Chapter 46 – [Sunday, June 23, 2002]
Ted scrolled casually through the word document, his glowing monitor shining on his face in the early morning darkness. The Hope Seattle offices were always quiet on Sundays and he relished the moments alone. As a Christian organization, most of the employees went to church and the majority of the residents did as well. But the father of three was up at work far before religious services would come to have any effect on office activity. It was 5:42am.
Jordan’s story fascinated him. The narrative itself was interesting but also the fact that it had come out of his own child and her experience. He couldn’t help but think of all the subconscious recesses of her mind the different tendrils of the plot must’ve lined up with her own experience.
Beyond that, Ted was genuinely blown away by her artistic talent and execution. The first story that had won her the competition had truly been impressive. This one was even better yet — and on a much larger scale. George says it ought’a be twelve chapters instead of the ten she’s got it divided into now; and at almost thirty-thousand words, that’ll be a hefty young-adult novel. I’m so thankful he was willing to work through it for her; what a gift and an asset!
He smiled to himself as he thought about how excited she’d be about the possibility of actually getting her story legitimately published. Ted’s mind floated back to the conversation he had had with the old college buddy who had become a copy editor at a local magazine. Over lunch the week prior, he had asked him if he’d read his daughter’s work and give her a few pointers. But just as Ted had been, George was enraptured by the teenager’s style and content — drawn in by the story and convinced that it had to be shared.
George gave it a full-blown edit and offered Ted a plethora of solid critiques and changes to the material to pass on to Jordan. “She’s got a ton of talent Ted; this is amazing stuff!” he had said as he passed the marked-up printed copy back to his friend.
In fact, George had promised to float a rough-edit of the book (with some of the changes) to some of his friends ‘in the industry’ with Ted’s consent (and assuming that Jordan’ would be alright with it). Ted thought that she probably would jump at the opportunity and had given the ‘go-ahead’.
Wouldn’t that be an amazing thing?! He thought, shutting down the computer and watching the sun long tentacles of sunlight creep down Seattle’s streets toward the water. What if Jordan became a professional teenage author in her own right? Wow! She seems so young to be growing up that fast.
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[June 23, 2002 – 4:23am]
The young girl felt completely warm, safe, and secure. Nestled in the crook of his elbow. The dark curly hair of his forearm tickled her cheek. His smell was calming; a mixture of sweat and aftershave. His breathing quieting.
The bulging plastic and fluff in between her legs was large and warm and bulbous — yet soft. Covered by layers of fabric, her delicate hand didn’t reach to touch it. Now completely out of any harms way, there was no need to check for leaks. Just relax fully and trust.
She stirred.
The size of his arm immediately felt huge compared to her tiny body. She could feel her bare feet curled up in the palm of his hand, pressed up against the soft dampness of her diaper. One of her small chubby hands was pushed up close to her face and the other was smashed somewhere down around his arm. It felt like a warm, stable tree trunk.
She heard herself whimper ever so softly.
The trunk became more firm. Soft flesh became more rigid. Warmth started to cool.
She turned her head to nestle her face in more comfortably in his elbow but it too had started to become unyielding. Splintery. The wonderful feel of hair replaced by slivers. The pleasant odors replaced by dust.
She heard herself whimper again, this time a little louder.
She began to wake.
As her eyes creaked open, the young girl realized she wasn’t indeed an infant under her Daddy’s tender care but just her old diapered self at summer camp. On the lower bunk, Jordan had somehow wrestled the foam mattress in such a way that it leaned all the way up against the wall, exposing the bare wood of the bed-frame beneath her. She lay largely uncovered from her sleeping bag on that hard surface, completely off the mattress and clinching the raised hewn wood side rail opposite of the wall. Her pillow was pushed up against the head of the lower bunk area and she was scrunched toward the lower end with her legs and feet tied up in the sleeping bag.
It was still dark out in the early morning hours, the third Sunday of the summer.
The teenager’s diaper was very wet. The third night in a row & the eleventh time since she had been at camp.
She began to silently cry in self-pity as she started to realize just how much she longed for the kind of tender-loving care no longer available to her. With the short-sightedness of any pre-teen, she simply couldn’t get ahold of the emotions crashing in her head with incredible strength. Jordan lay in bed, scrunched up in her sleeping bag, rocking back and forth, warm and alone. Silently weeping.
