It didn’t surprise Melody that her companion had said something like that. Either Bea was still on some misguided attempt to blend in or the little ditz had genuinely forgotten what they were supposed to be doing in the first place. She could only roll her eyes in a way that had become a kind of involuntary reaction.
What did surprise her was the friendly face greeting them. The old fat lady that had shouted them away and threatened to call security and was waiting for them. But her expression had changed entirely within the last forty five seconds. “Come on, Beatrice! Let’s go Melody!” Her gaze looked past the two, as if she had other things on her mind, as if she hadn’t caught two asshole teens in a trap. “Bryson! Good job!” Melody kept moving, but there was a shiver in her step. Where had the big bitch learned their names? It’s not like they had name tags.
“I’m waitin’ for Mel-Mel!” Bea said “She’s bein’ a slowpoke!”
Big Bitch smiled at that and chuckled. “Alright, alright. Just a second, though.” She called out, “Hurry up Melody!” But it wasn’t mean at all; closer to the tone a lady Santa Claus might use.
What did she do? What could she do? Nothing. LIterally nothing. All she could do was swim-walk a little faster. Beatrice giggled as she got closer and began to get out of the ball pit. Just like with the slide, there was a ramp leading out instead of a ladder. Just like the slide down, Beatrice opted to crawl up the ramp. Just like the ramp to the slide, Melody and everyone else behind her got a good look at Bea’s panties.
“The fuck?”
Except those weren’t Bea’s panties. They were nearly the same shade of red and covered her naughty bits, but all other similarities ended there. Everything else was just not quite right.
The shape of it was wrong. Bea’s panties were normally so tight you could see the outline of her ass. These things were bulkier, puffier, like someone had taken a couple dozen maxi pads and stuffed them on the inside of the girl’s underwear with reckless abandon. Padded: That was a better description. Bea’s panties were tremendously padded.
Then there was the texture. Bea’s panties (Melody had seen enough of them today) were bright, shiny, and smooth, almost like silk. These were approximately the same color, but they seemed rougher. Soft, but not as smooth, maybe it was all the wrinkles in the exterior. There was just something dull and off about it. It was cloth-like, but not proper cloth.
“Get up and walk you silly girl,” the big woman said. If Melody hadn’t been right behind Beatrice, she might not have heard the dry paper crinkle as the girl got up. Nor would she have noticed the little frilled gatherings around the leg holes as she did. What anyone would have noticed was how little Bea’s skirt did to conceal her undies. She’d been giving people a peek all morning every time she bent over, but now even that wasn’t necessary.
Free show.
Rising to her feet on the ramp, Melody couldn’t help but notice that the bottom part of Bea’s underwear was now plainly visible underneath her skirt. It wasn’t unlike...
That’s when it clicked. Bea wasn’t wearing underwear anymore. That wasn’t her underwear. Just like every other kid on the playground, Beatrice was wearing a diaper. And just like the faux-denim huggies that one kid had been wearing, Beatrice’s diaper was doing its level best to look like her red, silky panties, but deep down it was still a diaper. It was like a kitten trying to bark.
Melody couldn’t believe it. “Bea?” she said. “Are you wearing a diaper?”
“Yeah,” Bea said, taking Big Bitch’s hand and stepping down out of the ballpit.
“There you go, Bea.”
“Thankoo!”
“Why?” But before Melody could ask her follow up question, Bea was running off, stopping only to look behind her and wave Melody on. A flabby arm reached out for her and Melody took the grown-up in the hand-printed t-shirt’s help so she could chase after Bea.
Damn, that crinkling was loud. Melody could swear she heard it even when she was a dozen feet away from her diapered sidekick.
Waddle, waddle, waddle.
Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle.
Weird, Melody thought that she could still hear it even when Bea wasn’t moving.
“Bea,” Melody said when she’d caught up. “What’s going on?”
Bea shrugged nonchalantly. “I dunno. Was thinking about going to play over there.” She pointed over to a dome made of interconnected steel bars that created a kind of web effect. Perfect for climbing on, hunkering under or hanging upside down. “The slide’s gettin’ kinda crowded.”
Melody looked back over her shoulder. The slide WAS getting kind of crowded. It wasn’t any fun playing in the ball pit if it got too crowded. Mrs. Jay was making the other kids get out of the pit to make room for other kids coming down the slide. Play was less fun if there were rules to it.
