I ripped the sticker off my shirt, glaring angrily at Laurell. “I told you to stop it!” I yelled at her. “I don’t want to do this!” Not being particularly familiar with how diapers worked, it took me a try or two to get free, thus making the tearing off of it much less dramatic than I had anticipated. “What is your problem?!”

“What’s yours?” Laurell shot back. “Why are you throwing a tantrum? It isn’t like we’re forcing you to do this; you volunteered!”

“I don’t care!” I threw the diaper at her. “I’ve had enough of this!”

“God, don’t get your panties in a wad,” Ivy rolled her eyes. “We get the point.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to make fun of your best friend. We get it.” Laurell’s voice was cold and low, and I could feel goose-bumps racing up my arm.

Even so, I couldn’t help but feel a little shocked at how quickly I said, “She’s not my friend!”

“Really?” Laurell raised an eyebrow. Her “Prove it,” was silent, yet no less clear for it.

I took the pacifier from around my neck and stormed out of the bathroom. Maria wasn’t hard to find – in a school this size, nobody ever really was.

“Happy Halloween,” I told her, but by then, she’d already learned to avoid me as soon as she noticed me. I doubt she even saw the pacifier dangling from my hand before she turned around. I might not be the sneakiest person in the world, but Maria is also not the most observant, and sticking the ribbon around the pacifier to her backpack with the name-tag proved to be pretty quick and easy.

And Laurell and Ivy were there waiting for me, just like they always were, smiling as if the scene in the bathroom had never happened. I’d never noticed just how much like a couple of wolves they could look like.

“See?” I said to the dog, a little uncertain, not least of all because he seemed to be getting bigger. “I could’ve gone out in that costume, but I didn’t.”

“No, you didn’t,” he agreed, but I could tell he still wasn’t impressed. He was blocking out most everything now, obscuring all but a few of the students milling about, giggling behind Maria’s back as she walked, oblivious, towards her next class.

“Maybe I could’ve done more, but why should I have?” I demanded. “It isn’t my fault she’s in diapers!”

“Was it your brother’s fault when you had that accident in the sandbox?”

“No! That’s completely different!” I fumed. He obviously didn’t get me after all. “There’s a difference between a little kid having an accident and a teenager wearing diapers all the time! Besides, I’m not her sister! That’s not my job!”

“Does that mean she doesn’t deserve someone to look after her?” By then the dog had grown so large that I couldn’t even see his eyes anymore, just a mass of white. By the time I thought of an answer, I had the feeling that he couldn’t hear me.

I tried anyway. “She should be able to take care of herself,” I told him, staring up into the whiteness. He didn’t answer, and when I looked back down, I saw that the walls and floor of the school had been consumed by the white as well, and everyone else had vanished. “She’s a big girl,” I whispered, beginning to shiver.
If I had been expecting to be taken back to my room – and I did – I would have been quite disappointed. I stared around at the field of white around me, trying to decide if I should go for a walk across it, to see if there was anything there, or to just wait in one place for the next visitor to arrive, or for my room to appear so I could watch my clock and fret over what might be coming when it reached 2:00.

Before I could reach a decision, I noticed the whiteness starting to bleed out in one direction, images coming through, first of what looked like a city, and then the outline of a window framing it, and finally a whole room appearing around it. And in front of those changes, as if its footsteps were bringing them about, came an alien.

It was of the small, gray variety, the kind you saw in fake autopsy videos, so much so that, as it got closer I could see a Y-shaped series of stitches across its chest. As it got even closer than that, I could see that its eyes and mouth were being held closed in a similar manner, black x’s lined up across its face like some messed-up emoticon.

I could honestly say that it wasn’t anything I’d ever had as a pet, nor even thought of wanting as one. “My mind is just running wild with that stupid fortune,” I told myself, speaking out loud to make it sound all the more convincing.

Despite having its eyes closed – if that was, indeed, all that had happened, as from the way the eyelids looked close up, I began to wonder if there was truly anything beneath them, though I was by no means curious enough to try to find out – it walked up to me, making a clean stop right before it bumped against my chest.

I smiled feebly. “N-Nice…” I began, wanting to finish it with “to meet you,” but I could barely get the first word to come out as I stared down at the thing in front of me. Unsurprisingly, it said nothing. At first, I thought it had given no answer at all, until I saw that it had raised one of its hands a fraction of an inch, so that it was pointing behind me.

I wasn’t surprised to find myself standing there, although it was somewhat strange to see a version of myself I had never seen before. I’m not sure how old I was then, but somewhere in my twenties, I think. It was nice to see that I’d lost a bit of weight, and even if my breasts hadn’t decided to grow much more, I thought my legs might have, though it may have just looked that way because I was wearing only a nightshirt, which ended further from my knees than anything I would wear now. I looked about half awake as I stumbled across the kitchen floor to grab a glass from one of the cupboards and fill it with water.

The older me flipped open a door on one of those daily pill boxes and dumped the contents out into her hand. While she was doing that, a man, maybe five years older and looking equally drowsy, opened a door on the other side of the apartment and wandered out with a yawn.

The older me glanced over at him, in the midst of swallowing her pills, giving him an uneven smile in return for his, until he came up to her and gave her a kiss. She pulled away, began scrounging through the cabinets and drawers to pull out the makings of a bowl of cereal.

“I can make you an egg,” he offered. For a moment, I wondered if, by that point in my life, I’d gotten over my intense hatred for the taste of eggs. Then I saw myself roll my eyes, then shake my head.

“I’m fine,” I told him flatly, walking past him, brushing past his open arms, perhaps not noticing, seeing as it was so early, apparently, to sit at the little table and start to eat my cereal.

