✅ My Sister's Problem

45. Exposed

This chapter is dedicated to Clinton, and marks the end of what I managed to write in April. 45 chapters in 30 days isn't bad, but I wish I had a bigger buffer in case of a bad day.

Thank you, Clinton, for all your support!

I didn't want to stare at my sister, or point and laugh. I didn't want to humiliate her any more than she already had been. So I focused on a screen filled with penguin-shaped blocks, rainbows, and trippy spirals. My mind wasn't really on it, though. I was replaying a conversation from earlier, and realising that Mum was even smarter than I had realised. The way she laid those rules down, led Lindy into deciding her own punishment before she knew it would apply to both of us. I'd never realised she was so observant. But now I thought about it, I should have known an hour before, when she'd first told me what my punishment was going to be.

"Now, is it okay if I punish you?" Mum had asked, taking me completely by surprise. She'd explained that it wasn't me she was angry at. She didn't feel like I needed to be punished, but she wanted to do it anyway. And she thought there were some parts of it that I might not see as completely negative. She talked about it some more, and there was nothing there I disagreed with, but I wasn't close to understanding. If she wasn't upset, then how did punishing me help? It wasn't like I needed any motivation to keep from wetting myself; it was something I was desperate to stop.

Did she think I'd done it deliberately? That it was a part of this weird fantasy of being treated like a little kid? I didn't even understand those feelings myself, but I wanted her to be absolutely sure that I didn't want to be that young. It was about being treated like a child, not actually doing gross baby stuff. But how could I explain? It didn't make sense for it to just be an accident; not after so long without. And I couldn't pin the blame on Lindy now, not when Mum was already angry without knowing the full story. She'd crucify her.

"It's not..." I tried. "It's not a part of the baby thing. I mean, I want to be treated like a kid, sure. But that's not why I... I mean, I like wearing the diapers, but not using them. This really was an accident, you have to believe me. Maybe it's an infection or something, I heard some things can cause... that. But it's probably just a temporary fluke, I don't know what could have caused it."

"It was probably your sister putting your hand in a bowl of warm water while you were sleeping," she said, so matter-of-fact that it took me a few seconds to realise the enormity of the statement. Mum already knew?

She took me by the hand and went back to baby talk again as she led me across the landing back to my room. I sat on the chair with fuzzy towels round me, and she helped me to put on a top that was as big as a tent so that I wasn't naked while we talked. It made me feel even smaller, and I knew that she was just trying to calm me down. But I had to know what was going on now. It was like the rug had been pulled out from under me.

"It's a common prank," she explained, when I was soothed enough to listen and had promised not to interrupt too much. "You probably heard of it. Kids try it in movies sometimes, to show that they're pranksters. It was invented in the early 1910s by an author writing about bullying at a British boarding school. He needed a prank for the boys in his book to do, and he managed to make up something that would sound realistic but wouldn't cause any problems if his readers tried to imitate it. Since then it seems to have gone viral, or whatever the pre-war equivalent was, passed on in schoolyard rumours. Every generation is willing to believe it. But it turns out that it can work, very occasionally. Possibly due to the placebo effect, like when people notice pain less if they've taken something that they think is a painkiller. It shouldn't, but it does."

"I've heard of that," I said. "Lindy tried it?"

"Someone tried it on me in college," she said. "Didn't work. It usually doesn't. And Harper Eisen tried it on you at the party when she became captain of your hockey squad. Yes, I know you didn't tell me, and you put your clothes straight in the laundry bag, maybe hoping the water would soak out into your other clothes and I wouldn't notice. But it didn't work, she cheated by pouring water on you. Greg Eisen noticed, and he told me because he wanted to be sure I wouldn't punish you for having wet pants."