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[June 23, 2002 – 8:02am]
Every other week at Camp White Pines, campers had to switch classes so that everyone would get a turn at the ‘best’ offerings. The first signups had happened during the registration period during the school year and so kids could easily compare notes and strategize with one another. Once camp was in session, new class assignments took place on Sunday mornings right before breakfast; campers were required to put in their requests to their counselors the Saturday night before. Jordan’s pack had already come up with a plan for what they were going to do on this, the second rotation of the summer. First choice: horsemanship. Second choice: rock climbing. Third choice: hiking. Fourth choice: Indian Jewelry. Fifth choice: culinary arts.
The boys hadn’t seemed particularly thrilled about the more ‘feminine’ choices on the list (nor had Alex who was much more into athletics and ‘action’ than sitting around flipping omelets), but they all knew it was impossible to get assigned to three ‘active’ classes in any one rotation. It just never happened, even if all five choices were in that realm, the ‘powers that be’ would just automatically assign them to a third class like wicker basket making or toenail art. Everyone with any experience at camp knew that it was better to settle on your own ‘indoor’ classes as options because it was inevitable anyways. So at campfire on Saturday night, Jordan’s posse had all agreed on the same order to request — giving them the best chance once again to land together for the second rotation.
After Jordan was out of bed and cleaned up that Sunday morning, she and her ‘Dragonflies’ made their way to the mess hall. The other girls crowded around the posted class sheets on the bulletin board before her as they walked in the building. Shrieks of delight and dismay immediately filled the room as other cabins arrived and crowded around. The girl who towered over most of them couldn’t tell if her friends were happy or dismayed. Soon enough it was clear — there was chaos in the dragonfly clan.
Not only had their small clan been divided, not one of them had received their first choice for classes in the second rotation of the summer. The only class the dragonfly girls shared together was swimming lessons (as in, learning all the different strokes in the pool), and it was the final class of each day. The worst part about it was that their entire cabin, including Nicole and Amber, were signed up for the class…so even though she and her girlfriends got to be together, torment was inevitable.
As for the other classes, the girls and boys were largely divided. Jordan had been dumped into ceramics and outdoor survival skills during the first two periods and Alex was in rock climbing and somehow ended up in t-shirt making again. Their other friends had similar results, spread all over the camp.
We might as well not have even given them our requests!!! This is gonna be a terrible couple of weeks. The young teenager thought, shifting her weight into her chair in the mess hall, ready for breakfast. Why does this kind of crap always seem to happen to me?!
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A little over two weeks earlier, on the Saturday afternoon of check-in, Nicole and Amber traveled to camp together in a rickety old Honda Accord wagon with a leaky exhaust. Amber’s family had already left for their summer vacation and Nicole’s Mom had to work. Thus, transportation duty was left up to the only remaining family member in Nicole’s family, Auntie Anne.
Anne Rodgers had squawked the entire way from Seattle, going on and on and on about all the drama at her work in the hospital: this nurse said ‘such and such’ about one nurse and then she said ‘such and such’ about the other who went and talked to the supervisor who hd to send out an email to the whole department before a doctor ‘got frisky’ with the first nurse who’s actually married to a different doctor from another department…
The two girls had hardly been able to follow her endless (and seemingly mindless) banter on the four hour car ride. The jarring bumps, smell of smoke, and cramped quarters had only added to their misery.
Yet — about two thirds of the way into the trip, Nicole’s Aunt Anne started babbling about odd patients and experiences she had had at her job in the ER. This inevitably led to her telling the girls about ‘this young girl — I think about your guys’ age — and I think actually from your school’ who had come in with a ‘really bad bladder infection’ this past winter. She had gone on to talk about how the girl had been ‘wearing a full blown baby diaper’. From Anne’s perspective, the girl had looked ridiculous in the big poofy purple garment and she just couldn’t help herself but to stare and to try to get another look at the sight. ‘She ended up having a really bad diaper rash too! Like — like — little babies do!!’ Anne had bumbled, going on and on about the girl.
As the story about Jordan in the hospital took shape (of course without the ever-important detail of her name), Amber and Nicole’s attention perked up. They could hardly believe their good fortune. The crazy narrative matched up almost perfectly with the other things they had come to believe to be true about ‘Jordan-dear’. It wasn’t a smoking gun, but it was close.
