Nurserton Chapter 3: Tiffany

[afictionalphile]

Hi there! This is about a fictional ABDL community that I'm working on. It features adults who live in a kinky community for ABDLs. Everyone is over 18. I have about 10 chapters done and will be posting them here over time. 

Here is a detailed disclaimer that talks about the content and themes of this novel:: https://www.patreon.com/posts/65186383

Content Warnings 

• Extensive Diaper Use (Wetting and Messing)
• Extensive Regression themes
• Extensive Sexual themes
• Adult Nursing
• CNC
• Spanking/Corporal Punishment/Orgasm Control-Denial/Chastity
• Bullying and teasing
• Humiliation

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Previous chapter is here: 

Tiffany woke up in her crib and rubbed her eyes. The light was already bright in the Nursery. The nursery was built like a volcano, with a huge window of brightness at the tippy-top that shone like a mini sun, even in the winter. It’s the eye in the sky! Some babies like to whisper in the playpens and make up stories. That’s how the grownups always know when you’re wiggling!

It’s weird to wake up in an open space. Humans aren’t too removed from their mammalian forebears, even those humans who choose to live in a remote community of ABDLs. Humans still have a lot in common with a prairie dog or a small mouse. Cozy and cornered is the best way to stay protected when you’re asleep and vulnerable and the old genes still know it. Tiffany had woken up here for years now, yet still her mammalian brain still asked her why the hell she went to sleep where all the predators could clearly see her!

Specifically, where she woke up was called the Mountain. Though her immediate surroundings were fairly expansive, not everything beneath the mini sun way up high in the Nursery’s rafters was wide-open. The Nursery was themed with different biomes of the earth. Babies like their animals. It was a fancy way to divide up what was in fact a massive building. The Nursery wasn’t like the Daycare, which had been a school, or the Preschool, which had been a dormitory in its prior life to house the students who went to that school. Yes, all of them could be considered dormitories now, and yes, all of them had gone under significant renovation since being renamed Nurserton. The bedrooms now in the Daycare were just old classrooms, divided in half, repainted, carpeted, and filled with cribs. While the classrooms had been split, the walls between the old boys and girls bathrooms had been knocked down to make the huge changing rooms. The tech labs and home-economics classrooms had been converted into gigantic laundromats, and the locker rooms by the old gym had been expanded to become the tubbies. The whole center of the building had been gutted out to make the gigantic playroom there. Tiffany didn’t even know what had been undergone in the Preschool and Junior dorms  (well, the Preschool bathrooms were changing rooms too, so the same knocking down and combining must have happened there too). Compared to the other buildings, the Nursery had changed the least from it’s past life, and when Tiffany looked up and out of her crib, the large wooden ceiling rose up from all directions to meet in a point, the sunny glass eye, the pinnacle of the volcano, the same way it had when the building had been a 360 degree theater. Many, many renovations had cultivated the different zones within the Nursery such that on the ground level, the space was probably unrecognizable to someone who’d been in before Nurserton.

Lots had changed. Most of the changes involved diapers. And though Tiffany accounted for what might be a near record number of those diapers, that’s about all that had changed for her.

Each of the biomes of the Nursery were really just fancy excuses to separate out the humongous theater space and the adult babies within. They each made up a fifth of the pie, and big walls separated each biome from the others. There were enough decorations that Tiffany, even if she had not been squinting in the morning light, would have a tough time pointing out where exactly were the doors to the Ocean, in one direction, and the Desert, in the other. Fake snow was painted on the floor in some places, and live pine trees divided up the space further. They were potted in huge winding indoor gardens of mulch and needles. There was a rock formation, some of it real rock, and much of it plaster and concrete, that had rope bridges and bouldering sections and little raised alcoves, perched ten to fifteen feet above the playpen below. Where Tiffany was in all of this was on the opposite end of the Mountain from the rock formation, by the large painted wall that separated Mountain from Desert, in a protected area with a total of four cribs.

Sometimes, when it was quiet like it was now, she thought sometimes that the different biomes in the Nursery felt like ways to divide and control the babies. Like riot control, like how farmers keep cattle penned in different sections. Can’t let those babies organize, they’d make an army! Tiffany smiled. The Daycarers probably outnumbered them two to one, at least. And nobody would be afraid of an army of Tiffany clones. Imagine that. So smelly they couldn’t sneak up on anything.

