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as faking the bedwetting.

My phone buzzed. With one hand still holding the ice pack to my forehead, I checked my most recent message. It was from Angie, who was bored out of her mind on the road trip her family was taking out to South Dakota. This morning, her family was at Mouth Rushmore, and she’d taken a selfie to share with Emma and me. I really hoped the vacation my parents had planned for later in the summer was going to have better destinations than that.

“Since you’re not feeling well, I moved your sheets over to the dryer,” Mom said as she stepped into the living room.

I groaned, this time from the fact that my bedwetting wasn’t exactly being treated like a secret rather than from faking a headache. With Grace fully aware of it, Mom and Dad weren’t showing any reservations about bringing up that topic with me while she was around.

“Is your headache still pretty bad?” Mom asked. “Perhaps you should stay home today to rest up rather than going over to Emma’s place?”

There was no way I was going to be spending the first day of summer stuck at home. Even with Angie gone, I still had plans to bike across the neighborhood to hang out with Emma for the afternoon.

“I’m sure I’ll be feeling better by then,” I insisted. “I think the ice pack is really helping.”

“We’ll see how you’re feeling later,” Mom conceded. “I can always drive you over instead.”

I re-adjusted the ice pack on my forehead, trying to find a way to hold it in place that wasn’t so cold. All of us were in the living room except Jackson, who was playing with Legos in his bedroom. For the sake of all our feet, those evil bricks were now banned from being anywhere else in the house.

After a few more minutes had passed, I set the ice pack down. Hopefully, that recovery time from the headache wasn’t too unbelievable.

“There was something else your mom and I were wanting to talk to you girls about.”

I looked over at my sister before looking up at Dad. Grace appeared just as confused about what this could mean as me.

“Maddy,” Dad said. “Since you are going to be turning thirteen in a week, we’ve decided that you’re going to be able to stay home by yourself this summer.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Grace said.

I glared at my sister. “No need to act that excited about it.” I did see where Grace was coming from, though. Having to be home with me had limited some of her opportunities for work and hanging out with her friends during previous summers.

“Hey,” Grace said. “I’ve been asking Mom and Dad to let you do it for a while now.”

“It’s a lot of responsibility,” Mom said. “And you need to understand that this is a privilege that can be taken away if you aren’t careful with it. There are some rules you need to follow. It’s similar to the rules we had for your sister when she was your age. No having any friends over while we are gone. No using the stove or the oven….”

A picture of what those days at home might look like this summer came into focus in my head as Mom continued to go over all the things I’d need to do to be allowed to stay in the house by myself.

I had already thought this summer was going to be the best one ever, but this, having the whole house to myself? The implications became immediately clear. With the whole house to myself, I would have so much more freedom to experiment with peeing my pants.

What should I try first? I wanted to hold my bladder to the point of bursting before I let it out. I wanted to see what it would be like to wet my pants while sitting down. Maybe I could try peeing myself with different outfits on.

“Maddy, Maddy.” Someone was snapping their fingers and saying my name.

I blinked rapidly and returned my gaze back to Mom.

“Madelyn,” Mom said, “We want to give you more responsibilities, but you need to pay attention.”

“Sorry,” I said. I found myself beginning to subconsciously pick on my fingernails. I hoped that my sudden daydreaming hadn’t ruined this new opportunity before it had already begun.

Grace laughed. “I bet she was thinking about how to sneak in a boyfriend while I’m gone.”

“Eww,” I said. “No. Gross.”

“Your sister is right, though,” Dad said. “No friends over when you’re by yourself means no boyfriends as well.”

“Or girlfriends,” Mom said.

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have either of those.”

“What, you want to grow up to be a crazy cat lady?” Grace asked.

I looked over at Chester, who was napping in a sunspot on the carpet in front of the window.

“That doesn’t seem like a bad idea.”

<><><>
I sat on my bed with the fourth Harry Potter book in my hands. I wasn’t as big a fan of the Triwizard Tournament story arc, but I always found the Quidditch World Cup to be fascinating. It would be enough just to have the opportunity to go to a soccer World Cup at some point. If only I could convince my parents to get tickets when the U.S. hosted it in several years.

I had already breezed through the previous book earlier this morning after having finally discarded the ice pack. Once the conversation about being allowed to stay home alone this summer had ended, I had retreated up to my bedroom to read. It was too noisy downstairs to concentrate.

My eyes flickered back and forth rapidly across the pages. My teachers always told me I read too fast. I didn’t see how that was supposed to be a bad thing.

“Maddy. Maddy. Maddy!”

My head snapped up as I finally caught wind that someone was calling my name. Mom was standing a few feet away, looking down at me. I hadn’t even heard her knock or open my bedroom door, which should have been enough to get my attention.

“Can’t you pick out something else to read?” Mom asked as she looked down at the book in my hands. “There are plenty of other books to choose from in the basement.”

That was another reason I had gone off to my bedroom to read. The Harry Potter series was pretty much the only books I’d read over the past two years outside of anything that had been required for school assignments. I hadn’t counted how many times I’d gone through the series, but it had to be a lot. Sometimes, I’d read through the books in order, but other times, I’d jump around to different ones depending on which one I felt like reading at the moment.

My parents didn’t have anything against the Harry Potter books. They just were overly insistent that I try to expand my reading interests. None of the other series they’d thrown my way had caught my imagination in the same way, so I usually conducted my Harry Potter reading out of sight as to avoid any criticism. My parents had never explicitly banned me from reading them, but they had very much pressured me to not read them so often.

“Your sheets are dry now,” Mom said. “Can you please go grab them from the laundry room? And make sure to fold them neatly and put them back in the closet. I don’t want to come back up and see them tossed in a pile in the corner.”

“Can I at least finish this chapter?”

“Right away, please,” Mom said. “It’s almost time for lunch.”

“Can I at least not take those pills again tonight?”

“Let’s just try it for two more nights,” Mom said. “That way, if it hasn’t worked by the time we take you to the doctor, then we can talk with them about what to do next.”

I suppressed a sigh as I got off of the bed and headed toward the hallway.

“And while you’re down there, don’t forget to clean the litter box,” Mom said, calling out after me as I reached the stairs. “You know you’re supposed to do that in the morning before going off to play.”

“Stupid chores,” I muttered to myself. I let my feet fall just a little harder on the stairs as I trudged down the steps on the way to the main floor.

We had sadly eaten all the pizza last night, which meant no leftovers for lunch. Instead, Dad was busy in the kitchen, with multiple pots and pans set out on the stovetop.

I tried to avoid making eye contact with anyone as I made my way back upstairs with a bundle of laundry in my arms, enduring the walk of shame in silence as I carried the evidence of my presumed bedwetting back up to my bedroom.

<><><>
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Emma said as she opened the front door to let me into her house.

I had biked over to Emma’s house after lunch, though it had taken some work to convince Mom that my fake headaches had cleared up enough for me to leave the house after all. But she had still made me take a couple of Tylenol pills before I left.

Even though Emma’s house was on the opposite side of the neighborhood, it was an easy trek, one that I had made countless times before.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

I thought about that for a second. “Good news.”

“The good news is I’m still free to go to the park.”

That didn’t make much sense to me. Why would Emma not have been able to go to the park near her house, where we often hung out during the summer?

“What’s the bad news?”

Emma raised her eyebrows and looked over her shoulder. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Her.”

I took another step into the house and looked over Emma’s shoulder. The girl in the distance bore a slight resemblance to Emma, enough so that I had to guess that they were related in some way. They both had curly brown hair, though the girl's hair was done up in braided pigtails while Emma had left her shoulder-length hair unbraided.

But it was how they were dressed that differentiated them. Like me, Emma was wearing soccer shorts and a T-shirt. The girl was wearing long pink and white striped socks that came up to her knees. She had on a plaited, muted-pink skirt and a white shirt with a Hufflepuff emblem in the middle. There was a pink watch on her left hand and a half-dozen colorful bracelets in different styles on her right hand.

But what stood out most was the set of earmuffs she was wearing. I settled for that word rather than headphones, because something just looked off about them.

The girl hadn’t turned in our way yet. She was facing the other direction, staring off into space.

I lowered my voice so the girl wouldn’t hear me. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, despite whatever misgivings Emma seemed to have. “Why is she bad news?”

“She’s my cousin, Hannah. Her family has been staying with us for the weekend. She is bad news because I accidentally let her overhear that I was going to go to the park with you, and now she wants to come as well. She threw a tantrum when I told her she couldn’t, and then my mom said I had to let her tag along.”

I looked over again at Emma’s cousin before turning back to face Emma. Setting aside the fact that a girl our age throwing a tantrum was a bit strange, I still didn’t get why Emma was concerned. “So?”

Emma opened her mouth to respond, but Hannah ran over to greet me before Emma had a chance to say anything further. Emma grimaced as Hannah stood next to her.

“Hi!” Hannah said, waving her hand at me.

“Um, hi,” I said in return. I noticed that Hannah was looking down at my waist rather than up at my face.

“OK,” Emma said after the long silence that followed that awkward introduction. “Hannah, this is my friend Maddy. Maddy, this is my cousin Hannah.”

“What happened to your fingernails?” Hannah blurted out. “They look all chewed up.”

Were my nails that bad? I hastily pulled my hands up in front of my face. I did have a habit of picking on them absentmindedly, but it was embarrassing to have a stranger call it out so bluntly.

“I paint mine so I don’t bite on them,” Hannah said. She thrust her hands out in front of me, showing off nails painted in yellow and black. “I did them in Hufflepuff colors. Have you ever read-”

Buzz. Buzz. The screen on a bright pink watch Hannah was wearing around her wrist went off. She paused what she was saying mid-sentence and dashed off around the corner.

“Whatever you do, don’t mention that you like Harry Potter,” Emma said as soon as Hannah was out of sight.

“Why? I like Harry Potter.”

“I’ve had to listen to her yack about it for the past two days non-stop. It’s so annoying. She’s even more of a chatterbox than you. Can’t get her to stop for nothing, so don’t you dare get her started on it again.”

“And she can hear us fine with those earmuffs?”

“Yeah, as long as you aren’t whispering,” Emma said. “They’re supposed to reduce noise or something since she’s supposedly sensitive to loud sounds.”

“What’s the deal with her watch?”

“It’s to help remind her to go use the toilet.”

“But, like, why would she need to be reminded to do that?”

Emma rubbed her face with her hand. “Yeah, I should have warned you. She has autism. She acts like a toddler more than a teenager a lot of the time. You have no idea what I’ve had to deal with since she got here two days ago. I was hoping to get away from that weirdo for the afternoon, but now I’m stuck with her.”

I thought through all the details of my brief interaction with Hannah so far. That made sense. Something had felt obviously off about her.

“I suppose she is a bit different.”

“Oh, that’s not even the worst of it,” Emma said. “She still pees the bed every night. Can you believe that? She’s already thirteen, and her mom has to help her put on a diaper before tucking her into her sleeping bag. And, of course, she has to be sleeping on the floor in my room. I’ve been using a scented odor spray, but my bedroom still smells like piss.”

I prayed fervently that I could keep a poker face and not give any hint of what I was thinking. It wasn’t as though I wasn’t aware of the fact that my friends had a poor view of kids our age who wet the bed.

In the three years since I had learned about two of my own cousins being bedwetters, I hadn’t ever come across another kid who was a bedwetter. I had practically a million questions, not that I could ask Emma any of them directly.

“She really, like, pees in a diaper? That’s so gross,” I said.

That only encouraged Emma to continue her rant about her cousin.

“Honestly, her parents should probably just make her wear diapers during the day. She pissed herself all over the couch last night when we were watching a movie. It was so gross. She didn’t even really seem to notice. Just sat there with her soaked clothes until my aunt said something about it.”

I fidgeted and began picking at my nails again, even though there was hardly much left on the ends of my fingers.

Like Hannah, I had also been wetting the bed and peeing my pants during the day. But I was different. I wasn’t some weirdo like her. I had full control over what I was doing. I just did it because it felt good. It wasn’t anything like Hannah did, basically behaving like a toddler who wasn’t fully toilet trained.

Hannah came sprinting back around the corner with a smile on her face, nearly running into me as her feet slid on the wood floor. “Are we going to the park now?” she asked Emma.

“Yes, we’re going to the park,” Emma said curtly. “Go get your shoes on.”

Hannah walked over to the doorway and grabbed a pair of white and teal shoes off of the shoe rack. I noticed that instead of laces, they had Velcro straps.

Emma leaned in toward my ear and whispered to me. “I know right, she wears those cause she can’t even tie her shoes properly.”

We waited for Hannah to finish getting her shoes on and then followed her out the door.

“Aren’t you going to grab your bike from the garage?” I asked Emma once we were in the driveway.

“We’re going to walk since there isn’t a bike for Hannah, at least not one with training wheels,” Emma said.

Hannah appeared oblivious to our conversation. I was wondering exactly how well those noise-reducing earmuffs worked. She was sitting on her knees in the grass next to the driveway, plucking dandelions. The weeds were still bright yellow, not close to the point where their seeds would be ready to blow away.

The park, situated near the center of the neighborhood, was only a couple of blocks down. It was a massive complex. There was a large playground, a splash pad, a sand volleyball court, a couple of baseball diamonds, and, of course, some soccer fields. It would have been nicer to bike over to it, but walking along the sidewalk wasn’t that bad. This part of the neighborhood was fairly quiet, without much through traffic.

Emma and I both had our soccer cleats and a soccer ball tucked inside matching drawstring bags on our backs. Emma shifted over to the left side of me, leaving me between her and her cousin. As we walked down the sidewalk, there was a sound coming from Hannah’s direction that brought back an old memory. Could that faint rustling sound be what I thought it was?

I didn’t have long to consider it. When the park came into view after turning around the corner, Hannah darted out ahead of us, skipping energetically down the sidewalk with her arms swaying awkwardly out by her sides.

Emma put both her hands on her face. “She’s such a fucking retard.”

I bit my lip and stared down at my feet as I continued to walk alongside Emma.

There had been one time five or six years back when Grace has used that word at me during an argument we had been having. The details of what had led up to that confrontation had been long forgotten, but the aftermath of it was still stuck in my mind.

My parents had always been fully opposed to corporal punishment. They’d never once laid a hand on my bottom. As far as I was aware, that was the only time Grace had ever been given a spanking. Her face had been puffy, red, and wet with tears when my parents brought her back to apologize to me afterward. I still remembered how Grace had squirmed uncomfortably on the couch that evening.

The message had been crystal clear. And that word had never been heard again in our house. I wouldn’t have ever considered using that word against someone else, no matter how angry I was or what I thought of them.

Even years later, when I first discovered a word that rhymes with duck, the only thing my dad had told me was that unless I had just whacked my finger with a hammer or stubbed my toe, that I shouldn’t be using that type of language.

As uncomfortable as I was with what Emma had just said, I found myself agreeing with the overall sentiment. I felt uncomfortable around Hannah in a way that I hadn’t felt about anyone else before. I cringed as I watched her prance around in the playground in a way more reminiscent of girls my brother’s age. Something about her rubbed me the wrong way, like a piece of chalk being slowly dragged across a blackboard.

“How long is her family staying?” I asked.

“Just through the weekend, but it might end up being forever. They are looking for a house in the area. There apparently is a school around here that her parents want to send her to, you know, one for special kids like her,” Emma said, making air quotes around the word “special” with her hands.

“Emma, can you push me?” Hannah yelled in the distance.

We looked over at the playground. Hannah was sitting stationary on a swing.

Emma sighed again. “Better go do it. I’ll hear it from Mom if she finds out that Hannah didn’t have a good time at the park.”

I followed Emma over to the swing set, watching as she stepped behind her cousin and took hold of the swing, pulling it back as far as she could before running forward and giving it a big push. Emma sprinted underneath Hannah as she flew in the air and then came to stand next to me.

There wasn’t any mistaking it as Hannah flew up on the swing. The wind caught hold of her skirt and lifted it up, revealing that Hannah wasn’t wearing ordinary underwear. My suspicions about the sound I’d heard on our walk over to the park were confirmed.

There was a short flash of pastel colors on a material far bulkier than normal underwear. I waited with bated breath as Hannah swung backward and then came up toward me again. This time, my eyes were locked in.

When her skirt lifted up in the air again, I caught sight of a pattern I had only previously seen in magazine ads. What Hannah had on beneath her skirt was nothing other than the pull-ups I was so badly wanting for myself.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 9, 2024 at 9:59 PM
Content: Chapter 20: Euphemisms
Mesmerized by what I was seeing, I watched Hannah swing for another minute. Once Emma had gotten her cousin started with a push, Hannah didn’t have any issues maintaining her momentum on the swing set. Hannah swung her legs back and forth in a rhythm that kept her flying high into the sky each time she swung toward me.

Every time Hannah was vaulted up into the air by the swing, the wind seemed to catch her skirt without fail, lifting it up enough to give me a brief glimpse of what I was by now one hundred percent certain was a pull-up. I wondered if Hannah knew how little her outfit did to conceal the pull-up and if that was something that concerned her in any way.

Emma was standing next to me in front of the swing set, but she had pulled out her phone and was tapping away at it. If Emma had gotten a glimpse of her cousin’s undergarments, she didn’t say anything to me.

Despite the suspicion that I had heard some crinkling from Hannah as we walked to the park, I was still somewhat surprised to find that Hannah was wearing a pull-up. Emma’s tale about Hannah wetting herself on the couch – and her statement that she thought Hannah ought to be put back in diapers during the day as well as at night – had made it appear as though Hannah hadn’t been wearing any daytime protection.

But I was certain my eyes hadn’t deceived me.

I had accepted Emma’s statement about Hannah’s bedwetting without thinking too hard on the matter. After all, my sister had wet the bed until she was my age, and it was clear from the advertisements I’d seen that pull-ups were sold for bedwetters the same age as Hannah and me.

So, finding out that a thirteen-year-old girl was still wetting the bed – though unusual – wasn’t a surprise. And, from what I’d learned recently in conversations with my parents and Grace, there seemed to be some clear medical explanations for why a kid my age could experience bedwetting.

But this – a girl my age needing to wear a pull-up during the day – was something altogether different to consider. It was like that five- or six-year-old girl I had seen getting her pull-up changed at the mall last week, another shock to my preconceptions about pull-ups and who used them.

But why? That was the question I couldn’t escape. Why would a girl my age have difficulty controlling her bladder while she was awake? I wanted to pee my pants, and even trying to get my body to do it intentionally took an insane amount of effort. Using the toilet was natural, and it took a lot of convincing to get my body to do otherwise.

So, what was the deal with Hannah?

I looked around the playground. It had been several years since I had lost interest in running through it. We weren’t the only people using the playground by far. There were a couple of younger kids on swings further down the line on the swing set, and behind us on the playground, and another dozen or so from toddlers to kids a couple years younger than others running around on different play sets and equipment.

I cringed a little as Hannah’s skirt lifted up to flash her pull-up again. I found myself getting embarrassed at the thought of what anyone else at the park would think of Hannah – and by association, Emma and me – if they were to notice that Hannah was wearing a pull-up, and about the derogatory word Emma had used to describe her cousin on the way to the park.

As my parents had explained from their own experience, bedwetting was a normal thing that could happen to any kid, so while it was still embarrassing to have my family view me as a bedwetter, I could handle that as it allowed me to get pull-ups for myself.

I remember that Emma had mentioned that her cousin had autism as if that was a one-size-fits-all explanation for all of her strange behavior. That had to be the explanation for why the girl wasn’t smart enough to use the toilet, despite being a teenager.

“Alight, she’s good now. Come on,” Emma said, looking up from her phone. “She’s perfectly fine playing by herself.”

We walked a short way from the playground to a nearby soccer field that wasn’t being used.

I sat down on the grass and switched over from my tennis shoes to the soccer cleats I had brought along in my bag. I considered the possibility of taking a pull-up or two from Hannah once we got back to Emmah’s house.

If I hadn’t already begun my bedwetting plan, I was sure I could have arranged to spend the night at their place. That would have been a perfect chance to get some pull-ups and learn more about why Hannah needed them. But with my parents now thinking I was a bedwetter, and with them not having gotten me any pull-ups yet, that wasn’t an option.

Besides, as impatient as I was getting for pull-ups – seeing another girl my age wearing them wasn’t helping – I felt certain that I would be getting some from my parents soon, so unless the perfect opportunity presented itself, it wasn’t worth risking it to get any from Hannah.

These soccer fields were currently set up for elementary-age kids, so the soccer goals were a lot smaller than the full-sized ones we typically played on. But that worked well for playing simple games of one-on-one and for practicing being more accurate with our shots. It was a shame that Angie wasn’t around, as she would have been able to play goalie for us. Instead, Emma and I took turns attempting to block each other’s shots.

I dribbled the soccer ball out past the penalty box, which, like the goal, was proportionally smaller than the field we played our games on. Emma positioned herself in the middle of the goal, a few feet off of the line.

Behind her, Hannah was having fun by herself on the playground. She had moved on from the swing set. Now she was busy climbing on a massive, circular jungle gym. Twisting through the different rings and levels until she was near the top of the structure.

I pushed the ball ahead of me to the right with the outside of my right foot before stepping ahead to line up a shot. I pulled my leg back as far as I could before swinging it forward. I wasn’t going to give Emma a chance to stop it from going into the net.

In the distance, Hannah had reached the top of the jungle gym. Even from as far away as I was, it was still obvious that she wasn’t wearing normal underwear. That made me even more curious. Emma hadn’t seemed to have had any reservations in talking about all the issues she had with her cousin. I couldn’t see how Emma could have been unaware of her cousin wearing a pull-up.

That brief moment of taking my eye off the goal caused me to send the shot well over the top. The soccer ball sailed in the air.

“Seriously,” Emma said. “You would have missed that by a ton, even on a regular-sized goal.”

I groaned and jogged past Emma. It was my responsibility to retrieve the ball since I had missed the shot. Hannah saw me approaching and slid down from on top of the jungle gym. She jogged up to grab the soccer ball, which had rolled a few feet onto the rubber surface of the playground.

“I want to play soccer now,” she said, starting to walk with me toward the soccer field.

I really wanted to say no. But Hannah hadn’t even phrased it as a question. By the time I had managed to think of a somewhat polite way to tell her to go back to the playground, we were already nearly back to the soccer field.

Emma had taken advantage of the break to grab a water bottle from her bag. She had just finished drinking from it when Hannah and I returned.

“Can I have some of your water?” Hannah asked her cousin.

Emma pointed to the other side of the playground. “Go get something from the drinking fountain over there.”

“I tried it. It’s too cold,” Hannah whined. “It makes my teeth hurt. Can I have yours instead?”

“Fine,” Emma said. She didn’t look happy about it, but she handed the water bottle to Hannah nonetheless.

Hannah pushed open the cap, and then raised the water bottle right up to her mouth, placing her lips on it.

“No, no, no,” Emma said, snatching the bottle out of her cousin’s grip. “Don’t be gross. I don’t want your germs on my water bottle.”

Hannah stomped both of her feet on the ground. “That’s not fair. I need something to drink.”

I winced at the sound of her high-pitched whining, but I wasn’t going to offer her my water bottle. I didn’t want anyone’s germs on it, either.

“You can have my water bottle,” Emma said. “But you need to pour the water into your mouth.”

Hannah crossed her arms. “I can’t do that. It will spill.”

Emma tilted her head back and demonstrated for her cousin, pouring water from the bottle into her mouth without having her lips touch it. “That’s how you do it.”

Emma handed the water bottle back to her cousin.

Hannah hesitantly raised the bottle in the air, but she didn’t have it aimed correctly at her mouth. When she squeezed the water bottle to get a drink, the water instead sprayed all across her face and dripped down onto her shirt.

Emma looked as though she was having a hard time suppressing a laugh as she watched her cousin struggle to line up the water bottle for another attempt at taking a drink.

The second attempt didn’t go any better than the first. And now Hannah’s face and shirt were all wet.

“I can’t do it,” Hannah pouted. She looked like she was going to start crying.

“Fine,” Emma said. “Drink it however you want. You can have the rest of it.”

Hannah raised the bottle to her lips and sucked on it almost like a sippy up.

“See what I have to deal with,” Emma said to me quietly. “She whines like a baby when she doesn’t get what she wants. If I hadn’t given her the water bottle, she would have been tattling on me to my mom and aunt when we got home.”

“All done,” Hannah announced. She handed the now-empty water bottle back to Emma.

“Why don’t you go back to the playground,” Emma said. “Maddy and I are going to play soccer for a little while more, and then we will head back home.”

“I can play soccer, too,” Hannah said.

I watched as Emma started to say something and then bit her lip. I remembered what she had said just earlier about how she was supposed to be accommodating to her cousin. “Yes, that would be nice,” Emma said flatly.

“Awesome!” Hannah yelled. She walked up to one of the soccer balls and kicked it toward the goal, putting it straight down the middle. Hannah turned around proudly toward us. “See.”

“Yeah, and I would have blocked it if I was playing goalie,” Emma said with a wave of her hand.

We decided to play a game called World Cup. The rules were simple. One person would guard the goal while the other two players competed against each other to score a goal. Whoever scored had to take the next turn at playing goalie.

The game started off with Emma standing in the goal. She threw the ball out toward the middle of the field, and Hannah and I raced off to get it. Hannah was unexpectedly fast for how awkward her running form was. She made it to the ball first and began to turn to dribble back toward the goal.

I backpedaled a little as I kept myself in front of Hannah, waiting for her to lose control so I could step in and easily poke the ball away from her. But, to my surprise, she was handling the ball much better than I had anticipated.

Still, as she neared the top of the penalty box, I swung my foot forward, thinking I was going to get an easy steal, but instead of making contact with the ball, my cleated foot swung harmlessly through the air, and I nearly lost my balance.

I didn’t know how Hannah had managed to evade me, but I turned to see her spinning past me, all while maintaining perfect control of the soccer ball with her feet. She took a shot at the goal and put it past Emma and into the corner of the net. She jumped up and down in celebration, again showing off the pull-up she was wearing.

Emma started laughing at me. “I can’t believe you fell for that move.”

“You’re the one who let it in the goal,” I retorted.

“Only cause I was too distracted by you spinning in a circle.”

I made Emma pay for that comment by stealing the ball from her and getting a goal of my own. Hannah’s goalkeeping skills weren’t anywhere near the level of her dribbling, so that wasn’t as much of a challenge.

We continued our game for another twenty minutes or so, though the question of who was the winner was never really in doubt. Hannah had easily scored more goals than either Emma or me. It made more sense when she mentioned that she played the forward position on her school team back in Illinois.

After scoring another goal, it was my turn to guard the goal while the two cousins faced off against each other again.

I punted the ball gently, sending it out for them to chase after it. Hannah again reached the ball first and managed to keep it away from her cousin until she was closer to the goal. Hannah sidestepped deftly past Emma, but before Hannah could get the shot off, Emma shoved Hannah off of the ball with her hip, causing Hannah to fall to the ground. I was so caught off guard by the move that I wasn’t ready for Emma’s shot, which sailed past me untouched into the goal.

Emma did an exaggerated celebration, sliding down on her knees on the grass. The way she had been so aggressive toward her cousin shocked me. No hard fouls was one of the unspoken rules we had when we were practicing.

As Hannah lay on the ground for a moment, I got a much closer look at her pull-up than before. It did appear as though she had managed to keep it dry so far.

After a few seconds, Hannah stood up awkwardly, brushing off her skirt as she did so.

Beep. Beep. Beep. The timer on Hannah’s watch began to go off. Unlike when we had been back at Emma’s house, Hannah didn’t rush off to use the restroom. She tapped frantically at her watch, finally getting the alarm to shut off.

Hannah got into position next to me as Emma grabbed the ball to walk toward the goal.

Emma looked over at her cousin. “Aren’t you going to take your potty break?”

“I can wait until we’re home,” Hannah insisted.

“Hannah,” Emma said. “Your mom did tell me to make sure that you went if your watch went off while we were out.”

Hannah glanced over at the center of the park. “I’m not going in a porta potty. Those are gross.”

“Whatever,” Emma said. “I suppose you are wearing a diaper today, so it doesn’t matter if you pee your pants.”

“I’m wearing a skirt, not pants,” Hannah said. “And they’re absorbent underwear, not a diaper. Only babies wear diapers, and I’m not a baby.”

I recognized the euphemism from how the pull-ups were often described in the advertisements I had seen. I had always found the phrase to be really silly. Who would actually think those undergarments were underwear rather than just another version of a diaper?

“Whatever,” Emma muttered quietly, rolling her eyes after turning away from her cousin. “Same difference.”

Emma returned to stand in front of the goal before again through the ball out for Hannah and me to chase. We went through a few more rounds before deciding it was time to head back home. Emma and I sat down to change from our cleats back to our tennis shoes for the walk back to her house. Hannah was still dribbling a soccer ball absentmindedly in the field behind us.

“Are you free to do anything else this afternoon?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure what answer I wanted. There was part of me that was curious about Hannah’s need for pull-ups and another part of me that really didn’t want to spend any more time around that weirdo than was necessary.

“Sorry, we’ve got plans to do stuff with Hannah’s family this evening,” Emma said. “But we could do something tomorrow.”

“What are we doing tomorrow?” Hannah had snuck back up on us completely unnoticed. “We could play soccer again. Please?”

“I think it is supposed to be raining tomorrow,” I said, as we started to walk down the path out of the park.

“Then we can stay inside and watch a Harry Potter movie.”

“That would be fun,” I said automatically, without thinking about it. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I saw Emma just glare at me. I then remembered how she had warned me not to bring that topic up.

What followed was an incredibly detailed interrogation from Hannah.

“What House would you be in? What is your favorite character? What movie do you like best? Should Harry have ended up with Ginny? What would your patronus look like?”

I barely had time to answer dozens of rapid-fire questions before Hannah jumped onto the next one.

There finally was a brief pause, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Thank goodness that was over. I was mistaken.

The next thing I knew, Hannah was talking about some Harry Potter fanfiction she had read on a website I hadn’t ever heard of before. Emma had slowed down, and was now trailing a dozen feet or so behind us to try to avoid the conversation.

I hadn’t even realized that people writing their own versions of those stories were even a thing. She was talking at one-hundred miles an hour, with just the shortest of pauses to catch her breath as she detailed her favorite alternative plot, which somehow involved Hermione and Malfoy becoming friends.

It was so bizarrely outlandish, but there wasn’t a chance for me to step in and ask any questions.

Hannah paused her rambling mid-sentence as we were about a half-block away from Emma’s house. She then took off in a straight sprint, cutting across several yards rather than remaining on the sidewalk.

“You know,” Emma said as she caught up to me. “You can’t say that I didn’t warn you about bringing up that topic.”

Ahead of us, Hannah came to an awkward stop about halfway up the driveway to Emma’s house, when she suddenly frozen mid-sprint and stood with her legs crisscrossed. She remained frozen in place for about fifteen seconds before walking slowly up toward the house.

“Yep, looks like she just pissed herself again,” Emma said with derision. “Such a baby.”

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 9, 2024 at 10:01 PM
Content: Chapter 21: Beyond My ImaginationI wasn't in a hurry as I biked back home from Emma's place after saying my goodbyes and setting up a tentative plan for me to come over tomorrow afternoon.

My feet pedaled slowly as my bike meandered down the side of the road, but my mind was racing.

I simply couldn't get the image of Hannah's pull-ups out of my mind. It was one thing to see pictures of the pull-ups on all the advertisements I had spotted in magazines and newspapers. It was something entirely else to see what they looked like in person. And the pictures had not done them justice.

I had been unable to take my eyes off Hannah every time her skirt had lifted up to reveal what she had euphemistically referred to as her absorbent underwear.

I simply had to have them.

Yes, I had managed to wait about three years so far, but even waiting another three days now felt nearly impossible.

When I'd followed Emma up the driveway to her house, passing the spot where Hannah had seemed to have stopped and peed herself, the black pavement had been completely dry. I'd seen Hannah drink enough water that she must have had a sizeable accident, but the pull-up seemed to have been more than absorbent enough to handle it.

While the size ranges listed in the ads for the pull-ups had suggested that I wouldn't have any issue fitting into them, there was now zero doubt that the pull-ups would work for me. I estimated that Hannah's pant sizes were one or two larger than mine. Any fears about having grown too big to wear the pull-ups were now fully assuaged.

I was going to see Hannah one more time tomorrow, and then, who knew if our paths would ever cross again? If I had met her in any other way, if Hannah hadn't been my best friend's cousin, perhaps I could have discussed bedwetting with her, even in spite of the discomfort I felt around her weird behaviors.

But that topic had to be off-limits with her. I didn't have any faith that Hannah would be able to keep that secret from Emma.

Perhaps, like that time with my cousins all those years ago, I could corner Hannah for a bit while she was alone and see if I couldn't manage to dredge out some more details about her bedwetting, daytime accidents, and pull-ups.

For the briefest of moments, I actually toyed again with the idea of wetting my pants during the day in front of my parents. There was no way that couldn't result in being required to wear pull-ups during the day like her. But I realized now that hiding that I was wearing pull-ups in the day would be incredibly difficult. Even if I avoided shorts, skirts, or other things that might make the pull-up become visible, the crinkling sound alone could be a dead giveaway to someone familiar with that sound.

Time was running out quickly. I would need to get the pull-ups soon enough before my birthday so that I could prove to my parents that they worked. I needed them to allow me to have the sleepover, and I couldn't quit bedwetting now, not after all the progress that I had made.

But with Mom's comments the other night about how she wasn't ever going to force me to wear diapers, I had no choice but to take the initiative if I was to ever get those pull-ups.

As the bike ride home continued, I silently mouthed my way through a half-dozen different scenarios before I turned to pull into the driveway, desperately searching for the magic phrase that, if used on my parents, would convince them to purchase pull-ups for me without any hesitation.

But none of my arguments felt quite right. I had to find good excuses for the questions I was asking. It couldn't be that I was asking for pull-ups out of the blue. I had to have an explanation for what inspired the request.

The only thing I'd settled on so far was that the movie we had watched the other night would be the ideal way to open up the discussion; I could act as though that had given me the idea that this was even something that could be done to handle bedwetting.

But how to get from that to the specific bedwetting pull-ups that I wanted to wear? I suddenly had an idea.

Once I was back in the driveway, I tapped in the five-digit code to open the garage door so I could put my bike away. When I entered the couch from the garage, which led right into the kitchen, I ran across Mom prepping something for dinner. She was hunched over a cutting board in the corner of the room.

"Mom," I asked, "I didn't have a chance to finish that newest Reader's Digest? Where did you put it?"

She answered without looking up from her work, though she did stop chopping with her knife. "It's in the basket next to the couch."

I retrieved my prize and retreated to my bedroom. With the door closed behind me, I flipped rapidly through the tiny magazine until, at last, I came across the advertisement I had seen earlier in the week.

My parents knew that these pull-ups were an option. But they were so adamantly against them that they had even gone to the length of reassuring me that they wouldn't make me wear them.

Was it simply that they thought I didn't want to wear them? Had my sister perhaps reacted negatively to the suggestion of wearing pull-ups a long time ago?

If that was the explanation, perhaps all I had to do was indicate to my parents that I would be OK with trying out the pull-ups.

But even then, I had to go about it in the right way. I couldn't have my parents thinking that I wanted to wear those pull-ups, but perhaps I could frame it as wanting to go on a sleepover so badly that I'd be willing to try anything to make it happen, even something I wasn't keen on, such as pull-ups.

That could do. That could be a successful angle of attack.

I would use the movie we had watched the other night as an opening to bring up the topic of diapers, then I would conveniently mention the ad I had seen in the magazine. I'd have to make sure I didn't sound thrilled about the idea, but if I could come across as desperately willing to try anything so that I could have the sleepover, that surely had to be enough to win my parents over.

But first, I needed to wait until the pills had run their course. Two more nights of wetting the bed should do the trick for that. Then, once the doctor's appointment was over, I would make my move. Perhaps, if I was lucky enough, the doctor would bring up the idea of pull-ups unprompted.

I breathed a sigh of relief and flopped backward onto the bed, stretching out on my back.

I didn't mind the crinkling sound that the new mattress made. It reminded me in a way of how the pull-ups had sounded when I had been wearing them three years ago and of the sounds I had heard all yesterday afternoon when Hannah had been walking or running next to me.

Everything would be simple once my parents were buying pull-ups for me. Continuing the ruse of bedwetting would be as easy as peeing in a pull-up most nights, rather than the charade of going down to the basement after midnight to toss in my bedding. And there would be no need to fake that I was having headaches from the anti-bedwetting pills in the morning.

For times when I was away from home – whether for sleepovers or for the soccer camp I'd have later in the summer — I could leave whatever pull-ups were packed with me safe in the bottom of my suitcase, letting my parents think that the bedwetting issue was resolved without actually needing to risk having anyone discover my secret.

And I wouldn't have to wet the bed every night. I could allow for a few nights a week when I would remain dry, but then I could save those unused pull-ups to be used during the day to continue the experiments I wanted to conduct with wetting my pants while I was awake.

And I'd have the house all to myself to do that.

<><><>

My nighttime routine followed the same pattern as the past couple of days.

My water intake was heavily monitored. I wasn't given quite as much to drink after dinner and only was allowed a small amount to sip on afterward. I made up for it by drinking from my tap-water filled bottle in my bedroom.

And I was again given the anti-bedwetting pills. Mom stayed in the room, watching as I placed them in my mouth and washed them down with a small glass of water. I had considered the idea of faking that I had taken the pills and just flushing them down the toilet, but that wasn't possible with how she had stuck around to make sure I had actually taken my medication. If I could have avoided taking the pills, that would have allowed me to wet the bed normally.

Mom again reminded me that I was to not drink anything more than the tiniest sip of water now that I had taken the pills. The sternness of the warning was such that there wasn't any scenario where I was going to disobey her.

And then there was the reminder to use the toilet before bed. With Mom and Grace around when that reminder was given, there was no way to fake using the toilet, either.

All of that meant that there wasn't any way I was going to be able to actually pee in the bed tonight. That was a supreme disappointment. It felt like forever since the last time I had actually peed myself, though in reality, only a little more than a day had passed since I had intentionally wet my pants while in the laundry room on Friday afternoon.

I weighed my options: toss everything in the washing machine tonight or wet the bed when I woke up in the morning. As much as I didn't want to deal with having to take my wet bedding down to the basement in the morning, the urge to sleep was irresistible.

<><><>
The prediction of Sunday being a rainy day turned out to be correct. As Grace was out with her friends, Mom drove me over to Emma's place.

I had woken up to an actual headache this morning, and for once I didn't have to fake how miserable I was feeling until the Tylenol kicked in.

I didn't have any issues with getting myself to pee when I woke up, and I found myself once again lying in a puddle of urine in my bed for about twenty minutes until I decided that it was time to head downstairs.

I nearly managed to take my bedding to the laundry room without running into anyone, only to have Grace unexpectedly pop out around the corner after I had gone down the stairs to the basement. I had attempted to at least wrap up my sheets so that the wet spots weren't visible on the outside, but in my surprise at coming across my older sister in the basement, I dropped everything I was holding, and the sheets unraveled to reveal the spots where they had gotten soaked with urine.

That had led to an awkward moment as I scrambled to pick up the evidence of my wet bed while Grace awkwardly excused herself to head past me and go upstairs.

"How are you holding up?" Mom asked, once I had gotten into the car. She was all buckled with the key in the ignition, but she hadn't taken the car out of park yet.

"Fine."

"How's your head doing?"

"Better."

Mom sighed. "We've got your doctor's appointment setup first thing Monday morning. I'm sure they will be able to figure out what might be causing the bedwetting you've been dealing with."

"It better be something that doesn't give me headaches in the morning."

"Just one more night of the pills, and I won't make you take any more if they don't work, OK?"

I nodded in response, and Mom finally shifted the minivan into reverse and backed out of the driveway.

The drive over to Emma's place was quick, and nothing further was said about the bedwetting or the doctor's appointment. Mom pulled up as far as she could in my friend's driveway, so that I would have to be out in the rain for long.

<><><>

Hannah was wearing another Harry Potter-themed shirt this afternoon. It made me begin to wonder if she had anything else in her wardrobe.

She was already holding open the front door for me as soon as I was getting out of the passenger side of the minivan. I managed to not get completely soaked during my short sprint up the front steps and into the house.

I had wondered if it would be difficult for me to tell if Hannah was wearing a pull-up today since, from Emma's tale about how Hannah had peed on the couch, it seemed as though she didn't necessarily wear them all the time.

But it became obvious right away that Hannah was wearing a pull-up. Her Harry Potter T-shirt barely made it down to her waist. She was fine if she was just standing still, but as soon as she reached up to hold the door open, the shirt lifted up to reveal about an inch of the pull-up sticking out above her loose-fitting shorts.

"We're all set. Emma helped me get the movie set up on the TV," Hannah said as soon as the door shut behind me.

"This is all your fault," Emma muttered to me after Hannah had raced off toward the family room where the TV was located without waiting for a response from me.

"What is all my fault?" I asked as I slipped out of my shoes.

"I'd finally managed to convince her that I wasn't interested in Harry Potter, and then you had to encourage her yesterday and she hasn't shut up about it since. She's already gotten through the first two movies this morning. All she's done today is sit in front of the TV."

I followed Emma toward the family room. I said hello to Emma's mom on the way over. She was talking with two people who I assumed were Hannah's Mom and Dad.

"Does Hannah have any siblings?" I asked Emma.

"No. Thank goodness," Emma said. "I couldn't handle more than one of her."

Hannah was sitting in the middle of the room in front of the couch when Emma and I walked in. Her eyes were already glued to the TV, where the movie adaptation of the third Harry Potter book was queued up to start.

I figured this wouldn't be so bad. I didn't enjoy the movies as much as the books, but they were still a fun way to pass the time. And it would certainly beat the interrogation I had gotten from Hannah yesterday afternoon.

But I wasn't even able to enjoy the movie. Hannah didn't seem to have the ability to stay quiet for long. She was constantly talking over the movie, either sharing trivia about it or commenting on how she didn't like some parts that weren't similar to the book.

Emma was instead focused intently on her phone. I could see her scrolling through TikTok from the corner of my eye. She didn't even have her headphones in, either. Even though the volume was set low, I could also hear the annoying music from whatever she was watching.

I found myself picking absentmindedly at my nails again. I was getting really annoyed. All I wanted to do was watch the movie in peace and quiet. I found my eyes drifting downward to where Hannah was sitting in front of me. Her shirt wasn't doing a good job of hiding the pull-up.

Even though I had previously foresworn the idea of looking for her pull-ups at Emma's house, and even though I was on track to potentially have pull-ups of my own in a few days, I couldn't help but want to get my hands on some as soon as possible. Every warning I had given myself about it being too much of a risk was washed away by an intense, uncontrollable urge to find and put on one of Hannah's pull-ups.

I wanted nothing more than to put one on, and I simply couldn't wait any longer. All I needed was to find the right excuse to have a chance to explore Emma's bedroom upstairs. If that is where Hannah was sleeping every night, there had to be pull-ups in her luggage there.

We were forty-five minutes into the movie when it was interrupted by the now-familiar sound of Hannah's watch going off.

"Pause it," Hannah yelled to her cousin as she went off toward the bathroom. I realized right then that this was my chance to do a little exploring. With the bathroom on the main floor occupied, I had an excuse to head upstairs to the other bathroom there.

"I really need to go, too," I said as I stood up from the couch. "I'm going to run upstairs."

Emma nodded silently, but didn't look away from her phone.

The layout of Emma's house was exactly the same as mine, as if the company that had developed our neighborhood had simply hit copy and paste hundreds of times as the homes were built. But that also meant that I knew where everything was.

I hadn't completely lied to Emma. I did need to pee slightly, but not nearly so badly as to need to rush all the way upstairs to do so.

What I wanted to do was take a look in Hannah's suitcase, which I assumed would be in Emma's bedroom, where Hannah had been sleeping on the floor.

But first, there was something I wanted to check in the upstairs bathroom.

After arriving upstairs, I discreetly peeked into each of the bedrooms, confirming that I was completely alone. I set a timer on my phone to make sure I remembered to head back downstairs in a reasonable amount of time.

I stepped into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet without lifting up the cover and cautiously opened up the lid to the trash can set next to it.

At the top of the pile of garbage were a half-dozen wet wipes and one of the bedwetting pull-ups Hannah had been wearing the other day. The pull-up hadn't been rolled up particularly well. I could see inside it easily. The previously white padding had expanded and turned yellow. I wondered how frequently she was having accidents.

But what caught my eye was what was beneath the pull-up. I shook the trashcan a little so that the pull-up moved away to the side. No way was I actually going to be reaching in to touch anything.

Underneath the pull-up was a diaper, one different from anything I had seen before. One thing was immediately clear. This was not a baby diaper. That was obvious because it didn't have any of the colorful designs that had been on the diapers my younger brother had worn. There were no pictures of smiling animals or cartoon characters wearing their own diapers. Instead, the diaper was mostly white.

The one similarity it shared with the baby diapers Jackson had worn was that there was a wetness indicator running down the middle, and if I was reading it correctly, the diaper had most certainly been wet before it had been discarded.

But there were other signs as well. Unlike every diaper and pull-up I had seen before, the material of the diaper didn't appear soft. There was a silky-smooth plastic look to it. I wondered what it would feel like, but couldn't bring myself to touch it.

The most obvious sign that this wasn't a baby diaper was how large it was. There was no way this would have fit on a baby – and there weren't any in this house. This had to be a diaper for someone my own age. For Hannah.

In a single moment, all the questions I still had from yesterday had been answers, and another million ones had been created.

I hadn't known what to make of Emma's statement that Hannah's mom had to help her daughter put on a diaper for bed. It didn't seem as though putting on a pull-up would be too challenging, even considering Hannah's disabilities, but I could see how a tape-on diaper would require assistance.

Emma's comment about thinking Hannah should have been put back into diapers during the day after the accident on the couch was also brought into a new light. Had she been insinuating that her cousin should have been wearing these diapers during the day as well, rather than her pull-ups?

I listened closely as I continued to stare down into the garbage bin. The stairs in Emma's house were as noisy as the ones at my place, so I would have ample alert if anyone was to come upstairs after me, but I hadn't heard the telltale signs of footsteps.

I slipped out of the bathroom, trying to walk softly down the hallway so that everyone below me wouldn't realize how much I was wandering around.

The door to Emma's bedroom had been left open. Unlike me or my sister, she didn't do much to protect her privacy.

A whiff of a strange scent hit me as I stepped into the bedroom. I paused while I tried to consider what it was. Emma had complained about how her bedroom smelled like pee because of her cousin's bedwetting. Was that what I was smelling?

That brought an immediate rush of embarrassment and concern. Despite the efforts I had taken to freshen up my room with fabric sprays, is this what my bedroom smelled like? Had I simply not noticed it before? And would Emma be able to tell the next time she came to my house?

I was sick with worry for a moment, but those concerns dropped away as soon as I laid eyes on what was obviously Hannah's suitcase up against the wall, next to a balled-up sleeping bag and pillow.

The suitcase was already unzipped, and there was a pile of dirty laundry sitting next to it. To no surprise, a lot of the clothing was Harry Potter themed.

I pushed aside the guilt of prying into Hannah's personal belongings and lifted up the lid to the suitcase. I found what I was looking for right away.

There were more than a dozen pull-ups tucked along the side of the suitcase. But that isn't what drew my interest. Instead, there were nearly a dozen diapers matching the ones I had come across in the bathroom.

I pulled one of the two diapers out of the suitcase. It crinkly loudly in my hands, much more so than a pull-up. I gently unfolded it, taking a peek at the interior padding that was far more extensive. All I could think about was how it must be able to absorb an incredible amount of pee without leaking.

It was simply beyond anything I could have thought to imagine. I'd never once seen the remotest hint that a product like this could exist in all the advertisements I'd perused over the past three years.

I checked the timer on my phone. Only seven minutes left. There simply wasn't enough time. I had to set aside all my thoughts about the diapers for now and do what I had come upstairs to do.

I reluctantly set the diaper back into the suitcase, which was exactly where I had found it. Taking a diaper simply wasn't an option. I didn't have enough time to figure out how to get it on.

But I would have no issues with putting on a pull-up myself. Besides, I as attempted to remember, that was what I had come up here for in the first place. I was torn momentarily between the two designs – one with pastel stripes and one with floral pattern – before finally deciding to grab the one with the stripes.

I tip-toed back to the bathroom, pull-up in hand.

I looked at my phone again as I entered the bathroom. I had initially given myself thirteen minutes. Being in upstairs much longer than that would only risk making Emma and her family get suspicious.

I still had six minutes left.

After double-checking that the bathroom door was indeed locked, I hastily stripped off my pants and underwear, my hands shaking as I did so. My disappointment at not being able to try on the diaper melted away as soon as I began to stretch out the sides of the pull-up as I prepared to put it on.

Three years. How had so much time gone by so quickly?

I was once again holding a pull-up in my hands, and it felt as though no time had passed at all since I had last done so. Only this time, the pull-up was perfect for me. This was one meant for teen girls.

The pull-up slid up my legs just like a regular pair of underwear, except that it felt entirely different once I had it on. It was as if I was reliving the best dream of my life. Each moment replayed itself like those scenes from years ago that I had worked so hard to re-capture.

I examined myself in the mirror. The fit was perfect. All my worries about the pull-up not working for me had been for nothing.

But time was slipping by way too fast. I couldn't hide away in the bathroom forever, but I couldn't stand the thought of having to remove the pull-up after only having had it on for a few minutes.

Could I get away with wearing the pull-up back to my place? I put my underwear and leggings back on over the pull-up. My leggings at least rose up enough on my waist to easily cover the waistband so I wouldn't be exposing myself like Hannah had.

I turned around, examining the outline of my bottom in the mirror.

If only I had thought things through and worn an outfit that could actually have covered up my bottom, perhaps I could have risked wearing it. But there wasn't any way to hide the outline of the padding beneath my leggings, even if this outfit seemed to have somewhat reduced the crinkling sound.

Defeated, I removed my leggings and underwear a second time. The timer on my phone now said that there were four minutes remaining.

I ran my hands all over the outside of the pull-up, mesmerized by the crinkling sound, the way it hugged my waist, and the feel of the padding between my legs.

It was exactly as I had remembered. It was so completely perfect.

I wanted nothing more than to see what it would feel like to wet the pull-up, but there was no way to get away with doing so. An extra pull-up in the trashcan would risk raising some awkward questions, and I couldn't think of any way to discard the pull-up discreetly after peeing in it.

I let another couple of minutes pass as I stood in the bathroom, anxiously watching the timer on my phone continue to count down. It was over all too soon.

I removed the pull-up carefully, making sure not to rip any of the sides, and checked that the inside padding had remained clean. I folded the pull-up back up the way it had come out of the suitcase and tucked it back into place.

I managed to hit the pause button on my timer three seconds before it went off. I hurried back downstairs, hoping that my absence hadn't been so long as to raise any questions.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 9, 2024 at 10:04 PM
Content: Chapter 22: The Night Before
I returned downstairs to find that Hannah had resumed watching the movie without me. Like before, she was sitting on the floor. Emma remained absorbed in her smartphone on the couch.

"You were in the bathroom for a really long time," Hannah said as I took a seat behind her on the couch.

Emma groaned at her cousin's lack of social etiquette, though she still didn't look up from her phone. I didn't respond at all to Hannah's comment. Anything she might think I had been doing in the bathroom was better than what I had actually been doing. I hoped that I had managed to put everything back into the suitcase exactly like I had found it, and that the pull-up I had tried out wouldn't show any signs of having been worn.

I wasn't able to pay attention to the TV. It didn't matter that this was my favorite of the Harry Potter movies. I simply couldn't sit still and focus on it.

The diapers I'd discovered in Hannah's suitcase both worried and intrigued me. Why was it that she would need to wear those to bed rather than the pull-ups?

There was only one explanation that made sense. The pull-ups must not work well enough for her at night. There was no question from when I was holding the diaper that it had significantly more absorbent padding, but it seemed to follow that it would be more effective at absorbing urine.

But I struggled to understand why that was the case. The pull-ups seemed to work perfectly fine for Hannah during the day. Or did they?

When Emma had mentioned that her cousin had peed all over the couch the other day, I had simply assumed that she must have not had a pull-up on at the time. But what if that wasn't the case? What if she had been wearing the pull-up, and it hadn't been able to completely absorb the accident? Maybe those pull-ups didn't work one hundred percent of that time?

What would that mean for my own fake bedwetting once my parents got the pull-ups for me? I, of course, would be wetting them, but what would happen if they leaked all over the bed? I couldn't see my parents wanting to continue getting pull-ups for me if that were to happen. They wouldn't see them as having any value if there were still wet sheets to deal with, anyway.

Would I end up needing to wear diapers as well if I were to continue faking the bedwetting? And did I want to wear diapers rather than pull-ups?

That was a question I didn't know the answer to at the moment. I hadn't ever remotely considered the possibility of wearing a diaper rather than a pull-up outside of the makeshift diaper I had attempted to make for myself once a couple of years back to disastrous results.

Would a diaper feel as good as wearing a pull-up? Would it feel better than wearing a pull-up? That wasn't a question I could answer without having tried one on, but there hadn't been an opportunity to do so.

From the windows looking out over the backyard, I could see that the rain hadn't let up a single bit. I checked my phone. The forecast said the downpour wasn't supposed to stop until sometime overnight.

The movie finally came to an end. Hannah wanted to move on to the next one immediately, but not before taking another toilet break, as her watch had just gone off a couple of minutes earlier.

"I need to put my foot down," Emma said, though she remained seated on the couch with her legs curled up to the side. "I'm not watching another one of these movies this weekend."

Hannah was gone a lot longer than before. It was hard to tell since it was raining, but I thought I could hear the sound of someone going upstairs and walking around. When she finally returned, she didn't take kindly to Emma's decision to move on to any activity other than watching the next Harry Potter movie.

Hannah stomped her feet and ran off when Emma refused to hand over the TV remote to her. Hannah returned a few minutes later with her mom, who tried to helpfully suggest that perhaps we could make some TikTok videos with Hannah instead.

That seemed to test Emma's limit on wanting to do anything but watch another Harry Potter movie, but she agreed. There was still another hour or so before Mom was going to come and pick me up. We managed to get a couple of someone choreographic dance videos made that Emma promised Hannah that she would post to her account, though when Hannah went off to use the toilet again, Emma whispered to me that she was going to delete it all once Hannah was gone, saying that she didn't want to ruin the vibe on her account.

The doorbell rang a few minutes later. It had to be Mom coming to pick me up.

Hannah stayed behind in the living room as Emma and I went to the front door. Mom was chatting casually with Emma and Hannah's parents in the entryway when we arrived.

"Are you excited about summer break?" Mom asked Emma.

"I will be when Angie is back from her road trip," Emma said. "I'm looking forward to the sleepover on Maddy's birthday."

Mom nodded in response to Emma's statement and shifted her gaze over to me. And just like that, I was caught. Mom wasn't supposed to have known that I'd already invited Angie and Emma to have a sleepover on my birthday next weekend.

"Where's Hannah?" Emma's aunt asked.

"I don't know," Emma said. "Maybe in the other room."

"Can you go grab her? I'm sure she'd want to say goodbye since we're leaving early tomorrow morning."

Emma trudged back off toward the living room. I caught her rolling her eyes once she was at an angle where her parents couldn't see it. A little while later, there was a loud patter of feet running along the wood floor, and Hannah sprinted around the corner. I couldn't help but once again find my eyes drifting down to her waist. As she came to a stop, her shirt lifted up briefly, giving one final half-second glimpse of the pull-up beneath her shorts.

"Bye!" Hannah said with a wave at me. And just like that, she was done, having turned back around to sprint off toward the living room.

We continued to make small talk about plans for the summer for a few minutes, and then it was time to head home.

I closed the door behind me after getting into the passenger seat, bracing myself for an awkward conversation.

Mom turned on the ignition without saying a word and watched the rear-view camera as she carefully backed out of the driveway. Once we were out on the road, the questions began.

"Why does Emma think there's going to be a sleepover on your birthday?" she asked.

She had me there. It was stupid bad luck that Emma had thought to say anything about that to Mom. Mom had shot down the idea of an all-nighter, and she had made it clear that she wasn't going to OK the idea of a sleepover unless the anti-bedwetting pills had worked.

I really didn't want to answer Mom's question, even though it wasn't as though she likely knew the answer already.

"I told Angie and Emma that a sleepover was the plan for my birthday."

"Madelyn, you know that I had said that wasn't an option unless we managed to figure out what was happening with the bedwetting."

I nearly did it. Even though I had planned to bring up the topic of pull-ups tomorrow, I nearly went forward with the speech I had rehearsed about how it might be good to try them. But I instead fell back on a more vague excuse.

"I just figured that maybe the doctor would have something that would stop the bedwetting so I could still have the sleepover. I didn't want to tell them that I couldn't do it."

"That doesn't leave a lot of time," Mom said as we turned onto the road that led back to our house. "I want to make sure any solution actually works before letting you do a sleepover. Maybe it would be best if we just postponed it. Your friends can stay until it is time to go to bed. It's not as though you'd really miss anything while being asleep."

That was the last thing I wanted, especially after having already told my friends that a sleepover was going to happen.

"Please don't tell them that it is canceled yet. I don't want them to think anything is wrong."

Mom was silent for a bit as she pulled into the driveway and waited for the garage door to open.

"That's fine for now," Mom said at last. "But if we don't find a way to deal with the bedwetting before then, it isn't going to work to have the sleepover."

<><><>
Another night. Another set of pills to take before bed. At least this was going to be the last time.

Despite my pleas to get out of taking the pills tonight, Mom insisted that I should give it one more try before going to the doctor's appointment in the morning.

"I don't want you staying up too late tonight," Mom said. "The appointment is first thing in the morning, so you need to make sure you set your alarm for eight."

Great. Pills. No more water for tonight. No chance of peeing the bed this evening. And I had to get up early in the morning.

I held out my hand, and she dropped the two pills onto my open palm. I grabbed a glass with a small amount of water in it from her as well. Mom watched as I popped both of the pills into my mouth. I resigned myself to the possibility of dealing with an actual headache tomorrow morning as I began to raise the glass of water to my lips.

Some loud yelling in the distance – which sounded like my younger brother, Jackson – suddenly grabbed Mom's attention, as she turned around to look in the other direction.

Mom's back was turned as she headed down the hallway in the direction of the tantrum that Jackson seemed to be throwing. That wasn't common behavior for him, but when it happened, it usually took both of my parents to rein my six-year-old brother in.

This was my chance. I pulled the two tiny pills out of my mouth and placed them in my pocket before quickly chugging down the small glass of water.

With my plans for the evening suddenly looking much more positive, I didn't throw a fuss at going to bed earlier than I normally would have on an evening during summer break. I made sure to use the toilet while my parents were helping my brother get ready for bed, making sure they would know that any bedwetting would be happening in spite of all the precautions that were being taken.

I flushed the two pills down the toilet, watching carefully to make sure that they didn't resurface. The best part about having avoided taking the pills tonight was that I wasn't going to have to avoid drinking anything afterward. My mouth had been so parched the past several nights when I had gone to bed without sneaking a drink from the sports bottle I had tucked away in my bedroom.

Alone in my bedroom, I raised the bottle to my lips. I couldn't believe that I was somehow actually excited about the idea of drinking lukewarm tap water. The likelihood of being able to wet myself in bed tonight allowed me to manage to set aside my disgust at the bitter taste of the water.

The problem of going to bed this early was that I still had plenty of time to kill before midnight.

I tapped open the web browser on my phone, trying to recall the name of the website Hannah had mentioned reading those Harry Potter fanfiction stories on. I couldn't recall the exact name, but a quick Google search of the acronym she had mentioned brought up a link to the website.

I tapped on the link, and then I groaned as a new pop-up appeared on my phone, one that was unwelcome but familiar, a message that the website was blocked due to the parental restrictions on my phone.

Well, that was just great. Defeated, I set my phone down on the bed.

It wouldn't be the first time that an otherwise appropriate website had been mistakenly blocked by the software. If it was something Hannah had access to, I couldn't imagine that it was actually anything that bad or inappropriate.

I would need to ask Dad about the website tomorrow, and he would be able to update the permissions on the parental controls like he had done for me before, though perhaps I should consider coming up with a reason for wanting to access the website other than wanting to read Harry Potter stories.

A sense of melancholy struck me as midnight approached. This might be the last time of wetting myself like this. Going forward, I would be wearing a pull-up to bed every night for the foreseeable future.

I had first wet the bed nine nights ago. And tomorrow I would be going to see a doctor. I was amazed at how quickly everything had progressed.

I'd tried to put off thinking about what the doctor's appointment might mean for me in the morning. What tests would they end up running? What theories would they have for why the bedwetting might be happening? Was there anything I had done that might cause them to suspect that I was actually wetting the bed on purpose?

One thing was clear. Regardless of what happened at that appointment, I was going to need to find a way to broach the topic of pull-ups with Mom tomorrow. With any luck, tomorrow night, I'd be going to bed while wearing a pull-up identical to the one of Hannah's that I had tried out earlier today.

Having managed to avoid taking the anti-bedwetting pills, I didn't have to struggle at all to manage to wet the bed, and I took in the sensation of the warmth spreading beneath my waist.

Even though everything had gone right so far, even though I was still completely on track for my plan to succeed, another thought began to fill me with a new worry as I lay on top of my thoroughly soaked bedding.

What if the pull-ups didn't work for me?

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 13, 2024 at 6:40 PM
Content: Chapter 23: The Little That I Know
Three Years Ago

I now knew for certain that there were no pull-ups or diapers in the house. All I had managed to find were a bunch of Jackson's old baby items, but pacifiers and bottles held no interest for me. I may have wanted to wear diapers, but I didn't have the slightest interest in behaving like or being treated as a baby.

There was so much that I didn't know and very few means of attaining the information that I sought.

My fixation on pull-ups ebbed and flowed for the following year after I first learned about those bedwetting pull-ups from my cousins. It wasn't as though there was any point where I didn't want to try to wear one, but without any actual ability to do so, the desire would fade out of mind for weeks or months at a time until something would occur to spark those urges again.

I would catch a glimpse of an advertisement for diapers on the TV or in a newspaper. I would be at the park when a toddler would run by with the waistband of a pull-up clearly sticking out the top of their shorts. I would overhear some of my mom's friends talking about struggles they had with getting their toddlers to potty train.

And then my mind would be back at it again, fruitlessly searching for information until I once again gave up hope of ever getting my hands on pull-ups of my own.

<><><>

My mom kept me close at hand when we went shopping for groceries. Jackson was still young enough to sit in the cart, facing Mom as she pushed it down most – but not all – of the aisles in the grocery store.

To my dismay, there were a number of aisles that we never seemed to go by anymore, ones that I wished I had paid more attention to previously but that had been before I had known what I wanted to look for.

Slipping off to check out the baby aisle was never an option. Mom preferred that I stay within arm's reach of her at all times. I had to make do with attempting to discreetly peek down the baby aisle as we went by, taking in its distinct scents.

But it was hard to make out much from a distance. There were so many brands and styles, and I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for.

That changed one day right at the end of summer break, several months since my interest in pull-ups had begun. One of my mom's co-workers was having a baby shower for her first baby, which she was expecting in a couple of months, and Mom needed to pick out some diapers and wipes as a present.

I found myself standing smack dab in the middle of the diaper section of the baby aisle, completely overwhelmed by all the options, brands, and styles. All the bright colors and smells made it hard to concentrate on what I was looking for. I needed to find something that was meant for older kids my age, not toddlers or preschoolers. There were regular diapers and pull-ups and ones that seemed to be a mix of the two.

On a few of the other packages where information about the sizing was available, it was again clear that none of the products were remotely close to my size, as if that wasn't clear from the age of the models on the front of the packages. I began to wonder if that scene with my cousins a few months back had actually been real. Could it have just been something that I dreamed up in the boredom of that vacation?

Then I saw a package. There was a picture of a sleeping girl on it, more than old enough to be my age. Could that be it? But then I saw the phrase "nighttime underwear" beneath the brand name. That didn't make any sense to me. Why would they be selling underwear for girls in the baby aisle? That was just plain silly.

"Maddy," Mom said. "You need to keep up with us."

While I wanted to see if there was any other information to glean from the package, I didn't have any choice but to obey Mom as I turned around and dashed ahead to catch up to her shopping cart.

