✅1️⃣ | Hypnosis Doesn't Work Like That!

35: A Discovery

Nyx bustled around her home, doing her best to get the house into some semblance of order. She wasn't a naturally tidy person, and on the weeks she worked every day she found that the cleanliness dropped just a little. So when she had an unexpected day off in compensation for working three Sundays in a row, she felt obliged to spend at least half the day on too-long-neglected chores.

She was dashing out of the lounge with her hands full of disorganised brown envelopes for the third time when she spotted a loose piece of paper almost being blown away by the draft. She dropped off the latest load of bills in the office for later perusal, and went to pick up whatever it was. Maybe some of Adi's notes; she was almost as bad as her brother for leaving school work all over the house at times.

Nyx wasn't the kind of mother who would ever read her daughter's mail, even if she stumbled on a note that looked to have been passed from hand to hand under school desks or something of that kind. She hoped that if she trusted her kids, then they'd know they didn't have to hide things from her. So she carefully picked up the single piece of notepaper, and was halfway up the stairs to return it to Adi's room when the words at the top of the page caught her eye.

"Mom," she read out loud as one word at the top of the page caught her eye. That was one bad habit that seemed to have been in her family's genetics at least as far back as her grandmother. "If she's got a message for me, why didn't she say in person?" She slipped the note into her pocket to read later, and carried on with tidying the house.

* * *

It was much later in the day, with the kitchen cleaned and the lounge tidy, that Nyx looked again at the handwritten note she'd picked up. When she spread it out on the coffee table, she realised that she hadn't quite read the first line correctly. But she read on anyway, wondering what could have disturbed Adi so much that she couldn't say it in person. It surely wasn't dating trouble, because her daughter clearly felt she was too good for any of the boys at her school. And for all her warnings a few nights before, Nyx was sure that the Walker girl was enough of a gentleman – or whatever the equivalent term was for butch dykes – to let Adi make her own decisions if she ever decided to push her courtship behaviour beyond that half-joking place.

Adi had seemed more stressed than ever the last few days, like she was barely coping with the pressure of work. Nyx couldn't imagine what she was going through, being at once so smart and so isolated. So she promised herself that if she could find any way to help her daughter relax, she would give as much time and effort as she could. Nothing was too much, and nothing would be strange enough to shock her, if it could lessen the pressure her daughter was feeling.

"Dear Mommy," she read. "Please make me a baby. Hypnotise and un-potty-train me. Surprise me please."

She turned the page over, but there were no more words. Nothing to indicate if this was some kind of joke, or related to some weird teenage craze that she hadn't heard about yet. There were doodles in the corner, as if Adi had been deep in thought when she wrote this. A couple of hearts, and a sketched shape that Nyx didn't recognise the first couple of times her eyes skipped over it. Then she knew where she'd seen it before: It was a tiny thing not even the size of a pen, with a different electronic connector on each end. An MP3 player, that had been lying untouched on Adi's desk untouched since one of her distant cousins sent it as a half-hearted Christmas present. This morning Adi had been turning it over and over in her hand as she ate breakfast, fidgeting for no obvious reason.

Was that a part of the message as well? Was it some part of this strange request? It was easy enough to find the device beside Adi's bed. Nyx was sure she knew where everything in her daughter's bedroom was better than the girl did herself. But searching the Internet for some kind of context that might help her understand this letter, and checking what tracks were loaded onto the player, took most of the afternoon.

Still, by the time Adi caught the bus home, her mom was sure she'd know what she really wanted.

Author's Note: What next? There's so many ways this could go from here! What do people expect to see? And what do you want to see?