The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers

Chapter 1: Daydreams in Class

I will not chicken out this time.

That was what I had told myself two days ago. That was also what I had told myself yesterday. Third time was the charm, right?

It was easy to put a bold face to my latest harebrained scheme to acquire diapers from the safety of my daydreams. It was much harder when the time came to actually carry out the plan that had been brewing in the back of my mind for the past year – one I had finally decided to put into motion this week.

Why would a 12-year-old girl want to wear diapers in the first place? I don't know.

All I know is that for the past three years, nothing I have done has been successful at getting this obsession out of my head.

I certainly didn't have any interest in being a baby. My younger brother, Jackson, is only six years old. I discovered where Mom kept all his old baby stuff long ago. I've tried his old pacifiers, bottles, and sippy cups. None of those items held any appeal for me.

I can't stand kids' TV shows. I can't color to save my life. And don't get me started on dollhouses, barbies, and whatever other toys babies like to play with. In every aspect of my life other than this strange desire for diapers, I wanted to act my age.

My latest plan all started a year ago with a magazine and a desire to procrastinate on my homework.

There had to be some level of irony to the fact that this latest idea came about when I was seated on the porcelain throne. Mom had almost a dozen different magazines she subscribed to. Most of them found their way to the bathroom, which was also probably the only circumstance where I would have even considered reading them in the first place. I was already finished doing my business, but leaving the bathroom meant needing to continue a homework assignment I'd been slowly picking away at for the past hour.

The only reason I even bothered to pick up a copy of the Reader's Digest on that day about a year ago was for the few sections where it had funny jokes and stories. That, and I had left my smartphone in the bedroom. I really didn't know how my parents managed when they were my age.

I skimmed through the first section of jokes. Whoever had put together this edition of the magazine had totally mailed it in. There was a completely unoriginal one about redheads and souls that had me tempted to toss the magazine in the garbage. I mean, with how many magazines Mom had, would she even miss it?

Redhead jokes get old really quick when you've had people telling you them your whole life. It has been forever since I'd been told one I hadn't heard before. And even longer since I've been told one that was actually funny.

Maybe I would have better luck with the second humor section toward the back of the magazine. I flipped through the pages casually when one of the advertisements caught my eye.

I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. There it was. Right on the page. An exact replicate of the pull-up I had briefly stolen from a cousin two years ago. But there was more. That pull-up from two years ago had been the boys' designs. This ad showed that there were ones for girls as well. And even though I'd had a pretty good growth spurt in the past two years, the product info indicated that I wasn't even close to being too big to wear them.

I didn't tuck the magazine in the trash, but I did take it with me from the bathroom, burying it deep inside my box of miscellaneous things in my bedroom. I've looked at that page at least once a day for the past year.

"Earth to Maddy. Earth to Maddy. We're calling in."

My head jerked upright from the hard wooden desk in my math classroom to the sound of laughter.

"Here!" I called back to our math teacher.

"Well, thank you for joining us again, Maddy. Now," he said, pointing to a cluster of numbers, letters, and symbols on the whiteboard, "that we've isolated 'x' on this side of the equation. Can you tell us what it is?"