THE FUCK?! Melody rattled her head, shaking out the ridiculous notions that seemed to be manifesting in her mind out of thin air. No!” she said, “Why are you wearing a diaper?”
Beatrice looked confused, and not just her normal level of confusion. “Whaddya mean?”
Melody wanted to scream, but instead lowered her voice to a low hiss. “What’s there to understand?! You’re wearing a diaper.”
“So are you.” Beatrice cocked her head to the side. “All us babies are.”
“I’m not…” Melody stopped herself mid refutation.
Informally, tunnel vision is where a person becomes so focused on a particular element or situation that they block the rest of the world out. Their brain zooms in and focuses on a single aspect of its reality that it accidentally forgets to register all the other data being presented to it. It’s how students in a psychology class can watch a video of two people passing a basketball to each other and when told to count the number of times the ball is passed, not notice the dancing gorilla in the background.
Melody had just become victim to her own tunnel vision to such a degree that calling it such would be a misnomer. Melody was experiencing complete and total tunnel thought. The crinkling rustle she’d heard with every step had been hers. Her panties had become so thick and padded that she now walked with a kind of waddle.
Almost reflexively, Melody reached between her legs. Her cute shortalls felt a little less roomy. They weren’t any smaller, though. Objectively, they might have been a tad baggier. It’s just that her underwear was taking up more space than before. Melody’s fingers brushed against brass snaps on her inseams that hadn’t been there before a minute ago. She ignored those as she squeezed her panties.
Panties were another misnomer. That puff. That crinkle. That slight tickling as leg gathers and leak guards brushed her inner thighs. Melody wasn’t wearing panties. Melody, high school senior and grown-ass woman, was wearing a diaper.
As if on cue, she felt a slight trickle in her shortalls. A bit of relief came over her as her bladder relaxed just as it always did. She hadn’t felt the need to pee any more than most people feel a need to breathe. People didn’t feel the need to breathe unless they weren’t allowed to. They just breathed naturally.
The feeling of her diaper warming ever so slightly gave a hint as to what was going on. It wasn’t much of a wetting. The thirsty padding wrapped around her hips sucked the little spurts up in a jiffy, wicking the moisture away from her skin. By the time her and her bestie got to the jungle dome, she’d be able to forget about it.
THE FUCK?!
Melody pulled at her own pigtails, in an effort to focus her mind and get a hold of herself, letting the pain in her scalp bring her back to her senses.
PIGTAILS?!
Melody didn’t wait for Bea. She gave neither orders nor warning. Heart pounding in her chest, Melody ran as if Dean Garfield were right behind her wearing a cop badge and devil horns. The extra bulk of the diaper that had manifested slowed her down, but only just so.
Back in junior high, when she’d gone through her ‘shoplifting phase’, she’d managed to dash away with more cumbersome materials crammed into her pants. To her muscle memory this was only a half-step above the time she’d gotten a week’s worth of new underwear by trying on seven pairs of panties at once and ‘forgetting’ to take them off in the changing room. Changing...a poor choice of narrative inner monologue perhaps. Or perhaps, Melody feared, far too appropriate.
No time. Just run. Just breathe. Don’t think. Don’t pee.
“Melody! Wait!” Bea called after her. “You’re going the wrong way!”
Melody ignored her, pumping her legs as fast as they’d go. Her eyes saw the faux log fence she’d hopped over before her mind registered that something was amiss. The fence perimeter of the playground had been easy to infiltrate; it was only waist high. It was like hopping a turnstile. The thing in front of her was positively gigantic. That wasn’t a fence, it was a wall; a barricade even!
She’d shrunk!
“MELODY!” A strange voice called out. “STOP!” Melody’s legs did not immediately stop. As cartoonish as this all seemed to her and as fast as she’d wanted to sprint, she was not the Roadrunner. She couldn’t stop on a dime.
She did slow down though. Her legs stopped pumping as hard and her sneakered heels dug into rubber padded ground. She was stopping. If only she had commanded her body to. What Melody had wanted to do was power through and somehow sprint up the giant wall. She’d been preparing herself to put her arms and legs in the slats between the giant logs and use the momentum to scale over the top. Barring that, there would have been nothing wrong with a sudden change in the direction and fleeing out the playground’s exit proper.