Though saying that a Nursery army was tantamount to an army of girls like Tiffany wasn’t quite a fair representation of the average baby who lived there. They deserved a mightier comparison than that, at least.

Tiffany didn’t think about that much more. She wasn’t the seditious type. She yawned and realized she was cold. Wearing nothing other than stockings and a diaper will do that even under a big bright sun-eye. Tiffany turned on her back to reach for the comforter…

Squish.

She’d woken up dirty.

“You can’t have any,” said a voice from beside her. It was the woman she’d been cribbed with, a very tall woman with bushy hair named Zayda. She’d sensed Tiffany’s movement and guessed what was on her cribmate’s mind. “You’re not dutch oven-ing me for another second tonight.”

Tiffany agreed that she did not smell good. “I’m sorry.”

The woman beside her was facing away out her side of the crib. Her chest rose and then fell. “I know you can’t do anything about it,” she said. Her chin turned towards the ceiling. “But when Miss Lili was here before bed and asked you to potty and do pushes, did you even try?”

“I did pushes,” Tiffany said. “I swear.” Tiffany wondered how long Zayda had been fuming over there. A large part of pooping in her sleep was her inability to recall when it’d happened. Last night hadn’t been one of those nights when she’d startled herself awake while poo filled the seat of her diaper. She’d, for lack of a better term, slept like a baby. Who knows how long Zayda had been awake to suffer it.

“Obviously you didn’t,” Zayda said. Then, a hand came out across the mattress. How Zayda could reach Tiffany’s diaper from there, Tiffany didn’t know. Zayda was six-foot to her five-foot, and so maybe she just wasn’t good at measuring what actual adult-sized humans could do. The queen mattress felt large to Tiffany, but maybe it wasn’t for others. The hand pressed into the bottom of Tiffany’s diaper, though she was on her back so it only managed to press some of the poo, as well as the booster beneath. Tiffany moaned. “I mean that’s enormous,” Zayda said.

It was a bad one, and though Zayda was a bully; clearly irritated that she had been so unlucky to be cribbed with the notorious Tiffany, she spoke accurately. Zayda continued to press and play with the mess in Tiffany’s pants. “You fucking like that too, don’t you?”

Tiffany bit her lip.

“I mean I knew that already. There’s no way you pushed. I didn’t know the grownups were asking you to try that and I don’t know why they bother.”

“I did push!” Tiffany said. “It didn’t work…” Zayda had turned her neck all the way to face her, and Tiffany’s words got lost in her throat.

“No you didn’t and I’m telling everyone.”

Tiffany pouted, feeling the mass in her diaper ooze warmth against her skin. She was a terrible liar, but worse, she couldn’t even explain why she hadn’t pushed when Miss Lili had knelt down in front of her and asked last night while she stood there in her soaked dinner diaper. The lights had been dimming, the babies in the other crib were being helped into their pajamas. The great bright eye in the sky was jet black. Zayda stood arms-crossed in her own soaked dinner-diaper herself. She watched as Tiffany bent her knees and pretended to grunt and strain. “Don’t work too hard,” Miss Lili had said, rubbing the bare skin on Tiffany’s arm. “You’ll get it someday. Now now…”

“Why don’t you put her on the potty first,” Zayda had scoffed. “I don’t get it.”

“Hush,” Miss Lili responded, priming her own curly hair behind her ears. “She’s not ready for the potty,” she said, apparently not realizing how much ammunition she’d just given Zayda.

“I am too,” Tiffany had said, still squatting but no longer huffing and puffing. Miss Lili turned back to her and smiled. She took a finger and bopped her on the nose. “Of course you are. You’re a big girl.”

Zayda snorted.

Miss Lili continued. She took that finger and touched the wet crotch of Tiffany’s diaper. “And what goes here,” she said. The light was not dim enough to miss the gleaming smile of the grownup.

“Pee pee,” Tiffany said, blushing.

Miss Lili raised her eyebrows and praised her by saying, “good good!” Tiffany knew what came next. The hand passed between Tiffany’s thighs, underneath her, and poked gently at the expanse of diaper that was less wet than the front. “And what about here?”

Tiffany was too embarrassed to say. Miss Lili repeated herself.

“Poo poo,” Tiffany finally said.

