The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers (Ch. 24 - 4/24/24)

[spark]

How many more times will Maddy have to wet her bed, or when the next time happens?   I've written similar stories based on some of the posts I've seen and what I was thinking at that age.   I never acted on my impulse but I would if I was put back into my 12-year-old body.

[MinnesotaWriter]

Chapter 5: About That Favor

I 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.”

 

---

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

[spark]

You left us hanging on what Grace wants from her sister.    Right now, it seems like the parents are pretty normal parents and the bedwetting was just a one time thing.

[sklawlor]

curious aobut what the favor is?

[Ishigreensa]

Though I'm not really as interested in intentional wettings like this, this story is a lot of fun to read!

[Bonsai]

So far, Grace is the most interesting character of the story.

[spark]

6 hours ago, Ishigreensa said:

Though I'm not really as interested in intentional wettings like this, this story is a lot of fun to read!

I think that is a testament to quality writing.   I love intentional wetting stories because they speak to my experience (or in this case- wished experience.  I never had to guts to do this in real life).  However, guess which story I posted the most?    Take a look at how often I post on your stories, which also include dark themes of abuse that can be disturbing.  If it is engaging, I'll read it.

I'm excited for this story, because right now it reads more like a novelette.  A short harmless story about a girl who wants to wear Pull-ups and wets her bed on purpose.  It's been done multiple times, but usually in unbelievable ways.   However, @MinnesotaWriter has shared that this is going to go almost as long AMMR, and that requires a deep plot.   Unlike AMMR, which I had a good idea all along that Sarah would end up in foster care, I have no clue where this is going.

[MinnesotaWriter]

On 2/24/2024 at 12:50 PM, spark said:

You left us hanging on what Grace wants from her sister.    Right now, it seems like the parents are pretty normal parents and the bedwetting was just a one time thing.

I do love a good cliffhanger. But yes, parents do seem to be fairly normal and supportive. Not the type that are going to force baby someone for accidents like that.

They certainly view the bedwetting as a random one-off event, which makes sense since Maddy hasn't has any accidents -- day or night -- since being potty trained. Obiously they'll have to re-evaluate that as Maddy continues to have more "accidents."

On 2/24/2024 at 2:46 PM, sklawlor said:

curious aobut what the favor is?

We'll find out -- at least partially -- in the next chapter.

10 hours ago, Ishigreensa said:

Though I'm not really as interested in intentional wettings like this, this story is a lot of fun to read!

Thanks!

4 hours ago, Bonsai said:

So far, Grace is the most interesting character of the story.

She's an important character in the story. I'm having fun with writing an older sibling for the protagonist since I haven't done that in any of my past stories.

3 hours ago, spark said:

I'm excited for this story, because right now it reads more like a novelette.  A short harmless story about a girl who wants to wear Pull-ups and wets her bed on purpose.  It's been done multiple times, but usually in unbelievable ways.   However, @MinnesotaWriter has shared that this is going to go almost as long AMMR, and that requires a deep plot.   Unlike AMMR, which I had a good idea all along that Sarah would end up in foster care, I have no clue where this is going.

That's part of what I like about writing this story as well. There's a bunch of different directions it can go, which makes it easier to pull off some surprises.

[Little Sherri]

I'm enjoying this. Part of my lived experience is wishing that I'd thought to take this route, way back in the time tunnel. I had it all - I was a certified, licensed bedwetter, I had diapers being bought for me... but I was torn up with dissonance about having to wear them, secretly enjoying doing so, but knowing deep inside that I couldn't tell anybody that, so instead, I would pantomime not wanting to wear them - never very strenuously, but, I assume, convincingly. Then there was the reality that, other than furtively enjoying the confines of my plastic underpants, I was otherwise a pretty normal kid, so I wanted to grow up and be a big boy and do big boy things, stay up later, watch movies that everyone in the 5th grade talked about, be allowed to to play on the street even after the sun left the sky. And, on top of that, I suffered from intense anxiety about anyone finding out that I had a box of diapers in my bedroom closet long after most of my peers did; I was convinced that it would have been the end of the world, if anyone caught wind of it. So, when I stopped "organically" wetting the bed, it never occurred to me to disguise that from my parents - I wanted them to be proud of me and I enjoyed their obvious excitement that their decade of having diapers on the grocery list was drawing to a close. Little did I understand the period of mourning that I was set to endure, once my last box of diapers was folded into a trash can (it being the 1980's, no recycling programs yet existed...). 

If I'd just kept wetting them intermittently, after I started waking up dry, I could have kept a good thing going. 

