Ivy, I could wrap my mind around. As near as I could tell, Ivy was close to me and Catherine’s age, and had gotten a free ride into Beouf’s class for as long as I’d been working there. Zoge must’ve gotten to her young. By this point in her life Ivy had probably been in diapers longer than not, poor thing.
Amy? Five years in captivity is long, but it’s not that long. It’s not “full native long”. Especially without the crazy nonsense and mental conditioning that Amazons are so fond of. The woman that Amy used to be had had a degree in veterinary medicine for goodness sake! On the bus she had the vocabulary of maybe a four year old, the impulse control of maybe a two year old, and insisted that all animals said “rawr!”. The girl couldn’t walk and had no front teeth!
AND SHE WAS HAPPY ABOUT IT!
What? The? Typical?
And for all I knew, she was living next door to me. Catherine and I had run home in the rain over half an hour later when the bus looped back around, our hearts pounding and both of us more than a bit worried that some do-good giant would see two drenched Littles and decide not packing an umbrella was an adoptable offense. It would have been nice, comforting even in a messed up way to know exactly how close a baby crazy Amazon lived to us. (They were all baby crazy though, and that was part of the problem)
Even after pissing victory into the Amazon sized toilet in the master bathroom, even after the shared shower, even after the adrenaline fueled we-just-dodged-a-bullet-sex with my wife, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d heard; what I’d seen with my own two eyes.
Where was the line between a woman a bit older than me crying out for help as her Daddy took her to get changed and another woman a bit younger than me gleefully eating a wad of gum off a bus floor? Had Amy’s Mommy been telling the truth? She seemed to think she was. In many ways, Helena Madra reminded me of Melony Beouf. Just like Mrs Beouf, Amy’s Mommy made an odd distinction between diapered and free Littles, talking to me and Catherine as equals even as she bounced her adopted daughter on her hip. I should have been relieved about that.
But without protections, without titles like “teacher”, and “student” and “coworker”, I just felt naked on that bus. The fact that Mrs Beouf had quietly cultivated her own group of parental disciples to compliment the parents that I’d quietly converted over the years should have given me some satisfaction.
It didn’t.
At all.
I just kept thinking about that “Fankyoo,” I’d received. Had I done that to her? Had I accidentally doomed a fellow Little? Was I responsible; an accomplice to a more subtle form of reconditioning, regression, and absolute mind- numbing? While I was slowly teaching Amazon parents and children that Littles could be every bit as “mature” and “grown-up” as they saw themselves, was I at the same time accidentally teaching less fortunate Littles that they belonged in their playpen prisons?
Was I a Little Helper?
More than that, there was something else that I found deeply troubling. Were Beouf and Zoge right with all that pseudoscience bullshit about Maturosis and Developmental Plateaus? Was there something besides Amazon crazy to what they were doing? Even a tiny bit? Even if they’d drawn completely erroneous conclusions from the data they’d received? Did Littles like Ivy and Amy not succumb to their treatment as much as they wanted and enjoyed it?
I couldn’t accept that.
After Amy and her adopted mother, however, I couldn’t completely wave it away, either.
It consumed me. Even when I wasn’t thinking about it, I was thinking about it.
That’s why I couldn’t sleep. Eyes would close. Body would eventually give in and rest. But mind would never stop.
I sat there with all of these thoughts spinning circles in my head one morning after. I’d been so slow out the door, so sluggish in general, that I’d just finished the breakfast shake that Catherine had given me as I rode into the school parking lot. My stomach was too full and queasy for coffee and the last thing I wanted to do was look Beouf in the eye.