What exactly did that package mean by "nighttime underwear," and why was it located in the baby aisle close to all the diapers and pull-ups?

It would be a long time before I walked through the baby aisle again.

<><><>

An indoor water park in the winter made for a perfect vacation.

Grace was busy lying on her stomach on one of the poolside chairs. Teenagers were weird. It wasn't like she could catch a tan inside. Mom was at least reading a book while reclining in her chair. Dad was munching on some snacks, keeping an eye on Jackson and me from off in the distance.

I was playing with Jackson in the kiddie pool. The warm water only came up to our ankles, but there were tons of fountains, sprinklers, slides, and water toys to play with.

Above us was a bucket connected to a swivel. It gradually filled with water before tipping over and emptying its contents onto whoever might be unlucky enough to be standing beneath it at the time.

Jackson found the idea hilarious. Though for him it was more amusing when the bucket of water was dropping down on my head rather than his.

I knew better than to look up to try to see if the bucket was close to overflowing. I had made that mistake once and wasn't interested in making it again.

At this point, my hair was already thoroughly soaked, so there was no use in fussing over yet another bucket of water pouring over it again. The small clang the bucket made as it began to tip was the only warning I got. I closed my eyes and shut my mouth as the warm water – at least it was warm water – poured over my head. I opened my eyes to the sight of Jackson giggling and pointing at me like a maniac.

"OK, it's your turn now," I said.

I stepped away from the spot under the basket and motion for Jackson to take my place. It seemed to take the bucket a little under a minute to refill before soaking its next victim. But my eyes drifted away from Jackson.

Her top was a normal swimsuit, but around her waist was an uncovered swim diaper, blue with a picture of a mermaid on it. It was absolutely mesmerizing. Jackson yelled at me to pay attention to him, and when I looked again in the direction the girl had run off in, I had lost sight of her.

I knew that I wouldn't fit in a swim diaper made for a baby, but the site of the swim diaper still stirred up that longing that had gotten tucked away for a couple of months. Since that disappointing trip through the baby aisle, my interest in diapers had dropped off.

With diapers on my mind again, I couldn't help but notice them everywhere I went at the water park, and over the course of the long weekend, I spent much more time playing with Jackson than I normally would have, much to the delight of Grace and my parents. It wasn't so much that I cared to spend time around my brother, but being in the kiddie pool gave me a chance to catch glimpses of diapered kids as they splashed around in the water, wishing all the while that it was me who was wearing those diapers and pull-ups instead.

<><><>

I learned not to leave the room during commercial breaks. I didn't care much about the cartoon show that my brother was watching on TV. I found it difficult to concentrate on my book with all of that background noise.

Ever since coming home from the water park vacation, I had been obsessed with learning as much as I could about pull-ups and diapers, and I had discovered an easy way to do so.

I endured the annoying shows my younger brother watched for one, and only one, reason. The programs geared toward kids his age often featured advertisements for pull-ups and diapers. I had become familiar with the names of all the brands and the different types of pull-ups and diapers they would sell, and all the new features they were constantly adding.

I peeked at the TV over the top of the book I was reading. A new commercial break had just begun. The first two advertisements were disappointments. The first was for a cereal brand I absolutely detested. The second was for baby formula. A few commercial breaks had passed by already without any of the advertisements I had been looking for, and I was beginning to wish I had just spent the morning reading in my room instead when the next ad caught my eye.

One of the brands I was familiar with was advertising a new type of pull-up. A boy and a girl around Jackson's age were both going through the routine of getting ready for bed with their parent's assistance. There was the familiar scene of the closeup shot of them sliding the pull-up over their waists.

And then the lights went out, and the designs on the pull-ups were glowing in the dark.

But I knew by now not to get my hopes up. The kids in the advertisement were Jackson's age. No matter how cool those pull-ups looked, they weren't for me, either. The ad continued by showing how to activate the pull-ups first by holding them under a light.

The advertisement was over all too soon, and Jackson's show resumed. But instead of turning back to my book, I thought over again about what I had just seen.

This didn't confirm that the pull-ups I remembered my cousins' wearing were real, but it did confirm one important detail. There were pull-ups made specifically for use during the night.

I wondered again about the brand of nighttime underwear that I had seen in the diaper aisle nearly half a year ago. There was a word I had learned in class the other day. It was really long, and I didn't think I'd ever be able to remember how to spell it. The concept of the word – euphemism – was also hard to grasp, and the idea that a word might not mean what it actually meant was simply too confusing. It didn't seem right. It was so much easier when people simply said exactly what they meant, rather than the opposite of it.

But it was like a lightbulb had gone off in my head. Could nighttime underwear actually mean something entirely else?

I tried to recall the name of the brand I had seen that day in the baby aisle. It took several minutes for it to come back to me. I had to recite the alphabet silently in my head several times before I remembered it.

I whispered the name of the brand silently to myself over and over again, like a mantra.

With the name of what I was looking for now in mind, I kept my eyes peeled for any glimpse of it, but several more months passed by without any additional luck. I managed to catch a glimpse or two – or at least thought I had – of the packages of so-called nighttime underwear in the baby aisle. But that was only for seconds and from a long distance, so I wasn't able to glean any more information than from the time I had spent first looking at it.

My remaining options were highly limited. There was absolutely no scenario in which I would look up that brand on the family computer or tablet. I couldn't have my parents question why I was seeking out that information. I knew instinctively that they would not approve of this quest. There was no way that query would escape Dad's notice, and I had no desire for the questions that would surely follow.

And despite my continued vigilance in watching ads on the TV, I never managed to come across one for that nighttime underwear.

<><><>

About a year had passed now since the day I had worn pull-ups

My biggest fear was that I was growing. I was quite a few inches taller than a year before.

I wanted to believe that they made pull-ups for teenagers, but without any direct evidence to confirm that, my worry was that I would eventually get my hands on the bedwetting pull-ups, only to find that I had done so too later and would no longer be able to fit into them.

I was once again on the alert for any information I could find about that nighttime underwear brand. It was a week after my tenth birthday. To celebrate, I had gone with Emma and Angie to an indoor trampoline park. I had put the thought of those pull-ups out of my mind for a while, as I hadn't recently come across any new information.

The allure of the TV advertisements had faded. It was just the same old information re-packaged in different ways. Yes, I would still look up at the TV at the familiar sound of certain jingles, but I no longer went out of the way to stay in the living room as Jackson watched the TV.

The smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies wafted upward through the air and to the second floor of the house. I followed the irresistible scent downstairs as it grew stronger and stronger until I came across a bunch of cookies spread out on old pages of yesterday's newspaper on the dining room table.

To my disappointment, my parents only got the newspaper on Sunday. Mom said the only reasons she got it at all was for the advertisements that came tucked inside it, though all I cared about was pulling out the comics section from the middle, often wishing that I would be able to get the comics from the middle of the week as well.

Mom was in the kitchen, putting one final batch of cookies in the oven. She gave me permission to eat two – and only two – cookies.

I stared down at the newspaper pages as I tried to determine which two cookies were the biggest. None of the newspaper articles carried any interest to me. Reading the news was something that adults did.

However, the newspaper pages also included a section with advertisements for the local grocery store that Mom preferred to shop at. There were ads for a variety of baby products. I glanced over at them, not really expecting to learn anything that I already didn't know. There were headings for different products that were on sale: wipes, formula, diapers, and pull-ups.

I turned my attention to the images in the pull-up sections, which, according to the ad, were on sale for fifteen percent off this week.

And there it was. The picture was tiny, but unmistakable. It was the same package of nighttime underwear that I had come across so long ago in the grocery store.

And there was no mistaking what it actually was. It couldn't have been an accident that it had been listed in the pull-ups section.

I squinted down at the newspaper as I removed a couple of cookies and put them on my plate. There was some tiny writing on the package, but it was indecipherable with how small the picture was. The text next to the advertisement said that the sale included small through extra-large sizes, but I knew better than to let that phrase get my hopes up. I had seen a couple of ads for extra-large pull-ups before, only to find that this just meant they were for preschool-age kids and not toddlers.

I poured myself a glass of milk in the kitchen and slowly ate my cookie while considering this new revelation. I realized that the most important thing I had learned wasn't that these nighttime underwear were actually pull-ups. That was a discovery I had made on my own a few months back.

No, what I realized was that there was another potential untapped source of information about these pull-ups. From then on, I made sure to skim through all the advertisements in the newspaper. These special bedwetting pull-ups didn't show up often, but each time they did, the same problem remained as before.

The information contained in the ads was minimal, with nothing to suggest whether I would still be able to fit into these pull-ups or if I had already outgrown them in the past year. There wasn't any information about the weight ranges or clothing sizes that the pull-ups would fit.

But with the confirmation that these pull-ups existed, I found it impossible to put the topic out of my mind. After that moment, not a single day passed where I didn't think about what it would be like to be wearing a pull-up once again.

But actually getting my hands on one of those pull-ups seemed like an impossibility for the time being. It wasn't likely that I would be visiting those cousins anytime again soon, and I didn't know of a single other kid my age who was a bedwetter.

It was time to take matters into my own hands. If I couldn't get a diaper of my own, perhaps I could make one for myself.

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 13, 2024 at 6:41 PM
Content: Chapter 24: The Only Other Option
I hated everything about going to the doctor.

I tried to avoid thinking about what this doctor’s appointment was going to entail as I got ready for the day, but nothing I did was able to prevent my thoughts from drifting back to the subject.

There were the normal fears: needles, all the ways I’d be poked and prodded, the way that the general atmosphere of the hospital always seemed to unnerve me.

But there were also some fears that were specific to this occasion: I had successfully tricked my parents and older sister into believing that I was genuinely wetting the bed. But what would happen when my situation was examined by a professional? I had a sudden fear that they would be able to see right through the façade. Could there be something about the way I had gone about faking my bedwetting that would clue a doctor into the fact that it was all a lie?

The one good thing was that I wouldn’t be needing to take those anti-bedwetting pills anymore. It shouldn’t have taken as long as four days to convince Mom to give up on them, but when she got me out of bed this morning, the sight different sheets than I had on the bed the night before was all the confirmation she needed that I had wet the bed and changed my sheets overnight.

I didn’t bother with faking a headache this morning. And I didn’t have an actual one, as I’d managed to fake taking the pills the night before.

I fiddled around with my breakfast as Mom focused on getting Jackson ready for his first day at his summer camp, sipping on a glass of orange juice while nibbling on a piece of toast with cinnamon butter on it. In the background, Mom was chasing Jackson around, prodding him to finish getting dressed and packed.

I wasn’t normally all that enthusiastic about breakfast, but today, I didn’t feel hungry at all. My stomach felt all jittery, and while the upcoming appointment was weighing heavily on my mind, it wasn’t the only thing that was making me nervous. I was going to have to bring up the topic of pull-ups with my parents soon. I couldn’t hold off for much longer, not if I wanted to avoid having the birthday sleepover get canceled.

I stared down at the kitchen table. There wasn’t any way I could eat anymore. I went to dispose of my half-eaten breakfast. I dumped my half-piece of toast in the trash, but Mom caught sight of what I was doing before I could pour out the rest of my orange juice in the sink.

“Madelyn,” Mom said. “You need to finish your orange juice.”

I paused with the glass of orange juice held over the sink. “But I’m not thirsty.”

“I poured a full glass for you because Dr. Mathorn said he wanted to make sure that you were hydrated for the appointment. Now, please finish it because we need to be out the door in a few minutes.”

I retreated from the sink and finished the orange juice, as Mom had asked. Why would Dr. Mathorn care how much I had to drink for breakfast?

<><><>

It was a bit of a relief that we had to drop Jackson off first before we needed to be at the hospital for my appointment.

I sat in the car while Mom took Jackson inside to drop him off at his all-day summer daycare camp. I remembered the summers when I had been forced to do that every day. Sometimes, it had been fun. We took cool field trips to museums or amusement parks. But there had been plenty of other times when I had been forced to take part in group games or activities that I had no interest in. I’d rather be at the park playing soccer with my friends or curled up at home reading a book.

“We’ll be at the hospital in about ten minutes,” Mom said once she got back in the car. “It will be in plenty of time before your appointment.”

The silence in the car as the ride to the hospital began was deafening. On any drive longer than a few minutes, Mom typically had music playing, usually from some musical. Today there wasn’t anything coming out of the speakers.

I thought it perhaps was because she wanted to talk about the upcoming appointment, but the next few minutes instead passed by in silence as I texted my friends. I mentioned that I had a doctor’s appointment I had to go to, mostly because I wanted someone I could complain about it to, though I played it off as a standard check-up.

Both Angie and Emma were also excited to hear the news that I was allowed to stay home by myself during the summer, but disappointed by the restrictions my parents had still placed on me. Emma texted, asking if she could come over after lunch to hang out.

I promised Emma that I would ask, though I didn’t think I was going to like the answer.

“Can Emma come over after lunch? Please?”

As happy as I was that my parents were now entrusting me with the responsibility of being able to stay home during the summer by myself, there were a couple of downsides to it, namely the fact that I wasn’t supposed to have anyone over or be at my friend’s place without their parents or adult siblings around.

That wasn’t to say that I wasn’t going to enjoy my time alone. Between having as much time as I wanted to read Harry Potter without being accosted about the lack of diversity in my reading habits and being able to have more chances to experiment with wetting my pants, there was plenty to occupy my time.

“That’s not going to work today,” Mom said. “Your sister is going to be gone all afternoon, and I’m heading off to work once the appointment is over. I wasn’t intending to take the whole day off.”

“But Mom, that’s going to be boring. Can’t my friends at least come over some of the time? That can’t be any worse than letting me have the house to myself?”

“We’ll see how the first few weeks go,” Mom said. “Then your dad and I could perhaps talk it over and see if that might be allowed.”

I resisted the urge to argue further. That was probably as much of a concession as I was going to get. I passed on the bad news to Emma and received a bunch of sad-faced emojis in response.

<><><>

The last time I had seen our pediatrician had been at the start of the last school year, when I had gone through my normal physical required for the soccer teams I played on and had also gotten up to date on my shots.

The only good thing about that last appointment was that Dr. Mathorn had reassured me that it would be several more years before I would need any additional vaccinations. That was far enough away that I didn’t need to worry about it for now.

I took a seat in the waiting room as Mom got in line to get me checked in. We had arrived about twenty minutes early. I scanned the magazines stacked on the table next to me, trying to guess which one might have some ads for diapers or pull-ups.

After flicking through the pile of magazines, I came across a parenting one. I looked over to where Mom was standing in a long line. I had plenty of time to browse and then put it down before she got back.

I did manage to come across a few advertisements for baby diapers, which had me reflect again on the strange white diapers I had discovered in Hannah’s suitcase, ones that had two tabs on each side rather than one, but there weren’t any ads for the bedwetting pull-ups. I did stumble across an article discussing late potty training, but unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to read it, as I could see out of the corner of my eye that Mom was at the front of the line.

I reluctantly set the magazine down and pulled my phone out of my pocket. Mom came down to sit beside me a minute later, grabbing the same parenting magazine that I had previously been reading. I waited anxiously as a nurse occasionally stepped out of a door and called someone’s name. I breathed a short sigh of relief each time it wasn’t mine. I was so not ready for this.

After about ten minutes, the nurse again stepped out into the waiting area.

“Madelyn?”

<><><>

The first parts of the appointment were no different from past check-ups. I was weighed and had my height measured. I was a little disappointed to find that I wasn’t five feet tall just yet. I still had another inch to go for that. And according to the scale, I weighed ninety-six pounds.

Then there was the exam room to deal with. The nurse led Mom and me in and had me take a seat on the paper-covered exam table. She listened to my heartbeat and then took my blood pressure with that uncomfortable cuff that went around my arm.

Nothing was said yet about the reason for the visit while all these tests were underway. I sat silently while the nurse types some details into a computer.

“I’m going to go and grab Dr. Mathorn for you,” the nurse said. “She’ll be with you shortly.”

Then, it was just Mom and me in the room together. She was sitting in a plastic chair off to the side while I remained at the exam table. Mom gave me a reassuring smile as I looked over at her.

I tried to mentally prepare myself for Dr. Mathorn’s arrival. I couldn’t have her thinking in any way that the bedwetting might not be genuine.

I nearly slid off of the exam table in surprise as the door to the exam room swung open without a knock. I smiled nervously as we all exchange some pleasantries.

Dr. Mathorn took a seat in front of a computer and pulled up a chart with my medical history.

“I see you are going to be turning thirteen this weekend, about to be a teenager. That’s so cool. You have something fun planned for your birthday?”

The difficulties I often had with lying hit me right there. “I was wanting to have a sleepover…”

My voice trailed off. While that still was my plan for the coming weekend, sleepovers weren’t something that bedwetters went to typically, at least not in my family, and certainly not without something like medication or pull-ups to keep the issue hidden and managed.

“Of course,” Dr. Mathorn said. “I can see why that would be more of a challenge. Your mom did talk with me about the reason for this visit.”

I winced as I bit my lip a little too hard in nervous anticipation of what she was about to say next.

“Your mom mentioned that you’ve had some recent issues with bedwetting. Is that right?”

There was no need to fake how embarrassing and humiliating that question was, but that was the price I had agreed to pay in order to get those pull-ups. I tried to conjure the feeling of the pull-up from Hannah’s suitcase. I had worn it just the day before. If I could just get those pull-ups for myself, all of this humiliation would be worth it.

I couldn’t bring myself to say anything in response. I looked down at my lap and nodded. Mom saved me the difficulty of needing to give a full update on the status of my recent bedwetting. She filled Dr. Mathorn in on all the details: when the first bedwetting accident had happened, how frequently it had been since then, the unsuccessful attempts they had taken so far to try to get the accidents to stop, our family’s history of bedwetting.

I finally managed to look up about halfway through Mom’s speech. Dr. Mathorn was just nodding along as Mom talked, as though the subject of bedwetting was something she came across on an everyday basis.

Dr. Mathorn turned to me once again after Mom had finished with her very thorough explanation of the past week-and-a-half of my bedwetting. “Plenty of kids wet the bed – even some adults,” Dr. Mathorn said. “Even though it is more common in elementary age kids, it still does happen with kids around your age as well.”

Next came a whole litany of questions for me: Did it hurt at all when I peed? Had the color of my urine changed at all? Had I had any accidents in the day or had any times when it felt like I had to urgently rush off to the toilet? Was I waking up a lot at night? How much was I drinking before bed? Was I having trouble falling asleep? Had I been happy at school?

I answered all the questions as truthfully as I could, even the ones that didn’t seem to make all that much sense. It wouldn’t do to get caught in any unnecessary lies, but so far, the questions, if a little awkward, had been pretty straightforward to answer. Still, I found that I wasn’t quite able to meet Dr. Mathorn’s eyes as I answered all of her questions.

The gentle interrogation continued for a few more minutes before arriving at a surprising – an even more awkward – question than the ones that had pertained directly to the bedwetting and my peeing habits.

“From my notes from your last visit, you hadn’t gotten your first period yet. Has that changed?”

“Um.”

It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what Dr. Mathorn meant. My health class the year before had provided way more information than I would have wanted to know, and I figured that a little more than half of the girls on my soccer team had to deal with that affliction that came from growing older.

“No,” I said at last, followed by the only question that came to mind. “But why would that matter?”

“That’s not something we’ll know until we’ve got all your tests taken care of. There are a lot of things that could cause bedwetting to start, and puberty – hormones and the way your body is changing – could be one possible factor.”

Tests. I took a deep breath. What tests?

<><><>

If I had known that faking bedwetting would have resulted in needing to have my blood drawn, I might not have been brave enough to go through with it.

The testing area was on the main floor of the hospital. I had trailed behind Mom on the way to it like a prisoner heading to the gallows. The worst part of it was that Dr. Mathorn seemed to have implied that there was going to be more than one blood test that would be required.

At least the chair to sit in during the blood draw was comfortable. It was soft and allowed me to lean back quite a ways as I set my feet on a footrest.

The nurse who would be drawing my blood rested her hand on my arm. “I’m going to need you to relax. Why don’t you look off at the picture hanging in the hallway? I’ll count down when I’m ready.”

I tried to follow her advice, focusing my gaze on a painting of a mountain landscape in the distance.

“Three.”

“Two.”

And then the needle was in. I gasped audibly as the nurse poked me. She hadn’t even waited until saying “one.” That was not fair.

“You poked me early,” I protested a few seconds later after the blood draw was finished.

“That’s because you were less tense then. I don’t think you’d want me to have to try again if I missed your vein the first time.”

As the nurse placed a pink Band-Aid on my arm, I admitted to myself that she had a valid point.

<><><>

Next, it was time to pee in a cup, and I understood why I had been required to have a full glass to drink along with breakfast. That test was easy enough to pass, though it again made me worry about what would happen when my blood and urine tests came back and showed that there wasn’t anything noticeably wrong with me. What exactly were they hoping to learn from those tests?

I managed to fill up the plastic cup nearly all the way with any difficulty. I’d gotten better at making my body need to go whenever I wanted to over the past week or so. I didn’t even need to hand the cup back to the nurse. There was a discreet hole in the bathroom wall to slide the cup of pee into afterward.

But that wasn’t the last test.

I followed Mom down a couple more hallways to the final exam room, where they did an ultrasound of my bladder. I saw some black-and-white images flash on the computer screen during the process, but I had no clue what they meant, and the technician doing the ultrasound said we’d have to wait to talk with my doctor afterward.

<><><>

Dr. Mathorn was waiting for us in the exam room when all the tests were finished.

“We can rule one thing out right away,” she said as I once again took a seat on the exam table.

I tried to decide whether that would be good news for me or not.

“Some of the results we can get back right away,” Dr. Mathorn said. “The lab technicians ran a test of your urine, and it came back negative for a UTI, which isn’t too surprising since you weren’t showing any other symptoms for that. There’s a more thorough test they’ll do later that takes a few days to get results back, but I’m not expecting it to say anything different.”

I tried to look relieved, as if I wasn’t completely aware of what the test result was going to show.

“So, what do you think the issue might be, then?” Mom asked.

Dr. Mathorn swiveled in her chair to face Mom. “There are a number of things we might look for in a situation like this, where bedwetting is starting for a teenager who hasn’t had any previous issues. We’re going to test for diabetes as well as any other medical conditions or illnesses that could be causing complications. There is your family’s medical history to consider since there is a genetic component to bedwetting. And given Maddy’s age, it could very well be an issue with hormones that may resolve itself on its own in a matter of weeks or months.”

Dr. Mathorn turned to face me. I again couldn’t quite manage to look her in the eye. “I know it is frustrating, Maddy, but I don’t think we should worry about it much until we’ve got the test results back and have a better sense of what the next steps should be.”

“But what should we do in the meantime? Are there other medications we could try?” Mom asked.

That caused me to groan loudly. I was annoyed at how Mom kept avoiding the obvious solution, but I hadn’t intended to noticeably complain about it.

“You didn’t like the pills you used the past few days?” Dr. Mathorn asked.

“No, they gave me headaches, and they didn’t even work at all.”

“That’s OK,” Dr. Mathorn said. “We won’t make you take those pills again. And for now, I think it would be best to wait until we get the test results back – it shouldn’t take more than a week – until we think about trying other medications.”

That was it. We were back to square one. The question was now on the tip of my tongue. All I had to do was ask. Surely, pull-ups would be an acceptable choice for now if there weren’t any other options to choose from.

It was so obvious that pull-ups were the right decision to handle my bedwetting at this point. Why was it so difficult for either of the adults to bring it up?

I swung my legs back and forth. The exam table was tall enough that my feet didn’t come close to touching the floor. I wanted to ask the question. What was stopping me from doing it? I just couldn’t get the word “pull-ups” past my lips, so I asked something else instead.

“But what about the sleepover?”

Dr. Mathorn looked as though she was about to say something, but she paused as Mom answered my question first.

“I think we’re just going to need to skip sleepovers for a little while,” Mom said. “I’m sure it won’t be long before you get better.”

“There is something that could help with that,” Dr. Mathorn said tentatively, as if not wanting to upset me. “It’s not something you have to try, but there are other kids, some of them your age, in fact, who find that it helps to wear some protection to bed.”

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 13, 2024 at 6:41 PM
Content: Chapter 25: Doctor’s Orders
“Protection.”

The implications of that single word didn’t immediately strike me. What exactly was Dr. Mathorn talking about? It was Mom’s reaction to my pediatrician’s suggestion that caused me to put two and two together.

“No offense, Dr. Mathorn, but that’s a bit ridiculous,” Mom said. “No teenager would want to wear that to bed. I already promised Maddy that I wouldn’t make her wear them.”

I had never heard the word protection used to refer to a diaper or pull-up before, but there could be only one thing that would mean. Like the phrases “absorbent underwear” or “nighttime underwear,” it was another way to way to refer to a diaper that was intended to be less embarrassing.

Mom’s reaction was disappointing, but not in any way surprising. It seemed as though my parents had done everything but purchasing diapers for me as they sought to deal with my recent bedwetting. Of course, she would have to respond that way to Dr. Mathorn’s suggestion.

“I don’t know about that,” Dr. Mathorn said. “A bedwetting accident is going to be embarrassing regardless of what steps you’re taking to clean up or contain the mess.”

Dr. Mathorn turned back to face me. “I’m not saying you should feel embarrassed about the accidents you’ve been having at night, Maddy. You shouldn’t need to feel bad about something that isn’t your fault, though it is normal for it to be an upsetting experience when your body isn’t behaving the way that you would like it to.”

“I just don’t see how that is a good solution to her bedwetting,” Mom said. “We’ve already got a waterproof mattress, and Maddy is more than capable of making sure her bedding gets washed and changed whenever there is an accident.”

“Those are certainly ways to handle it,” Dr. Mathorn said. “But letting her wear some protection to bed would make cleanup a lot easier and allow Maddy to get a full night of sleep, which is still extremely important for teenagers as they develop. It’s not going to be good for her to have her sleep constantly interrupted for however long the bedwetting may continue.”

“I’m not making my teenage daughter wear diapers to bed,” Mom said.

There it was. The word that both my mom and the doctor had avoided saying so far in this conversation.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Dr. Mathorn said. “I wouldn’t ever suggest forcing a teenager to wear a diaper to bed if they didn’t want to. But I think that Maddy’s opinion about all of this is what is important. She’s the one who is having to deal with a wet bed nearly every night.”

Both Mom and Dr. Mathorn turned from their argument to look at me.

“You’ve been unusually quiet,” Dr. Mathorn said to me. “What do you think?”

This was it. I could have everything I wanted, but it would require an admission that it was, in fact, what I wanted.

There was a large kernel of truth to Mom’s objections. She was absolutely right. Girls my age weren’t supposed to want to wear diapers. Someone else in my situation would have to be extremely apprehensive, at best, about a doctor’s suggestion of protection.

Dr. Mathorn was right about the issue of missing sleep, though it wasn’t playing out like she thought it was. Having to stay up until everyone was asleep to wet the bed and toss clothing in the laundry had often left me rather tired the next day.

“Um. Um.”

I looked back down at my feet. Saying yes would have to mean admitting what I wanted. Could I do that in front of them?

This was the final test. I had to make it clear that I was willing to wear diapers without making it seem like I was in any way looking forward to doing so. I thought back to all the preparations I had previously been making for the possibility of having to bring up the topic of those pull-ups directly with Mom.

I stared off into the space between Mom and Dr. Mathorn as I delivered my carefully thought-out answer. “I don’t really want to, but I want to be able to have a sleepover still. And it would be nice to not have to get up and have to change all my sheets in the middle of the night. I guess I could give it a try.”

Mom let out a small, defeated sigh. Why did she seem so disappointed in my decision?

“I think that is a good idea for now,” Dr. Mathorn said, “at least until all the test results are back.”

“When should we expect those?” Mom asked.

“Maybe by Friday, but certainly no later than earlier next week,” Dr. Mathorn said. “I’ll give you a call right away, and then we can see if you’ll need to bring Maddy in for another appointment.”

There was a long pause after that answer. Even with having given my decision about how I was comfortable trying diapers.

“So,” Mom asked, “They do, you know, have some in Maddy’s size?”

I bit my lip to hold back from blurting out an answer about the advertisements I had seen. Here I was thinking that Mom might have paid attention to them when, apparently, she had been completely oblivious.

“Of course,” Dr. Mathorn said. “Most stores would still carry them in the baby aisle, though, in my opinion, they really ought to have them in a separate section.”

There was another pause in the conversation.

“I guess we’ll get some and see how it goes,” Mom said.

<><><>

As soon as we had said our goodbyes to Dr. Mathorn, not a single word was said about the decision that had been reached in the exam room while we walked out to the car.

My heart was pounding in my chest as I buckled myself into the passenger seat. I had done it. Actually done it. Mom had agreed to purchase pull-ups for me. The only remaining question was when she was going to do it. Surely, it had to be by tonight. Mom would want to see that the pull-ups worked for a few nights in a row before agreeing to the sleepover that I had already set up behind her back with my friends.

I got an answer to that question a couple of minutes later as Mom pulled into the parking lot of the first big box store we passed.

“Why don’t you stay in the car,” Mom said as she cracked the windows down an inch. “I shouldn’t be in the store all that long.”

Mom was out of the car before I had the chance to say anything else. It took me a moment to realize what Mom was doing, but once I understood, I was a bit grateful. The last thing I needed was to run into someone I knew while going inside with her to purchase the pull-ups.

I watched from the window as Mom disappeared into the store. The baby aisle was all the way in the back. Surely, it wouldn’t be that hard for her to find the pull-ups. I knew from the ads that I had seen that the package would clearly show that the pull-ups would fit me. It wasn’t as though I could tell Mom that I had already verified the fit the other day.

I pulled out my phone to respond to some texts from Angie and Emma, though I couldn’t resist looking out the window every few seconds. The worst of it was that it wasn’t even noon yet. I was going to have to wait all day until I’d have a chance to finally wet one of the pull-ups.

I wondered how strict Mom and Dad were going to be about their new nighttime rules for me once I started regularly wearing pull-ups to bed. Was I still going to have to deal with the same restrictions about not having too much to drink, even though I’d shown them that it hadn’t done any good? I figure that at least the part about being made to use the toilet before bed wasn’t going to be going away anytime soon.

And what about Grace? She was observant enough that she would no doubt notice the sudden drop-off in the amount of laundry I was doing each and every morning. I had no desire for her to find out that the reason was because of pull-ups rather than the bedwetting coming to an end.

I checked the time again on my phone. About fifteen minutes had passed since Mom had walked into the store. What was taking her so long? She had said earlier that she was only planning on taking the morning off from work, and with how long the appointment had gone with all the tests, she didn’t have that long until she would need to go into the office.

I rubbed at a sore spot on my arm where the nurse had done the blood draw earlier this morning. It hurt worse than when I’d gotten shots for vaccination. If it was this sore tonight, finding a comfortable position to fall asleep in was going to be difficult.

The van beeped, and the trunk popped open. Mom had managed to sneak up on me, after all. I peeked into the mirrors and got a glimpse of Mom loading up a few bags. As much as I tried, I couldn’t see their contents.

If Mom had managed to successfully find the pull-ups, she didn’t give any indication of that when she took her seat in the car.

“Why don’t we get you something to eat on the way home,” Mom said.

<><><>

Fast food wasn’t something we did all that often. According to Dad, the price really began to add up when it was our entire family eating out.

So it was a surprise when Mom said I could pick whatever fast food place I wanted to go out to, as long as it was something that we were going to pass anyway on the way home. I weighed my options before deciding that chicken strips and fries were what I wanted to eat for lunch. When we pulled into the drive-through lane, Mom ordered a meal for me but just got a drink for herself.

The best part about the meal being entirely mine was that I could snack on fries on the way home without anyone complaining that I was actually taking theirs.

Since I didn’t have keys to the front door, I punched in the code to the garage door to get into the house that way instead, while Mom went to the back of the car to grab the shopping bags.

I had just finished transferring my chicken and fries to a plate when Mom stepped into the kitchen behind me.

“I’ve got to hurry into the office,” Mom said. “There’s a meeting I’d really prefer not to miss after being out this morning.” Mom reached into the plastic bag and pulled out a bag of pull-ups that weren’t like anything I had seen in any recent advertisements or during the long-ago trips down the baby aisle. “Why don’t you go ahead and put these in your dresser?”

My mouth dropped slightly as I took hold of the package. These were not the pull-ups that I had dreamed of wearing for the past three years. These weren’t the same brand I’d worn just the other day in the upstairs bathroom at Emma’s place. They weren’t even specifically for girls, with the packaging making it abundantly clear that the pull-ups, which in the picture appeared to have some grayish designs on the front of an otherwise completely white design, were meant for both boys and girls.

After all the trouble that I’d gone through to get Mom to make this purchase for me, she had gone ahead and purchased a knock-off store brand. I stood next to Mom in the hallway, staring numbly at the package of pull-ups in my hands, unable to move.

Mom reached out and placed a hand on the package. “If you’ve changed your mind, I can always return them. I’ve still got the receipt. You don’t have to feel like you have to wear them if you don’t want to.”

I maintained a firm grip on the pull-ups. It may not have been what I had been expecting, but there was no way I was going to let Mom take it away from me. I’d just have to hope that these pull-ups were as good as the real thing.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll see how they work tonight.”

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 13, 2024 at 6:42 PM
Content: Chapter 26: It Couldn’t Be Wrong
I stared at the package of pull-ups I had set on the bed. It was the worst type of disappointment, the kind that comes completely as a surprise shortly after being certain that success was inevitable.

For the shortest time this morning, I had been certain that I was going to get what I wanted. My gambit with Dr. Mathorn had paid off, as I managed to prompt her to bring up the topic of protection, which I was then able to tentatively accept over my mom’s objections.

On the drive from the hospital to the store, all I could think of was of the pull-ups I had worn briefly at Emma’s place. That Mom would have multiple options to choose from was inconceivable. And of course she had managed to choose the wrong one.

And the worst part of it was that I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to correct this situation. How was I supposed to convey to her that she needed to switch to my preferred brand of pull-ups?

I tried to think on the bright side. Perhaps these pull-ups Mom had purchased for me would fit as comfortably as the others I had tried. Perhaps they would perform as well when I wet them in bed later tonight. Perhaps they would be capable of satisfying that itch that had begun three years ago.

I walked over to the window and watched as Mom pulled out of the driveway. Here I was. The entire house to myself. Grace had gotten herself a summer job, with hours during the day, unlike previous summers when she had been forced to stick to working evenings as my parents hadn’t wanted to leave me home alone. Her eight-hour shift would have her arriving home in our old minivan around the same time that Mom and Dad finished with work and picked up Jackson from his day camp on the way home.

As I had left to head upstairs with the pull-ups, Mom had given me one final reminder of the chores that she and Dad expected me to have done by the time everyone was home for dinner. The cat litter still needed to be cleaned, my laundry needed to be done, and I was supposed to empty all the garbage cans and take them out to the garbage bin in the garage.

I picked up the package of pull-ups to examine them one last time before returning downstairs to eat my lunch. But I didn’t discover much more information than the cursory glance I had given the package before. Aside from not being specifically for girls and having boring designs, the notes on the package touted the same basic features that I’d seen in ads for the pull-up brand I had been coveting. I checked the information about the sizing and found that I was squarely in the middle of the size range for the pull-ups.

I managed, though just barely, to avoid ripping open the package of pull-ups right then and there. That wouldn’t do. I couldn’t risk Mom thinking I was actually that eager to wear them on the off chance that she noticed what I’d done. I debated for a moment about where to put the pull-ups, then decided that the underwear drawer at the top of my dresser was the most suitable location.

That decision elicited a small laugh. It brought to mind the phrase that Hannah had used to describe her pull-ups. She had referred to them as absorbent underwear.

I shut the dresser drawer with a sigh. Tonight couldn’t come quickly enough.

But there were other fun things that I could still do in the meantime.

I walked down the stairs nervously. It was hard to explain, but I could somehow just feel that the house was empty, and not empty in the sense that someone had stepped out and would be back in a minute, but the kind of solitude that came from having a place to myself without any interruptions for the next five hours. And I wouldn’t be leaving. My parents had made it clear that I was to remain in the house and not leave or let anyone in unless it was an emergency.

My half-unpacked lunch of chicken strips and fries was sitting on the kitchen counter. I took the lunch with me to the living room, but not before grabbing a Harry Potter book to read. I hadn’t had a chance to ask Dad to reverse the block on the fan fiction website Hannah had told me about, so for now, I would need to continue with reading the real thing.

For the first time in my life, I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted at home, and I found that, for now, I was doing exactly what I would have been doing had Grace been left home with me like in previous summers.

I quickly gulped down all of my pop well before I was finished with my chicken and fries that I was eating with a fork to avoid getting any greasy fingers on the pages of my beloved books.

It was time to get something else to drink from the kitchen. I grabbed the largest plastic water cup that I could find and filled it to the brim with the filtered water pitcher from the fridge. I took a few large sips and then topped the cup off again.

I was already beginning to squirm with anticipation at the thought of how I would soon be wetting my pants again later this afternoon. This time, I wanted to wait until I couldn’t avoid peeing any longer, and the best way to do that was to make sure I drank as much as I reasonably could. While I wouldn’t be wetting a pull-up, this would be the next best thing.

I considered my options for where I should have this fake accident. When I had wet my pants last week, I had done so in the laundry room. With the cement floor with a built-in drain next to the washing machine, it had made cleanup a breeze.

The bathtub would be the easiest to clean up, but that simply felt too weird and gross to do. I simply couldn’t do that given everyone else in my family would stand in it, well, except for Jackson, who was still young enough that he almost exclusively took baths.

Wetting myself over carpet was an obvious no-go, though there were a few other places that could still work, such as in the kitchen or in the bathroom. I could have done it in a room with a wood floor, but I remembered Dad’s complaints from when I had spilled a glass of lemonade on it and his concerns about how the flooring might get warped or stained. That was another option to be ruled out for now.

I had spent the weekend thinking through various scenarios that I could play out. What clothes should I be wearing when I had an accident? Did I want to try seeing what it would be like to pee myself while sitting in a chair rather than standing?

I kept a close eye on the time as I continued to hydrate, making sure to take another sip of water every few pages. An hour and two full cups of water later, I was now finding it almost impossible to sit still, my body squirming in anticipation of my afternoon plans. I still had a book open in front of me, but I hadn’t switched over to a new page in more than ten minutes.

I had made up my mind. I was going to change out of my leggings into a different outfit, and when my bladder couldn’t last any longer, I would be sitting in a chair in the laundry room.

The only chairs in the basement were folding ones that were only brought upstairs for special occasions when there were enough guests to warrant it. But those chairs were immediately ruled out, as the fabric cushion on them would be impossible to clean.

That left me needing to hall one of the wooden chairs from the dining room table set downstairs. I posited it right over the laundry room drain.

By this point, there was no question that I needed to pee. It wouldn’t have been difficult to go now. All I would have to do is give my bladder the word, and it would release. But that wasn’t what I wanted to experience today. Nothing but the biggest possible accident would suffice. I wasn’t in any danger of having an accident yet, so I headed upstairs to retrieve my laundry and changed into a pair of stretchy denim shorts.

Once I got the washing load started, I took a seat on the chair. I had made sure to only put about half my clothes in with this load, as I would have another to start when it came time to clean up after wetting myself.

I wanted it to be as close to a genuine accident as possible, so despite the pain now coming from my bladder, I forced myself to continue to desperately hold on despite the increasingly irresistible urge to pee. I wanted to experience something that felt like an actual accident rather than a fake one.

The sound of water sloshing around in the washing machine wasn’t doing me any favors. I clenched my hands between my thighs. My bladder ached worse than anything.

I finally reached the point where I couldn’t hold on any longer, even if I had wanted to. I lifted my hands up not a moment too soon as my legs involuntarily unclenched. I looked down at my waist as I began to pee uncontrollably. I gasped as a massive, ever-expanding wet spot appeared between my legs.

The pain in my bladder was suddenly gone. That alone was a massive relief.

The seat of the chair wasn’t completely level. It had the slightest of slopes from the front to the back. The result was that the puddle forming in front of me was steadily drifting backward, soaking through the entire bottom of my shorts and then dripping down onto the floor like raindrops.

My heart was racing audibly. This was no less exhilarating than the first time I had wet myself in the basement.

Something wet touched my feet. I jerked them off of the floor. I hadn’t thought much about how I had positioned the chair, but with how I was sitting, my feet had been directly in the path the urine was taking down into the drain.

I immediately ripped off my wet socks as I continued to pee. I didn’t like the sensation of them being wet. It was like having to play soccer in the rain or on an early spring morning when the grass was still covered with dew.

And then it was all over. My shorts and underwear were fully soaked, wet, and warm. The seat of the chair was wet, but basically, all the urine that hadn’t been soaked up in my clothes had dripped down to the floor and had turned into a couple of small streams headed for the drain.

I wished that I had thought to time how long it took me to empty my bladder. I couldn’t recall ever having peed for that long before. I wondered if I had been going for nearly a whole minute.

I stayed seated in the chair for several minutes with my feet hovering above the floor. For how much buildup it took to arrive at these moments, they were always over far too soon.

I stood up from the chair, careful not to step on any wet spots on the floor, and stepped back to a dry spot a few feet back from the chair. My shorts felt far heavier than before. Unlike my leggings, the shorts had absorbed quite a bit of urine.

The evidence would be gone soon enough. Once this first load of laundry was finished in the washing machine, a hose would spit out all the water into the drain, washing away any trace of what I had done.

It hadn’t taken long for my wet clothes to begin to cool off, becoming clammy and clingy against my skin, the comfortable, warm wetness having devolved into a clammy, cold, damp sensation that wasn’t at all pleasant.

With that cooling off, the exhilaration of the moment began to wear off, and I started to take in the sight of what I had just done. The chair that was noticeably wet. The puddle of urine that was gradually disappearing down the drain. Demin shorts that had changed from a faded light blue to a much deeper color.

There was a lingering sense of unease in the back of my mind, whispers that what I had just done was gross, unnatural, weird, that I should be ashamed of even thinking of doing it, let alone actually going through with the deed.

I tried to shake that feeling, to refocus on how good I had felt only minutes ago. It had all felt so good, so why was I now feeling bad about it?

I thought about Hannah again. I didn’t want to be anything like her, a freak who wasn’t potty trained despite being in middle school, a weirdo who needed to have a watch to give her reminders to go to the toilet.

I had never experienced anything more enjoyable than peeing myself, whether that was while lying in bed or just now while sitting on a chair. It couldn’t be wrong. I just couldn’t be.

Everything from the slowly building anticipation as I made sure I was fully hydrated to the moment when my bladder finally couldn’t hold on any longer had been exactly what I wanted. So why was I experiencing this emotional drop-off now?

I blamed Hannah for it. I hadn’t felt anything close to this before meeting her over the weekend. Sure, there had been some embarrassment at how my parents and Grace had learned about the bedwetting, but that hadn’t come with this same sense of wrongness.

I mean, Hannah was practically a baby, from how she couldn’t tie her own shoes or properly drink from a water bottle to how she fussed and whined when her needs weren’t being catered to. There wasn’t any way she liked peeing in her pull-ups and diapers. She probably didn’t even notice doing so half the time.

Looking at Hannah had been like looking into one of those mirrors at a carnival, the kind that returns some sort of distorted reflection that is too tall or too short or too fat or too skinny, where the reflection doesn’t quite match in some way but is close enough to be discomforting.

When I pictured Hannah, the resemblance was like that. I could hear Emma’s disdain for her autistic cousin ringing in my ears, along with the specific epithet Emma had used to describe her.

I looked down again at my soaked shorts and the evidence of the accident in front of me on the floor. It had felt so good just now. It had felt so good every time I had done it before. And I knew despite what I was feeling at the moment that it would feel so good this evening when I finally was able to pee into a pull-up.

I wasn’t Hannah. I wasn’t some stupid dumb girl who wasn’t potty trained. Not me. I wasn’t some awkward baby who couldn’t behave like a normal kid when necessary.

I was going to be a teenager for real after this first week of getting a taste of independence. I could indulge in these desires without compromising my status of being a big kid.

I did what I did of my own volition. I was completely in control. Besides, it all felt good. It couldn’t possibly be wrong.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Oct 13, 2024 at 6:43 PM
Content: Chapter 27: Moment of Truth
Any trace that I had wet myself in the laundry room was long gone by the time the doorbell rang several hours later.

I had put off the rest of my chores until the last minute and had only just stepped back into the kitchen after taking the garbage out to the bin in the garage when Grace arrived home.

Dad was the next to arrive home about five minutes later, followed by Mom, who had Jackson in tow.

My stomach grumbled loudly. Usually, when Grace was home in the afternoon, she would often help with getting a few things prepped for dinner so that it would be easier for our parents to finish quickly once they were home from work.

That wasn't the case with me. I had been expressly forbidden from touching the oven or the stove while they were away, and Dad didn't even feel comfortable with me chopping vegetables with his extra-sharp kitchen knives, even when he was around to supervise in the kitchen. It didn't seem likely that dinner prep was a responsibility I would be given anytime soon, not that it was something I was eager to add to my already more than long enough list of chores.

I hid away in my bedroom until dinner, partly to read Harry Potter without any judgmental glances from my parents, but mostly so that I could continue to sneak glances at the package of pull-ups in my dresser. It felt like bedtime was still way too far away. There were so many questions that needed answering. Would this generic brand live up to the lofty expectations I had built up over the past three years?

Dinner was spaghetti, steamed zucchini, and toasted garlic bread. I arrived at my spot at the table to a surprise. Unlike the past week, my glass was once again filled the same way as everyone else's.

That was a welcome, although unexpected, concession from my parents, who had been diligent in limiting my fluid intake at and after dinner. It made sense. If I was going to wet the bed regardless of how much I had to drink, it didn't make all that much sense to have me stay thirsty all night long.

Still, as much as I preferred having nice, filtered water to drink, I wasn't going to push my luck and go for a refill while still eating dinner. Jackson was too young and self-absorbed – rather like myself at his age – to even notice that something was different with my glass of water. On the other hand, I could see from the look on Grace's face as I took a large sip of water that she seemed to think this wasn't going to bode well for me come bedtime.

That did raise another concern. Under no circumstances did I want Grace to find out that I was wearing pull-ups to bed. It was enough for her to know that I had been wetting the bed. With any luck, once she noticed that I was no longer doing any laundry in the morning, she would simply think that my short-lived bedwetting phase must have come to an end.

I hadn't directly asked my parents to withhold that information from my older sister, but with how hush-hush they had been with all the bedwetting issues between us, not saying anything unless it was necessary to do so, I felt confident that my privacy would get respected in that matter.

Wouldn't she be surprised when the next few days passed without me doing any extra laundry? I wondered if it wasn't too late to get my old bed back. Surely, I wouldn't need that now that I had pull-ups to keep my sheets dry.

The rest of the evening ticked by all too slowly. Instead of hiding in her bedroom, as was her usual routine after dinner, Grace was in the living room with me and our parents.

I would have preferred that she wasn't around for the request I had for Dad, but I figured that it probably wouldn't make any difference. I needed something, anything, to pass the time. And I figured now was as good a time as ever to see if Dad would unblock that website Hannah had mentioned to me over the weekend so that I could access the supposed treasure trove of Harry Potter stories on it.

Dad frowned slightly as I named the website that I wanted to be able to visit. I made sure not to mention why I was specifically interested in it, as I suspected that it wouldn't help my cause.

"And who mentioned this site to you?" he asked.

"Um, Hannah?"

"And Hannah is?"

"Emma's cousin. She was visiting over the weekend."

"I see," Dad said. He pulled out his phone and began to tap on it. I assumed that he must be checking out the website.

I crossed my legs as I waited anxiously for his answer. I didn't see what was taking so long. There couldn't be any way that Hannah would have told me about visiting a site that was anything bad.

"Probably best if you didn't go reading stories on there," Dad said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Grace sitting on the couch. She appeared to be biting her lip.

"But Hannah did, and she's my age..." I nearly mentioned the fact that Hannah was autistic, but I also wasn't sure that would help my case, either.

Dad set his phone down. "Just because her parents let her doesn't mean that it's a good idea. If you need more books to read, I'm sure Grace could run you over to the library."

"No, I'm fine."

Grace seemed relieved with that answer.

<><><>

I didn't bother hiding the Harry Potter book I was reading when Mom called my name after knocking on the bedroom door.

"Yes, you can come in."

Instead of just cracking the door open a couple of inches, like she usually did when she had something to tell me, Mom stepped inside the bedroom and closed the door behind her before walking up to my bed.

"Are you still wanting to try that, um, new underwear I got for you tonight?" Mom asked in a hushed tone.

New underwear, now, that was certainly one way to refer to the pull-ups.

I nodded. It seemed rather unnecessary for Mom to come up here like that to ask that question.

"OK, we'll see how they work then," Mom said. "It's getting late enough, so you should get ready for bed, and don't forget to use the toilet after you brush your teeth."

I did make sure to brush my teeth, but only for about twenty seconds, rather than the full two minutes that Mom and Dad always insisted that I did.

And then I was alone again in the bedroom, staring down at the package of pull-ups in my dresser drawer.

There was a dotted line on the side of the package that seemed to indicate that this was where I was supposed to tear it open. That seemed as good a way as any to get it open, better than risking cutting too much with scissors.

I ripped open the package all the way and removed a single pull-up from the package.

As I held the pull-up in my hands, it appeared as though this pull-up was decidedly inferior in every imaginable way to the one of Hannah's that I had worn just the other day.

The first issue was with how the pull-up looked. It wouldn't technically be correct to call these pull-ups ugly. Boring and plain were more apt descriptors. The pull-up was mostly white, with some gray patterns down the middle of the front and back. I couldn't really tell what they were supposed to be designs of.

I emptied the remaining ten pull-ups from the package into my underwear drawer, trying to see if there were any others with better designs on them. Nope. They all had the exact same boring pattern, unlike the pull-up brand I had wanted, which came with two separate designs.

But that was far from the only difference that I noticed. As I held the pull-up in my hands, I practiced spreading out its stretchy sides. They didn't seem as malleable as the Hannah's pull-ups had been. They were a little rougher to the touch and not as stretchy. Still, as I held them stretched out against my waist, it seemed as though I wouldn't have any difficulty fitting into them.

At the sound of footsteps in the hallway, I hastily dropped the pull-up back into the drawer and slammed it shut. I waited until the steps had passed my room, and I heard what I assumed to be Grace's bedroom door open and close.

With the hallway once again silent, it was time for the first test. I undressed and once again opened the top drawer of my dresser. My hands weren't shaking anywhere, nearly as bad as when I had put a pull-up.

I once again stretched the pull-up open, slipping in one leg and then another through the leg gatherings before pulling it up to my waist.

That was when I noticed the last two differences with this pull-up. The way that it fit around my waist didn't feel the same, and the sides of the pull-up were just a little scratchy. The other sensation that was different was the padding between my legs. It felt stiffer and not as soft as the two previous pull-ups I had worn.

I tried to remind myself that it didn't matter what the pull-up looked like – no one else was going to see it except me. All that mattered was that it did what it was supposed to do, keep my bed dry when I wet it later tonight.

Wetting it wasn't going to be that much of a challenge. Yes, I used the toilet when I went to brush my teeth. I knew better than to disobey Mom's request that I do so. But with my parents not having restricted my liquids tonight, along with still having had a few sips from my secret water bottle, I estimated that I would be feeling the urge to pee again in about another hour.

That didn't stop me from once again removing the water bottle from its hiding place and taking a few last gulps.

I stood in front of my dresser for a moment with nothing but the pull-up and a t-shirt. My annoyance at not getting the exact product I had dreamt of began to fade away. This was it. After all those long years of waiting. I finally had pull-ups of my own.

I thought back to everything I had gone through to get to this point since that fateful moment with my cousins three years back. The inability to find pull-ups in the house, the slow process of learning more about diapers and pull-ups through all the ads I would sneak looks at. The time I had attempted – and failed quite badly – at creating a makeshift diaper for myself. The way I had kept my eyes and ears peeled for any news or glimpse of diapers while in public. The times I had chickened out of taking diapers from friends of my parents who had kids who weren't potty trained. All the times when I had considered going through with becoming a bedwetter, only to back out at the last minute.

Getting to this moment had been my constant, single obsession. I wasn't going to let anything ruin it.

I thought, for a moment, about what I should wear to bed. I considered putting on some pajama shorts, but decided against them. I didn't want anything preventing me from feeling and seeing the pull-up once I was in bed.

I knew I couldn't linger long in front of the dresser. Yes, Jackson was supposed to be in bed, but I didn't even want to think about how I would have to explain things if he or anyone else were to spot me in this state of undress.

I tiptoed speedily across the room to turn off the light switch, suddenly conscious of how noisily the pull-up crinkled as I moved. I was extremely grateful I was only going to have to pretend to Mom that I wore it during upcoming sleepovers this summer.

I hurried to get all the lights off, and then I slipped under the covers of my bed. The crinkling sound of the pull-up soon became lost in the crinkling of my waterproof mattress.

The next hour passed by way too slowly. I tried to find ways to distract myself as I waited for my bladder to fill, but I couldn't keep my mind – or my hands – off of the pull-up for long.

I kept reaching down to feel the outside of the pull-up, reassuring myself that, yes, it was actually real and I was actually wearing it. I found that I enjoyed the sensation of having all the padding between my legs as much as I had before, though I suspected it would take a while to get used to falling asleep like this.

It was almost hard to believe that this crazy scheme had worked. Mom and Dad fully believed I was an actual bedwetter. Even Grace did as well, even if I would have preferred that she have remained completely ignorant of what was happening.

I stared at my phone in annoyance. Why had Dad made such a big deal about me wanting to visit that website? I couldn't see how it could be a big deal if even Hannah was allowed to use it. And nothing she had said about the Harry Potter fanfiction stories had made it seem like they would be anything my parents would consider inappropriate for me.

That would have been a perfect way to pass the time tonight. It might have even been enough to temporarily distract me from the pull-up I was wearing.

Instead, I used the flashlight on my phone to continue reading the Harry Potter book I had started earlier this afternoon. I made sure to do so from under my covers. Even with the door shut, my parents would be able to tell if I had the lights on yet. Yes, I had a later bedtime during summer break, but that didn't mean that there still wasn't the expectation that I would need to go to bed at some point.

Unlike previous nights, I didn't bother with waiting until my parents were asleep and in bed. It wasn't as though I was going to need privacy to go down to the laundry room and put wet bedding in the laundry machine. I figured I would just fall asleep in the wet pull-up and deal with cleaning up in the morning.

With my bladder finally telling me it was ready to go, I set my phone and book aside and rolled over beneath the covers. I laid on my stomach like I had done previously when forcing myself to wet the bed. After more than a week of practice, I had become comfortable letting my bladder go from that position as long as I had a reasonably strong need to pee.

I was squirming, both out of the need to pee and in anticipation of what I was finally about to do. I took one final deep breath and let everything go.

For a moment, it was everything I could have dreamed that it was going to be. It was warm. Oh so warm, and it was all contained in one spot. I hadn't really thought much about how it would feel specifically to wet a pull-up, what did catch me by surprise was how it felt as though the absorbent material in the pull-up was greatly expanding into a squishy mass between my legs.

Then everything went wrong.

I felt something wet in a spot that should have been dry.

I slid my hand around the outside of the pull-up. My bare thighs were undeniably wet, and there was a smallish wet spot that had expanded directly on the sheets around my waist.

There was no mistaking what had happened. Disaster had struck. The pull-up had leaked.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Feb 20, 2025 at 6:09 AM
Content: Hi! Back from my hiatus. Will be getting this story back up to speed.

Chapter 28: UnprotectedThis was a complete and total disaster.

I removed my wet hand from underneath the pull-up and wiped it dry on my sheets. There was no denying what had just happened during my first attempt at peeing in a pull-up; it had completely and utterly failed to do what it was supposed to do.

I pressed my face deep into my pillow and let out a heavily muffled scream. I had waited for too long and had worked far too hard to arrive at this moment, only to have it fail like this. Of all the obstacles I had thought I might encounter, having the pull-up leak on me actually hadn't been something I had considered. I had figured that as long as it fit me, there wouldn't be any issue with holding at least one wetting. That it would leak like this wasn't something I had ever imagined.

What was I supposed to do now?

The immediate problem was the wet sheets. They needed to be placed in the washing machine. But there wasn't anything I could do with them at the moment. Mom and Dad weren't in bed yet. I was highly skeptical that I would be able to successfully sneak downstairs and put my bedding in the laundry room without them noticing. And who knew if Grace was asleep? She, at least, should be already, as she had to be up early in the morning for her summer job, but that was far from guaranteed.

There was no choice but to try to stay up late enough that I could get a head start on my laundry once the rest of the family was asleep.

There was too much to worry about, and I couldn't even manage to relax and enjoy the aftermath of wetting the bed like I had all of those other nights. There wasn't any comfort to be found in the warmth and squishiness beneath me, not with the implication of the leak hanging over my head.

There were far bigger problems to contend with than what to do with my bedding.

If my parents didn't think that these pull-ups were able to keep my bed dry, what was to stop them from not purchasing any more for me and going back to the plan of just changing bedding every night?

That was, by far, the worst-case scenario. It was also completely believable that my parents could end up choosing to go that route, especially with how reluctant Mom had been to even consider pull-ups as an option when confronted with that idea during the appointment with Dr. Mathorn.

The only good thing was that there were still another eleven pull-ups in my dresser drawer, which meant eleven more chances to demonstrate to my parents that these pull-ups were useful enough that they should buy more for me when they ran out.

But there was a faster deadline approaching. My birthday was this Saturday, meaning that in order to convince my parents to allow the sleepover to succeed – avoiding any awkward conversations with my friends about why it might need to be canceled – I would only have four more nights to prove to them that wearing protection was a viable option to allow me to have a discreet sleepover. Obviously, there wasn't any way I would actually be wearing a pull-up around my friends that night, let alone pee in one, but that wasn't something for my parents to know.

There was no choice but to find a way to wet these pull-ups without causing a leak. There needing to be evidence on hand that this new choice was working.

But that required knowing what went wrong. Was it as simple as just having peed far more than the pull-up was intended to handle? Was it because Mom had purchased an inferior product? Had I perhaps drunk far too much water before going to bed? Or was there some other factor at play that I wasn't aware of?

What exactly happened when someone wet the bed for real? Did they have a big accident all at once, like how I had just peed myself, or did it come out slowly in little dribbles in a way that would be much less likely to leak out of a pull-up?

In any of those cases, the immediate solution to the problem wouldn't be all that difficult. If I cut down a little on how much I was drinking and avoided getting extra hydration from my secret water bottle, perhaps I could wet the pull-ups without a repeat of what happened tonight. In a worst-case scenario, I could just pour some water in the pull-up before throwing it away, and that would be enough to make it look as though it had been used.

Something else began to make a lot more sense. I remembered the diapers I had seen in Hannah's suitcase, which Emma had strongly implied that her cousin wore to bed every night. The amount of absorbent padding in those diapers had been many times more than what was in the pull-ups.

I wondered if I would have experienced a leak like this had I been wearing one of those diapers instead.

But why would pull-ups get sold for nighttime use if they weren't effective for actual bedwetters? The product had to work for most people. I mean, it certainly seemed enough for Hannah during the day, including that one time it appeared as though she had wet herself while we were headed back from the park.

I let out a big yawn as I attempted to settle into a comfortable position in bed.

I realized that it was much less fun to be lying in a puddle of pee when it was completely unexpected. That said, I did like how the wet pull-up felt, both with how it was extra warm and the way it squished beneath me. If only it had been enough to completely handle the wetting, then I could have laid like this comfortably all night long.

Another ten minutes passed before I began to hear the telltale signs coming from the bathroom that my parents were both beginning to get ready to head in for the night.

I yawned again. I was so tired, especially after all the nights of having my sleep schedule interrupted by either staying up too late or getting up extra early.

I closed my eyes once more, telling myself fit would just be for a few seconds before I re-opened them to begin to get ready to take my bedding down to the laundry room. That turned out to be a lie.

<><><>

I must have tossed and turned a lot in my sleep because when I woke up, I was no longer lying on my stomach in the middle of the bed. I had moved over to the side of the bed, having nearly slipped out from underneath all of my sheets.

There was enough sunlight coming in through the window that I knew it wasn't super early in the morning. Still, I didn't really feel like opening my eyes. I shifted over to my side, trying to get comfortable. For some reason, I was having a harder time closing my legs than I normally would have. There was something that had happened last night that I should have remembered, but it wasn't coming back to me.

There was a faint voice calling my name in the distance. "Maddy, it's time to get up."

My first reaction was that I didn't want to get up and go to school. Then I remembered that it was the second day of summer break, and once my family was off for the day, I'd have the entire house to myself.

I tossed off the covers as I prepared to swing out of bed. That was a mistake. A big mistake.

Because no sooner had the sheets come fully off that I really both what I was and wasn't wearing.

I was wearing a pull-up, which was the reason for the foreign sensation of bulkiness between my legs. And part of the reason that it was feeling so bulky was because of my attempt to wet it before I fell asleep last night.

But that was exacerbated by the problem of what I was wearing, as I had failed to put on any pajamas over the pull-up.

I pulled the sheets back over myself as soon as I realized what I had done, but it was far too late.

The result of all that was that Mom got a full view of everything that had occurred last night. The front of the pull-up had turned from white to a muted, faded yellow, and while I had rolled away from the wet spot in my sleep, the way I had tugged on my sheets and cover while starting to get up had also revealed the now-dry urine stain in the middle of the bed.

I raised the sheets over my head. I was so embarrassed. I had already come to accept the fact that my parents would be aware that I was peeing in the pull-ups, but that was far different from providing my mom with visual evidence of what I had done.

I heard some footsteps as Mom approached the bed and then took a seat next to me on the edge of the mattress. She patted my shoulder with her hand.

"It's OK, Maddy. I'll give you some privacy to get cleaned up in a little bit. Grace and your father are already off for the day. I'm getting ready to head out with Jackson. Just because it is summer break, it doesn't mean that you should be sleeping in till lunchtime. You can stay in bed until I leave, but I do expect you to get out of bed and get cleaned up right away once I'm gone."

"Fine," I said from beneath the sheets.

Mom paused, as though she was considering what to say next. "You don't have to wear your new underwear tomorrow night if you don't want to. I can see if I can still return them."

That wouldn't do. Not at all.

I slid the sheets off of my face so that I could see Mom, even if I didn't look up directly at her to respond to that offer.

"But I want to be able to have the sleepover," I said. "I'll try them again tonight. I might have had too much to drink."

"That could have been an issue," Mom said. "But it's OK if it still doesn't work. I'm sure that once the test results come back next week, Dr. Mathorn will have some good ideas about other ways to help you. Even if it feels like it, it wouldn't be the end of the world to skip one sleepover."

I wasn't going to let my parents give up on the idea of wearing protection to bed that easily. And there was no way I was going to miss the sleepover. Still, I nodded along, though I wondered what was going to happen when the results came back, showing that there wasn't anything wrong with my body at all.

"I left you a banana on the counter. You need to at least eat that for breakfast, even if you don't have any cereal or yogurt."

With that, Mom stood up from the edge of the bed and walked over to the window, which she cracked open. "When you get up, please make sure to take all your garbage out to the garage. That will help with making sure you room stays fresh."

I waited to get out of bed until I heard the sound of Mom's van pulling out of the driveway.

Now, it was time to examine the pull-up.

I got out of bed for real this time. The pull-up was less uncomfortable after sleeping it in all night long than I would have expected.

The stretchy sides appeared to have a spot in the middle where the pull-up could be torn to be easily removed, but I instead took the pull-up off the same way I would have with my regular underwear.

The pull-up was much heavier than when I had put it on the night before, though it still remained snug around my waist. It sagged noticeably as I slid it down my legs.

With the pull-up off, I noticed that my skin felt a bit gross. I would need to get washed thoroughly after spending a whole night wearing a wet diaper.

The last thing I noticed was that there was a faint smell of urine, similar to what I had smelled when I snuck into Emma's bedroom to get a glimpse of her cousins' pull-ups and diapers.

The inside of the pull-up had turned from white to yellow. The entire front of the pull-up was soaked, though the back and some of the middle on the inside appeared to have remained completely dry. That made sense, given that I had been laying on my stomach when I peed, which hadn't made efficient use of the absorbent padding.

A few ideas to solve the problem of leaks popped into my head. Perhaps I would get far better result if I were to wet the pull-up in a different position, such as standing, sitting, or laying on my back.