“Very good. Now can we try another push?” Zayda groaned behind her, but Tiffany nodded in affirmation. Nothing came of it though. Nothing came of it at all, not until both of them were in their ni-ni diapers, with their teeth brushed and flossed and, in the case of Zayda, her PJ shirt put on. Nothing came until sometime after Tiffany had gone to sleep, when finally her body relaxed and made use of yet another thick Big Squidge diaper.

“Can I please have some blanket?” she asked now. She was curled up, her stinky bottom facing away out the bars of their shared crib. It was a queen bed, but somehow there never seemed like there was enough room. It was like the bars of the crib shrunk the mattress somehow, and she always tried to make as much space for her cribmate as possible as a sort of apology for her accidents.

“No. Learn your place.”

“I do know my place.”

Zayda had rolled back the opposite direction, and looked at Tiffany. “Yeah, what’s that?”

“I’m a baby.”

Zayda laughed. “And?”

“And I stink.”

“And...”

Tiffany didn’t know what else. Zayda allowed the moment to continue for a few moments. She smiled down at her. She looked down the horizontal length of Tiffany’s bare body. Her small breasts, bare and cold. Her tummy, empty and rumbling, as if unaware as to how once again it’d led her into another embarrassing morning.

“And that’s all you’ll ever be,” Zayda said. “A baby, and a stinky one. Nearly the stinkiest one at that.”

The words hit with the same squish that Zayda’s hand had, when it came around and whumped on Tiffany’s diaper. The hottest insults are true, even if they are still meant and taken as insults. How many really were stinkier than her? Across all of Nurserton, across over 1000 babies. It hadn’t been that populated when Tiffany had started, but even though hundreds had arrived, still the few that rivaled her were rare. Zayda slept in a crib, under the big sunny eye of the Nursery, and had for a long time. But she had standing to say what she said.

Tiffany’s nipples were hard. Her pussy, swathed in the warmth of her diaper, was excited. “You’re absolutely right,” she admitted. She resented Zayda when she said it, wishing she could just bury herself in the mattress, wishing she could just evaporate in the warmth of the morning. But it turned her on to say that too. Humiliation was a kink best served wiggling, and even in a world of diaper-accepting ABDLs, Tiffany somehow had more such wiggling than a worm after rain. The big eye can always see when you’re wiggling. But she pressed through, as turned on and ashamed as she was. Admitting what Zayda wanted might win her a piece of the comforter from her crib mate, and the morning still wasn’t that warm. “I’ve got a lot to learn from big girls like you,” Tiffany said.

Zayda laughed. To Tiffany’s dismay, her cribmate rolled away, the covers tucked around her like a cocoon. There would be none for little Tiffany. Zayda spoke over her shoulder.“That’s not the point, dummy. You’re never going to learn.”

—

For breakfast, she’d gotten banana babyfood, one of her favorite flavors, as well as a biscuit and black coffee. She ate all her meals in highchairs, which were arranged in distributed feeding areas across the Nursery. Here, in this part of the Mountain, there were seven, with one for each of the sleepers who’d spent the night in the four nearby cribs (one of the cribs had been half occupied). In the mornings, a grownup and a junior would come by and change each one of the babies in the cribs, and then take them down one-by-one to the highchairs. They would repeat this until all seven were in fresh diapers and seated in the semi-circle of chairs. A refrigerator, sink, and a few other appliances stood by, and once each baby was seated, the grownup and the junior began filling their trays with appropriate breakfasts.

It was their little alpine campsite, nestled in a private spot far beneath the shining eye, and Tiffany’s highchair had been the one with the smiling billygoats painted onto the wooden tray. She’d sat in every highchair by now. In addition to Tiffany and Zayda, who’d been seated next to each other in the middle, there was Patter, a quiet baby with pure-white hair who was not much bigger than Tiffany, though he was big enough for Training. There was Minnie, a woman nearing forty who wore braces (there was a guy in the Daycare who practiced Orthodontics for the rare few who needed it). She was sometimes teased for her lisp, though such teasing would bring serious punishments on whomever did it. She was very inconsistent with her training, and could have stellar Daycare worthy months, or stretches where she was as bad as Tiffany. Unlike with Patter, getting to Daycare wasn’t a longshot for her, but nobody really thought Minnie had it in her. Kylie was on one end of the semi circle and was the biggest of the group and was the kind of baby who made it to Daycare often, although she always flunked out quickly. That was pretty common. James was next, bearded and usually talkative except for the mornings until his coffee was in him. Everyone liked a good talk with James, and even though he didn’t care one minute about being a big kid, you could always count on him for a good grownup conversation. Last was Reuben, the littlest except for Tiffany. He was also the oldest. He suffered from incontinence that was apparently caused by a car crash over a decade ago. He almost always spoke like a baby when he talked, which wasn’t often. He’d been seated on the other side of Zayda, and that made her furious. As meek as it was, Tiffany could hardly blame her. Not only had she drawn the shortest straw to share last night's cribbing with Tiffany, she’d been put beside two of the smallest babies at Nurserton for breakfast.

