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

[ABDeLane]

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.

<><><>
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?

[ABDeLane]

DLFez said:

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

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.”

[ABDeLane]

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.”

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

Growler0128 said:

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

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

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.

[ABDeLane]

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.