The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers

Chapter 12: Change of Plans

I fell asleep last night without pretending to wet the bed. But that was OK. I'd come to the conclusion that I was going to need to adjust my approach to bedwetting if I wanted to convince my family that the bedwetting was real and not going away anytime soon.

I was supposed to set an alarm on my phone before going to bed on a school night so that I would get up in time to get on the bus, but I rarely remembered to do so. That meant that instead of a buzzing sound from my phone, I was rudely awakened by Mom knocking on the bedroom door.

"Madelyn, I'm not going to say it again. You need to start getting ready for school right away."

There were a couple more knocks on the door, followed by a longer pause.

I opened my eyes long enough to take a look at the digital clock in the room. It was fifteen minutes past when I should have gotten up to get in the shower.

For the first time in three mornings, I had woken up in my bed rather than in a sleeping bag on the floor. I closed my eyes again. I was too exhausted to even want to sit up in bed.

There was a reason Mom and Dad never let me stay up past midnight on a school night. These late nights were absolutely killing me.

The door creaked open and then clicked shut. I heard Mom's footsteps as she approached the bed, but I kept my eyes closed. Just let me have a few more seconds of rest. Pretty please.

Mom sighed and rubbed her hand against my shoulder. "You really need to get up now, Maddy, or you're not going to have time to eat breakfast before catching the bus."

That would have been fine with me. I didn't care to eat breakfast most mornings now if I could avoid doing so. But Mom and Dad usually insisted that I get something to eat before going to school. Sometimes, when I was running late, they'd just hand me an orange or a banana, which would often get passed off to one of my friends.

Mom rubbed my shoulder again. I opened my eyes. There was no use putting it off any longer. I glanced up at Mom.

"Looks like someone slept a lot better last night," she said.

I didn't agree. I opened my mouth in a wide yawn. "But I'm so tired."

"But your bed stayed dry, right?" Mom asked in a whisper that was unnecessary with the door closed.

Oh, that's what she was referring to. I rolled my eyes, attempting to be the perfect caricature of a soon-to-be teenager, annoyed that her mother would even dare ask that kind of question. "Of course it did."

"That's good," Mom said, though she did take one more glance down at my midsection as she said so. "I think as long as you don't drink too much and remember to use the toilet before bed, we shouldn't have any repeats."

I nodded in agreement. I could let her think she had won, for now.

With Mom now convinced that I was awake, she left the bedroom, leaving me to hurry through my morning routine. I tossed the covers off and went to select an outfit for the day to have something to change into in the bathroom once I was done showering. I grabbed a pair of black leggings and a light-blue T-shirt that had three ducks in a row on it – two yellow ones and one gray one.

I was much more awake the moment I stepped into the shower.

My change of plans had been the result of several realizations, ones that were even clearer after having a night to sleep on it.

The first realization was that I couldn't just keep doing the same bedwetting routine night after night. It was fine to try to do the most normal type of bedwetting for the first couple of nights of faking the bedwetting, but I was going to need to risk mixing things up. Wetting the bed in the same way at the same time, night after night, would eventually appear unusual if I were to be following an exact pattern.