Zayda took all of this as an injustice, and set out to make her revenge. As usual, Zayda reckoned that the best way to distance herself from being suffocated by adult infants was to loudly reshare Tiffany’s silent admission earlier in the crib. “Tiffany said that she doesn’t really try when she does her pushes before bedtime!” Tiffany, with a mouthful of banana mush, blushed as hard as she had when Zayda’s hand had squished her diaper. Once again, Tiffany found it impossible to defend herself.

“Is that so?” Miss Lili asked, spooning a mouthful of babyfood into Reuben’s mouth. She turned to James. “Are you all set there?”

“Could I have more water,” he said, groggy, holding out his baba.

Miss Lili turned to her Junior assistant, a man by the name of Tyce. He nodded and left the high-chairs of Kylie and Minnie to accept the baba from James. He held it up to jog the thoughts of the babies. “Anyone else?” Nobody said anything until he’d turned to the kitchen, which was when Minnie called out and held up her baba too. Tyce bore his service with grace, and turned on a heel to cross the crescent of adult babies to receive Minnie’s baba. “Anyone else?”

“It is so,” said Zayda, ignoring Tyce and the conversation about beverages and addressing Miss Lili.

“Stop being a meanie,” Kylie said to Zayda.

“Remember to close your mouth when you’re speaking,” Miss Lili said to Kylie.

All seven babies were forced to have the same fare for breakfast. Today that meant babyfood, drinks, and a biscuit. Reuben and Tiffany, however, were the only two not allowed to feed themselves. Instead, Tiffany and Reuben had to wait for Miss Lili or Tyce to notice they weren’t chewing and bring the biscuit, coffee, or a spoonful of babyfood to their mouth. Miss Lili hovered between them, alternating which one she helped feed. Now and then she would make airplane noises and tap Tiffany’s lips with a spoon because Tiffany was too distracted with the conversation going on around her, and about her, to notice it was time for another bite.

Minnie took her baba back from Tyce and held it with both hands. She sucked the nipple loudly. Minnie didn’t always get to feed herself. Probably just last month she’d gotten the restraints, but for the rest of June, at least, she was big enough to feed herself. “It happened to me,” Minnie said. “Tiffany I mean. She had to do pushies but she shotally did it like swenty minuish later as schoon as she falled ashleep.” Her lisp was pretty serious, but Tiffany found it easier to understand her than Reuben sometimes.

“See, Kylie, it’s a problem. Just like you. You’re not so great yourself anymore.”

Kylie stuck out her tongue. Once again, Zayda’s words found their mark. Though Kylie was historically one of the better Nursery babies, and had been promoted almost a dozen times over the years, she was in a low stretch. Normally an eight or more star baby, even at her worst, she’d had only four stars in April, two in May, and worst of all, was headed to her first ever zero-star month in June. Zayda was hardly one to talk, having plenty of zero-star months herself. All of the other babies here save James had had zero-star months. Still, despite the fact that she remained in the top two of the seven babies present in terms of potty-skill, and was in fact clearly the most competent, Kylie blushed and sunk away from her defense of Tiffany. It was hard to argue with Zayda this month, as Zayda’s five stars this June alone was better than everyone in the group. Five would mark more than a year’s worth of effort for Reuben, and Tiffany didn’t dare entertain any personal comparisons to Zayda’s current success.

“Relax, ladies,” Miss Lili said. She’d moved to Tiffany and spooned another heap of banana babyfood into her mouth. Tiffany couldn’t meet her eyes, but she could still tell that Miss Lili was smiling.

