✅ My Sister's Problem

99. Peace Offering

Lindy didn't seem happy on the way back to the beach house. She was clearly happy to start with, and excited about all the things she had seen. But she kept on trying to put me down, telling me that I was too little to understand what all the exhibits had been about. I was thinking like an adult again by that point, so I could answer her questions pretty well if I wanted to. But whether I tried to remember the words I had read and actually make sense of them, or just talked like a little kid, she seemed somehow disappointed.

Long before we reached the beach again, I knew she was upset about something because I could hear her feet kicking against the back seat as she swung her legs. She would get excited thinking about all the fun she'd had, then say something to me, and then be kind of morose until she found another topic to capture her attention. And I didn't understand what I was doing wrong here. Was it because she expected me to be upset?

"Sally's not being a baby properly," she protested eventually. "She's talking too much, she's not doing it right."

"She's been a good baby most of today," Mum corrected her, and I found myself blushing just because she didn't even think of asking me what I felt about the accusation. "And she's mostly playing along. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"She's too happy," Lindy snapped, and then I thought I might understand better. "It's supposed to be a punishment, she's not supposed to enjoy it. She tried to humiliate me and ruin my life. She shouldn't be so happy. You should make her mess her diaper, remind her how it feels to be so humiliated."

"Did I do that to you?" I answered, though I didn't know how many of the words she would have understood while I was speaking through a pacifier. "I didn't do anything, why do you hate me?"

"You tried to make me feel like a baby," she answered, and I wondered if she actually knew what I had done. I thought the punishment was overkill; and I knew she'd framed me. But still, I had found a way to make her wet her bed, and that was what I was being punished for, even if the times didn't quite line up. "Come on, she needs reminding that this isn't a fun thing. Make her feel what she tried to do to me."

"Okay," Mum said with a nod, and I shrunk back in my seat. Okay, maybe some kind of punishment was fair. But I was sure that Lindy's demands were over the top. Still, I guessed that she wouldn't feel guilty unless she thought she was hurting me, so maybe this was for the best after all. And Mum could probably balance all the different needs. I trusted her to do that for me, just like a little baby should.

"Okay," I squeaked, my excitement fading away a lot.

"Let's see how well you've taken in all those special words, shall we? Sally, Poop for Mommy."

I screwed up my eyes and tried to pretend that she hadn't said those words. Especially not while we were on the road. It was so easy to imagine myself getting lost in the mind of a toddler that I would just push and let it happen, my desire to please Mommy overruling my natural respect for hygiene. I could see it in my mind, too. A baby crawling around on the floor in front of the TV, pooping without worries as those beautiful spirals swirled. The voice had asked me to imagine that scene, hadn't it? There had been four or five things that it had told me to imagine doing for Mommy, and the descriptions had felt so real that I could see them in my mind's eye without needing to remember the words. Just like the hypnotist had said, I was just a baby, and babies couldn't hold it.

I didn't want that, it wasn't fair. And I knew that the words could only make me imagine. I could still remember imagining that scene; I had seen a little baby girl in my mind's eye, oblivious to all the rules that adults tried to wrap her in. But I hadn't imagined being that baby. I still couldn't clearly imagine pooping my diaper like a little baby, because that was something I wasn't prepared to do. I didn't really know how it would feel to do that, and there the scene in my mind became a little less real. I could imagine struggling to walk, because that scene had been in my dreams. I could imagine being terrified like a child, because I had been thinking about a time when that had happened many years before, on my first visit to the museum. I could even imagine wetting myself like a baby, after so many dreams and so much thought about how it could happen while I'd been researching how to cause little accidents for Lindy. And of course, I'd already been used to doing that thanks to the influence of Mister Tunes. But messing? I didn't have that experience to make the memory seem real.