The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers

Chapter 10: Equals

Grace clasped both of her hands over her mouth, holding back a muffled reaction that might have otherwise woken up the rest of our family.

My hands remained on the front of my pajama pants, as pointless as it was to remain in the posture as I wasn't able to fully conceal how I had peed myself. Neither of us moved. I couldn't take my eyes off of my sister.

As much as I had worked to avoid it, I had known that it was a possibility that Grace might find out about my faked bedwetting. As a former bedwetter herself, my older sister would be attuned to the signs that something might be off about me. And it was certainly better than having my younger brother or friends discover this secret.

But of all the ways Grace could have discovered my fake bedwetting, this had to be among the worst. I had anticipated something much less dramatic and certainly much less embarrassing.

I couldn't stand in front of my parents' bedroom door forever. That was not a feasible plan.

There were only a couple of directions I go could. Returning to my room wasn't an option. Doing so would require going toward my sister.

I was definitely not going to do anything to wake up my parents at this point and turn my bedwetting incident into a whole family affair. Running down the stairs in the dark wasn't an option, either.

That left the bathroom.

I dashed inside it with a few quick steps, closing the door as gently as I could while also shutting it quickly.

I was safe. Safe, but trapped.

I listened at the door, hoping that Grace would go back to her room and give me some privacy to get back to my bedroom and get cleaned up. At least let me change into a dry set of pajamas. I was having no such luck.

I flipped on the light switch. Even if I hadn't peed quite as much as last night, my pants didn't appear any less soaked. Enough time had passed, and the wet clothes were already beginning to get uncomfortable as the initial warmth faded away.

The expression on my older sister's face had left no doubt that there had been enough light in the hallway for her to notice how wet my pajamas were. And she had been a bedwetter. If it had been Jackson instead, I perhaps could have tried to say I had just spilled a glass of water on myself. My six-year-old brother might have been gullible enough to fall for that, especially if he was still a bit drowsy.

But Grace? No, she knew exactly what wet pants looked like from having wet the bed.

I heard footsteps in the hallway. I held my breath. Then there were two soft taps on the bathroom door. There was some faint whispering from the other side of the door, but I couldn't make out what was being said.

I breathed out. Grace wasn't going to let me avoid having this conversation. I leaned forward and pressed my ear up against the door in an attempt to make out what my sister was saying.

There was another series of soft taps on the door, followed again by my sister's voice. This time, I could make out what she was saying, if just barely.

"Is everything OK in there? I can help. Promise I'm not going to judge you or anything."

If I hadn't known about my sister's previous bedwetting, it might have been harder to trust that statement. But I figured that I could. She had actually gone through what I was only attempting to fake. I stepped back and pulled the door open.

Grace at least had the courtesy this time to not stare down right at the wet spot on my pajama pants.

But what was she thinking as she was looking at me? Did Grace see a reflection of herself from six years ago? If I were to go back and look at our old family photo albums from that vacation, it would be plain to anyone that I was almost an exact carbon-copy of her when she was my age. I realized that I probably looked the same to her as she had looked to me when I had watched her walk up the staircase in her wet pajamas six years ago.