After breakfast everyone went their own way. Miss Lili and Tyce helped each baby out of their highchair and collected their bib. Tyce took Minnie a few feet away to a mat because she’d messed herself just a few minutes after Zayda’s and Kylie’s argument. Minnie’s mess had been a relief for Tiffany, even if it meant she had to listen to Zayda demand that Tyce or Miss Lili drag Minnie away for a change as soon as possible. Zayda was disgusted! Five whole stars in June for this! Her voice became shrill after Miss Lili calmly threatened to put Zayda back in a crib if she didn’t settle down. Minnie would be changed when they were done eating, Miss Lili assured her, like always. Breakfast would take an hour if the grownups stopped every time someone had an accident. Kylie found her courage once again, and observed that Zayda had her fair share of high-chair accidents too. Patter, Reuben, and James said nothing while the ladies argued back and forth. The boys seemed content with their food. Minnie’s accident bothered nobody but Zayda (and maybe Tyce, who wound up having to deal with it). The conversation never returned to Tiffany, not even once breakfast was finished. Zayda zoomed off elsewhere in the Mountain as soon as she was free, presumably to beg a grownup to let her through one of the gates to anywhere else. Patter and Reuben waddled off in the direction of the Mountain playpen, and Kylie followed them after a lengthy diapercheck from Miss Lili. James waddled off to one of the cribs to return to sleep.

Soon, only Tiffany remained. She was the third to be released, after Minnie and Zayda,  and stood by Miss Lili as the grownup began cleaning up the trays, bowls, and babas.

Miss Lili hadn’t been at Nurserton for long. Two years, maybe, and only the last six months of that had she been stationed in the Nursery. She lived in grownup apartment N22, somewhere on the outer circumference of the circular Nursery. The biomes divided up the middle: Mountain, Ocean, Forest, Desert, Arctic, and around those was a ring of rooms where most of the grownups who spent their day caring for the Nursery babies lived. N22 was somewhere behind the Arctic, way on the other side. It was probably a ten minute walk to get to their little Alpine campsite this morning so she could tap on the side of Tiffany’s crib and get her and Zayda out of bed for food and changes.

She felt a little bad. Tiffany’s poop had taken quite a long time to clean up. Tyce changed three other babies and got them set up in their highchairs before Miss Lili had Tiffany in a fresh diaper.

Pure coincidence had meant that Miss Lili had been both the one to put Tiffany to bed last night and the one to wake her up. Often it’d be different grownups, and with around two hundred babies in the nursery, it could be weeks or months before Miss Lili would be in charge of her again.

Tiffany didn’t want it to end, so she stood around and watched the grownup put the trays in the washing machine there. Sometime later, one of the bigger kids (bigger than Tiffany, but still a nursery baby) would be in charge of emptying that dishwasher and stacking everything nicely in the cupboards. Another one would be in charge of making sure the fridge had enough coffee and babyfood.

Eventually, Miss Lili addressed the baby hovering in her presence.

“Go play, honey,” she said. “Or do you want morning milkies?”

“I’m not hungry, Tiffany said. Her bib was gone, and she was still dressed as she had been when she slept; diaper and socks, though the plastic pants that covered her diaper were gone. This was what the smallest wore indoors, and in the summer, outdoors too. It was what Kylie would be wearing if her 0-streak closed out June, and it was what Tiffany had worn for years. It wasn’t a birthday suit because she wasn’t naked. It was the babysuit. Diapers, slippers, and maybe socks.

“That’s good. Would you like to help me clean up? Poor Tyce had different cleaning to do,” Miss Lili said. She ruffled Tiffany on the head. Miss Lili wasn’t as tall as Zayda, but was much older than both of them. Tiffany guessed that Miss Lili was in her forties, or maybe older. Her hair had streaks of gray. She liked to dress in tennis clothes including a bright collared shirt and a stretchy skirt, at least in the summer, and these showed off the veins in her arms and legs. She was sprightly and athletic, though, and never groaned when kneeling to change a baby. Sometimes, when a different grownup was taking Tiffany and others out for a walk on their leashes, Tiffany would see her going for a run around the footpaths that connected the different Nurserton buildings.