Her body did none of that. The strange voice commanding her to stop had been as the voice of God. “No-no-no-no-no!” Melody shrieked. The sudden shift in momentum and her own body railing against her caused her to lose balance. Her arms flailed out- a penguin trying to fly-before she fell onto her backside. The fall didn’t hurt at all. What shock the padded ground failed to absorb, her padded bottom more than compensated for. Only her pride and sense of self were hurt. “The fuck?”
Melody didn’t stop when someone told her too. If anything she tended to do the opposite (at best).
A shadow fell over her. “The playground’s that way, little missy.” The voice was authoritative, yet caring; an adult speaking to a child that didn’t know any better. Two hands scooped up underneath Melody’s armpits, lifting her back to her feet. Melody whirled around to face the giant...
Only there was no giant. Just a girl close to Melody’s own age, maybe a year or two older than her. A community college student in a white t-shirt decorated with rainbow handprints. She glanced back at the fence. Melody hadn’t shrunk, and the fence along the edge of the Kiddie Korral hadn’t gotten bigger; or it had, but not through any expansion of mass. It was just built bigger. Concrete faux logs were now stocked six rows high instead of two.
The blonde haired senior (now in pigtails) summed up her shock and confusion in two succinct words. “The fuck?!”
The other girl grimaced and sucked in her lips, stifling a laugh. “Heh,” a giggle escaped. “Melody, don’t say naughty words like that.”
Against all common sense and the distinct feeling that something was very wrong, Melody’s almost knee jerk reaction to authority kicked in. Bitch didn’t like swearing, eh? “Why the fudge not?” The color drained from her face. She’d really said ‘fudge’; it was that crappy movie they played every Christmas but in reverse.
“Because little girls your age shouldn’t even know those kinds of words,” Miss Sarah said.
Melody’s heart leapt into her throat. She’d blinked and suddenly she knew this rando, Miss Sarah’s, fudgin’ name! Fudgin’? That wasn’t the right word. She couldn’t even think of the word she’d meant to think. She didn’t know it anymore!
Butt!
Meanie!
Darn!
Fudge!
Poopy!
Those were the only bad words that were coming to mind and they weren’t NEARLY bad enough.
Like a freight train, Melody’s emotions barreled right past denial and anger and straight into full blown bargaining. “I wanna leave!” she said. “I wanna go home!” Fudge it. “I wanna go back to school!”
Miss Sarah just put a comforting hand on Melody’s shoulder and looked her in the eyes. “I know it can be scary to be in a new place,” she said, “but this is only for today. After this, we’ll go back to school and your Mommy will pick you up and take you home.” She spoke softly and slowly, an adult explaining a simple concept to a simpler mind. “Okay?”
Melody shook her head, her pigtails gently wafting. “I don’t…” she mumbled… “I’m...I’m not sure what’s going on.”
The girl who’d ordered her to stop didn’t explain anything further. She just took Melody’s unresisting hand and started walking away with her. “Come on.” Melody’s eyes wanted to bulge out of her head. Her mouth wanted to scream. Her feet, however, only wanted to follow and her hand firmly held Miss Sarah’s. Just like a good little girl.
And out of the two of them, only one of them crinkled.
Head on a swivel, Melody’s brain started to take in the sights and sounds of the Kiddie Korral’s playground. More was different than just the size of the fence. The entire playground had somehow scaled up. Equipment was bigger, expanded to fit grown-up bodies.
The kids that had been playing them were now completely gone...sort of. There were still curly topped girls and carrot topped boys waddling along the playground. The waistbands of diapers still poked out the top of shorts with distinctive bulges below the belly button. A handful were wandering around in just t-shirts and Pampers. There was still a kid wearing a diaper that was made up to be blue jeans.
But none of them were babies, anymore. Legs were longer, shoulders were developed. Chests were bigger and giggling, shouting, and screaming voices were deeper. Girls had hips and breasts and a quick look downstairs confirmed that most of the boys had a little more than just padding in the front of their Huggies.
A boy Melody’s age with a tangle of curly black hair was now bouncing happily in a bounce house decorated to look like a saloon.. A barely twenty-something woman was clapping and chanting, “Go, Ollie, go! Go, Ollie, go!”
The same lady who’d been playing a hide and seek version of peekaboo with a little girl in a play tunnel, was still playing. The problem was that the tot she was playing with now had bigger breasts than her. “Where’d Emma go?! There she is!”
