The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers

Chapter 6: About That Favor

I woke to the sound of claws being dragged across wood.

Chester was scratching at the door, his paws all the way past the doorknob. The cat was a master of breaking into my bedroom. Getting out of it, not so much. He dropped his paws to the ground, turned around to glare at me, and let out a loud, high-pitched meow.

I rolled over as if to move to the side of the bed, only to find myself completely tangled up in a sleeping bag.

I looked around for my friends – Angie and Emma – but they were nowhere to be found. But I was on the floor in a sleeping bag. And I only slept in those during sleepovers. So where exactly were they?

Oh, wait.

The events of last night came back to me. The struggle to get my bladder to release. The flooded sheets after I had finally managed to trick it into letting go. Having to knock on my parents' door to inform them of the supposed accident. Mom setting up the sleeping bag for me on the floor.

Chester meowed loudly at me again and then resumed his scratching at the door. It was only slightly better than having to listen to chalk on a blackboard.

I scrambled out of the sleeping bag. Better to let him out quickly than have Grace, or worse, Jackson, open the door for me and discover that all my bedding was missing. I'd have a hard time coming up with a good explanation for that, along with why I had ended up on the floor in a sleeping bag.

I cracked the door open just enough for Chester to squeeze through into the hallway and then closed it right away. I stretched my hands in the air. I always felt so stiff after sleeping on the floor. How long had I slept in, anyway?

I grabbed my phone off of where I had left it on the floor next to the sleeping bag. I tapped the screen. Already 10 a.m. I had really slept in. But that made sense with how late I had stayed up.

I scrolled through my notifications. There were a half-dozen messages from Angie and Emma, ribbing me for how late I had slept in. Both of my friends had been up earlier, discussing what our plans would be for the day. They had come to the decision that they wanted to go to the mall. I agreed that it sounded like a bunch of fun, but aside from needing a ride, none of our parents were going to let their middle schoolers stay at the mall unchaperoned.

I highly doubted that any of our parents wanted to spend time at the mall this weekend.

And there weren't any other good options at the moment.

Emma's older sister would sometimes be willing to go along with us, but she wasn't getting back home from college for a few weeks. Angie didn't have any siblings at all, so that wasn't of any help. And Grace, well, she worked very hard to avoid spending any more time around my friends than was absolutely necessary. I wasn't even going to bother asking her.

In most other things, Grace and I were on good terms as far as sisters with a five-year age gap between them could be.

We both had inherited our parents' red hair, and I was practically a younger mini-me of my sister, everything else diverged from there.

I was the athlete of our family, taking more after my dad in that regard. I mostly stuck to playing soccer, at least competitively, but I was always the first girl picked for any of the activities during gym class. If only I had managed to get Dad's brains as well. I wouldn't have any trouble doing math at all.

Grace was much more artistically inclined. She planned to major in graphic design at college. I did like to doodle myself, but only as a distraction during boring school lectures; nothing that ended up in my notebook could exactly qualify as art.