Tiffany felt her bladder leak into her diaper. It was hard to tell if she wet more after waking up but before Miss Lili’s change, as her diaper was so full by then that any addition to it was like a drop in a bucket. But in a new diaper, wettings, at least big wettings, were obvious. Tiffany wasn’t going to let a wet diaper stop her, though, and right now she saw an opportunity. “What do you need?” Tiffany asked. She also liked taking orders from grownups, and even juniors. Some nursery babies chafed at being bossed around by Juniors, but in Tiffany’s opinion, they’d earned their authority. It didn’t matter if they had once been in diapers themselves.

Miss Lili instructed her to collect the plates and utensils from the chairs and told Tiffany to pile them up by the sink. Then Miss Lili gave her a washcloth and had her wipe down both the trays and then seats. She reminded Tiffany to be mindful of the order. Trays before seats. Minnie might not have been the only stinker, she might have simply been the only one who was caught. Tiffany realized why Miss Lili had spent so long checking Kylie. While she worked, Tiffany tried to guess if any of the others had had a big accident. Not Kylie, obviously, and not herself, she was pretty sure. She touched her bottom to make extra sure, and Miss Lili caught her doing so and checked her herself before sending her to wash her hands. Oops. She wanted it to be Zayda…that would have been funny, but if it was anyone, it was probably Reuben. Miss Lili hadn’t really meant that someone had pooped, though, she just merely meant to clean as if a big accident had happened. That was smart, and Miss Lili was smart. Still it was fun to think about Zayda and not Minnie being the biggest stinker at breakfast.

Tiffany enjoyed the servility, almost so much so that she forgot briefly what she came to ask Miss Lili about. It wasn’t until Miss Lili’s nose began to twitch and she came up behind Tiffany for another diapercheck that she remembered. Tiffany’s self-check had made Miss Lili suspicious that something was moving in Tiffany’s tummy. It could happen, it often happened. Tiffany’s heavy morning diapers never meant the coast was clear.

“Guess I was just smelling Minnie’s accident still. Make sure to wipe hers down extra. Our secret,” Miss Lili said, tickling Tiffany’s ear with the hand that had just yanked the back of her diaper. The grownup didn’t even address the pee she found in Tiffany’s diaper. The boosted Big Squidge wouldn’t need to be addressed for hours if Tiffany kept poop out of it. More like: if poop stayed out of it. Tiffany had little to do with what wound up in her diapers.

“Miss,” Tiffany asked after Miss Lili had turned back to the kitchenette that housed great deals of babyfood and other snacks under lock and key.

“Yes Tiffers?” she asked in return, after a silent moment. That was a nickname Miss Lili had used once or twice now, and as far as Tiffany knew, Miss Lili was the only one who called her that.

It took a lot of courage for Tiffany to say what she had to say next. It would be a lot easier not to. In fact, it would be a hell of a lot easier to just blurt out something dumb like “I LIKE YOU!” to the grownup. She’d done that before, in the beginning, years ago when she found herself falling in love with every grownup that changed her stinky diapers. After the babyfood got into her diet, there were just too many people a day to fall in love with.

Gulping, and tugging at the waistband of her diaper, and curling her toes into the soft carpet, Tiffany finally found her voice. “What Zayda was saying was true. Before she got in a fight with everyone. I didn’t…push.”

Miss Lili sucked her teeth and put an arm around Tiffany’s shoulder. Despite all the changing and working Miss Lili had already done today, she still smelled good.

The admission seemed far less shocking to her than it had been challenging for Tiffany to say. Just like that, all of Tiffany’s effort seemed to vanish away in an instant. Miss Lili’s voice continued like a lullaby. “It’s okay, that’s why we practice.”

“But I wasn’t practicing,” Tiffany said.

“You weren’t practicing pushing, but you were practicing something else. You had to do that to get to this point.”

“But I lied.”

“In a way. You probably wanted to do the big kid thing, didn’t you?” Tiffany nodded to this, but she wasn’t sure. “How come you didn’t push?”

A rush of thoughts came to Tiffany’s head. She heard a few babies laughing and giggling not far away, maybe just on the other side of the wall in the Desert, or back around the wooded hallway where the playpen was. “I don’t know,” was all she mustered.

Miss Lili put her arm around Tiffany’s shoulder. “Are you afraid?”