That gave me another idea. I needed to pee again, and the as my bedding already needed to be washed, there wasn't any harm if another leak happened. Besides, from the way the pull-up looked, I probably had only ended up wetting a third of it before it leaked last night.

Rather than toss the pull-up in the trash, I instead put it back on.

I thought about the best way to wet it again. I could pee while standing up, but I wanted to make the most use out of the remaining padding, that wasn't the most optimal position to go for.

I instead returned to bed, though I opted for laying on my back, with my head propped up on a pillow.

This was yet another new experiment for me, as I hadn't attempted to pee myself in that position before. It took a minute of straining, but I needed to go badly enough that I was able to work past the difficulty of getting my bladder to release from that position.

This sensation was much different from any of the previous times I had wet myself, as I could feel the urine running down between my legs before soaking into the pull-up beneath me.

At first, it felt as though the pull-up was just warming and expanding, and I began to hope that I would be successful in avoiding leaks this time around, but just like last night, it again reached its limit, with the pee first pooling inside of the pull-up beneath my bottom and then leaking out to form another puddle on the bed.

Perhaps if I had started this second experiment with a completely dry pull-up, it might have worked. But I had my doubts.

I had two options, neither of which was one that I liked.

I could be extra careful with how I wet the pull-up over the next few nights, being sure to do so in an optimal position and without having had too much to drink beforehand. That would convince my parents to continue buying the pull-ups and allow me to have all the sleepovers I wanted. But I would be stuck with pull-ups that fell far short of what I actually wanted. That wouldn't do, not with all the embarrassment and humiliation I had endured over the past two weeks to get them. I deserved a far better prize for my efforts.

However, the other option had its own pitfalls as well. I could continue to allow the pull-ups to leak and then try to get my parents to purchase a better product for me. The downsides to that were obvious. The first was the problem of finding something that worked before the sleepover, but the bigger issue was the concern that this might cause my parents to give up on the idea of diapers for good.

It was a lot to consider, but as I was once again being left to my own devices for the day, I would have plenty of time to come up with a solution.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Feb 22, 2025 at 1:59 AM
Content: Chapter 29: Goldilocks:It was barely time for lunch, and I was already bored out of my mind.

I shoved Chester off of my lap as I stood up from the couch. The orange cat gave me an angry meow before sprinting down the hallway and out of sight. I set the book I had been reading down on the couch without bothering to mark my place. I’d have no trouble finding the correct spot to resume later on from memory.

My stomach rumbled as I walked down the hallway.

I hadn’t eaten the banana that Mom had left for me in the kitchen for breakfast. Didn’t she know that it was basically my least favorite fruit? There was something about its mushy texture that I simply couldn’t stomach. Instead, the banana had gone into the trash bag along with the completely soaked pull-up, which hadn’t had a single dry spot remaining on it after I had wet it a second time.

In retrospect, that second attempt at peeing in the pull-up – done while laying on my back in bed – probably would have been best reserved for trying with a dry pull-up. However, it hadn’t leaked nearly as bad as when I had peed while lying on my stomach, so perhaps there was hope for attempting a wetting in that position sometime again.

The issue I was facing was I had too many experiments I needed to do with the pull-ups and too little time – and too few opportunities – to pull them off. There were two big questions I needed answers to: Were there positions in which I could wet a pull-up that had fewer chances of leaking? And how much could I get away with drinking without risking a leak like last night?

Mom was aware of how many pull-ups were in the package she had purchased for me. Even if she wasn’t keeping a close eye on them day-to-day now that they were tucked away in my dresser, if I were to use a bunch of them during the day, it would be very obvious that something was off when I went to ask her to buy me some more a week earlier.

That meant that I was stuck to an allotment of one pull-up per day. It didn’t feel like close to enough.

I had gotten what I had wanted, but it hadn’t turned out to be like what I had hoped for.

I was finally being given the freedom to stay home alone by myself for this summer break, but that freedom had come with its own costs. I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t have my friends over. I couldn’t even make myself a grilled cheese sandwich on the stove to deal with my growling stomach.

That last restriction was a major pain. I had texted Mom an hour ago, asking her what I was supposed to do for lunch for myself. She responded that there was bread and everything I needed to make a sandwich in the refrigerator.

The sight of bland lunchmeat as I opened the fridge door was enough to temper my appetite for the moment. Was that what I had to look forward to all summer long?

It wasn’t what I had pictured when I had dreamed of being given the freedom to stay home alone, and in a way, it was almost worse than prior years when I would be stuck home at times with my older sister. At least she usually left me home alone, especially when my friends came over to hang out, which they had actually been allowed to do then. And Grace, of course, had been considered responsible enough to handle kitchen appliances without burning the house down.

My parents had said they would be willing to re-evaluate things, but I didn’t know how long it would take for them to reach that decision.

Instead of returning to my book on the couch, I left the kitchen and trudged upstairs to my bedroom.

In the past, having privacy like this might have led me to get out all the old advertisements of pull-ups and diapers I had saved over the years. Now, I couldn’t even bring myself to think of them or risk again feeling disappointment over what I had in my dresser drawer instead.

Instead, I pulled open the top drawer of the dresser and shuffled through the pull-ups with my hands. Part of me wanted to wear one right now and wet it, even with the risk that Mom might later notice the count was off. But the other part of me feared what might come of it. It wasn’t so much that I was worried about Mom catching me than the worry of how I would feel if I were to have the pull-ups fail on me yet again.

Unlike every night for nearly the past two weeks, I was dreading going to bed rather than looking forward to it. Any excitement over getting to wear a pull-up to bed again was overshadowed by doubts about the product’s effectiveness and my concerns about how well my fake bedwetting plan would hold up in light of last night’s failures.

That left me stuck in limbo. I wanted this afternoon to end, but didn’t want this evening to come.

I left the pull-ups behind in the dresser and returned downstairs. Tonight was going to answer a lot of questions, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for the answers.

<><><>

My water restrictions were back in full effect during dinner. My glass of water was a little less full than everyone else’s at the dinner table, and I didn’t even bother asking for a refill, which I surely would have been denied.

I obeyed my parents’ unspoken limits without complaint, knowing that it would be necessary for what I planned to do tonight. While I limited how much I had to drink, I completely scarfed down the hot dish that was a Frankenstein combination of pizza and spaghetti, my ravenous hunger a result of skipping lunch in favor of snacking on a few handfuls of salted crackers.

It was a delicate balancing act that I needed to play out. I needed to be hydrated enough that I would be able to pee in the pull-up, but not so hydrated that I would cause it to leak out disastrously like last night. I was like Goldilocks; it had to be just right.

That wasn’t to say I still didn’t steal a couple of sips from my hidden water bottle – after an extremely careful trip to refill it while Grace was downstairs washing dishes. But I made sure that it didn’t extend to anything beyond that.

I attempted to avoid any awkward conversation with my parents about my new nighttime underwear by voluntarily heading to bed at what they – and not me – considered to be an appropriate time for the summer.

Unlike yesterday, I hadn’t bothered to wet myself again while I was home alone for the afternoon. That was a mere substitute for what I really wanted, which was to be able to completely let my bladder loose into a pull-up, a quest that was currently delayed until I got my hands on something more absorbent than what Mom had initially purchased for me.

This time, while getting dressed for bed, I didn’t make the mistake of not having anything on to cover the pull-up. Granted, the pull-up – with its bland gray designs – wasn’t much to look at.

I ended up being overdressed for the weather, with an extra-long T-shirt and poofy pajama pants that would have been better suited for bitterly cold January nights. But it guaranteed the pull-up would be fully covered.

I took a few steps across the room. The pull-up may have been hidden from sight, but I could still tell it was there. I wondered if the way I walked with the additional padding between my legs looked as awkward as it felt. I wondered if someone else would be able to hear the crinkling sound as I walked and, like I did with Hannah, come to the conclusion that there was a disposable undergarment beneath my pajamas.

There was a knock at the door. I knew it was Mom without needing to wait for her to say anything.

I looked over my pajamas. All discreet. “Come in.”

Mom opened the door and stepped halfway into the bedroom. “Are you all dressed for bed?”

I stared at her blankly. “Duh.”

“Madelyn, don’t take that tone with me. You know what I meant.”

I actually didn’t have a clue what she meant. A second later, I realized that Mom wasn’t looking directly at me, but rather behind me. I twisted my head to get a look. My underwear drawer – with both my regular and new underwear – was still pulled all the way open, leaving its contents completely exposed. I reached out to push it shut with one hand. But I wasn’t successful. The dresser drawer got jammed on a pull-up that was sticking part of the way out.

Mom’s momentary frown relaxed into a gentle smile. I got it then.

I looked down at Mom’s feet. “Yeah, I’m all dressed for bed.”

“And are your teeth brushed?”

I nodded because saying “yes” would have been a lie, but I didn’t want to leave the bedroom because of how I was dressed.

“And if I check your toothbrush, is it going to be wet?”

“Mom,” I protested.

“Madelyn.”

I shuffled my feet. “No,” I muttered.

“Then you need to brush your teeth right away now. And use the toilet afterward.”

Mom stepped to the side and held the door open for me. Right now, meant right now.

I slowly stepped past her, cringing internally at what I was sure was the incredibly loud and obvious sound of the crinkling coming from the pull-up.

No sooner had I started to brush my teeth than Grace joined me in the bathroom, taking the adjacent sink.

I stood completely still as I worked the toothbrush to all the places the dentist said it needed to go.

If Mom or Dad – or even Jackson, for that matter – were around, I would typically brush for the two minutes that I was supposed to spend cleaning my teeth. That wasn’t always the case with Grace, who wasn’t as judgmental about that as my parents, and, unlike my brother, wasn’t one to go and tattle on me, either.

That wasn’t the case tonight. There was no chance I was going to leave the bathroom before my sister did. She may have never worn a pull-up to bed herself, but I still thought that there would be too great of a chance for her to notice that something was off about me.

I tried to keep count of how long I had been brushing my teeth, but I lost track after about forty or fifty seconds when my mind began to wander.

The only thing going for me was that Grace – while being more diligent in taking care of her teeth than me – wasn’t nearly as fastidious as either of my parents. Outlasting her wasn’t the most impossible of challenges.

Still, the minty taste of the sudsy toothpaste in my mouth began to be too much to bear. I spat it out in the sink before rinsing off my toothbrush and swishing some water in my mouth to get rid of the awful aftertaste of the toothpaste.

Grace had finished brushing her teeth before me and was now busy flossing. I absolutely hated flossing. But I needed an excuse to not leave the bathroom, so I was left with no other choice but to grab a disposable flossing stick from the drawer and begin to slowly work it in between my teeth.

I caught sight of Grace looking at me a bit incredulously, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing, but I held firm, managing to floss most of my teeth by the time she had left for her bedroom.

<><><>

I considered my options as I sat in bed with the covers off and only a thin sheet on top of me. I wasn’t too warm to fall asleep later, but the way I was dressed was less than ideal. It was my only option, though. I wasn’t going to go through a repeat of this morning when Mom got a glimpse of my wet pull-up. I didn’t even want to imagine how embarrassing that would have been if that had been anyone else in the family who had seen me in that state.

Since I had leaked both times while lying down, perhaps it was best to wet the pull-up in that position tonight.

Standing up in my room wasn’t a good option. Leaking onto the carpet would be a disaster. I could stand on top of my bed, but even then, a leak would be impossible to hide from Mom. Going all the way down to the basement was also ruled out. That might have worked when I had the excuse of taking laundry downstairs, but it would be harder to explain if I was caught doing that otherwise.

That is how I found myself sitting in the safest position to pee into a pull-up – on the toilet.

It was what I had done that one time I had attempted to put together a makeshift diaper. That time, the decision to sit on the toilet had been because of the difficulties I had had in trying to pee myself, though that had proved to be a good decision considering how poorly the makeshift diaper had performed.

The walk from my bedroom to the bathroom, even though it was just the tiniest of strolls down the hallway, had nonetheless been nerve-wracking. I remembered all too well how Grace had caught me in wet pajamas in the hallway that one night when I had been certain that everyone else would be asleep. Still, as it was now after midnight, I felt confident that no one would be able to tell that I had gotten up.

There wasn’t any way for me to lose in this scenario. If the pull-up didn’t leak, I could go back to bed and wear it the rest of the night.

On the other hand, if it did end up leaking, there would be no evidence for Mom to find. I would likely need to toss the pull-up in the trash, but if Mom were to notice, I could always say that I had woken up early in the morning after an accident and tossed the pull-up to be more comfortable.

Wetting the pull-up while sitting on the toilet required little effort on my part, which was good because the need to pee wasn’t all that urgent. Bladders weren’t particularly smart that way. My bottom was seated on the toilet, so the fact that I still had a pull-up around my waist was inconsequential.

I found myself peeing the moment I decided that I wanted to.

This time, I counted the seconds out in my head as I began to feel a familiar warmth against my body.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.

For the first time after wetting the pull-up, I got to watch as it soaked up all the urine.

The pull-up did nothing to hide the fact that I was wetting, aside from how it began to swell up all around the epicenter. The white backing in the pull-up didn’t exactly stay white for long. It was one thing to feel it happening as I was lying in bed; it was something entirely else to watch the process take place.

I had to resist the urge to press against the pull-up and keep it firmly in place against my body in an attempt to stop any leaks from happening. If I was going to avoid any leaks, it was going to need to happen naturally.

It felt so incredibly good, and this time there wasn’t the rude interruption of wet sheets to interrupt my enjoyment of this wonderful sensation.

Nine Mississippi. Ten Mississippi.

Then I was all done. It was hardly the massive wetting like I had done yesterday afternoon in the basement or even close to as much as I had peed into the pull-up either of the two times I had wet it.

I listened carefully as I remained as still as I could on the toilet, waiting nervously for the sound of any urine leaking from the pull-up and dripping down into the toilet. All I heard was silence. I ran my hands down the inside of my thighs. Both stayed completely dry.

I released a large sigh of relief. I had done it. The third time was the charm. I had actually managed to pee in a pull-up successfully.

I didn’t get up from the toilet immediately. I was too comfortable to want to move. I gave the front of the pull-up a gently squeeze, feeling how much it had expanded. I estimated that the pull-up was perhaps only halfway full.

Without the need to stress over how to handle a leak, I was finally able to relax and take in the sensation of wearing a wet pull-up.

For several minutes, I allowed myself to empty my head of anything but the thoughts of how good I was feeling, but then it was time to return to bed.

That left me with a difficult choice. I really didn’t want to take the pull-up off, but I also was slightly worried that it might leak once I laid down on it in bed. Despite the risks, I couldn’t bring myself to remove the pull-up before I crawled back into bed.

I reflexively ran my hand under my waist just to double check that nothing had leaked out when I had pressed the pull-up between myself and the bed, but my sheets remained dry.

The effectiveness of the nighttime pull-ups began to make more sense now. Assuming that kids who wet the bed didn’t chug down lots of liquids before going to sleep, it did seem as though these pull-ups could live up to their claim of being able to provide enough protection to keep bedding and pajamas dry overnight.

I told myself that I could make this work. Having a pull-up I could pee in a little was far better than not having one to pee into at all.

It wasn’t everything that I wanted, but it would need to be enough for now. I had a sleepover to host this weekend.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Feb 22, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Content:

goodniteslover12 said:

Why are you only on chapter 29 here, but on chapter 42 on deviant art?

[End of quote]

Good question. I started posting this story elsewhere first, where it is fully up to date. Figured it would be better not to post everything here all at once. We'll be caught up in a week or so as I'll post once or twice a day.

It's fine to read ahead, let's just avoid spoilers.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Feb 23, 2025 at 5:23 PM
Content: Chapter 30: Different
My efforts with the pull-ups over the next two days were a complete success.

On Wednesday and Thursday nights, like I first had on Tuesday, I had gotten up after everyone else was asleep and had made my way to the bathroom toilet to safely wet the pull-up with just the right amount of pee.

Even though I had been drinking less water, sitting on the toilet still made it easy for me to relax and allow my bladder to empty into the pull-up. The pull-ups Mom had purchased for me were far from perfect, but through these several days of experiments I had at least confirmed that the pull-ups consistently did what they were supposed to do under the right conditions.

Three nights in a row of wet pull-ups without wet bedding or pajamas had been enough for Mom to tentatively agree to not call off the sleepover I had pre-planned with my friends for my birthday tomorrow on Saturday, though that meant I would still be needing to follow my strict regimen of not having too much to drink after dinner.

That didn’t mean that the sleepover was a go for sure. I still had tonight to pass. Mom made it clear that any leaks would mean that the sleepover portion of my birthday celebration would need to be canceled.

I wasn’t worried about the sleepover. There was absolutely no way I was going to be wearing the pull-up around my friends, let alone actually wet it. I would just pretend to my parents that I had been lucky enough to avoid a bedwetting incident that evening.

The pull-up wouldn’t be a problem at all. The actual problem might be with following my parents’ rules about how much I could have to drink without letting Angie and Emma catch on to anything being off. Mom would be keen to make sure the pull-up didn’t leak at night when my friends were over, and since she believed that keeping me from being too hydrated was the key to that, I suspected she would be watching what I was drinking like a hawk tomorrow night.

<><><>

Tonight, like nearly every Friday night, had been pizza night. Sadly, we had devoured all the pizza without leaving any leftovers for tomorrow.

But that didn’t matter much, since tomorrow was my birthday, I was allowed to choose whatever I wanted to eat for dinner when my two friends were over for the party. And yes, I had chosen pizza from my favorite local pizza place.

I had hung out with Emma a couple of evenings this week, and we had finalized some of our plans for the sleepover – with help from the occasional text from Angie, who wasn’t getting back home until late Friday evening.

There wouldn’t be an all-nighter, but that didn’t mean we weren’t going to be up late. My friends and I usually slept in sleeping bags in the living room when they spent the night. That way we could at least be a little noisy without waking everyone else up.

The sleepover was going to be such a relief after this first excruciatingly boring week of summer. I had gotten all the free time that I had coveted and had suddenly discovered how difficult it was to fill all of these hours I now had under my control.

But I knew better than to complain to Mom and Dad. If I said I was bored, they would likely take it upon themselves to find other ways for me to fill my time, and it was far from certain that I would be happy with the choices they might make.

Even finally succeeding in getting pull-ups for myself wasn’t making matters any better. It wasn’t like I could do anything with them in the day except look at them, and that only made the wait until bedtime feel even more excruciatingly long.

And all that waiting would culminate in spending ten, maybe fifteen seconds of peeing into the pull-ups. That experience was still as enjoyable as the first time I had done so, but it was such a small payoff for how long I had to wait and think about it every day.

Like each night before, I had gone back to bed, still wearing the wet pull-up. One of the best parts about peeing in it rather than in the bed was that the warmth from the accident would stick around a lot longer. I often found myself falling asleep before the interior of the pull-up had gone cold.

I had attempted to supplement that feeling by wetting myself a few more times while home alone for the day, but the satisfaction from that was always short-lived as I struggled to fight off thoughts about how weird and wrong it was to be doing it.

“Maddy, Maddy.”

I looked up from where I was sitting on the couch to see Mom trying to get my attention. I had again been lost in thoughts of what it was going to be like to be wearing the pull-up to bed in an hour or so.

Mom sent me to the kitchen to put the bowl of ice cream that I had finished in the sink. Luckily for Grace, she had done dishes prior to dessert, so this bowl would be for Mom or Dad to get washed before they went to bed.

Grace was upstairs, doing whatever it was that she liked to do on her bedroom computer. Jackson was in his room playing with Legos. He tended to sometimes avoid our parents when he knew it was getting close to bedtime, as if being out of their sight might cause them to forget that it was time to tell him to get ready for bed.

I returned to the living room to come across an unusual sight. Dad had left his recliner which he rarely did in the evening, and had instead taken a seat next to Mom on the couch. However, instead of sitting right next to each other, he had left an empty cushion right between them.

“Maddy, why don’t you have a seat?” Dad asked as he patted a spot on the couch between him and Mom. “There is something we need to talk with you about.”

My heart sank. This was worse than being in regular trouble. Regular trouble usually meant being referred to by my whole first name rather than Maddy, perhaps with my middle name also getting invoked if it was a little more serious.

This was worse. Way worse.

It was the conflict that caused the most consternation. I was never called Maddy when I was in trouble. But I was also never asked to sit down for something to talk about between my parents unless it was for a serious conversation about some misbehavior on my part.

My first worry was that they had found out about how Grace had helped me cheat on the math homework, but that would have involved a double scolding, and Grace was nowhere to be found. Besides, as I tried to re-assure myself, Grace’s efforts had only gotten me a “C” on the assignment, part of her strategy to make sure the result didn’t look suspicious.

No, it had to be something worse. Had they realized that something was off about the bedwetting? Had Dr. Mathorn caught on after the test results showed that nothing was wrong with my body? But surely that wouldn’t be the case. They hadn’t given the slightest inclination at all this week that they harbored any doubts about my bedwetting.

“It’s OK, Maddy, you aren’t in any trouble,” Mom said.

OK. That did it, then. I was so in trouble.

It didn’t take long to walk from where I was standing at the entrance of the room to the couch, but it felt like an eternity.

Nothing else was said until I eased myself down between my parents.

“We got your grades back from school,” Dad said

He grabbed his laptop from the table next to his side of the couch. It was already on the website where parents could check their kids’ grades. He set it down on his lap at an angle where I could see what was shown on the screen.

I’d heard stories about the old days when kids would be sent home with only a paper copy of their report card to show to their parents. That was a lot better because at least you’d have a warning about what it entailed rather than being surprised by them. I’d also heard stories about kids who had attempted – some successfully, some not – to alter those report cards so the grades didn’t look quite so bad when presented to their parents.

How I wished I would have been able to pull that off.

I scanned through my grades for my seventh-grade year, dismay building up in me with each additional result.

I had never done particularly well in school, much to my parents’ consternation. It didn’t help that I had an older sister who had always maintained pretty much perfect grades all the way through high school. Grace’s level of success wasn’t a bar that I was ever going to meet.

A good grade for me was typically a “B.” I usually got one – maybe two – of those in a semester if I was lucky. The rest of my grades usually fell in the range of a “C,” though often closer to a “C-” than a “C+.”

The results this year were far worse than in years past.

This second year of middle school had been tough, but I hadn’t realized how poorly it had gone on until now. I still had one “B” on my report card for PE, which didn’t come as much of a surprise. Everywhere else wasn’t looking good. I only managed one “C” in my other subjects, having earned that grade in my American History class.

“D.”

That was the letter marking every other line of the report card. Well, almost every other line. There was one letter even worse than that, listed as the grade I had earned for my math class.

I looked away from the laptop screen for a second before looking at it again. Nothing had changed. Those grades hadn’t been my imagination. There wasn’t anything I could say to improve the situation, so I sat between both of my parents in silence.

I hadn’t really paid all that much attention to the grades I had gotten back on assignments throughout the school year. Had it really been that bad? Had I perhaps performed more poorly than expected during final exams, dragging my low grades even lower?

“Maddy,” Dad said, breaking the silence. “Your mother and I are concerned about how you did at school this year. This isn’t what we were expecting to see when we got your grades back. What happened?”

I started picking at the skin around my fingernails, wincing as I peeled away at my skin enough to cause it to start bleeding. How was I… how could I explain what he was seeing on the report card?

“I… Um… Um…”

“We got your grades back from your standardized tests as well,” Mom said. “Those didn’t turn out any better.”

I stared down at my lap, unable to think of anything to say.

“And we talked with some of your teachers,” Dad said. “They said you seemed to be having a difficult time behaving and paying attention in class.”

It was all too much to take in at once. “I’m not stupid,” I blurted out.

“Maddy, no one is saying that you’re stupid,” Dad said. “Some kids learn differently than others, that’s all.”

Different. There was one mental image that displayed more prominently than any other. A picture of Hannah popped right into my head. The stupid way she talked by prattling on and on. Her stupid watch, telling her to go potty every time she forgot. How her parents wanted her to go to a special school cause she was too stupid to attend a regular one.

I wasn’t stupid like her. I wasn’t.

“I’m not, though,” I muttered, almost as if to myself.

Despite my best efforts at keeping a straight face, tears began forming in the corners of my eyes. I tried to blink them away, but it was no use.

I wasn’t actually sad. It was just something that happened whenever I got flustered or upset or angry. I would start crying, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. I hated it so much. It was hard to argue with my parents or be taken seriously when tears were streaming down my face.

I felt Dad’s firm hand begin to rub my back as Mom placed a gentle hand on my lap.

Everything my parents were saying felt like it was going in one ear and out of the other as their conversation continued. It was a blur that I couldn’t bring myself to focus on, let alone comprehend. There was something about how they had talked with some of my teachers about how I was doing in class. Then, the dreaded phrase – summer school. What steps might need to be taken to avoid needing to repeat seventh grade. And then there was something about how they were going to have me go see a therapist next week and get tested for some attention disorder thing.

This couldn’t be happening. It all felt so wrong. It was summer break. I shouldn’t have had to worry about school for another three months.

The tears were getting worse now, and I was starting to sniffle, first a little and then rather loudly. Mom scooted closer to me until she was right up against me on the couch.

“It’s only middle school,” Mom said. “Grades don’t really start counting until you start high school, anyway. There’s plenty of time for you to get back on track next year.”

“But…” I said before being interrupted by another loud sniffle. I couldn’t find the right words to express how I was feeling.

Mom put her hand around my shoulder, and then pulled me closer to her so that my head was resting against her with my face buried in her shoulder.

“Everything is going to be alright,” Mom said. Her hand was now resting on my head with her fingers sifting through my hair. “We’ll get you all the help that you need to make sure you do well in school next year.”

That promise sounded more ominous than comforting at the moment.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Mar 1, 2025 at 5:06 PM
Content: Chapter 31: Saved for LaterI was fairly certain that I had brushed my teeth, flossed, washed my face, and used the toilet. But I wasn't one hundred percent sure.

I also didn't recall putting the pull-up on either, but there it was, snug around my waist as I stood in front of my dresser. The differences between it and the pull-up I had desired all these years felt a little less pronounced now that I had worn these generic bedwetting pull-ups to bed four nights in a row. It wasn't the same. But it was still pretty good.

The past half-hour had been a complete blur. I was extremely grateful that my siblings had been too distracted to wander back downstairs because I had stayed and cried on Mom's shoulder for several minutes before I managed to calm down slightly and catch my breath.

I still wasn't sure how I had managed to find my way upstairs and get ready for bed while my brain was still in a fog. The sniffles still hadn't gone away, and my eyes now felt irritated from how much I had been rubbing them earlier in unsuccessful attempts to quell the tears.

However, my mind was finally beginning to feel clear enough to begin to assess what had just transpired.

It almost felt like it would have been better if my parents had simply been angry with me for getting bad grades. But they never really got angry with me – or any of my siblings. Disappointment was a reaction to times of more serious misbehavior.

But how they had handled the news about my end-of-year grades – instead of making me feel better – only made me feel worse. I had done so poorly that they couldn't even be mad or disappointed. My performance had been so bad that nothing but a complete intervention of help would do.

I didn't like the insinuation behind my parents' offers of help that there was something wrong with me. I'd just had a bad time with this semester. I could try harder next year. I still wasn't really clear what exactly they wanted to do about it before school started up again in several months.

But assurances that I would try harder weren't enough for my parents. And now, a summer that I felt had been perfectly planned out was about to be ruined less than a week in.

It just wasn't fair. I did try to do well in school. I had plenty of other classmates who goofed off and didn't pay attention. But they didn't seem to have any issues with getting good grades when it came time to turn in assignments and take quizzes and exams. I probably just hadn't tried hard enough; that, at least, was something I could admit at times.

I grabbed a nightgown from my dresser. While it was long enough to easily cover the pull-up, it was a thin enough material that I wouldn't be uncomfortable in this summer weather.

As far as I knew, Grace remained oblivious to the fact that I was now wearing pull-ups to bed. I'd finally worked up the courage to directly bring up that topic with my parents earlier in the week when I had a chance to be alone with them, and they reassured me that they wouldn't.

It helped that Grace was gone for her summer job by the time I was out of bed in the morning. That made it easy for me to toss the wet pull-up in the garage trash bin without fear of it being seen in the process.

That left the question of what to say if Grace asked whether the bedwetting was continuing. Thankfully, she wasn't usually that nosy and had shown a reluctance to bring up the topic of her own accord around me, likely because it brought up memories of her own years as a bedwetter.

Which was good for me. Mom, Dad, and Dr. Mathorn were the only people who needed to know that I was wearing pull-ups to bed at night, and I didn't see any reason why I wouldn't be able to keep the secret limiting to just them.

I was so emotionally drained that even wetting the pull-up didn't sound all that appealing. I didn't feel like attempting to stay up late to wet my pull-up in the bathroom like the past three nights.

But that was fine for this evening. I didn't doubt Mom's sincerity in her threats to cancel the sleepover if the pull-ups leaked at all, so perhaps it was best to just completely play things safe for the night.

<><><>

I woke up to the unusual sensation of a dry pull-up between my legs. I had grown used to waking up to a full pull-up the past three mornings, as I had always chosen to wear the pull-up back to bed after wetting it in the bathroom.

There was enough light coming through my windows that I knew I had slept for a long time. Which was fair, as I had a lot of lost sleep that I probably needed to catch up on.

Then I remembered why I had been so exhausted last night that I hadn't bothered to wet the pull-up and the conversation with my parents about my extra poor grades this semester. I didn't want to dwell on whatever plans they were drawing up for me this summer, but I couldn't keep the worst-case scenarios from flooding my brain after having a night to mull over what might be in store for me.

Could I end up stuck in summer school, forced to get on the bus every day to in a musty, warm classroom that lacked adequate air condition to protect from the summer heat? Suddenly, the last, mostly boring, week of being home alone was suddenly not bad after all.

Then I remembered something else that put all of that out of my mind. Today was my birthday. I was now officially a teenager. And I was having a sleepover tonight.

Technically, as my parents and older sister liked to remind me. I wasn't going to officially be thirteen until 7:14 p.m. this evening. That didn't seem fair to me. I deserved a full day to celebrate being a year older. I wondered what my parents had planned for a gift for me, but presents were usually reserved for the party, and that wouldn't begin until later in the afternoon as Angie needed at least a little bit of time to recover from coming back from the road trip she had been on with her family.

And now that I was thirteen, Angie and Emma wouldn't be able to get away with teasing me about being the baby of our friend group. Maybe Grace would take me a little more seriously with us both being in our teens.

I did feel a normal urge to pee. If I hadn't had the threat of not having a sleepover hanging over my head, I perhaps would have given into that urge to let my bladder go right away, despite the high likelihood that the pull-up would end up leaking all over the bed.

Then I decided that it was for the best that I hadn't wet the pull-up.

I realized something that I hadn't considered earlier. Since I had kept the pull-up dry all night, there certainly wasn't any point in throwing it out. Mom had said that I should toss even the unwet ones each morning. She had said something about how just sweating at night would make it unhygienic to wear the same pull-up for multiple nights in a row.

I really didn't see the harm in it. Besides, if I kept it, I wouldn't be wearing it to bed again. I'd just be getting it out Monday morning to wear for a few hours in the day before I actually wet it.

Still, it wouldn't do for Mom to realize that the pull-up count was off in my dresser on the off chance that she was to check it. She did sometimes put clothes away in my bedroom if she had purchased anything new for me or if any of my things had gotten mixed up in her laundry.

I removed the dry pull-up from underneath my nightgown. The drawer beneath my bed, where I kept the old magazine and ads I had saved over the years, would be the perfect spot to hide it away until Monday arrived.

I had just reached down to grab the handle of the drawer when my bedroom door burst open.

I twirled around quickly, keeping the pull-up behind me and out of sight as Jackson burst into the room. A few seconds earlier or a few seconds later and it would have been a disaster as I likely wouldn't have been able to keep the pull-up out of sight.

"What the heck?" I yelled.

I didn't understand why he didn't get it. The rules with my bedroom were really simple. Knock. And then enter when I say you can. I mean, I understood that about Grace's room when I was Jackson's age.

"Happy birthday!" Jackson yelled in response as he continued to speed toward me.

It was clear that he wanted to give me a hug.

There was, of course, absolutely no way I was going to allow that to happen. I had the pull-up head securely behind my back. I couldn't risk moving around, much less allowing him to wrap his arms around me.

"Shoo!" I said, still keeping a tight grip on the pull-up with both hands behind me. "You shouldn't be in here. You have your own bedroom."

My lack of enthusiasm for his rude awakening at least caused Jackson to stop short of throwing his arms around me.

"Dad says you need to get up for breakfast."

I sighed. There probably were a bunch of things waiting for me down in the kitchen that I didn't really feel like eating. I usually wasn't hungry until I'd been awake for several hours. Explaining that to my parents still didn't stop them from being aghast at all the times, I would skip eating anything for breakfast.

I hated the types of birthday surprised which were more my parents attempting to get me to do something they would think is fun than something that I would actually think was fun. A massive breakfast in the morning, when I would be judged for not trying all the food they had made for me despite the fact that my stomach wasn't ready for anything yet, wasn't exactly my definition of fun.

"What are you hiding?" Jackson asked. He started to lean to the side, so I shifted as well, keeping my hands and the pull-up out of sight.

I tightened my grip on the pull-up. "Nothing."

"Then show me your hands."

I inched backward so that I was standing right up against my bed. With my legs together, the pull-up wouldn't be visible directly behind me.

I dropped it onto the mattress and displayed both of my hands.

"See. Nothing. Now shoo. You shouldn't come in without knocking."

He ran off. But, of course, he didn't even have the courtesy to shut the door behind him.

The second I heard his feet start to race down the stairs, I turned and hastily stuffed the pull-up deep in the drawer. That had been way too much of a close call.

I wasn't worried that it would be found in that location. Mom didn't have any reason to go into that drawer on the rare times she came into my room. And my friends usually didn't spend much time in my bedroom during normal sleepovers. We would sleep in the living room to avoid disturbing everyone else upstairs. And even during normal hours, there wasn't as much to do in my bedroom.

I didn't bother changing out of the rest of my pajamas. I could do that when I hopped in the shower after breakfast.

Maybe if I was lucky, there would at least be bacon.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Mar 1, 2025 at 5:06 PM
Content: Chapter 32: Definitions
Breakfast did, in fact, contain a lot of bacon. There was plenty of other stuff as well. Sliced grapefruits, French toast, scrambled eggs, and yogurt.

The plate I filled up before heading to the dining room table was mostly bacon with the smallest slice of French toast I could find. I didn’t really care for it, but I knew my parents would say something if I didn’t eat anything other than bacon. Yogurt was plain yucky, and I would rather eat almost anything else other than grapefruit.

The one bonus was Mom had at least purchased the right kind of orange juice – pulp free – for me. I had a completely full glass of it. There wasn’t any point in restricting how much I drank during breakfast.

Everyone said happy birthday at least once as I sat down at the table. I was just glad that there wasn’t a muffin with a candle on it to have them sing happy birthday to me like they had done last year.

“How does it feel to finally be a teenager?” Mom asked.

My mouth was already full of bacon, so I shrugged my shoulders.

Honestly, I didn’t feel any different from the day before. It was weird. I’d had been looking forward to it for so long, but it wasn’t like anything was all that different. I looked and felt the same as yesterday.

“She does still have a few hours till it counts for real,” Grace said.

I just rolled my eyes and stuck a fork in a greasy piece of bacon. Everyone else was eating it with their fingers, but I didn’t like the feeling of my hands being that messy while I was eating.

Dad reminded my siblings of the birthday plans for the evening. Jackson was indifferent, but Grace wasn’t able to hide that she was shocked.

“Wait, Maddy is having a sleepover tonight?” Grace asked with a barely disguised incredulity.

I realized, rather belatedly, that my older sister must have suspected that something was up, but she should have noticed that the morning laundry had come to a stop after my doctor’s appointment. I would be fine as long as that could be attributed to my bedwetting ending as abruptly as it had begun, rather than her thinking that I was now wearing diapers to bed.

Jackson was busy chowing down on his French toast, but his presence at the dining room table thankfully prevented the conversation from delving directly into the topic of bedwetting.

“Yes, your sister is all set to have a sleepover without any issues,” Mom said. “Angie and Emma will be over shortly before dinner, so I’ll need you to spend a little time helping to get things straightened up before they arrive.”

Grace looked over at me after Mom had finished with her explanation. I tried to keep a neutral face. Did she believe that the bedwetting had actually stopped?

“Fine,” Grace muttered, “just as long as they leave me alone.”

That wouldn’t be an issue. Grace didn’t care much for hanging out with my friends, and the feeling was mutual. That lone time she had taken us to be dropped off at the mall a couple of weeks back had been the most interaction she’d had with Angie and Emma in ages.

Thankfully, Grace’s interrogation came to a quick end. I managed to eat a half-dozen slices of thick bacon and a couple of bites of French toast before I was too stuffed to eat anything else.

My birthday fun was put on hold as soon as I was done with breakfast. I was immediately banished to my bedroom to get it tidied up for tonight.

It wasn’t like my friends typically spent much time in my bedroom, and, with my new extra crinkly mattress, I didn’t have any plans of inviting them up, either.

That didn’t stop Mom from making me clean it as thoroughly as possible.

I had been warned earlier in the week that I would need to have everything tidied up, but as Mom hadn’t officially cleared the sleepover until I had once again woken up Saturday morning to a dry bed, it had been hard to motivate myself to actually do anything more than pick up a few clothes off of the floor.

That is to say, I was forced to spend the morning of my thirteenth birthday cleaning my bedroom.

I surveyed my bedroom. I didn’t think it was all that bad, but Mom didn’t agree.

The problem was that our definitions of cleanliness were vastly different. It was not that we both didn’t think that everything needed to be in the right spot; it was just that our understanding of what the right spot to put things in didn’t always line up all that well.

For me, as long as I could remember where something was, that was enough. For Mom, everything had to have a specific place to be put away, and it had to be done in a neat and orderly fashion.

The next couple of hours passed slowly. I ended up sitting on my bed reading for most of the time rather than getting to work tidying up the room. I would listen carefully for the sound of someone coming up the stairs or down the hallway and would hastily tuck the book under the pillow and start the cleaning up again for a few minutes anytime there was the possibility that Mom might be coming to check on my progress. Most of my cleaning had involved collecting miscellaneous odds and ends and stuffing them in the closet or the drawers beneath my bed.

Mom was that way with the rest of the house, but she never allowed it to get to the point of being super messy, so getting ready for guests was never a huge chore. Jackson had been given his own set of cleaning chores to do, but that mostly consisted of picking up his toys so that Grace could help with vacuuming.

The distant sound of footsteps coming up the stairs caused me to tuck my book once again under my pillow as I sprung out of bed and pretended to be organizing a bookshelf.

There was a knock at the door, and I yelled to Mom that she could come in.

“We need to talk about the plan for tonight,” Mom said as she was in my bedroom with the door shut firmly behind her.

She looked around at the state of my room. It didn’t seem like she was all that impressed with my progress – or lack thereof – in the few hours since breakfast. “When it is time to get changed into your pajamas, you need to make sure you don’t forget to put your bedtime underwear on.”

It had been a while since we had directly talked about the pull-ups she had purchased for me. I had very much preferred our arrangement, where she and Dad would let me handle everything for myself.

“Mom, I’m not going to forget.”

Mom stared back at me. “There’s going to be a lot going on for the sleepover, and I know it’s easy for you to get caught up in things. I had an idea to help make it easier for you. I know you don’t normally get a lot of privacy to dress by yourself during sleepovers, so I’m going to leave a pair of bedtime underwear in the downstairs bedroom for you.”

“Mom. No.”

Mom held up an opaque makeup bag. “Why don’t we put two of them in here, just in case? I’ll tuck it in the back of the cupboard under the sink. No one else will notice it. I’ve even put some plastic baggies in there so you can toss it without someone seeing that it has been put in the garbage.”

I didn’t like Mom’s plan, but I could hardly say no to it. My intention all along had been to just not wear the pull-up to bed during the sleepover. It wasn’t like I was going to have an actual bedwetting accident. And since I had had a few nights where I had stayed dry, I could play it off as just getting lucky for the sleepover.

But with Mom setting all of that up for me, avoiding wearing a pull-up would be an impossible task to pull off. What if Mom were to check that container later and discover that I hadn’t actually taken a pull-up out of it?

“Fine,” I said.

“OK, but I need you to help me get some to put in it. Where are you keeping them?”

That last question led to me needing to awkwardly walk over to my dresser, cringing as I pulled open the top drawer to reveal that the remaining pull-ups had been crammed in hap hazardously with my socks and underwear.

I handed Mom two of the pull-ups while trying to keep the disarray out of view, but I wasn’t successful. Mom leaned in to take a look at the rest of the dresser.

I didn’t understand the point of folding underwear. It got all crinkling under my clothes, anyway. And I hated having to go through my socks and put together matching pairs. It was much easier to just have them all in one pile in my dresser, where I could take out any two that looked like they might be a good fit while I was getting dressed.

“Madelyn, this is a mess,” Mom said, sifting through the pile of socks. “I’ve told you before that everything needs to be sorted and folder before it goes into the dresser.”

I knew better at this point than to argue. I hadn’t been successful in my other attempts to get Mom to see my point of view on how laundry should be managed.

But then Mom had the gumption to pull open the remaining dresser drawers, which revealed much of the same issue. I had folded my shirts, well, perhaps most of them. But the rest — shorts, leggings, and other items – had been balled up and stuffed randomly in the rest of the dressers.

I stood anxiously with my legs crossed as I watched Mom look at each of the drawers. Thankfully, all the items I intended to keep hidden from her – the dry pull-up from last night and the diaper and pull-up advertisements – were instead in the drawers beneath my bed. I couldn’t help but glance over at them as well. If Mom was intent on seeing how I had organized everything, was she going to stop with my dresser and not check everything else out?

I didn’t have that luck. Mom proceeded to check the drawers beneath my bed, though at least those were deep and she didn’t do much more than a cursory glance to see that like with everything else, I had pretty much just stuffed all the things I had needed to put away into the drawers without taking any time to make things neat or organized.

“You’ll need to tackle this later,” Mom said. “It will have to do for now. Your room isn’t clean just because you jammed everything out of sight, but you need to get all your clothing re-folded.”

“But Mom, that is going to take too long.”

“There is plenty of time until your friends arrive. It would have been quicker if you had cleaned up your room right the first time, but it still needs to be done.”

There was no escape at this point. Mom left to go to her own bedroom and was doing some tidying up there, which seemed exceptionally pointless to me. I mean, why did it matter if it was a little disorganized or messy? It wasn’t as though any of my friends would be checking it out.

The problem was that Mom was only ever a few steps into the hallway, away from being able to see what I was doing in my bedroom.

I emptied out each drawer individually onto my bed, re-folding all the clothes before tucking them back into place. I wanted the fun parts of being a teenager, not the assumption that I was supposed to do everything in the responsible way my parents wanted it done.

As I finished finally placing all my newly sorted and folded clothing back into the dresser, I tried to figure out what I was going to do about the pull-up tonight.

I thought about how I had heard a crinkling sound occasionally when I had been around Hannah. What excuse would I give my friends if they began to ask what the sound was or where it was coming from? I tried to remind myself that even though the sound had stood out, I hadn’t connected it to her wearing pull-ups until Hannah had been on the swing and had accidentally shown me what was beneath her skirt.

I would be safe tonight. My friends didn’t know I wore pull-ups. They would have zero reason to even think there was the remotest possibility that I had one on when I was around them.

After the third inspection, the state of my room finally received Mom’s seal of approval, and with the rest of the house all clean, everything was set for my friends to arrive in a few hours.

Given all the chaos of the past week – some of it good, some of it, well, not very good – a birthday sleepover would be a welcome return to normal.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 2, 2025 at 3:49 AM
Content: Chapter 33: Birthday Sleepover (Part 1: A Birthday Wish)
Everything was all set for the sleepover.

Three sleeping bags and accompanying pillows were set in a corner of the living room for when we would finally be headed to bed. Even though my parents had vetoed the idea of an all-nighter – my mom insisted that we had to at least get a little sleep – there was no doubt we would be up late, definitely well past the time everyone else in the house was asleep.

Somewhere in the house, there were birthday presents wrapped and hidden. I still didn’t know where my parents kept presents hidden before birthdays and Christmas. I’d had no better luck finding them in the house than I’d had in my fruitless searches for diapers years ago.

Pizza was ordered. I’d gotten my choice of anything I wanted to eat for dinner, and I had chosen exactly what I had wanted. There was also a Hawaiian pizza for me, a cheese pizza for Angie and Jackson, who were the picky eaters of the bunch, and a meat lover’s pizza for everyone else so they could have something that they might enjoy.

The pull-ups I hadn’t found a way around wearing tonight were currently tucked away in the back of the cupboard beneath the bathroom sink. A few minutes ago, mom had given me one last quiet reminder about the plan for me to discreetly change into – and out of – them tonight.

I could hardly sit still. I found myself getting up every few minutes from where I was sitting on the couch with my phone and walking all the way to the window near the dining room to check if any of my friends had pulled into the driveway yet.

The anticipation wasn’t for the usual reasons, at least not completely. There was still that concern about what might be awaiting me when I opened my birthday presents later today. But there was also the nervousness of what was going to be in store for me as I attempted to keep my bedwetting secret safe. I had to wear the pull-up to make sure Mom believed that my worries about wetting myself overnight were genuine. And I had to keep the secret from my friends, because I would never, ever live it down if that secret were to get out.

I had only settled back into my spot on the couch when I finally heard the sound I had been looking for.

Now, with the first ring of the doorbell, one of my friends was here.

I sprinted into the dining room, which was by the entryway, just as Dad opened the door for Angie to come inside. It felt like it had been forever since I had last seen her, even though she had only been gone away on a road trip to South Dakota with her parents for a week.

I gave her a hug before she had a chance to set any of her things down. Then I noticed what she was holding.

I attempted to reach for the present in Angie’s hand, but she pulled it back.

“Not yet,” she said. “I know you’re trying to guess what is inside.”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “That’s half the fun.”

Angie set the present aside on the table, but only after I had pinkie-promised not to touch it until it was time to open it.

Emma arrived a few minutes later, also carrying a backpack and a present. Both presents were wrapped into neat cubes, not giving away any potential hints about their contents.

We chatted for a bit about details from the past week that hadn’t made it into our shared text chat. Angie complained quite a bit about how boring the road trip had been.

“You have no idea how freaking flat it was, grass for as far as you could see for hours and hours.”

“So,” Emma said. “At least you didn’t have to deal with a teenage cousin who isn’t potty trained yet, going around peeing all over my bedroom.”

“Hey, let’s not turn this debate about who had the more miserable week into a pissing contest,” Angie said, barely managing to keep a straight face before cracking up at her joke.

“You’ll find out exactly what I mean,” Emma said. “This weekend wasn’t the worst of it. My aunt and uncle apparently found a house in the neighborhood that they want to put an offer on pretty soon. Just wait till you have to deal with her later in the summer.”

I didn’t know how to react to that news. I couldn’t get over the sense of annoyance and discomfort I felt from being around Emma’s cousin. But then I remembered what I had seen inside her suitcase. If I had a diaper to wear instead of a pull-up, I was sure I’d be able to drink as much as I wanted and pee without the slightest concern of a leak. Having to deal with Hannah might be worth it if just for the slightest chance of getting to try an actual diaper for once.

The doorbell rang for a third time. This time, it was for the pizza delivery.

“Please don’t tell me you ordered a Hawaiian Pizza,” Angie said.

“Don’t worry,” Emma said. “I’m sure Maddy still got a cheese one just for you.”

Grace, who had already retreated to her bedroom before the doorbell had run for Angie, made her way downstairs to fill a plate with pizza before heading up to her bedroom. Getting to hide away and eat upstairs was her one consolation prize for needing to deal with me having friends over for a sleepover.

It was pretty much the same for me whenever Grace had hosted sleepovers of her own. I didn’t have anything in common with her friends, either, so during her sleepovers I would be off at Angie or Emma’s place for a sleepover of my own, or I would be happily hidden away in my bedroom reading Harry Potter.

I had the whole evening planned out. And, of course, because it was my birthday, I got to have priority for the evening plans.

That meant it was time to watch a Harry Potter movie. This was the only day of the year when I could get away with making my friends sit down for it. In my defense, I didn’t care all that much about the movies they would choose to watch during their birthday parties.

After pizza and a movie, it would be time for presents and cake. I would probably be able to talk my friends into playing some games before everyone else went to bed and we had the living room to ourselves. Then the real fun could begin.

My Dad wasn’t much for social media, which didn’t really make a lot of sense to me, considering his whole job seemed to revolve around working with computers and technology. I wasn’t allowed access to any of that and wouldn’t get it until high school.

That didn’t stop me from attempting to live vicariously through my friends, though we’d have to make at least some effort to be quiet later this evening if we wanted to make any TikTok videos downstairs without waking up the rest of the house.

I settled onto the couch with my pizza as the familiar opening theme began to play, a melody that was calming in the face of the unknown awaiting me later this evening.

<><><>

There weren’t any candles on the cake in front of me. I had a thing about blowing over food that people were about to it. It just felt so gross and weird.

And given that it was an ice cream cake as well, perhaps that was for the best.

Instead, two candles – a one and a three – were sitting upright on a small plate, secured at the bottom with wax that was keeping them from falling over. Dad struck a match and lit the one and then the three. What followed was my least favorite part of having a birthday – the completely out-of-tune rendition of the Happy Birthday song.

It would have been fine if everyone gathered around the table could follow Mom’s lead – she, at least, being a former actress in musicals, could keep a perfect pitch – but what followed was a discordant mess that just made me want to place my hands over my ears.

The only good thing was the song was over quickly. I didn’t think there was a second chorus to it. And if there was, I prayed fervently that my friends and family would never discover it.

I blew out the candles in two short puffs the moment the song ended.

“What did you wish for?” Grace asked. “You have to have a birthday wish.”

“But you can’t tell anyone,” Mom said. “Then the wish doesn’t happen.”

I had completely forgotten about birthday wishes. Of course, the wishes for the past few years had been pretty obvious. Pull-ups had been at the top of my mind each of those times, and that wasn’t a hard wish to keep secret.

But what did I want now that I had gotten what I wanted? I knew what it was. I wanted more. I wished for diapers.

“Looks like someone is happy about her wish,” Angie said.

I felt my cheeks growing warm at her comment. I added a second wish. And don’t let my friends find out.

There were a total of six presents waiting for me on the table next to my birthday cake. There were one each from Angie and Emma, two from my parents – though technically three, since they would have also bought whatever Jackson had picked out for me for his gift – and one present from my sister.

I started with the gifts from my friends. I got a new soccer ball from Angie – I could never have enough – and then a soccer jersey from my favorite team, courtesy of Emma. The theme continued with Grace, who got me an electric soccer ball inflator tool, but that was interrupted by Jackson, whose gift was a couple bags of my favorite candy.

While I was happy with everything, I was hoping that I had saved the best for last. There were two presents remaining, both from my parents. One of them was just a regular box shape; the other was thin, almost in the shape of a book, except probably too thin to actually be one.

Out of curiosity, I grabbed the smaller of the two presents first.

“I think you should open that one second…“ Mom began, but I was already in the middle of ripping off the wrapping paper to reveal someone that I hadn’t even remotely considered as a possibility, a Harry Potter video game. I turned the case over in my hands, noticing that the game was for a Nintendo Switch.

I stared at the game blankly. I had never had any gaming systems, and as none of my friends did either, I hadn’t ever played outside of a few random times I’d played with a soccer teammate during overnight trips for tournaments, and I had been pretty terrible at it compared to my much more well-practiced teammates.

The only video games I ever played were simple games I would occasionally pull up on my phone if I was especially bored at the moment.

“But how I am supposed to play it?” I asked. “I don’t have a Switch.”

Mom started laughing. “Maddy, I think you’d better open up the next present.”

I set the video-game case on the table and began to unwrap the last remaining present. I didn’t even need to get all the wrapping paper off before I realized what had been hidden beneath. I was now the proud owner of a Nintendo Switch.

I dropped the half-unwrapped box onto the table and raced over to give each of my parents a hug.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Emma groaning and Angie rolling her eyes. I had never succeeded – despite my many attempts – to convert them into becoming at least slightly into Harry Potter, much less into becoming as much of a dedicated fan as I was.

That was perfectly OK. As far as I was aware, this was only a single-player game, after all.

I returned to the table and finished tearing off the rest of the wrapping paper. I was pretty clueless as to how I was supposed to set everything up, but I knew exactly how I was going to be spending all of my free time this summer, even if there ended up being a little less of it than I initially had hoped for.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 2, 2025 at 3:49 AM
Content: Chapter 34: The Birthday Sleepover (Part 2: Hidden Underneath)

I kept pressing all of the buttons on the Nintendo Switch, but nothing was happening.

Getting everything out of the box had been a pain. My fingernails had been too short to pick through all of the tape holding the box for the gaming console together. Dad had needed to pull out his keys to get it open.

What had really surprised me was out tiny the game cartridge was. I had figured with how big the case was for the Harry Potter game that what was inside would have been a lot bigger. Instead, the cartridge I had pulled out after opening it had been just a little bigger than the fingernail on my thumb.

I had clutched it tightly, deathly afraid that I'd somehow drop it and never find it again. Grace helped show me where I should insert the cartridge into the Switch, and that at least alleviated some of my fears about losing it for the moment.

But that wasn't my biggest annoyance.

"It won't turn on," I complained. I was fairly certain I was pressing the power button.

"Um, I think you need to charge it first," Angie said a bit sarcastically.

"Of course, I knew that," I mumbled, searching through the box until I found the charging cable.

That was so not fair. I didn't want to wait for it to charge. I wanted to play it right away. The one nice thing I noticed was that it did use the same type of charger as my phone, that would at least keep things simple.

The consolation prize was that it was now time for cake, Harry Potter themed, of course.

"Why don't you girls get ready for bed now?" Mom said after we had finished eating our cake.

"But Mom, we're not going to sleep now. I want to stay up until midnight."

"I know," Mom said. "But if you're going to do that upstairs, I want you to do it now so you aren't waking everyone else up in the middle of the night."

We filed up to my bedroom to have a spot to get ready for bed. My friends both grabbed their bags and followed me upstairs.

Angie and Emma searched their bags for pajamas. Emma pulled out a pair of shorts and a t-shirt for herself, but Angie came up empty handed.

"I didn't bring anything," Angie said. "Can I just borrow some of your shorts instead?"

"Fine," I sighed. Angie seemed to almost never remember to bring pajamas for herself.

"Thanks," she replied. Then Angie started walking directly toward my dresser, her hand reaching toward the top drawer.

That was not good. The pull-ups were in the top drawer. And even with Mom having me re-organize my dresser, I hadn't done anything to tuck them out of sight. I should have done so. I just hadn't considered that my friends might snoop or, in this case, have a legitimate reason to be going through the dresser.

Instead, the pull-ups were just stacked in a neat pile on the left side of the dresser, next to the actual underwear that they were but a crude imitation of.

"Bottom drawer," I said quickly. "You can't borrow my underwear."

"Eww. No." Angie instead bent down to open the newly organized bottom drawer where she pulled out a pair of pajama shorts.

That was close. Way too close. I didn't want my friends to be in my bedroom any longer than was absolutely necessary.

"Thanks," Angie said as she finished getting dressed. "My Mom hasn't gotten caught up on laundry after getting back from our road trip."

That was another thing. Of the three of us, I was the only one who actually had to do their own laundry. Angie and Emma's parents still did theirs.

"I am just so glad to be back," Angie said. "I would go crazy if I would have to stare out the window like that again for hours on end."

"You got to see Mount Rushmore," I said.

"Boring. I mean, I guess it was kind of cool, but not like the drive ten hours to see it kind of cool."

Emma started sniffing as she finished getting dressed.

"Something smells," she said. "It almost smells like my room did with Hannah pissing herself every night."

Angie and Emma both turned to look at me. I sniffed a little myself. Why couldn't I notice anything? Mom had just been in my room earlier today as well. She should have noticed and said something to me if it was smelling off.

But I needed an excuse. And I could just say that I wasn't able to smell it myself.

"That must have been Chester," I said, throwing the cat under the bus. "Sometimes he gets shut in the bedroom overnight. He might have peed on something then. I don't know how I didn't notice it earlier."

"Gross," Angie said.

"I'm glad I don't have a cat," Emma said.

This was the second disaster that had been narrowly averted in a matter of minutes. I needed to get my friends out of my bedroom as soon as possible before something else went wrong. The only good thing so far was that no one had sat down on my bed yet. I wasn't sure if I would be able to come up with as good of an excuse for why it was suddenly sounding different than it had on sleepovers last summer.

"Are you going to get dressed, or are you just going to stand there?" Angie asked.

Oh. Right. I headed over to my dresser and stripped off my shorts and shirt.

I considered my options.

A nightgown was out. Yes, while I was standing, it would be good, but lying down on the couch or on the carpet could potentially make things tricky.

Most of my pajama pants had gotten ruled out as well. They tended to either be too thin or tight-fitting, to the point where the extra padding from the pull-up would be obvious, or they were low-rise, meaning the pull-up would stick out an inch or so over the waistband.

I settled for a loose pair of pajama shorts, ones that came up a decent way up my waist and also had a drawstring I could tie shut to ensure that there was no scenario in which they would fall down. I paired them with a long t-shirt that covered the top half of the shorts.

I still didn't feel great about what I was going to need to do, but I didn't have any better options. I would just have to hope that the pull-up didn't show too badly. Perhaps I could get away with putting it on right before it was time to get into our sleeping bags for the night.

By the time we were downstairs again, Mom had laid out the sleeping bags in the middle of the floor in the living room with a pillow next to each of them.

Grace was still in her room, and by now, Jackson was getting ready for bed. He had stomped off angrily after being informed by Dad that he wasn't old enough yet to stay up as late as my friends and I.

Mom pulled me aside into the kitchen while Angie and Emma went into the living room.

"Happy birthday again," Mom said as she gave me a hug. One of her hands patted my bottom as she embraced me.

"I think you need to finish getting ready for bed in the bathroom," Mom said in a quiet whisper after she had let go from the hug.

That didn't make sense. "I don't need to brush my teeth yet. I'm going to have some more snacks this evening."

"Maddy," Mom said. "You know what I put in the downstairs bathroom for you."

I grimaced and turned around to make sure none of my friends were in earshot. "I'm not going to forget."

Mom wasn't in any way convinced by that statement. "Maddy, go do it right now. And make sure you don't have too much to drink while you're staying up. And make sure to use the toilet one last time before getting in your sleeping bag."

"Fine." I stomped off toward the bathroom, a little miffed. Just because I was wetting the bed didn't mean I needed to be treated like a baby. I was a teenager. I could remember to do all of those things on my own without needing any reminders.

<><><>

I made double sure that the door was locked behind me before I retrieved the pull-up from the bag in the cupboard underneath the sink.

Just like when I had packed it earlier, there were two pull-ups along with two plastic baggies.

There was no getting around it. Mom was going to check. She'd either look under the sink to see if a pull-up had been taken from the bag or just give me a pat on the bottom at some point before she finally went to sleep. Or perhaps when she woke us up for breakfast in the morning, she'd be listening extra carefully to see if there was any slight crinkling sound coming from me.

I undressed and slid the pull-up up to my waist, all the while listening for any sound of my friends, not that they should have had any reason to try and spy on me as I used the bathroom.

For a moment, I wasn't sure what I would do with my underwear. I could just toss it in the bag before I put it back under the sink. But I decided to wear it over the pull-up instead, though it didn't exactly do anything to obscure it. The underwear wasn't even as high-waisted as the pull-up, and there would be no mistaking what was underneath it.

After pulling on my shorts as well and getting them securely tied around my waist, I was satisfied at least that the pull-up wasn't going to be visible.

The legs on the shorts were long enough that there wasn't any way that anyone would be able to get a glimpse of the pull-up, even when I was sitting down. And the top of the shorts easily covered the pull-up as well. The long t-shirt provided insurance just in case the pull-up did somehow manage to peak out over the top of my shorts despite all the precautions I was taking.

But there was one last problem – the noise.

I paced back and forth in the bathroom, listening to the faint sound of the pull-up rustling from beneath my pajamas.

It didn't matter that I knew that my friends were unlikely to notice the sound, and even more unlikely to connect to me, and even more unlikely to realized that it signified that I was wearing a diaper under my pajamas.

I knew. And that was enough of a problem for me.

<><><>

Mom and Dad might have typically spent more time downstairs on a weekend evening, but with the sleepover, they headed upstairs a little earlier, giving us some more space by ourselves.

Angie and Emma were both on their phones when I arrived back in the living room from getting changed into the pull-up.

I attempted to walk as normally as possible as I entered the room. Angie and Emma both glanced up from their phones for a second but then dropped their gaze right back down where they were holding their phones in their laps once they realized it was me and not one of my parents or siblings.

That caused me to look down at my shorts as well. But everything, at least looking on the outside at the front of my shorts, was still all good. I grabbed the Switch from where I had left it, plugged it into the charger earlier this evening, and pressed the power button. There apparently was a way to get it connected to the TV, but I didn't have a clue how to do that on my own, so that would need to wait until later.

This time, it turned on. I took a seat on the couch, careful not to sit too close to either of my friends.

It was impossible for me to forget that I was wearing a pull-up. Not with the way I had totally felt like I was waddling as I walked to the couch. Not with the way that it crinkled as I was bending over to sit down. Not with the way that the padding pressed up against me as I eased myself down onto the couch.

My heart was racing. I looked over again at Angie and Emma. How could they not possibly realize something was out of place? But there they were, just sitting casually on the couch, playing with their phones.

They didn't know. It didn't make sense to me that they didn't know. Everything about what I was wearing felt so obvious, from the way the pull-up crinkled ever so slightly to how I walked with a little bit more of a waddle as I moved around to how I was still certain that the outline of my bottom must appear slightly didn't beneath my shorts.

That was an important lesson to learn. They didn't expect me to be wearing a pull-up, so they weren't going to attribute any of those signs to me wearing one, and that was only if they noticed any of those signs in the first place.

I was safe. This was going to work. I could continue to manage my fake bedwetting act throughout the summer.

I looked down at the gaming console in my hands. It was now fully powered on after a minute of going through some initial steps to get things set up. I finally managed to get the game started.

The device felt clunky in my hands. I had to keep checking to see whether I was pressing the correct button. It didn't seem intuitive which ones were labeled A, B, Y, or X. I was ready to start playing, but the first thing the game made me do was design my own character. Of course, I named the witch I was creating after me. I managed to finally turn her hair red and take off her glasses, but after ten minutes of trying to get the rest of her appearance to match, I finally gave up and pressed the next button to continue.

Angie snapped her fingers. "Hello, Maddy, you going to join in the video we're making or what?"

I finally looked up from the Switch. Angie and Emma were standing in the middle of the living room. Angie had brought a stand for her phone so it would stay up while they did a video for her TikTok channel.

"Just a few more minutes," I said. "I just started. You want to see the witch I made. She looks like me."

I flipped the Switch over so my friends could see my newly created character "That's nice, Maddy," Emma said flatly. "Are you going to join us or what?"

On any other sleepover I would have been incredibly eager to jump into a video with my friends. This was the only time I ever got to experiment with social media. And I had been very careful to never bring up the topic of what we did late in the evenings with my parents.

But in my hands was a gateway into a completely new Harry Potter experience. I'd eaten up as much information as I could about the Harry Potter universe. I'd read all the books a million times and watched all of the movies about as often, including the newer ones that weren't based on the books. There wasn't any way I could possibly wait and put off the game until tomorrow morning.

"Later," I replied. I turned up the volume on the Switch as the intro music began to play.

"Can you use headphones or something?" Emma asked. "If you have the music playing in the background, this video could get taken down for a copyright violation."

"I don't have any for the Switch."

"Then just turn down the volume."

I relented and clicked the volume down button a half-dozen times until the music was just barely audible to me.

The next few hours passed by in a blur. My inexperience with video games was quickly apparent. While the opening sequence had been mesmerizing as I was getting introduced to this new story, actually playing the game was a whole different challenge. The biggest issue was the two joysticks. I kept randomly making my character stare up at the sky or right down at their feet as I attempted to get the hang of maneuvering around the world.

