✅ Over Protected

1. A Friend Loses Control

Author's Note: I wasn't intending to post this yet, but stress has kept me from finishing the next chapter of the story that was due to be posted today; so you get a new story. I'll use this to fill in if I'm struggling to write anything new, and hopefully get back to a normal posting speed soon enough. There are 6 more chapters currently available for my Patreon people, but they aren't actually the first chapters (I've been writing this one out of order).

It's hard to say where the story started. Maybe it goes all the way back to when I was born, or even to the birth of my big sister, Sarah. Maybe it was something I'd picked up in school, or the way that I found it so easy to go along with whatever my friends suggested, whether it sounded easy or not. Whatever it was, I would certainly never have expected it to be the start of a story that would lead to me back in diapers and being treated like a baby again.

It was going to be a big part of my life, but I didn't fully realise what a big deal it was until the first day I woke up in a wet bed. But I think the story, or at least the events that I can trace a kind of dotted line of causality between, started a couple of months before that. It was a sleepover; just me and a couple of girls from school. We were all excited, of course. But I had no idea that this was going to be a night that changed my life. Even afterwards, I could hear all my friends talking about it, the rumour mill grinding away, but I had no idea the impact it would have. Of course, that night was just a coincidence, or an excuse. If it hadn't happened, there would have been some other trigger to set it off. But it did happen, so I think I could stick a pin in my diary at that point and say that's where my life changed. Everything after that just followed on naturally, and I don't think there was any point it could really have gone differently.

I was writing in my diary. Of course I was; it had been my obsession ever since I got the journal for my birthday, and I wasn't going to miss a day just because my best friends ever were chatting in front of the TV. On the screen there were penguins and ponies, some cartoon show that I was sure we were all too old for, but everybody was still laughing. Some of my friends were engaged in a lively argument about whether boys were all gross, or if some of them were actually grown up enough to be cute.

I couldn't see it myself. I didn't understand why anybody would get so giggly and happy just from looking at a boy, or so hung up on getting to talk to him. But for some of my friends, it was starting to become a big deal. Others still said that boys weren't worth talking to, and couldn't imagine themselves ever meeting some Prince Charming to sweep them off their feet. I was neutral in this debate. I had two sisters, one of them actually a half sister, who had moved out of our house a few years before. We lived with our mum, who loved us more than anything in the world. There were no boys in our house. All my cousins were girls. I had a couple of uncles, but they were boring and told terrible jokes. They faded into the background at any family gathering, and I didn't think about them much. There were no boys next door either. Most of our neighbours were much older or younger than Mum, so they either didn't have kids yet, or their kids had already left home. There were only a few kids around my age on Blissey Avenue, and they were all girls.

I didn't know what boys were like at all, I'd never really interacted with them, so there was nothing to tell me if I should be drawn to them or repulsed by them, which seemed to be the only two options according to my friends.

Lyra glanced over at me and giggled. There were four of us in sleeping bags now, stretched out on her lounge carpet, with a variety of bean bags and cushions to make the place more comfortable. Lyra herself was curled up on the couch, with just a blanket to make her comfortable. Not because she was the host tonight, but because she was the only one of us who wasn't too tall to stretch out properly on the couch.

"What's Alice doing?" Penny mumbled. "You've got your phone light on?"

"Mmhmm," I nodded. "Just writing my diary."

"Neat," Lyra answered. "You're so full of words. Always spilling out, like you swallowed a dictionary or something."

"I don't know that many words," I said, blushing just a little. I didn't think I was anything special, but I knew I would always win if we played Scrabble with our families. Somehow I'd gotten really into the game when I first heard about it, and I'd ended up looking up the meaning of every unfamiliar word I found in a book, and then all the words that were in the dictionary definitions for that one as well. I knew more words than I needed to, that was for sure. I didn't know if that was anything to do with how relaxing I found it to hold a pen and let my thoughts stream out onto the page, but I knew that writing was a good thing.

I'd just about finished filling in my diary for the day. It wasn't an actual diary; those weird things with the dates printed in never had enough space for all the things I wanted to write. Instead I had a type of diary called a Moleskine, a gift from Aunt Petunia. It had a soft cover that had a funny texture and felt nice to run my fingers over, big pages with no clutter like dates or phases of the moon, and a stretchy band that went around the edges, like a bookmark that would also keep it closed in my bag. That diary came everywhere with me now.

With all my writing done, I could dive back into an evening of laughing and joking with my friends, until one by one we got tired and drifted off to sleep. At some point in the middle of the night, Lyra's mum probably came in to dim the lights and check that we were all sound asleep, but if she did I was already deep in dreamland.

The next thing I did notice was whispering in raised voices; someone was trying to stay quiet, but too excited to actually keep the volume down. And then there were people moving around, obviously with some purpose in mind.

"Wstfgh?" I mumbled, rubbing at my bleary eyes. But it didn't take long before I realised what had got the adults down here so early in the morning, as well as disrupted the routine and gotten all my friends speculating about what might have happened. A puddle on the floor, and tell-tale dark patches on the blankets and her pyjamas, told the whole world that Lyra had wet the bed. This would be a terrible thing for her, I was sure. She was already insecure about her height, a couple of inches smaller than anyone else in our year, which is why we all knew not to mention height or growth spurts while she was around. If any of the mean kids at school found out about this, she would be teased and called a baby for the rest of school.

The adults were taking care of cleaning up, and they'd already given her some clean clothes to change into. It was good to see that someone could take charge, and knew what to do so that my friend wouldn't be as panicked as she would otherwise have been. And our friends all cared for each other, so as soon as I changed the subject they would stop speculating about why this would have happened, and let Lyra stop worrying.

That was all I could do for today.