Not a single actual toddler remained; only adults acting like them. The adults who’d been playing with them didn’t seem to notice this switcheroo. The same twenty somethings were on their feet playing with the much bigger babies with older women off to the side looking at their phones and occasionally bouncing a fussy adult toddler on their knee. Yikes that was weird, but no one besides Melody seemed bothered by this.
New playground. New bodies. Same babies. All unfamiliar faces.
If any of them had looked like her classmates, she might have been relieved. That would have meant that she’d busted her head going down the slide or just had a stroke and any minute now she’d wake up in a hospital bed or dead (both were okay options). Instead, a set of children had been replaced with same aged peers, and those peers were acting as if splashing in a ballpit, or playing with a giant tic-tac-toe board was high tea. The fudge?
“Here we are,” Miss Sarah said. They were at the spider-web dome. Bea was hanging upside down on a lower platform, the tips of her fingers just grazing the ground. The hem of her skirt had fallen upside down with her hair and her diaper was on full display, not that anyone seemed to care. “Are you having fun, Bea?” Bea answered by giggling like an idiot. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Melody let go of the daycare worker’s hand and knelt by the dome so she could look her sidekick in the eye. “Bea,” she whispered. “Stop it! You’re embarrassing me.” A second later she thought to add, “And yourself. You’re embarrassing me and you! You’re embarrassing us!”
Bea stopped giggling and untensed her legs slowly. It was a safe dismount, but not a graceful one. She didn’t so much as drop into a handstand as she kind of slowly crumpled to the floor and picked herself up. Too late, Miss Sarah let out a “Be careful, baby!” and stepped forward to check on Bea. Out of all the teacher aides, Miss Sarah was always one of the less fun ones, even though she said it was because she cared.
How the fudge did Melody know that?!
Miss Sarah looked right at Melody. “Mel-Mel, you play nice with Bea, okay?” No. It was not okay. None of this was okay. But it was enough for the grown-up to walk away satisfied. Melody wanted to chase after her and ask more questions, or else make another go at that wall. Instead, her body squirmed and dipped and ducked into the middle of the jungle dome.
“You’re actin’ funny,” Bea said. She was already starting to Spider-Man up the inside of the dome.
Melody burned with anger. “You’re acting like a total...dummy.” She’d wanted to call Bea something meaner, but she couldn’t quite come up with the right words. What was meaner than ‘dummy’?
“You always say stuff like that,” Bea replied. She didn’t sound hurt, more like she was stating a fact. It was a fact. Whether it was highschool or daycare, Melody’s relationship with her sidekick wasn’t what would be referred to as ‘health’ or an ‘equal partnership’.
“I say stuff like that because it’s true,” Melody said. She started to climb up the inside of the dome, hooking and unhooking her legs rung by rung until she was dangling side by side with Bea. She hadn’t realized she’d been doing it until her pigtails were closer to the ground than her feet.
Miss Sarah had told her to play nice, after all.
“You’re acting weird today,” Bea said. “You normally love this kind of stuff.”
“No I don’t!”
From upside down, Bea’s confused frown kind of looked like a smile. “Is it opposite day?” There was no trace of sarcasm in her tone. She was genuinely asking if they were playing a kid’s game that most outgrew by late kindergarten.
Melody scoffed. “No, you dummy!”
“So...yes, I’mma smartie...?”
Melody let a hand loose so she could properly facepalm. “No!” Finally she had the presence of mind to right herself and stand on her two feet. “I mean you’re acting like a...a...a baby!” There weren’t any other words.
“We’re not actin’,” Bea said. She lowered herself back to the ground, too. “We don’t even got costumes on.”
Melody pointed to where her sidekick’s panties used to be. “You’re wearing a diaper!”
“You’re wearing shoes!”
The blonde haired girl blanched. She looked down at her sneakers. “What...?”
“Now you say something that I’m wearin’,” Bea said. “No fair sayin’ shoes cuz I already said that.” Girls just wasn’t getting it. Melody didn’t understand what was happening either, but Bea was on a completely different (and dumberer) level.
“Bea!” Melody snapped. “Focus!”
Bea smiled. “Kay kay!”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothin’.”
Melody made a sweeping gesture to bounce houses filled with adults rocking onesies and people playing patty cake unironically. “Why is everybody...playing…?”
Bea shrugged. “Cuz itsa playground?”
“But WHY?!”
Bea’s attention gave out. She looked past Melody and over her shoulder. “Oh look! Teeter totter is open! Let’s go!” For the first time since they’d known each other, Bea grabbed Mel by the wrist and tugged her along, and Mel felt she had little say in the exchange.