Angie and Emma kept asking if I would join in with them on the videos they were making, and I kept waving them off as I worked my way through the tutorial level. It wasn't fair. I just wanted to go and explore Hogwarts, not get stuck in this mysterious cavern.

I yawned and finally paused the game to check the time on my phone. It was already after midnight. I couldn't believe that I'd already been playing the game for over three hours. It didn't feel as though I had made almost any progress on it at all.

Angie was folding up the phone stand and tucking it back into her backpack. Both she and Emma looked about as tired as I felt.

I stood up, ready to head to the bathroom one last time. Even though I knew Mom and Dad weren't going to be aware of whether or not I was brushing my teeth and using the toilet, it was too much of an ingrained habit to ignore.

"You guys going to brush your teeth as well?" I asked as I stood up from the couch.

"You going to let me borrow your toothbrush?" Angie asked.

"No."

"Then I guess not," Angie said with a laugh.

I tiptoed up the steps, careful not to wake anyone, as I finished getting ready for bed in the upstairs bathroom. I contemplated taking off the pull-up again, but I couldn't risk Mom noticing that I didn't have it on in the morning.

Angie and Emma were huddled close together on the couch when I returned from brushing my teeth. They paused whatever they were whispering about the moment I entered the room.

"What were you talking about?" I asked.

"Nothing," Emma said. "Just planning some more videos to make."

"Seriously," Angie said. "You need to take a break and join us next time."

"I'll do them with you next time," I said absentmindedly. My mind was still mostly thinking about the new game.

I turned off the light and slid under the covers of my sleeping bag as Angie and Emma did the same. At least this time I wasn't using a sleeping bag because of having wet the bed in the middle of the night. Looking back on those initial attempts to convince my parents that I was becoming a bedwetting, I couldn't believe I had actually had the gumption to pull it off.

I drifted off to sleep, full of thoughts of what it would be like to begin exploring Hogwarts for real tomorrow

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 2, 2025 at 3:50 AM
Content: Chapter 35: The Birthday Sleepover (Part 3: Not on My Terms)
My dreams picked up right where the Harry Potter game had left off.

But just like the video game, which I had been all-so-clumsily attempting to control with my non-existent gaming abilities, I stumbled around almost drunkenly through a never-ending underground labyrinth.

That was far from the normal experience of dreams in which I found myself wandering through Hogwarts. That wasn’t to say that none of those dreams had been scary, but I had at least been competent at using magic during them.

I failed my arms again in an exaggerated motion, but just like this evening, when I had kept getting confused about which buttons to press, I kept casting the wrong spells.

A ghoulish skeleton was closing in on me way too fast. I was already far too close to the edge of the pathway I was walking on. The little light being given off by a few lanterns only gave enough illumination to prove that the fall would probably be quite long.

I couldn’t risk maybe more than a single step backward before falling off into an unknown darkness. Just because I was mostly aware that this was a dream didn’t make the situation any less frightening.

I waved my wand again, taking careful aim at the animated skeleton approaching me. There was a spell that was supposed to send the foul creature flying backward. The problem was, there was also a spell that, for some unbeknownst to me reason, would actually cause an enemy to come flying toward me instead.

And guess what spell I ended up using on accident?

I tripped over my robe and took a step backward, swinging my arms again while trying to steady myself.

One wrong step led to another, and then I was falling, falling, falling. Had I been in the game, I would have received a pitiful message – one I had gotten far too many times while still in what appeared to be the tutorial level – that I had died and would need to pick up from the most recent point the game had saved.

But in dreams, falling only ends when you wake up the instant before you strike the ground.

I landed in my sleeping bag, not at whatever was at the bottom of that endless abyss.

The living room was almost completely dark, save for the tiniest amount of moonlight. I gasped as I opened my eyes. I didn’t like this new turn my Harry Potter dreams had taken one bit.

As I dragged my hand along the floor in an unsuccessful attempt to locate my phone to see exactly what time it was, I realized that I was both colder and warmer than I expected to be.

The answer for the first half of that realization was obvious.

The top half of my sleeping bag had shifted off of me. I must have been tossing and turning quite a bit during that dream. The AC had been left a bit cooler than normal since my friends were over. I shivered as I fumbled in the dark, attempting to grab the right part of my sleeping bag to pull it back over me. It didn’t feel at all like a normal early summer night in Minnesota. I probably should have considered retrieving some of my winter pajamas from the closest, in fact, considering how much more coverage they provided, that wouldn’t be a bad idea for when I would be forced to wear a pull-up again during future sleepovers.

I started to rub my eyes but immediately yanked my right hand back in disgust. It was wet? How?

I slid my hand back inside the sleeping bag, rubbing it dry against the outside of my shorts. Yes, there was that second sensation that needed to be addressed. Considering the events of the past week, I perhaps should have come to an understanding of what had transpired during my dream a little faster, but I was still rather groggy.

Despite having been uncovered for who knows how long, my shorts felt unreasonably warm.

My hand slid from where I had been drying it off on the outside of my shorts to in-between my legs and everything became abundantly clear. There was a pull-up beneath my shorts. And it was wet.

Unlike every other time I had wet my clothes or my pull-up the past two weeks, that revelation brought about no sudden burst of euphoria, no rush of excitement, no sense of relaxation or calmness.

No, there was just a cold wave of terror a million times worse than watching a creepy dream skeleton advancing toward me.

I lay as still as I could inside the sleeping bag. I was off to the side, with both Angie and Emma lying between me and the hallway leading to the downstairs bedroom.

I held my breath as I listened for any sounds coming from the other two sleeping bags. I’d spent enough nights with my friends to be able to differentiate the noises they made when they were asleep. Thankfully, neither of them snored at night. Angie wheezed just slightly in her sleep, while Emma’s soft but regularly paced breaths were only barely noticeable.

That settled it. They were asleep. I needed to do everything I could to make sure it stayed that way until I was out of the pull-up.

And I had to get out of the wet pull-up. The longer I waited, the worse things would be.

I realized that I didn’t have a good nose for the smells that accompanied a wet pull-up. I hadn’t noticed anything off in my room. But when we had been getting dressed for bed, my friends had. It was only my quick thinking to blame Chester that had diverted their attention from me.

It would be harder to blame the poor cat again if my friends were to wake up in the morning, insistent that the room suddenly smelt like pee.

And that wasn’t even considering the fact that a wet pull-up would alter the outline of my shorts and the way that I walked. Emma would know exactly what that looked like.

I carefully ran my arms along the carpet around my sleeping bag. My phone was still nowhere to be found. But perhaps that was for the best.

I tiptoed softly all the way to the hallway. That had been the easy part. This room was carpeted, at least. To avoid making too much noise in the wood-floor hallway, I slid on my socks instead of walking, taking a look back every few feet while pausing to listen and make sure that I wasn’t being followed.

I shut the door softly behind me before flipping on the lights.

One look in the mirror told me that it was a good thing I had woken up now rather than in the morning.

While I had been fortunate enough not to suffer any leaks, outside of a tiny damp spot on my shorts where I had dried off my hand., the way the pull-up was now sagging down against my shorts would have made it plain as day to my friends that I hadn’t gone to bed in normal underwear.

I must have somehow slipped it under my shorts while I was asleep. That would explain why it had been wet when I woke up.

I hastily stripped off my shorts and the wet pull-up. I peered inside it as I slid it down my legs. There wasn’t a single white, dry spot to be seen inside. Had I let out just another ounce of pee, it would have been a far greater disaster. As it was, even the underwear I had put back on over the pull-up remained completely dry.

There had been a number of things going for me that might have prevented the leaks I had experienced the first few times I had wet these pull-ups. The first of which was that I had obeyed my parent’s rules about liquids this evening. I hadn’t gone off to sneak any extra sips from my secret water bottle, mostly because I didn’t see the need to try to get extra hydrated because I wasn’t going to have an opportunity to wet the pull-up.

The second factor in my favor was that I had fallen asleep lying on my back. My brief experiments this week seemed to indicate that this was a superior position for wetting a pull-up, at least compared to doing it while lying on my side or my stomach.

I set the pull-up on the floor while I tried to figure out how I was supposed to get cleaned up.

Showering wasn’t an option. It was bad enough having to explain that to Grace or my parents, who knew that any middle-of-the-night shower obviously meant that I had wet the bed. But my friends? There wouldn’t be any adequate explanation for them. Besides, I suspected that while Angie might not know much about bedwetting, Emma’s knowledge of the topic was possibly rather decent, considering her experiences with her autistic cousin.

I raised a tentative hand to the faucet for the bathroom sink. I twisted it as slightly as I could. But counterintuitively, I hadn’t actually turned it on enough. A rapid series of drips started coming out of the faucet, the flow not enough to form a solid stream as the water noisily splashed in the sink, the sound a lot louder than what I would have expected from so little water.

I twisted the nob just a hair more, turning the steady, noisy drips into a solid, thin stream of water that made only the faintest noise as it ran into the sink.

A washcloth would be another piece of evidence that had the potential to give me away. Instead, I unrolled a ton of toilet paper, balling it up before quickly waving it through the running water in the sink before making my best attempt at getting myself all wiped down and then dried off.

I chucked the toilet paper into the toilet. That evidence would flush away at least once I was ready to head back to my sleeping bag.

With my heart no longer racing, I took a deep breath. The problem was both fixed and not fixed.

I’d solved the problem of preventing my friends from discovering that I had wet the bed. But now that the stress of working to resolve that situation was fading away, I was left to ponder the more concerning long-term problem.

I hadn’t even considered the possibility of starting to wet the bed again for real. How was it even possible? Yes, I knew that there were potential medical reasons for why a teenager might suddenly start losing control of their bladder – I had counted on the fact to get away with my fake bedwetting.

But that would be way too much of a coincidence for that to happen to me, and not only to happen to me but to happen just weeks into my fake bedwetting.

Could I have done anything to accidentally cause my body to suddenly think it was OK to let my bladder go while I was asleep? Could it be as simple as the idea that wearing a pull-up would have subconsciously given my brain the go-ahead to forget a decade’s worth of potty training?

And what was I going to do about it? It would be ironic if I ended up needing to rely on whatever solution my doctor came up with from those tests earlier this week in order to actually stop bedwetting.

Because that’s the thing. I didn’t want to actually be a bedwetter. That wasn’t to say I hadn’t toyed with the idea and played out elaborate scenarios in my mind of what it would be like if I had suddenly actually been afflicted with that rather than having faked my way into it.

But all those fantasies had always come undone in one way or another. Sleepovers were, of course, the main thing that killed the plausibility of that fantasy. I wasn’t going to stop having them, but the idea of playing bedwetting roulette every time I went to sleep around my friends was something that had always steered my thoughts away from any desire to be a real bedwetter.

However, the reasons behind that were more than just the convenience of sleepovers. Yes, I liked wetting my pants, but I liked doing it on my own terms when the desire was at its highest, when the anticipation had built up all day until I could scarcely take it any longer.

And doing it in my sleep meant I was missing all the fun. The warmth I had felt under my shorts upon waking up just now was but a fraction of what it would have felt the moments after wetting the pull-up. But I had been asleep, so I had missed all of that.

No, being an actual bedwetter meant getting none of the fun and taking on all the risks. That wasn’t for me.

I stared back down at the pull-up lying on the floor. Now, to hide the last bit of evidence.

Mom, thankfully, had thought of everything. There was no way I was going to be tossing the pull-up in the nearly empty bathroom trash bin. Even if I were to cover it up with toilet paper, that would still pose too much of a risk of it being noticed.

Instead, the plastic baggies Mom had left under the sink with the pull-up bag were perfect. I slid the wet pull-up inside and zipped the bag shut.

But the plastic baggies weren’t the only thing left under the sink for me. There was another pull-up in the bag. Mom had, of course, thought of everything.

The idea of not putting it on wasn’t even considered. If I could wet the bed for real once. It could certainly happen again. I couldn’t take that chance with my friends asleep a few feet from me.

But wearing a pull-up because I had to was a lot less fun than wearing one because I needed to. I tied the drawstring of my shorts as snugly as I could and re-examined myself in the mirror. I could tell I was wearing a pull-up, or at least I thought I could. But the signs were faint. And if my friends hadn’t noticed last night, they weren’t going to notice for a few minutes in the morning before I snuck off to the bathroom to change.

I placed the baggie with the wet pull-up back inside the bag, making sure it was tucked away as far back in the cupboard as possible.

I made my way back to my sleeping bag as quietly as possible, hopeful that I at least couldn’t have any scarier dreams tonight than the nightmare I had woken up to.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 2, 2025 at 3:51 AM
Content: Chapter 36: The Sleepover Part 4 (Taking No Chances)
The smell of waffles was the first thing that I noticed the moment I woke up.

Unlike my rude awakening in the middle of the night, when I had woken up from a terrifying nightmare into the more terrifying reality of having actually wet the bed, I was still completely snug inside my sleeping bag, which remained all zipped shut.

Angie was already out of her sleeping bag. She was sitting on the couch, scrolling away on her phone. Emma appeared to have just woken up as well. She was sitting up halfway out of her sleeping bag, her arms stretched upward, while she let out a large yawn.

I took a deep sniff, breathing in the familiar smells wafting across the house from the kitchen. There were some traditions for our sleepovers that were always the same at my house, one of which was that we would be woken up by the smell of Dad making breakfast for everyone in the kitchen. That wasn’t the same for sleepovers at my friends’ places. At Emma’s house, we were lucky to get something other than a bowl of cereal, while Angie’s parents often had bagels on hand for a quick bite in the morning.

I reached down inside the sleeping bag down to my shorts to conduct a blind examination of my pull-up. The good news was that it was all dry this time. I felt all around the edge of my shorts to make sure the pull-up was peeking out at all. I wasn’t taking the slightest risk that a bit of the pull-up might be visible, but I was safe, as my shorts were more than enough to keep my nighttime underwear hidden.

The hard part was over. I just needed to survive the next few hours. I tried to set aside the idea that I was going to have so many more sleepovers this summer. The one good thing was a lot of them would hopefully be at my friends’ places now that Mom would be satisfied that the pull-ups were working. And over there, I could just leave the pull-up Mom sent me with in my backpack.

Or could I?

That was the problem, wasn’t it? Having finally realized my dream of getting pull-ups for myself, I had careful plans to keep them secret for the whole summer. When I was sleeping away from the house, all I had to do was make sure Mom was aware that I had packed pull-ups for the trip, and then, whether it was at my friend’s place or at summer camp, I could just leave them in my bag, and no one would be any wiser.

That wasn’t a risk that could be taken if I was actually wetting the bed.

“Well, are you coming to breakfast or what?” Emma asked.

I looked up to see both of my friends staring down at me. Emma had finally extricated herself from her own sleeping bag, which now lay in a jumbled mess on the floor.

“You’d probably have better luck if you told her she couldn’t play her Harry Potter game until after she’s had breakfast,” Angie joked.

I rolled my eyes. “Fine, I’m coming.”

I had hoped that answer would send both of them off to the kitchen, and then I could carefully get out of the sleeping bag while making sure again that the pull-up wasn’t visible in any way. But instead, my two friends kept their gaze fixed on me.

No one said anything for a couple of seconds.

“Well,” Emma said. Her eyes flickered over to meet Angie’s for a split second afterward.

Beneath the sleeping bag, I brushed my hand against the edge of my shorts one final time. I was safe. I didn’t feel the crinkly touch of the pull-up sticking out of my shorts.

With my friends still watching me impatiently, I carefully unzipped the sleeping bag, making sure to casually tug my shirt down as I stood up.

“I told you,” Angie muttered as she turned and walked toward the kitchen.

It was Emma’s turn to roll her eyes. “Whatever,” she said as she turned to follow Angie toward the smell of waffles.

With their eyes finally off of me, I did one last look-over of my midsection before following them into the kitchen. I was safe. The pull-up was completely obscured.

I caught up to Angie and Emma just as they stepped into the kitchen. I started to stretch my arms upward, but caught myself just in time. My T-shirt was long, but it wasn’t that long. Lifting my hands up like that would still leave the waistband of my shorts exposed. Again, I couldn’t be taking any chances.

There was a pile of waffles on a plate on the counter, and two waffle makers were set up next to them. From the steam coming from the sides, it appeared like there were still even more waffles on the way. I didn’t get how everyone else managed to be able to eat so much in the morning. About half of one of those massive waffles would be about as much as my stomach could handle this early in the morning.

“It’s not time for breakfast just yet,” Mom said as Angie stepped forward to grab a plate. “Sleeping bags need to be rolled up first before you come and get your waffles.”

I let Angie and Emma go ahead first as we retreated back to the living room to get things tidied up from the sleepover.

I tugged down on the hem of my shirt as I knelt down next to the edge of the sleeping bag. I hated rolling up sleeping bags. I could never seem to get them into a compact enough spiral, which just meant trying to tie them shut was a massive pain.

Angie and Emma finished with their sleeping bags well before me. They didn’t stick around to watch me struggle with getting mine all tied up.

None of my friends showed any indications of changing out of their pajamas yet. Both had made their way to the kitchen without bothering to get changed.

I usually felt a decent need to pee when I got up in the morning. That wasn’t the case at the moment. I winced when I recalled why that was the case.

The freak bedwetting accident still didn’t make any more sense to me this morning than it had last night. I mean, it couldn’t actually be possible to turn oneself into an actual, real bedwetter? I refused to believe that. And I refused to believe that I could have coincidentally had something go wrong with my body at the exact time I had started faking bedwetting. But there wasn’t any other explanation, and I didn’t see any other way to figure out what was going on other than to see what would happen the next few nights.

I thought about how I still had my underwear tucked into the bag Mom had for me under the sink. There wasn’t anything stopping me from going to the bathroom on the main floor and swapping out the pull-up for my regular underwear.

Except, I didn’t really feel like taking off the pull-up just yet.

After spending all of last night and the beginning of this morning around my friends, I had slowly let go of my initial fear that what I had on beneath my shorts was going to be obvious to them. Yes, I had rationalized all the reasons for why they wouldn’t notice, but it was different seeing how easily my secret was kept.

Angie and Emma were completely oblivious. Even though I had managed to catch on to the crinkling sound beneath Hannah’s clothes, they hadn’t the slightest clue about what lay beneath mine.

Besides, if I put the pull-up back underneath the sink, odds were that Mom would probably just toss it with the wet one I had put in the bag overnight. That would be a complete waste. It would be a lot better if I could save the pull-up until I had a chance to wet it either later today or tomorrow.

With that decision made, I returned to the kitchen. I cut a waffle in half before putting it on my plate and smothering it in maple syrup. We weren’t allowed to eat waffles in the living room, not after that incident a couple years back. That had resulted in a very sticky mess to clean up.

Grace and Jackson were both up for breakfast as well, so it made for seven people squeezed in around the table for breakfast.

“Did you guys end up staying up late?” Dad asked.

My mouth was full of waffles at the moment, so I just nodded in response. Come to think of it, I couldn’t exactly recall how late we had stayed up.

The conversation shifted to summer plans. There was the soccer camp I’d be going to in a couple of weeks, a consolation prize from my parents since the lengthy vacation we had planned later in the summer was enough to prevent me from taking part in the summer soccer league that I had done the past two years. Emma said she wasn’t sure yet when her cousin Hannah would be moving, but that it would be before the end of the summer.

“Are you looking forward to having your cousin at the same school as you?” Mom asked Emma.

My friend bit her lip before responding. “Oh, she’s not. There’s a school for special needs kids that she’s going to be attending. That’s part of why they are moving to the area.”

“Special needs?” Mom asked.

“Autistic,” Emma replied.

“I thought the school district had programs for kids like that,” Dad asked.

“I don’t know,” Emma said. “I think she is too—”

Emma paused abruptly. I got the sense that she had just caught herself before using the same word to describe Hannah as she had done that weekend when I had first met her cousin.

“I mean,” Emma continued. “She just needs a lot of extra help with school cause she isn’t very good with it.”

“Well, we’ll have to invite them over for dinner sometime after they get settled in,” Mom said.

I took a peek out of the front window. The sky was already getting overcast. Everything was dry still, but it wouldn’t be worth risking going out to the park to bike or play soccer. The forecast had only said that there was a thirty percent chance of rain, so that didn’t seem quite fair.

We had another couple of hours left for the sleepover, as both Angie and Emma would be headed home before lunch. Their families had other plans for the afternoon. Angie was off to a birthday party for her grandparents, and Emma was going to a movie with her parents. I would have gone along, except it was rated R, and I hadn’t been able to convince Dad that it was OK for me to be able to watch it, at least before he had a chance to see it himself.

After returning our very sticky places to the kitchen, we meandered back over to the living room, all of us still in our pajamas. Grace was still in the living room, as she hadn’t retreated to her upstairs bedroom yet.

“Can’t you guys find somewhere else to goof off?” Grace asked, interrupting our noisy chattering about what to do for the next couple of hours. “I’m sure you wouldn’t be bothering anyone upstairs.”

I gave my sister a look. Not that she knew, but going to my bedroom was the last thing I wanted to do at the moment. Between the pull-ups in the dresser, my extra crinkly bed with the mattress protector, and the fact that my friends seemed to think that the room smelled like pee, there was far too much evidence of the bedwetting for me to want to spend any more time with them there today.

“Yeah, no,” Angie said. “It smells gross since Chester peed in it.”

“He did what?” Grace asked.

“Don’t you remember,” I said. “Chester peed in my room a couple times this week.”

Grace turned to look at me. Her lips were pursed, and she had a frown on her face. She knew full well that Chester hadn’t been having any issues whatsoever with peeing outside of the litter box.

“Well, it’s not the cat’s fault,” Grace said. “You should know better by now not to close your bedroom door if he is in your room when you are going to sleep.”

Graced shut her laptop firmly. “Since you guys aren’t going anyway,” she muttered as she left the room.

“She needs to chill out,” Angie said.

<><><>

We ended up putting together a large puzzle on the living room coffee table while listening to the sound of rain coming down hard outside. It was a 500-piece puzzle, but between the three of us — with a small amount of help from Jackson — we managed to get it down before it was time for everyone to leave.

I was so distracted that I completely forgot about the fact that I had a pull-up underneath my shorts. It was almost a surprise to see it when I took a break halfway through the puzzle to go and use the toilet. For half a second, I was tempted to wet the pull-up then and there and toss it under the sink with the one I had wet during the night, but that wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t going to get that many pull-ups to use during the day, so I needed to make it count.

After Angie and Emma left for home, Dad took Jackson out to get a haircut while Mom went off to run some other errands in the rain. Grace was all the way upstairs, leaving me alone on the living room couch.

I lifted up the front of my shorts to take a look at the pull-up underneath. There was still something surreal about how the last several weeks had gone. As embarrassing as some parts of it had been, it still felt so incredibly worth it.

The need to pee was fairly slight. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to force anything out. But now I might be able to, and a little tinkle wouldn’t create any leaks. I watched as the pull-up began to swell with a familiar warmth between my legs. I set a timer on my phone for thirty minutes. That would give me a good reminder to get changed before Mom and Dad got back home.

I didn’t go back to playing my video games. I laid all the way down on my back on the couch. This was perfection. I’d gotten what I had always wanted, and it felt better than I could have dared dream. After about fifteen minutes of lying on my back, the pull-up began to cool off. I allowed myself to make just another slight tinkle into it, warming it up again.

That’s when I heard the unmistakable sound of my sister walking down the stairs. I scrambled back to a sitting position, hastily grabbed my Switch, and restarted the game. Maybe Grace was just hungry for lunch. But if she did come into the room, I needed to look natural, like nothing was out of place.

To that end, I kept my eyes glued to the screen, even as the sound of Grace’s footsteps indicated that she was now in the living room.

“You,” Grace said. “Need to be a lot more careful. I’m not going to tell your secret, but I’m not always going to be able to get away with covering for your lies.”

I paused my game and looked up from where I was seated on the couch.

My heart stopped. What did Grace know? What lies and secrets was she referring to? Did she know that the bedwetting accidents were anything but accidents? Did she know about those times when I had been wetting myself intentionally in the basement? Had I not been as careful as I had intended to be about covering my tracks?

Did she know that even at this moment, I was sitting in a wet pull-up?

“Lies? I tried to sound confident but casual in my denial, but the word seemed to catch in my throat as I croaked out my answer.

“Come on, we both know that Chester hasn’t been peeing in your bedroom. It smells like that because you’re still wetting the bed and not airing your room out enough. You need to leave the window open for a couple hours with a fan every morning. Just spraying some air fresheners in there isn’t going to do enough.”

I paused before responding after Grace gave her explanation. Was that it? If so, I might still be safe.

But that was the thing. Grace wasn’t supposed to know that I was a bedwetter. Mom and Dad had promised to keep it a secret. And besides, if I had managed to keep wearing a pull-up secret from Angie and Emma, surely Grace hadn’t noticed anything about the pull-up as well.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said in a nervous whisper, concerned that Jackson might come back at any moment. “I mean, it stopped earlier this week. That’s why Mom and Dad let me have the sleepover for my birthday.”

“Sure, and you’re wearing a pull-up under your pajamas for no reason at all.”

I made the mistake of looking right down at my pajama shorts that I still hadn’t changed out of, fearing for a second that the bulge from the accident might be visible or, even worse, that pull-up was something sticking out in some way. I looked back up at my sister. She had that expression on her face that told me that any more denials weren’t going to be believed.

“Mom and Dad promised not to tell you.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “No, they didn’t. But it was pretty obvious. It wasn’t exactly believable that your bedwetting would magically go away before it was time for the sleepover.”

There wasn’t much I could say in response to that. I realized that I was still very much a beginning when it came to bedwetting. Grace had wet the bed for about a decade after being toilet trained. It was stupid to think I could have kept it hidden from her like that.

“Hey, it’s going to be alright. I’m not going to tell anyone,” Grace said. She stepped forward and gave me a big hug with one hand around my back and another on my shorts.

I hadn’t even realized that I was on the verge of crying until the first few sobs came out, the sound muffled with my face pressed against my older sister’s shoulder. I had gotten over the embarrassment of Mom and Dad knowing about the bedwetting. That had been an inevitable and necessary part of my plan. But I hated that Grace thought that I was a bedwetter. I didn’t want her advice or opinions. I wanted my bedwetting to be handled the way hers had been left as an unspoken secret that didn’t need to be brought up in conversation.

“You should go get changed,” Grace told me as she released me from the hug. “It’s not good for your skin to stay in a wet pull-up that long.”

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 3, 2025 at 5:07 AM
Content: Chapter 37: Ambushed
For the third morning in a row, I reached cautiously below my waist and pressed my hand up against the front of my pull-up. The material crinkled gently under the touch of my fingers as I lay on my stomach in bed.

It had been warmer the past few nights, so I had gone to bed wearing just a thin t-shirt in lieu of the pajamas I typically wore to bed. Grace and I had both complained to our parents about the air conditioning’s sudden lack of effectiveness in the summer heat, but apparently, it was something that wasn’t going to be able to get fixed for a day or two more.

With my little brother now the only person in the house still unaware of what I was now wearing to bed, the risk of discovery didn’t feel as great. The state of undress had the added benefit of making it even easier to determine the condition of my pull-up in the morning.

I gave the front of the pull-up a good squeeze. The result was what it should be: Dry.

I breathed a sigh of relief, not a feeling a teenage girl should be experiencing over finding out the condition of her undergarments in the morning. I had always taken my ability to choose when and where I relieved my bladder for granted. The actual bedwetting accident – during a birthday sleepover, nonetheless – had shaken that self-perception.

I had gone to bed a bit nervously the night after the sleepover, but despite a handful of scary dreams, there was no repeat of the bedwetting incident that had marred an otherwise successful sleepover of hiding the pull-ups from my two completely oblivious friends.

I still didn’t know what could have happened at the sleepover to make me have my first genuine bedwetting accident in over a decade, but with three straight days having passed by without a recurrence, I felt safe in assuming that whatever had befallen me that night had been a random fluke. That being said, I wasn’t going to skip out on wearing a pull-up at the next sleepover.

On the other hand, the fake bedwetting was being continued with regularity. I had mastered the ability of managing to wet the pull-ups in moderation so as to not deal with the leaks that had first plagued me when Mom had finally purchased them for me last week, though I still abstained from wetting the pull-ups while in bed.

I wasn’t sure what my parents would do if they discovered that the pull-ups weren’t all that effective. My hope in that scenario would be that they would upgrade my nighttime protection from pull-ups to the type of diapers I had seen in Hannah’s suitcase. My fear – and what I worried would be the more likely scenario – was that my parents would just have me go back to washing the sheets every night if the pull-ups provide futile in keeping my bedding dry.

I certainly didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of asking my parents to purchase diapers instead of pull-ups. That was a bridge too far. And without making that direct request, I didn’t think there would be any likelihood of them taking such a drastic step to handle the bedwetting.

That left me stuck in the status quo. I’d gotten what I wanted, and it was enough to satisfy me for the time being.

I did need to pee as I lay in bed, but I decided not to do it at the moment. I could have stood up out of bed and let myself gradually pee into the pull-up before getting back under the sheets, but I decided that it was too early in the day to do that. Grace had a full eight-hour shift today, which meant I’d have the house to myself to wear the pull-up.

After having to endure the humiliation of having my older sister point out how I had been wearing a pull-up – and tell me that I needed to change it at that – I had completely avoided having my pull-ups on in any circumstances when my sister might be around.

At the sound of knocking on the door, I adjusted the covers to make sure I was hidden completely beneath them.

“Maddy, I’m opening the door in three seconds.”

The door swung open in what felt like a lot less than three seconds, but I was already completely prepared by the time Mom stepped into the room.

“You really should be up by now,” Mom said. “Everyone else has already gotten dressed and eaten breakfast.”

“But I don’t eat breakfast.”

“Then it should be even quicker for you to get up in the morning.”

That, in my opinion, was completely unfair. If I was able to get ready for the day quicker, I ought to be allowed to stay in bed longer.

“Did you sleep well last night?” Mom asked.

“Yeah,” I said with a nod, thinking about how I hadn’t had any more scary dreams, which was good considering the Harry Potter game had given my brain more than enough material to work with for that.

“And?” Mom asked.

I remembered what Mom was really wanting to know with that seemingly benign question.

Both Mom and Dad had taken great pains to avoid using the word diaper or pull-up. If those articles of clothing got mentioned at all, they were usually called something along the lines of nighttime underwear or protective undergarments. Usually, though, they didn’t even go that far, choosing to instead allude to the topic rather than state it outright.

I had learned that in Mom’s mind, the condition of my pull-up was reflective of how well I had slept.

I didn’t have to fake embarrassment when giving my answer: “Dry.”

“That’s good,” Mom said.

Mom walked over to the dresser and opened the top drawer.

“Mom,” I protested. But she didn’t heed my warning as she slid the drawer open all the way and shuffled through the contents.

I didn’t care much for Mom to be looking at any of my underwear, whether that was my regular or special nighttime ones.

“I’m just seeing if I need to order any more for you,” Mom said as she shut the drawer.

“I haven’t run out yet,” I said.

“There are only three left,” Mom said. “Since they seem to be working well, I’m going to order more online if that’s OK with you.”

I answered that question with the slightest of nods, with my head barely peeking out from underneath my covers.

“Don’t forget to hop into the shower when you are out of bed,” Mom said. “Just because you aren’t going anywhere today doesn’t mean you can skip cleaning up.”

That had been a point of contention earlier in the week. I didn’t see the point of needing to do that right away when I wasn’t allowed to leave the house yet when I was staying home alone.

That was followed by the usual reminders. No cooking anything in the oven or on the stove. Make sure to do all my chores for the day – vacuuming, cleaning the cat litter, and making my bed – that I was supposed to have done before everyone was home from work.

After Mom left the room, I got out of bed and took a peek out through the blinds from the window that overlooked the front lawn.

Only Mom’s minivan remained in the driveway. Dad’s car and the old minivan that my older sister now drove were both already gone. I waited impatiently until I at last watched as Mom and Jackson stepped out the front door and then sped off down the road.

Part of me wanted to be annoyed at the idea that my parents didn’t trust me to look after my six-year-old brother during the day, but then I thought about how much of a pain it would be to have him around, and I decided that I was completely OK with that decision.

The rule about not hanging out with my friends while home to myself was still in place. Though Dad had hinted the other night that as long as I continued to show that I was being responsible with doing my chores and not burning the house down that I might be granted some additional freedoms later this summer.

I let out one last yawn as I stretched my hands out above my head. It was going to be a perfect day. I had the next eight hours all to myself. I had a Harry Potter game to stay inside and play. And I had a pull-up to wear that I would eventually get around to wetting at some point in the afternoon.

Well, almost perfect. If only I didn’t have chores to get done as well.

<><><>

I hopped in the shower a few minutes later as Mom had requested. I stayed in the shower for a lot longer than normal. It wasn’t so much that I enjoyed it, as I disliked how I would feel once the warm water was turned off. It wasn’t uncommon for Mom or Grace to pound on the bathroom door, telling me to hurry up and finish so that there would still be some hot water left for them.

But once I reached the point where my fingers were starting to look like raisins, I finally gave in and turned the water off, stepping out of the tub to dry myself off while I began to shiver slightly.

I left my pull-up back on the bed. I didn’t like putting it on after it had sat in the bathroom, which would get all steamy during my shower. I made sure to dry off extra thoroughly before putting it on. I didn’t want any of the absorbent material to go to waste before I decided that it was time to wet the pull-up.

I put on the pull-up and one of my sports shirts. Afterward, I skimmed through my closet and dresser for about a minute and then decided that I didn’t really feel like putting anything on over the pull-up. The house wasn’t exactly as cool as it normally was in the summer.

I took a careful peek down the stairs after leaving my bedroom. The blinds covering the front window were completely closed. That was one nice thing about our house. I had total privacy as here weren’t any vantage points where someone would be able to see inside.

It felt exhilarating to be wearing the pull-up so openly. Before I had gotten the pull-ups, I would never have felt comfortable enough to go around the house in just my underwear while I was home alone, but for some reason, this felt different.

It wasn’t like I wanted someone to catch me wearing them; that would have been completely mortifying, even if it was only Grace or my parents. There was just a sense of freedom in being able to flaunt my pull-ups as I walked around the house alone.

One of the nice parts about being home alone was that I could connect the Switch to play on the TV rather than just squinting to make out all the details on the small screen. With everything plugged in, I sat cross-legged on the floor with a glass of lemonade set next to me on the coffee table.

The chores weren’t that important. They could always be done later. That was what I told myself, at least. I had about eight hours until everyone was back home, and it wasn’t like they would take that long to do, anyway.

I tried to decide how I wanted to wet the pull-up today. That was always a challenge. There were so many scenarios I still wanted to experiment with and given that I still needed to wet the pull-up at night at least three to four times a week to keep up the bedwetting charade, I didn’t get nearly as many chances I would like to wet the pull-up at my leisure during the day.

I took another sip of my lemonade as I watched a cutscene from the game play out on the TV. Playing a game in the Harry Potter world had replaced – at least for a moment – my obsession with the books that had remained mostly untouched since my birthday.

The important thing was staying hydrated. I could figure out how the pull-up was going to get wet once I actually needed to pee.

The first several times I felt my bladder telling me it was time to go. I managed to take a reluctant break from the game to make a short trip to the toilet. I made sure to refill my glass of lemonade a couple of times, staying a lot more hydrated than usual.

It was late in the afternoon when I finally decided it was time to put the pull-up to use. I had held off on going to the restroom as long as I could. It was all I could do to keep from squirming at the need to pee.

I headed into the bathroom where the tile floor would serve as protection against any leaks. I picked up the rug in front of the sink and tossed it into the corner where it would be safely out of the way. I adjusted the bathroom mirror so that I could stand in front of it with my back to it and look over my shoulder to see my padded bottom.

I watched with a sense of exhilaration as the pull-up grew warm and expanded in the mirror. It was one thing to feel it. It was something else to also be watching it happen.

The pull-up sagged even more heavily, and then I watched in the mirror as pee began streaming out of both sides, running down my legs and dripping straight down onto the floor.

Unlike past times when the pull-up had leaked, I wasn’t disappointed. I had come to accept that it wasn’t capable of absorbing everything when my bladder was full to the brim.

I tentatively pressed against the bottom of the sagging pull-up. It was incredibly heavy. It had absorbed a lot of pee, but there was also some that had pooled up inside it that hadn’t leaked out yet.

I crossed my feet and squeezed my legs together, causing another small wave of pee to release down my legs.

Then the exhilaration was replaced with disappointment. It wasn’t a disappointment of anything that I had done. Just a disappointment that I was only able to indulge in this experience several times a week.

<><><>
With the wet pull-up safely disposed of, I rushed through all my chores. I should have known better than to save them until the end of the afternoon, but I had kept putting them off by telling myself that I’d just do them in another ten minutes until I’d reached the point that I barely would have enough time to complete them before the rest of my family got home.

I had just finished wrapping up the cord back around the vacuuming cleaner when I heard the sound of the front door opening. I slid the vacuum cleaner into its spot in the hallway closet and slid the door shut.

All done, and not a moment to spare.

I ran back to the living room – now neatly vacuumed – and resumed my game on the Switch, trying to pretend that I hadn’t just left doing all of my chores to the last minute.

Dad took a single step out of the hallway and into the living room.

“You finish all the chores your mom asked you to?”

I wanted to roll my eyes. Couldn’t Dad see that the living room had just been neatly vacuumed?

“Yes,” I said.

“I see that you vacuumed. Did you also make your bed and clean the cat litter?”

My heart sank at the last item on the list.

“You better hurry and get the litter cleaned,” Dad said without waiting for the answer to his question. “Your Mom will be home in a few minutes. She’s a few minutes later tonight since she has to drop Jackson off at the sleepover he’s going to tonight.”

I tossed my gaming console to the side and sprinted past Dad all the way to the basement.

No sooner had I dumped the bag of litter clumps in the garbage then I heard the front door open once again. This time, it was Mom who had returned home.

“Did Maddy get all of her chores done?” Mom asked Dad.

Instead of answering, Dad just turned and looked at me.

“Yes, I got them all done.” I went through the list proudly. “I vacuumed, made the bed, and cleaned the litter.”

“Thanks, Maddy,” Mom said.

I grabbed the Switch and headed upstairs to my bedroom. Dad often took over the TV after work, preferring to watch the news for a bit before dinner.

<><><>
“Maddy, dinner time!” Mom called out fifteen minutes later from the top of the stairs.

I paused my game. That didn’t make any sense. My older sister wasn’t supposed to be home from her summer job for at least another twenty minutes.

“Why aren’t we waiting for Grace?” I asked as I arrived in the dining room.

“Your sister just texted,” Mom said. “She picked up an extra shift and won’t be home until late tonight.”

There were only three spots set at the table tonight. Jackson’s absence, unlike Grace’s, wasn’t unexpected. He was off to his very first sleepover for a birthday party for one of his school friends.

It was only slightly unfair. I hadn’t been allowed to go on sleepovers when I was Jackson’s age.

Perhaps Mom and Dad had simply not wanted my older sister to feel left out. It would have been hard to explain how Grace wasn’t having sleepovers if her younger sister wasn’t. But whatever the explanation, the result was that I was having dinner alone with my parents this evening.

I picked at my meal uneasily with my fork. Dinner was fried rice and egg rolls. Not my favorite, but it could have been far worse. Mom had at least forgotten to put the frozen peas in it this time.

I had been forced to endure a taco casserole the night before. The only thing going for me was that the rest of my family had liked it so much there weren’t any leftovers.

The three of us started the meal in silence as we chowed down on our food, but the dinner alone with my parents soon turned into a complete ambush. It became clear that they intended to make use of my siblings’ absence to bring up some topics that would never have been discussed had Grace or Jackson been around.

“We looked into signing you up for summer school,” Dad said.

“Do I really have to?” I said, cutting Dad off mid-sentence.

“Maddy, don’t interrupt people when they are talking,” Mom said.

“As I was saying,” Dad continued. “Your Mom and I looked at summer school options, and it seems like it was too late to sign you up for the earlier classes, and we’ll be gone on vacation later in the summer, so classes then won’t work either.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. I had blocked out the whole conversation about my grades and summer school. Now I wouldn’t need to worry about doing it at all.

“Instead,” Dad said. “We’ve found a company that offers private tutoring for small groups of students, so you’ll be doing that three days a week to help you get caught up by the time school starts in the fall.”

“But.”

“Think about it this way, Maddy. It won’t be anything like school,” Dad said. “There will be lots of time to interact with your tutors, since it will just be with you and a few other students. It won’t be just sitting at a desk for hours while someone talks at you.”

That didn’t cheer me up. I wanted to spend less time with teachers this summer, not more.

“When does that start?” I grumbled.

“Next week,” Mom said. “You’ll go every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

“All day?”

“No, it will just be for the mornings. Either your Dad or I will drop you off when we go to work, and then one of us will take you home during our lunch break.”

I relaxed just a little. This wasn’t as bad a deal as I had feared when the threat of summer school had been brought up last week. Losing three summer mornings wasn’t the worst possible outcome by far.

“There is something else that is going to be starting, too,” Mom said. “We have an appointment set up for a therapist you’re going to be seeing this summer.”

I was surprised, but then I realized that I shouldn’t have been. If they hadn’t forgotten about summer school, there wasn’t any way they had forgotten about therapy, either.

“I don’t need therapy. There isn’t anything wrong with me.”

Mom and Dad exchanged a glance.

“Going to therapy doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you,” Dad said. “It’s more about learning how to deal with different situations that can be challenging, like school can be, for example.”

“Or marriages,” Mom added.

I blinked a few times. “You went to a therapist?”

“Of course,” Dad said. “So there isn’t anything for you to worry about with seeing one yourself.”

“Is therapy starting next week as well?”

“No,” Dad said. “Actually, we’ll be starting that tomorrow. It will be in the afternoon, so I’ll come home from work a little early so I can take you to the appointment.”

I winced after realizing that I had picked a little too far at one of my fingernails. I could think of a lot of things that there was no way that I was going to tell a therapist about, no matter how much they poked or prodded.

“It’s OK,” Mom said. “You’ll do it for a few weeks, and then you’ll get a break for camp.”

Camp. Even before I had committed to the plan of faking my bedwetting, I had been a little nervous about the idea.

I would leave on a Sunday afternoon and not be home until midday on Saturday. I had never had a multi-day sleepover before. Yes, I’d had back-to-back sleepovers with Angie and Emma before, but that didn’t really count as I’d had plenty of time to see my family.

Under the best of circumstances, being that far away from home for that long had me feeling uncertain.

I hadn’t realized how quickly it was approaching. It was less than three weeks away.

The summer camp – along with the family vacation planned for later in the summer – had been one of the big hurdles initially as I had been trying to work up the courage to begin wetting the bed, but without Mom and Dad around to actual check if I was wearing a pull-up to bed, it would be an easier secret to keep than at a sleepover at our house.

“If you don’t feel like going to camp this summer, you don’t have to,” Dad said, interrupting my stream of thoughts.

“No, I still want to.”

The soccer camp had been my consolation prize for not getting to do my summer soccer league because of all the vacations planned for later in the summer. I had no intention of backing out of it, regardless of the bedwetting situation.

“That’s good,” Mom said. “I called the camp and talked to them about your new medical condition.”

My jaw dropped down in shock. There was no way she actually did that. The whole point of wearing the pull-ups was that no one else needed to know.

“Why?” I croaked out, barely able to keep the sound of distress out of my voice.

“Maddy,” Mom said. “It isn’t like there aren’t other campers who have similar issues. It was important to talk with your camp counselors about it to see what they could do to help.”

“But I don’t need any help.”

“Cabins don’t always have a lot of privacy for getting dressed and changed,” Mom said. “I don’t think I would be as easy to hide as it was for your sleepover. They told me that your bedwetting won’t be a problem at all. In fact, they have a cabin that is reserved for kids like you. That way, you don’t have to worry about having to sneak around and hide your nighttime protection while you are away.”

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 3, 2025 at 5:08 AM
Content:
Chapter 38: Questions
Perhaps it was better that the therapy appointment had been sprung on me just the night before, as I only had to endure one restless night of wondering what the following day would entail rather than going through a week of the worry building up day by day.

The contents of my dreams escaped me as I woke up the following morning, but even though I couldn’t recall what had been happening in my dreams, I could still feel the lingering sense of apprehension that had been a common thread through all of them.

I woke up dry, the room still dim and quiet. No alarm had gone off yet, and it would be a while before Mom or Dad would peek in to check on me before heading to work.

I stepped out of bed. A peek out the window confirmed that Grace was already out of the house. I hadn’t seen much of my older sister this week. And last night, she had been out working an extra shift at her job. I had fallen asleep before she had returned home. It would have been impossible to miss the sound of her returning to her bedroom.

As much as I would have preferred to have saved the pull-up to use later today, I needed to make sure that Mom and Dad continued to believe that my bedwetting wasn’t abating. I’d been dry the past two nights. Three dry nights in a row was more of a risk than I was willing to take.

The urge to pee felt a little more urgent than normal this morning, enough so that I wasn’t comfortable even trying to carefully wet the pull-up while in a safer standing position.

This could have been the most perfect summer ever. It should have been the most perfect summer ever. But instead of being able to enjoy the warmth and comfort of a wet pull-up in bed in the morning, my mind was instead racing through all the potential scenarios for what could happen in the therapy session.

What about the bedwetting? Of course she’d bring it up — how could she not? What if she asked something too specific, a question I hadn’t prepared for? What if she looked at me and knew? What if she could see right through me, see the lie I had built so carefully unraveling in front of her?

I snatched a change of clothes and slipped into the hallway, moving quickly to the bathroom before Mom’s usual knock came, telling me to get moving. I managed to traverse the short distance in the hallway between my bedroom and the bathroom without running into anyone.

The one benefit of waiting to wet my pull-up until I was in the bathroom was that I could let loose without fear of leaks. And that had ended up being a wise decision, with the pull-up proving to be little match for an extra full morning bladder.

Everyone was gone by the time I finished showering. Mom had come to knock on the door half-way through, letting me know that she was on her way and reminding me about how Dad was going to get off work early to take me to the appointment later in the afternoon.

The day went by far too quick.

Instead of playing my Harry Potter game, I retreated to the familiar comfort of the books. The clock seemed to have jumped ahead by leaps and bounds every time I looked up from my current spot on the page. My eyes flickered rapidly back and forth as I almost skimmed through the already familiar tale, desperate to keep my mind on another topic but unable to fully prevent the worst of my anxious thoughts from occasionally creeping in.

I managed to nearly finish the first book in the series by the time I heard the sound of Dad’s car pulling into the driveway.

<><><>

I had a picture built up in my mind of what a therapy session was supposed to look like. What actually transpired couldn’t have been further from what I had anticipated.

I think that Dad had tried to talk to me on the fifteen-minute ride over, but his words of advice or encouragement simply went in one ear and out the other. I had given the occasional nod or mumbled response, but my eyes were focused out in the distance as I watched each mile pass by, bringing me closer and closer to an encounter I wasn’t looking forward to.

I felt confident that I had everyone fooled. I was sure that Mom and Dad believed that my bedwetting was genuine. The same went for my older sister, Grace. I was a little less confident about the doctors and nurses I had seen, but even though they hadn’t been able to determine a specific medical cause to attribute the bedwetting to, they also hadn’t said anything that would suggest that they thought I was faking my condition.

But I worried that this next test would be far more difficult. Her whole job was about being able to understand how people think and act. What type of information would the therapist be able to trick me into unknowingly providing her? I was determined to give her as little as possible to work with.

The therapist’s office turned out to not be in some massive downtown medical complex, but rather at her home in an older neighborhood filled with sprawling, massive trees.

I positioned myself as much behind Dad as I could as he rang the doorbell and then introduced me to Mrs. Reynolds when she opened the door and ushered us inside. I had been expecting an older woman, maybe one with thick glasses and a cardigan. Mrs. Reynolds was younger than my parents, though at least several years removed from college.

Her office was right in the entryway and was not what I had initially pictured. In my mind, I had pictured all the cartoons I’d seen of people going to see a therapist or psychologist, and they had always seemed to include some sort of reclining chair for the patient to lie down in.

Instead, in the middle of the room there were two couches facing each other with a large coffee table in between them. There was a box of tissue paper and some jars of wrapped candies on the center of the coffee table. The room was well lit, though the curtains were drawn, cutting off the view of the street.

Dad and Mrs. Reynolds talked for a couple of minutes while I took a seat on the couch and helped myself to a couple of chocolates, though I had to fish through the bowl to find some that weren’t dark chocolate.

“I’ll be right in the waiting room, Maddy,” Dad said as he turned to head toward the door at the other end of the room. He was holding a handful of papers that Mrs. Reynolds had handed him on a clipboard. “Mrs. Reynolds will come get me when you are done.”

The door closed behind him a few seconds later. Then, it was just the two of us.

As Mrs. Reynolds walked toward the couch opposite the one that I was seated on, I set my feet on my couch and sprawled out all the way on my back. The couch was just long enough for me to stretch out fully, my toes brushing the armrest, but not so small that I felt cramped.

“Looks like someone is getting comfortable,” Mrs. Reynolds said.

“I thought I was supposed to lie down while you asked me questions?”

“That’s a common misperception,” she said. “You can sit however you feel comfortable, though it might be easier for you to sit up for some of the things we’ll be doing. Though yes, I have some questions for you. I like to think of it as more of a conversation than an interrogation.”

I swung my feet off of the couch and sat upright, but I wasn’t eager for this to begin. I was determined to say as little as possible lest she somehow figure out the one secret I couldn’t allow her to discover.

“Do I really have to do this?” I mumbled, avoiding eye contact. My fingers picked at the couch seam.

“Well, what do you mean by this?”

Her question in response to my own query left me uncertain of how to respond as I picked at my fingernails. I waited a few seconds. Mrs. Reynolds didn’t say anything. She kept looking at me expectantly with a calm expression on her face.

“I don’t know,” I said at last after another ten seconds of awkward silence. “How is talking with you supposed to make anything better?”

“You’d rather be somewhere else?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s alright to feel that way,” Mrs. Reynolds said, her voice steady. “What were you up to earlier? Anything fun before your dad brought you in?”

I skipped over the whole waking up and wetting my pull-up part of the morning and mentioned that I had spent most of the morning and afternoon reading a Harry Potter book. We talked for a bit about the books and the new game I had gotten for my birthday.

It was only when I looked up at the clock that I realized ten minutes had passed by. Mrs. Reynolds’ relaxed demeanor made it impossible for me to maintain my initial reticence.

“So, which house would you be in?” Mrs. Reynolds asked, leaning forward slightly.

“Slytherin,” I said quickly, the answer coming without a second thought.

She raised an eyebrow. “Slytherin? Interesting. What makes you say that?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be in Hufflepuff,” I said. I thought back to the first day I’d met Hannah, who had been decked out in Hufflepuff gear. No way would I be in the same house as her. “They’re boring. And everyone always chooses Gryffindor, so I didn’t want to choose them either.”

“And what about Ravenclaw?”

“No, I don’t think that would be right for me. My older sister Grace would be in there for sure, though she doesn’t like anything to do with that stuff.”

“And why don’t you think you could be in Ravenclaw?”

“It’s just like where are the nerdy kids go and, I’m not like…”

I let that train of thought drop off, but not soon enough. No sooner had the words left my mouth than I felt as though Mrs. Reynolds had just played a cruel trick in getting me to make a confession that I hadn’t intended to let slip past my lips.

“So, you settled on Slytherin, then?” Mrs. Reynolds asked.

“I guess so,” I replied, though I wasn’t as certain of that answer as I had been before. “I like how their house colors look.”

To my relief, Mrs. Reynolds didn’t dig further into the explanation I had given about what Hogwarts house I would be in. We drifted into safer territory—school, classes, homework. The mundane stuff. But even as I answered, my mind raced ahead, waiting for her to circle back to something more personal, something I wasn’t ready to talk about.

As Mrs. Reynolds continued to ask questions around those topics, I could see that she was beginning to take much more thorough notes. She never once made any direction mention of how my grades had shown on my report card.

“When you’re bored in class, what do you like to daydream about?” she asked, her pen tapping lightly against the notebook.

I was pretty sure I was beginning to blush from embarrassment. I knew exactly what topic my mind had the tendency to wander to over the past three years.

“Um,” I stammered, trying to think of something else that I could admit to daydreaming about that would be believable, but much less embarrassing. “I don’t know. Maybe Hogwarts or soccer.”

“Do you find that you like to stop what you are doing and daydream a lot, especially in school?”

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

“And why do you think that might be?”

I shrugged. “I guess it beats math class.”

The conversation shifted to the topic of ADHD and a lot of big, fancy-sounding words that I didn’t quite understand.

Mrs. Reynolds handed me a sheet of paper with twenty questions on them. I was supposed to give answers ranging from never to very often for the behaviors being described.

I looked at the first question: “How often do you find yourself being restless or fidgety?”

I bit down on my lip. It was a tie between often and very often. I put a checkmark on very often. It took me less than five minutes to go through the rest of the questions while Mrs. Reynolds sat at her desk and typed away at her computer.

I didn’t understand the point of the questions, but I did try to answer them as accurately as I could. As far as tests went, this was a lot easier than any I’d had this year at school.

Mrs. Reynolds took a seat back on the couch across from me once she noticed I was done answering all the questions. “There’s one more thing from the intake application that I wanted to talk with you about this afternoon before I go and get your dad.”

I stared down at my feet. There was only one possibility I could think of.

“They mentioned that you started wetting the bed several weeks ago,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “They said that though it does tend to run in the family, that you hadn’t had any issues staying dry at night since you were a toddler.”

I couldn’t bring myself to look at Mrs. Reynolds. “Can we please not talk about it?” I whispered.

“It’s just that bedwetting starting randomly, especially if there isn’t a medical cause, can indicate that other things aren’t well for you. If there is anything else that is going on, I want you to know that you can talk with me about it.”

I shook my head emphatically. “No, I’m fine.”

“OK,” Mrs. Reynolds said in a way that seemed to suggest that she had been hoping I had something else to elaborate on.

“Then I think this will be good for today.” Mrs. Reynolds took the paper from the coffee table. “I’ll let your dad know that we are all done.”

Mrs. Reynolds let Dad in from the waiting room and took the papers she had given him. They looked suspiciously similar to the worksheet she had made me fill out just now. She exchanged them for another stack of papers.

“We’ll have some similar assessments for your parents and some of your teachers to do as well,” Mrs. Reynolds said as she turned back to face me. “Then we’ll take those into consideration the next time that we meet.”

The idea of my teachers grading my behavior like that made me feel a bit queasy, so I just nodded mutely in response. I hoped I would have a different set of teachers for the new classes I’d be taking in the fall.

I breathed a small sigh of relief as I stepped outside after Dad, and the door swung shut behind us. I still didn’t quite get what the point of the past hour had been, but it at least hadn’t been as bad as I had feared.

Dad and I spent the drive home talking about a soccer game that was going to be on TV later that evening, leaving the topic of what had happened during the therapy appointment untouched.

On the way through the neighborhood, we passed Emma, who was riding her bike down the street. I gave her a quick wave, though my mind began working through what I might tell her I had been doing going out with Dad in the afternoon. It wasn’t as though I was going to tell either of my friends the truth about the therapy appointment.

But even with that hiccup, I was beginning to feel a little better about how this summer was going to go – maybe if I was lucky, the summer tutoring also wouldn’t be as bad as I feared. I was busy looking at my phone as we pulled into the driveway. It wasn’t until after I had stepped out of the car that I saw the package that had been unceremoniously dumped on the top of the front steps.

It wasn’t one of the plain brown cardboard boxes that usually came delivered whenever we ordered something online.

Mom had ordered a new box of nighttime pull-ups for me. The package on the doorstep was anything but subtle. The bright cardboard box screamed its contents, the brand name and product pictures bold enough for anyone passing by to notice.

I raced toward the front door. I had to get the package out of sight as soon as possible.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 3, 2025 at 5:09 AM
Content: Chapter 39: Maybe
My heart pounded in my chest as I leaped up the four steps leading to the front door in a single bound.

The package of my bedwetting pull-ups had been set unceremoniously right in front of the door sometime while I had been away at the therapy appointment.

The box was much larger than I had anticipated when Mom had mentioned that she’d be re-stocking on pull-ups. I had been a bit relieved when she mentioned she would be getting them online, as that meant there wouldn’t be any risk of someone seeing her purchase those items in person. The idea that they would arrive in anything other than a standard, plain, brown cardboard box was completely unthought of.

I bent down and heaved the package up with both hands. It was even heavier than it looked. Not in my wildest dreams would I have expected my parents to order me so many pull-ups this early.

But why did it have to come packaged like this?

It simply wasn’t fair. I mean, the whole point of the product was that it was supposed to be discreet. Many of the advertisements I had seen had focused on how the pull-ups could be worn underneath pajamas at sleepovers, with other kids being none the wiser. My own sleepover experience – setting aside my older sister’s observations the following morning – had proved that part of the advertising to be true.

But being able to hide the pull-up under one’s pajamas wouldn’t do any good if the whole neighborhood was already aware that you wore them because of packaging that practically screamed out that the contents were for a teenage bedwetter.

Like, why couldn’t it have just come in a normal brown box like practically everything else on Amazon did?

I struggled to hold the box of pull-ups in one hand while reaching for the door handle. I wiggled it to no avail. Locked.

If only I hadn’t had to go to that pointless therapy session, then I would have been home, and I would have been able to get the package out of sight right away. I wouldn’t have gone to the door immediately since I wasn’t supposed to answer it when at home by myself, but at most, the package would have been out there for only a minute or two instead of who knows how long.

I looked back for Dad. To my dismay, he had instead crossed the street to the mailbox, completely oblivious to my current crisis.

I rang the doorbell several times in quick succession. My older sister was home. The minivan that Grace drove was in the driveway as well. I heard the bell echoing inside, but I didn’t hear the sound of any footsteps approaching the door.

“Grace, please,” I whined to myself. “I know you’re in there.”

I glanced up and down the street. At least no one was in sight at the moment.

With my luck, my older sister would already be upstairs in her bedroom, sitting in front of her fancy computer with her fancy headphones on, typing away at her fancy keyboard. There really wasn’t that much hope of her coming to my rescue.

I tried to think. Exactly how long had I been gone from the house? Counting the drive to and from the therapist’s home office, we had been gone for a little over an hour and a half.

I tried to reassure myself that this was fine. Maybe the package had been dropped off a few minutes ago. Maybe the packaging wasn’t so obvious to people who might be unfamiliar with the product. Maybe none of my friends had passed by my house while the box of pull-ups had been lying out there in the open.

Would Emma have passed my house? Maybe not. After all, both my friends were well aware of the restrictions I was under to start the summer. They had given up on trying to tempt me to break my parents’ rules and sneak out to visit them during the day, or, just as badly, to let them hang out with me at home while everyone else was gone at work.

Maybe my secret was still safe.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

I looked across the street. The pale-cream-white blinds were drawn shut, and the regular silver sedan wasn’t in the driveway.

I looked to my left. There was still no traffic coming in that direction. I looked to my right. Way off in the distance, there was someone riding a bike. Someone that I didn’t have any trouble recognizing.

I shielded the box out of sight as much as I could as Dad ambled across the street and up the driveway, his eye scanning through a dozen pieces of mail that he was slowly sifting through as he walked back toward the house.

“Dad,” I moaned, drawing out his name. I didn’t dare yell, but I desperately wanted to convey a sense of urgency while not drawing Emma’s attention to my predicament.

I looked back down the road. My friend was still far enough away that I doubted she could make out anything more than the fact that I was holding some sort of colorful package. But distance wasn’t going to be my friend for long.

“Dad, please!”

As Dad reached the bottom of the steps, his eyes flicked up at last to the package I was holding in my hands.

“I’m sorry,” Dad said as he rushed up the steps to unlock the door. “Didn’t think that was supposed to arrive until tomorrow.”

I kept my eyes focused on Dad’s hands as he sorted through his keychain for the right one to unlock the door.

The second the lock clicked open. I shoved at the door and burst inside, slamming right into my older sister. The box slipped out of my hands as we both crashed to the floor.

“What the hell, Maddy,” Grace yelped out as she lay on the floor, wincing and rubbing at her knee.

“Sorry,” I muttered. There was a sudden annoying ache in my shoulder.

“Seriously, what’s the hurry?” Grace asked. Her eyes caught sight of the package before I had a chance to say anything in response. She raised her eyebrows. “Oh.”

There was someone especially embarrassing about the quantity of pull-ups in the box. Like, if it had just been a nine-pack of them, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But the whole thing just screamed out that I was a super serious bedwetter.

At least Grace already knew about the bedwetting and that I was wearing the pull-ups every night. This would have been a million times worse if it had been the first time she had found out about it.

Dad had completely ignored the collision. He was standing near the dining room table, opening up the letters one by one.

“You didn’t have to leave it sitting out there,” I said.

“I was upstairs,” Grace said. “Besides, they probably didn’t even knock. Half the time, they just dump in at the bottom of the steps and run off.”

Grace eased herself off of the floor first, then offered me a hand, helping me get up to my feet.

The doorbell rang.

It wasn’t hard for me to guess who it was. I instinctively raced to the door. It would very much be like Emma to barge on in after ringing the doorbell without waiting for anyone to come to the door.

I was too late. I got to the door, but before I could do anything to stop her, Emma had set foot inside.

I turned around in a panic. The box of pull-ups was nowhere to be seen. And neither was Grace.

“I was headed over to the park to meet up with Angie before dinner,” Emma said. “Didn’t think you’d be free until I saw you drive by. Wanna come?”

I looked back at Dad.

He checked the time on the phone. “Go ahead, but you need to be back in about an hour for dinner.”

I went to join Emma outside. I would have liked to change into something more comfortable, but I didn’t want to risk Emma following me further inside the house. Grace may have taken the pull-ups out of sight for me, but I wasn’t sure where they had ended up.

“What were you up to with your Dad?” Emma asked as I punched in the code for the garage door so that I could retrieve my bike.

I thought for a second about a lie that would sound better than going to see a therapist.

“Just shopping. Was looking for some new cleats but didn’t find anything I liked.”

That was a safe enough answer that Emma didn’t follow it up with any other queries as we made our way to the park.

<><><>

To my good luck, neither Emma nor Grace had asked any more questions about what I had been up to with Dad. Emma must not have been close enough to make out anything about the package, because she didn’t say anything about it, either.

With dinner still about ten minutes away, I headed up to my bedroom right after coming home from the park.

My bedroom door was closed, which was odd, because I was fairly certain I had left it open before I had left to go to the therapy appointment.

I opened the door and then shut it right behind me. It turned out that Grace had put the box of pull-ups right on my bed. I probably should thank her for rushing to get that out of sight when Emma came to the door, but I didn’t have any desire for any further conversations about pull-ups with my older sister.

It’s not like she had worn them for her own bedwetting, after all. Had that simply been out of embarrassment? Or had they not worked for her as well as they mostly did for me?

I glanced down again at the numbers on the box. Sixty-three pull-ups. Sixty. Three. That was more than two whole months’ worth of pull-ups.

I grabbed a pen from my desk. I stabbed a couple dozen times at the plastic wrap holding the box together until there were finally enough holes to weaken it and let me rip the box open.

Inside were another three bags, though the packaging on them was much more discreet than the outrageously blunt designs on the exterior.

I ripped each of the bags open one by one, letting the pull-ups tumble out into a pile on my bed. I was suddenly overcome with the desire to have a pile of pull-ups so large I could dive into them like Scrooge McDuck did with his hoard of gold.

The pull-ups did end up fitting in the dresser drawer, though just barely. There was hardly enough room for my regular underwear, though, to be fair, those didn’t take up nearly as much space.

I paused to consider what this meant for me.

With the much smaller package that Mom had purchased initially, it had been impossible for me to sneak an extra pull-up for use during the day. I had instead been forced to wait until after a dry morning before being able to have a pull-up to experiment on while home alone. It would have been too obvious to my parents if I had been going through the pull-ups a lot faster than one per day.

But with this many pull-ups, I doubted that using a few extra a week would cause my parents to think anything was amiss. And, even if they did notice, I decided that I could just tell them that there had been nights when I had woken up wet and wanted to change so that I could fall back asleep.

That would work, at least as long as Mom and Dad were much more careful the next time they shopped for a refill.

<><><>

I was practically in heaven the next two weeks. It didn’t matter that I had to go to the stupid therapy sessions a few times a week and answer all the stupid and pointless questions. It didn’t matter that I had to go to the private tutoring sessions – and at least those didn’t send me home any homework to do. And, to my great relief, I didn’t actually know any of the other kids whose parents had also signed them up for summer lessons.

