✅ My Sister's Problem

54. My Shame

Tomorrow! A week had flown past. Those new rules should have been a nightmare, but instead it was like being inside some kind of game. Like they made sense, but only in an abstract way, and it didn't feel like the real world. Once I'd been able to see it as just a game, I'd tried to win at it and that was all that mattered.

I picked up my phone, and looked at my sleep stats. It was no surprise that I had slept more deeply than most nights. Sleeping wet always seemed to do that, even if I didn't entirely understand why. I checked Lindy's watch as well, and saw that she had slept moderately well except for a brief interval at 1:40 when she had set a vibration alarm to wake her up. Oddly enough, that was about the time at which my own sleep quality had gone from good to excellent. No surprise there. I didn't know why she was still doing this, but I was finding myself resigned to the possibility. She paused sometimes, but never stopped. And in the last week and a half, the time of my punishment, she had chosen to do it three times. I kept thinking that Mum would find it suspicious that my wet mornings had increased dramatically as soon as I was the only one being punished, but if she saw the trend she hadn't said anything about it. I hoped that she didn't think I was doing this deliberately in order to get babied, because nothing could be further from the truth.

I took a deep breath, and got out of bed. I was wearing a loose T-shirt and a diaper, nothing else. That was one of Lindy's old demands that I had never really cared enough to go back on. It was kind of comfortable in a way. My normal morning routine would have been to put on some clothes over my diaper, chosen from the pile that my sister had lifted out for me. I might be embarrassed by the options she'd given me, but I had a choice. And then I would go downstairs and ask permission to change. The chance was about fifty-fifty that Lindy would say she thought I'd had an accident, and I would be subjected to a diaper check in the kitchen. I didn't mind that at all. But it wouldn't happen today, because I didn't want to find out what might happen if I broke Mum's rules. If Mum had to check my diaper to find out that I was wet, I would be in a whole lot of trouble.

I didn't get changed today. I stood in front of the door for several seconds, building up the courage to let someone see me. A glance in the mirror told me that the front of my diaper was visibly stained. I couldn't face the shame now. I picked up my phone instead, and checked messages from my friends. I was just putting off the inevitable, but maybe it was okay to be a little bit childish in this situation.

Nadine wanted to introduce me to Jim. They were going to a national skeeball tournament, which I didn't even know was a thing, and he'd said she should bring a friend. I reluctantly replied that I didn't think I would be able to go anywhere today, because we were supposed to be packing for our beach trip. She wasn't really upset, and her next message said that we should meet tomorrow and she'd show me photos of their amazing day out, before I left to have fun in the sun. It still seemed weird to think that our family trip, a little over a week, was all that remained of the summer break. And then Lindy would be starting at the same school as me, able to bug me or ask for help any time she wanted.

"Tomorrow, then," I replied, and finally summoned the courage to head downstairs.

"Mummy?" I called from the bottom of the stairs. She must know what I was going to say already; it was the only reason my diaper would be on show, even if she couldn't see how yellow it was. "I had an accident."

"Oh, of course you did. Well, sit down for breakfast, baby. I can change you after."

I could only cringe as she served me a bowl of warm oatmeal, and both of them were talking to me like a baby for the whole meal. It was my own fault for letting it get this far; and at the back of my mind I couldn't forget that this had all started because of one weird dream. The seed had sprung up from somewhere in my subconscious, I had let it grow, and I was the one who had watered that seed until it bloomed into something real.

It wasn't until Mum had finished eating and picked up her phone that I realised there was a way I could avoid this situation in future without turning Lindy back into the victim of my prank. She hadn't started this, and whatever happened I didn't want to make her feel humiliated or get her punished. But there was one more thing I could do; a way to turn around the problem and make it work.

"Oh, Mum," I said, grabbing her attention. A raised eyebrow got me to correct that. "Sorry, Mummy. If there's a long video on my cloud that's deleted, don't worry about it. Okay? It would be super embarrassing if you see it, but it's not anything naughty."

"What do you think, Lindy?" Mum asked. "Your baby sister doesn't want me to see this. Should I watch it anyway?"

"I don't know. What is it?"

"It's just me. Asleep," I said. "Like, watching me sleep is kind of weird."

"Why would you have..."

"When I went to a sleepover, ages ago, I was worried about somebody messing with my phone. You remember? I installed this ZoneWatcher thing. It uses the sleep tracker on my watch, so if it detects movement near my phone when I'm asleep, it's supposed to start recording. But I couldn't figure out all the settings."

"I remember," Mum said. I'd told her about it at the time, and that was all true. "You told me about that. So why are you deleting the video now? You went back and found that the files were still there?"

"No, it never actually worked. But the other day Nadine said her friend Shelby was trying to use it. And I thought I might be able to figure it out, so we could help somebody else. I'm older and smarter than I was then."

"You look littler to me, baby," Lindy added in a stage whisper, but I tried to ignore her.

"Anyway, it was tough, but maybe I was able to figure out one of the little tricks to help them. But when I woke up there was a notification that it detected movement at like half past one this morning. There was an hour of video, I think it's just me sleeping, but watching that seems kind of creepy so I deleted it. I don't want anybody to see that, not even me. I mean... it's this ZoneWatcher thing and not the built-in camera app, so I don't know if the video will even show up in your parental control thing. But if it does, it was just a bug. Don't worry about why I'm taking those videos."

Mum started to say something about how she might take a quick look, because sometimes babies need somebody to make sure they sleep soundly. That's what baby monitors are for, after all. I blushed furiously at the thought of that. But Lindy leapt to my defence this time, and said it would be a terrible invasion of privacy. Not a good precedent, she said. But from the way she had suddenly tensed up when I mentioned the time of the recording, I knew that she was only thinking about what the hypothetical video might show; and I silently hoped that she would be coming into my room a lot less often from now on.

It wasn't until an hour later, after a thoroughly humiliating diaper change, that I realised what was strange about that thought. I'd sincerely wished that my sister would make me wet the bed _less often_. I hadn't even considered that she might stop entirely, hadn't hoped for it, and once again I was at loss to explain what my subconscious mind might have been thinking.