My sister stopped talking and gave me a hard look, then said, “My brother was the only one who knew about that! How did you know?”
“Simple,” I said, “I’m your brother!”
“What? You can’t be!”, she said in amazement.
“I am and I can, Gina!”, I told her.
“How did you know my first name?”, she asked me, “No one here has said it!”
“I heard it first when Mom and Dad brought you home from the hospital. I was eleven at the time,” I explained.
“This can’t be!”, my sister exclaimed.
“It sure can, Cleana Gina!”, I said using the nickname I had given her in childhood. She had been an awful tomboy, aways getting herself dirty and covered with mud. I used to kid her about it when she was six and seven and I was in high school. I’d haul her into the house to hand over to her nanny for a bath and tell the nanny, “We need Gina cleana’!”
“Bubba?”, she asked, using her childhood name for me. She knew that I hated to be called Bubba, I decided that she had called me that to see who I really was.
“I really wish you wouldn’t call me Bubba like I was some hick farmer!”, I told her tiredly.
“It really is Bubba!”, she exclaimed to the nurses. She looked down at my diminished body and said matter-of-factly, “You’ve changed!”
“I had an accident,” I explained.
“Oh?”, she said with a surprised look on her face and then she seemed to notice the diapers I was wearing for the first time. She smiled and said brightly, “That’s okay, Bubba. Your dydees will soak it up! I used to have ‘accidents’ too, when I was your age!”
“You’ve never been my age, Gina. I’m ten years older than you, remember?”, I said with irritation.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” she said with a stupid look on her face, “But you look like you’re two years old.”
“The accident caused that,” I told her.
“Peeing in your dydees made you two years old again?”, she said, looking perplexed.
“That’s not the kind of accident I was talking about,” I growled.
“Oh,” she said, “What made you young again?”
“I told you! I had an accident in the laboratory,” I explained patiently.
“I see,” she said with a glimmer of understanding growing in her eyes, “You peed in the laboratory and you got young again.”
I put my head in my hands and muttered, “No, Gina. I had an accident in the laboratory that made me young. It had nothing to do with peeing!”
“Then why are you wearing diapers?”, my sister asked.