Kalina slipped into the bathroom again, feeling a little jealous of whoever was behind the closed stall door, and not just because the stall with the changing table was bigger.

As much as she liked diapers at home, she wasn’t a fan of being stuck in them.

She had been careful not to drink much at the potluck lunch after the service,

even so, she’d found her bladder filling back up as if to defy her.

Wetting herself around the rest of the youth group – minus Crisanta, who had told her that they should sit with their family instead of their friends, to which Kalina had retorted that she had just spent all morning with her family – was just as difficult to consider as doing it while seated right next to her mother, so she had excused herself.

Really,

she knew she was incredibly lucky her mother hadn’t made her sit with her family,

since technically she was still grounded.

She suspected Crisanta was just upset because of the same thing, wanting to see Kalina suffer as much punishment as possible.

And, actually, sitting there had been a little like punishment, though more self-inflicted than anything.

As if hearing Alice talking about the game session the day before,

during which Sam The Boy had apparently tried to kill a monster hiding in a huge trash pile in an enclosed room by setting that pile of trash on fire, wasn’t bad enough,

Kalina was constantly worried that someone would somehow notice her diaper.

She sat still as much as she could, at least until she started feeling the need to pee, not even daring to get up to grab some dessert, always nervously watching anyone who decided to do so themselves, and took the route that led them behind her.

She’d almost had an accident right there at the table before she finally worked up the courage to excuse herself.

She went into the empty stall and pulled down her skirt a little, in case whoever was in the other stall was watching her for some creepy reason, and sat on the toilet.

Somehow, that didn’t make what she was about to do feel any less babyish, and, in fact, almost made it more so.

She peed herself slowly, not wanting to overload the diaper and end up leaking.

Hopefully, whoever was in the next stall wasn’t paying -too- much attention.

The toilet was just barely tall enough that her feet didn’t quite reach the ground, so she let them swing, humming to herself, softly at first, then a little louder so that perhaps it would distract the other person in the bathroom from the fact that there was no other sound.

After a few moments, a quiet voice came from the other stall.

“Is that you, Kalina?”

“Crisanta?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Crisanta replied quietly, her voice sounding a little scratchy, almost like she’d been crying.

The “Are you okay?” never quite left Kalina’s mouth, paused by the memory of Crisanta’s actions that morning, on Friday evening.

Kalina hopped down from the toilet and pulled her skirt back up, starting towards the sink.

“Kalina, could you go get my purse?” Crisanta’s voice came from the stall.

“Huh?”

“Oh, never mind,” Crisanta sighed, her breath rattling ever so slightly. “Forget it.”

Kalina considered it.

She was busy on her own, after all, checking out the back of her skirt in the mirror to make sure she hadn’t leaked yet, then tentatively pressing the skirt back against her sagging diaper and checking again.

Satisfied, she went back to the fellowship hall, hoping the youth group hadn’t gone off into some new conversation in her absence.

She passed her family’s table,

saw her parents talking with an older couple, Camelia sitting happily beside them.

Crisanta’s purse sat by an empty seat, quiet and lonely, yet calling out to Kalina in her sister’s voice, the way it sounded when she was trying to pretend she hadn’t been crying.

‘She deserves it,’ part of her mind told her, while another tried to convince her,

‘She can’t really -need- anything from it all that badly.’

‘And if she does,’ the first part replied, ‘all the better.’

She could hear the hand dryer running on the other side of the bathroom door when she approached again, then a mad scramble of feet.

The stall door was closed again when she opened the outside door.

She walked up to the stall and stood up her tiptoes, draping the purse over the top of the door.

She didn’t even pull it away once she saw Crisanta’s feet on the other side of the door.

“Thank you,” Crisanta said softly.

“Whatever,” Kalina shrugged, though Crisanta obviously couldn’t see her.

She started to leave again, only to be stopped by, “Kalina?” She didn’t reply, which led to another, “Kalina?”

“Yeah?” she answered finally.

“Could you maybe do me another favor?”

Kalina rolled her eyes. “What is it?”

She could hear some motion behind the door, and then Crisanta’s new skort was hanging there, a large wet spot on it.

Kalina was too shocked to even tease her, or ask what really happened.

She grabbed the skort and briefly considered opening and closing the bathroom door to make Crisanta think she had taken it and left her stranded in her panties – even more briefly, she considered actually doing it.

Instead, she turned the hand dryer back on and held the skort underneath.

It took a while, and she could vaguely hear Crisanta moving restlessly around her stall,

though she couldn’t make out much, with the dryer going right in front of her.

Finally, they were dry, and she draped them back over the door.

Crisanta felt incredibly lucky when she saw her skort being draped back over the door.

If the hand dryer hadn’t still been going, she might have been too petrified to walk over to grab it, sure that her sister would hear her diaper crinkling as she moved.

She felt much more secure with her skort back on, though, realistically, she doubted there was much muffling of sound going on there, except in her own mind.

She took a compact from her purse, used it to gauge when her face had turned a light enough shade of red that she felt all right opening the stall door.

Kalina was still standing there, waiting. ‘Why doesn’t she leave me alone?’ she wondered, somewhat uncharitably, all things considered.

“Thanks,” she said, to be nice. Kalina gave her an odd look, continuing to stand there, in her way. “I’m fine,” she told her.

