Ostinato

Chapter 10

Sunday June 8th: 7:04

"Teddy..." a high pitched voice nagged. "Teddy!" Theodore awoke with a disgruntled grumble, a series of unhappy animalistic snorts accompanying his return to consciousness. Luke's dorky five-year-old features loomed inches from his face, his little cousin stood practically on top of him at the side of the bed. "WAKE UP!" he exclaimed with an over-energetic shout, practically vibrating with energy.

Upon glimpsing the number displayed on a paw-patrol themed alarm clock on the bedside table, the boy's first instinct was to ignore the annoying preschool graduate and turn around - endeavoring to go right back to sleep. But as Theodore was forced to process the juvenile room around him, and felt an uncomfortable dampness beneath the Sesame Street sheets, and slowly began to recall the events of the last night, and the day before that, and the day before that, his sleepy pre-adolescent grumpiness dissipated completely - giving way to jittery anxious anticipation.

He sat up as rigid as a board in bed, springing up like a jack-in-the-box. Practically shoving Luke aside, he reached for the alarm clock - reading the day of the week displayed in the top right hand corner. His heart fell a little. It was Sunday. Again.

As he studied the dark glass display however, his hope once again piqued at the shrouded barely visible shimmers of his own reflection. His eyes darted around the room, eventually locating the full length mirror directed towards him propped up in the corner. It showed himself, wide eyed and bed-haired, sitting straight up in bed. He let out an involuntary yip. He'd got bigger again!

Theodore continued to stare, his smile only growing bigger and dopier. He was still a kid, that was for sure, not a whisper of the subtle hints of his impending adolescence that he'd possessed at fourteen yet present on his smooth girlish neck and wonderstruck round face. But there was definitely progress - there was no denying that.

His nose, though smattered with just the right amount of adorable freckles, was no longer a cute babyish button - seeming to have found some semblance of grown-up grade-school definition; his hair was no longer a uniform blonde, his wavy curls now arranged in a unkempt thicket of butterscotch atop his head; his cheeks, though still plenty rosy, no longer possessed that pinchable plumpness of a kid only just making his way out of toddlerhood - now more suitable for a boy well on his way with his ABCs. He recognized himself as about ten or eleven, accounting for the late-blooming in his preteen years which left him looking just a tad bit younger by common reckoning.

The boy's mind, free from the kindergarten fog and already starting to whir into factory production of boundless curiosity, at once began to speculate. Before, it had been a straight spiral - a definite downward trend. He'd started off eighteen, then endured fourteen, and then six. He'd half been expecting to wake up in a crib. Instead he'd gained five years, earning a reprieve from full-time diapers - for now.

"Um...I think you weed on my bed." Luke interrupted with a giggle, loosely shaking Theodore to stir him from his daydream and pointing down to a very conspicuous dark spot visible just over Theodore's crotch - blotting out a cheery picture of Elmo.

"Huh?" Theodore exclaimed, turning to stare in horror at what he'd done. The cold dampness between his legs confirmed the truth. But how was that even possible? He'd been well past wetting the bed at this age! At least the first time.

He didn't dedicate any more time to useless navel-gazing, however. He jumped up from beneath his covers, discovering an equally humiliating yellowy damp stain displayed prominently on the shorts of his white and red Pokemon pajama set. Acting as if Luke wasn't even there, he found himself whipping around and starting to strip the bed, as if acting on autopilot. He tried not to panic, but with every passing second he only grew more and more jittery. The mystery of his repeated regressions - not to mention the endlessly repeating Sunday - faded far into the distance in terms of Theo's priorities, the boy instead finding himself catastrophizing over every possible humiliating possibility that might stem from the babyish bedwetting incident. He needed to fix this! If Mom found out - or worse, Charlie or Ewan - his life would be over!