Some part of her still wanted to ‘play nice’, even without the mean old grown-up telling her what to do.
STOP IT!
The two were waddling over to an unclaimed seesaw with seats made to look like saddles. Melody made it over and threw one leg over an end of the saddle-saw. Might as well get this over with. Maybe Bea’s brains could work if her legs were occupied. When she looked across, she realized that Bea wasn’t with her.
Bea had stopped in her tracks. Her feet were shoulder length apart, her elbows tucked in, and her butt was sticking out. Bea’s eyes were squeezed shut, a tense smile on her face. A few seconds later, she stood back up and walked over to the other side of the teeter totter.
“What was that about?” Melody asked.
Bea wasn’t being any more helpful. “What was what about?”
“Nevermind.”
“Okie dokums.”
It had been a while since Melody had been on a seesaw but it was a bit like riding a bike, or so the grown-ups said. Point is, once a seesawer always a seesawer. The girls balanced each other out and Melody really put her weight on her seat for the first time.
Mistake. Big Mistake. Melody felt her wet diaper squish up against her. She’d literally forgotten that she’d pee-peed in her pants until the moment she sat down on the wet padding. Gross. Totally gross!
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. That’s all she had to do, just keep her mind off of it.
“Whatcha thinkin’ ‘bout?” Bea asked.
“Nothing!” Melody felt the hot blush of guilt spread over her face. She normally lied like a pro; close to a socio...socio…? A sociologist! She lied like a sociologist! Apparently what was going on in her pants was a kind of kryptonite to her normal ability to fib.
Bea didn’t seem to notice. She just lowered herself onto the seat of the seesaw and sent Melody catapulting into the air. A grin once reserved for roller coasters and smoking spread out over Melody’s mug as Bea pushed up from ground and sent herself up into the sky just so that Melody would go plumpting down.
Melody caught herself and paused just long enough so that she could REALLY jump for this second time. She went higher! It was impossible, but somehow she KNEW she’d gone higher. The two kept going.
UP!
DOWN!
UP!
DOWN!
This was kind of-
NO! NO! This was NOT FUN! This was stupid and a waste of time! They had to get out of here.
Biting her tongue, Melody kept going through the motions while regaining her focus. Her legs were pushing off the ground but her mind was running full tilt. How did she shake Bea out of this?
Up.
“Bea? What do you remember doing this morning?”
Down.
“Going to school and then coming here.” Technically true.
Up.
“What about Dean Garfield?”
Down.
“I love Garfield!” Bea said. “He’s funny!” Darn! Not what Melody had meant! Though Garfield WAS funny. STOP!
Up.
“Bea what grade are you in?”
Down.
“Huh?”
Melody stopped pumping and leveled out the seesaw. “We’re Seniors. In highschool. Remember?”
Bea shook her head and giggled. “Nooooo.” A gust of wind blew past them, and Melody’s nose wrinkled in disgust. It smelled like the bathroom after her uncle with IBS came to visit. It smelled like someone had an accident.
The pieces came into place as soon as Melody looked upwind and saw her friend sitting across on the teeter totter. THAT’s why Bea had stopped. With surprising agility, she leaped off the seat. Bea, caught off guard, plummeted down a whole three feet down onto her bottom and rolled backwards onto the padded ground.
The smell was stronger as Melody walked over to her friend. Leaning over she whispered. “You poopied in your pants!”
Bea looked up at Melody, her face a mask of awe. “Yeah? How can you tell?” She gasped. “Are you gettin’ potty trained? Is that why you’re acting so weird?” She stood up. “Just don’t turn into a dumb meanie head like Annie.”
“Pfft,” Melody said. “Annie doesn’t go potty. She just wears Pull-Ups and pees and poops in them like a diaper, same as everybody else.” A wave of panic overtook Melody. “How do I know that?!” Melody pinched herself and looked. “Just whatever! Whatever! Gross! So gross!”
“What’s gross?” Bea asked.
“You pooped your...you’re still wearing…” It suddenly occurred to Melody that Bea had pooped before she got on the seesaw. The mental image of what must have been going on inside Bea’s diaper while they were on the seesaw filled Melody’s mind and made her want to vomit. “Just...just go get changed.”
Bea’s brow knitted together. “What?”