I had more pull-ups than I could ever have dreamed of getting for myself, and that was enough to make even the more unpleasant parts of my summer break at least a bit bearable.

Pull-ups had completely replaced my regular underwear, at least when I was in bed or had the house to myself. I would never choose to wear a pull-up around Grace. And I wasn’t tempted to risk it with either of my parents, though I didn’t think they would be as observant as her.

For the two weeks after the arrival of the box of pull-ups, I paced myself with the actual bedwetting, working it out so I wet my pull-up in the morning a little over half the time.

I figured that was frequent enough to ensure that my parents continued to supply me with pull-ups while also giving me enough extras to wet during the day at my own leisure.

After a few more mornings of checking in on me, Mom finally gave up on checking to see whether I had had a bedwetting incident overnight. She hadn’t checked my dresser either. I probably wouldn’t be doing that for another month.

With my bedwetting phase now having lasted almost a month, it seemed as though my parents had come to accept that it was how life was going to be for me for the time being.

The initial restrictions my parents had placed on me for staying home alone had been loosened, though I had mixed feelings about that. I was now allowed to have my friends over to hang out, and I could go and visit them, though I had to text my parents right before I left the house and right when I arrived at my destination.

On one hand, it was nice to hang out with Angie and Emma again during the day. On the other hand, it severely cut into the time I would have had to wear the extra pull-ups.

The only time the topic of bedwetting came up with my parents was in relation to spending the night away from home. I attended two more sleepovers, one at each of my friends’ houses.

Mom had been reluctant to let me go – in fact, she had nearly even spoken to my friends’ parents about my bedwetting, only relenting after I begged and begged her not to do so.

In the end, the perceived effectiveness of the pull-ups was enough to convince her that it would be OK for me to spend the night away from home, though that didn’t stop my parents from both giving me several reminders about how I was to refrain from drinking too much in the evening.

I had headed out to both sleepovers with a pair of pull-ups tucked deep at the bottom of my backpack. Despite the actual bedwetting that had happened at the previous sleepover, I didn’t actually end up getting a pull-up out of the hidden spot in my bag before getting ready for bed.

After a few more weeks without any issues, that single actual bedwetting accident was now almost an ancient memory.

Since I hadn’t actually had any true bedwetting accidents other than that one incident, I decided to write it off as a fluke. I figured I was safe from that happening again, and my bigger fear – given how easily Grace had figured out my secret – was that I might not be lucky enough to hide a pull-up around Angie and Emma again.

All those worries proved to be for nothing. I made sure not to have a second glass of soda in the evening, left the pull-ups out of sight, and made it through both nights without any problems.

This wasn’t going to be my experience at camp, which was now only two days away. I still couldn’t believe that my parents had actually told the camp counselors about the bedwetting and that they had consented to have me placed in a cabin with other bedwetters.

I knew that my parents meant well, but the fact that I had managed to deal with the bedwetting secretly during the birthday sleepover should have been enough to show them that I would be fine at camp without any interventions.

I still didn’t know how I felt about that.

I was incredibly embarrassed at the idea of anyone else thinking I was a bedwetter. It was bad enough that the circle of people who were aware of that secret had expanded to include the therapist I had now had several appointments with.

But that meant that I wouldn’t have to go a week of abstaining from wearing and wetting pull-ups.

Besides. I was curious. I wondered. Would all the other girls wear the same bedwetting pull-ups as me? Were there other brands that I was unaware of?

And what about what I’d seen in Hannah’s suitcase several weeks ago? What if one of them – like her – instead wore diapers to bed?

Maybe I could get my hands on one?

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 3, 2025 at 5:10 AM
Content: Chapter 40: Cabin B
I couldn’t wait for the soccer camp to begin.

The one annoyance of all the vacations planned for later this summer was that I wasn’t able to be on the summer soccer team that I had been on with Angie and Emma in previous years. That meant hearing secondhand about how all their games went while wishing I had been out on the field with them as well.

The itch to start playing again was beginning to grow after I had largely taken a break from soccer over the first month of the summer, having avoided it apart from the handful of times I had gone to the park to kick a ball around with my friends.

My worries about spending the week at the camp had receded as that date was quickly approaching.

All I had to deal with was one more appointment with the therapist, one that both Mom and Dad were coming along with this time. Then I’d be free until it was time for Mom to take me on the two-hour drive to the camp after lunch tomorrow.

There didn’t seem to be any end in sight to the appointments with Mrs. Reynolds. In the visits after the first appointment, there had been other questionaries and tests, along with many more questions about school and my interests in general.

Thankfully, the topic was dropped after the brief questions about bedwetting during the initial visit.

The downside to driving with both Mom and Dad in the car to the appointment was that I was relegated to the less comfortable seats in the middle row of the van.

I stared out the window as Dad drove. It would be nice to have a break from therapy the next week. The last few sessions had felt so repetitive that I found it wasn’t any easier to pay attention to Mrs. Reynolds than to any of my teachers at school.

About ten minutes into the drive, I noticed a problem. This was not the route to Mrs. Reynolds’ house, where all the previous therapy sessions had occurred.

“Mom, I think Dad is lost,” I said.

Mom just chuckled a bit before answering me. “No, he’s going the right way.”

“But this isn’t the way to Mrs. Reynolds’ place.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Dad said. “We told you the other day that we would be meeting her at the clinic this time.”

“Why’s that?”

“She wanted to have a psychiatrist at the meeting today as well,” Mom said.

That didn’t make any sense. “I thought Mrs. Reynolds was a psychiatrist?”

“Oh no, that’s actually something different,” Mom said from the front seat. “Therapists help diagnose patients and talk with them through their issues. But for any medications, a psychiatrist will usually be the one to prescribe them.”

That was not welcome news. I felt rather betrayed. No one had told me anything about having to take any medicine.

Words seemed to slip off my tongue and go back down my mouth as I fumbled out a response. “But, what?”

“Maddy,” Mom said gently, turning around slightly in her seat so that she could look back at me. “We did talk about this yesterday. Weren’t you paying attention?”

The answer was probably not. After my initial fears about therapy had proven to be unfounded, I hadn’t given much, if any, thought to it. But it wasn’t like I wanted to admit that to my parents, either.

“I don’t know,” I replied sulkily, looking away from Mom and out the window again.

“Well,” Mom said. “I’m sure Mrs. Reynolds can fill you in again when we arrive.”

<><><>

As I slumped in the chair with my head resting on my hand, my thoughts drifted ahead to the cabin full of other bedwetters I’d be spending a week with.

I’d been sitting in the room with my parents, Mrs. Reynolds, and Dr. Arnold, the psychiatrist, for about ten minutes now. I would rather have been about anywhere else. I tried my best to distract myself from the worries about what medications I might be forced to take. My mind raced back to nightmares of being forced to sit still for shots or take thimble-sized drinks of pungent cough syrup that had the consistency of molasses.

I thought ahead to what would be awaiting me at camp. I tried to picture the diapers I had seen in Hannah’s suitcase: thick, large, and nearly all white. They hinted at a world of possibilities to be explored. Aside from the many ads I’d seen over the years for my nighttime pull-ups and a few ads for incontinence underwear for old people, I hadn’t seen any ads for diapers or pull-ups that weren’t for babies.

If that option existed for Hannah, was it likely that it was the only alternative, or was there a whole host of other diapers and pull-ups that I had been completely oblivious to all along? My mind raced through dozens of combinations of styles, colors, and patterns. Maybe one of the other bedwetters would have extra I could borrow to try?

“Madelyn, Madelyn,” Mom said. “You need to be paying attention to what Dr. Arnold is saying.

“Huh,” I replied, looking up at all the adults.

Dr. Arnold just chuckled. “I didn’t exactly need more evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” I asked.

“Of your diagnosis,” Dr. Arnold said. “Mrs. Reynolds and I went through all the information from your therapy session and the questionnaires we had everyone fill out, and it seems clear that you have ADHD.”

“ADHD?”

“It stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” Dr. Arnold said.

I just stared at him blankly. I didn’t get it. I understood what all of those words meant individually, but not when they were lumped together like a run-on sentence.

“It’s basically just a long string of words that means that the brain doesn’t always think through things in the same way that everything else does,” Mrs. Reynolds explained. “That’s why it’s hard for you to focus sometimes in school or why your mind tends to wander off into daydreams like you did just now.”

“I did not,” I said. I think I was blushing, less from being caught daydreaming and more from the knowledge of what I had been daydreaming about.

“Madelyn,” Mom said.

“Fine,” I said. “So I guess that daydreaming is illegal.”

“It’s not illegal,” Dr. Arnold said with a laugh, “but it is important to be able to concentrate at times when you need to do so, like at school. There isn’t anything wrong with daydreaming as long as it isn’t stopping you from handling your other responsibilities.”

I didn’t like where this conversation was going or what seemed to be implied behind Dr. Arnold’s and Mrs. Reynolds’ polite explanations. “You’re saying that I’m stupid.”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “Just smart in different ways. Your brain is sometimes trying to take on more things than it can handle at once. There are medications that can help you focus better.”

“I’m not sick,” I said. “I don’t want to take any medicine.”

“This type of medicine isn’t like that,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “There isn’t a cure for ADHD. Nothing we give you is going to make it go away permanently. Think of it more like taking vitamins. It’s something that helps your body work the way that it should.”

“I’m going to write up a prescription,” Dr. Arnold said. “We’re going to start on a smaller dose, and we can re-evaluate in a few weeks.”

I sank back into the chair as the adults talked back and forth over me. It didn’t feel like I had much of a say in this decision at all. There was talk about neurodivergence, IEPs, and some other words and acronyms that I didn’t understand. I tried to think about how Mrs. Reynolds had described it. I could deal with the idea that my brain handled things differently. But I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t.

“Can’t the medication wait until school starts?” Dad asked.

“Actually, it would be better to start now,” Dr. Arnold said. “That way, if there are any side effects or it just isn’t helping, we can consider other dosage levels or medications and work to get everything set by the time school starts up again.”

“That makes sense,” Dad said. “But Maddy’s got a soccer camp she’s going to for the next week.”

“In that case, you can start once she gets back. Best to not start new medications while away from home for a week.”

“So that means I don’t have to come back now?” I asked.

“No,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “There will still be things to talk about. Medication is just one part of helping with ADHD. It can’t be the only thing. We still need to work on different learning and studying strategies to help as well, but that should get a lot easier with the medication.”

I didn’t argue. I just sighed and crossed my arms. There couldn’t be anything that wrong with me if all it took was a small pill to make everything all better.

<><><>

We pulled up to the entrance of the camp in the middle of the afternoon.

I was sitting in the front passenger seat as Dad, Grace, and Jackson were staying at home while Mom handled the nearly two-hour drive to camp. It would be Dad’s turn when it came time to pick me up in a week.

We hadn’t spoken much on the drive, but that was mostly because Mom had chosen to play almost the entire soundtrack from Hamilton, with the music turned up way too loud. As I hadn’t brought any headphones with me, there was nothing to do but listen along to the music.

That was fine by me. I didn’t really want to have another discussion about my bedwetting or how I was supposed to handle it at camp. Mom and Dad had spent twenty minutes talking to me about it the night before. I had been forced to sit on the couch and bite my lip as they went over how I needed to make sure to use the toilet before bed and not forget to put on a pull-up every night and what I could do to keep everything discreet.

I didn’t see why they were so concerned. I was going to be with a bunch of other bedwetters, and apparently, all the mattresses in the cabin had protective covers, just in case there were any leaks.

I had passed the time on the drive by playing my Harry Potter video game. I hadn’t beaten it yet, but I thought I had to be getting somewhat close to the end of the game. Mom and Dad had allowed me to bring it along for the drive with very clear instructions that it was going to return with Mom. Video game systems were not allowed at the camp.

With the rush to get ready for camp, the topic of the ADHD diagnosis and the pills I’d need to be taking afterward had fallen largely to the wayside, apart from both Mom and Dad giving me assurances that there wasn’t any harm in giving the medication to see how it would go. Still, I couldn’t help but feel as though the fact that we stopped to get fast food on the way home wasn’t a bribe in some way or another.

I worked hard to push the topic out of my mind. It wasn’t like I’d have to deal with it for another week. I could worry about it then.

Dust kicked up in the air as we drove down a narrow dirt road. I could make out a bunch of wood buildings about a half mile in the distance.

The gravel parking lot was about halfway full when Mom pulled the van into an empty space and finally turned off the music.

I stepped out of the van with my backpack while Mom popped open the trunk to grab my soccer bag and the duffle bag with all my regular clothes.

There were collections of parents and their kids walking toward the welcome center, hauling suitcases and gym bags. The camp was for middle-school-age students only, with just girls entering sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. That left me in the oldest tier of campers.

Some of the kids were wearing orange or green t-shirts. I got a better glimpse of one as we got to the back of the check-in line. They appeared to be from previous summers at the camp.

I scanned over the crowd of anxious parents and impatient girls getting dropped off for the camp. There was at least one cabin of bedwetters. I wondered which of my fellow campers were going to be in mine.

The first time I had ever met any other bedwetters before had been the experience with my cousins at the reception after the funeral those three years ago. I had plied them with so many questions, though in the years after, I had always wished I had managed to ask better ones.

Three years had passed before meeting another bedwetter, but with Hannah, I had no intention of asking her about her nighttime or daytime accidents, partly because I couldn’t think of a way to do that around my friends that wouldn’t seem strange and mostly because I had been put off by her weird behavior

This was different. I wasn’t a curious outsider, with the excuse of just wanting to know how things worked. This time, I was one of them. I had to act like I really was a bedwetter, and not that it was some new thing I was curious about.

I had already decided against mentioning to the other girls about how I had only recently started bedwetting. I had been able to sell that to everyone back home, but it felt like it would just be easier to go along with the story of having been a lifelong bedwetting when among other girls who surely must have had that experience.

The sign-in and drop-off process was well rehearsed. A bunch of counselors – denoted by their bright purple shirts and name tags – were checking names off lists, handing out shirts, and pointing out what direction to take their bags.

I stood by silently as Mom checked me in. I was handed a pink camp t-shirt. I set my backpack down on the floor so I could pull it on over my shirt like the other campers were doing.

Once I had the oversized camp shirt on, the counselor handed me a name tag. I looked at it in annoyance. They had spelled out my full name – Madelyn – rather than putting Maddy.

“You’ll be in cabin ten,” the impatient counselor said as they glanced at the ever-growing line of new arrivals. “You can go ahead and walk over to cabin ten. The cabin counselor will be waiting for you.”

“Are you sure you don’t need help carrying anything?” Mom asked me.

“I’m sure,” I said.

I gave Mom one final hug goodbye and then headed out the opposite door toward the cabin where I’d be spending the rest of the week.

There were a couple dozen cabins lining either side of a trail on the other side of the welcome building. I could make out a bunch of soccer fields in the distance as part of a large sports complex. To the side was a larger building. I figured it must be the cafeteria.

I readjusted my backpack and duffle bag so they fit correctly around me. I was only going to be away from home for seven nights, but my parents had insisted that I pack an extra five of the nighttime pull-ups, just in case.

I paused in front of the entrance to cabin ten. I had to remind myself that there wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about. Every other girl in the cabin would be a genuine bedwetter themselves.

It was one thing to fool my parents and Grace or the doctors, nurses, and therapists I’d seen this summer. A cabin full of girls my age was going to be something entirely else.

I took a deep breath. I could do it. I could pretend to be a bedwetter for the next week. I’d wet my pull-up a couple times or maybe even every night.

After all, there couldn’t be any way in the world that they’d come close to thinking that someone would voluntarily fake wetting the bed.

I stepped forward, took hold of the door, and pulled it open.

A college-age woman in a purple camp t-shirt greeted me the second I stepped inside.

“Hi, I’m Amy,” she said. “I’m the cabin counselor.”

“Um, Maddy,” I said after a short pause.

“Welcome to Cabin B,” Amy said.

“I think I’m supposed to be in cabin ten,” I said. I looked down at my name tag, which also included my cabin number, which still very much said the number ten, which was what I was sure I had seen on the outside of the cabin door.

Amy just rolled her eyes. “That’s just a joke. Trust me, you’re in the right spot.”

Amy looked down at her clipboard without bothering to explain what she meant and then checked off a box that must have been next to my name.

“Halfway done,” she muttered to herself before looking up at me again.

“Half the beds are taken,” she said. “You can grab any that are still free. Orientation will start once check-ins are done, which should be…” Amy pulled out her phone to confirm the time, “… in about forty minutes. So you can just chill here and unpack while we wait for everyone else to arrive.”

I took a look around the cabin. The first thing I noticed that was different about the cabin was that there weren’t any bunk beds. Instead, there were a bunch of slightly lofted beds spread out around the edge of the cabin, each with a small dresser and nightstand next to them.

There were two girls chatting over to the right side of the room. A third girl was rummaging through a suitcase she had set up on another bed. A fourth bed was taken, though its claimant was nowhere in sight.

I took a free bed in the corner. There was a smaller dresser next to the bed for me to unpack my clothes into. I didn’t feel like doing that at the moment. My pull-ups may have been at the bottom of my bag of clothes, but I didn’t want to be the first person at the cabin to expose their different nighttime underwear.

I mean. I knew that this was supposedly the bedwetter cabin. Was that something all the other girls knew yet as well?

My thoughts vacillated between anticipation and trepidation. I was so intrigued at the possibility of learning what other products existed outside of my own nighttime bedwetting pull-ups, but I was scared that one wrong move, one misstep, could out me as a fraud as I tried to not stand out among a crowd of seasoned bedwetters.

I couldn’t wait until it was time for everyone to be getting into their pajamas for bed.

“Maddy! Hi!”

I nearly jumped from the shock of a distinctive voice

I turned around, my heart already sinking, as I knew full well what I was going to see.

Stepping out of the cabin bathroom, with her telltale headphones, Harry Potter shirt, and Velcro shoes, was Hannah.

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 4, 2025 at 4:13 AM
Content: Chapter 41: Of Course
There was no way this was actually happening to me.

I stood, frozen in place, my mouth slightly ajar as I watched all of my carefully laid plans tumble to the ground like I had just pulled the wrong piece out of a Jenga tower.

Three long, painful years of longing. Months of careful planning. All the humiliation and embarrassment I’d allowed myself to endure to get to the point of having pull-ups of my own.

All of it completely unraveled because, of course, I had to run into Hannah again at the worst possible moment.

There was a look of recognition in Hannah’s eyes that signaled something far more than just recognizing a friend of her cousin that she had met once before. She knew. She knew exactly what this cabin was for. She knew why she had been assigned to it. She knew why every other girl in the room was here rather than in any of the dozens of other cabins in these campgrounds.

Hannah knew that I was a bedwetter.

My mouth felt dry as her eyes flicked down to my bag, then back up. She probably even knew that there was more than regular underwear tucked away inside my duffle bag.

My mind raced through all the possible excuses I could make for myself. What if I pretended that I must have been assigned to the wrong cabin? I could deny being a bedwetter and just keep the pull-ups out of sight all week long.

But that wouldn’t do. I had to imagine that this news would find a way of getting back to my parents. I couldn’t see any way of talking myself out of that situation.

“Oh, my goodness. Maddy!” Hannah raced across the cabin to me, and without asking any permission, she flung her arms around me in a big hug.

I responded by giving her a tentative pat on the back before slithering out of her grasp and taking a step backward. As I gave myself a tiny bit of breathing room from Hannah, whose face was still beaming with excitement, I caught a brief flash of purple sticking out of the top of her shorts before her shirt shifted back down again.

The three other girls who had arrived before me, who hadn’t paid much attention when I had first entered the cabin, were all looking up and staring at us now.

The only person who didn’t seem to care was the counselor, Amy, who was staring disinterestedly at her cell phone as she waited by the door for the remaining campers to arrive.

“Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.” The girl closest to us had stood up from where she was seated on a bed on the other side of the room. Both of her hands were clasped across her face.

She looked back and forth between Maddy and me, her long French braid waving rapidly from side to side.

“Like, you guys know each other? From, like, outside of camp?”

“Yes!” Hannah exclaimed a little too loudly.

Know was a bit strong of a word for me and Hannah, in my opinion. I’d only met her a couple times, and only because she was a cousin of one of my friends.

The girl looked back and forth between us again. “And you both know what this cabin is for, right?”

I looked down at my feet.

“It’s for soccer players,” Hannah ventured.

The girl just started laughing. “Like, you guys seriously didn’t know about each other before this?”

I remembered that I wasn’t actually supposed to know that Hannah was a bedwetter. I’d caught a glimpse of the pull-ups she wore during the day – the same as the ones I wore at night – when Hannah had come with me and my friends to the park.

Her cousin, Emma, had then explained to me about how Hannah still wasn’t fully toilet trained – a fact she attributed to her cousin’s autism.

It was only later that I noticed the diaper in the garbage at Emma’s place. I then discovered the plain white diapers that Hannah wore to bed each night when I discreetly rummaged through her suitcase.

I looked up at Hannah. The confused expression on her face made me wonder how much she actually understood about the situation.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

I turned to look at the corner, where another girl was slowly clapping her hands together.

“It’s because we all still piss the bed at night. Yippy Ki Yay,” the girl said sarcastically as she let the clapping come to a stop. “And now you know.”

“Oh, shut up, Maya,” said the girl on the bed next to her. “You’re only mad because you lost the bet we made that you wouldn’t be back in this cabin again.”

“I’m not doing it,” Maya said as she crossed her arms.

Our counselor finally chimed in, though she didn’t even look up from her phone. “I seem to recall you making a pretty big deal about it last time.”

“I don’t even care about pissing the bed. I was just hoping I’d be rid of you this year,” Maya retorted.

“Well,” the counselor said, “judging by what I saw you unpack, I’d say you are still very much out of luck. Stuck with me for one more week.”

“So what,” Maya said. “I get to graduate from this cabin at least, unlike you.”

I was so caught up in the feud – I wondered what the terms of that bet had been – that I nearly forgot about Hannah for a few seconds.

I turned to face Hannah again. Her eyes were wider than I thought was humanly possible.

“You... wear diapers?” Hannah whispered, her eyes wide, voice trembling with awe.

“Pull-ups,” I said tartly. “They are pull-ups, not diapers.” I paused, wanting to make the distinction between myself and Hannah clear. “And I only wear them at night.”

“Aww, is someone embarrassed?” the girl who had won the bet with Maya said. She had gotten up from her spot in the corner and walked up to Hannah and me.

I just glared at her.

“Chill,” she said. “I’m just teasing. We’re in the same boat, after all.”

“Boat?” Hannah asked. “This is a cabin.”

I grit my teeth together. The thought of spending an entire week trapped in this cabin with Hannah twisted my stomach into knots.

The girl rolled her eyes. “The camp doesn’t know what to do with us bedwetters, so they just toss us together in one cabin for the week.

“Oh,” Hannah said.

“I’m Chloe, by the way,” she said.

“You guys all wet the bed at night? And you wear diapers?” Hannah blurted out before I had a chance to introduce myself.

My face burned again at her insistence on referring to pull-ups as diapers. I was really ready for the topic to be dropped until tonight. I was not nearly as prepared as I thought I was to be talking about bedwetting amid a bunch of strangers, especially now that I had to be much more careful about my answers with Hannah around.

“Duh,” Chloe said. “It would be kind of weird if I was assigned to this cabin and didn’t wear them.”

“I wear them during the day, too,” Hannah said excitedly.

Chloe raised her eyebrows at Hannah’s sudden, unprompted confession, but Hannah continued on, completely oblivious.

“Do you wear them... like... during the day, too?” Hannah asked, her voice rising at the end as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“No,” Chloe replied, her eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “Wait, you seriously do?”

“Yeah,” Hannah said. “Sometimes I don’t notice that I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Ok, yeah, that’s…” Chloe’s voice trailed off into an awkward silence.

I realized belatedly that I probably was supposed to appear surprised by this revelation as well. Hannah didn’t know that I had gotten a glimpse of the pull-up under her shorts that other day or that her own cousin had spilled the tea on her condition.

I made a show of looking down at Hannah’s waist and back up at her. “Wait, for real?”

“How did you not know about each other?” the girl with the French braid asked, joining back in on the conversation.

“We’ve only met a couple of times, actually,” I said, rushing to answer the question before Hannah could. “She’s a cousin of one of my friends.”

“I see,” the girl said. “I’m Hailey.”

“Maddy,” I said.

Hailey looked expectantly at Hannah for a few seconds. “And you are?”

“Hannah.”

<><><>

What followed were a bunch of introductions as I desperately tried to steer the topic of conversation to anything other than diapers.

Maya and Chloe, who had lost the bet, were both entering eighth grade like me. This was Maya’s third year at the camp, while it was Chloe’s second. I tried to ask what it was that Maya had to do since she lost the bet, but she only scowled and refused to answer me while Chloe was reduced to giggling excitedly.

When Chloe finally managed to stop laughing, she assured me that I would find out by the end of the week.

Hailey, a soon-to-be sixth grader who was tall and skinny for her age, was a first-timer like Hannah and me.

What annoyed me was that I couldn’t seem to shake Hannah. She followed me everywhere around the cabin, standing at the edge of every conversation I was having, hovering just off to the side of me.

It was like she couldn’t stop talking about it — every conversation with Hannah circled back to the same embarrassing question. “Are you a bedwetter too?” It was as if she had no sense of discretion, no understanding of how horrifying it was to hear that question aloud, especially in front of others. Each time she said it, my body tensed, a fresh wave of embarrassment coursing through me, my cringe almost painful as I braced myself each time.

What ended up saving me was her noticing that Hailey had a Gryffindor pin on her backpack. I slipped back to my bed as soon as Hannah started chatting away about Harry Potter, leaving Hailey stuck in that rather one-sided conversation.

I knew I would need to unpack my stuff eventually, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it yet. I suddenly felt rather self-conscious about my pull-ups, but not for the normal reasons a bedwetter might feel that way.

I stared at my duffle bag, the childish designs on my pull-ups swimming in my mind. They were cute... but not in a good way. Not in the way I needed them to be. Compared to the plain white diapers Hannah wore at night, mine looked like they belonged in a daycare. What if everyone else had something like hers? Something neutral, something that didn’t scream that I’m still a kid.

I took a deep breath as I pulled out my phone and sat on the bed I had claimed. I wasn’t really planning on doing anything on the mobile device. I just wanted to look busy enough to not be bothered while I collected my thoughts.

I hadn’t counted on running into anyone I knew. I had pondered the then worst-case scenario of meeting another girl I had played with or against in years past in the bedwetter cabin, but I had figured my secret would be safe under those circumstances. After all, we both would be mutually motivated to keep silent.

But Hannah? How could I possibly be expected to entrust a secret of this magnitude to her? Was she even smart enough to do so?

Besides, both my friends were already aware of Hannah’s need for diapers at night. I couldn’t use that leverage to keep her quiet.

There was one factor going in my favor. I was fortunate that I had met Hannah earlier this summer. If camp had been our first meeting, and I hadn’t realized she was Emma’s cousin until later on, that would have put me in an even more precarious position. I shuddered at the thought of that scenario.

All my worries about how I would handle being around a bunch of other bedwetters seemed miniscule in comparison to the question of how I would handle things when Hannah’s family moved into my neighborhood.

What would Hannah say about me? Would she be willing to keep my secret? And even if she was willing to do so, could I trust her not to accidentally let it slip?

The remaining three campers arrived in the next fifteen minutes, with Isabell, Olivia, and Lily bringing the group of bedwetting campers to eight.

Like Hanah and myself, Isabell and Olivia were both first-timers at the camp. Neither appeared to be surprised to have been placed in Cabin B, as Amy kept referring it to when she checked the new arrivals off of her list.

The last arrival at our cabin, Lily, like Maya and Chloe, had been coming for three straight years.

I watched as Olivia unpacked her suitcase full of clothes by unzipping it and unceremoniously dumping all the contents out on top of her bed before stuffing them haphazardly into the dresser.

I tried to avoid staring as Olivia rummaged through the pile of clothes on her bed. I was sitting on my own bed, pretending to be distracted by my phone while actually attempting to get a glimpse at what sort of nighttime protection Olivia might have brought with her.

My eyes gravitated to Olivia’s bed as she unpacked, my breath catching when I glimpsed something white and crinkly in her pile of clothes. I strained to see more, my heart thudding in my chest, but Olivia shifted, blocking my view. Was that... another diaper? Or pull-ups like mine? My curiosity buzzed, but I forced myself to look away, acting nonchalant, even as my stomach churned with nerves.

From outside, I caught a few words of some announcement that was playing on the loudspeaker.

“Alright, everyone,” Amy said. “We can finish unpacking later. We’ve got orientation, dinner, and some games to play.” Amy looked over at Hannah. “Make sure to grab anything you need since we won’t be back until it’s time to get ready for bed.”

I tucked my phone in my backpack after getting up from the bed. This pair of shorts didn’t have any pockets, and I didn’t think I’d need it for anything. No sooner had I done that then Hannah was right back beside me. She was wearing a small drawstring athletic bag on her back and was holding her noise-reducing headphones in one hand.

Everyone else was out the door when Hannah turned and asked me a question.

“We’re friends, right?” Hannah asked, her voice small, her hands fumbling awkwardly with her noise-reducing earmuffs.

For a moment, I hesitated, forcing my lips into what I hoped was a sincere smile. The beginnings of a new plan were forming in the back of my head, a way in which I might actually manage to salvage this situation.

My secret had to be kept, and I was willing to do anything to keep it.

Even if that meant having to pretend to Hannah that I was her friend.

“Of course.”

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 4, 2025 at 4:14 AM
Content: Chapter 42: Not Like Them
Pretending to be Hannah’s friend was both difficult and easy.

The easy part was that she hardly left me alone. The difficult part was that she hardly left me alone.

What I needed more than anything was some peace and quiet to be able to organize my thoughts. Too much had happened in the last few hours, from being placed in a cabin with a bunch of actual bedwetters to the discovery that one of those fellow campers was none other than Hannah, the cousin of one of my best friends.

The following several hours proceeded like a blur as my mind vacillated between the hope that I might be able to maintain my secret once I returned home from the soccer camp and despair over whether Hannah would be willing and capable of doing so.

“Are we friends?”

That was the query from Hannah earlier in the day that was the source of both my hope and despair. I had answered in the affirmative, which was the exact opposite of how I felt about her. In truth, I couldn’t stand being around Hannah, though it was hard to put a finger on why exactly that was. Yes, she was annoying and completely oblivious to other’s personal space, but there was just something else that rubbed me the wrong way, though I couldn’t find the words to describe precisely what I was feeling or why I felt that way.

What I did know was this: keeping Hannah on my side was the only way I could extract myself from this mess.

The hours after leaving the cabin passed by at a rapid-fire pace. There was a big gathering of all the campers and counselors, where they went over all the rules and the schedule for the week, a tour of the campgrounds and the sports fields, all followed by a meal in a cafeteria that was only marginally better than the uninspiring goop served in the cafeteria at my middle school back home.

In the few brief moments when I was able to find some time to detach from all the noise and bustle and begin to contemplate my next move, I arrived at a few decisive conclusions.

Quitting bedwetting wasn’t an option. I had worked too hard and had endured too much to let go of my hard-won right to wear pull-ups to bed each night.

Besides, that wouldn’t make any tangible difference to how my friends would react if Hannah spilled the beans about our time in Cabin B.

The only option was to convince Hannah that my secret was not to be shared with anyone else.

I had a week – well, technically, this evening, five whole days, and one morning – to get Hannah over to my side, or I would be done for when her family moved over to my neighborhood later this summer.

“Maddy, Maddy, come on!” Hannah was standing to the side of where I was seated at a long cafeteria table, holding a half-eaten tray of food that had been heavily picked through.

I held back a sigh and attempted to smile. From the grin on Hannah’s face, she hadn’t cued into my initial disappointment. The only moments of peace I had gotten were two times she had abruptly sprinted off to use the restroom before racing back afterward to catch up with me.

I looked down at my own plate, which contained a half-eaten, probably microwaved, corn dog, Jell-O, and a few remaining raw baby carrots and broccoli that had rolled into a pool of Ranch dressing.

It wasn’t appealing enough that I would risk letting Hannah get out of my sight.

“Sure,” I said, as happily as I could manage.

The rest of cabin B – the nickname having stuck in my head - had split up for the most part. Maya and Chloe, despite their apparent annoyance with each other earlier, were seated together with Lily a few tables away. I still wondered what the outcome of their bet - that Maya would get over her bedwetting by this summer - was going to be.

No sooner had we both emptied the contents of our trays in the trash did Hannah dash off again without warning. This time, I didn’t bother calling after her to ask what she was doing. I knew she was headed to the bathroom like she had done a couple of times since we’d left the cabin.

I followed behind Hannah at a much slower pace. I wasn’t feeling any need to use the restroom myself – while fiddling with the lanyard ID card hanging around my neck. On one side, it had my name, cabin, counselor’s name, and the name of the team I’d be on for the week. The back of the card had a tiny map of the campgrounds. We’d also been given a schedule for the week. I didn’t have any pockets to put it in, so I had stuffed the paper inside the cardholder as well.

Teams weren’t divided up by cabins – that would have been a lot simpler – but Hannah and I had still ended up getting paired together. I actually wasn’t all that annoyed by that. Hannah had demonstrated that she actually knew what she was doing when she had come to the park to play with us that one time she had been visiting her cousin earlier in the summer.

I fiddled idly with the lanyard, twisting it around and letting it loose to spin again, as I watched the other campers filter out of the cafeteria toward the fields. We were going to meet up with our teams this evening before getting s’mores around the fire and heading back to our cabins for the night.

I let out a sigh after a few minutes had passed without Hannah stepping out of the bathroom. She had probably wet her pull-up and was needing to change. While her outfit was discreet enough to conceal her pull-up. I had been able to pick up the telltale sign of it rustling beneath her shorts a few times today. I mean, if she hadn’t been potty trained earlier this summer, what were the odds that she had managed to turn that situation around in the last month?

Still, I couldn’t shake the embarrassment of standing out in the hallway waiting for Hannah to finish doing her business like I was some kind of chaperone for her.

A grin spread out across Hannah’s face once she saw me after she had exited the bathroom. I returned a quick smile. “We need to hurry,” I said. “We still need to get our gear from the cabin. Don’t want to be late to the first practice.”

<><><>

I couldn’t help but feel nervous when I stepped back into the cabin a few hours later.

The last few hours of the night had been a welcome distraction as Hannah and I joined up with the group of girls who would make up our team for the week. I was so focused on the drills and games that, for a while, I was able to push my dilemma to the back of my mind.

Even Hannah hadn’t been that bad. She’d reverted to being extra clingy around me but hadn’t been as much of a nuisance as she had been when we had first arrived at the cabin in the afternoon earlier. She did make two runs to a nearby porta-potty – one time bringing her small backpack with her – furthering my suspicions that there were still plenty of times in the day when Hannah wasn’t keeping her pull-up dry.

That behavior had drawn some looks from our new teammates, but nothing more than that so far.

Hannah and I were the last two campers to arrive back at the cabin after the evening practices and campfire s’mores. Everyone else was busy either tucking away their soccer gear, chatting, or looking at their phones. I was finally afforded a few minutes of peace as Hannah again rushed off to the bathroom at the back of the cabin.

I unlocked my phone to find a half-dozen text messages. I responded to the ones from my parents first, assuring them that I wasn’t feeling too lonely, which was the truth, as I’d been so busy the first day of camp.

I didn’t make any mention of Hannah being at the camp. I hadn’t mentioned her to my parents earlier and hoped that wasn’t a conversation we’d need to have. The last thing I needed was for my parents to be aware of another bedwetter that was soon to be in the neighborhood.

There were a few messages from Emma and Angie. The team had managed to pull out a close win today. I did feel rather jealous. I would have rather been playing in the summer league like I had in the past rather than being forced to skip it because of all the upcoming family vacations. Even being fully immersed in soccer for an entire week wasn’t enough of a consolation prize.

I hesitated while trying to decide what I was going to tell them. There was no way I would be able to get around Emma finding out that Hannah had gone to the same camp as me, but I wasn’t sure how to break that news to them in a way that would avoid any implications that I was a bedwetter like her cousin.

They had to think that everything was going normally at camp. What would I be telling them if I had met Hannah at camp and hadn’t been faking being a bedwetter?

I tapped out a quick message to the group chat with Emma and Angie: “You’ll never guess who is on my team at the camp?”

That elicited a few responses from them – all wrong – as they put in guesses about some other girls we had played soccer with over the last few years.

I finally provided the answer. I typed in “Hannah,” followed by an ellipsis and an eye-roll emoji.

That brought back a rapid-fire flurry of texts in response. Emma and Angie were both far too amused at the situation, though, to my relief, neither made any jump to assuming that I was in a cabin with Hannah or what the implications of that would be.

At the sight of Hannah exiting the bathroom out of the corner of my eye, I quickly closed out of the group chat, switching over to the much more innocuous messages thread I had been on with my parents. Hannah was still wearing her noise-reducing headphones. The only time she had removed them was when we were playing soccer after dinner.

I let out a small sigh of relief as Hannah went over to her bed instead of coming by to chat with me.

“Hey, listen up,” Amy said, as the cabin counselor clapped her hands several times in a row. “Excuse me, I need your attention. Lights are supposed to be out by 10:30, so we’ve got about thirty minutes to get ready for bed.”

There were a few groans from that. At least for me, that was a fairly normal summer bedtime.

“Show of hands,” Amy asked. “Who is taking a shower tonight, and who is doing one in the morning?”

Hailey, Lily, and Hannah raised their hands.

“Well, that’s a relief,” the counselor said. “It’s impossible to be on time in the morning if everyone is waiting until then.”

Amy pointed at Hailey and Lily and told them that they were first to shower, then it would be her and Hannah’s turn.

I suddenly felt way out of my element. I’d never had any issues getting dressed around other people before, whether that was with family, or soccer teammates in a locker room, or during sleepovers with Emma and Angie.

It didn’t matter that everyone knew or that every single person in the cabin - with the exception of Amy, the counselor - was going to be wearing some form of protection beneath their pajamas.

I tried not to look anxious as I glanced about the room. I had no intention of being the first person to reach into their suitcase or dresser to retrieve a pull-up.

I wanted so badly to look around and see what all the other campers were doing. But at the same time, there was a gnawing guilt running through me, like I was an intruder in a space I had no business being in.

How did actual bedwetters behave?

I couldn’t take into account anything I’d observed Hannah do. She was the complete and total opposite of normal, regardless of the circumstances. At a normal camp, I would have felt totally at home stripping and changing right next to my bunk bed without giving it a second thought.

But I realized something. I absolutely did not want anyone to see me wearing a pull-up. It was one thing to be a pretend bedwetter in the abstract sense. It was something entirely else to be going through that performance with all eyes in the cabin on me.

Hailey pulled out a small bag from her suitcase and made her way around the corner to the bathroom first. I watched Lily from the corner of my eye as she rummaged through her suitcase, first pulling out a T-shirt and then a pair of pajama shorts. That was followed by something white and crinkly. It wasn’t the colorful style of pull-up that I had in my own suitcase, but it also didn’t bear any resemblance to the diapers of Hannah’s that I snuck a look at when she was staying at her cousin’s house.

I dropped my gaze as Lily stepped away from her bed, looking up again to catch her rounding the corner to the bathroom as well, but I didn’t get another peek at the pull-up.

No one else appeared to be in much of a hurry. There were still thirty minutes left till the lights were supposed to go out.

I tried to think through what my plan was going to be. I regretted not saying I was going to take an evening shower. That would have made getting changed into a pull-up a lot easier.

I decided that grabbing some pajamas and changing in a bathroom stall would be easiest. At least that way, no one would have to see me in a pull-up. And, if I went first, I would have the bathroom to myself while I did that.

I had packed enough pull-ups to have one each night with a handful left over. They were buried at the bottom of my suitcase. I re-orientated the suitcase so that the open lid faced the rest of the cabin, helping keep the contents out of view.

I found a pair of shorts and a shirt. I looked up. Everyone else was minding their own business. No one else seemed like they were in a huge hurry to get dressed. That was good. I was counting on one of the bathroom stalls being open for me to be able to change in.

I dug further into the suitcase, my hand brushing up against the familiar texture of the nighttime pull-ups. I grabbed one, scrunched it up, and then tucked it in between my pajamas.

I considered grabbing the pouch with my toothbrush, toothpaste, and other toiletries but decided to come back and grab that after I had gotten dressed. With everything in hand, I took a deep breath and stepped away as casually as possible from the suitcase, making sure not to leave it open.

Fixing my eyes directly on the back of the cabin, I walked as calmly as I could toward the bathroom, resting the urge to sprint – or at least speed walk – around the corner and out of sight.

My hands were shaking by the time I rounded the corner into the bathroom. The setup of the bathroom at least lent itself to some privacy. There was a row of three sinks on a counter, past that were two small bathroom stalls. Beyond that was a pair of shower stalls. I could hear the water running behind them.

I hurried to the furthest bathroom stall and closed the door behind me with my heart still racing. I looked down at the bundle of clothing in my hand. I unwrapped the shorts and the T-shirt. The pull-up was nowhere to be seen.

My heart sank right into my stomach as I sifted through my pajamas in a hopeless attempt to see if the pull-up had just gotten bunched up somewhere I couldn’t see. It simply wasn’t there.

The second-to-last thing I wanted to do was to go back to the main room of the cabin to retrieve the pull-up. But the last thing I wanted to do was to leave the pull-up sitting out any longer than necessary.

I placed my hand on the door to the toilet stall, trying to assure myself that I could do it. I counted to three, but at the last second, I shrank back from the door.

How could I have been so careless?

I stayed frozen in place. With each passing second, there was a greater chance someone would notice the pull-up on the floor, but it still took me a couple of minutes to work up the courage to finally ease the door to the toilet stall open and peek my head around the corner, taking a look at the bathroom floor.

It figured that I wouldn’t have been lucky enough to have dropped the pull-up somewhere out of sight from everyone else. I pushed the stall door open all the way and made my way back to the main room of the cabin.

And there it was. My pull-up was lying right in the middle of the floor. I’d only made it a few feet away from my bed before it had slipped out of my grasp.

Every step toward the pull-up felt like an eternity. I kept my eyes locked in on the pull-up, not daring to look around at everyone else. I was sure they all must be staring at me. What were they thinking? Were they judging me for the type of pull-up that I was wearing - the brightly patterned one that was clearly a style for kids? Was it typical for girls my age to prefer nighttime protection that was less childish?

The cabin wasn’t that large. It only took me a dozen or so steps to reach the pull-up. I didn’t need a mirror to confirm that my face must have been burning red as I bent down to pick it up. Once I had the pull-up in hand, I hastily tucked it back inside my pajamas.

Only then did I chance a look around the room.

Hannah was lying on her bed reading a book that was held just a few inches in front of her face. I knew exactly which Harry Potty novel it was right away from the cover art.

Olivia and Isabell were chatting between their beds, both already having changed into their pajamas. I’d gotten a glimpse of something white - though I wasn’t sure whether it was a pull-up or diaper - when I’d seen Olivia unpack earlier, but I didn’t know what type of protection Isabell was wearing. If either had noticed the pull-up on the floor, there was no indication of it.

Maya was staring at her phone on the opposite side of the cabin. She hadn’t gotten up yet to get ready for bed.

My worst fears unrealized, I turned to head back toward the bathroom. And there was Chloe, standing right in front of me.

I literally jumped in surprise as I untended like a spring. But right as I did so, the pull-up again slipped out of my grasp and fell to the floor. I scrambled to grab the pull-up, instinctively tucking it and my pajamas behind my back.

Out of the corner of my eye, there was some movement elsewhere in the cabin. Great, now I was the center of attention, after all.

Chloe let out a lighthearted laugh. “There isn’t anything to be embarrassed about,” she said. “I used to wear those pull-ups too.”

“Um, yeah, um.” My feet shifted anxiously as I tried to figure out what to say in response. The only thing I’d experienced more embarrassing than this was when my older sister, Grace, had come across me wearing urine-soaked pajamas in the hallway when I had first begun faking my bedwetting.

I stepped around Chloe to head to the bathroom without saying another word. This time, I ran.

A few seconds later, I was again back in the bathroom stall.

This evening was a complete disaster. Why could I just be chill and relaxed, wearing a pull-up like all the other campers? I had totally flunked if my goal had been to not stand out. And in my embarrassment, I missed an opportunity to find out what type of protection Chloe wore to bed, obviously having moved on from the nighttime pull-ups I used.

And the worst of it was that I was going to have to go out and face everyone again. And the more I delayed doing so, the more awkward it was going to feel.

Given that I hadn’t heard the showers turn off yet, Lily and Hailey must have still been cleaning up. I wondered what Amy would do if we weren’t all ready for bed in time.

After using the toilet for its intended purpose, I finally got changed into my pull-up and pajamas, running into yet another problem.

My shorts covered the pull-up, but just barely. I cinched the drawstring uncomfortably tight around my waist and made sure to double-knot it. It would have been easier to check if I had been standing in front of a mirror, but I reached my hand around to feel the back of my shorts, confirming that the pull-up was hidden, if just barely.

My shirt was the second problem. Ordinarily, there wouldn’t have been anything wrong with it. The edge of the shirt came down just past the waistband of my shorts. I regretted not putting more thought into the clothes I had packed for the week.

I walked sheepishly out of the toilet stall, this time to retrieve my toiletry bag. I had never been more fully conscious of the pull-up beneath my shorts. The way it crinkled. The way the padding wrapped around me. It felt so obvious and out of place.

Chloe and Lily were in the middle of brushing their teeth as I headed in the direction of the sinks toward the exit from the bathroom. I got an obvious answer to my question about Chloe. A bright pink pull-up was visible beneath the bottom of her hoodie, and there wasn’t any question that it contained significantly more padding than the pull-up covered up by my shorts.

I had made do with my nighttime pull-ups, but only because I could wet them while I was awake, when I could be careful about how much I peed and what position I was in when doing so. I realized a truth I had been refusing to admit to myself. Just because these pull-ups still fit me didn’t mean they were the right choice for a girl my age. I had been so obsessed with getting them to be willing to acknowledge that they might not be perfect, and I had been too ignorant of the now so-obvious reality that there were other, better products available.

I managed to pry my eyes away from Chloe as I slipped past her - the image of the pull-up stuck in my head as I returned to my suitcase to retrieve my toothbrush.

I was afforded one more glance at Chloe’s pull-up when I returned to the bathroom and took my place beside her at the sink. I realized suddenly that all the discomfort I had felt at my pull-up mishaps a few minutes ago had disappeared. A pull-up on the floor was less awkward and embarrassing than a pull-up around one’s waist, and the casual manner with which Chloe handled her bedwetting took away the feeling that anyone in the cabin would care one bit about what I was wearing under my shorts for bed.

Hailey and Lily each wrapped up their showers while I was flossing, and soon after, Amy walked behind us on the way to the showers, followed by Hannah, who was holding a nightgown in one hand and one of her white diapers in the other.

I tugged at my shorts to lift them up a half-inch before leaving the bathroom once I was finished brushing my teeth. While I was grateful for how Chloe had put me at ease, I wasn’t keen on following her example. The packaging still labeled my pull-ups as nighttime underwear, and under what I was wearing was where I intended to keep them.

I returned to sitting on my bed, not quite sure of what else to do before it was time for the lights to go out. I kept reaching down to tug at my shirt after spotting the pull-up waistband peeking out ever so slightly from my shorts.

Lily, Chloe, and Maya were all veterans of the camp and seemed to have their own little clique. Isabell was in the corner, talking quietly with her phone pressed up against her ear.

Haile and Olivia, who, like Hannah and I, had gotten paired on the same team together, were chatting on the other side of the room as they were braiding their hair.

I missed Emma and Angie. I missed my parents. I could almost bring myself to admit that I missed my older sister, Grace, and my younger brother, Jackson.

I grabbed my phone from my backpack and unlocked it, though I just stared at the home screen, flicking it back and forth and back and forth with my thumb. I was so absorbed in thoughts of home that I didn’t notice Chloe until she had already plopped down next to me on the bed. At least this time, I didn’t jump in surprise.

“You doing OK?”

“Fine.” A one-word response that was both widely inaccurate and somewhat befitting my current mood.

“Yeah,” Choe said. “I shouldn’t have said that you shouldn’t feel embarrassed earlier. I mean, that really isn’t true ’cause that kind of is a normal feeling, especially with bedwetting.”

“I guess.” There wasn’t any need for me to fake embarrassment, even if the sources and reasons for it were something that there was no way anyone would suspect.

“Your first time spending the night away from home?”

“No, I’ve had sleepovers before.” I tugged down at my shirt again, just in case.

“I’m guessing they went better than this has.”

“Yeah.” I managed to stop my hands before they reached down for my shirt once again.

The conversation shifted to soccer and what types of things I could expect the rest of the week. While I appreciated the advice, it was hard to focus on it. Chloe was sitting so close to me that it was uncomfortable looking her in the eye, but looking down at my lap meant her pull-up would be clearly visible, which wasn’t much of a better option.

I tried to rack my brain about where she could have gotten it. The only other ads I’d ever encountered had been ones for ugly, old-people diapers, and those didn’t hold any appeal to me or bear any resemblance to what Chloe had on.

Aside from Chloe, if I hadn’t known that any of the other remaining girls were bedwetters, I might have missed the subtle indications that they were also wearing protection underneath their pajamas.

Chloe was saying something about Maya, but the words went in one ear and out the other as I watched Hannah return to her bed.

The nightgown Hannah was wearing, which had a large picture of Hedwig on the front, came down to Hannah’s knees. That didn’t make the diaper any less obvious. An audible crinkle emanated from her direction any time she moved. She was humming a tune from a soundtrack to one of the Harry Potter movies, not the theme song, but a more obscure one that I still was able to recognize as being from the sixth movie.

Amy was out of the bathroom a few seconds later.

“Have we finished getting ready for bed?” she asked once she was at her bunk near the front door.

That was answered by a few murmurs of yes and a loud “not yet” from Chloe, who was still sitting on my bed.

The lights went out without warning, leaving the cabin brightly lit up by the several phones that were still in use.

“Really,” Chloe said in annoyance as she stood up and crossed the room to her bed.

“If your phones aren’t off in three seconds, I’m confiscating them until morning,” Amy yelled from her bunk near the door.

That threat resulted in prompt obedience to her request, and a few seconds later, everything was dark.

Now what?

I stared up at the ceiling as I listened to the sounds of the cabin. A few of the girls were shifting around in bed, adjusting pillows, or otherwise attempting to get comfortable.

The bed crinkled under my weight as I rolled over onto my back. The sound was firmer than the soft crinkling like my pull-up made, or even the almost crackling noise that had come from Hannah’s diapers.

I slid my hand to the edge of the mattress and reached my hand beneath the sheets. There wasn’t a mattress protector. But that didn’t matter. The whole mattress was covered in soft but slightly plasticky material that I assumed was incredibly waterproof.

That made sense. I knew full well how much of a pain it was to deal with a wet mattress.

I stared up at the dark ceiling as I tried to consider what I had going for me with my plan to keep the bedwetting secret once I was home from camp.

It was clear that Emma didn’t exactly like spending a lot of time with her cousin. They weren’t close at all, and even with Hannah now nearby, it wasn’t likely that they would be confiding secrets to each other.

I counted how many sleepovers I had gone to with Emma and Angie before realizing that it was well over forty of them. We’d gotten dressed into our pajamas around each other countless times. They knew I didn’t wear pull-ups to bed. And not once had any of us ever wet the bed during any of the sleepovers.

The plan was clear. Make sure Hannah viewed me as a friend. Get her to promise to keep my secret, perhaps by figuring out something I could do in exchange for her. All the while, I could continue my bedwetting, confident that even if Hannah were to say anything to my friends, there would be no way they would actually believe it.

It felt like a massive weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. That wasn’t to say this was going to be easy to accomplish, but with a plan in place for all the possible outcomes, I was able to shift my attention back to my regular obsession.

For so long, I had viewed the kid’s bedwetting pull-ups, which I wore, as the epitome of what I could get for myself. From my previous brief experience with Hannah’s nighttime diapers to the variety of protection I’d caught a short glimpse of from the other bedwetters in the cabin, it was obvious that there existed a whole world of diapers and pull-ups beyond the single brand that I had coveted.

I wanted all of it.

As attached as I was to my pull-ups because they were the first, and there was something that would probably always be special about them. I felt the sudden desperate urge to try everything else.

What would the other brands of pull-ups feel like while being worn? Would they be softer, thicker, or perhaps absorbent enough that I could wet them without any fear of ever leaking? I simply had to know.

And there was one product that was drawing my attention more than anything else: Hannah’s diapers. When I had held one in my hand, it had been immediately apparent that the diapers had the ability to contain so much more absorbent material than any of the pull-ups did.

I’d gotten what I had wanted, only to discover that it wasn’t enough to satiate my desires. I needed more, and as I continued to dwell on that inescapable desire, a new plan began to form.

But until then, I would need to make do with what I had at hand.

I only needed to pee a little at the moment. But that would do.

A warmth expanded in the pull-up as I let my bladder empty in a now well-practiced way.

If I was going to fake being a bedwetter, I may as well get the most out of it.

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 4, 2025 at 4:15 AM
Content: Chapter 43: Promises - Part 1
It was still dark outside when I woke up the first time, cutting my dream in half.

The details of the dream that had been interrupted were a bit fuzzy in my head. I felt like it had been something to do with trying and failing to hide my nighttime pull-ups from my little brother Jackson, the only member of my family still oblivious to my bedwetting situation.

I blinked a few times as the realization that I wasn’t home hit me. I was at camp. In a cabin. With a bunch of bedwetters. And Hannah.

A couple minutes passed as my eyes gradually acclimated to the darkness, calmed by the fact that the present situation was at least better than the nightmare I had been in the midst of a few moments ago. Not that it was a particularly high bar to clear.

My attention was redirected to the other side of the room by a creak from a floorboard. I couldn’t make out who it was in the dark, but I could make out the silhouette of someone on the opposite side of the room who wasn’t being stealthy enough as they rummaged through a suitcase on the floor before tip-toeing toward the bathroom.

I craned my neck as I watched them go down the hallway; the light that flickered on from the bathroom showed me that it was Lily with a white pull-up clenched in her hand.

I pretended to be asleep when the bathroom door opened again and a flicker of light appeared from it before Lily flipped the switch off.

But pretending to sleep swiftly changed into actually sleeping.

It was past sunrise by the time my eyes opened up once again.

I had shifted out from underneath the blanket in my sleep, and my shorts had slid down enough that the waistband of my pull-up was visible. I grabbed the blanket and pulled it back over myself before surveying the room.

Half the bunks were already empty.

Lily, Hailey, and Hannah also remained in bed, but they showered last night, so there wasn’t any rush to get ready for the day.

Amy, the cabin counselor was already up and dressed. She was laying down on her bed flipping through some papers on a clipboard, going through what looked like a schedule for the day. Isabella had also finished getting ready for the day; she was beside her bed organizing some soccer equipment into a smaller drawstring bag.

While a dry pull-up or diaper might not be as noticeable underneath pajamas, I discovered, to my chagrin, that a fully wet one was rather obvious, at least in the case of Hailey, who I watched carefully as she got out of bed, grabbed some clothes, and made their way out the bathroom. The pull-up wasn’t directly visible, but from the way her pants sagged down, it was clear she hadn’t come close to staying dry last night.

I winced. The way my older sister Grace had figured out I had a wet pull-up beneath my pajamas that one time suddenly made more sense. Had It really been that obvious the morning after the sleepover?

I slid my hand beneath my shorts to inspect my own pull-up. It was only a little full, all from when I had wet it before falling asleep last night. I reassured myself that it wouldn’t be nearly as noticeable as Hailey’s.

I did need to pee. Now, it wasn’t nearly so bad that I needed to rush off to the bathroom, but it was enough that I knew better than to risk wetting the pull-up for a second time, which would probably result in it leaking out over the bed.

That had been one of my considerations when I had been contemplating how I could get my hands on another type of pull-up or diaper. I had thought about wetting my pull-up so much that it leaked, and then using that as an excuse to borrow some of the better protection options from the other girls.

It hadn’t taken me long to soundly reject that plan. For one, I wasn’t sure if I could endure that level of humiliation. Secondly, there wasn’t any guarantee that there would be any extra pull-ups that would fit me.

Amy glanced up from her clipboard as Olivia and Maya returned from the bathroom, before turning her eyes in my direction. “You need to hurry up, Maddy. You’re the last one, and there should be a shower open now.”

I tugged my shirt down and slid out of the bed. There weren’t many times where I was happy to get out of a pull-up, but this was one of them. It would be a welcome relief to not be worrying about if anyone could see what I was wearing beneath my shorts.

As I gathered some clothes for the day and grabbed a washcloth, shampoo, and a pair of flip-flips, I tried to focus on what Chloe had said to me the night before, that feeling embarrassed was perfectly OK. The problem was that the source of my discomfort was the exact opposite of the obvious assumptions Chloe was making. Or was it? If I had been an actual, real bedwetter, would I have still been as uncomfortable, or would I have been so at peace with that situation as to be able to walk around like she did with her pull-up fully exposed?

Everyone was too wrapped up in what they were doing to pay any attention me as I made my way over to the bathroom, quickly using the toilet before slipping into the shower stall with a quiet sigh of relief as I admitted that this whole situation would have been much easier to handle as a regular bedwetter rather than someone pretending to be one.

The shower was partitioned into two sections. Behind the first curtain was a small changing area with a few hooks on the wall to hang a towel and a wood bench where I could set my clean clothes. That was separated from the tiny shower stall with another curtain.

It took several minutes of twisting the hot and cold knobs back and forth to get the water to an acceptable temperature. I looked down uneasily at the plastic shower flooring, grateful that Mom had insisted on having me pack flip-flops. I wasn’t all that keen on the idea of stepping onto it with bare feet.

Once I was finished showering I ran into another problem as I looked down at the pile of pajamas still on the bench. I hadn’t thought through how I was going to dispose of the wet pull-up without anyone noticing. If I had been thinking properly, I would have tossed it in the small garbage can in the toilet stall.

My only option was the trash can at the far end of the bathroom, which meant having to walk all the way past the sinks. I shifted the wet pull-up to my left hand so that my body could somewhat naturally shield it from view as I walked by everyone to my right by the sink.

I kept my eyes laser-focused on the garbage bin. I didn’t glance over at the mirror. I didn’t want to know if the girls at the sink were reacting in any way to what I was doing, though out of the corner of my eye, I could tell that it was Chloe and Hannah who were in the middle of brushing their teeth and hair, respectively.

I took a peak inside the garbage bin as I deposited the pull-up. The only thing that made me feel better was that there were already several pull-ups and what must have been Hannah’s used diaper at the bottom of the otherwise mostly empty garbage bin.

Well, that was over with, at least. I turned to glance back toward Hannah, who was still busy with a brush, trying to get a few tangles out of her hair. My face burned with second-hand embarrassment at the sight of the purple waistband of her pull-up sticking up an inch over her shorts. She must not have tied her waistband snugly enough. She was completely hopeless.

I returned to my bed, which I made by haphazardly tossing the sheets and blanket on top before pulling out my phone to enjoy what I suspected were my last few Hannah free moments of the morning. I was midway through responding to a text from Mom when I overheard a conversation between Chloe and Maya behind me.

“You won’t believe what I saw in the bathroom,” Maya said. “Hannah is actually wearing a pull-up still. I honestly thought it was some sort of weird joke that she wore them during the day. What’s wrong with her?”

“Maya,” Chloe said. “You literally piss your pants every single night. I don’t exactly think you are in any position to be judging someone about having accidents.”

Maya rolled her eyes. “Whatever, you know what I meant.”

I had hoped that Hannah would at least be discreet with her pull-up during the day. It was one thing with a diaper, which was basically impossible to hide, but there wasn’t any excuse for letting a pull-up show.

---

When I stepped outside the cabin behind Hannah, there was already a steady stream of campers making their way to the cafeteria.

Once everyone had gotten dressed, Amy had given us a rundown of the schedule for the day. We’d have some practice sessions based on what positions we played, followed by some with our actually teams for the week. Outside of that, there would be some non-soccer activities organized by cabins.

My stomach grumbled as I tried to keep up with Hannah. Even though I would normally skip breakfast most mornings, I was feeling quite ravenous today. Surely, breakfast would be better than the disaster that had been dinner last night. Breakfast was pretty hard to mess up.

Hannah was dressed like normal with yet another Harry Potter themed shirt and a drawstring bag that I assumed contained extra pull-ups to change into.

The problem with the bag was that it was causing the back of Hannah’s shirt to roll up slightly, which, when combined with the fact that Hannah’s shorts had slid down an inch again, meant that the waistband of her pull-up was showing.

“Hannah, wait up,” I yelled. But, of course, she didn’t seem to hear me. I still didn’t really get why she needed to wear those stupid noise-reducing ear-muffs.

The only time the earmuffs came off was when Hannah was sleeping or when she was going out onto the soccer field. That would be too much of a safety hazard. I wouldn’t have wanted to try a header with those on.

I quickened my pace and finally caught up to Hannah a few seconds later, quickly reaching out to grab her shirt and give it a tug down.

Hannah paused and swatted away my hand as she turned around. “Don’t,” she said in a whiney tone.

I managed to hold back my irritation at her response. “Your underwear was showing,” I said.

Hannah just stared at me with a look of confusion on her face. “But I’m not wearing…”

I glanced around. There were too many campers walking nearby. At least no one seemed to be looking directly at us. I leaned in closer to Hannah. “I mean, your pull-up was showing,” I said in as soft of a whisper as I could manage.

Hannah tugged up her shorts. Now that she was facing me, I could see that her drawstrings had come undone.

“Just tie your shorts,” I said, trying not to let my exasperation show. “Then you won’t have to keep worrying about them falling down.”

Hannah fumbled at the drawstrings for about ten seconds before giving up. “I’m not very good at tying knots.”

I was inclined to believe that statement. After all, both her regular shoes and soccer cleats had Velcro clasps in lieu of laces.

My initial annoyance at her request turned to relief with the realization that this was exactly what my plan was needing. I needed to Hannah to think I was her friend if I wanted to get her to keep my pull-ups a secret.

“I can do it for you.”

I reached down and cinched both of the drawings before tying a double knot to keep her shorts securely in place.

I tried not to think about what everyone else would be thinking if they were watching me tie Hannah’s shorts. I tried even harder not to think about how awkward it would be if Hannah’s pull-ups were showing at all during the practice sessions after breakfast.

With the shorts in place, Hannah dashed off again toward the cafeteria without so much as a thank-you.

I let out a long sigh as I slowly walked behind her. Best friend? More like babysitter.

---

To my chagrin, I learned several minutes later that it was, in fact, incredibly easy for a cafeteria to mess up breakfast.

On my plate were a few rubbery pancakes, an unpeeled orange, and some yellow gunk that was allegedly scrambled eggs. The only normal thing was a small plastic cup of yogurt, which had the benefit of at least being pre-packaged.

For her part, Hannah had barely touched any of her breakfast. Instead, she stared down at her phone, which she had set on the table next to her tray, casually swiping down on what appeared to be a never-ending block of text. I was kind of curious about what she read if it wasn’t the Harry Potter series.

“What are you reading?”

“It’s a fic about what would happen if Harry got sorted into Slytherin.”

I stared at her dumbfounded for a few moments, attempting to processes what she was saying, recalling that Hannah had mentioned reading fan-made Harry Potter stories before.

“This is one of my favorite ones,” Hannah continued as she swiped down on her phone to scroll through what looked like a massive wall of text without pausing to look up at me. “Harry and Malfoy are dating.”

I spat out a mouthful of yogurt all across my plate, earning more than a few glances from other campers. “What? The? Heck?”

Hannah provided me with enough of an explanation that I understood why the parental controls my dad had set up would have blocked the particular fan fiction site she was on.

Hannah went back to reading as if I hadn’t said anything at all. At least this kept her quiet, or, to be more accurate, it prevented her from talking my ears off. I instead had to contend with her smacking lips as she chewed loudly with her mouth open like she was attempting to mouth the words to herself as she was reading.

I managed enough bites of breakfast to sustain myself through a morning of practice but didn’t take a single bite beyond that.

Thankfully, our schedule didn’t allow much time for breakfast. Hannah tagged along behind me as we returned our trays with half-eaten breakfasts.