Kalina let her go over to the sink, but stayed there while she washed her hands, staring over at her.

Had the sneak looked in her purse? Had she heard the diaper change over the dryer? Or had she just determined the real cause of Crisanta’s wet skirt?

“I’m fine!” Crisanta repeated, her voice cracking slightly.

“Okay,” Kalina replied gently, holding up her hands. “I believe you.” Kalina was a terrible liar.

“I spilled my water on my lap,” Crisanta told her before she could ask.

That was only partially a lie, since she had, indeed, done so, but not quite on accident.

She’d seen her diaper leaking and that had been the only thing she could think of to keep anyone else from noticing.

Of course, she didn’t want to be seen like that, either, so she had hurried out after apologizing for her klutziness, apparently in too much of a hurry to remember to grab her purse.

“Okay,” Kalina repeated. She was standing in front of the exit now, still staring.

Crisanta glanced back at the mirror over the sink, making sure that her diaper wasn’t sticking out anywhere.

“You know,” Kalina said, finally looking away from Crisanta, concentrating on her own feet instead, “I saw you.”

Crisanta quickly contained her panic, keeping her, “What?” as neutral as possible.

“Practicing for your try-out. You were -totally- better than anyone who actually got in.”

She looked up at Crisanta slowly, a tiny smile playing across the corners of her mouth.

It was Crisanta’s turn to stare, unsure what to say.

“Oh, what do you know about cheerleading?” is what she came up with, gently pushing past Kalina to get to the bathroom door, holding it open.

Kalina’s smile brightened as she stepped outside. “So, you spilled your water, huh? Maybe you -do- need one of Camelia’s sippy cups.”

“At least I don’t need my mommy to tell me when to go to the potty,” Crisanta shot back, well aware of the irony in her statement, and barely able to keep that from being obvious in her voice. Kalina stuck out her tongue, but they were both giggling.

“What’d you need your purse for, anyway?” Kalina asked.

“I didn’t,” Crisanta told her. “I just wanted you to get out of the bathroom so I could dry my skort.

I don’t know why they don’t have a lock on the bathroom door.”

“They probably just hate you,” Kalina nodded sagely.

“Probably,” Crisanta agreed. Kalina scurried back over the youth group’s table,

while Crisanta went back to her family bashfully, full of apologies.

Kalina flopped onto her bed, bottom itching slightly beneath her panties.

She sincerely hoped that it wasn’t the diaper rash she was feeling,

though to really believe that, she would have had to ignore the redness she’d seen on her bottom when she was changing.

She glanced over at the wall between her and Crisanta’s rooms, thinking.

It had felt a little nice to be the reliable one, for Crisanta to be the one having to be rescued.

Still, Kalina couldn’t see either of those becoming regular things, not anytime soon.

But it could happen one day – the responsible thing, anyway – and who knew what that would really be like?

Maybe she would be too grown-up, too concerned with being always being in control, of herself and of everything else around her, to be able to lower herself to even thinking about wearing diapers for fun.

She hopped down from her bed with a smile, heading towards the closet.

If that was going to happen, then she had better enjoy them while she could, before she turned into a time-delayed version of Crisanta.

At the moment, it was almost impossible to imagine, but she decided she had better prepare, just in case.

She liked to think that she was going to somehow get to be a kid forever – perhaps that was why she had started liking diapers in the first place, as a way to preserve that,

while Crisanta worked so hard to grow up as much and as quickly as she could – but she knew that was impossible.

How had Crisanta accepted that so easily?

How had she given up all the fun of being young without a second thought?

Sometimes, it was hard for her to believe just how different she and Crisanta were.

Crisanta sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping on her bottle.

She knew she should get changed and go be with her parents and little sister, but it had seemed like such a shame to waste the diaper she’d changed into in the church bathroom.

She was glad that she had taken her shower the night before, so it wouldn’t seem odd when she took one again in a few minutes – she didn’t mess her diaper often, but she figured Easter was a special enough occasion.

She stared at the wall between her and Kalina’s room, thinking about that incident.

She had been so sure Kalina would just abandon her there, leave her in there with a leaking diaper and a soaked skort, neither of which she would have had the courage to leave the bathroom in.

She could hardly bear the thought of anyone seeing her like that as she dashed away from her table, she could never have made a reappearance in it.

It was hard for Crisanta to admit, but Kalina was more mature than she gave her credit for.

Of course, she was well aware of how silly that was to think, sitting there, having just intentionally pooped herself a few moments before.

There were times when she wished she was more like Kalina, so happy with the simplest things, so pure, so – usually – sweet.

As horrible as it seemed, if she was being honest with herself, Crisanta wasn’t sure if she would have helped Kalina out, if things had been reversed.

If Kalina had somehow gotten her grounded, and made her miss something that meant as much to her as that silly little game, Crisanta might have just left her in that bathroom to fend for herself, though, of course, she wouldn’t have had the same problem since even her silliest past-time wasn’t quite as silly as Crisanta’s.

Perhaps Crisanta just got all of her immaturity out of the way in private with her diapers,

while Kalina spread it out over the whole rest of her life,

somehow not caring if it was in public or not.

Sometimes, it was hard for her to believe just how different she and Kalina were.