“If you’re going to act like a baby, at least do it right, and go get changed.” Now Melody was thinking about how her diaper felt during the ride. Operation Don’t Think About It: Failed.
Bea crossed her arms. “No.”
Not in all their friendship, had Bea ever refused. Melody didn’t know how to process this. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
Still sitting, Bea pouted out her lip. “I mean ‘no’. I’m not gonna go get changed. I wanna go play an’ you’re not the boss of me.”
Melody held her nose. “But you stink!”
“So?”
“Your butt is covered in smushed up poop!”
“So?”
Melody opened her mouth for another point, and then closed it. How did you argue with somebody who legitimately didn’t care that their bootie was smeared with poo-poo? How did you argue with an eighteen year old baby?
“You might get a diaper rash!” The counter argument practically vomited out of her. “Then it’ll hurt to walk and sit and playin’ will be no fun cuz you’ll have a big ol’ owie on yer butt! It’ll be like you got a big ol’ spankin’ but the owie will last longer an’ the grownups will put icky cream on your butt that’ll make your diaper sticky on the inside, but not the fun way!” Melody felt sick with herself for saying that.
Where had that explanation come from?! She was right, she knew, but she didn’t know how she knew. It was like her brain had inverted herself: Talking about how stinky Bea was right then didn’t make her feel gross. Same with how Bea’s butt was covered in poop. Unconsciously she felt like she was mimicking what grown-ups felt when poopy diapers were mentioned.
It felt like she was pretending and saying what grown-ups said. But when she talked about how bad and annoying it was to have a rash, a part of her felt...a part of her KNEW she was speaking from experience; not even far off experience. Mundane experience. Everyday experience. Experience that no typical eighteen year old should be so familiar with.
Bea looked perplexed. Melody had finally made an argument that both of them could agree on and understood...and it had disturbed Melody on levels she couldn’t articulate. “But...but...I don’t wanna…” Bea stood up, finally. “I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna!” She was on the verge of having a breakdown. She punctuated each ‘wanna!’ with the stomping of her foot, as if that might add more weight to her argument.
“You don’t wanna what?!” Both girls’ spines went ramrod straight and stiff. It was Miss April. Melody felt a sense of dread. If Miss Sarah treated them too much like grown-ups (in a bad way) with her rules and her calls to play nice, Miss April treated them too much like babies, (also in a bad way) with cooing and fawning and no privacy and never believing them. She was smiling...the girls were not.
Melody bit down on the sides of her tongue. Somebody else’s life-somebody much younger, much dumber, and definitely not potty trained- was being copied and pasted into Melody’s head and she didn’t like it one bit. But the memories and knowledge seemed so genuine, and the babyish voice giving thoughts to her sounded so reflexively like her own.
“You don’t wanna what?” Miss April repeated herself.
“Nothin…” the girls said in unison. Some things had changed about them, but neither of them were tattle-tales. Tattle-Tales got put in diaper pails, or so the old saying went.
“Um…” Melody started to lie. “You see…the truth is...” Fudge! What did giant babies lie about?!
Miss April had a patient and practiced smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Go on,” she said. “Use your words.”
GRRRR! This was infuriating! Melody might’ve been a baby but she knew how to tal- wait no she wasn’t! She was a grown-!
“Melody wanted to go down the ball pit slide again,” Bea fibbed. “But I didn’t wanna stop playin’ on the teeter-totter.”
Miss April put her hands on her hips in that condescending manner of hers. “Awwww! Sounds like two best friends were having an argument. Sometimes friends disagree but instead of arguing, they make a compromise. Do you girls know what ‘compromise’ means?”
“Yeeeeeessss….?” They said in unison. Melody was looking the teacher-girl in the eye. Bea wasn’t...Bea was fibbing. She didn’t know what the word meant. To be fair, Melody wasn’t sure if Bea knew the word before things had gone sideways and upside crazy.
The teacher-girl either knew Bea was fibbing or didn’t care that Melody already knew. “A compromise means that you take turns doing what you want to do so everybody gets a little bit of what they want. So how about you both play on the teeter-totter for just a little bit longer, and then you go play on the-” Miss April stopped and wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?”
“Nothin!” Again, the two were synced up. Beatrice might have poop in her pants, but Melody wasn’t going to be the one to tattle on her and purposefully stop the playtime. (Darn it! Why did that make so much sense?)
Miss April seemed less convinced. “It doesn’t smell like nothing.” She pointed toward the ground and made a tiny circle with her finger. “Turn around, Bea.”
