All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 29: Study Buddies

The hallway at the front entrance of the high school was completely empty as I walked in after Mom dropped me off for our first official match for the Fortnite team. I made an immediate beeline for the nearest restroom, which, like the hallway, was also completely empty. I needed to get out of this pull-up pronto and put on one of the ones I'd taken from my sister instead. Another week of this charade where I have to carefully manage what undergarments I'm wearing was the price I was going to have to pay to get Mom off my scent about the daytime accidents again.

Taking a seat on the toilet, I hastily removed the pull-up I had on. I was more than happy to take off the cupcake pull-up. I zipped open my backpack and reached my hand toward the bottom, where one of Emilia's pull-ups would be. Beneath the books for the history project, I felt some old erasers, candy wrappers, and a couple of pens, but the pull-up was nowhere to be found. My heart raced as I scoured the remainder of the backpack, but I came up empty.

How did I forget to bring some of my sister's pull-ups along?

On one hand, this was the first of the seven consecutive days I would need to keep Mom from discovering my daytime accidents, so if I did end up wetting the cupcake pull-ups, re-setting the clock would only set me back half-a-day.

However, this meant I only had one pull-up. Mom hadn't sent another one of the cupcake pull-ups along. Since the two daytime accidents she had discovered were a couple of weeks apart, she at least still seemed to view them as isolated incidents and not part of a larger problem I was dealing with. I couldn't afford to have two accidents, cause the second one would lead to wet pants and a puddle on the floor.

Lisa was already seated at her spot in the computer lab when I arrived. Shy was an apt description of her, but today she seemed to be a bit fidgety and on edge. She nearly jumped out of her seat when I grabbed the chair next to her and said hello.

Unlike with other sports teams, since Fortnite can be played online, we didn't have to travel to another school for the Fortnite match. The requirement was only that we come to the school to play and the coach would just certify who was playing that day. Coach Olson gave a re-run of the rules once everyone had arrived.

"All the schools in the state that have a girls Fortnite team will take part in the matches each week, with four games to be played," he said. "For this week, it will be all duo matches. There will be two matches going on at each time, so that pairs from the same school can't collude by being in the same match."

Olson gave Lisa and me a password to enter, and we logged into the lobby for the first match and waited as players joined in from the other schools. I rubbed my palms against the sides of my jeans, as my hands had gotten a little sweaty. I shouldn't have had any reason to be nervous. This wasn't different from any other Fortnite match I'd played. Besides, Lisa, my teammate for the day, was a much better player than me.

We waited for about five minutes before the countdown timer began, and then we were off. It turned out that I didn't have much to be nervous about. I was better than most of the competition, and Lisa was light years ahead of them. We parachuted straight down from the Battle Bus as soon as it arrived over the island, and we made short work of the other teams that had been unfortunate enough to also land in the same area. The round ended in an easy first-place victory over the second-place team we ambushed after hiding in a couple of bushes.

The second and third rounds went the same way, as we fought our way to decisive first places finishes. We were in the lobby waiting for the fourth and final round of the day when trouble arrived in the form of clear and unmistakable signals from my bladder that I better get my butt on a toilet sooner rather than later. But this wasn't a sport with the option to call for a timeout, and the countdown timer for the next match was down to ten seconds already.