The girls spoke directly to Kim only once, when one of them inquired why he had not asked to go to the bathroom. Kim mumbled through the fog of his embarrassment that he did not know. “Boy, I guess I don’t remember what babies second-graders are,” the other girl remarked. When the floor was clean and the girls were replacing the implements in the cloakroom, Mrs. Bartlett returned and received a full report of the incident. Emerging into the classroom, she called Kim to her massive desk before the chalk board, glanced at his wet pants and said simply, “I think you’d better go home and change.”

Kim had never been so relieved to get out of school. As the brisk autumn breeze chilled his drenched thighs, Kim concocted what seemed to him a plausible excuse for his wet pants and his early return from school. On entering his house, Kim told his mother, who did not work then, that the bully of his class, John Aspinal, had pushed him down in a puddle of rain water on the playground. To Kim’s amazement and great relief, his mother bought the story and sympathetically told him to get into some dry pants and stay home for the balance of the afternoon.

Unfortunately, Kim had to return to school the next morning. A few of his best friends mercifully accepted the story about his falling in a puddle on the playground, but the taunting by the rest of the kids began immediately. Kim was heartbroken when Nancy Stringer, one of the cute girls who had been in his class since kindergarten, challenged his alibi by asserting that Kim had not been wet when she had seen him come in from recess yesterday. “I think you wet your pants,” she opined loudly. Upon hearing Nancy’s pronouncement, John Aspinal chimed in that everyone knew Kim wet his pants, that he did it all the time and was nothing but a big baby. Kim crept through the halls of school with his head down, attempting to ignore the catcalls and smirks of his fellow students, but he knew that vicious rumors were circulating about him. At the end of the day, one of the longest of Kim’s young life, lovely Marcia Baker accosted him on the sidewalk and asked in an embarrassed but eagerly curious voice whether it was true that Kim still wore baby diapers. Although he denied it, he wistfully thought that he might as well wear diapers, since he was sure that everyone in school believed the rumor.

Within a few weeks, other news at school had replaced the stories of Kim’s indiscretion, and although he was still treated as an outcast by most of his peers, Kim had successfully lived down the incident. Kim came home from school the day after a parent-teacher conference, however, to discover that his shame would not be allowed to fade away so easily. His mother greeted him at the door with a reproachful but concerned look and stated that Mrs. Bartlett had confided to her about Kim’s accident a few weeks before. She had then discussed this serious matter with Kim’s father. Kim was to understand that while wetting his pants in school was unacceptable behavior, he was not going to be punished for the incident itself. His mother tried to look aggrieved as she complained, “But Kim, you lied to me about it. You falsely accused some other boy of pushing you into a puddle. While it is bad enough that a seven-year old wets his pants, lying to me is unforgivable. You will be punished for lying, not for having an accident.”

His mother’s disingenuous words were belied by the nature of Kim’s punishment, however. She led Kim into the living room where, in the center of the carpet, she had laid out a diaper, safety pins, ointment and baby powder as she had years before. While Kim wailed and pleaded, his mother undressed and then diapered him, explaining that he would be kept in diapers at home for the ensuing week. If he failed to learn his lesson, however, and either told another lie or had another accident, the sentence would be extended. “And if you do anything bad at school again, you will be wearing your diapers at school, too,” she warned. Kim humored his parents by pretending to hate his punishment, but he again secretly enjoyed “the baby treatment.” He dreaded the prospect of having to wear diapers to school, so Kim behaved himself, but he found himself looking forward to getting home to his diapers. He was deathly afraid that his friends might learn of his secret, so he made excuses to prevent them from stopping at his house on the way home from school. On the final day of his punishment, Kim avoided the bathroom all afternoon and soon after his mother had wrapped him securely in his soft diapers, Kim soaked himself and, inadvertently, the living room sofa. As he had anticipated, he was condemned to another wonderful week in diapers.