I started to itch just thinking about it. I did my best to ignore how disgusting I was and focus on the singing and the accompanying hand signs. Or is that what Beouf and Zoge wanted me to do: To deaden my disgust and become fascinated by foreign nursery songs from a land where everyone my height was confined to a cradle?

It didn’t matter. There wasn’t much else I could do. I admit I didn’t think of Cassie; mostly because I didn’t want to imagine her looking at me in my present state. Besides, there was no backing track and no video so it couldn’t have been hypnosis. Not in the typical sense.

The second song seemed to be about the weather…or maybe it was the Yamatoan alphabet? A circle and a semi-circle hand could have been an ‘o’ and a ‘c’. Then again, it could have been a sun and a moon. I wasn’t sure. Did Yamatoa even use the same alphabet as us? I didn’t think so. Maybe it was about shapes.

The next song might have been about body parts or colors. People kept pointing to different clothes. Maybe it was about clothing? Hard to tell.

The third one was definitely about animals. That’s how I learned that not even onomatopoeias were universal. I saw fingers used to simulate horns and noses pushed up to be snouts, but heard nary a ‘moo’ or an ‘oink’.

The whole thing was mystifying in a sense, and I suspected that was the point. How easy it would have been to become conditioned by all of it. New rituals. New routines. New culture. Different language.

“You’ll get the hang of it eventually,” Mrs. Beouf said to me with a smile and an overly friendly wink. I had the strangest feeling that she wasn’t just talking about circle time.

The next song started, and I was caught off guard when two hands scooped me up under the armpits. “Omutsu o kōkan suru toki ga kimashita.” Zoge had finished changing Chaz and was now picking me up. I’d been so preoccupied trying to suss out the meaning of the songs that I’d become otherwise oblivious.

“Is everything here in Yamatoan?” I asked once we were almost in the bathroom. A silly question. I’d walked into Beouf’s room enough times to know that this wasn’t a language immersive classroom. The question was more of a way to inoffensively make my displeasure known.

Zoge laid me down on the changing table, pulled the restraint over my chest and slipped my pants right off me. The elastic waistband and the wide leggings made it so my shoes stayed on. “Just in case you wiggle. I don’t want your nice white shorts to get dirty.”

Great. She was ignoring my pointless question. Typical.

The door was left open. Always open. That way any administrator or Amazonian adult could peek in and see that the Little on the changing table wasn’t being abused by their caregiver behind a closed door. At least not abused in a way Amazonian society didn’t approve of.

It was very likely that the last time that bathroom had offered any form of actual privacy to its occupant was two weeks prior when I’d had my close call during teacher pre-planning. I didn’t know when it had served that function before or it likely wouldn’t be serving that function again for a long time.

Shit. Had it only been two weeks ago…?

“Let’s clean the baby up,” Zoge cooed at me while she pulled at the tabs on my absolutely putrid padding.

I kept my mouth shut and made the mistake of staring up past the cooing and smiling face directly above me. I saw myself in the ceiling mirror, again. I still looked like every bit like a baby. More so with a brown lumpy smear in my diaper and a sailor suit top just above.

The reflection did more than to hammer home how the giants now saw me. It also caused me to well…reflect: When you’re an adult, there’s something that feels fundamentally off about laying down and getting your ass wiped for you.

I stopped staring at my privates and found myself staring more and more at my hands of all things. What did I do with my hands? If I had been allowed the simple autonomy to bend over, I could have at least rested them on my knees. What now?

Looking in the mirror, leaving them by my side felt awkward for some reason. I tried crossing my arms, but the mirror showed me just looking like a sulking child, to be taken no more seriously than pouting Jesse in his shortalls. I put them behind my head but that looked like I was luxuriating as the old diaper was disposed of and its replacement unfolded. Resting them on my stomach just looked compliant and comfortable, something I was decidedly not. Pulling on the straps would have been an exercise in futility besides being definitively ‘bad behavior’.

My pulse quickened as my frustration built. I couldn’t stop looking at myself! It was either look at my own bum as Zoge’s gloved fingers dipped in a jar of rash cream and spread them on my cheeks, cooing at me in a foreign language, or cover my face in shame…which of course would have been interpreted as me playing peekaboo. I was too wound up to close my eyes.

The thought of Mrs. Zoge dangling plastic keys over my head and me gleefully reaching up just to keep my digits busy bust into my brain. I curled up one knuckle and bit down as hard as I could just to chase the terrible thought out. “Do you want a pacifier?” Shit! I should have seen that coming.

“No…”

She finished by powdering me and taping the new Monkeez on. “Mrs. Beouf told me a few things over the weekend,” she said to me. “I bet it’s much easier having a grown-up change you than having to hide it and try to change yourself.” She gave the front of my diaper a pat. “Don’t worry. Ivy went through a similar phase.”

I ground my teeth and grumbled, “I bet Ivy did…”

Zoge ignored my mumbling, and tossed her gloves in the diaper pail. She booped me on the nose and said. “All done! I love you!”

I wrinkled my nose as if the phrase was equally foreign coming from her as any number of Yamatoan nursery rhymes… She loved me? Yeah….no thank you. Needless to say, I did not say ‘I love you’ back.

The restraint came off and I was quickly scooped back up onto Zoge’s hip. Alarm bells started ringing in my head Zoge hadn’t put my pants back on! “What about my-?” I started to ask.

“We’re not going back outside until lunch,” Ivy’s Mommy told me. “I’ll change you right before we go to the cafeteria and put them back on, then.” Then she added. “If you need it.”

So it was either let myself be paraded around pantless or give up on holding it in until at least after lunch. There went any delusions of me having the slightest choice this day.

Typical.

Zoge sat me down on my feet back in the semi-circle she’d plucked me up from. My hairless legs were exposed down to my socks and the white and navy trimmed shirt barely skimmed the top of my diaper. Foolishly, I yanked down the front, even though I knew it would accomplish literally nothing in terms of modesty. At least I’d found something to do with my hands…

A few of the girls looked at each other knowingly, and giggled behind their palms. A few of the boys, too. They’d all been there. We’d all been here. “You look very cute, Clark.” Mrs. Beouf said once I’d sat down. “And I bet that new diaper feels a lot better, too.”

I reeled inside and failed to contain the shades of pink blossoming all over my body. “Yes, ma’am.” This was how Beouf must work: Keep her students off balance. Shake our worldview. Keep us disoriented so we compromise themselves again and again and again until ‘compromised’ becomes the new normal.

“We’re going to break into our center rotations and use our visual schedules.” Beouf told all of us. “Ivy? Can you show Clark how to use his visual schedule?” Ivy nodded and then grinned at me. “Okay everyone. Let’s go!”

I got up from the floor and tugged my shirt down. It was stupid but it made me feel better. “Come on, Clark,” Ivy said, gently but firmly tugging at my wrist. “This way!”

I started to follow and then stopped as the fresh crinkle of the new diaper slapped my earbuds. “Fuck,” I whispered to myself. “I just accidentally thought of us as students…”