“Don’t leave without me,” Hannah yelled back to me as she darted off toward the bathroom while we were walking to the exit from the cafeteria.

I leaned back against the wall as other campers streamed out past me, resigned to the fact that I’d be waiting like his on Hannah all week long. I felt a twinge in my bladder. I had just used the toilet a short while ago before showering. May as well go now since I was waiting for Hannah either way.

It turned out that I didn’t need to pee that much. I was in and out of the toilet stall quickly. It was only when I was washing my hands that I realized Hannah hadn’t finished doing her business.

“Maddy!”

I turned around. Hannah’s head was peeking out of the stall.

I grabbed a couple of paper towels to dry off my hands, getting a quizzical look from the girl who had been standing next to me at the counter before heading over to the toilet stall where Hannah was.

Probably just needed me to tie her shorts again. At the rate this was going, I hoped I wasn’t going to be changing her diapers by the end of the week.

“You tied it too tight. I can’t get my shorts off,” Maddy said, not bothering to keep her voice down.

There was a poorly disguised snicker from the other girl at the sink. I bit my lip. Six more days. I just had to get through that, and everything would be better again. Just six more days.

“Here, I can help.”

I pushed the door to the stall open slightly further and looked down at Hannah’s shorts. In my haste to get them tied on the way to the cafeteria, I had double-knotted them extremely tight.

My fingers fumbled around with the drawstrings on Hannah’s shorts for more than a few seconds before getting them loose. It was harder to do it from a different angle, and my tighter-than-normal knot didn’t do me any favors. I got the knot undone, but I went too far in loosening her shorts.

Hannah’s shorts slid six inches down her legs. Not much. But also more than enough to reveal the pull-up that Hannah had wet after being stymied by the double-knot.

“Oh my god, for real?”

The girl at the sink was now staring at us, a couple of crumpled-up paper towels in her hands.

Hannah tugged her shorts up as I pulled the stall door shut, but the damage was already done.

The girl at the sink didn’t say anything else. She just stood in place, gawking at us, one hand held over her mouth. My face burned as red as my hair. The only thing more humiliating than this would have been if I had been caught wearing pull-ups myself.

She finally dashed out of the bathroom, dropping the wet paper towels in her hand onto the floor.

I took a few steps away from the stall to give Hannah some privacy. A few seconds later, I heard a faint trickling in the toilet bowl.

I shifted my feet impatiently. It was already enough of a delay to stop and use the restroom. I didn’t want to be late for practice.

But a minute passed, and Hannah was still inside the bathroom stall. I knew from experience that changing a pull-up didn’t take long.

With the bathroom still empty of any other campers, I approached the stall and lightly tapped on the door.

“Hannah, we need to go now. We’re going to be late for practice.”

“Go away, I’m not going.”

“But Hannah…”

“Go! Away!”

I flinched as Hannah yelled out from the other side of the bathroom stall, and then was drawn closer by the ensuing sound of muffled sobbing.

I stepped closer to the stall door once again. “Everything is going to be OK.”

I had no idea how I was going to make this better. All I knew was that abandoning Hannah here would mean abandoning any hopes of coercing her into keeping my secrets.

“You promise?” Hannah asked quietly.

“Yes, yes, I promise. Now, will you come out and wash your hands?”

Hannah opened the stall door slightly. Her shorts were back on with a single knot, but they looked secure enough this time around.

Hannah held out her hand with one small finger extended toward me. “Pinkie promise?”

I fought the urge to roll my eyes. I clasped my pinkie finger around her. Whatever would make her happy.

“I promise,” I said.

A smile spread across Hannah’s face. “Friends don’t break promises.”

“Of course. Now, let’s go.”

Hannah inched forward, then leaned back. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

“But she saw my pull-up.”

That was going to be a problem. Or would it? Hannah would have been done for if her shorts had dropped like that in the middle of a soccer match. But with just one witness, was as much at stake?

“No one else saw besides her,” I said. “If she says anything, we can just say she is lying. I mean, who is going to believe that someone your age is still wearing pull-ups?”

Hannah’s eyes turned down toward her feet. I rolled my own eyes. What had I done now?

“OK, so can we go? I don’t want to be any more late.”

Hannah mumbled something incoherent and took another step inside the stall. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

“Of course you can. Your shorts are tied right. Your pull-up will stay hidden.”

Hannah still didn’t move. My irritation got the better of me. “What’s wrong?” I snapped.

Hannah wiped the back of her hand against one of her eyes before replying. “No one else my age wears pull-ups during the day.”

I guess that out of the millions of girls in the country, her statement wasn’t technically true. But providing that information wasn’t going to be a solution.

This was a disaster. And it was all my fault. If I hadn’t helped tie Hannah’s shorts so tight, she wouldn’t have gotten into this predicament.

I had a stupid idea. No, that was putting it mildly. It was downright reckless.

But one more glance at Hannah’s distraught face made me fear losing any chance of building a friendship that simply had to exist by the end of the week.

How far was I willing to go to earn her silence?

“Here,” I said. “I’ll wear a pull-up during the day, too, so you don’t have to be alone.” I looked at her bag. “You have extras, right?”

The next few seconds felt as though they were being strung out for hours as I waited breathlessly for her response. If this gambit didn’t work, what would?

“OK.” Hannah handed me her bag.

“One more thing,” I said. “I’ll wear the pull-ups for you, but you have to promise not to tell anyone that I’m doing it. Pinkie promise.”

Our fingers locked again. There. A simple test. Could Hannah be trusted to keep a secret for a week when the stakes were far lower than what awaited me back home?

I ushered her out of the stall to go wash her hands as I stepped inside, beginning to contemplate the repercussions of this offer.

I tried to reassure myself that it wasn’t a bad idea. Hannah was the only person I knew at camp. If, somehow, my secret did get out, would it actually matter? It wasn’t like I was ever going to see anyone here again.

I had never considered wearing pull-ups anywhere other than the privacy of my own home. Sure, there was the standard fear of discovery, but it was also such a private act that there was somehow a wrongness to doing it in public, no matter how hidden the pull-up might be.

I told myself that I was just doing it as part of the deal to win over Hannah’s friendship. That my shaking hands were only because of the fear of what might happen should other campers discover what I was doing. That there weren’t other factors guiding this decision.

I opened Hannah’s bag and pulled out the single object I had desired most over the past three years. The pull-up I had hoped my parents would have purchased for me instead of the generic brand I had been stuck with.

The distinctive purple waistband. The pastel rainbow on the front.

But there was no time to admire it.

I couldn’t deny a sudden rush of giddiness that was running over me as I felt the stretchy waistbands of the pull-up brush up against my legs as I slid it up to my waist.

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 4, 2025 at 4:16 AM
Content: Chapter 43 is split into multiple parts due to size limits for posts.

Chapter 43: Promises - Part 2
I took a sharp step forward with my left foot, planting it in the direction I was aiming my pass across the field. I swung toward the ball with my right foot, striking the ball on the inside of my cleat and sending it flying on a low trajectory toward Hannah twenty yards away.

Hannah received the pass easily, executing a fancy side-step with the ball before kicking it back over to me.

And no one could tell that we now had matching undergarments beneath our shorts.

We’d gotten some looks from the coach running the morning drills, but he let us off with our excuse that we had gotten lost during our first morning on the massive complex.

The drills had begun right away, leaving me little time to fret over how the pull-up was going to hold up.

It turned out that there was no need to be worried. The pull-up was snug beneath my compression shorts, but to my pleasant surprise, it seemed like keeping them hidden during the day would be quite easy.

So far, I hadn’t noticed any difference between these long sought-after pull-ups and the generic brand my parents had gotten for me.

They felt the same. I hoped these would be more absorbent, but now wasn’t the time to test that.

The compression shorts came up higher on my waist than the pull-ups did, reaching nearly to the top of my soccer shorts, and the snug fit of the compression shorts seemed to mute the crinkle sound, which I now could only make out faintly when I was close to Hannah while she was walking.

It was impossible to forget that I was wearing the pull-up, not with how the compression shorts held it and pressed it up tightly against my skin.

I mishandled the return pass from Hannah, the ball bouncing over my leg and coming to rest a dozen yards back. I jogged over to retrieve it, conscious the entire time of the extra padding between my legs, hoping fervently that it wasn’t forcing me into any type of waddle.

Hannah’s semi-frequent runs over to the port-a-potty continued, my annoyance tempered with the relief that she seemed to be avoiding accidents, except perhaps for the time she’d grabbed her drawstring bag before heading in. There weren’t any more mishaps with her shorts, though I made sure to look over each time she returned to make sure that the drawstrings were in fact tied.

I kept an eye out for the girl we’d encountered in the bathroom, but I didn’t catch a single glimpse of her. With the amount of campers, I hoped that this would stay the case for the rest of the week.

I tried to re-assure myself that such an encounter wouldn’t matter. Like, who would believe her even if she accused Hannah of wearing pull-ups? Kids our age just didn’t do that.

By the time morning practices were over, I was hungry enough that I didn’t care what was being served in the cafeteria. I intended to clean my plate down to the last bite.

Hannah trailed behind me as we walked amidst the crowd, all flowing in the same direction, and she suddenly veered off to the side.

“This way,” Hannah said, grabbing my hand.

“Hey, the cafeteria is the other way,” I said.

Hannah leaned in to whisper in my ear. “I need more pull-ups.”

“Fine. But let’s be quick.”

The detour to our cabin only took a few minutes. I had to nearly jog to keep up with Hannah’s speed-walking.

I had done it. I’d survived a whole morning wearing a pull-up with no one else having a single clue. The small wave of giddiness I had felt earlier was back, and I didn’t know why.

I suddenly felt like I needed to pee. Not so badly as to rush to a bathroom, but enough that doing so wouldn’t be difficult. What if I just went in the pull-up right now?

I fought back at the intrusive thought. I knew that was a bad idea. I had no idea if these pull-ups would be much better than my own.

I realized I had a decision to make as we arrived at our cabin, empty besides ourselves. I initially had intended to only wear the pull-up for one day. I had no desire for any of my cabin-mates to catch on to what I was doing.

The opportunity to continue to wear these long-desired pull-ups was too difficult to pass up.

And I really liked wearing the pull-up, even if wetting it wasn’t an option. And when was I ever going to get a chance to wear them for a whole week in a row without having to worry much about what the consequences of being caught would be?

“Hold up,” I said as Hannah was making her way to the bathroom after restocking on pull-ups from her suitcase.

“Would it make you feel better if I wore pull-ups the rest of the week?”

Hannah didn’t answer right away. I began to worry that I had gone too far with my request, that she would be weirded out by my willingness to wear pull-ups without any actual need to do so.

Instead, Hannah raced forward and wrapped her arms around me in a tight hug. “You’re the best friend ever.”

“Um, thanks,” I said as I eased myself out of her grasp. “Can I take enough extras to put in my bag? That way, no one else has to know. Just us?”

“Sure.”

After Hannah went into the bathroom, I turned back and scanned around carefully, double-checking to make sure that none of our fellow cabin mates were approaching the cabin.

I swept over to her suitcase, which she had left unzipped. I had no issues locating her pull-ups, which took up a third of the suitcase. Unlike me, Hannah had made no attempt to hide their presence.

I counted out enough pull-ups to wear one each remaining day, scooping them up into my arms.

Then I spotted something else. A bag full of Hannah’s nighttime diapers.

Could I? Did I dare? There was no time to answer the question. There was only time to act.

I counted the diapers quickly. There was one for each remaining night at camp with four spares.

Way over-prepared, which was good, because that way she would be likely to overlook one of them going missing. If she had only brought one diaper per night, it would have been too mean to take one.

I looked around once more before pulling the diaper out of the suitcase, sprinting to my bed, and tucking the diaper at the very bottom, away even from my own nighttime pull-ups.

I looked around again. The coast was still clear. Hannah was still in the bathroom. No one else had entered the cabin. It wasn’t exactly a heist worthy of *Ocean’s Eleven*, but I still felt like I had pulled off a major job.

Assuming Hannah didn’t notice anything was off tonight, once I got home from camp, I would finally be able to discover what it felt like to wear an actual for real diaper.

I stared off into space, my mind awash with a whole new world of possibilities that I had never before considered. Would it fit? Would I be able to get it on by myself? What would it feel like? What would it sound like? And what would it be like when I finally released my bladder after holding it in as long as I could?

“Maddy. Maddy! Is my pull-up showing?” Hannah asked, turning around so that her back was facing me.

I didn’t see any tell-tale signs of the pull-up’s waistband above her shorts.

“You’re good, it’s not showing.”

“Thanks,” Hannah said as she turned around to face me again.

“Why don’t you wear something like compression shorts over the pull-up?” I asked. “It hides my pull-up perfectly. You wouldn’t have to ever worry about anyone noticing.”

I pulled down the waistband of my soccer shorts and my compression shorts, letting the top inch of the pull-up show briefly before hiding it again.

Hannah crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t like them. They’re too tight on my skin. They feel funny.”

“So? Isn’t it better to feel a little funny than to have someone see your pull-ups on accident?”

Hannah shook her head firmly. “Uh, uh.”

She was hopeless. I shuddered to think how this week of camp would have gone for Hannah if I hadn’t been along to hold her hand each step of the way.

I didn’t know what to say next to help Hannah. My experience with wearing pull-ups paled in comparison to hers.

“Well, maybe just make sure your shorts are tied tight enough so they don’t sag down.”

I excused myself to go use the restroom. May as well be extra cautious. It was one thing for Hannah to be aware I was wearing a pull-up to make her feel better, but wetting them, on purpose or otherwise, would only serve to confuse things. Only kids like her had daytime accidents.

---

I needed to pee so badly that I barely made it to the toilet on time.

I should have gone before going to the campfire, but I had an experiment I was desperate to perform.

I had lingered in the bathroom longer than normal each time, reluctant to remove the new pull-up from my view. Why did Hannah have to be so lucky as to get to wear these as well as her nighttime diapers?

The thought of trading places came and went. No, that wouldn’t be worth the humiliation of everyone knowing that I wet my pants all the time.

I let my soccer shorts and compression shorts fall to my feet. I didn’t remove the pull-up from my waist, sitting down on the slightly cool toilet seat with the pull-up still on.

It was time to get ready for bed, and no way was I going to wear these at night. I didn’t want any of the other girls to get any hints of the extent to which I was now wearing pull-ups.

If I was going to throw the pull-up away in the tiny garbage can in the toilet stall, there wasn’t any point in not wetting it first.

I stared down at the pull-up as I let my bladder release. It filled up quickly. Too quickly. In a matter of seconds, there wasn’t a single dry stop remaining.

I could feel urine pooling inside, not getting absorbed, but not quite leaking out yet, either.

And then a few drips in the toilet, followed by a tiny stream.

I sighed.

Different pull-up. Same result.

---

The next few days passed by in a blur as I settled into a routine.

Sneaking an extra pull-up to change into after I showered in the morning wasn’t easy, but I managed to pull it off.

And if anyone in Cabin B guessed that I was wearing a pull-up beneath my compression shorts, they kept that knowledge to themselves.

Outside of the cabin, keeping the secret was even easier. By the second day, I hardly noticed that I was wearing a pull-up while I was running around during different soccer practices, games, and other camp activities.

Hannah was basically a shadow, considering how she almost never left my side. That may have been for the best, considering the amount of times she needed my assistance, leaving me to feel almost as though I had gotten stuck in the role of a babysitter.

I found myself once again in the restroom with Hannah, though at least she was proving to be more self-sufficient with her shorts.

The stalls were narrow, and the walls didn’t go super close to the far. The effect was that you could see the feet of the person sitting in the stall next to you, along with whatever clothing they had dropped down to their feet, something I had noticed quickly and had made sure to be careful with my daytime pull-ups so as to keep them out of sight.

I didn’t mean to notice Hannah’s pull-ups as I sat down in the stall, but it was impossible not to.

I shuddered at the thought that anyone else she had been using the restroom next to might have inadvertently caught a glimpse of her different underwear.

“Hannah,” I whispered, though I was fairly sure we were alone it the bathroom again. “You need to keep your underwear pulled up when you’re on the toilet. Otherwise someone might see it.”

At least after a few days Hannah did understand that when I used the word underwear in public, I was instead using it as a euphemism to refer to her pull-ups.

I saw her hands quickly grab her pull-up, and a second later it was out of sight.

---

I kept a close eye on the back of Hannah’s shorts as we sat down in a semi-circle in the middle of the practice field while one of the coaches pulled out a white board to talk about some passing tactics to break offside traps.

There was no sign of a pull-up sticking out. I breathed a sigh of relief. After the drawstring mishap on the first day at camp and the incidents in the bathroom, I was constantly checking to make sure her pull-up wasn’t visible.

I still didn’t understand Hannah’s aversion to the compression shorts, but it did seem to be a theme, with all of her clothing looking large and loose-fitting on her.

But, I would happily suffer any amount of discomfort if it meant preventing others from seeing my pull-ups, and it didn’t make sense that Hannah, who did have a sense of embarrassment at her insufficient toilet training, wouldn’t go along with that solution. Especially when it was so obvious.

I was really enjoying all of the practice sessions. I couldn’t wait till this fall when I’d be back on a team with Emma and Angie and would be able to put this into use in games that actually mattered.

Then Hannah’s hand shot up into the air in the middle of the coach’s explanation. Not again. I wanted to disappear into the ground. Her tendency to ask awkward, off-topic questions was only slightly better than her proclivity to just spout out whatever unfiltered thoughts were on her mind.

“Hannah,” the coach said. “We’ll have time for questions later.”

Hannah continued on, undeterred. “Are we going play capture the flag after dinner?”

How and why her brain made that connection from what the current topic was something I couldn’t figure out.

I looked down at my feet, second-hand embarrassment rushing through me, as the coach again gently explained to Hannah that there was a time and place to interrupt and ask questions.

---

Three nights in, I realized something significant. As far as I could tell, not a single one of my fellow bedwetting campers had experienced any nighttime leaks. I hadn’t noticed any wet spots on pajamas in the morning, and no bedding had ever been removed or replaced.

I knew from the evidence discarded in the bathroom garbage bins that plenty of bedwetting was happening each night.

Why was it that the pull-ups didn’t work for me when the various forms of protection they wore seemed to work so well?

My generic pull-ups did technically work, but only under the right circumstances when I peed in a moderate amount while my body wasn’t contorted in a bad position. And while I hadn’t tried to wet one of Hannah’s pull-ups fully in bed, I suspected the result wouldn’t be to my liking.

Anything more than that, or if I tried to wet myself while lying on my side, and I was nearly guaranteed to create a big puddle underneath myself.

Did some bedwetters just not pee as much? That might explain the situation for some of the campers.

But the fact that Hannah wore a diaper to bed at night seemed to suggest that her pull-ups would be insufficient for the task. And whatever brand the pink pull-up was that Chloe wore, it appeared noticeably more absorbent than my own ones.

The knowledge that there were better options than my pull-ups continued to taunt me. The problem was that I couldn’t see anything to do about it.

No way was I going to ask my parents to buy diapers for me. That would put an end to the careful charade I put on to allow myself to continue going on sleepovers with my friends. The best I could do was the one I had stolen from Hannah.

The thought of better pull-ups was also intriguing, but I couldn’t see a way to easily convince my parents to switch over to them, not when they thought my current pull-ups were doing an adequate job.

I was in bed once again with one of my own fresh pull-ups. I’d last gone to the toilet about an hour ago, so I didn’t need to pee a lot, only a little. I shifted off of my side and onto my back and let my bladder release.

Everything was warm, and warm was good. I was asleep before the pull-up cooled off.

---

The soccer matches we played at the camp were adjusted slightly from the ones I normally played,

The matches were shortened. That, and having large teams with lots of substitutions, allowed us to get a lot of games in while making sure everyone got sufficient playing time and enough rest in between.

The beginning of the camp was a round-robin tournament. Our team won the first four games in our group, with Hannah and I tied for the most goals scored. But now we faced our biggest challenge. The team we were up against had also gone undefeated, meaning whoever won would get to go to the champion’s bracket for the ensuing playoffs over the final two days at the camp.

It wasn’t my turn to start, so I had to wait about ten minutes until I got sent in with a substitution. The game remained scoreless. Hannah had also come off the bench to play the forward position across from me.

Then I saw her. The girl from the bathroom. And she was playing defense for the opposing team.

Maybe she wouldn’t recognize Hannah. Just as importantly, perhaps she wouldn’t recognize me.

Then I saw the look on her face. How she ran over to whisper in the ear of another defender while pointing at Hannah.

The girl and Hannah were both playing on the same side of the field, with the defender shadowing Hannah. There wasn’t much for us to do at the moment, with the action taking place on the other side near our own goal. As much as I wanted to move closer to Hannah to make sure she wasn’t getting bullied, doing so would put me well out of position.

The other team finally got a shot off, with our goalie making an easy save. Now, it was our turn. The punted ball landed right in front of me at midfield. I trapped the ball and then turned to make an upfield pass toward Hannah.

The defender got there first. She intercepted the pass, but knocked it out of bounds while in the process of doing so. The referee signaled for us to make a throw-in.

One of our midfielders came up to throw the ball in while Hannah and I, the two lone forwards, attempted to get free of our defenders to receive it.

The ball was thrown in toward Hannah’s feet, but it wasn’t aimed well. The defender slid between Hannah and the ball, shielding Hannah from it. A quick shove as she turned to pass the ball, and Hannah was on the ground.

And, of course, the referee didn’t blow the whistle.

There was a smirk on the defender’s face as she watched me run up to help Hannah to her feet.

“Aww, did someone make a pee pee in her pull-up?” the girl taunted as I pulled Hannah off the ground.

My mind searched for a solid comeback and went blank. Hannah looked like she might start crying.

“Come on,” I said, guiding her away with a firm pat on her back. “She’ll shut up as soon as you score.”

No sooner had we gotten back into position then the ball was moving up the field toward us again.

Once again, I had the ball at my feet. I dribbled past the first defender and attempted another crossing pass toward Hannah. This time, I aimed it better, and Hannah was able to control the ball before the defender arrived.

Hannah deftly swept the ball to her right past her. Now, there were no defenders remaining between herself and the goal.

The girl spun and reached out toward Hannah as she ran past, grasping onto the back of Hannah’s jersey. A blatant but strategic foul to stop Hannah from getting a clean shot at the goal.

I watched in horror as Hannah’s shirt lifted up and came untucked as she pulled away from the defender. There was a brief flash of pink above her shorts before Hannah tumbled to the ground, and the shirt fell back into place.

The whistle blew a few times in quick succession. The ref first motioned for a direct kick and then pulled out a yellow card to display in the direction of the defender.

I ran up to Hannah. As I helped her to her feet for a second time, I tugged down on her jersey to ensure it was covering her waistband.

“Stop,” I said as Hannah started to try to tuck her shirt back in. She had again inadvertently exposed the pull-up, but just for a split second. I managed to get Hannah’s shirt tucked in without further showing off her pull-up. I hoped no one had gotten enough of a look to realize what it was.

I lined up to take the direct kick, with the ball about 10 years out of the penalty box. Too far for a shot at the goal to be likely to succeed, but a great distance to send it into the box for an assist.

I struck under the ball, getting a nice amount of loft as it dropped into the goalie box. Hannah slid between two defenders, leaping up at the exact right time. She flicked her head and the ball was in the back of the net a second later.

We ended up winning by one goal.

---

I stepped onto the field confidently, ready for my chance at glory.

We’d made it all the way to the championship game, which was taking place on the main field after dinner on the last night of the soccer camp.

Five minutes remained on the scoreboard. The score remained tied at 0-0.

We had been allowed to let our round-robin matches end in a tie, but if both teams remained scoreless after the next five minutes, the winner would be determined by a penalty kick shootout.

But there wasn’t much I could do about that at the moment. The ball remained stuck on the other side of the field as the opposing team attempted back-to-back corner kicks, though they failed to get a good look on goal either time.

There was a sudden twinge in my bladder.

My first instinct was to ignore it. I’d used the porta-potty shortly before the game began. That was a little over an hour ago. I hadn’t even drunk more than a sip or two out of my water bottle.

I’d be fine until after the game was over. I could head over to the porta-potties near the bleachers then if I needed to pee that badly. I didn’t think Hannah would have the same issue. She made a habit of taking a potty break during half-time.

Another couple of minutes passed as I stood tensely at mid-field. Just one chance, that’s all we needed. Our defense finally gained possession of the ball, kicking it up to the midfielders. I started a run up the right side of the field, raising my hand to ask for a pass.

I got what I wanted, but the ball flew past my head and was easily cleared by a defender.

I rested my hands on my hips for a brief second. The need to pee hadn’t gone away. But I really didn’t need to go badly, so I pushed it away again as I jogged back toward midfield, watching as our defense struggled under our opponent’s attack. Two shots on goal. Both deflected. Then three straight blasts of the whistle. Time was up.

I returned to the sideline to see what the coach’s instructions would be for the shootout. I was pretty sure I’d be selected. The signals from my bladder were still coming. There was a porta potty about a hundred yards away. But no way was I going to risk missing the end of the game. I didn’t even need to go that bad.

Hannah and i were among the five picked for the shootout. Hannah was to go first. I was chosen to go last.

I found it hard to stand still as I lined up at midfield to wait my turn for the shootout. It was easier to ignore my bladder when I was focused and moving. It was much harder to do so when I was standing still. The rest of the campers and staff were gathered in a small set of bleachers overlooking the field. No way was I doing a potty dance in front of them.

The other team missed their first shot.

Hannah went first for us. The goalie dived to the left side of the goal, the ball hit the back of the net on the right. No surprise there. Hannah grinned as she returned to join us.

The score was 2-2 after each team had shot twice. The final player for the opposing team missed their penalty kick with the ball bounding off the left post with a loud clang.

This was it. Make the goal, and we win right then and there. Miss and it would be on to the single elimination round of the shootout.

I walked up to the penalty box, scooped the ball up in my hands, and placed it on the penalty spot marker just how I liked it.

My strategy was always the same for the first time I faced a goalie. Hesitate just slightly. Let them make the first move. Then drill the ball safely down the center.

I stood up and took a pre-practiced amount of steps backward.

As I got into position, the urge to pee transformed from a moderate need to an urgent, you are going to wet your pants right now, feeling in the span of just a single second.

One minute, I was holding my bladder in with some effort, but it wasn’t so difficult that it caused me any worry. The next second, I was peeing uncontrollably.

The whistle blew. My turn.

I stood in place for a few painful seconds. My eyes remained fixated on the center of the goal. My mind remained fixated on what was happening inside my pull-up as urine warm enough almost to the point of feeling like it was burning spread between my legs.

The stream of urine ended as abruptly as it had begun. Not enough that it should have leaked. But I didn’t look down to confirm.

I moved forward – each step automatic and well practiced – and hesitated just enough to get the goalie to start diving, before tapping the ball straight forward into the net.

I sank to my knees as shouting teammates surrounded me.

---

In the chaos of the win, I’d managed to slip away, getting back to the cabin by myself.

I’d lost track of Hannah, but I could blame the crowds if she ended up being that unhappy about being separated.

What had just happened?

I stood in one of the bathroom stalls, holding a pull-up I’d grabbed from Hannah’s suitcase. She was nearly out, but the half-dozen remaining ones would be enough for her to make it home tomorrow.

My soccer shorts and compression shorts lay in a heap at my ankles. The state of my pull-up ensured that I couldn’t ignore what had happened on the soccer pitch a half-hour ago. I placed my hand on the front, the touch of my hand confirming what I saw. I had peed myself in public. Not on purpose. Not because I had wanted to see what it was like but because something had happened outside of my control.

If I hadn’t been wearing a pull-up…

I pushed that thought away. It had been nearly impossible to pee into a pull-up the first time I tried. It had taken a lot of effort to convince my brain and bladder that it was OK to urinate away from the toilet. I’d finally re-wired my brain to think it was OK to pee in a pull-up, and after wearing pull-ups for a week straight, it was inevitable that I would have relaxed enough to create the possibility of an accident.

Tomorrow, I’d be back in regular underwear during the day. I wouldn’t wet myself then. My bladder knew better than to do that.

---

After several minutes of moving back and forth, I finally found a seat that was a comfortable distance from the campfire.

There were at least a dozen campfires in a scattered cluster on the outskirts of the cabins, enough so that a good portion of the campers could be sitting around them at any given time.

The campfires had been completely full the first night, but they had gradually lost their appeal as the week wore on, and now, on the final night of the soccer camp, the seats around the fires were scarcely populated.

I struggled to find a spot close enough to the campfire where I would be comfortable. Too close, and it felt like my shins were on fire. Too far, and I could barely feel any warmth at all, which was no good since I had forgotten to put on a hoodie before coming out in the surprisingly cool evening air.

Hannah jumped back from the fire with a yelp, having set aflame her third straight marshmallow in a row. She pulled it close to blow it out, nearly striking her face on accident, but with the marshmallow’s surface completely charred black, the damage was already done.

“Just get another one. I’ll do it for you.”

After a week of eating s’mores, I was already sick of marshmallows myself, but Hannah again insisted on coming out to the campfire. Out of more than a dozen attempts this week, she had only managed to properly cook her marshmallow on one occasion, leaving it up to me to make one that would be perfect for a s’more.

The problem was that her definition of perfect was very precise, and I was stuck eating the ones that were – according to her – too overcooked.

Hannah returned with another marshmallow in her hand. I stabbed it securely onto the end of her three foot skewer and carefully positioned the marshmallow a safe distance from an open flame, rotating it every so carefully to make sure to get an even, lightly gold melt.

I pulled it out in the nick of time a couple of minutes later, placing it onto a graham cracker held in Hannah’s outstretched hand.

“I’m really glad that I got to spend the week at camp with you,” Hannah said between bites of her s’more.

“Yeah, me too.” The lie came easily after a week of rehearsal.

I mean, I was kind of glad that I had gotten to wear pull-ups the whole week. Well, aside from what happened in the game, but I was determined to blacklist that memory from my mind.

And I was glad for the chance to wear one of Hannah’s diapers afterward. But I would easily have traded all that in for the peace of mind of knowing that my bedwetting secret was safe.

But my plan had worked. Hannah had, admittedly to my surprise, held up her end of the bargain. She had not said so much as a word to anyone about the pull-ups I had worn each day. If I asked her to do the same about my bedwetting, I felt like I could trust her to be silent. The alternative wasn’t pleasant.

“We’re moving to Minnesota in a month,” Hannah blurted out.

I did some quick mental calculations. One month. That meant I’d be away on our family vacation at the time Hannah was moving in. Nothing to bother Hannah with at the moment.

I adjusted how I was sitting on the chair, feeling the padding press up beneath me. What if? Maybe, the diapers would work well for me. New plans formed. Sleepovers with Hannah. Waking up in the night to grab a couple diapers from her closet to tuck away in my backpack. A steady supply that would supplement the pull-ups my parents purchased for my nightly use.

All that could be mine for the simple price of pretending that I was her friend.

---

For the first time in nearly a week, I was wearing regular underwear beneath my shorts, leaving me with the odd sensation of feeling a bit naked even though I, of course, was not.

I had experienced a slight amount of trepidation as I pulled what felt like an unusually thin undergarment up to my waist. But the idea of a repeat of last night was unthinkable. This would get my bladder back on track during the day.

All my bags were carefully packed. Other than my underwear, which had basically gone unused since the first day of camp, I was down to my last clean pair of clothes.

Beneath the layers of dirty clothes bunched tightly into the suitcase was a secret that I couldn’t wait to experiment with. The single white diaper.

If Hannah had noticed that her diaper count was off, she didn’t say anything. I was pretty confident it was something she would have spouted off about right away, so in the absence of any outbursts from her, I felt it was safe to assume that I was in the clear.

What was the rest of my summer going to be like after camp? Hannah wouldn’t move in until I was already gone on the family vacation.

There was the diaper tucked safely in the bottom of my bag. I would have to find the perfect time to try it on.

But returning home also meant a return to attending that stupid summer learning program. The only thing good about it was they weren’t making me take any tests. And then there were the therapy sessions, the AD-whatever diagnosis, and some medication I was supposed to be starting for that as well.

In less than an hour, my dad would be arriving to pick me up. It was time for the conservation I’d been prepping to have with Hannah all week long.

Hannah and I were the last ones in the cabin. This time, I was grateful for how slow she was getting dressed and ready for the day.

“Hey, I, um. I need you to do me a favor after camp. It’s really important. Do you think you could do that?”

Hannah’s eyes lit up. “Sure!”

I looked around, making sure that no one was heading toward the cabin, before inching closer to Hannah and whispering my request. “I need you to promise to not tell anyone else that I am a bedwetter.” I paused, feeling like it was probably best to be specific. “That includes your cousin, Emma, and Angie, and anyone else.”

“They don’t know? Don’t you do lots of sleepovers?”

Of course, I wouldn’t be able to escape with the promise without facing an interrogation.

I shrugged my shoulder in an attempt to act nonchalant about her inquiry. “I’m good at keeping it hidden.”

“But aren’t they your friends?”

I grit my teeth. Couldn’t Hannah avoid being nosy just for once? “I don’t want them to tease me.”

“Emma doesn’t tease me about it,” Hannah said.

Of course not. But it wasn’t like I could tell Hannah that the only reason Emma was nice to her was because her parents insisted on it, that the words used behind Hannah’s back were far different and far less kind.

“Please,” I begged, no longer fully needing to fake my anxiety and concern. “I’m really embarrassed by it. Can you please do it for me? As something for a friend?”

Hannah’s head bobbed back and forth for a few seconds. “I guess I can.”

“Pinkie promise?” I said, tentatively sticking my finger out without any hesitation. If I was going to do it, I should do it right.

“Pinkie promise!” Hannah stretched out her own hand in return.

Our fingers locked. Our hands shook. The promise was sealed

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 4, 2025 at 8:52 PM
Content:

Gejoe said:

Nice as always

[End of quote]

Thanks!

Toet said:

I love your story. I enjoy reading how the main character is being deepened and we get to know her.

[End of quote]

Thanks! Glad you are liking it.

ryan8710 said:

Hope there more, I'm loving the story it's a really good read congrats and thank you for the enjoyment

[End of quote]

We've got a few more chapters, which I'll post later today. After that it will be fully caught up with everything I've written so far.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 5, 2025 at 4:54 AM
Content: Chapter 44: Doubling Down
I placed the small pill into my mouth for the third time before taking a few quick sips of water.

Finally, I hadn’t managed to swallow the pill during the first two attempts, but I got it down on the third try. I had almost been tempted to throw it in the garbage. That would have been as useful as swallowing it. But my parents would ask later if I had taken it, and despite my ability to fake my way through bedwetting, I wasn’t confident that I could pull off lying about taking my medicine.

The first morning after coming home from camp, Mom had come into my bedroom with a glass of water and the medicine that was supposed to make my ADHD better.

I had gone to bed the night before without wearing anything over the pull-up, and I had wet it slightly before falling asleep. That led to the unfortunate situation of tossing off the covers, leaving no doubt about the condition of my nighttime underwear.

In the minutes following the first time I took the medicine, I had sat in bed with baited breath, in anticipation of what might come next, like there might be some magical transformation happening in my body.

Was there a tingling sensation in my toes? No, my foot had just gone numb because I had been sitting on it funny.

As far as I could tell, the following week played out like every other had at home during the summer vacation. I attended a couple more therapy sessions, but I couldn’t tell what the continuing questions and discussions were supposed to add up to. The summer tutoring, on the other hand, really sucked. Even being gone from it for a week made it feel like I had forgotten so much already, and I didn’t care for the math worksheets and flashcards.

The tutors tried hard to not make the lessons feel like real school. I wasn’t fooled.

That left me with less time alone at home than I would have desired. Summer was supposed to be about freedom, and I had so much less of it than I desired, a problem worsened by the item hidden at the bottom of my backpack.

That changed today.

Today was the first time I would have the house all to myself while Jackson was at his summer daycare camp and everyone else was at work. After the first morning of supervising my medication, Mom left it to me to take the pills every morning when I got out of bed.

My parents had promised that I would eventually be able to have friends over during the day if I showed that I could be responsible. I felt like I had lived up to my end of the bargain. I hadn’t accidentally burned the house down. I had done my chores even if I usually procrastinated and didn’t finish them until right before my parents arrived home. Well, mostly. I forgot to clean the cat litter every once in a while, usually not on purpose. And I hadn’t snuck in Emma and Angie, turning aside their suggestions to sneak in while I had the house to myself.

But for now, I held off on reminding my parents about that promise; I wasn’t going to do that until I had a chance to try the diaper.

Hannah’s diaper, hidden at the bottom of my backpack, remained unused. I’d spent hours looking at it, taking it out when everyone was away, building plans for the day I’d finally wear it.

I had one shot. I had to preserve it for the right moment. A time when I could get the most possible use out of it. With the amount of padding inside, it had to be five or six times more absorbent than my pull-ups. Wetting it just once before throwing it away wouldn’t do.

The clock read 9 a.m. Grace would be the first home from work, not returning until 4:45 p.m.

More than enough time to do everything I wanted to do.

I’d emptied my bladder into the pull-up minutes after Mom left with Jackson in tow, springing a small leak onto the bathroom floor I’d cleaned before showering. Now I stood in the bedroom fully engulfed in a massive towel I’d wrapped around myself. I’d retrieved the diaper from my backpack. It sat on my bed, taunting me.

Last week, the dreams of wearing those bedwetting pull-ups had finally come true, courtesy of unsuspecting Hannah. Never in my wildest dreams would I have envisioned being able to wear pull-ups for nearly a whole week.

And yet.

I now realized how tiny the dreams of the past three years had been. I had just dreamed of the moon when a whole universe awaited me. And I had only just scratched the surface.

I placed a tentative hand on the diaper, the plastic surface so strange compared to the soft pull-ups I wore every night.

One chance.

If I did this now, I wouldn’t be able to do it again. But with how busy my summer was becoming, waiting for later might risk missing another good opportunity.

I let the blanket fall to a heap on the floor and grabbed the diaper, shaking it to make it completely unfold. This brought one of the main questions I’d pondered in the last week back to the forefront of my mind.

How exactly was I supposed to put the diaper on?

It wasn’t at all like a baby diaper. There were two tapes on either side. Was there a certain way I was supposed to connect them to the front of the diaper? If so, the diaper was of no use. There were no guide marks on it, no indications of what I was supposed to do. The only marking that stood out was a yellow stripe running down the middle, which I guessed had to be a wetness indicator.

The internet was of no help. I didn’t dare look up any guidance on putting on an adult diaper. Dad would find out. There was no plausible excuse I could think of to explain away that type of online query.

I attempted and failed to position the diaper correctly while standing up. That proved impossible. How was I supposed to hold the front and back in place while also grabbing one of the sticky tabs to connect it all together?

There had to be an easy way to do this. If Hannah, a girl so inept that she couldn’t even undo a double knot, could manage to put an adult diaper on all by herself, then surely I could figure out a way to do it all on my own.

How did baby diapers get put on? While lying down.

After finally stumbling on that obvious clue, I laid down on my back on the bed, sliding the back of the diaper beneath me. The padding was everywhere. I was used to just the thin strip of absorbent material that l ran in a narrow, straight line up and down the inside of the pull-up.

The padding engulfed me.

I pulled the front of the diaper all the way up to my waist, but it didn’t quite align with the back, coming up way too far on my belly. After another minute of adjustments, I thought I might have everything lined up right.

I looked over at the clock. Nearly ten minutes had passed by already.

The problem now was the tapes. There were too many of them. I grabbed one and pulled it as far as I could before pressing it firmly against the front of the diaper, moving on quickly to the next three.

I stood up from the bed. The diaper nearly slid off.

I began to understand why none of the other girls in Cabin B had chosen to wear diapers rather than pull-ups.

I started pulling the top right tab off to adjust it for a better fit. Then I noticed it was about to rip the front plastic off the diaper.

Sweat started building up on my forehead. Had I ruined my only chance to wear a diaper? What was I supposed to do? Would regular tape even be enough to hold the diaper in place?

After a few panicky seconds, I realized to my relief that the tapes could be set twice. There was a second tab on top the first one that allowed for one re-do. But no more, once that was done it was final. The only way to remove the diaper afterward would be to irreparably damage it.

This time, I didn’t rush.

I examined the diaper for several minutes, trying to think through the best locations to place each of the four tapes, until at last I felt confident that my next attempt would go better.

I adjusted the tapes while standing up. I undid the first tab and re-taped it to a much snugger fit. The next three tapes were just as easy.

I gazed down at my waist and admired my handiwork. The diaper no longer sagged. The tapes weren’t exactly symmetrical, but for my first try, I felt like I had done good enough.

The difference between this diaper and my pull-ups was almost too much to believe.

I walked over to my dresser, my gait transformed into an actual waddle as I struggled to bring my legs together. And that was just with a dry diaper.

I threw on a t-shirt but opted against wearing anything over the diaper. I would be safe with all the blinds shut.

Now, there was only one thing left to do. Drink as much water as I possibly could, then hold onto my bladder until I couldn’t last another second.

<><><>

I eased my way down the stairs carefully, still not fully confident in my new waddling. My eyes remained fixed on the windows, confirming that the blinds were shut and the shades were down. I chose not to turn on the lights, leaving the house in a semi-darkness broken only by thin beams of light peaking in through the edges of the windows.

I tiptoed to the front door, twisting the handle. Locked. Same was true for the back door and the door to the garage.

The first glass went down easily as I chugged the cold water down the back of my throat, but I struggled to get even halfway through the second glass, my stomach angrily protesting that it simply couldn’t take any more.

My stomach gurgled uncomfortably after one more cautious sip as I tried to prepare myself. I was caught between my desire for the awaited moment to arrive and my intention to hold off as long as possible in order to get as much as I could out of it.

I set the half-full glass on the counter, pausing to catch my breath. I needed a break. Any more to drink, and I might vomit.

Normally, killing a few hours with the house to myself would have been an easy task. Pick a Harry Potter book at random. Flop on the couch. Lose track of any sense of time.

Now it didn’t even feel like my new Hogwarts game would do.

Meow. I jumped at the sound of our cat, Chester, as he announced his entrance to the kitchen and meandered over to his food bowl.

I didn’t see what he was complaining about. The bowl was still about half full. But the bottom was visible in a few places, and that wasn’t acceptable to the orange cat.

Chores. The bane of my existence, well no, Algebra probably held that distinction. I rummaged through the cupboard under the sink for the cat food, finding that bending over, like walking, was more difficult when wearing a diaper.

Chester stuck his face right into the food bowl the second I filled it up, not so much as a “please” or “thank you.”

At least one of my chores was done, but their familiar dread was beginning to weigh down on me. I could do them later. After I was done with the diaper. I had nearly eight hours or so remaining.

But what if I did the chores now? I felt motivated to get them out of the way. I wanted to enjoy the rest of my diapered day without them hanging over my head.

I scooped the litter — not before putting toilet paper in my nose to block out the awful smells. Then I took out the garbage from the kitchen and the bathroom.

The chores quickly done — the list for today had been short — I filled up two more glasses of water in the kitchen, bringing them with me to the living room, seeking momentary distraction from a sensation beginning to grow in my bladder.

<><><>

I sat on the couch, a couple of now empty cups set in front of me on the coffee table. It was becoming harder and harder to concentrate on the Hogwarts video game I was playing on the TV. I was well into what I assumed must be the middle stages of the game, racing around the exterior of the castle on a newly upgraded broomstick.

My bladder ached, reminding me of that time I had held on as long as possible down in the basement, prior to when I had gotten even any pull-ups. That had been a pain to clean up afterward. I couldn’t imagine ever doing that again, no matter how much I had enjoyed it.

Nearly three hours had passed since I had put on the diaper this morning. After finishing my chores, I spent the rest of the morning sitting on the couch. About thirty minutes had passed since I had finished the last of the two glasses in front of me. By taking small sips every few minutes, I had managed to drink both glasses, bringing my total to three-and-a-half.

I glanced down at the diaper for the millionth time this morning. I tried to picture nearly four glasses of pee all in the diaper, but the idea suddenly became preposterous.

My body swayed back and forth in rhythm with the music from the game.

I pressed the pause button and tossed the control to the side, my hands immediately sliding between my legs in a last ditch attempt to try and hold everything in.

I rocked back and forth, tapping on the ground with my feet.

Just like at camp. The soccer field. The championship game. Losing control right before the penalty kick. I pushed it out of my mind. That had been a fluke, just bad luck because I’d been wearing pull-ups all the time. That wasn’t going to happen again.

I looked at all the empty cups on the table. Had I really drunk that much? My confidence in the diaper began to sink. Could it really actually work?

And what was I thinking? If it leaked while I was sitting on the couch and dripped down onto the carpet, how was I supposed to get that cleaned up properly?

I needed to be somewhere safer. Out of all my options, the kitchen was the closet.

I stood up. I took one step. The dam broke.

Warmth. Indescribable warmth. All gushing out of me fast enough that I could make out a not-so-faint hissing sound of the urine streaming against the inside of the diaper.

I dropped my gaze to my diaper, pulling aside my hands so I could witness what was happening between my legs.

The white exterior of the diaper left not doubt about what was happening beneath, as as rapidly expanding wet spot expanded faster and faster. The yellow line turning blue in each spot the wetness reached.

Ten seconds passed. Still going as strong as before. The diaper began to bulge outward.

Thirty seconds. I could feel the diaper grow heavier, heavier than my pull-ups had ever gotten, expanding outward even more. I braced myself, waiting for the inevitable trickle of wetness seeping out around my thighs and racing down my legs. But I still couldn’t move.

Forty-five seconds. Everything remained contained. I was still peeing. I couldn’t bring it to a stop. But it was now coming out much slower than before.

Sixty seconds. Done. A few last bursts of pee, and then it was all out. Everyone other than the diaper remained completely dry.

I ran a hand along the inside of my thighs where the stretchy sides of the diaper were held tight against my skin. Completely dry. Not even a hint that the diaper had leaked at all.

I examined the diaper more closely. To my amazement, the wetness indicator turned back to yellow about halfway down.

All that I had drunk and the diaper was only halfway used? No wonder Hannah didn’t have to worry about leaks at night. This amount of absorbency had to be overkill for those purposes, however well-suited it was to mine.

I pressed a tentative hand against the front of the diaper. Warm. Squishy. It was everything I had envisioned when I had first dreamed of getting pull-ups to wear.

In every area where the pull-ups had failed, these diapers succeeded.

It was not fair. Why did Hannah get to wear these at night when I was stuck in pull-ups?

It was awful enough for my parents to be aware that I wore pull-ups. For my sister to be aware that I wore them. A diaper? No, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I grimaced, imagining Grace walking by me in the hallway after I had changed into a diaper for the night, the padding underneath my clothes painfully and audibly obvious.

And forget about sleepovers. If my parents expected me to have a diaper on when my friends were over for the night, that would be impossible to navigate without Emma and Angie finding out.

My heart sank. It was not to be. Maybe I could pilfer the occasional diaper from Hannah, but it was impossible to try and fathom a point in the future where I’d be able to get diapers like this for myself.

I walked to the kitchen with an empty glass in each hand. Now I actually waddled, the diaper remaining snug around me. A quick re-fill. Maybe a bite to eat. And I could attempt to hold out another three hours before wetting the diaper a second time.

I no longer had any doubt that it would hold.

I opened the fridge after setting the glasses on the counter. My options for lunch were slim. I supposed that I should be grateful that it was better than the slop I had been fed for a week at camp, but that didn’t quell the disappointment at the choice of leftover spaghetti, a bologna sandwich, or

My stomach rumbled. Not because I was hungry. I needed to poop.

Maybe it was just a one-off. I couldn’t need to. I wouldn’t need to.

That hopeful thought was followed a few seconds later by a stronger rumble and then the unmistakable sensation of something moving in my gut.

I tried to hold it in. Maybe if I waited it out, the urge would go away, and I’d be able to resume enjoying my diapered day. It was no use. I reluctantly arrived at the inconvenient truth that I was going to poop, probably in the next five to ten minutes, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The only question left was where I was going to do it.

I had never had any desire to mess myself. Gross was far too simple of a word to describe my feelings about pooping my pants. Even in the earliest days of obsessing over pull-ups, I had only ever contemplated wetting them.

Doing that in a diaper was not an option.

But the only other choice was taking the diaper off for good, and I had no idea when or even if I would be able to get another one again.

Hannah’s move-in date remained a month away. And I’d be away on vacation during it. And once I was back, how long would it take to be able to secure a sleepover at her house and re-stock? If, if, and if.

I filled one of my empty glasses at the sink and chugged it down. The idea of being able to empty a completely full bladder twice into a diaper was so tempting.

Taking the diaper off now would be such a waste.

I clenched my stomach as the urge to poop grew stronger. Time was running out. If I didn’t choose, my body was going to soon choose for me.

Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad after all. The diaper would hold it all in. Then, I could wait and wet the diaper a second time. Clean up in the shower afterward. Babies did it all the time.

I paced through the main floor of the house, to the living room, back through the hallway, and past the bathroom that I nearly stepped into, back into the kitchen before arriving in the dining room.

I couldn’t take off the diaper. Not yet. I’d worked too hard and risked too much.

I gripped the edge of the dining room table with both hands as I squatted slightly, the motion an almost entirely involuntary response to the urges coursing through my body, far past the point of being able to exert any control over what was about to happen.

Then, I, Madelyn, a 13-year-old girl, messed myself intentionally.

It really was that bad.

The initial relief of the tension leaving my body as my bowels evacuated was short-lived, replaced by a pungent smell and a sticky, gooey sensation on my bottom.

“Oh fuck!”

I clasped my hands over my mouth as if uttering those forbidden words was somehow remotely comparable to the act I had completed prior to that verbal outburst.

What next?

Taking the diaper off meant missing out on my last chance to wear one for who knew how long.

Leaving the diaper on meant having poop held snug against my bottom for the next several hours.

Taking the diaper off meant having to wipe a huge amount of shit off of my butt. Later. Doing that later sounded like a much better idea.

Besides, what was the point of messing myself instead of using the toilet if I was just going to take the diaper off right away?

A wad of tissue paper stuffed in each nose resolved the issue of the smell for the most part.

With that first problem resolved, I collected several bottles of water, bringing them all to the coffee table as I gingerly stepped through the hallway. I sat down on my knees, finding that to be the least uncomfortable of my options. I attempted to remain as still as I could. If I didn’t move, I could partially manage to ignore the uncomfortable side of the diaper.

I chugged through each bottle of water as fast as I could manage, eager to fill my bladder up as fast as possible. This time, I lasted only about an hour before the urge to pee became too strong to bear.

And for the first time ever, I wet myself without any single worry that there would be a leak.

<><><>

As far as I could tell, the wetness indicator on the diaper was now entirely blue. I twisted and turned in the small bathroom on the main floor twenty minutes after the second wetting, trying to get a fuller view of my now very full diaper.

I’d drunk over a half-dozen glasses of water so far today. And I’d even messed myself. And still the diaper held, if just barely.

Why did my pull-ups have to be so shitty in comparison?

The need to pee returned, though just a little. I emptied my bladder once more in a tiny spurt.

It was time to get cleaned up.

I had no desire to take the diaper off. Some of that was because of how it felt to wear it. Some of it was because of realization that I would not get to wewar another actually diaper for a long time. Most of it was because of the building dread of how gross that process would be.

I walked to the base of the stairs, where I stood looking up. The only shower was in the upstairs bathroom.

Each step up was more excruciating than the last, as I oscillated between the comfort of the still slightly warm diaper and the sensation of cold poop smearing across my bottom.

Mom had gotten me a pack of wet wipes to help clean up in the morning. I had been embarrassed at first, but now I was incredibly grateful that she had done so. I had to use nearly the entire pack of wet wipes before the last traces of poop were removed from my bottom.

I still didn’t feel clean.

I stepped into the shower with my back facing the faucet, water streaming down my back. I remained in the shower for ten minutes until, at last, I was sure everything had been rinsed off.

Never again.

<><><>

I disposed of the wet and soiled diaper as carefully as I could, wrapping it in a half-dozen garbage bags, both to conceal the smell and to make sure that it wasn’t possible to get any glimpse of the contents through the white plastic lining.

The diaper was now in the trash bin in the garage, hidden underneath a couple other garbage bags. Trash day was tomorrow. All the evidence of what I’d done would soon be gone forever.

I wrinkled my nose as I stepped back into the living room. The lingering malodorous scents of the diaper still hung in the air. I couldn’t have my parents returning to the house if it smelled like this.

I rummaged through the closet until I at last found an odor-killing air spray. I went through half a bottle as I sprayed it liberally throughout the house.

I collapsed onto the couch, clean underwear on beneath my shorts as I resumed my game. A pull-up would have been nicer to wear, but it would have been a waste to wear a pull-up for only a couple of hours before my parents and siblings arrived home.

That had been the most wonderful experience of my life if only it hadn’t been marred by the need to poop. I simply had to experience it again. Hannah’s arrival in our neighborhood couldn’t come soon enough.

The urge to pee arrived suddenly and strongly. I didn’t get up from the couch as I continued the fight against the boss that I was in the middle of. I could go to the bathroom after I had beaten him. A few seconds later, a jolt of pain between my legs caused me to toss the controller to the side without even pausing as I leaped up from the couch, my bladder aching as though it was almost to the point of bursting.

I nearly slid on the wood floor as I rounded the corner to the bathroom.

I slammed the toilet seat open and dropped my underwear and shorts to the floor, taking a seat on the toilet just in time.

I strained for a moment, and a small stream of pee came out. I tried to pee some more, but nothing happened.

I looked down at my underwear as I stood up from the toilet. It was marked by a fresh pee stain. I hadn’t completely made it in time.

Not again. But, the wet spot was only the size of a quarter. It hadn’t been that much of a leak before I’d made it to the toilet.

The wet underwear went into the laundry basket, buried out of sight deep in the middle.

I examined my shorts. They had remained dry at least. Another pair of underwear would be the better choice, but I instead grabbed one of my nighttime pull-ups, putting it on instead, tension easy as the familiar padding was pulled snug between my legs.

I didn’t need it. I just wanted it. That’s what I told myself as I again resumed playing my videogame.

<><><>

I jolted upright at the sound of pounding at the door, grabbing my shirt and pulling it down over my waist. Was someone home already? I looked at my phone. It was already past when Grace should have arrived back home, and Mom should be here with Jackson any minute as well.

Running back to my bedroom wasn’t an option. What if they saw me round the corner when they stepped inside?

All I could hope was that the dry pull-up beneath my shorts would go undetected until I could sneak upstairs to remove it.

Then, there was another round of knocking, followed by the doorbell ringing.

Wait a second. It wouldn’t be Grace or my parents at the door. They had keys, so they wouldn’t need to knock. I relaxed and leaned back against the couch cushions. I was still safe. It wasn’t uncommon for a package to come during the day or some random salesperson to knock briefly before leaving a flyer and moving on to the next house.

I returned my focus to the game. As soon as they left, I’d go up and take my pull-up off, and then be safe for when my family actually arrived home.

Then the doorbell rang yet again, followed by another series of knocks. Whoever was at the door was being very persistent as the pounding grew more rapid and intense.

Still, I didn’t go look. My parents had given me a lot of rules for staying home by myself, but one of the ones my dad had been most clear on was that I was not to answer the door for anyone, period. Especially strangers, but not even my friends.

I sighed. They’d have to realize soon enough that no one was going to answer the door.

The next pause lasted nearly a minute. But I wasn’t in the clear. The sounds returned, louder than ever.

I knew the rules, but curiosity got the better of me.

I tip-toed toward the front of the house, making my way to the living room. I slid a window blind open a quarter of an inch, just enough to get a glimpse of someone standing at the door, swaying back and forth on the balls of her feet with one hand pressed up against the front of her shorts.

Hannah.

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: May 5, 2025 at 4:56 AM
Content: Chapter 45: The Visitor
My jaw dropped at the sight of Hannah standing on the front steps. How? She wasn’t supposed to be around again for over a month. Not until I was back from the family vacation. And what was she doing at my doorstep?

I watched as Hannah whacked her knuckles against the door yet again. The pace was becoming a little more frenetic. What was her deal? Couldn’t she get the memo? No one was going to answer the door.

I looked away from Hannah, glancing down the street. There was no sign of Hannah’s cousin, Emma. Hannah must have come all the way to my house by herself.

Hannah continued to knock on the door, the pounding becoming more and more forceful and urgent. If I didn’t intervene, she would keep this up until my parents got home. And how was I supposed to relax and play my video game with all this racket?

My parents had told me not to let anyone in, but they hadn’t specifically said I couldn’t talk to someone as long as they remained outside.

Assured that this loophole meant I wasn’t violating their strict instructions, I backed off from the window blinds I had been peeking out through and started toward the front door.

I paused halfway to the front door, suddenly keenly aware of a faint rustling sound coming from beneath my shorts. The pull-up. Wearing a diaper nearly all day had dulled my senses to the point where a pull-up felt much more like being back and wearing underwear. I had forgotten I had switched to a pull-up rather than putting on a clean pair of underwear after a close call at the toilet earlier this afternoon.

I briefly considered going back upstairs to take the pull-up off, but at the repeated ringing of the doorbell, I decided that answering the door was better. Like Hannah would actually notice I had a pull-up on. Besides, I was just going to tell her to go back to her cousin’s place.

Still, I pulled my shorts up a little, double-checking that the pull-up waistband wasn’t visible before tugging my shirt down.

There were technically two front doors — a regular wood door and a screen door in front of it. Both were locked when my parents left for the morning.

I unlocked the front door and cracked it open a few inches, leaving the screen door closed and locked.

“Let me in!” Hannah whined without so much as a “Please” or “Hello.” She rattled the handle to the locked screen door unsuccessfully.

I watched as Hannah’s potty dance began to grow more intense.

“I’m sorry. I can’t. My parents don’t let me have anyone over when I’m home by myself.”

“But I need to pee,” Hannah protested, as if it weren’t already painfully obvious.

Hannah had a pull-up on, right? Wasn’t that the whole point of her wearing them so that there was a backup plan if she wasn’t able to make it to the toilet on time?

“I told you,” I said firmly. “I can’t let you in. Can you just run back to your cousin’s place? It’s not that far.”

Hannah looked over her shoulder down the road. “I don’t know how to get back.”

I started to give directions. It was only a half-dozen turns. She’d be back in five minutes. Maybe faster if she ran.

“I can’t remember all that,” Hannah said. “What if I get lost?”

“Can’t you put the address in your phone?”

“I left it at Emma’s.”

No phone. No directions. She didn’t even appear to have that small bag she kept her extra pull-ups in. Hopeless.

“What are you doing here so soon? I thought you weren’t moving in till next month?”

“Mom and Dad had to come to get some things settled with the house and school and stuff.”

“How did you even know where my house is?”

“Emma told me.”

Of course she did. I felt a twinge of annoyance. Just because Emma didn’t want to deal with her annoying cousin didn’t mean she should just toss Hannah off onto me. I mean, I had to put up with Hannah for a whole week at camp. It should be her turn.

“Then she should have told you that I can’t have any visitors over during the day. Emma did mention that, right?”

Hannah continued to squirm. “I don’t know. Maybe. I just wanted to hang out. Can I come in? I’ll be quick.”

I wasn’t going to risk having my summer home-alone privileges revoked for Hannah’s sake. I pulled out my phone, getting ready to message Emma and tell her to come get her cousin.

“You can just go in your pull-up,” I said while unlocking my phone. “What’s the big deal? Emma can come pick you up, and you can go home and change.”

Hannah was holding both hands in front of her shorts now. “But Maddy…”

I was so focused on typing out my message to Emma that I didn’t look up at the minivan coming down the road until it pulled up into the driveway. Mom and my younger brother, Jackson, were home.

I looked up from the phone, the message to Emma still unsent. Good. Hannah could come in and use the toilet and stop with her fussing.

I looked back at Hannah and was getting ready to unlock the door when I saw her expression change.

Hannah’s feet stopped squirming. Her hands relaxed slightly at her sides. I knew the look on her face. My mom had arrived home a minute too late.

Twenty seconds passed as Hannah stood silently on the other side of the screen door, a defeated expression on her face in the wake of this latest accident. Everything was still fine. I could finish my message to Emma and get her to come take her cousin home, where Hannah could get changed into a dry pull-up.

Then I noticed a large wet patch gradually expand on Hannah’s shorts on the inside of her thighs. The pull-up had failed at its only job.

I fumbled at the door as Mom and Jackson exited the car and made their way up the driveway toward us, attempting to get the screen door unlocked to usher Hannah in before Mom could see what had happened.

I finally managed to flip the lock. Too late. Hannah had spun around at the sound of the card doors slamming shut in the driveway. I was a little surprised that she was able to hear that sound with the noise-reducing earmuffs she wore.

Hannah turned back to face me, tears starting to form. I pushed the door open, and Hannah darted past me inside, not bothering to take off her shoes or ask where to go.

“The bathroom is to the left,” I yelled after her. Maybe Mom and Jackson hadn’t noticed the wet spot on her shorts. She could hide in the bathroom until Emma came.

“Maddy, who is that?” Mom asked as she speed-walked up the driveway to the front steps with Jackson in tow.

I held the door open for Mom and Jackson as they stepped into the house. “Hannah. She’s Emma’s cousin. She was at the soccer camp.”

I left out the part about how we had been in the same cabin. The one for bedwetters.

“Did she pee her herself?” Jackson blurted out loudly.

So much for hoping that the situation could be kept discreet.

“Jackson, that isn’t a polite thing to point out,” Mom said. “Go put your backpack away in your room.”

Mom leaned in and asked me a question in a hushed tone as Jackson sprinted up the stairs to his bedroom on the second floor. “Did Hannah have an accident?”

“Yeah, I think she is in the bathroom now.”

“Why didn’t you let her in?”

“You and Dad said I wasn’t supposed to let anyone in at all while you were gone.”

“Yes, I know we said you couldn’t have friends over. But if it’s an emergency, you can let a friend in to use the bathroom.”

“But…”

“It wasn’t nice to force her to wet her pants.”

I was irritated. I had only done what my parents had told me to do. Why was Mom unhappy with me?

“But I didn’t think Hannah really needed to come in,” I said, trying to defend myself. “She wears pull-ups anways.”

Mom raised an eyebrow at me.

“She has autism,” I added. “She wears pull-ups during the day because she isn’t potty trained. I think they leaked.”

Mom didn’t say anything immediately in response. At last, she rubbed her chin and said, “I see.”

Mom looked over her shoulder toward the hallway. “Is Hannah still in the bathroom?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“We better get some clean clothes for her. Does Hannah know about your nighttime underwear?”

“Yes,” I mumbled.

“Go upstairs and get her one of them and some shorts if there are some she’ll fit into.”

I obeyed and returned downstairs a minute later with a pull-up wrapped inside a pair of my soccer shorts. Mom was talking to Hannah through the bathroom door when I arrived.

“Maddy has some shorts and a clean pull-up for you if you can crack open the door a few inches to take it. I can put your wet clothes in the wash once you’ve changed. They should work. You and Maddy should wear the same size.”

“I know,” Hannah said as she opened the door narrowly. “Maddy tried my pull-ups at camp.”

I winced. That was supposed to be a secret. Hannah had promised not to tell anyone. Promised.

I was able to squeeze the shorts and pull-up through to Hannah, but not before I glanced around to see if my younger brother was in sight. To my luck, he must have been upstairs, still in his bedroom.

“You wore her pull-ups?” Mom asked.

“Yeah, but just at night. I liked how they looked better. Mine are ugly.”

As I shifted on my feet, I became painfully aware that I was still wearing a pull-up under my shorts. Why did I keep forgetting that I had it on? And could Mom tell? Grace had, but that had only been after I had wet it.

“Would you like me to get you the same pull-ups that Hannah wears to bed?”

My heart fluttered. It was right there for the taking. A week ago, I would have been thrilled out of my mind. Now? Yes, I would like that brand of bedwetting pull-ups better, but as of this afternoon, it had been replaced as the sole object of my desire by something far superior.

Did I dare?

I rolled the dice.

“Yeah, I would like that.”

“OK, I’ll get that brand instead when it’s time to re-stock.”

And there it was. The pull-ups I had dreamed about would be all mine.

But back to the current dilemma. I needed to get the pull-up off that I was currently wearing. I considered making an excuse to run up to my bedroom when Hannah inched the door open again, with only her head peeking out.