With a heavy and defeated sigh, Bea did as she was told. “Yes ma’am.”
Melody started taking steps back and away. “Not so fast, Melody. You’re next.” Melody’s knees locked in obedience. She was forced to watch as Bea’s skirt was lifted all the way up and her diaper was pulled back and inspected. “Thought so. You need a change right now, lil’ missy.” Beatrice just groaned in annoyance.
She walked two steps to Melody. “Let’s check you, too.” She undid two of the snaps along Melody’s inseam and stuck two fingers inside Melody’s diaper. It really was a diaper she was wearing, too. The young woman could see the black lace trimming of her panties, but just like with Bea, it had been reduced to a knock-off...a diaper doing an impression of big girl undies. “You’re a little wet,” Miss April said. “But I think you can wait a bit before you need a change.”
Almost as an afterthought, Miss Melody reached around and patted Melody’s backside. Melody didn’t have to ask to know that she was being checked for lumps of you-know-what. It was so bizarre. Logically, Melody knew that this girl was maybe a year or two older than her, but deep down she was not-so-subconsciously accepting of her authority and her status as a grown-up.
Melody stood there, paralyzed, while the snaps were reapplied over her wet diaper. “Bea, come with me. Melody, you can go play if you want, baby.” Internally, Melody felt relief that Miss April had put that qualifier there. If the adult girl had phrased her permission as a command, Melody would have had no choice but to toddle off. She just knew it.
Instead, she was allowed to watch, horrified, as her best friend was led away and laid on a picnic blanket in some nearby grass. It was like a car being t-boned by a trolley in slow motion still careening towards a pile of baby goats bleating in terror; but Melody couldn’t make herself look away.
She watched as her best friend’s skirt was shimmied up, putting her diaper on full display. She gazed in a kind of awe and terror as Bea rested her hands behind her head as if this were the most natural thing in the world while Miss April, dug around a big canvas bag.
It was a communal diaper bag, Melody somehow remembered from previous nonexistent outings: Everybody had two to three extra diapers, separated into big ziplock bags, plus a few extra provided by the daycare ‘just in case’. Miss April dug through and found Bea’s baggie, removing a fresh diaper, along with some powder and a pack of wipes from different reaches of the bag.
“No,” Melody whispered to herself when she saw the diaper. Even from halfway from across the playground, she could tell there was something different about the diaper; or rather something very very not different. The poop filled diaper that was being undone right there in the open air was a diaper, yes, but it at least was attempting to look like Beatrice’s decadent red panties. The lavender and white Luvs that was to replace it was nothing more than a scaled-up version of something available in most any grocery store.
Melody couldn’t quite express why she was feeling sad as her best friend was getting poopy wiped off her tushie, but she was feeling it all the same. Perhaps it was because as the vile thing was being balled up and moved to the side, it was like the last bit of Bea’s adulthood was being tossed into the shit with it. The powder and the fresh Luvs being slid under her was like every other freakshow oblivious adult baby on this playground.
Bea might be feeling better as the new diaper was fastened on (though she’d never admit it) but Melody was mourning her lost adulthood. Somehow, Melody intrinsically knew there was no longer any chance of saving Bea from whatever weird and warped reality they’d gotten themselves trapped into.
While Bea was being helped up and her skirt flipped down over her new Luvs, yet another tiny spurt of pee rushed its way into Melody's panty-diaper as a reminder that her own sanity and sense of adulthood was on a ticking clock. She had to escape. It was all but guaranteed that if she were laid down on that picnic blanket, she’d wouldn’t get a diaper that resembled anything close to big girl undies.
She was in another universe: That was the only quasi-logical explanation; a universe where 18 year olds were closer to two-year olds instead of being fully grown adults about to graduate high school. There might not even be highschools in this universe, considering most of the teacher-girls didn’t look old enough to drink. And the rules of this reality were corrosive and oppressive and imprinting themselves on Melody’s consciousness. If Bea, simple as she was, was any indicator, Melody wouldn’t even realize she didn’t belong here before day’s end.
Time to get out.
Gait still widening, Melody waddle ran back up the stairs of the covered wagon jungle gym towards the slide. The simplest solution was most often the correct one. It’s why Melody faked notes about dentist appointments instead of funerals when she wanted to miss a day of school. Recovering toothaches were easier to fake than grief. The slide brought her to this dimension; so it should be the gateway out.
