The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers

Chapter 3: Fully Prepared

I tilted my head back, forcing myself to finish each drop of water from the twelve-ounce glass that I had filled to the brim.

I had just come home from school, but it wasn't too early to begin working on getting myself as hydrated as possible for what I was planning on doing tonight. Plus, I had a soccer game to play in a couple of hours. It wouldn't hurt to be prepared for that, either.

Grace was already home when the bus dropped me off halfway down the block in our suburban neighborhood. It was easy to get lost in the neighborhood if you didn't know what street you were on. Development in the neighborhood had just finished when we moved in a decade ago. The cookie-cutter homes all looked the same – houses painted with a repetitive palette of bland colors, a scattering of barely mature trees dotting the front yards.

I waved goodbye to my two friends, Angie and Emma, as I got off the bus, knowing that I'd be seeing them again in a few hours. Angie was three blocks down from my house. Emma was on the opposite side of the sprawling neighborhood, about a half-mile away. We'd put a lot of miles on our bikes once our parents had decided that we were old enough to make the trek back and forth between our houses unsupervised.

Emma's parents were going out for the evening, so she would be hitching a ride with us to the game this evening.

My stomach felt uncomfortably full after downing so much water so quickly. I belched.

"Well, excuse you," my older sister called out from the living room, where she was reading a book on the couch.

I probably should have taken it a bit slower, sipping on the water over the course of a few minutes rather than trying to chug it down all at once. But I couldn't help myself sometimes. I was very much an all-or-nothing type of person, and I wasn't going to allow myself to waver the slightest bit in my commitment to finally wetting the bed tonight.

Grace always arrived home from high school before the bus dropped me off. In a few minutes, she would walk to the end of the block to pick up Jackson when he was dropped off from elementary school.

It was nice to have some freedom between the time I got dropped off by the school bus and the time when my parents returned home from work. Yes, Grace was left in charge, but my older sister was more focused on making sure Jackson wasn't getting into trouble than worrying about me. The most she would ever do would be to remind me to do my homework, which was better than getting a lecture from my parents for not having gotten started on it before dinner.

I set the empty glass on the counter next to the sink and retreated to my bedroom. I should have been starting on my homework. Any assignments from school were supposed to be done before I could have any time to myself, but I had no desire to even try to begin working on the Algebra sheet that I had been sent home with.

I shut the door behind me as I entered the bedroom. Grace knew better than to barge in on me. We had a well-established quid pro quo about staying out of each other's rooms. I knew she wasn't going to barge in on me announced.

Jackson, on the other hand, had about as much respect for boundaries as one would expect from a six-year-old boy, which is to say that he really didn't have that many. I had to be a lot more careful when he was around.

My bed had a set of dressers underneath it, most of which I used for storing various odds and ends. My clothes went into my regular dresser and closet.

Buried beneath a pile of old books and notebooks in the bottom middle drawer under my bed were some of my most treasured possessions. I had three copies of Reader's Digest. After the first time I had come across the ad for the nighttime pull-ups on it, I browsed through all the magazines my mom hadn't managed to throw out yet. A few had the same ad, so I didn't bother keeping them, but I did get lucky enough to find one with a different ad. Then, for the following year, I kept a close watch on the new magazines that were arriving in the mail.