Hannah tossed my crumpled-up pull-up into the hallway. “I don’t like them. They’re itchy.”

“Hannah,” Mom said, a bit exasperated. “Can you just try them for a little? We can have your family bring you your usual ones real soon.”

“No. I don’t want it. I need mine.”

Mom looked at a loss about what to do in the face of Hannah’s defiance.

“Can you go without pull-ups for a little while?”

Hannah shook her head. “No.” I couldn't see, but it sounded like she had stomped her feet as well.

I pulled out my phone, flipping back to the app where the unfinished message to Emma waited for me.

“I’ll text Emma and see if she can come over. She can bring some pull-ups for Hannah and take her home.”

<><><>

The doorbell rang. I rushed over to answer it. Emma was at the front door with Hannah’s bag in hand.

“Took you long enough,” I said. “It’s been like twenty minutes.”

“I had to find her things,” Emma said, holding up the bag. “Took me forever to find where her pull-ups were. Where is she?”

“In the bathroom. I gave her some of my shorts to wear, but she won’t come out until she has a pull-up.”

“Oh my goodness,” Emma said with a groan. “I’m really looking forward to when she moves in next summer.”

“You are?”

“Of course not,” Emma snapped. “I’m never going to be able to get free of her. I don’t need her coming over and peeing over all of my stuff. I sent her your way ’cause she’s been prattling on about you non-stop. It all got worse when Mom insisted that she could stay up with us for our sleepover tomorrow.”

I started picking at my fingernails. What had Hannah said? Was the pull-up under my shorts rustling loudly? Or was I just imagining it? I had to get out of it.

“She’s your cousin, not mine.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“Maybe not tell her where I live. Or maybe tell her I can’t have friends over when I’m home alone.”

“I did tell her. But she’s not exactly the smartest cookie in the jar. She kept asking where you lived, and I finally told her. I didn’t think she was just going to up and run off without any of her things.”

“Can you just get her the bag, and then she can get dressed and go back home with you?”

“Fine.” Emma rolled her eyes and marched past me toward the bathroom; I trailed along behind her.

Mom was still waiting outside the closed bathroom door when we arrived.

Emma knocked on the bathroom door. “Brought your pull-ups.”

Hannah opened the door and took the bag from Hannah’s hand.

“Sorry about my cousin,” Emma said to my mom with a shrug of her shoulders.

“Did her family move in early?” Mom asked.

“No, just visiting for the week, but her family is moving into the neighborhood next month.”

It didn’t take Hannah more than a minute to get her preferred pull-up on and exit the bathroom.

“Come on,” Emma said to her cousin. “We’ve got to hurry back home. Remember, I’ve got a soccer game tonight.”

It was hard to resist being jealous. Even with getting to go to the soccer camp, I missed the being on the summer team with my friends.

“Do I have to go to?” Hannah whined. “It’s no fun watching. I’d rather play. Can’t I stay here with Maddy instead?”

I looked over at Mom. Please say no. I didn’t want to be stuck having Hannah over for the evening. How was I ever supposed to get out of these pull-ups before someone noticed that I had them on?

“Of course,” Mom said. “That would be great, but only if her parents are OK with it.”

“Yay!” Hannah yelled.

“One more thing,” Mom said, pulling Hannah aside.

I didn’t hear Mom’s whispered question. But Hannah’s response was at her normal volume. I didn’t think I’d ever heard her whisper. “Yeah, I have extras.”

I thought I could guess what Mom had asked.

Now I needed to figure out a way to excuse myself to my bedroom. I just needed a minute alone. That would be enough to swap out the pull-up for regular underwear.

Emma appeared to be having difficulty suppressing a grin on her face as she called her aunt, letting us know once she hung up that Hannah could stay for dinner and that Hannah’s parents would come pick her up before her bedtime.

Hannah ran up and gave me a hug. “This will be so much fun.”

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Jun 26, 2025 at 2:09 AM
Content: Chapter 46: Just a Fluke
I stood frozen in place with Hannah’s arms wrapped firmly around me.

At least she had hugged me around my chest. Any lower and her hands might have stumbled upon the padding beneath my shorts. I needed to get that pull-up off. I should have known better than to keep it on so close to when everyone was coming home for the evening. I could have encountered problems even if it weren’t for Hannah’s surprise visit.

And what had I gotten myself into? I deeply regretted telling Hannah that we were friends back at camp, even if that had been the only plan I was able to come up with to purchase her silence about my bedwetting.

I watched over Hannah’s shoulder as her cousin, Emma, practically dashed out the door. Not fair. She got to go play soccer. I had to stay home and babysit her cousin.

It was an annoying ending to what had otherwise been a perfect day of having the house to myself to experience wearing an actual diaper for the first time. Who knew how long it would be before an experience like that again? I should have taken at least one more diaper when I had swiped one from Hannah’s suitcase back at camp. Like she would notice one more was gone.

My little brother Jackson came pounding down the stairs behind me as I watched the front door shut following Emma’s exit.

Hannah finally released me from the hug. I wasn’t sure if it was her pull-up or mine that I heard crinkle when we each took a step back.

If Jackson, who had witnessed Hannah’s accident on the front steps when he had arrived home with Mom only minutes ago, had any further thoughts on what he had seen, he didn’t make them known. He turned the corner to the living room with a handful of miniature toy cars held in his arms.

Well, he was only five. Kids that age had memories about as good as goldfish.

“I’m going to start making dinner,” Mom said. “Hannah, do you like eating spaghetti?”

“No,” Hannah said with a shake of her head. “That’s gross.”

“How about fried rice?”

Hannah shook her head again.

“I could make you some chicken nuggets.”

That suggestion brought a smile to Hannah’s face.

I couldn’t believe it. Mom never let me be that picky when it came to dinner. If I didn’t like something, I had to try it, but I wasn’t required to finish it. But being able to reject dinner options multiple times in a row? That was unheard of.

I wasn’t all that keen on spaghetti, but I would have preferred if Hannah had stuck on that or fried rice rather than nuggets. That was Jackson’s favorite meal. I didn’t mind it. But it wasn’t something I wanted to eat more than a few times a month.

“Why don’t you show Hannah around?” Mom said. “It’s going to be a while before dinner is ready. Have to get the oven heated up first.”

I gave Hannah a short tour of the house, showing her around the main level before heading upstairs. I gave Jackson, who was playing with his toys in the living room, a wide berth.

Hannah ran up the stairs ahead of me to the second floor, and I realized I had made a mistake in the clothes I had picked out for her. Many of my shorts didn’t tend to be high-waisted. After all, there wasn’t any need to worry about a pull-up sticking out the top.

On Hannah, this was a problem. If she was standing or sitting still, her shirt settled in place just enough to keep the top of the pull-up concealed, but the second she lifted her arms up, bent over, or leaned to the side, her unusual undergarments were plain as day.

I didn’t like other people wearing my clothes. I didn’t ever share clothes with Emma or Angie, though they, at times, would swap pajamas at sleepovers. It was an unexplainable ick. I hadn’t objected initially to getting the shorts for Hannah both because Mom had asked me to do so and because there hadn’t been any alternative solution to her wet pants, which was also partially my fault.

It wasn’t until I took the first step up the stairs that I became aware again of how I still had a pull-up under my shorts as well, as the padding scrunched between my legs with each step upward. At least my shorts were a pair that was better suited to hide the pull-up.

I had to get the pull-up off before Grace got back. Mom didn’t seem to have noticed, and Jackson was obviously oblivious. I didn’t think Dad would be a problem, but my older sister had called me out in a wet pull-up that morning after the birthday sleepover.

Would Grace notice a dry pull-up beneath my shorts? I didn’t want to chance it.

After getting up the stairs, I pointed out each bedroom as I walked down the hallway toward my own one, which was at the very end.

Once inside, Hannah ran toward my bed and launched herself in the air onto it.

“It’s crinkly, just like mine,” she proclaimed loudly.

I winced, glancing instinctively toward the hallway. Thank goodness that Jackson had already made his way downstairs. I needed to get Hannah off of the topic of pull-ups and bedwetting, lest she accidentally blurt out the wrong thing at the wrong time.

I chose not to acknowledge her comparison of how our beds both had protective covers on the mattresses. Though it did make me wonder. My experiment today seemed to suggest that Hannah’s diapers could hold a massive amount of pee without leaking. Why would she also need a plastic mattress protector?

Hannah didn’t seem capable of sitting still. She practically leaped off of the bed as she perused the entire bedroom. There was no stopping her as she touched and sifted through all my things, all while giving a running commentary of what she thought about all of it.

I had left the top drawer of my dresser open. Sure, Hannah already knew about my pull-ups. But I couldn’t be this careless. What if Jackson had wandered into my bedroom? He was just tall enough that he might be able to see into the top drawer if he stood on the tips of his toes.

Hannah peeked into the drawer before I had a chance to go over and shut it.

“That’s a lot of pull-ups!”

Mom had just restocked. I belatedly remembered her comment about how she would get me the name-brand ones like Hannah wore rather than the generic ones I had the next time she was going to purchase pull-ups for me. It was a shame that I would have to wait a while for that.

Hannah, thankfully, didn’t remain fixated on the pull-ups, her attention drawn next to some of my soccer trophies.

While Hannah examined the trophies, I slid over to my dresser and closed the top drawer.

As I stood next to the dresser, I clenched my legs together instinctively as a sudden urge to pee struck me. When was the last time I’d gone to the bathroom? It couldn’t have been that long ago.

I relaxed as the need to pee went away, resuming my watch over Hannah as she continued to peruse my bedroom.

A few moments later, the need to pee was back in full force, my bladder feeling as though it had suddenly arrived at its breaking point.

What to do? Risk leaving Hannah alone in my room? Or risk not making it to the toilet in time?

I had the pull-up on. I could wet it. No. I wasn’t like Hannah. I didn’t need to use pull-ups because I couldn’t make it to the toilet on time during the day.

“Be right back.”

I walked calmly to the bedroom door, acting as if my bladder wasn’t practically screaming at me, quickening my pace the moment I rounded the corner to the hallway and was out of sight.

I locked the bathroom door behind me and then collapsed onto the cold toilet seat in a hurry. I barely managed a trickle. That was odd. I was sure I had needed to pee more than that.

I strained for about a minute, getting a little more urine to come out. I was probably just feeling off because of how much extra water I had drunk today. That had to explain why my body was acting strange. I’d be fine tomorrow.

I did look down at the pull-up as I attempted to empty my bladder. The absorbent lining on the interior remained completely white. Nothing had come out on accident. I relaxed slightly. The quarter-sized leak on my underwear earlier today had just been a one-off.

I toyed with the idea of taking the pull-up off, hiding it somewhere in the bathroom, and returning to the bedroom commando. But in the few seconds I had before needing to get back to my bedroom, I couldn’t think of a suitable location that my family might not accidentally stumble upon before I’d have the opportunity to retrieve the pull-up.

I wiped myself clean as fast as I could, trying not to think about what Hannah might be getting up to in the bedroom in my absence. I didn’t wait for the water to warm up as I washed my hands under a cold stream in the sink, shaking them dry and rubbing them on my shorts as I hurried back to the bedroom.

I found Hannah with her head stuck inside my closet, looking through all the clothes hanging on the rack. A few shirts on the floor and empty hangers above them evidence enough that she wasn’t being all that careful.

“What are you doing?” I asked as calmly as I could, doing my best not to snap at her. I’d put too much work into putting my laundry away neatly to have her come along and mess it all up. It was one of my least favorite chores to do.

I tried — and failed — to surprise a large sigh. Hannah just had no concept of personal space or privacy whatsoever.

There had been many times in my life when I had wished that I had a sister closer in age to me than Grace — maybe even a twin. But no, at least with siblings a decent distance in age from me, I was granted privacy in my room, and I certainly wasn’t expected to share any of my clothing.

“I want something else to wear,” Hannah said. “I don’t like these shorts. They’re itchy.”

I looked at the shorts Hannah was wearing. I’d last worn them a week ago at camp. Nothing had been wrong with them then.

That didn’t make any sense. I knew my shorts weren’t itchy. Just like I knew my pull-ups weren’t itchy. I didn’t understand why Hannah would claim that they were. Maybe that was just her way of saying that she didn’t like them.

It was bad enough that Hannah was already wearing that pair of shorts. I didn’t need her trying on half my clothes to finally find something that would better suit her picky tastes. And what did it matter that her pull-ups showed, anyway? That secret was already out.

“Can’t you just wear the shorts? It’s only for a few hours.”

“But,” Hannah said, her voice rising an octave to a high-pitched whine.

A distraction. I needed a distraction. No more conversations about pull-ups, bedwetting, or clothing.

I knew what would work. Even if I also knew that it would send Hannah on another tangent that there would be no getting her off of.

I walked over to my desk, opened the drawer, and pulled out the portable video game console. “Do you want to check out this Harry Potter game?”

<><><>

“Maddy, Hannah, it’s time for dinner.”

At the sound of Mom calling from the foot of the stairs, I looked over at the clock. Nearly forty-five minutes had passed since Mom had come home. I hadn’t been expecting dinner just yet. I knew Grace wasn’t home. She always went back to her room to change clothes after returning from work, and I knew I wouldn’t have missed her walking in the hallway.

“Can you play for a few more minutes?” Hannah asked as I pressed the pause button on the game and set the console to the side.

I eased myself off of the bed, again careful to make sure my pull-up didn’t show. I had to get it off.

Maybe I could let Hannah run ahead. It would just take a moment. I could slip the pull-up off. Exchange it for regular underwear and return it to the dresser.

I let Hannah head out the bedroom door without following behind her. I waited, listening for her footsteps. I’d be able to tell if she made it down the stairs. That would give me enough time.

But the creaking of her footsteps in the hallway came to a pause. And a second later, Hannah poked her head back around the bedroom door.

“Aren’t you coming?” she asked.

I suppressed a sigh. There was no choice but to follow her.

I noticed that only five spots were set at the dining room table when I arrived at the bottom of the stairs.

“Isn’t Hannah staying for dinner?” I asked as Mom rounded the corner from the kitchen, a tray of breaded chicken tenders in one hand and a bowl of spinach salad in the other.

“Of course she is,” Mom said, setting the food down on the center of the table.

“But where is she going to sit? You didn’t add a spot for her.”

“Oh, Grace is covering for a coworker’s shift, so she isn’t going to be home for a few more hours.”

That was really good news. I still needed to get the pull-up off, but Grace was my main concern. I would have a few more hours to get free from Hannah before.

Before I could respond, Hannah walked to the other side of the table, taking a seat in Mom’s spot.

For meals in the dining room, we always sat in the same spots. Mom and Dad on one side of the ovular table. Jackson was seated between Mom and me, and Grace was to my left.

I stomped my foot. “You can’t sit there, Hannah. That seat is for Mom.” I pointed to where my older sister would normally sit. “You can have Grace’s spot.”

Mom just laughed. “Maddy, it’s fine. We can mix things up tonight since Grace isn’t going to be here.”

“Who’s Grace?” Hannah asked.

I took a seat – in my proper spot, at least. “That’s my older sister.”

“I’d like to have an older sister,” Hannah said while fiddling with her fork.

Mom called out to Dad and Jackson, who came over from the living room to join us, with each going to their normal seats at the table.

I looked over the options for the meal: frozen chicken strips with ketchup, ranch, and honey mustard to dip them in, a spinach and strawberry salad, and instant mashed potatoes.

The dishes got handed around the table, and I helped myself to servings of each.

Hannah looked apprehensively at the scoop of salad that Mom helped serve onto her plate. “Strawberries are a fruit,” she said. “Salads are for vegetables.”

I gritted my teeth as Mom just laughed off Hannah’s comment, assuring her that it would actually taste good. I knew I wasn’t supposed to criticize food at dinner. Why were the rules different for Hannah?

I picked sullenly at my dinner. I would have preferred the spaghetti that Mom had originally been planning.

Hannah was not the neatest of eaters. Twice, she let ketchup drip onto her shirt while raising a chicken tender to her mouth, for real. Not even potty trained. And probably not far off from needing a bib.

Nothing more was said about the circumstances surrounding Hannah’s arrival at the house. I didn’t doubt that Dad already knew, though. Information tended to flow freely between my parents.

My parents asked Hannah some basic questions: Where was her family from, whether she had siblings, and what she liked to do for fun. Hannah answered nearly all of them with her mouth full as she focused on downing her chicken strips, the salad still untouched.

Jackson’s chair squeaked as he pushed it back and stood up from the table.

Mom looked first at Jackson’s plate – chicken mostly finished, salad and potatoes uneaten — before calling out after him. “Jackson, you need to clean your plate before you go play.”

Jackson didn’t turn around as he gave his reply. “I need to poop.”

I rolled my eyes as I stabbed another chicken strip with my fork, preparing to dip it in a small puddle of ketchup pooled in the corner of my plate opposite the still, untouched salad. What was with boys his age and their obsession with saying poop or pee rather than just saying they were going to the bathroom or restroom?

As if Jackson’s sudden exit had reminded Hannah of something, she stood up from the table as well, glancing down the hallway to where Jackson had gone to the first-floor bathroom.

Hannah’s feet were crossed, her legs quivering slightly. “Is there another bathroom?”

I realized I hadn’t directly pointed out the upstairs bathroom on our tour.

“It’s upstairs on the right side of the hallway,” Mom said.

Hannah dashed off, nearly losing her balance as she rounded the corner to the stairs, which were visible from where I was sitting at the dining room table. Her shirt flew up as she took the stairs two at a time, exposing enough of her pull-up to make it more than obvious.

I started to work on my salad after finishing the last chicken nugget. Not my favorite, but one Mom had made before. I didn’t really like spinach, so I tried to ration out the strawberries so I would not end up having to take bites that only contained that awful-tasting green leafy stuff.

And then I needed to pee. Again.

I clenched my legs together. It wasn’t fair. We only had two bathrooms in our house. I knew that Angie’s place had three. This wouldn’t even be a problem if my parents had just bought a house with a reasonable number of bathrooms in it.

I probably had overdone things this morning, drinking way too much water in my eagerness to make sure I made full use of the diaper. Now, my bladder was all confused.

And there was nothing I could do. Both bathrooms were full. I couldn’t think of any excuse to leave the table.

There was no way to know how much time had passed since Jackson and Hannah had each gone off to the bathroom. I couldn’t see the clock near the entryway, and I knew better than to pull out my phone at the dinner table. Doing so was strictly forbidden.

The pain between my legs was building rapidly. I didn’t have much time left. Maybe I would be safe. It wasn’t as though I had peed that much during the last two close calls.

I tried to stare blankly at my pile of mashed potatoes as my bladder gave in without warning, the familiar warmth between my legs now terrifying rather than comforting.

I found myself unable to breathe as I silently counted out the seconds. Three. Five. Seven. Done. The flow of urine into my pull-up ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I shoved a large spoonful of mashed potatoes into my mouth, not daring to look up at Mom and Dad.

Was I safe? They hadn’t reacted. Despite the warmth of the newly wet pull-up, I didn’t feel the telltale wetness around my inner thighs that would be the first recognizable sign that the pull-up hadn’t held up.

It was Hannah’s fault. If she hadn’t been here, I would have been able to go to the bathroom without being stuck at the table and forced to instead go in the pull-up.

I continued to pick away at my food, stabbing irritably at the remaining spinach on my plate. Jackson arrived back at the table a minute later, followed closely by Hannah.

I looked over at Hannah’s plate. She had picked each strawberry out of her salad. I doubted that she had eaten a single leaf of spinach.

As much as I tried to ignore the feeling of the wet pull-up, I wasn’t able to take my mind off the sensation. I needed to get it off as soon as possible. But how?

I had to get away from Hannah. But the only place in the house she would leave me alone would be in the bathroom. Couldn’t leave the pull-up in the trash. That would raise too many questions if it was noticed.

I was still in the midst of contemplating a way out of my predicament when Hannah loudly announced she was done eating and stood up from the table.

She took one step away before pausing, her eyes drawn to the floor by a sudden pitter-patter of feet from beneath the table.

“A cat!” Hannah exclaimed.

I leaned down and looked underneath the table. Chester was standing underneath Jackson’s chair, his tail flicking back and forth.

“Does your family have any pets?” Mom asked.

“No,” Hannah said. “I really wish I could get a cat.”

As Hannah walked toward Jackson’s chair, Chester darted away, pausing at the foot of the stairs before running up to the second floor.

Hannah pouted. “I just wanted to pet him.”

“Chester can be shy sometimes,” Mom said. “Maddy can show you how to play with him.”

I was happy for the chance to avoid finishing the small pile of spinach on my plate. I was not happy to be forced to stand up from the table with all eyes on me. Not with what was under my shorts. Certainly not, given the condition that it was.

The moment of truth.

I stood up from the table as carefully as I could, ever so casually giving my shirt a tug to ensure the waistband of my shorts was fully covered. I didn’t look down. I didn’t want to draw any attention to that area of my body.

With each step away from the table, I was fully aware of how the pull-up was sagging off of my body, though I was experienced enough to sense that it wasn’t nearly as full as its maximum limits. I hoped more than anything that my posterior didn’t appear off to anyone watching me. At least the shorts were large on me, not form-fitting to the point where the outline of a wet pull-up would show.

I followed Hannah up the stairs, struggling to keep pace with her while also trying to walk normally.

It wasn’t hard to find Chester. There weren’t many places for him to go. The doors to Grace’s and my parents’ bedrooms were both closed. We checked the bathroom first, but he usually only went in there after showers to lick drops from the faucet in the tub.

We arrived at my bedroom to find Chester lying sprawled out on my bed, nestled in between my two pillows.

Before I could even open my mouth to warn Hannah that she needed to slow down or risk scaring Chester away again, she bolted forward, right up to the edge of the bed, leaning right over the cat.

Chester was not amused. He jumped out of his spot on the bed and made a beeline for the door.

When Hannah dashed after the cat, I didn’t make any attempt to stall her. This was the distraction that I needed.

I listened to the sound of Hannah’s feet pounding down the staircase. Poor Chester. Maybe I could make it up by sneaking him a catnip treat later.

With no hesitation, I dropped my pants to the floor, along with the pull-up. The wet pull-up got rolled up and tucked beneath the plethora of dry pull-ups in the top drawer of the dresser. Not ideal. But I could toss it out in the garage in the morning. That was the normal routine, at least after realizing that keeping the wet pull-ups in the garbage can in my room or the bedroom was leaving a lingering scent of urine.

I grabbed a clean pair of underwear and nearly put it on before realizing belatedly that it would be better to get cleaned up first. With my shorts and underwear in hand, I dashed down the hallway and into the bathroom, where I quickly wiped myself dry with toilet paper, flushed, and then got dressed into more age-appropriate clothes.

I wasn’t in a rush to get back to Hannah. I adjusted my shorts while looking at myself in the bathroom mirror. So many close calls. I promised myself that I would be more careful going forward. But I didn’t fret. It wasn’t my fault, especially not the last accident. Just a fluke.

But no matter how I adjusted my shorts, the underway hidden beneath them didn’t feel right. I found myself wishing it was already time for bed when I could wear a pull-up freely, with my little brother being the only person I would need to keep it hidden from at night.

As I meandered down the stairs, I wondered if Hannah had managed to corner Chester. For his sake, I kind of hoped that she hadn’t.

If Chester had been a smart cat — in possession of more than one brain cell — he would have disappeared into the basement to hide in the dark corners of the laundry room until Hannah was gone for the night.

Chester was not a smart cat.

He had instead made his way into the living room, where he was hiding underneath one of the sofas.

Hannah was busy attempting to coax him out to play. She had found one of his favorite toys, a little fishing pole with a soft mouse at the end of a short, stretchy string.

Dad was in his recliner, feet up, typing away on his work laptop. Jackson was playing with his miniature toy cars, making the most awful sounds that didn’t bear any resemblance to the actual thing. Mom was off in the kitchen. I could hear the sound of running water coming from the sink in the distance as she worked to tidy up from dinner.

As I took a seat on the couch, I found myself subconsciously tugging my shirt down again while sitting. I pulled my hand away. Completely unnecessary. Not like I had anything I needed to hide now.

The shorts I had loaned to Hannah didn’t fit her as well as they fit me. As she laid down further to reach for the cat, the top several inches of the pull-up became visible.

I averted my eyes, pretending to suddenly be really interested in the remaining tea in the glass on the side table to my left. I adjusted my shirt again.

“Dad, dad,” Jackson said, until his whining caught Dad’s attention, and he looked up from his laptop at my younger brother. “Why is she wearing a pull-up? Only babies wear pull-ups?”

My cheeks burned with secondhand embarrassment. Hannah didn’t look up. It was still hard to tell how much she heard through her noise-reducing ear muffs, but I had come to realize that unless she was actively paying attention to a conversation, things happening to the side didn’t catch her attention.

I didn’t recall much of the potty training process my parents had used for Jackson – that had taken place before my interest in pull-ups and diapers had begun – but I did recall that what had done the trick for him at least had been making the clear distinction for him that in order to be a big kid, he had to move on from wearing pull-ups.

Dad’s eyes shifted to the left, briefly taking in the sight of Hannah, whose pull-up was still showing, before providing an answer to Jackson’s query.

“It’s not polite to talk about other people’s underwear,” Dad said. “And yes, sometimes older kids need to wear pull-ups if they have a medical condition, and their bodies have a hard time remembering to go in the toilet.”

“OK,” said Jackson. He accepted the answer and resumed making even more irritating noises with his toy cars. I looked over at Hannah. She was lucky enough to be able to block all of that out.

“Maddy,” Dad said, looking at me and nodding in Hannah’s direction.

I looked down at Hannah, who was still loudly attempting to get Chester to chase the toy and come out from under the couch.

“Can you help her out?”

I scooted over to the other side of the couch and gave Hannah’s shirt a slight tug downward to get it back into place, removing the pull-up from sight. Hannah remained too focused on her unsuccessful attempts to play with Chester to pay any heed to my intervention.

I rolled my eyes as I watched her continue to whack the toy back and forth under the couch. I slid off the couch and took a seat on the floor next to Hannah.

“Give it here,” I said as I took the toy from her. “You have to wiggle the mouse and then move it out of sight so that he gets curious about chasing it.”

It took about a minute, but after a few final deft maneuvers with the cat toy, Chester came darting out from underneath the couch.

Hannah immediately attempted to grab him. Not a good idea.

“Ouch,” Hannah squealed, jerking her hand back as Chester sprinted out down the hallway at full speed. Despite Hannah’s whimpers about the fresh cut on the back of her hand, I was able to make out the sound of the cat scrambling madly down the stairs.

<><><>

Picking out a band-aid for Hannah proved nearly as difficult as finding pull-ups or clothes that she liked to wear.

The plain ones were ugly. She didn’t like any of the superhero ones reserved for Jackson. There were a couple of Harry Potter-themed ones remaining from a pack Mom had purchased for me a couple years back, but none of them were in the right size to properly cover up the inch-long gouge Chester had left on Hannah’s hand.

“Ow, ow, ow,” Hannah cried as Mom finished applying disinfectant to the wound.

Hannah had finally acquiesced to one of the standard Band-Aids, if only because I told her that she wouldn’t be able to play on my videogame system unless she had a bandage on the cut.

Sequestered in the bedroom, there wasn’t any more damage that Hannah could do. No more uncomfortable interactions with Jackson or my parents. No pull-ups being shown off at inopportune times.

The only breaks I got from her were the trips to the bathroom. Hannah made three mad dashes to the bathroom. As far as I could tell, she managed to avoid having any accidents.

I remembered the potty training watch Hannah had been wearing the first time we had met earlier in the summer. She hadn’t worn it at camp either. Perhaps Hannah had forgotten it back at Emma’s place. Seemed like something she should still be using.

For myself, I made two quick trips to use the toilet, though neither had been prompted quite as urgently as what had led to the accident at the dinner table.

The sound of the doorbell ringing a couple hours later had me letting out a massive sigh of relief as Hannah raced downstairs to greet her parents. Hannah darted up from the bed to race downstairs. I tagged along more slowly. The sooner Hannah was out the door, the better.

But when I got to the foot of the stairs, it was Grace I saw coming in through the entryway, not Hannah’s parents.

Hannah didn’t say anything to my older sister. Her attention was focused straight down the hallway, right at Chester, who was in the living room.

This time, Hannah didn’t run after Chester. She started tip-toeing as slowly as possible in his direction.

Grace took a look at the bandage on one of Hannah’s outstretched hands. “Looks like she learned to be careful with Chester the hard way,” she said.

“Her family doesn’t have any pets,” I said.

Grace and I continued to watch as Hannah moved in slow motion down the hallway. Chester, who had flopped in the middle of the living room, was now occasionally looking back in her direction. Hannah paused each time he looked up at her like she was in the middle of a game of Red Light, Green Light.

“What’s the deal with Hannah wearing pull-ups?” Grace asked in a hushed tone as Hannah finally made it to within a few feet of Chester.

I took a close look at Hannah before replying. Her pull-ups weren’t visible at all.

“She has autism,” I said at last. That had been a sufficient enough explanation for Mom.

“I see,” Grace said. She paused for a second before turning around to head up the stairs to her bedroom.

That was a close call. Not for Hannah, but for me. What would have happened if Grace had come home for dinner when I still had a pull-up of my own underneath my shorts?

I nibbled slightly on my lip as I thought about what the answer to that question might be. That had been a close call. Even if I’d kept my pull-up dry tonight, if I’d still had it on, Grace would have been aware, and it would have been impossible to try and explain away why I was wearing one a couple hours before my bedtime.

In the distance, Hannah was now only a foot away from Chester, every motion remaining slow and very exaggerated as she started to bend down. Chester seemed relaxed enough. Maybe she’d get away with petting him without needing any additional bandages.

Her pull-up was visible once again as she bent down further. There was no helping her with that.

Then the doorbell rang for a second time. Chester flew up right into the air, scrambling as he landed back on the floor and dashed away back to the basement. Hannah turned around to watch him run, stomping her feet as she did so.

“I’m coming,” Mom called out from the kitchen.

I took a peak through the window as Mom walked to the front door.

The two adults at the door bore a close resemblance to Hannah. She was finally going home. Thank goodness.

Mom ushered Hannah’s parents, Steve and Megan, inside as Dad stepped into the living room as well to greet them.

“Thank you so much for looking after Hannah,” Megan said. “We hadn’t even realized that she had run off until your daughter texted Emma.”

Mom reassured her that it hadn’t been an issue at all. “We have Emma over all the time. I’m sure we’ll be seeing Hannah again.”

“Hannah was so excited when she got back from camp last week. She said she had a lot of fun being in the same cabin as Maddy,” Megan said. “Having a new friend to look forward to is making the move so much easier.”

I started picking at my fingernails. Hannah had promised not to speak of my bedwetting or the fact that I had been wearing pull-ups during the day at camp as a means to make her feel better. What did her parents know? Even if Hannah hadn’t mentioned that I was a bedwetter, telling them that I had been in the same cabin as her, one reserved for kids with that issue, was just as bad.

“When is your move-in date?” Dad asked.

“We don’t have an exact date yet,” Steve said. “But it will be sometime later this summer. Need to get everything settled before school starts.”

“Will they be in the same grade?” Dad asked. “Maddy is starting eighth grade this fall.”

“Hannah is in seventh grade,” Megan said. “But we have her signed up for a private school about fifteen minutes from here. That was one of the reasons we relocated, actually. We were looking for something that offered more specialized attention.”

“Hannah,” her dad said. “We need to get going. It’s almost time for you to get ready for bed.”

I watched as Hannah started to walk over to her parents. Her shirt briefly slipped up to reveal the pull-up waistband again for a half-second. Cause her shorts didn’t cover it. Because they were my shorts. It was bad enough that she was borrowing them for the evening. I didn’t want her taking them home.

“Hey,’ “I said. “Can I have my shorts back before you leave?”

Hannah’s parents both looked at me quizzically and then at their daughter. Apparently, Emma hadn’t informed her aunt and uncle about the extent of her cousin’s accident.

Mom stepped in to explain. “Hannah’s shorts got wet, so I tossed them in the wash and gave her a pair of Maddy’s to wear for the evening.”

“I see,” Hannah’s mom said with a nod that suggested this wasn’t an unusual occurrence, taking another glance over at her daughter.

“Maddy,” Mom asked. “Can you go grab Hannah’s shorts from the laundry room? The dryer should be done by now.”

Mom had tossed Hannah’s urine-soaked shorts into the washing machine with a load of laundry, so it took me a couple minutes to pick through the nearly too-warm-to-touch clothing in the dryer before I found her shorts.

Hannah happily took her shorts back from me once I returned, rushing to the bathroom to get changed before returning to the room and tossing my shorts right at my chest. I caught them but held the shorts gingerly as if they had been contaminated. I didn’t like touching other people’s dirty clothes, even if it was my clothes that someone else had worn.

As our parents talked, Hannah kept peeking down the hallway and sneaking glances into the kitchen, but with two new strangers arriving, Chester appeared to be out of sight for good this evening. That left Hannah and I standing awkwardly in the dining room as our parents talked about boring adult stuff like interest rates and the housing market.

I watched as Hannah attempted to stifle a yawn, causing me to yawn for real. So much for needing to get home urgently for Hannah’s bedtime.

That at least caught the attention of Hannah’s mom. She looked at her watch before motioning to her husband.

“I think we need to head out for real now,” Megan said. “Emma mentioned she had friends coming over for a sleepover tomorrow, so we’ll see you then.”

My heart sank at the reminder of the sleepover, which I had pushed to the back of my mind since Emma had told me earlier today that her cousin would be in town for it.

How was I going to survive it?

The sudden hope of getting a chance to snatch another one of Hannah’s diapers clashed head-on with the fear of my secret getting out to the last two people in the world who I wanted to find out.

Hannah would expect me to be wearing pull-ups tomorrow night. Emma and Angie would assume I’d be in regular underwear.

Somehow, someway, I would need to convince all three of them that they were each right.

I glanced over at Hannah as she crinkled past me on her way to the front door. She had better keep her promise.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Aug 20, 2025 at 1:06 AM
Content: Chapter 47: Beneath the Storm (Part 1)A flash of light zigzagged across the sky, followed several seconds later by a crackling roar of thunder.

I watched the incoming thunderstorm from the front window as I waited for Mom to drive me to the sleepover. I adjusted the backpack on my shoulder for the millionth time, glancing back yet again to the hallway to see if Mom was finally ready to drive me over. I normally would have biked the short distance to Emma’s house, but the storm wasn’t supposed to let up until tomorrow morning.

I had taken no chances during my preparations for the sleepover.

I hadn’t experienced any issues with all the sleepovers I’d attended in the wake of my fake bedwetting at the start of summer break. But that had been before Hannah. It was one thing to go about my evening as normal, the pull-ups Mom insisted that I bring with me left untouched at the bottom of my backpack. It was another thing to balance the dual expectations now that Hannah would be there.

I couldn’t have Emma or Angie come across a pull-up. I couldn’t have Hannah notice that I was actually wearing underwear to bed. Everyone had to come away from the sleepover with their assumptions about my nighttime undergarments still intact.

“Are you all set, Maddy?”

I jumped around at the sound of Mom’s voice. The sound of her approaching footsteps had been completely muffled by the roars of thunder and the heavy drumbeat of rain.

“Yes, I’m ready.”

Mom lowered her voice to a whisper. “Did you make sure to pack your bedtime underwear?”

I didn’t have to fake my annoyance at the question as I adjusted how the backpack strap sat on my shoulder and delivered the pre-planned lie while shifting my gaze back toward the window out at the increasingly darkening sky. “Yes, I made sure to pack them.”

The truth was that I only had regular underwear with me tonight. In addition, I had packed a long nightgown as my pajama selection for the night. That wouldn’t have been my first choice, but I needed something I could wear to bed that would prevent Hannah from realizing that I was just sleeping in regular underwear.

I continued to stare out the window. It didn’t seem like it should have been possible, but the rain was coming down even harder than just a few minutes ago. It would have been a lot nicer if Mom had parked in the garage. But by this point in the summer, the garage was a mess, and there wasn’t room for either of my parents’ vehicles. It probably wouldn’t be organized again to fit even Dad’s smaller car until late in the fall.

“Make sure you don’t forget to put them on before you go to bed,” Mom said before heading over to the entryway to put on her shoes and raincoat.

I fiddled with the zipper on the front of my own still unzipped raincoat, struggling for a few failed attempts before, at last, getting everything to connect properly. Then I noticed the hood that was usually buttoned onto the back of the jacket was missing.

Mom jingled her keys to get my attention. “I’m going to unlock the van now, and we can make a run for it.”

I waited until the lights on the car flashed once, signaling that Mom had unlocked it with the key fob, before dashing out into the rain in a frantic effort to get inside the car. Despite my best efforts to minimize my exposure to the rain, my head was rather damp by the time I was safely inside the minivan.

I gave my head a shake once I made it to the passenger seat and shut the door behind me, but it just seemed to make things worse. My long red hair, which was normally straight, had a tendency to get curly in humid weather.

I adjusted the rearview mirror to point in my direction and took in my reflection. As bad as I had feared. The last time my hair had gotten this bad, Emma had kept teasing me that I looked like Ginny Weasley, Ugh. And the worst was that there was nothing I could do to fix it until the weather dried out.

“Madelyn!” Mom scolded as she got into the car herself. “Please don’t touch that. I need to be able to see when I’m driving.”

"Fine.” I gave my hair one last pointless brush with my hands before buckling myself in, letting mom re-adjust the mirror.

I counted a half-dozen flashes of lightning in the brief drive through the neighborhood. Mom was saying something about needing to pay attention to weather alerts tonight. I was paying more attention to the raindrops colliding with the windshield, the waves of water splashing to the side of the tires, and the puddles forming at the base of each driveway.

My legs clenched shut involuntarily before I even realized that there was a need to do so, tightly embracing the backpack set on the floor between my feet. My bladder had transitioned from unnoticeable to a five-alarm fire in the span of just a few seconds.

Water all around me. I closed my eyes for a few seconds in an attempt to shut it out, but doing so only somehow made it more vivid as the darkness brought into focus all the sounds of the storm.

My eyes opened. We had just turned the corner. Onto the street where Emma lived. I should have been fine. It wasn’t my fault. It was just all this rain.

I could just make out her house in the distance. How many seconds would I need to last?

Sixty seconds until we were parked in the drive. The time to unbuckle, open the door, and bolt inside? As quick as fifteen seconds. And no one would question the urgency to get inside and out of the rain. From there, the nearest bathroom was only fifteen seconds away, even accounting for slipping out of my wet shoes. I could shave a few seconds by sprinting, but I had no intention of letting anyone be aware of how close the situation was to disaster.

Ninety seconds. That would do. I began counting upwards in my head.

Fifty-two. We were at last pulling into the driveway after making one last big splash through the puddle at the base of it.

Fifty-eight. The minivan was now in park. I grabbed hold of my backpack, which was tucked beneath my legs. I didn’t give one thought to the rain or the wind or the storm. I yelled “Bye” and pushed open the door in a mad sprint toward the house.

Seventy-three. The door had been left unlocked. I barged inside without bothering to knock or ring the doorbell. Emma was at the window. This was her element. She loved thunderstorms.

Seventy-nine. My shoes were off. Finally. My backpack was tossed on the floor against the wall.

“Hey,” Emma began as she at last shifted her gaze away from the window.

“One sec,” I said, cutting her off.

As I made my way toward the bathroom, the mental clock still ticking upward, I knew that I was walking at a normal pace, but it felt as if I was moving in slow motion. But the bathroom was just around the corner. A few more steps.

One step passed the threshold. Door closed behind me. But not locked. Shorts and underwear pulled down in one clean motion. The cold plastic of the toilet seat now against my bottom.

Nothing. I squeezed as hard as I could. Still nothing.

I could give it a minute. I pulled open my phone. I decided to wait on the toilet for several minutes this time.

I passed the next few minutes by playing a word game on my phone, but even after I had successfully beaten the puzzle a few minutes later, I hadn’t gotten a single drop of pee to come out.

That wouldn’t do. I wasn’t going to be running back in here again. My body had said it needed to go. I was going to make it go.

After straining for about a minute, I winced as a hot, short stream of urine finally spurted out. I tried to pee some more, but nothing came out. Was that it?

I gingerly pulled my clothes back into place, still feeling a little discomfort, and then cautiously made my way out of the bathroom.

<><><>

“I can’t wait for this stupid storm to be over,” Emma muttered after I returned.

I remembered the only other time there had been a storm during one of our sleepovers. Emma had raced to the window after the first clap of thunder, pulling the blinds up and opening the window.

“I thought you liked thunderstorms?”

Emma rolled her eyes. “Yes, but not when Hannah is here.”

Another loud crack of thunder rolled through the air, temporarily cutting off my next question.

“Why is it a problem that Hannah is here?”

Emma sighed, rolling her eyes a second time. “She’s hiding in the basement. Her earmuffs don’t block out the thunder well enough, apparently. It’s so annoying. I suppose she’ll want to see you.”

I picked up my backpack and followed Emma through the house and toward the basement, where we typically would spend the night during sleepovers at her place.

“Is Angie here yet?” I asked.

“No,” Emma said, pulling out her phone and taking a quick glance at it before putting it back in her pocket. “She’s running late. Should be here in a little bit. She has to wait until her sister is ready to drop her off.”

“Gotcha.”

“I’m glad I don’t have an older sister,” Emma muttered.

I thought about Grace. “It isn’t always bad.” Well, it was bad when she couldn’t mind her business about my nighttime pull-ups, but I wasn’t about to mention that to Emma.

“I suppose,” Emma said. “That I’d rather have a bossy older sister than a retarded cousin.”

I grimaced awkwardly at Emma’s use of that slur, looking around anxiously. At least it seemed like no one else was in earshot. It was just Emma and me on the first floor.

“Hey!” Emma said sarcastically as I placed my foot on the first step of the stairway leading down to the basement. “Don’t go stomping like you usually do. Don’t need the baby upset more than she already is.”

“I don’t stomp my feet,” I protested. “And what baby?”

“Hannah’s the baby, and yes, you do stomp. Hannah’s being annoying enough with the thunder. I don’t need her to be any worse.”

I tiptoed as stealthily as I could down the stairs with Emma right at my heels. Definitely not stomping. However, it did take me almost a minute to reach the bottom and turn the corner to the game room.

It was about as ideal a spot for a sleepover as one could dream up. Several couches. A massive flatscreen TV. A large table for playing all sorts of card and board games. And a foosball table. When it was just the three of us, we would have to take turns playing one-on-one. Sometimes, one of Emma’s parents joined in to make it a full game, but that didn’t happen very often.

Four sleeping bags were set aside in the corner with a quartet of pillows. But we wouldn’t be getting those out until well after midnight.

While the game room was technically in the basement, Emma’s house was built on the side of a hill, so the back half of the basement was actually on the ground floor, with windows looking out onto a large patio and then to her expansive backyard.

When we were younger, Emma’s backyard had been the perfect spot to go out and kick a soccer ball around. But with new neighbors with unfriendly dogs and the ability to more easily send a ball flying over the fence by accident as we got older, that activity had transitioned to the fields at the neighborhood park.

I didn’t spot Hannah at first. Not until another blast of thunder made it practically feel like the house was shaking. That was followed almost immediately by a brief but intense, high-pitched whine from the corner of the room.

I took a few steps forward and gazed over the couch.

Hannah was curled up in the corner, wrapped in a massive cocoon made of several different blankets, with only her head – with her trademark earmuffs in place – being visible. She was holding her hands over the muffs, keeping them as tight to her head as possible. Hannah’s mom, whom I had just met the other night, was sitting on the floor next to her daughter with her back against the wall, a mug of what appeared to be tea in her hand.

“When is it going to stop?” Hannah whined with her hands still placed over her head.

“The forecast hasn’t changed,” her mom said. “It’s the same as before. The thunder should stop in another ten minutes. Then it is going to rain the rest of today, and there may be some more thunderstorms overnight, but you’ll be asleep before then.”

Hannah wiggled underneath the blanket, her feet sticking out for a second before getting pulled back in. She didn’t appear to have noticed my arrival yet. Emma and I must have been quiet enough when coming down the stairs.

“Oh, hi, Maddy,” Hannah’s mom said as she at last looked up in my direction. That caught Hannah’s attention.

“Hi, Maddy,” Hannah said as a fraction of a smile appeared on her face as she looked up at me. But Hannah didn’t rush up to greet me. That was a first. She remained curled beneath the blanket.

“We’re down here in the corner because Hannah has a hard time with thunderstorms,” Hannah’s mom said, giving the same explanation as I had gotten from Emma upstairs.

While her mom was talking to me, Hannah started off by biting softly on the tip of her thumb. A second later, half of it was inside her mouth.

Hannah’s mom must have caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye. She paused what she was saying to me mid-sentence and turned back toward her daughter, gently taking hold of her wrist.

“We don’t put fingers in our mouths,” her mom said. “If you do that too much, it will mess up your teeth, and you’ll need braces again. I don’t remember those being a lot of fun, do you?”

Hannah’s eyes widened at the threat of braces. She removed the thumb from her mouth, then – ewe, gross — she wiped her finger dry on the blanket. Hannah sat upright at the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs before another roar of thunder caused her to shrink down again, holding her earmuffs again with both hands.

A few seconds after the footsteps stopped, Angie poked her head around the corner, water still dripping off her hair.

“You’re early,” Emma said.

After setting her backpack on the floor next to mine, Angie took a long look at my hair. “Hi, Ginny,” she said with a smarmy grin.

“Can you just stop with that?” I whined.

“What, you do look like her, with all your cute curls.”

I crossed my arms. “I’m not cute.”

“Uh oh,” Emma said to Angie. “Looks like someone is mads.”

“Big mads,” Angie followed up with a laugh.

“Ugh, you guys.” I stomped away toward the window, fighting the urge to make another unsuccessful attempt to straighten out my hair with my hands.

The clouds right above were still nearly pitch black, but a little ways off, they were a much lighter shade of gray, and the rain wasn’t falling quite as hard as it had been during my mad dashes to and from the minivan.

Watching the storm was fine for a few seconds. Then, there was another flash of lightning. A brief glimpse of my reflection in the window. A realization that Emma and Angie’s teasing comments were a little too accurate.

Angie and Emma joined me at the window several seconds later. At least they didn’t make any additional comments about my hair.

“So,” Angie said, taking a look back to the other side of the room where Hannah was still curled up on the floor beneath her blankets. “That’s your cousin.”

“Yep,” Emma answered tartly.

“I almost thought you were pulling my leg over her,” Angie said. “At least until Maddy said she had met Hannah at camp. What’s her deal now?”

Emma let out a long sigh. “Well, let’s see. There’s a whole long list of problems, but right now it’s that she doesn’t like thunderstorms.”

“At least when your aunt and uncle finish moving, she’ll have her own house to stay at, right?”

Emma let out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, you should ask Maddy how that goes.”

“How what goes?” Angie asked.

Emma lowered her voice. “Hannah ran over to Maddy’s house yesterday cause she was bored and wanted to hang out with her, but she pissed herself right on the doorstep before she could get inside. I had to go drop off a change of clothes for her before the game last night.”

“You’re joking,” Angie said to Emma. Then she turned to me, “Emma is joking, right?”

“Um, no,” I said. I wasn’t going to add that it was mostly my fault, as I hadn’t allowed Hannah to come in to use the bathroom.

Angie rubbed her hand on her chin, but thankfully chose to stare silently out at the rain with Emma and me for a minute rather than continuing her train of questions.

“I think the thunder should be gone for now,” Hannah’s mom said from the other side of the room.

“Are you sure?” Hannah asked.

“I’m sure. Why don’t we leave these blankets in the corner, and you can come back to them just in case it does get stormy again?”

“OK”

Hannah slowly unraveled the blankets, and with her bright outfit, she looked like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

On her feet were pink and purple striped socks that went halfway to her knees. She was wearing a tie-dye shirt – a break from her usual Harry Potter-themed outfits.

Hannah had a half-dozen bracelets on one hand, but her potty watch was still missing. I had to figure at this point that her parents had moved on from it for some reason – certainly not because she was showing a ton of success making it to the toilet on time.

“Looks like you’ve got a fourth for foosball now,” Hannah’s Mom said to Emma.

“Um, yeah, I guess,” Emma said, glancing over at her cousin.

“Foosball? Yay!” Hannah sped right past us toward the table, bumping against me in her haste to cross the room.

“Remember what we talked about yesterday,” her mom said. “You have to be gentle with the handles. Just flick them, don’t try and spin them.”

“But Emma did.”

Hannah’s mom raised her eyebrow toward her niece. “I’m sure you’ll set a good example for your cousin.”

“I always do,” Emma replied with a smirk.

Behind us, Hannah was already examining the foosball table. “Where are the little soccer balls?” she asked.

“They fall down to a drawer on the side,” Emma said.

“I looked. They aren’t there,” Hannah said.

“Maybe they got stuck after going in the goal,” Angie suggested.

Hannah leaned over the foosball table, trying to stick her hand as far into the nearest goal as possible. A few seconds later, she pulled her hand back out. “I found it! We can start.”

“Actually, hold on a second, Hannah,” her mom said, walking up to the foosball table behind her daughter.

I couldn’t help but notice how Hannah’s mom’s hand drifted to her daughter’s bottom, giving her the lightest of pats underneath her skirt.

“Why don’t you go get changed before you start your game?”

“But I wanna…”

“Right now,” her mom interrupted.

“Fine,” Hannah said, letting the foosball drop with a clank onto the middle of the table before heading off toward the stairs with her mom in tow.

“Changed?” Angie asked as soon as two pairs of footsteps started moving up the stairs. “Did she mean what I thought? For real?”

“Yes, for real,” Emma said.

“Like she has to go change her diaper?” Angie asked.

Emma nodded. “Yep. I bet she pissed herself during the storm.”

Didn’t they understand that pull-ups and diapers were different things? “You mean she had to change her pull-up?”

“Same thing,” Angie said with an eye roll.

“They’re different,” I said.

“What, are you an expert on that?” Angie asked.

“I mean, she did just have to spend a whole week at camp with Hannah,” Emma said. “Did you end up on diaper-changing duty?”

“No!” I protested. “I wouldn’t. Just no.”

“Wait, do her parents still have to change her diapers?” Angie asked.

“No,” Emma said. “At least not now. They were still doing it last summer when I visited her place. It was so awkward when we were going out. I don’t know why my aunt and uncle keep trying to potty train her. She’s a lost cause.”

I bit my lip, pretending to be really focused on fiddling with one of the handles on the foosball table.

Footsteps on the stairs thankfully cut the conversation short as Hannah returned, practically running around the corner.

At the sight of her cousin, Emma scooted over to the other side of the table, next to Angie, “There you are,” she said to Hannah. “You can be on Maddy’s team.”

I thought for a moment about which positions I wanted to play. Offense was a lot more fun, but if Hannah wasn’t any good, having her in control of the two rows of defenders would be a disaster.

“I’ll play defense,” I said, sliding down to make room for Hannah.

She had turned out to be pretty good at regular soccer, so perhaps we would stand a chance.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Aug 20, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Content: Chapter 47: Beneath the Storm (Part 2)Hannah did not end up being very good at foosball, and that was a generous assessment of her abilities. We got absolutely smoked by Emma and Angie. We scored more own goals than actual ones. It was all I could do to not slam the table in frustration after she again sent the ball the exact opposite direction from what she was supposed to do.

Hannah spooked once at a stray thunder clap, but otherwise the thunderstorm had shifted to a steady, calm downpour.

I thought we should have mixed up teams again for another round, but at the suggestion of Hannah switching sides with one of them, both Emma and Angie said they were bored, and hopped onto the couch to scroll through social media on their phones.

Hannah started to follow her cousin over to the couch, before pausing, a hand reaching down between her legs, and turning around and sprinting out of the room.

“Uh oh, someone may have had another potty accident,” Emma snickered to Angie.

I stood on the couch behind Emma, watching her scroll through the short, funny videos. I still didn’t understand why Dad had made such a fuss about not allowing me to have the app. It was completely harmless. Just a bunch of dumb dances, silly music, and sometimes unfamiliar pop-culture references. The draw to it was inexplicable. But drawn to it I was.

Emma held her phone in her outstretched hand, tilting the screen so that Angie and I could both watch the nearly minute-long video.

“Absolutely not,” Angie said the exact moment the video ended. “That is the stupidest thing I’ve seen all week. Right, Maddy?”

I shrugged. “Um, I don’t know.”

I wasn’t on social media anywhere close enough to have an opinion on the topic. I was just along for the ride.

“You got to pick last time,” Emma said. “I don’t care if it is stupid or not. It’s what’s trending right now. The one you picked last time hardly got any views.”

“Fine, I’ll do it, but you’ll owe me one,” Angie said.

I kept losing focus over the next minute as Emma went over how we were going to choreograph the dance ourselves, demonstrating a multitude of hand and arm movements after finding a version of the song on YouTube to play in the background during her explanations.

Once she was satisfied that Angie and I understood what was expected of us, Emma spent the next five minutes adjusting and re-adjusting her phone on the camera stand until at last she was satisfied with how the backdrop for the video was framed.

Emma stepped away from the camera, clapping her hands twice. “Places. Take one.”

Angie and I shuffled in front of the couch, leaving room for Emma to stand between.

“No, no, no, not like that,” Emma whined, rushing forward to correct my initial posture and stance.

“I was doing it right,” I complained as Emma grabbed my arms and shoulders and re-directed them forcefully.

Take one was followed by take two, and take three, none of which were to Emma’s satisfaction.

I stood listlessly, nearly bouncing on my feet. I usually liked being included in videos Emma was making for her account, but I preferred ones that could be finished in one or two takes at the most.

As Emma fiddled with the positioning of the camera stand, I looked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of Hannah and her mom returning to the room.

Hannah darted forward past her mom and up to her cousin, jumping up and down in front of her. “What are you doing? Are you making a video? Can I join in?”

“Sorry, we’re already underway,” Emma said with a wave of her hand. “Maybe next time.”

Hannah crossed her arms and turned around, stomping her feet on her way back toward her mom.

“Emma,” her aunt said. “I’m sure you can make room for your cousin.”

“But this routine is supposed to be for three people.”

“Just let Hannah stand next to Maddy and copy what she does. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

I watched as Emma stopped biting her lip long enough to reply “OK” to her aunt’s request.

“Yay!” Hannah yelled. She ran forward, jumping into place between me and her cousin.

“Let’s get started,” Emma said, starting to walk back to her phone.

“Aren’t you going to show Hannah the video so she knows what to do?” I asked.

Emma turned around and stared at me. “Fine, I guess we can do that.”

“You know,” Angie said, as Emma held out her phone with the video for all of us to see. “I was really wanting to watch that again.”

I turned around toward her. “You were?”

“No,” she said with a drawn-out groan. “Once was plenty.”

“Just shut up and watch it,” Emma seethed quietly.

Emma gave her final instructions to her cousin once the video concluded. “You and Maddy are copying the girl on the left. Just do what she did.”

Emma rushed back to get her phone in place on the camera stand without giving any further instructions to her cousin. I had to give Hannah a nudge to get her into a pose that vaguely resembled the one in the video we were attempting to replicate.

She pressed a button on the phone and then hurried back into position.

“Three, two, one, start.”

Three minutes later, we were seated on the couch, ready to watch a replay of the video. We had only done one take with Hannah, who had run off as soon as it had finished.

“Let me see what we got,” Emma said as she stared at the phone screen right in front of her face.

As Emma watched the video play back on her phone, the smile on her face shifted to a frown, and then she rolled her eyes in disgust.

“Are you going to let us see or what?” Angie asked, attempting to peek in at the video.

“Yeah, no way this one is going on my feed,” Emma said in a whisper to me and Angie.

“Seriously,” Angie said. “You’re saying I had to learn to do that stupid dance for thirty minutes and I don’t even get to show it off?”

“I mean, I guess you could,” Emma said. “I’m sure you’d like to have everyone see you dancing next to diaper girl here.”

Emma held her phone out so that Angie and I could see it, scrolled twenty seconds into the video, and then pressed play.

Emma, Hannah, myself, and Angie were standing from left to right. I didn’t see what the big deal was for the first ten seconds. I did notice that I was doing a much better job than Hannah at copying the correct moves for the dance. I winced at how bad her dance moves were.

Then Hannah’s skirt flared up. Once. Then Twice. Then a third time. It left no doubt about what she had on underneath.

“Wait. Pause it. Go a few seconds back,” Angie said, pointing a finger at the phone.

Emma complied, pausing the video at the requested spot.

Angie looked over to Hannan and back at the video. “Gross, her diaper is wet. Yeah, no, delete that.”

I stared at the paused video. I didn’t correct Angie’s incorrect description of Hannah’s pull-up this time around.

“Duh,” Emma said. She tapped once on the trash can icon and tapped a second time to confirm.

<><><>

Dinnertime, an hour later, found us filling our plates as we grabbed slices of the staple food of sleepovers – pizza. The parents had brought down several boxes of pizza, cheese bread, and a two-liter bottle of pop and set them out on the game table for us.

“Don’t fill that more than halfway,” Hannah’s mom reminded her daughter as she was reaching for the two-liter bottle.

After grabbing a couple of slices for myself and filling my cup – all the way to the brim – I took a seat on the couch next to Hannah. She took a glance at my cup and then me, but didn’t say anything about it.

“What are we watching?” Angie asked as she took a seat on the couch next to me on the opposite side as Hannah.

“Harry Potter!” Hannah exclaimed.

“Yeah, no,” Emma said, snatching the remote off the coffee table before her cousin could grab it. “We’re going to watch Wednesday.”

“I don’t want to watch that,” Hannah protested with crossed arms.

“Do you even know what that TV show is about? It’s got like witchcraft and weird magic stuff in it. Isn’t that what you like?” Emma said to her cousin, who was still sitting on the couch with her arms held tightly across her chest.

“Just give it a try,” Hannah’s dad said. “How about you watch the first episode, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch any more of them?”

“Fine,” Hannah muttered.

I did share some of Hannah’s disinterest, but I wasn’t as opposed as she was to watching something different. That was the price that had to be paid when attending sleepovers hosted elsewhere than at my house.

The intro immediately got my attention – even if the piranha scene made me feel a little too squeamish. That, and the music was quite catchy.

We were about halfway into the first episode when I really needed to pee. I squirmed a little on the couch. It couldn’t be that much longer until the end. I could hold it until then.

My cup of pop was completely empty. But I had just finished that moments ago. No way had that made it all the way through my bladder that quickly.

Another jolt of pain. Another tentative squirm. A sudden fear that the next time might mean a wet patch on my shorts.

“Can you pause it for a second?” I asked, getting up before Emma even had time to reach for the remote.

I walked steadily — I wasn’t going to endure the humiliation of breaking out into a run in front of everyone — letting my forward foot hit the ground before bringing my back foot forward.

Rinse and repeat. All the way until I was out of sight around the corner. All while trying desperately to not start peeing.

I sped up – to a jog, not a full sprint – for the last few steps to the bathroom once I was in the clear.

At least this time the urgency had coincided with an actual need to urinate, even if what came out was almost uncomfortably warm. I looked down at my underwear before pulling it back up. Spotless. See. Nothing like Hannah. I could handle my business perfectly fine during the day.

Nothing was said as I returned to my spot on the couch and the show resumed. I could see that Angie had used my absence as an excuse to load up her plate with another two slices of pizza.

At the end of the first episode, I slipped off the couch and walked back over to the game table with my empty plastic cup. My mouth was parched. I needed something more to drink.

I unscrewed the lid to the two-liter bottle and began to pour myself another serving of pop, filling my cup all the way to the brim.

Angie gave me a look as I sat back down on the couch next to her. “I think I’d wet the bed if I had that much pop to drink.”

My stomach dropped. I rolled my eyes as defiantly as I could, while Emma just chuckled.

Hannah stomped her feet, looking at her mom. “Why can’t I have some more?”

“It’s not good for your bladder, especially this close to your bedtime,” her mom said.

“But Maddy got a second cup. She filled it all the way. What about leaks?”

My heart stopped. Seriously, Hannah? She knew better than to hint at me having bedwetting problems.

I tried to play off the comment. I held up the cup while making eye contact with Hannah. “It’s not going to leak.”

That, I thought to myself, was a good catch. Why couldn’t Hannah just shut up and mind her own business?

“You can have a little water if you need something more,” Hannah’s mom said. “Everyone is different, and different parents may have different rules for their kids.”

Both moms exchanged a glance.

“Your parents OK with you drinking that much pop this late in the evening?” Emma’s mom asked.

I thought for a second. They wouldn’t have objected to the first glass this early in the evening. But with my faked bedwetting, the second glass probably would have raised an eyebrow, not like I was going to admit that.

“Of course,” I said, taking a short sip.

“Did you like the new show?” Hannah’s dad asked his daughter.

“I don’t know,” she mumbled.

“Would you watch another episode?”

“I guess.”

“Everyone else good with that?” he asked the group.

With unanimous nods in agreement, Emma clicked play on the second episode.

Another twenty minutes into the next episode, I glanced over enviously at the mobile devices Emma and Angie held in their hands. They had a habit of not being able to watch anything on TV without also needing to look at their phones.

It wasn’t fair. They could do anything they wanted to on their phones. It was just my luck that my Dad worked in IT and knew how to set parental controls that were impossible to evade, controls that had stymied my ability to conduct proper research into pull-ups and diapers the past three years, and, as of recently, had prevented me from exploring the fan fiction site Hannah seemed to be obsessed with.

And no attempt to let me have my own social media accounts was successful, with my parents’ consistent refrain being that since Grace had needed to wait until high school for that, I would have to as well.

I watched as Emma finally set her phone down, shifting her focus to the second episode of Wednesday.

I had a sudden idea. And I felt like I would be able to get away with it.

“Can I play with your phone for a bit?” I asked.

“What for?”

“I want to go on TikTok?”

“Geeze, you still can’t have that on your phone?”

“No, I’ve told you that before. I don’t think Dad even lets Grace have it on hers.”

Emma sighed. “Fine, but just for a little bit.”

I walked over to the other couch and snatched the phone eagerly from Emma’s outstretched hand, and went to sit on the couch on the far side of the room, positioning myself in the corner where no one would be able to sneak up behind me and see what I was viewing on the phone screen.

As I was settling back into the couch, I watched as Hannah’s mom gave her daughter a gentle nudge, followed by a whisper in her ear.

Hannah muttered something incomprehensible from where I was sitting and jumped up.

“Pause the show,” she yelled as she darted off down the hallway.

Her mom was obviously trying to crack down on the number of accidents Hannah was having.

“Emma, please grab the remote,” Hannah’s mom said a few seconds later, and Emma scrambled to comply with her request.

Hannah was back a minute later, wiping wet hands on her skirt as she took a seat on the floor in front of the TV. Gross.

I had to fiddle with Emma’s iPhone for a minute before I figured out what I was doing. With what I wanted to look up, there was no way I was going to ask her for any assistance. It always took me a second to adjust to using the iPhone. That unfamiliarity was another not altogether small annoyance I had with my parents, who had gotten me an Android phone to use.

But I had made my way around Emma’s phone before, but instead of opening TikTok, I brought up a web browsing app instead, then selected the private browsing mode.

I knew better than to try to use that to hide something on my own phone. Whatever methods Dad used to monitor my internet activity weren’t fooled by it. I knew that from experience.

Emma’s parents weren’t so strict. I just needed to make sure that she wouldn’t see later what I was looking at. I could peruse whatever I wanted to and close everything out afterward, and Emma would be none the wiser about what I had done.

It took a moment to recall the name of the fan fiction site that Hannah had told me about on multiple occasions. I didn’t type it out correctly on the first Google search, but I was close enough that it appeared near the top of the search results.

I clicked the link, opening up the home page.

What now? I spotted a search bar near the top of the page. I tapped it, but paused as the keyboard appeared at the bottom of the phone screen. I lifted my eyes slightly, peering over the top of the phone to where Emma and Angie were watching the movie on the other side of the room.

Now, what did I want to search for? I stared at the phone numbly for several seconds before deciding to just start with something generic. I tapped out “Harry Potter,” and then selected the search icon.

It was all I could do to avoid letting out an audible gasp when the search went through. More than six hundred thousand results. How was that even possible?

I skimmed rapidly through the first page of results, passing bunches of acronyms and slang that seemed as foreign to me as another language.

I clicked the link to one story that caught my eye. I got three sentences in before it dawned on me what the previously cryptic acronym had meant. I tapped the back button as fast as I could, averting my eyes until I was certain I had returned to the page with the search results.