[MinnesotaWriter]

Chapter 6: Not Going to Happen Again

There 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.”

 

---

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

 

[spark]

Quote

“Do you want to go home?” Angie asked. “You don’t need to be specific. Just say Angie took us to the mall. That’s technically the truth, after all.”

I think you mean that Grace asked

I wonder how long Maddy will have to wet the bed before she get Pull-ups.  Her mom sounds like the ideal parent for someone who is accidently wetting the bed, but that won't necessarily help Maddy

[MinnesotaWriter]

4 minutes ago, spark said:

I think you mean that Grace asked

 

Thanks, fixed that.

4 minutes ago, spark said:

I wonder how long Maddy will have to wet the bed before she get Pull-ups.  Her mom sounds like the ideal parent for someone who is accidently wetting the bed, but that won't necessarily help Maddy

I think it is safe to say that her quest for pull-ups will take a while. But we've also only had one wet night so far.

[Kaiko-chan]

21 hours ago, MinnesotaWriter said:

I put on what I thought was a good display of confidence. “Relax, Mom. It’s not going to happen again.”

Lol fibber

[JustaFoxGirl]

One of my favourite things about your stories is how there's so much else going on aside from the main plot that it really makes the world feel alive.

[Bonsai]

Knowing that your older sister has a secret to hide and trusts you to not give her away can be useful.

Maybe, soon, you will need her complicity on a sensitive matter.

It will for sure make it easier to share your own secret with her and ask for help in getting what you want, when time gets ripe for it.

 

[MinnesotaWriter]

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.

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

[Bonsai]

Nice plot twist!

Grace's POV in all this would be extremely interesting. 

[spark]

Her secret is no longer a secret

[thedman]

Well I guess she is committed to the gag now

[Kaiko-chan]

Caught. 

 

[Ishigreensa]

Oh, how the Screw Turns!  I loved this latest episode.  Now, what is sister going to do?  She understands the humiliation and fear of wetting and worried about being found out.  She was probably in her sister's shoes plenty of times, only with a real accident when they had vacation with relatives and she was fearful of someone catching her that wasn't her mom, dad, or maybe even grandma.  

I am going to love seeing how Grace navigates this with her younger wet sister, one who we have no idea how she is going to react to Grace finding out, but we know she's as scared as a young animal knowing the tiger is prowling close by and could leap at it at any moment!

[MinnesotaWriter]

On 3/1/2024 at 2:02 PM, Bonsai said:

Nice plot twist!

Grace's POV in all this would be extremely interesting. 

Thanks,

We'll be sticking with Maddy's POV for this story, but we'll continue to get lots of details about her family/friends.

On 3/1/2024 at 2:02 PM, spark said:

Her secret is no longer a secret

Nope

On 3/1/2024 at 4:35 PM, thedman said:

Well I guess she is committed to the gag now

A little more than before, but, like Maddy considered in the chapter, all she would have to do is not fake the bedwetting and she'd still be able to move on from it at any point.

Regardless of how it happened, I think it would have been difficult for Maddy to keep her secret safe from Grace in the long run, since her older sister is very familiar with all the ins and outs of bedwetting.

18 hours ago, Kaiko-chan said:

Caught. 

 

Very much so.

16 hours ago, Ishigreensa said:

Oh, how the Screw Turns!  I loved this latest episode.  Now, what is sister going to do?  She understands the humiliation and fear of wetting and worried about being found out.  She was probably in her sister's shoes plenty of times, only with a real accident when they had vacation with relatives and she was fearful of someone catching her that wasn't her mom, dad, or maybe even grandma.  

I am going to love seeing how Grace navigates this with her younger wet sister, one who we have no idea how she is going to react to Grace finding out, but we know she's as scared as a young animal knowing the tiger is prowling close by and could leap at it at any moment!

The main question is going to be if Grace knows that Maddy knows that she was a bedwetter, and is either of them going to be willing to bring up that topic?

[Ishigreensa]

20 minutes ago, MinnesotaWriter said:

The main question is going to be if Grace knows that Maddy knows that she was a bedwetter, and is either of them going to be willing to bring up that topic?

That is true, but I'd find it hard for Maddy to not bring it up if Grace does anything that would upset a bedwetter.  Maddy also has a secret on her sister, regardless that she made a deal with her in the beginning, she could use that to her advantage to make sure her sister doesn't out her to anyone.

[MinnesotaWriter]

Chapter 8: Equals

Grace 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.

 

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

[JustaFoxGirl]

Well, now the cat is out of the bag for both of them. Since Grace is a former bedwetter herself, I wonder if anything Maddy does will tip her off that she's faking it?