This bonus chapter is dedicated to Jordan, with thanks again for all the support you have given me!
I hesitated at the door. This was Sarah's room, and she hadn't given me permission to be in there. I told myself that it wasn't going to be a problem, that it wasn't such a big deal. I was just going to take a couple of diapers out of the pack, and she would never mind. I could even leave a note for Mum, to explain what I had done.
It wasn't like I was intending to steal, or that I was jealous of the cuter designs. It was just that I'd knocked a glass of juice off my desk. Thankfully it had landed on my pack of diapers, saving the floor from a proper soaking. The amount that had splashed on the carpet had been cleaned up by a spritz of carpet shampoo and spreading a towel over it for an hour. But that meant I didn't have any diapers until Mum bought the next pack. And because of the conflicting demands of work and school schedules, tonight was the only time that Mum would be able to take Sarah to the doctor. She needed to see a specialist, apparently, to work out why she had been wetting the bed more and more often even after testing negative for the virus.
They would be back really late tonight, and Sarah would be wanting to go straight to bed. I didn't want to bother them. Just a couple of diapers; it would be easy enough. And less of a problem than sleeping without them. Maybe Mum would say that I could have just gone back to not wearing them; but the rules had been that we should both be in diapers, and she'd never changed that. The last time she bought a new pack, she had told me I didn't have to wear them if I didn't want to; but I'd said that wouldn't have been fair to Sarah.
No, I wanted to keep on wearing them. They were comfortable, and they made it easier to sleep. So I'd carefully written a message, saying that I'd spilled juice over the last few diapers in my pack, and I didn't know if Mum had any more stashed somewhere, so I'd borrowed a couple of Sarah's ones. Sarah wouldn't be upset, if it meant she needed two fewer nights of dryness before she would have a chance to wear big-girl pants again. And I had the note in my hand now, so that I could place it in the pack where the missing diapers would have been. She wouldn't need to worry where they had gone before going to bed, and by then I would already be asleep. I really hoped Mum wouldn't be mad in the morning, but I didn't worry too much. I was just doing the most logical thing.
I noticed that book was on the desk again. And there was a bookmark in it this time. Sarah really had been trying, and I was sure that if she could have stopped her accidents just by force of will, or by learning how to sleep differently, she would have managed it by now. The virus must have left some lasting damage, or something like that... but Mum still kept reassuring Sarah that it would get better. It was hard to believe that Sarah wouldn't have watched the news herself, so maybe she was just trying to stay hopeful. Maybe being treated like a baby was a kind of therapy, in that way. Because so long as Mum kept treating the bedwetting as something she would grow out of, Sarah wouldn't have to give up hanging onto a slim thread of hope.
I couldn't help wondering if that was why the punishment had lasted so long. Or perhaps it really was the only way Mum could get Sarah to behave responsibly. Mum had told me already that Sarah had done some things that were too serious for me to even know about; she wasn't mature enough, and she took silly risks. So if there was some medicine or whatever that would help her, maybe treating her like a baby and taking all her choices away was the only way to make her take it.
In any case, I wasn't here to be thinking too much about Sarah's problem. I just needed diapers. Feeling like a thief in the night, I crept over to the dresser. I knew which drawer the stuff was in, because it was in sight of the doorway and I'd seen Sarah lifting things out when I was passing the room a few times; and more recently Mum opening the same drawer while Sarah was lying just out of sight on the bed.
In the drawer, the first thing I saw was a pack of diapers. It fitted snugly into one of the sections of the drawer, so that it looked like a box lined with thin plastic, torn around the edges. There were five diapers left, all with the octopus design I'd seen before. I pulled two out and stared at them, and realised that they weren't exactly the same. They both had the theme of the octopus holding hands, or tongues or whatever they are, but they were either alternate patterns or different sections of the same repeating design. I shrugged; I was taking them because I had agreed to wear diapers for as long as my sister did, not because I wanted to see how wearing something so cute made me feel. And if I kept telling myself that, I could almost believe it. I held my two diapers under my arm, and slipped the note into the pack where they had been. It was just a simple message, "I borrowed your diapers because I spilled juice on mine." Addressed to Sarah, but I was pretty sure now that Mum would be the one reading it.
The other stuff in the drawer was all baby related. Powder, baby oil, and wipes. There was even a pacifier in there; although I wasn't sure what that was for. Had Sarah started grinding her teeth while she slept again? Or was it just one more thing that Mum could hold over her head, to embarrass her with if she didn't do as she was told?