Yikes, I understood why Dad had vetoed my request to remove the parental blockers from the site.

Undeterred, I continued to skim through the options, going through several additional pages, occasionally clicking a link to a story — though being much more judicious in my selections — and reading the first few paragraphs before deciding that it wasn’t for me.

Reaching the bottom of the next page of search results, I again tapped the button to move onto the next set.

My jaw dropped as I read the synopsis for the story at the top of the next page, with a few key words flashing in my mind like lightning bolts.

Hermione. Bedwetting. Nappies.

Nappies? Oh, wait, diapers.

The stats for the story caught my eye. It had been viewed more than twenty thousand times. That many people wanted to read a story about someone wearing diapers?

I looked up again. Emma and Hannah were still watching the show with their parents. Angie had left the room. Perhaps a trip to the bathroom, though she hadn’t asked for the episode to be paused. No one was paying any attention to me.

It wasn’t that the show wasn’t interesting. This story was just a million times more intriguing.

My finger shook as I attempted, and failed, to tap the correct spot on the phone to open up the story, finally getting it on the third try.

My eyes shifted back and forth in a blur as I sped through the opening paragraphs.

Hermione. Arriving at Hogwarts. Wetting the bed. Wearing magical diapers. Desperate to keep her secret hidden from the other Gryffindor girls.

While I cringed at times where the author deviated from well-established lore of the Harry Potter universe, I was otherwise fully entranced, thoughts roaming first to my pull-ups, which for half a second I wished I had actually brought with me, to the magical diapers of my own world, the white ones that were Hannah’s domain.

If only I could have something like Hermione’s magic diapers. Baby-sized ones charmed to perfectly increase in size to fit her body, snug to the point of never risking a leak. Thoughts drifted to imagining myself at Hogwarts instead, in her place, as a bedwetter.

“Hey Maddy!”

I looked up, pressing the phone firmly against my chest, the contents of what I had been reading fully obscured from view.

Emma was glaring at me from across the room. “I need my phone back. You’ve had it forever.”

“Oh. Sure, Yeah.”

I lifted the phone up again. Closing the web browser with a few simple taps. Gone for eternity. No one would know what I had just been reading.

I walked across the room and handed the phone back to Emma, all the while wishing she had given me just a few more minutes so that I could have at least finished the first chapter, wondering what was going to happen next to the bedwetting first-year student at Hogwarts. How was I supposed to get a chance to continue reading that story?

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Aug 25, 2025 at 2:40 AM
Content:

Fiammaverde said:

So, after discovering that there's plenty of diaper fiction in internet and that one of those stories has more than 20.000 view, she will understand she's not alone in her desire for diapers.
Will this change her approach on the matter?

[End of quote]

It certainly could be an influence, but she is first going to have to find another way to read it.

Ecchi231 said:

The last few lines caught my attention. Sounds like Maddie only closed the browser on the phone, but didn't delete the history. Guessing she gets discovered by her friends much sooner than later now.

[End of quote]

I'm admittedly not all that familiar with iPhones, but the intent with how it was written is that it is like the Android Incognito mode, which doesn't track browser history (hence why Maddy would choose it).

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Aug 26, 2025 at 3:40 AM
Content: Again, breaking this next chapter into multiple parts due to reaching the word limit on posts.
Chapter 48: Beneath the Storm (Part 3)We made it through three episodes of Wednesday without a single peep of complaint from Hannah. Though she was still hesitant to admit that she had, in fact, liked it when her parents asked her what she thought of the show so far.

I hadn’t minded it. I had some quibbles about how werewolves were presented in the show. But at least it wasn’t anywhere near as awful as Twilight. Sparkling vampires? No thanks.

My problem had been managing to pay attention after the fan fiction chapter I had read on Emma’s phone. I wanted more. I needed more. As the third episode of Wednesday had played out on the TV screen, I couldn’t help but keep re-visiting what I had read, my mind drawing tendrils of possibilities as to where Hermione’s bedwetting journey would lead her.

I watched as Hannah once again made a rapid dash to the bathroom, yelping slightly as she bumped into one of the foosball table handles on her way to the hallway. Emma was right. She was such a baby.

“Let me grab a slice quick before we start the next episode,” Emma said, stepping up from the couch with an empty plate in hand.

“We’re going to put a pause on things for tonight,” Emma’s mom said. “It’s time to get ready for bed.”

“Mom, it’s only nine. You can’t be serious?”

“Your cousin needs to get her rest since her family will be traveling home tomorrow right after breakfast.”

“Just have her sleep in my room. Just not on my bed,” Emma said.

“Then Hannah will feel sad about being left out. She wants to be part of the sleepover. Having a normal bedtime just one time isn’t going to hurt anyone.”

Emma opened her mouth. And then she shut it.

“Maddy, why don’t you hop in the shower first?” Emma’s mom suggested.

I would normally prefer to shower in the morning. Mom had insisted that I shower in the evening during sleepovers away from home, and use that as an excuse to be able to put a pull-up on discreetly.

“Sure,” I said, grabbing my backpack and heading upstairs. The only shower was on the second floor, and I had a sudden idea about what else I might be able to accomplish up there.

I figured that I had the second floor to myself, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Upon my arrival, I tiptoed through the hallway, peeking into each bedroom. Yep, all alone.

I set my backpack down in the bathroom and went back to Emma’s bedroom. Unlike the first time I had laid eyes on Hannah’s diapers, I was prepared. I knew exactly where to look. Hannah’s suitcase was in the same spot as before, unzipped, contents out in the open for anyone to see.

I sifted through an already opened package of white diapers, counting how many were left – twelve. Not a lot, but enough that one missing one wouldn’t be too obvious.

But what about a pull-up? Mom wouldn’t be getting me the name-brand ones for a while. It might be nice to have one of those to wear, even if the diapers were so much better. I checked the package of pull-ups in the suitcase. Only five left. Less than I expected, but Hannah’s family was leaving tomorrow afternoon, and she had wet herself plenty of times the past couple of days.

No, I couldn’t take one of those. I would have to be content with the diaper. With the diaper in hand, I listened attentively once more to make sure no one was coming up the stairs, then hurried back over to the bathroom.

I took great care to make sure the diaper was hidden carefully in the backpack. I wrapped my shorts and shirt tightly around it before making sure it was at the very bottom of the deepest section.

That almost made having a sleepover with Hannah worth it.

I let the water run for about five minutes before working up the courage to step into the tub. It was bad enough using the same shower as everyone else in my family; using the one at Emma’s house, even though I’d known her family for ages, had never felt comfortable.

After a quick, but thorough, scrubbing, I slipped on my pajamas — regular underwear and a long nightgown — and examined myself in the mirror.

I didn’t like the look, but it would have to do for tonight. No way was I wearing a pull-up at one of my friends’ houses, and no way was I letting Hannah find out I wasn’t wearing a pull-up.

The only times I had slept with regular underwear this summer since starting the fake bedwetting plan had been the few sleepovers I’d done this summer at Emma and Angie’s places.

Before leaving the bathroom, I checked my backpack one last time, making sure it was fully zipped shut. Hannah appeared to have kept her mouth shut. Emma and Angie had no clue that I was supposed to be changing into a pull-up at this very minute. Hannah hadn’t even said anything to me about the topic of bedwetting either, minus that one slip-up about leaks that I had successfully dodged.

Never mind Hannah. Never mind the early bedtime. I had one more real, actual diaper to wear, maybe as soon as tomorrow. This was quite a good sleepover after all.

<><><>

I returned to the basement, setting my bag casually on the floor against the wall, as if I hadn’t just surreptitiously added to its contents upstairs.

Emma let out a short laugh at the sight of my nightgown. I groaned, but it wasn’t to be helped. It was the opposite of cool. And not at all my normal style. But I could endure as long as it kept Hannah oblivious to the lack of pull-ups around my waist.

Angie had already changed into her pajama shorts and a long t-shirt that came down past them, while Emma and her cousin hadn’t gotten changed yet. Hannah’s mom was the only adult left in the basement. The rest had found their way upstairs while I was in the shower.

“Were you planning on saving hot water for anyone else?” Emma chided as I sat down on the couch next to her.

“I wasn’t in the shower that long,” I replied truthfully.

“Hannah, your turn to get in the shower,” her mom cajoled. “And Emma, why don’t you set a good example for your cousin and go get ready as well?”

Emma turned away from her aunt to look at Angie and me and rolled her eyes before getting up and going upstairs, with Hannah trailing closely behind.

I knew what getting ready for bed meant for Hannah, and I wasn’t eagerly anticipating her return.

Hannah wasn’t the best at being discreet with her pull-ups, but they didn’t take that much effort to keep concealed most of the time. The same couldn’t be said for her diapers.

Hannah’s mom bade us goodnight, and then it was just Angie and me in the basement.

“Well, this just sucks,” Angie said. “I’m not tired at all yet.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I drank all that caffeine thinking I was going to need it to stay awake past midnight.”

“I still can’t get over how weird it is that Hannah isn’t toilet-trained yet,” Angie said. “Like, if she was sitting in the corner drooling and pissing herself, that would be one thing, but like, how can she go play soccer and still be wetting her pants all the time? You’d think she’d figure it out eventually.”

I twiddled with my thumbs. I didn’t know what the answer was to that question. I hadn’t met anyone with autism before meeting Hannah. With the way her diagnosis had been presented to me, I had just assumed that the inability to use the toilet consistently was a typical symptom.

“Yeah, it’s really weird,” I finally said in response.

“You did spend a whole week in the same cabin as her, right?”

I nodded reluctantly. Where was this conversation going?

“That had to be so embarrassing, being stuck around her all the time. Especially ‘cause she doesn’t exactly keep her potty training problems a secret.”

Another nod. No disagreement from me.

“You don’t think she shits herself as well? Can you imagine how gross that would be?”

I hadn’t thought about that at all. I hadn’t noticed, but that might be more difficult to spot as long as she changed right away. The image of the interior of my messy diaper from yesterday came to mind. I wouldn’t wish that problem on my worst enemy.

I was rescued from continuing the conversation by Emma’s return, as she was the first to rejoin us, having just changed into her pajamas as she preferred to shower in the morning..

I turned to stare out the window. With the lights still on, there wasn’t much I could see outside with the glare of all the reflections, but I could hear the rain beginning to pick up from the steady light drizzle of the past few hours. The pitter-patter was steady and loud enough now that it was impossible to push the sound out of mind.

Then the downpour was interrupted by about twenty heavy thumps, the sound of feet pounding on wooden stairs.

I sucked in a deep breath and held it in as the thumps came to a deep stop, letting it all out when Hannah came around the corner.

She was wearing a Harry Potter-themed matching t-shirt and pants pajama set – again, no surprise there. She had done nothing to obscure her change from daytime pull-ups to nighttime diapers. The poofy contours of the thick diaper were outlined unmistakably beneath thin pajama pants that clung tightly to her legs, the material sheer enough that the diaper itself was almost visible – or perhaps that was just my imagination.

And the pants were a size too short on her. That was first obvious from how the bottom of the pant legs ended a couple of inches north of her ankles, but as she walked toward the foosball table, the random shifts of her shirt showed the top inch of the diaper’s waistband to be in view. If she were to be standing completely still, the shirt would be just long enough to reach the top of her pants, but that coverage fell apart at the slightest of movements.

After that one quick glance at Hannah, I refocused my attention to my phone, which I was holding in my lap, second-hand embarrassment radiating up to my now-warm cheeks.

“That is even more ridiculous than I imagined it would be,” Angie said in a whisper to Emma and me.

“No teasing her,” Emma whispered sternly. “I don’t want you getting me in trouble if she gets upset.”

“I know, thank you very much,” Angie said. “I got that lecture from your mom already.”

“Don’t have to worry about you, though, do we?” Emma said to me. “You’re already best buds with her.”

“No, I’m not,” I protested.

“Maddy and Hannah, sitting in a tree…” Angie started in a sing-song voice.

“You guys,” I said, growing frustrated as I watched Hannah play around at the foosball table by herself. “I don’t like her. I can’t help that she follows me around everywhere.”

Angie finally averted her eyes from Hannah. “Oh, my goodness. I just can’t with this.”

Emma’s phone buzzed twice. She swiped to unlock it, then sighed. “Mom is checking to see if we are getting into our sleeping bags yet.”

Emma walked over to where the sleeping bags were stashed in the corner of the room. She wrapped her arms around three of them, lifting them up with a big groan before depositing them in the middle of a large open space of carpet.

“Which one is mine?” Hannah asked, finally stepping away from the foosball table.

“Yours,” Emma said, carrying Hannah’s sleeping bag and taking twenty steps away from where she had set the rest, getting all the way to the other side of the room. “Goes here.”

“But I don’t want to sleep over there,” Hannah said.

“And I don’t want any pee getting on my sleeping bag,” her cousin said in response.

“That’s not going to happen,” Hannah said.

“Yeah, right. It has happened before,” Emma said.

“That…that was different,” Hannah stammered. “I was just wearing a pull-up, and it couldn’t hold as much. I don’t have any leaks at night now.”

“Just get in your sleeping bag,” Emma said. “Mom is already being pushy about why the lights aren’t out down here already.”

Hannah stomped over to her sleeping bag. The crinkling from her diaper was loud enough that it was audible from the other side of the room.

“Really looking forward to waking up to the smell of pee in the morning,” Angie whispered.

This time, I managed to catch her sarcasm. Couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to wake up to that smell.

I set out my sleeping bag a short distance from Emma and Angie’s while Hannah pouted on the other side of the room.

“It’s not fair,” Hannah said. “Maddy gets to sleep next to you. What if she gets you wet?”

I tried to move my lips, but found they were frozen shut. What? No. She wouldn’t dare. A promise was a promise.

Before I could say anything, Emma let out a loud laugh.

“Yeah, right, I think I would know if Maddy wet the bed,” Emma said.

“Yeah,” Angie said, “You couldn’t even make Maddy wet the bed if you tried.”

Emma’s phone buzzed again. She checked it. Rolled her eyes yet again.

“Going to brush my teeth,” she muttered.

“Yeah,” Angie said. “I totally forgot. I need to, too.”

Emma paused next to me on her way out. “I’m sure you can handle being a babysitter for a few minutes.”

I waited until I was sure Emma and Angie were out of sight. Then I marched over to Hannah.

“What’s your problem?” I spouted off immediately, in a hushed but urgent tone. “Remember, you promised you weren’t going to say anything about my bedwetting. Then you talked about leaks when I was getting pop, and now you brought up the possibility of me getting pee on Emma.”

“It’s not fair,” Hannah said. “You got to drink more soda and sleep over there with everyone else.”

I looked back over my shoulder briefly. Hannah was not keeping her voice down as much as I was. I really hoped it wasn’t carrying too far.

“For one,” I said, lowering my voice further – maybe Hannah would catch on. “That pop was a while ago. My pull-up isn’t going to leak. And…”

I waved my hand at her midsection. The front waistband of her diaper was sticking out again. When she had lowered her arms, the hem of her shirt had gotten settled on top of it, and she hadn’t tugged it loose to re-cover up the diaper.

“The reason they don’t know is because I don’t go around showing off my diapered bottom to everyone in existence with pajamas that are way too small.”

“But these are my comfy pajamas,” Hannah protested.

Not this stupid argument about clothes again. “I mean, couldn’t you just wear a nightgown like this?”

“No, I don’t like how those feel.”

Hopeless. Completely hopeless. “Then don’t go getting upset at me if I happen to be more discreet than you.”

Hannah pouted and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Or do pinky promises not count?”

“No,” Hannah said, unfolding her arms and looking down at her feet. “They count.”

“Good, now stop complaining. Angie and Emma will be back soon.”

The prediction came true about twenty seconds later. That prevented any resumption of our argument, though I felt I had won when I had gotten Hannah to concede that she was supposed to follow her promise not to tell anyone about my bedwetting.

Everyone but Emma got into their respective sleeping bag.

I made sure that the sleeping bag was zipped up extra tight. No one was catching a glimpse of my underwear in the morning.

Emma shut the lights off; the darkness was complete for a second before she turned her phone on to navigate back to her own sleeping bag. And then the lights were off for good.

Before getting tucked in, I had been skeptical that sleep would come quickly tonight. I had a hard time finding a comfortable position in the sleeping bag before finally rolling over to lie on my stomach.

My thoughts drifted back to the Hermione story I had read earlier today. My daydreams began with a simple replay of the events of the first chapter, then evolved first into an exploration of what might come next, and then reversed roles, imagining what life would be like for me arriving at Hogwarts as a bedwetting first-year student.

The ever-increasing downpour outside – somewhat more visible with the lights out — only served to amplify those impossible, but incredibly intriguing fantasies until at last I drifted off to sleep.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Aug 26, 2025 at 3:41 AM
Content: Chapter 48: Beneath the Storm (Part 4)A shrill buzz cut through the dark.

I rubbed my eyes. It was too dark and too bright all at the same time.

Something flashing. Lightening? But not from outside. There was lightning flashing outside, but this light was coming from beneath my pillow, which suddenly wiggled again with another loud buzz.

My phone. I had left it beneath the pillow like I normally did at night.

What time was it even? It was dark out. Really dark, at least in the brief moments between lightning flashes. And it was wet and cold. Raindrops pounded outside.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Texting? Calling? This time of night? Why? That made no sense.

I closed my eyes and rested my head back on the pillow. My head ached. I didn’t want to deal with this. Hadn’t I put that stupid phone on mute?

The buzzing continued to reverberate through my pillow. Fine. Where exactly was that stupid phone? I swept around with both hands stretched out behind my head, but I wasn’t able to locate it.

Now more buzzing. More stirring beneath sleeping bags. But that was nothing compared to the noise coming from outside.

A pounding mixture of rain and hail. Howling wind. And in the background of it all, the unmistakable emergency warning siren blared its constant, oscillating tune. Had that been there unnoticed the whole time, or had that just started?

That cacophony was joined a few seconds later by a rumbling of footsteps coming down the stairs — no effort at all being made to stay quiet — which only added to the chaos.

My outstretched fingers at last stumbled across my phone. I lifted it in front of my face, and then blinked rapidly, temporarily blinded by the glaring light from the white, bold letters floating at the center of the lock screen.

The letters formed words. The words formed a sentence. But my head was still reeling, registering only every other word. Emergency… Warning… Tornado…

What? No? This was just some bad dream. But the siren from outside. That felt real enough.

I struggled to extract myself from the sleeping bag. Why had I zipped it up so tight? I never did that. Then I remembered. The pull-ups. Or, more accurately, the pull-ups I wasn’t wearing and needing to keep the fact that I wasn’t wearing them from Hannah.

More lights. But not just lightning, the steady shining coming from more phones getting unlocked in the dark.

Someone in a sleeping bag next to me – Maybe Emma, or was that Angie – said one of those words that I knew better than to utter out loud.

Now, where was the sleeping bag zipper again?

I found it after a few more seconds of fumbling around with my hands in the dark. The pounding footsteps in the distance were gone. Another flash of lightning illuminated a couple of figures at the entryway to the game room.

I gave the zipper a tug. It moved an inch. Then nothing. Stuck. Of all times for this to happen.

“Maddy, we need to go. There’s a tornado. My phone told me.”

I looked up with one hand shielding my eyes from a bright phone screen. Hannah was standing right above me.

The amount of urgency necessary for this situation was beginning to dawn on me. Forget the zipper. I’d just crawl out of the sleeping bag on my stomach.

I pushed the pillow aside and inched forward rapidly on my stomach like a high-speed worm. I felt strangely colder than expected. Certainly colder than I should have been wearing a nightgown while having spent part of the night in a sleeping bag.

Ten long seconds until I had fully extracted myself from the sleeping bag. Hannah yelled at me again. There were some other voices joining her. It would have been hard to hear them amidst the ever-growing roar of thunder, even if I had been paying attention.

A hand gripped me firmly around my left arm, tugging me upright as I stumbled to my feet, somehow managing to keep a hold of my phone at the same time.

“Come on, follow your mom down the hallway to the laundry room,” Hannah’s dad said.

“Is that everyone?” a voice called from the hallway.

“Yes,” he replied.

I didn’t succeed in stifling a yawn with my free hand as Hannah tugged me along through the hallway.

“Hurry, we need to hurry,” Hannah said.

I stumbled down the hallway after her, one hand caught in her vice-like grip, the other maintaining a firm grasp on my phone.

“Let go,” I yelled as I staggered along after her, bumping into the wall as we turned the corner into the laundry room.

Hannah finally released me a few steps into the laundry room. I wandered over to an empty wall in a daze. This was by far the craziest thing that had ever happened during a sleepover.

The front of my nightgown clung to me as I slid against the wall until my unpadded bottom was resting on the cold concrete floor.

“Ouch,” Hannah whined. “Someone stepped on my foot.”

“My bad,” Angie said.

“Can someone get the lights?” Emma’s mom asked.

I raised an arm to shield my eyes as the laundry room lights flashed on without warning.

“You could have let me know you were doing that,” I said, still not able to look about the room.

“Oh my god, Maddy?” Angie said.

What was that about? Was something wrong? Had I gotten hurt when Hannah bumped me against the wall? Was I bleeding?

I blinked rapidly as I pulled my arm away from my face. Everything was still so red and bright and a little blurry. It was so hard to see.

Emma let out a muffled, awkward laugh. “Wait, did you really?”

A few quiet seconds passed. I could see everyone now. Especially since all of the faces were looking at me. Confused, like Emma and Angie. Concerned, like all of the parents in the room. And then there was Hannah, sitting in the corner already wrapped in a blanket. The look on her face was one of calm vindication.

But their eyes weren’t matching mine. No one — save Hannah — was looking me in the eye. Their collective gaze was fixated right at my waist.

“Maddy’s pull-up leaked because she drank too much soda,” Hannah said in a loud, matter-of-fact tone that seemed to cut through the noise of the storm carrying on outside.

Pull-up? I wasn’t wearing one. And leaked? I began to roll my eyes, but stopped as my hand drifted across the front of my nightgown.

It was cold. Wet and cold.

My eyes dropped to my waist. There wasn’t a wet spot on my pajamas. There was a massive dark patch covering nearly the entire bottom third of my nightgown. How had I not noticed it until now?

The damp, cold wetness – a sign that this accident was not exactly fresh – suddenly swept through me as my eyes took in the damage.

I had fallen asleep on my stomach, having struggled to find a comfortable position on the floor. That meant that when I had wet the bed – the automatic mental admission striking terror into my heart – it had gotten all over the front of my pajamas, as the cotton material in the nightgown readily soaked up the urine.

Both hands fell into place in front of my waist, a pitiful attempt at shielding it from view.

I wanted to deny it. But there was no excuse that could distract from the reality that was apparent to everyone in the room. Especially not with Hannah’s sudden outburst. How dare she mention my pull-ups in front of everyone else?

How had I wet the bed? This wasn’t supposed to happen. The only times I wet myself were when and where I chose to do so.

Yet another roar of thunder and crack of lightning. A loud creaking sound outside. A massive thud that jolted the ground. A shrill scream as Hannah covered her ears.

Then all was black as the lights flicked out.

Phones flickered back on one by one. Little patches of light illuminated faces scattered across the room. I left mine off. I didn’t want anyone getting a closer look at me.

Even from our sanctuary in the laundry room, the roar of the storm swelled louder than it had ever been all night.

At first, I thought the rumbling was just the result of an extra close and big strike of lightning. But then it lasted for five seconds, then ten seconds, a crescendo growing deeper and fuller until the walls themselves began to shake.

Hannah dropped her phone. It hit the concrete floor with a loud thud as she placed her hands over her head again with a whimper. I set my phone down more gently before placing my hands over my ears myself. The shame of my pee-soaked pajamas momentarily set aside in the terror of the storm.

That thud from Hannah’s dropped phone was nothing compared to a loud crack and thump that sounded like it had come from the backyard.

And just as soon as the roaring started, it faded away, leaving behind the still noisy tempest outside.

Please let the power stay off.

I heard whispers coming from the other side of the room where Angie and Emma were huddled together. Hannah was rocking back and forth silently from her crouched position near the corner, with her mom sitting on the floor next to her.

Both of Emma’s parents and Hannah’s Dad were huddled together, all looking at something on their smartphone screens.

My hands shook. The brief reprieve provided by the tornado was now over.

I kept trying to figure out what to do next, but each possible future seemed bleaker than the next. Bedwetter was not a label easily discarded or forgotten. How could I possibly attend another sleepover with Angie or Emma ever again?

And Hannah – she hadn’t been the initial source of ruin for tonight, but her outburst about pull-ups had been the cherry atop this disaster Sunday.

Tears began to stream down my face. It was all ruined. Everything was ruined. If I could have convinced my frozen legs to move, I would have dashed out of the laundry room and out of sight.

“Angie, Maddy, I texted both your parents to let them know that we’re safe in the basement,” Emma’s mom said. “They all got woken up by the emergency alerts as well and are doing OK. It doesn’t seem like the tornado got as close to them as it did to us.”

“Tornado?” Hannah yelled.

“It’s fine, sweetie,” her mom said. “It is already well past us by now.”

“Sounded like it took out at least a couple of trees,” Emma’s dad said. “But we’ll have to wait until the morning to see what the damage is.”

“When will the lights come back on?” Hannah whined.

“I’m sure it will be back on sometime in the morning,” her uncle said. “But if a lot of power lines got knocked down, it might not be back on until after you leave. You should turn down your phone brightness for now so you don’t drain the battery so much.”

No lights till morning. I was fine with that. Anything to keep my wet pajamas out of sight.

“The forecast just updated,” Hannah’s dad announced. “The severe weather warning will be over in ten minutes. Thunderstorms and rain will continue on and off until morning, but we can go back to bed then. But it is still really windy out, so we need to remain here for now.

Ten minutes until what? Parading through the hallway with the evidence of my accident on display? And it wasn’t like I had brought extra pajamas.

And then I really needed to pee again. More? After how wet my pajamas were?

I slid both hands between my legs and squeezed tightly. Just ten minutes. Maybe a few less than that. I could do it. I had to do it.

I didn’t dare pull out my phone to look at the time. Not when doing so would only bring the evidence of what had transpired while I was asleep right into view.

I didn’t even manage to count to one hundred before whatever was left in my bladder began to leak gently out, soaking my nightgown even further.

The only thing that saved me from further embarrassment was that it was just a small amount of pee. Not anything that would be noticed, not amid all of the damage that had already been done. At least everyone else appeared to be distracted by their own conversations. Wet pajamas at least weren’t as exciting as a near miss with a tornado.

I sniffled loudly a few times as my nose started to get runny. Great. Now that is something I should have expected. Those symptoms were a fairly reliable successor to any tears.

Someone was walking toward me. It was Emma’s mom. She was holding a large towel.

“I nearly forgot we still had a couple of old towels down here,” she said quietly. “You can use it to cover up.”

I took the towel and eased myself up slightly so I could wrap it around my waist, covering up all the massive wet patches on my nightgown.

“Why don’t we get you upstairs so you can take a shower and get cleaned up?” she said in almost a whisper.

“But didn’t Hannah’s dad say the storm warning is going on for a little while longer?”

“We’re fine since the tornado is past us now,” she said. “That weather warning is expiring in a few minutes anyway, and radar shows the worst is behind us.. Come on, I’ll round up some dry clothes for you while you shower.”

I bit my lip and then lifted part of the towel to dry my eyes. I realized that I wasn’t going to get a better deal than this. One short walk of shame out the door, and then I’d be out of sight.

Emma’s mom used the flashlight app on her phone to light the way for me as we exited the laundry room. I kept my eyes focused on the ground, all while maintaining a death grip on the towel.

“Don’t you worry about the bedwetting. It’s OK,” she said once we reached the top of the stairs and arrived at the main floor. “Your parents told me about it earlier in the summer, just in case there was an emergency like this.”

Emma’s mom had known? All this time? She had been aware that I was supposed to be wearing a pull-up to bed during each of the sleepovers I’d had at their place?

The shock turned to annoyance, and then to hurt at the betrayal. How could my parents have let that secret slip so easily? On the other hand, there was some relief – no matter how begrudgingly admitted – that I wasn’t going to be forced to offer any explanations.

But for as far as Angie and Emma went, any pretenses that this was a one-off event or that I still slept in regular, big-girl underwear were completely gone with Hannah’s outburst about how my pull-ups must have leaked.

If she could have just kept to her promise, kept her stupid mouth shut, maybe I could have salvaged some degree of dignity.

I didn’t offer up any additional details about the bedwetting situation to Emma’s mom. I had to assume she knew everything my parents did. I also had to assume that the details of tonight’s mishaps would find their way to my parents’ ears.

Once out of the basement, the flashlight app was almost unnecessary as our path was almost constantly lit up by flashes of lightning. Just one more set of stairs, made slightly more difficult to navigate with both hands still securing the towel.

“Is your phone all charged?” Emma’s mom asked as we arrived at the upstairs bathroom.

I unlocked my phone to check, but in doing so, the towel slipped from around my waist. “Yeah, almost fifty percent.”

“Very good. You can use your phone for light while you shower.”

“But I don’t have anything to change into after?”

“Do you have anything in your backpack you could wear?”

My backpack. Yes. But wait. The white diaper was in there. And I didn’t have any spare pajamas or underwear.

“No extra pajamas,” I said.

“That’s OK. I’ll find something for you while you are cleaning up. I’m sure Hannah or Emma have some pajamas you can borrow. I’ll be back in a few minutes once you are done getting cleaned up. I’ll put your wet clothes in the washing machine with the sleeping bag to get cleaned up once the power is back on.

I turned on the flashlight app and set my phone face down on the bathroom counter. Not quite as bright as it would have been with the lights on, but it was more than enough to see what I was doing.

I turned to face the mirror. A red and puffy-faced stared back at me. The damage to my pajamas was far worse now that I could fully examine it. How had this happened?

It was tempting at first to blame the extra pop that I had drunk with my dinner. But I had consumed extra liquids before bed plenty of times before without suffering a similar fate. It made no sense at all. Maybe it was just the storm. That had to be it. All the water pouring outside. The loud noises. It was just a fluke. It wasn’t going to happen again. I wouldn’t let it happen again.

Then I remembered something else.

No one had thought to check to see if I had actually been wearing a pull-up. Hannah obviously thought I had worn one to bed. As for Emma’s Mom, she was also operating under the impression that I would have worn my nighttime underwear.

As for Emma and Angie, with what Hannah had said in the laundry room, I couldn’t see how I was supposed to convince them that I hadn’t been wearing a pull-up.

And there was no way I was telling Emma’s mom the truth, that I, in fact, hadn’t even brought a pull-up with me. That news would get back to Mom. That would find me in a bit of trouble at a minimum. And, at a maximum, might raise questions I wouldn’t want to have to answer.

I stripped out of the wet nightgown first, cringing as the wet cotton garment peeled off my skin.

Next off was my underwear. There was not a dry spot on the front half of it.

But what to do with it? I couldn’t exactly give Emma’s mom my regular underwear to go in the wash along with my wet nightgown. Where was I going to put it?

I opened the trash can under the sink. Nearly full. There were a couple of Hannah’s wet pull-ups partially rolled up on the top. I bunched my wet underwear up, wrapped it in a few layers of toilet paper, and carefully buried it halfway down the small garbage can. There. No one had to know.

I couldn’t have it getting back to Mom that I had been neglectful in wearing my pull-ups. If she found out, I’d rather have her think that tonight’s incident had been the result of a leak.

Next, I turned the shower on. Just like Emma’s mom had said, there were no difficulties in getting the water warm.

I let the water run for another five minutes before stepping in, having managed to get the phone tilted at an angle that would allow me to see what I was doing. Washing in the dim light provided by my phone wasn’t easy, but I focused mostly on the areas that had come into contact with urine.

Part of me wanted to stand under the hot water forever. Never return downstairs. Never open the door for Emma’s mom to bring me clean clothes. Never having to see the looks on my friends’ faces. What were they saying about me downstairs, even now? And Hannah. I wasn’t so much embarrassed to face her again as I was mad. Of course, she had to make this impossible situation even more impossible to deal with.

Then one yawn came. Then another. I leaned an arm against the cold tile wall. Dreariness returned as adrenaline faded, eased on by the heat of the water pounding on my back.

Every other desire and emotion faded to the back behind the desire to just curl up and sleep. Never mind the fallout to be dealt with in the morning.

I twisted the faucet handles shut and stepped out onto the shower mat, taking hold of a fresh towel to dry off.

There was a gentle knocking on the bathroom door while I was still drying off, followed by the voice of Emma’s mom. “I’ve got some clothes for you, Maddy. Can you crack the door open a few inches?”

I didn’t want to wear anyone else’s clothes. But I also wanted to sleep. And I wasn’t going to sleep naked.

Once I rubbed myself with the towel a few more times to dry off and was convinced that the towel was wrapped around me securely enough to give some privacy, I stepped toward the door and inched it open slightly.

Emma’s mom passed me a small bundle of clothes. I grabbed it awkwardly with one hand. It was heavier than just a simple set of pajamas should have been.

Then the pile crinkled as I pulled it toward me. The shirt on top fell to the bathroom floor, revealing one of Hannah’s white nighttime diapers that had been sandwiched between pajama shorts on the bottom and the pajama shirt on top.

My mouth dropped. “I’m not wearing that.”

I held out the shorts and diaper toward Emma’s mom, but she didn’t take them from me.

“You had a lot to drink,” she said. “I think it’s for the best if you wear some extra protection for the rest of tonight.”

“Doesn’t Hannah have some pull-ups I could use instead?”

“Yes, but she uses the diapers for bed so that there isn’t a risk of any leaks happening.”

“But….”

“Maddy, you had way too much to drink last night, and I don’t want to risk any more leaks on the carpet. I’m sorry that it isn’t what you are used to. But one leak is already a lot of work to clean up.”

I couldn’t look at her anymore. My eyes dropped down to her waist, and then to her feet.

“It’s not your fault, Maddy,” she said. “Accidents are accidents, but that doesn’t mean that you get to avoid taking the proper precautions around them. There isn’t anything wrong with wearing these to bed. It’s exactly what Hannah does.”

But that is exactly what made it wrong. I wasn’t like Hannah. I wasn’t a retard who had to be reminded to go to the toilet lest she pee her pants. I wasn’t a baby, like her, who had to wear pull-ups and diapers because of not being potty trained yet. I was in control. These flukes didn’t count.

It was just one leak, one fluke mistake. To be brought down to her level because of it was so incredibly unfair.

Maybe if I feigned ignorance – I mean, could a normal girl my age actually be expected to know how to put an adult diaper on first try, especially sleep-deprived at this hour of the night – she would relent and just let me wear the pull-up. It was only another four or five hours till morning at this point. Surely, I could convince her that a pull-up would work until then. Besides, it wasn’t like I was going to wet the bed again. That was just a fluke accident.

I unfolded the diaper awkwardly, doing my best to appear confused by the four tapes. “But, I… how am I supposed to put this on?”

Emma’s mom looked at the diaper in my hand and then back at me. “Wait one second.” Then she backed off, closing the door as she stepped away into the hallway.

I stared dejectedly at the closed door. Well, that gambit had failed miserably. What now? I contemplated just putting the diaper on as I failed to stifle another yawn, but I didn’t want to admit defeat so soon.

I tossed the diaper and shorts to the floor and settled for at least throwing on the pajama shirt. I shuddered as it settled into place.

Another knock at the door. This one was much more urgent and far from gentle.

I reached for the handle and then paused at the sound of the voice speaking on the other side.

“Maddy, let me in,” Hannah said.

“No.” Absolutely not.

“Maddy, it’s me out here,” Emma’s mom said. “Hannah can help show you how to get that protection on.”

I stomped my feet. Not fair. I had been completely outmaneuvered. I yawned and rubbed my hands against my drowsy eyes.

I was too mentally and physically exhausted to continue the fight. I’ll keep the diaper dry until the morning. Show them that the wet sleeping bag was just a fluke.

I surrendered wordlessly, stepping forward to open the door.

Hannah darted in.

‘I’m going to head downstairs and give you girls some privacy,” her aunt said, pulling the bathroom door shut.

Neither of us said anything for several seconds. I looked down at Hannah’s pants. I didn’t have my sister’s eagle eye for detecting wet diapers and pull-ups, but unless I was imagining things, her sagging bottom indicated that Hannah hadn’t managed to stay dry through the first half of the night.

“You’re really upset,” Hannah observed.

“No fucking duh,” I stammered.

More awkward silence.

“Sometimes,” Hannah began. “When I get sad about having accidents, I like to pretend that I’m a baby, because it can be embarrassing to have accidents as an older kid, but babies are supposed to, so I feel less bad about it.”

“I’m not a baby. That’s stupid. Why would you want to be a baby?”

“I didn’t say you are a baby,” Hannah said firmly. “And I’m not a baby. It’s just pretend. It can make you feel better.”

A brief image popped into my head. Wearing one of Hannah’s diapers. A pacifier in my mouth. A bonnet on my head. My hair braided in pigtails. Sitting on a playmat with a bunch of oversized plastic building blocks scattered in front of me. A half-full bottle of milk set to the side. It all almost made me want to vomit.

“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

Hannah shrugged. “Can you grab that?” She pointed at the diaper and pajama shorts I had dropped on the floor.

“You need to unfold it first. Tapes are on the back side. You can put the back up behind your bottom. You can lean against the wall to hold that in place while you grab the front and put the tapes on it.”

I just stared blankly at Hannah as she meandered through her instructions. I yawned. That was too much. I refused to admit that I knew how to put a diaper on. I wasn’t going to display proficiency in that area lest it become suspicious. Surely it was normal to struggle to put one on the first time without having watched any tutorials or having practiced.

“I can’t do that.”

“Um, yeah, it is a lot easier to change while lying down. It took me a long time to figure out how to do it while standing up.”

“I’m not lying down on the bathroom floor; it’s cold.”

“Yeah, I usually put a diaper on while on a bed. Let’s go to Emma’s room.”

Without saying anything further, Hannah turned to open the door. And she didn’t bother to close it behind herself.

I was left with no choice but to follow. I pulled on the pajama shorts sans underwear, grabbed the unfolded diaper and my phone, and followed Hannah to her cousin’s bedroom. Please let everyone else still be downstairs.

Hannah was waiting for me at the foot of the bed, fiddling with her phone.

“I can’t get the flashlight turned on,” she complained.

“We can use mine.” I set my phone facing up on one side of the bed.

Emma’s bed was made up neatly. I couldn’t bring myself to voluntarily take the next step, even though I knew what it was.

“Lay down on the bed. You can copy me,” Hannah said.

I did as she said. Too tired to argue. I watched from the bed as Hannah bent over – no doubt there, her diaper was definitely wet – to grab something from her suitcase on the ground. She stood up a second later with a diaper, wipes, and a bottle of powder in her hand.

“I need to change, actually, so we can do it together,” Hannah announced cheerfully, flopping on the bed next to me.

I averted my eyes, focusing on the shadows playing on the ceiling and listening instead to the telltale crinkling sounds as Hannah removed her own wet diaper, wiped herself clean, and then rolled the diaper into a ball and set it to the side.

“Shorts off,” Hannah said.

I yawned. And complied. And yawned again.

At this point, I knew what to do. Where to place the diaper. How to get the front lined up properly on my waist. And I had a good idea of where to place the tapes to make sure they would stay in place. But it had taken a bit of finagling to figure that out initially.

“Now watch as I put my diaper on,” Hannah said.

She went through the steps quickly, but methodically, all the while narrating her actions for me.

She shook open the diaper, positioned it beneath her bottom, adjusted the front and back so they were even, poured a bunch of powder and rubbed it all over her bare skin, pulled the front of the diaper up to her waist, and then pressed all four tapes into place.

“There, all done.”

Hannah turned to look at me. Shorts off. Diaper still in hand. “You were supposed to be copying me.”

“You were going too fast,” I whined.

“Just start,” Hannah said. “I’ll tell you what to do.”

I started to place the diaper underneath me, deliberately going slow, making sure it wasn’t lined up right, trying to act like I had no idea of what I was doing, like I hadn’t just put on one of these diapers less than forty-eight hours ago.

“No, no, no,” Hannah said. “Not like that. Just let me do it.”

Hannah rolled over and stepped off the bed. She stood in front of me without bothering to put her pajama pants back on over her diaper. She had done a good job. The tapes were perfectly symmetrical.

Hannah reached for the front of the diaper. “Lift your bottom up.”

Before I could utter a word of protest, Hannah had already begun. She lifted my legs up herself and slid the diaper beneath me.

Shame and pleasure mixed together in a twisted concoction. I was unable to deny how good the expansive padding beneath my bottom felt. But the indignity of being diapered by Hannah of all people was too much for me to bear. Every humiliation I had endured so far in my quest to acquire pull-ups and diapers paled in comparison to looking up and seeing Hannah reach down to re-position the diaper beneath me.

I wanted to flail about. Push Hannah to the side. Rip up the diaper and run off.

My mind wanted all those things. My body was completely frozen. As helpless as a fawn staring down headlights. I wasn’t stiff or tense. My muscles offered no resistance as Hannah adjusted my position.

Then waves of cool baby powder on my bottom. A new experience. And not unpleasant. Why did it have to feel so good?

Hannah finished putting the diaper on me nearly as quickly as she had put the diaper on herself.

The front of the diaper was pressed up against my waist. I coughed as a wave of baby powder puffed over my face.

One tape was in place. Then two. Then three. Then four. Then it was done.

I looked down at the result. Even in the semi-dark, it was clear that she had done a better job putting the diaper on me than I had with the one I had stolen from her back at camp.

Another yawn approached. Another attempt to stifle it failed. My eyelids closed halfway before I forced them open again. Relief that it was over battled with the shame of the events from the past half-hour. There was not a decisive winner.

Hannah put on her pajama bottoms. But like before, the diaper was not exactly hidden. I waited to get up from the bed until she had grabbed her wet diaper and gone off to dispose of it in the bathroom garbage pail.

I picked up the shorts from the floor and pulled them back on, not even caring that they belonged to someone else.

And I needed to pee again. But need was far too simple a word to describe the sensation blaring like a foghorn from my bladder.

A jolt of pain like a lightning bolt ran between my legs, and what followed a second later was not a roar of thunder but a sudden gush as I began to pee uncontrollably with my hands pressed futilely on the front of my shorts.

There was no stopping it. I could feel the warmth even with my hands as the diaper expanded.

Five seconds had passed. Hannah peeked her head through the door. “Are you coming?”

“One second,” I gasped.

Hannah’s head disappeared around the corner. Another five seconds passed. It was over as suddenly as it had begun.

All my hopes of proving myself with a dry morning diaper were dashed.

There was nothing that could have been done. Even if I had been standing in Emma’s room with regular, big-girl underwear around my waist instead, the outcome would have been the same. Well, not exactly the same. In that case, a massive puddle of pee would have amassed on the floor between my feet before soaking into the thick carpet.

This time, there was nothing to blame other than myself. Why hadn’t I gone to the toilet when I had been in the bathroom, cleaning up? I had been too distracted and upset. I hadn’t been thinking straight. That was it. Tomorrow, in the light of day, I would refocus. Make sure there were no repeats.

I waddled out of the bedroom, joining Hannah in the hallway, the reality of my last accident inescapable as the warm, soaked padding squeezed between my legs with every step.

I stumbled down the stairs, saved from disaster by only my firm grip on the railing.

Emma’s mom greeted us at the foot of the stairs. “There wasn’t another sleeping bag, but I laid out several blankets on the floor that you can sleep on.”

The sound of snores greeted me as I entered the basement TV room after Hannah in an almost zombie-like trance. In the time that it had taken me to get showered and diapered, Emma and Angie had fallen back to sleep.

The blankets and pillow Emma’s mom had laid out for me weren’t in the original spot where my sleeping bag had been next to Emma and Angie. She had set up a spot for me way in the corner with Hannah.

Perhaps I should have been grateful for the extra privacy, but all I could think of was how I was being banished for the crime I had committed in my sleep.

I cautiously reached down to pull back the top blanket and lower myself to the floor without raising my shirt enough to expose the diaper waistband. Even with the room only lit slightly by a couple of glowing phones, the white waistband would stick out like a sore thumb when contrasted with the black shorts.

I made it under the blanket, tucking myself in as thoroughly as possible.

There were no plans for what would come in the morning. No schemes. No ideas. No checklists of steps to take, actions to perform. My mind was as blank as the night sky, now that all the lightning had stopped.

I would sleep. I would wake up. There was no way things could get worse in the morning.

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Aug 26, 2025 at 3:42 AM
Content: Chapter 48: Beneath the Storm (Part 5)I was able to enjoy about five seconds of happiness when I woke up, because that was how long it took for the events of the last night to come racing back into my head.

A loud crinkle was the response as I shifted from my stomach onto my side.

That was all I needed to know. Everything that had transpired last night had been real. The tornado warning. The rush to the laundry room. My pee-soaked nightgown on full display. Diapered by Hannah. And one last shameful accident.

I could tell immediately that the diaper wasn’t dry, but it was impossible to tell if I had lost control yet again in my sleep or if that was all the holdover of having wet the diaper shortly after putting it on last night.

The basement was quiet. The snores from last night were gone, as was the methodic pitter-patter of rain and the roars of thunder. There were no blinds or curtains on the wide windows overlooking the patio and backyard, so the whole basement game room was bathed in sunlight. All the lights were off, but that is how they had been set prior to the power going out in the middle of the storm. I wondered if that was back on yet.

I thought about checking my phone to see what time it was before remembering that I had left it upstairs in Emma’s bedroom. We were far from the longest day of the year. It might not even be past six in the morning, or it could already be after nine. I stifled a yawn; it made sense that I was still tired, considering how my sleep had been interrupted.

From my position in my makeshift bed on the floor, I could see where Emma and Angie were still tucked inside their sleeping bags on the other side of the room. I didn’t bother to check what Hannah, who was on the other side of me, was doing, but I assumed she must still be asleep as well.

I tensed at the all-too-familiar sound of footsteps on the stairs. But the footsteps stopped about halfway down.

“Girls,” Emma’s dad yelled out. “Breakfast is about done. It’s waiting for you in the kitchen.”

There was immediate stirring in Emma and Angie’s sleeping bags. They were obviously not as asleep as I had previously assumed. I shut my eyes. I would pretend to be asleep and let them go on up without me. I didn’t fully trust the borrowed shorts to keep the diaper out of sight.

I listened attentively as sleeping bags were unzipped. Then there was some talking in voices hushed too quiet to make out what was being said, followed by some giggles. I winced as Hannah’s foot came perilously close to stepping on me as she crossed over to the other side of the room.

“Maddy, Maddy!” Hannah said, practically yelling. She had no bedside manners whatsoever. “You need to get up for breakfast.”

I kept my eyes shut, attempting to maintain the same posture on my stomach. To acknowledge that I was awake would require facing them, and I wasn’t ready for that, certainly not before I had a chance to dispose of the diaper and get cleaned up.

I heard someone – Hannah, I presumed – walk toward me. That was followed by a couple of nudges to my pillow, probably with a foot. I didn’t flinch.

A few more tense seconds passed. There were no further attempts to wake me up. Eventually, footsteps leaving the room and ascending the stairs a few moments later let me know it was safe to open my eyes once more to the now-empty room.

I let out a large yawn and stretched my arms as I started to push myself off the ground, when I noticed something was amiss.

Maybe it had been because of how dark it had been last night. Or perhaps it had been because of how drowsy I had been at the end. But I hadn’t paid a huge amount of attention to how the borrowed pajamas had fit – or more accurately, hadn’t fit — on top of the white diaper. Reality was far worse than my earlier worries.

The shorts were both loose and short on me — the worst possible combination. The waistband of the diaper stuck out through the top. And the bottom of the diaper — soaked and sagging — bulged out between one of the leg holes.

The benefit of a sleeping bag is that, as long as it is zipped up correctly, it is unlikely to wake up uncovered.

But, while sleeping in the hastily put-together pile of blankets that Emma’s mom had laid out as a makeshift bed for me, I must have tossed and turned enough during the night to shake off enough of my coverings to show off my bottom.

There was absolutely no way that Angie, Emma, or Hannah had missed seeing the diaper. It would have been plain as day to anyone looking in my direction. And to make matters worse, the white exterior of these diapers did much less to hide that they were wet than the colorful pull-ups did.

I tugged the blankets back on top of me, not that it mattered at this point. Everyone was long gone.

How had it come to this?

Why had nine-year-old me become so enamored at the sight of my distant cousins’ bedwetting pull-ups? I had never sought to question it then. I had simply accepted the desire and pursued it with every ounce of my being. I couldn’t have explained it any better three years ago than I could now.

But what would happen next?

I imagined a future where I kept up my fake bedwetting at home. A future where sleepovers now included Hannah. A future where I would be diapered before bed, just like her.

I had fallen asleep clueless as to my next move. I knew what I needed to do.

No more pull-ups. No more diapers. No more fake bedwetting.

I would wake up dry tomorrow morning. And the night after that. And the night after that. And each night after until I had provided my parents the necessary amount of proof to allow the pull-ups to be removed from the top drawer of my dresser, never to return.

I would wear big girl underwear to the next sleepover. Make sure to wear pajamas that made my choice of undergarments abundantly clear. Everyone would know that I wasn’t a bedwetter. That I had recovered from this summer’s affliction. The jokes and teasing from Emma and Angie were inevitable, but they would fade away. Hannah’s arrival in the neighborhood would give them plenty of new material.

Everything would be as it once was. Except. There was a loud crinkle as I shifted slightly again.

Then my bladder provided an answer to the question I had wondered about upon waking. I needed to pee rather badly, so I must have avoided doing so in my sleep during the second half of the night. This time, at least, it wasn’t so bad that I wouldn’t be able to hold it in until getting my bottom onto a toilet seat.

I had worked so hard. This summer had been the culmination of three years of hopes and dreams and plans. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine a future where I didn’t set those dreams aside; it was that I couldn’t bear the thought of what it would cost to live through it.

My bladder began to ache. One last time. Like the final drag of a cigarette before going cold turkey.

I rolled over onto my back. That was the safest position for wetting while lying down, not that I needed to worry about the diaper leaking.

My bladder was obedient this morning, releasing the moment I decided that I was ready to.

Even after wetting myself in the sleeping bag, the small leak while waiting on the storm in the laundry room, and the accident moments after Hannah diapered me, there was apparently still plenty of pee waiting to be let out.

I took a deep breath as the warmth took a familiar path, beginning at the front of the diaper before drifting downward as gravity pulled the urine towards the still dry portions of the diaper, until twenty seconds later, it felt as though there was not a single dry patch left.

I tried to slow the flow, let it linger as long as possible, dreading the moment that the warmth would begin to fade for the last time.

But no matter how much I tried to savor the sensation, I couldn’t escape a growing emptiness in the back of my mind, the acknowledgement that I would be forgoing this activity forever, or at least as long as I lived underneath my parents’ roof.

It felt so good to wet my pull-ups and diapers. Why did I have to let it go?

But was it actually good?

The scales fell from my eyes as the reality of my current situation suddenly dawned on me.

I was lying down with a plastic bag of pee-soaked padding strapped tightly to my skin.

No, it wasn’t good. It was pee. It was gross. It was disgusting. It was not in any way, shape, or form something a thirteen-year-old girl should desire.

Was I truly all that different from Hannah? Could I really pretend that I was better because I wet my pants on purpose?

Hot tears poured down my cheeks, dripping down onto my shirt.

I rolled over onto my stomach, burying my face in the pillow.

Waves of shame rolled over me, a storm that threatened to pull me under, when for the first time I accounted for my actions since the start of summer break.

I had gone to my parents’ bedroom, standing in the hallway, pajamas soaked through with pee.

I had worn a wet pull-up around my very own sister, who, with her eagle eyes, had pointed it out.

I had gone to a camp with actual bedwetters, pretending to be one myself.

I had worn a pull-up under my clothes for most of the camp, having let the cousin of one of my best friends be aware of it.

I had stolen adult diapers from Hannah.

I had hidden myself away in the basement, holding my bladder to the breaking point before pissing all over myself as urine pooled beneath me on the concrete laundry room floor.

I had wanted to wear diapers so bad that I had actually pooped myself, and then sat for another several hours in that shit-filled diaper, rather than take it off sooner than I wanted to.

I had stolen that very first pull-up from my cousins, miraculously managing not to get caught. Perhaps it would have been better if I had been caught and suffered that small indignity – nipping this nonsense in the bud – rather than endure everything that was to come of it in the years after.

I had burned every last shred of dignity. For what? Because I liked how it felt when I pissed myself?

Filled with a sudden resolve, no longer was I giving up my pull-ups reluctantly. I wanted them out of my life at the soonest possible moment, never to return.

I sat up briefly as my stomach lurched. Had I already had breakfast, I would have vomited it straight onto the carpet, but I instead endured a couple of painful dry heaves until the discomfort in my belly passed.

The early warning system of footsteps on the stairs found me hurrying to cover myself up.

I re-adjusted the blankets – no way was the diaper going to peak out again – and rested my head on the pillow, closing my eyes as if I was still asleep.

Please don’t let it be Emma or Angie. Or even Hannah, for that matter.

For perhaps the first time since I went to bed last night, prayers were answered in a way that I actually requested.

I closed my eyes just the tiniest amount possible before closing them again, trying to see who had entered the room. It was Emma’s mom.

She took a seat on a couch a few feet away from me.

“Good morning, Maddy. I know you’re awake. I saw you open your eyes.”

Caught, I reluctantly opened my eyes, though I didn’t say anything in response.

“I already had a talk with Emma, Angie, and Hannah,” she said. “Everyone knows you had a rough night.”

Yes, don’t tease the poor girl who peed all over her sleeping bag and then woke up the second time in a wet diaper. I knew how effective those admonitions were.

She eased herself onto the floor next to me. “The upstairs bathroom is all free for you to use. I figured you’d want to get in the shower again before getting dressed.”

As much as I wanted to take the diaper off once and for all, the thought of getting up and walking through the house filled me with dread. “I guess.”

“Or, if you would like, I could see if Hannah would be willing to help.”

That threat, which I knew from last night, was far from empty, changed my mind in an instant. I would do it myself. Having Hannah put a dry diaper on me had been a terrible enough experience. No way was I having her help me get out of a wet one.

“I can do it myself. Just give me a few minutes.”

“OK,” she said. “Everyone else is already in the kitchen, so it’s all clear for you to head upstairs.”

I waited to get out from underneath the blankets until I could hear her footsteps on the stairs.

I momentarily considered ripping the diaper off then and there, but thought better of it. I had nothing to clean up with. Another minute or two of wearing it while I made my way to the upstairs bathroom wouldn’t kill me. Especially if I could manage that walk without running into anyone else.

After standing up, I spent a minute attempting to adjust the shorts so that the diaper was fully concealed, which turned out to be an almost impossible task. In their ideal position, the shorts covered the diaper with no margin for error.

I looked out the window. The prediction that some of the loud thuds in the night had come from trees falling in the backyard had turned out to be true. A massive oak tree had fallen over in the backyard – thankfully not in the direction of the house – and lay sprawled out across the lawn that was still speckled with puddles from the hours and hours of torrential rain.

I grabbed my backpack, partly for the clean clothes I was going to change into and partly so I could use it to shield myself from view, and walked out of the game room. The hallway lights were on. That had gotten fixed faster than had been predicted last night.

As I neared the top of the stairs, I smelled waffles, eggs, and bacon cooking in the kitchen. At least the layout of Emma’s house was different from mine in that one could walk from the basement all the way to the second floor without going through the kitchen, where Emma’s mom had said everyone was gathered.

The shorts offered little support to the diaper that was now quite full. I could feel it sagging downward with each step. I paused near the top, running my hand along the back of my shorts. To my relief, the diaper remained covered up, though I suspected the outline of my posterior would still be a telltale giveaway as to the state of what was beneath.

I took the final step onto the main floor. The next set of stairs was just a short way away. I glanced left, and then right, and then left again. No one was in sight. I speed-walked over to the stairs, holding the backpack with my left hand, trying to shield my shorts from view in case I was still in the line of sight from someone eating at the kitchen table.

Then up the stairs as fast as I could, no longer attempting to make sure my shorts were properly positioned. I was out of sight. All that mattered was getting into the bathroom and getting the diaper off as fast as possible.

I locked the bathroom door behind me, tugging at the handle to confirm that it was indeed secured properly.

I dropped the shorts to the floor and then kicked them off my feet.

I took one quick look in the mirror, taking in the sight of the yellowed and sagging diaper. How could I have ever wanted this for myself?

It took a second to get hold of the first tape, but then I ripped it off violently, tearing the plastic backing on the front of the diaper, causing little white specks of diaper fluff to shoot out.

The sound was anything but discreet. But the diaper was off, and that was all that mattered.

I bunched it up, using the tapes to keep the diaper snug after rolling it into a tight ball. The garbage bin under the sink was now overflowing, as Hannah had left both of her diapers from last night on top. She had not stayed dry the second half of the night either.

I hastily set the diaper on top, then closed the cupboard door with a great sigh of relief.

Never again.

Another shower. Another moment alone to contemplate what awaited me downstairs in the kitchen. If anything, doing so while awake was even more painful than trying to do slow while still halfway in the thralls of sleep.

When it was over, I would have to join everyone at the breakfast table. There would be no unkind words there. No teasing, at least not while parents were present.

I hopped in the shower without a second thought, my typical squeamishness a distant second fiddle to my much bigger concerns.

<><><>

I didn’t linger long in the shower. That wasn’t intentional. I ran out of hot water after about ten minutes. Could that have had something to do with the power being out for most of the night?

I was back in my own regular clothes – t-shirt and soccer shorts – as I made my way down the stairs from the second floor. From the voices below, it sounded as though breakfast was still in progress. Unless, like last night, I had made sure to use the toilet – even though only a squirt came out – before leaving the bathroom.

There was no choice but to join them. Doing so was awkward. Hiding out of sight until Mom came to pick me up in a couple of hours would be even more so.

I attempted to put on a smile as I walked into the kitchen. Just stepping in to get breakfast like normal. Never mind what you saw under my shorts downstairs.

“Hi Maddy.” Emma’s mom greeted me right away. She was standing next to the counter, a cup of batter in hand, ready to pour onto a piping hot waffle iron. “I’ve got two fresh ones here for you.”

I kept my eyes laser-focused on the waffles, not daring to look over to the kitchen table where my friends were seated.

“Hold this,” she said, handing me an empty white plate.

Before I could protest, she piled it high with two massive waffles, a ginormous scoop of scrambled eggs, and four pieces of bacon. “Syrup is on the table.”

The table. I had nowhere else to go but there.

I turned around. Angie and Hannah were seated with their backs to me. But Emma was facing me. She looked up. Our eyes met for a second. Her face twisted into an awkward half-grimace, half-smile. My eyes dropped to the floor right away, watching my feet as I took a seat at the only remaining spot, which was between Hannah and her mom.

The plates at the kitchen table ranged from nearly finished to about three-quarters full. The syrup was on the other side. Of course it was. No words came out during my first attempt to ask Angie to pass the syrup to me.

I managed to get the message across on the second try, though my voice broke into a squeak halfway through. More eyes looking at me. I took the syrup from Angie’s outstretched hand with a muffled “thank-you” and tried to distract myself with breakfast.

I didn’t join in on the conversation, which ranged from upcoming soccer games for Angie and Emma to discussion about all the damage the storm had caused. Angie mentioned wanting to bike around the neighborhood later to get a look at it.

I made sure my mouth was never empty, taking immediate bites as soon as I finished swallowing, providing a ready-made excuse for my continued silence.

“Hannah,” her mom said. “We’re leaving in about fifteen minutes once we are done eating. We’re already running a little late. Please go use the bathroom one last time and then get your travel clothes on.”

Hannah did as her mom asked. One by one over the next few minutes, the crowd at the kitchen table thinned out until it was just Angie, Emma, and me left.

Conversation came to a standstill. The elephant in the room loomed large, and it was soaking wet.

I wasn’t hungry, but I stuffed a massive forkful of eggs in my mouth. There. I didn’t have to say anything.

I found the perfect excuse to leave. “I’m not sure where I put my phone last night. I’m going to go look for it.”

I left the half-eaten breakfast plate on the table. I had no intention of returning to finish it. I don’t think my stomach could handle any more anyway.

My feet plodded heavily up the stairs. I knew where the phone was. I had left it in Emma’s bedroom. Suddenly, now that I had secured my exit from the kitchen, I didn’t want to look at my phone.

Mom and Dad had already been informed of the evening’s mishaps. No doubt there were texts awaiting me from them. I already knew the answers and excuses I would give. I would claim I wore my pull-up as no one could dispute that, and admit that I had perhaps drunk a little too much soda before bed. But I could also blame the storm and earlier bedtime as having thrown of my body’s routine.

I found my phone exactly where I had left it, next to Emma’s bed. Thankfully, it wasn’t charged. The flashlight app must have drained the battery. I wouldn’t need to respond to my parents’ concerns quite yet.

I jumped at the sound of footsteps behind me. Hannah. Of course.

She was wearing that same stupid pink mini-skirt that she had worn that first time we had met. The same stupid ear muffs. And I didn’t need to hear the crinkling sound to know she was wearing a pull-up.

I recalled that time when I had gotten the first real-life glimpse of the pull-ups I wanted from all the advertisements I had seen and collected, not the generics my parents had bought for me. I’d seen a flash of the pull-up as Hannah had played on the swing at the park. Another shameful moment to be added to the tally of things I’d done this summer that I’d rather forget.

“What are you doing?” I asked a little crossly as Hannah crossed the room toward her suitcase.

“I’m getting changed for the road trip.”

What a baby. Up for thirty minutes, and she had peed her pants already. For the first time forever, it felt really good that I was wearing underwear beneath my shorts. That I was going to keep dry. Because I wasn’t like her.

“Did you really have an accident already this morning?”

“No.” Hannah lifted her skirt up proudly. “All dry.”

Hannah bent down to grab a diaper and a pair of soccer shorts out of the suitcase. “I wear these on road trips so there aren’t any leaks in the car.”

My stomach churned at the sight. I never wanted to see those diapers again. For that matter, I never wanted to see her again.

I knew I technically couldn’t blame Hannah for how I had wet the bed. But I could blame her for how she had amplified the shame of the incident, both with her comments the evening before and by disclosing my pull-up wearing while in the laundry room. Not to mention her complicity in ensuring that I went back to bed in a diaper rather than a pull-up.

“What is wrong with you?” I stammered angrily, as a rage that had been building since the start of the sleepover finally rose to the surface. “You promised that you wouldn’t tell anyone about my bedwetting.”

It was somehow her fault. Like by letting my secret slip last night, she had spoken the ensuing events into existence.

“But… I…” Hannah stuttered in response.

I made a direct account of her failings as I took a step toward her. “You talked about leaking after I drank the second soda. You said I could get Emma wet by sleeping next to her. And you told everyone I wear pull-ups when we were in the laundry room.”

“I… it was.. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. I’m sorry.”

There was no point in faking being her friend anymore. I didn’t need to work to get her to keep my secrets – like I could trust her to do so even if I needed to.

I would be perfectly content to not have to do anything with her ever again. If there was one, super tiny silver lining to this nightmare of a storm cloud, it was that I wouldn’t have to continue putting up with her stupid nonsense.

“But we are still friends, right?” Hannah asked, her voice quiet for once.

I watched as Hannah’s face shifted from anticipation to nervousness as I let a half-dozen seconds pass between her query and my response.

I was done with diapers. I was done with her. She was the baby. I was the big girl. Let her go around pretending to be a baby to feel better about her failure to be potty-trained. Next time I saw her, I would be wearing underwear to bed, while she’d be stuck in her adult diapers.

“No, we are not friends.”

“But, you said…” Hannah interjected.

I took her own words, which I had sought to use for my own protection. A clean break. I let her see the knife rather than drive it into her back. I made it clear in a way even she could understand, letting each word linger at the tip of my tongue before moving on to the next.

“Friends. Don’t. Break. Promises.”

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Author: ABDeLane
Timestamp: Sep 3, 2025 at 2:26 AM
Content: In light of the news about ADISC shutting down soon, I wanted to share some information about where else this story can be read. It's possible that the site will close before my next chapter is finished.

Moo's post seemed to suggest that actualy links are discouraged, but you can find this story on DailyDiapers, Deviant Art, and AO3. A quick search with the title will bring it up.