✅ My Sister's Problem

137. Origin Story

This bonus chapter is dedicated to Jay, with many thanks for all of your support.

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"She couldn't seriously mean to... But she did. Ten minutes later, Mom had put me in a diaper for the first time I could remember. My little was laughing at me, waving a teddybear and addressing me in baby talk. I wanted to slap her in that moment, but I knew better than to attract any more punishment. This was already a ten on the humiliation scale, even before Mom turned it up to eleven by grabbing the bottom of that butterfly T-shirt, which I now realised was actually a onesie as she fastened three snaps around the crotch. It covered the diaper, sure, but it would be obvious to anyone who even glanced at me that I was wearing one. Where had she even found a diaper that would fit me? I was pretty sure my hips had grown in the last decade, and I knew I'd put on at least a few inches around my thighs thanks to the amazing menu at the college cafeteria.

"I didn't know what was going to happen, and I didn't dare ask. Minutes later I was strapped into a stroller, and Mom was pushing me down the street. The neighbours were pointing and laughing, and I knew that this would be the talk of the town for weeks. I tried to protest, to tell her that this was too much punishment for a single wet bed, but she just put a pacifier in my mouth and I couldn't shape a meaningful answer. I knew she was eccentric, but she seemed to have literally gone crazy overnight."

I listened to a woman's voice, not quite understanding what I was hearing. The words sounded so familiar, and I wasn't sure what they could mean. This was an account of somebody being treated like a baby, I guessed. It was the kind of thing you might read in a blog post, if somebody was into that kind of stuff. But it didn't sound realistic at all; why would the mother have adult-sized diapers and a stroller lying around just in case? Some kind of fantasy, then? If there were other people who enjoyed being treated like babies, and I'd certainly found evidence of them while I'd been looking through all the bedwetting research, maybe some of them liked to post about the punishment of their dreams...

A switch clicked in my head, and I thought I might understand. I could vaguely remember a dream, six months before, that had played out almost like that story. That had been when I'd been trying to write a dream diary, something that Jules had suggested to boost my creativity. I'd typed up what I remembered of dreams when I woke up, and maybe shared them online for people to laugh about. But after that dream, I hadn't been willing to share it with my friends. I'd half typed it up, and never finished it.

I knew I should be showering now, but I needed to know if my memory was playing tricks on me now. I grabbed my phone, and quickly went to the Realjournal homepage. One draft post. I tapped it, and I knew things were really going weird.

"What's that?" I called out to Lindy. "I mean... I've got part of the same story in my dream diary, almost word for word. Has somebody been plagiarising unpublished blogs or something?"

"I don't think so," she said. "This is kind of..." I could hear she was hesitating, and I didn't want to wait too long. So I stepped into the shower, and then called for her to continue. I'd still be able to hear; she was right on the other side of the wall from me.

"It's a story," she said. "You know I needed a voice to help me sleep? After Dad wasn't well enough to do bedtime stories, and... well, you know. I listened to all that stuff on FictionLibrary, they've got the automatic text to speech thing now, right? Well, I was just using recommendations based on what I'd listened to before, and I never stopped a story because I was going to sleep, so after a while it kind of went weird. Anybody can write whatever they want on there. So... this story came up. I don't think they've copied it from you, there's too much of it to just be a dream. I was listening to this one for like all of June and July. Long story, it's called Little Sister's Revenge. It's about two sisters who both start doing the bowl of water trick to make each other wet the bed, and every time their Mom keeps on punishing them more. Like they just keep on escalating and never back down, until it gets to really crazy stuff like the older sister getting punished with surgery to physically turn her back into a baby."