All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 38: The Mirage

I had figured it would at least have taken several weeks, if not a month, before some other crazy drama occurred to move the school gossip away from Lisa's incontinence. It turns out it didn't even take a week. Even now, I wasn't quite sure exactly how all the details had played out, as it hadn't occurred within a social circle that I as a freshman was part of, but it involved the high school quarterback, the tuba player on the marching band, sugar free gummy bears, and the old school bus parked in the maintenance lot. The details were still murky. All that mattered was this was all that anyone was talking about, not the introverted freshman whose name everyone had already forgotten.

Mom had been in a good mood today when she had sent me off to school. Emilia and I had both made it to the weekend without any observable accidents, though my sister was the only one of us who had achieved that result legitimately, getting the right to wear panties for the first time since the middle of the summer. Nighttime was a different story. I hadn't had a single dry night, though there had been a couple times where I had woken up in the middle of the night with a strong urge to go, only to relieve myself in the diaper and drift back to sleep. Emilia had a single nighttime accident that had broken her string of dry nights, but otherwise appeared to be on track to wearing big girl underwear at night as well.

My daytime toileting success was a mirage that was on the verge of coming to an abrupt ending. Despite an increased cautiousness, I had on the last of the Minnie Mouse pull-ups I had swiped from my younger sister, with no clear options of how to get more for myself. Like I had predicted, I had made it to last weekend without Mom catching onto any further accidents, so the right to wear panties during the day had once again been bestowed upon me, not that I was risking taking advantage of that. I'd kept it dry through the school day so far, but it was only a matter of time before I would have to risk wearing panties outside of the house.

My friends had been bummed out by the news that a sleepover was a no go. I lied about Mom having banned me from those; I knew that would be the answer without needing to ask, but was glad that a weekend get together was still possible, even if it would need to be put off by a couple of weeks. I hadn't even begun to plan how I would handle my increase in accidents at that get together, or what I would end up saying if Lisa continued to push me toward letting Samantha and Desi in on the secret of my incontinence as well. I hoped that Lisa would let that topic drop, but I suspected that I wasn't going to get that lucky.

I couldn't wait for next week, when I would resume taking the bus home from school, getting back at the house much earlier, as well as getting some time to myself before Mom comes home from work. Before that, I needed to get through three more periods of after school detention, which meant sitting in an empty office in the administrative section of the school, watching cheesy anti-fighting and anti-bullying videos that must have been made at least two decades ago, as they were run on an old VHS player connected to one of those fat, cube-like TVs that had been wheeled into the room on a cart.

Claire and I sat on opposite sides of the room. A teacher I hadn't had any classes with was in the back, grading homework while making sure Claire and I stayed in line. He needn't have bothered. Claire had been in a completely subdued mood ever since we had returned to school on Monday, once our suspensions had ended. The upperclassmen on the cheerleading squad whom she had been hanging out with were no where in sight when I had got glimpses of Claire seated by herself in the cafeteria.

Meanwhile, I was convinced that the obviously college-age actors pretending to be high-school students must have failed out of whatever community college theater program they had attended. They weren't doing a good job at convincing me that fighting in school was wrong, but they did have me convinced that I never wanted to get into another fight, just so I could be spared from ever having to watch even another second of these videos again.