I stared at the pack of wipes for a couple of seconds. I didn't need them; I wasn't actually wetting the bed. There was nothing to clean up, and I didn't need some dermatologically tested all-night rash protection, or whatever the ornate squiggly text along the edge of the package promised. But it could still be soothing, couldn't it? Soothing my skin, and maybe I could imagine that it wasn't my own hands wiping me down. I could pretend that there was somebody tenderly diapering me, and maybe that would help me get to sleep more easily tonight.
Feeling just a little guilty, I lifted out the pack of wipes. And when I looked, I knew that I wouldn't need to justify myself to anyone over this. I could see a discoloured part on one side of the plastic, where it had rubbed against the side of the drawer as Sarah lifted it out and put it away again dozens of times. And yet ft if you didn't know better, this could still have been a full pack. One of these would last for months; when I looked on the bottom, it said it contained approximately 200 delicately scented wipes. So taking two wasn't going to make a noticeable difference. I promised myself that this was the only time I would try it; and that if I found that the wipes made a difference I would go buy some myself. I didn't want to be costing Mum anything, and I knew this was really just a silly treat that I could afford with my pocket money.
The packet the wipes were in was like a square plastic bag, with a pretty substantial-looking plastic lid fixed to the top. There was more text on it, boasting about how it could both allow wipes to be pulled out one-by-one, and keep the pack sealed so they didn't dry out once opened. Typical advertising for any supermarket brand, advertising common things like they were some revolutionary feature. But when I clicked open the lid, I couldn't believe what I saw. Inside the fixed lid was the top of the bag; which had a tap to tear it open within the area covered by the lid. It declared "once opened, close lid until it clicks to ensure a perfect seal". But it was still sealed. The wear on the side of the pack showed that it had been taken in and out of that drawer every day for weeks, if not months. But Mum had never actually opened it.
What could that mean? It didn't make any sense to me. But it was already close to nine in the evening. Mum and Sarah would be driving back from the clinic now, and Sarah would probably be going straight to bed after a light supper. Was I just too tired to think straight?
I put the wipes back into the drawer, and closed it. I walked back out onto the landing, and pulled Sarah's door so that the edge of it was just touching the frame, like she always left it. After putting my purloined diapers under my bed where nobody could see them from outside, I went downstairs again to get myself a little snack so that I didn't wake up hungry. A couple of cookies and a glass of juice would be fine, and I could watch something dumb like Sparkling Thunder Presence on TV for twenty minutes. My guilty pleasure; a show that Sarah could have enjoyed when she was my age, if she hadn't already been insisting she was too old for any kind of kid stuff.
By the time the silly dinosaur song at the end finished, I was already yawning, and I knew they were likely to be home soon. So I turned the TV off and the lights out, except for the kitchen light which would shine out through the back door just enough to help Mum with finding her keys. Then I hurried up to my own room, somehow a little excited about tonight. And this time, I realised that I was going to be wearing an actual diaper, rather than a pull-up thing. I didn't think they'd told me when Sarah had to switch, but it wasn't exactly something I would need to know.
I put my glass of water where I could reach it when I woke up; but moved it a little farther back than normal, to guard against future spills. And after inexpertly fumbling with the tapes for a while, I managed to get one of the diapers on. I didn't know if the clumsiness was just because I'd never done it before, or because I hadn't caught up with Sarah's growth spurt yet, or a combination. But once I had it on, I couldn't believe how thick it felt by comparison to the Allnights. There was no way to mistake that this was a real diaper.
As I shifted position and got comfortable, I could already hear the door open downstairs. I didn't want Mum to make me put on one of my own diapers, the thin pull-up ones, if she found out what I had done. So I whispered "Tomas, turn the light off". The little black box in the corner chimed quietly, and my room was dark. A few minutes later I heard the door drift across the carpet, and Mum's footsteps behind me. I hend onto Reggie, a giant plush giraffe, and pretended that I was already asleep.
"Alice?" Mum whispered, but I didn't respond. "Are you asleep?"
I waited nervously; and after a few seconds I heard the door close again. Now I could enjoy the unfamiliar feeling of a real diaper around my waist, and imagine just how cute I looked in it. And it was probably only seconds before I really was fast asleep.