Through feigned but clouded interest, the girls nosed more and more information out of Anne who happily told them all about the incident and everything she had seen: how the girl had come into the hospital completely out of it because of the infection; how the diaper had been completely obvious and smelly; how she had seen her wearing it in the room; and how she and the nurses had made fun of her at the nurses station. The girl had been one of the weirder patients they had ever seen with her Mom so carefully monitoring all her care, changing her diapers right there in the room like someone might for a two year old.
“HA! Can you imagine that!” She exclaimed as if the whole world and no one at all were listening, “Who diapers their teenager like a baby?”
At that, both girls had blurted out loud, “What?!” with giggles and glee. Everything seemed to match up with what they had gleaned over the course of the year: the gossip they had heard through kindergarten, Ed’s rumor from the classroom window during detention, the inkling of a revelation at Alex’s party…it all was fitting together. They didn’t even have to speak to each other to know it was true.
Anne Rodgers had eaten up the attention. Only just barely having achieved her GED in life and never having many friends in high school, she routinely felt insecure around people. Essentially every person she had ever worked with was more highly educated than her and made far more money. She often found herself with her foot in her mouth and frequently told stories and gossiped in order to build herself up. But few of the ‘white collar’ crowd she worked among had the time for her shenanigans. To have someone, anyone, offer her the kind of deference the two early-teens gave her on the trip to camp had been delightful. Anne had glowed under the temporary spotlight, spewing information that clearly ought to have been strictly private.
Of course, she had no idea how it might be used.
Once Amber and Nicole had made it to camp, both knew what they were gonna do given the new information and their already agreed-upon plan plan for the summer. Eventually situated in the same cabin as the girl who they strongly believed peed her pants and wore diapers for it, Amber and Nicole had made it their aim to find and expose Jordan’s secret at the most opportune possible.
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[June 23, 2002 – 2:25pm]
And so on the third Sunday afternoon Camp White Pines was in session, the two girls finally found themselves alone together in the dragonfly cabin, getting ready for their second class of the day, skin diving. The previous weeks, every time they had been in the space, someone else was there as well; able and ready to witness any funny-business. But by the third sunday, classes had switched and the two bullies carefully reviewed the new assignments that morning in the mess hall. In between the first and second session, they could see that they would be the only two returning to the cabin to change as all the rest of their ‘Dragonfly’ sisters would be out hiking or picking pine needles for tea. They knew their counselor Kari wouldn’t be in the cabin either because she was a lifeguard at the pool all three periods every day.
Their only obstacle would be time. The two girls on the verge of high school (and seemingly too old for the kind of pure evil they were up to) had just eight or nine minutes to change into their suits and head down to the van for the bumpy ride to the river before someone would come looking for them. They both knew this would be their first (and maybe best) chance…and they figured it would be plenty of time to ransack Jordan’s tiny cubby space.
Alone in the cabin, Nicole and Amber turned into that first room at the beginning of the hall and tore it apart. They dug through the cabinet, drawers, and bags, intentionally and roughly hunting for the paraphernalia they knew HAD to be there. Finding nothing at first, Nicole started to question their whole scheme as well as their judgment, “Maybe my aunt had it all wrong Amber; maybe we’ve got it all wrong. I mean, there’s nothing here!”
“No. It’s gotta be here. I know we’re right.”
Just then Amber pulled out a tube of Desitin from Jordan’s suitcase. “See! Lookie here. Diaper rash cream.”
After a few more minutes rifling around in the room, they made the determination that the diapers must be kept in the counselor’s locker for privacy sake. In short order, the two found themselves digging around in the counselor’s quarters which were never locked. The eight purple diapers weren’t hard to find in the wood cabinet behind the door.
Giggling with glee and malice, the two went to work — knowing that all the rest of the girls would be back in the cabin once again in about ninety minutes, just before the final class of the day in order to change for swimming. The two of them wouldn’t need to change their clothes per se as they would be just getting back from skin diving in the river, but of course they would ‘need’ to put their masks and snorkels away (and thus witness the festivities).
“We’ve got her Amber!” Nicole said greedily. “We’ve GOT HER!” she repeated again, palms sweaty, cheeks in pain from smiling.
“Yep. That little bitch is gonna pay now.” Amber replied. “Say goodbye to your little popularity club miss panty pisser…”