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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? 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? --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Jessica and Nancy sat in the middle round table talking about their plans for the day. To the left of their table, there was Angela trying to get her little one to eat breakfast, and Olivia, trying to get her little one to accept a new toy to tote around all day, a stuffed rabbit that was way too large to hide. "Now, come on," Angela said to her little Erica, the girl in red pigtails that Angela had gotten the stubborn girl to finally realize she had no choice if she wanted their protection from the bullies. "You need to eat your breakfast, and this cinnamon roll is actually pretty good, and I want you to drink your milk." Angela had bought the breakfast for Erica despite Erica already having had breakfast at home, partially, because Angela pretended not to believe Erica when she said she already ate. Olivia kept trying to shove the pink rabbit that was nearly half the girl's height into her arms. "Come on, now, Kim. Mommy worked very hard at a part time job to get this for you, and I really thought of you when I saw it. Please take it for today, then after you bring it home, you can decide if you want to bring it to school tomorrow or not." No one seemed to be paying attention to Cindy when she first entered the lunch room....

In somewhere little town, USA, there were four young girls who had gone to the same school for the last five years.