Was she afraid? Tiffany didn’t know. Having Zayda or whomever was being cribbed with her standing right there, waiting while she was being told to push was nerve wracking for sure. But she’d not pushed other times, even when her crib mate was a friend or someone who had as little chance of pottying as she would. Even being cribbed with Ari, the other person most likely to fill her pants in the dead of night, she didn’t push and only made a show of it. It couldn’t always be fear…but if it wasn’t fear that made her not push, was it that she just liked being dirty? She liked messing at night? If so, why was she afraid of that, or bothered by it? This was Nurserton, and what was more, this was the Nursery at Nurserton. This is what happened here. Babyfood, highchairs, and poop. Her nocturnal fecal incontinence was rare, but hardly unique.

“I don’t know,” Tiffany said.

“Well then. We’ll practice knowing, that’s what we’ll do.” She said it quickly, without missing a beat, as if she had been prepared all along.

Tiffany looked at her. “I’m really sorry,” she said. She was overwhelmed by how easy this conversation was for Miss Lili. How unsurprising this lady found Tiffany’s admissions. The grownup threw her head back and laughed. She patted Tiffany’s bum and drew a circle on Tiffany’s bare tummy.

“Oh honey,” she said. “Nobody grows up in one day,” she said. “And besides, that little Zayda will get herself in trouble if she keeps gossiping. She won’t get away with it.” Then Miss Lili swooped in for a hug. She held it there for a little while, and then pulled away to look Tiffany in the eye. Tiffany’s nakedness and her wetness didn’t matter to Miss Lili “We’ll keep trying, I won’t even tell the other grownups about this, though I’m sure when someone is spanking Zayda, the whole nursery might hear what she thinks amounts to a story. But we’re going to keep on practicing and pushing until we find out what’s stopping you, okay?”

Tiffany felt a pang of humiliation despite Miss Lili’s soft words. Did the grownups sit around in their rooms and talk about the babies? They surely did, what else would they talk about? Well, I was bedding Tiffany yesterday, and I had her do the pushes but once again, she didn’t try. All that huffing and puffing was a big fake. She’s a worse actor than a potty trainee, if you can believe it! She imagined a whole room of grownups adding in their own observations about Tiffany’s pushes. Yup, seems about right for that little tyke. Not putting her in training anytime soon. Maybe next year.

A little more pee came out. It warmed the front of her diaper. If Miss Lili noticed the growing yellow, she didn’t say anything.

“Okay.” Tiffany said, not so sure of herself. Miss Lili then led her back to the playpen, where she remained until a different grownup came to fetch her for pail duty, hours later. In that time, she behaved like most other Nursery babies; she journaled for a bit, she read a book, she watched Minnie get a spanking for throwing a toy at Zayda, she watched both Zayda and Kylie try and fail to reach a potty in time. Kylie stood up from doing crafts, waved at an adult, but then squatted over the bench she’d been sitting on and pooped. Zayda stood up in time for the grownup to hold her hand, but about five feet away from the plastic potty Zayda stopped walking and quivered as the back of her diaper began to expand rapidly. The grownup took her to the mat too. Tiffany’s own trip to the mat came a little while later, when a group of babies, including herself and most of the ones she’d shared breakfast with, tried to make a large block tower. Patter and James were there, and she was pretty positive that Patter was dirty, but nobody cared because he didn’t really smell that bad. In their fourth attempt to delicately stack blocks end to end higher than Tiffany was tall, Tiffany pooped her diaper while holding a block for Zayda (Zayda didn’t let Tiffany stack the blocks, claiming that she was too short). Zayda tattled, though a grownup named Mr. Kirian had already seen Tiffany’s bend her knees, and was already on his way to take her (and Patter) out of playtime to a nearby mat. Tiffany’s accident, which came noisily and completely out of the blue, shocked Zayda and caused her to mis-place the block, knocking the whole thing over. She complained about this for over an hour, and refused to let ‘volcano butt’ back to play blocks for the rest of the morning, even as the grownups gently reminded her that they were everyone’s blocks. Tiffany hardly minded. Those humiliations were nothing compared to where her brain was turning. Volcano butt living in a volcano nursery seemed about right.

Nobody grows up in a day, she thought, remembering Miss Lili’s words to her earlier in the morning. But there was so much that Miss Lili didn’t know in just six months stationed in the nursery. She was a sweet woman, and she’d be a grownup compared to Tiffany even if she was only twenty-one. Nobody really knew just how bad it was, just how complete it was. Sure, nobody grows up in a day. What about 30 years?