“Can I come back in yet?” Kevin was outside the tent.
“Yeah, okay.” Jessica replied, she had cleaned herself up with the baby-wipes and gotten into some dry clothes. She knew she couldn’t put her wet sleeping bag or clothes out in the sun to dry without it being obvious to everybody why, and so she had just put the sleeping bag, with the wet clothes inside it, into a carrier bag. She would wash them when she got home.
“You okay?” Kevin asked as he climbed into the tent, “All sorted?”
Jessica nodded.
Kevin moved over to Jessica and put his arm around her, “You know you really didn’t have to be scared of telling me, it doesn’t bother me. Does it happen a lot? Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that… You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Jessica said. She had never confided in a friend about her bedwetting problem before, and although it was embarrassing, now Kevin had accepted it she thought talking about it might be a good thing. She had, over the years, attached a lot of negative emotions to the problem. Since the age of five her parents had taken her to countless numbers of doctors and specialists regarding her bedwetting, and they had all said that there was no obvious reason for it. She’d tried every treatment suggested, but all to no avail. And although Jessica’s parents were very supportive about it, and never made Jessica feel that it was her own fault, she still felt that somehow it must be.
When, in her mid-teens, Jessica still hadn’t grown out of the bedwetting, as the doctors had promised she would, Jessica had begun to feel inferior to her peers. This didn’t happen to any of her friends, yet it happened to her, every night. And the bedwetting made it hard for Jessica to make close friends. Whenever she was invited to anything that involved spending a night away from home Jessica had to say no. Her parents were sympathetic to Jessica’s problem, and where possible they would pick her up from friends houses late at night so that she didn’t have to miss out on too much, but Jessica knew that her friends thought her strange for never staying over, and she knew that when she went home she left them free to talk about her. And even if they didn’t gossip about her when she wasn’t there, Jessica had read enough books to know that she was missing out on the best part of a sleepover, the games of truth or dare, the confessions and secrets spilled when the light were off, the bonding sessions which turned good friends into best friends.
It wasn’t until, aged sixteen, she started at the local sixth-form college, and made new friends, that Jessica allowed herself to spend the night away from home. She never allowed herself to fall asleep though; she became a master at keeping herself awake even when everybody else had fallen asleep. This was made even easier when she was introduced to drugs such as Ecstasy and Speed, which ensured that everybody stayed up all night. However, although through not having to miss out on parties, gatherings and sleepovers Jessica no longer felt as if she were missing out, she still felt inferior as compared to her friends. She’d never mentioned it to any of them because she had been convinced that nobody would be able to accept her as a sixteen, seventeen, and now eighteen-year-old bed wetter. But now Kevin had accepted it, and she was finally being offered the opportunity to talk about her problem. As embarrassing as it was, she knew that it would perhaps be better for her to talk to Kevin about it now, rather than to shrug off his questions, and lose the opportunity forever,
“If it’s not okay just say,” Kevin could feel Jessica’s discomfort, “It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have brought it up again.”
“No, it’s fine. I just, I’ve never told anybody before. I’ve never talked about it before. I thought people would hate me if they found out.”
“Don’t be silly, it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t change who you are, no real friends would care about it.”
“You don’t know that, it’s easy for you to say it’s no big deal, you’re not the one waking up in… it doesn’t happen to you every night.” Jessica couldn’t bring herself to say the words ‘wet sheets’ out loud. As long as the two of them continued to refer to the bedwetting as ‘it’ Jessica could still slightly disassociate herself from it, she could still pretend that none of this was quite real.
“Is that why you were in and out of the tent so much on Friday night? So you didn’t fall asleep?”
Jessica nodded.
“It happens every night?”
Jessica nodded again, looking down at her hands. “Pretty much.”
“But… how… you knew this was going to happen? Surely you didn’t think you could stay awake for two nights running?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t think about it that much. You didn’t really give me time to think twice, and I always manage one night fine. I didn’t think it would be that hard.” Explained Jessica.
“Two nights is a long time without sleep, especially here. No one could have stayed awake for all that time, not after using up all of their energy during the day. But anyway, it doesn’t matter now, like I said it’s no big deal and I promise I won’t tell anyone. Now, shall we go and see what everyone else is up to out there?”