“Wait your turn, Melody,” Mr. Ken said, sticking his arm out so that Mikey could go down first. Who cared if it was Mikey’s turn?! He was used to peeing his pants and having his Mommy Dress him stupid little shirts with embroidered ducks stitched in and matching shorts. It’d been that way all his life. This was not something she was willing to get used to.
Sadly, Mr. Ken was a grown-up, and so his word was law just now. Melody waited impatiently for Mikey to go down the slide. The sound of clattering balls down below signalling his splash down.
One...two...three…
Mr. Ken’s arm came up and Melody was allowed to swing her legs into the plastic tube and hurl herself downwards.
“WHEEEEEEE!” The tumble and sliding was met with the clattering and cushioning of a sea of brightly colored balls. Balls! There’d been none of the balls in her own reality! The fudge?! Why was she back in the ballpit? Shouldn’t she be a grown-up again?
A terrible thought slammed into Melody’s greymatter. Had she just made things worse? Scrambling for the surface as if she were drowning, Melody’s head breached and she reached skyward; terrified that her clothes had metamorphosed yet again.
How much younger had she gone? Was she in a stupid smock of a sundress, now? A pink sleeper? Naked save for her diaper? Had she been reduced to a crawler instead of toddler? All of these dreadful and until today fantastical possibilities ricocheted between her ears as she found her footing and waded closer to the pit’s shallow end. To her great relief, she was still in the same T-shirt and shortalls that Mommy had dressed her in this morning. Still normal...well not really but…
Her diaper! Had her diaper transformed more?! She had to know! Diving back down into the balls for a modicum of privacy, Melody went fetal and yanked at the legs holes of her clothes, unsnapping the little brass buttons so she could expect her urine soaked undergarments.
“Melody!” Mrs. Jay called out. Mrs. Jay...most grown-up among grown-ups. “What do you think you’re doin’ little girl?” Melody ignored her. She could because it was a question, not a demand. In this universe, babies like her only had to obey grown-ups when they were ordered to. Questions didn’t count so silence was still an option.
Something very much like relief settled into the back of Melody’s brain when she saw her diaper. It was a diaper, alright; two large velcro tapes holding together piddled-in padding with cutesy decorations to mask its ultimate purpose. But it still vaguely resembled the panties Mommy had dressed her in this morning. No cartoon characters; just the black piping and the cute little pink bow on the waistband. The bow was now drawn in instead of being an actual bit of ribbon, but it was better than Elmo or Mickey. At least she wasn’t any more babyish than before.
Now to just...just…crud! She couldn’t rebutton her pants! Just like a toddler, she could manage to strip her clothes off with some struggling and serious effort, but her hands had lost the fine motor control required to do something as simple as snapping two overlapping disks back over her crotch. Nevermind REAL buttons, Melody had lost the ability to do snaps!
“Melody, get out of there, you silly thing.”
She had no choice. The ends of her pants dangling behind her, Melody first crawled, then trudged out of the pit. Big and jolly like Mrs. Claus, Mrs. Jay was waiting for her. “Felt like turning your overalls into a dressie?” she asked.
“Kind of,” Melody lied. It wasn’t a completely absurd possibility, given the look and context. Melodies deconstructed leggings hung about her knees like a dress, and certainly covered her diaper better than any of the other babies actually wearing skirts.
Mrs. Jay took the time to check Melody again. Not even announcing her intent before violating the girl’s space. “Yup. You’re wet. You’ll need to be changed soon.”
Melody almost forgot to breathe. “But not yet…?”
Now, the most grown-up of the grown-ups reached between Melody’s legs and squeezed, feeling the squish between her fingers. “You can play a little longer.” Melody found her breath. Thank goodness. Mrs. Jay started snapping up Melody’s shortalls for her. “You’re getting pretty good at undressing yourself,” she said.
“Does that mean I’m ready for potty training?” Melody asked hopefully.
“We’ll see…” Mrs. Jay chuckled. “We’ll see.” Melody didn’t need to have full access to her grown-up brain to know that was a lie. Whatever eighteen year olds were in this crazy new world, ready for potty training wasn’t one of them.
With a quiet grunt and a growl, Melody waited for her pants to be snapped back up so that she could circle round back up the stairs to the ball pit slide. Try again. She had to try again. She wasn’t a dumb baby. She wasn’t a stupid toddler. She wasn’t going to give up after just one try.