“I’ll probably be a little late tonight,” the man said, getting out a bowl of his own. “Lenny wants to finish the project today. We have most of the plans done, but we’re going to have to use the older machines, and there’s almost always something that goes wrong with them, you know?”

“I think this cereal’s been in there too long,” I sigh, staring into it as I push it around my bowl. I take another bite or two, then push get up and carry my still mostly full bowl over to the sink, turn the faucet on while I start to dump it out.

The man sets the cereal box, turning and taking the half step it takes to get behind me. He wrapped his arms around my stomach, bent over to kiss the top of my ear while I finished rinsing out the bowl, then leaned back, letting his fingers trace around my waist, then, once they met in the back, downward, to the hem of my nightshirt, which he then drew upwards.

The man and I – the current me, just to be clear – let out gasps at the same, though his had just the slightest hint of playfulness to it, while mine was pretty much chock full of shock.

“Well, my, my,” he shook his head. “Guess it’s a good thing you had that accident last night, isn’t it?” The way he said ‘accident’ made it sound as if he didn’t think that was the real story. I could see myself blushing, but it was understandably difficult to deduce whether that was for the night before, or that morning. “I guess you’d better stay in diapers for the rest of the day, too, huh? Just in case.”

“If you think so,” I shrugged meekly.

“Oh, I do,” he replied. “Let’s go get you changed.”

I trudged over to the door he’d come from, obviously knowing what I was supposed to do. I could notice a bit of a waddle then, and began to wonder how I hadn’t noticed the bottom of the diaper drooping out from under the nightshirt. The man was following close behind and, right before they both went into the room, he gave my bottom a playful pat. I could see the grimace forming on my face for all the time it took for the two of them to step inside, and then he reached out and grabbed the doorknob.

“What the hell is going on?! Why am I wearing diapers?! Who is this loser?! What is going on?!” I asked, the flood of questions suddenly pouring out of me, even before the door completely closed. “What happened to me?”

But if the alien had any answers to give, they apparently weren’t important enough for it to reach up and tear out its mouth stitches, nor was I brave enough to try to do it.

I glanced around the apartment, wondering what else I was supposed to see there before the alien took me on to our next destination. I guess it wasn’t -too- bad – it was a little bigger than Ash’s, and a lot cleaner, not that that took much – and yet there was something unsettling about it, something final. I suppose it was that feeling that made me uncomfortable, that thought that this was where I was going to end up, and that was that. It felt like a cage.

I noticed the clock, the old kind with the hands, sitting on top of the television set, and thought something seemed off about it. As I looked closer, I could have sworn the second hand began to spin faster, and faster, until I heard a door open behind me. The older me and the man came out of what I assumed was the bedroom, both dressed, me in an old T-shirt and shorts, him in some kind of uniform. They were moving in fast-motion, not quite enough that they were just blurs, but fast enough that the man could go get his coat from the closet, finish the bowl of cereal he’d left sitting on the kitchen counter, and kiss me goodbye in a manner of seconds.

I, on the other hand, went back to the table and sat down, staring at the newspaper but only picking it up a couple times, then setting it back down. I sat there for a little while after the man left, too, before going over to get a glass of water to take to the sofa, just a few feet from where I was standing and watching. I turned on the television, flipped through the channels, then turned it back off and stared out the window for a while.

Eventually, I got back up, went back to the table to pick up a piece of paper I hadn’t noticed before. I started to walk over to myself, to see what it was, but luckily, I brought it back to the sofa to look at, so I easily managed to get a look over my shoulder to see that it was a grocery list.

The older me stared at it for a long time, though I lost interest fairly quickly. Finally, she gave what probably would have been a slow nod in regular time, went back into what I was now assuming was the bedroom, then came back out in a dress and sandals, with my hair finally looking as if it had seen a brush anytime that day, carrying a purse. I couldn’t tell if I was still diapered or not, which might have been the point.

I walked to the front door, then stopped. It seemed like I stood there, just staring at the door, for a long time, but at some point the hands of the clock must have slowed back down, so I don’t know how long it actually was. Finally, I reached into my purse and pulled out a different piece of paper, one that I could tell, even from across the room, was a lot older, and unfolded it.

“What is that?” I asked; the alien gave what might have been a tiny shake of its head, but likely was nothing at all. By the time I started to walk across the apartment to get a look, the other me had folded it back up and turned back around, setting both her purse and the list down on the table.

I kicked my sandals off, scooted them back into the bedroom with my foot, flopped back down onto the couch, the dress fluttering up enough to show that I still had the shorts, and thus, almost definitely, the diaper, on underneath. I picked the remote back up, but didn’t even turn the television on before tossing it back aside and standing up again, wandering over to the window.

The clock’s hands began to spin faster, yet still I stood there, staring out into the city below. When I broke away at last, I marched over to the bedroom and slipped my sandals back on. I didn’t even make it to the door, however, just picked up my purse for a moment and set it back down before meandering back to the window, then over to the bedroom, this time actually going in and closing the door behind me.

When I re-emerge, I’m wearing the shorts and T-shirt again, but the bulge around my waist is gone, and I’m looking at least a little happier. I even start to fill up the dishwasher before the phone rings. I rush over to it, but don’t make any move to answer it.

The answering machine picks up, plays out a standard greeting, then a female voice calls, “Cheyenne! Pick up!” It’s silent for a moment, then continues, “It’s Jane, Cheyenne, just wanted to see if you wanted to come get some lunch with me. Call me!”

I reached out and hit a button almost before the sound of the other phone hanging up echoed through the speakers. “Message deleted,” a mechanical voice confirmed.

I got some butter out of the fridge, made myself a couple pieces of toast, and settled back into the couch, where I shortly fell asleep.