Ten-year-old Erin Anderson was overcome with a sudden fear as the contents of her bowels began to spread through her swimsuit.
She desperately tried to hold it back, but it was no use; her body seemed to be mad at her for allowing it to be cold for so long, and thus, it refused to heed her pleas. Not that she had much of a choice in the temperature; she didn’t dare get out of the plastic swimming pool she was dutifully sitting in. Mary would be very upset with her if she was caught out of the pool.
Erin figured her stepmother did this simply so she didn’t have to deal with Erin. At the beginning of the summer, Mary had placed the plastic pool in the back yard, just behind the half wall that the back of the carport provided. At first, Erin had been surprised that Mary would be nice enough to get her a pool, but her opinion changed as Mary began to make her sit outside in the pool for the better part of many days of her summer vacation, generally only allowing her to come inside for meals. All things considered, it wasn’t really too bad of a situation for her to be in, although the hard plastic of the pool wasn’t particularly comfortable to sit on for hours on end. Erin rarely bothered to try to point out that she’d rather not sit in the pool all day, but any time that her body language managed to hint at such an opinion, she would recieve a lecture about how ungrateful she was after Mary had spent all that money to buy her a pool.
School starting had brought some relief; she would only be sent to the pool on weekends, and then only if she didn’t have homework. Unfortunately, as fall began to approach, the weather became less and less appropriate for sitting in water all day, and being forced to sit in the pool led her to shiver more and more frequently.
Such a shiver shook Erin back to reality; she reached a hand down and felt her swimsuit bottom to determine the size of the mass under it. She was going to be in serious trouble when Mary let her back inside. She hadn’t wanted to have an accident!
She’d learned long ago that it was pointless to ask if she could come inside and use the toilet; Mary would always tell her she should have gone before she got back in the pool. For the most part, Erin could make it through the stretch between her meal breaks without needing to urinate, but occasionally, she wouldn’t be able to hold it that long. At first, she simply peed in the pool, but she quickly realized that it was probably a bad idea to do that in water that wasn’t going anywhere until she emptied it out at the end of the day.
Mary had made it known that she would periodically check on Erin from the few house windows that overlooked the pool, and that Erin had better not be out of the pool when Mary checked. Erin realized, though, that she could sit on the grass just outside the pool, urinate through her swimsuit, and get back in the pool in well under a minute; the risk of getting caught was minimal, and she had, in fact, never been caught doing it.
That hadn’t been an option for her today, though; defecation had completely different rules. A bowel movement would take much longer, and would require her to actually pull down the bottoms of her swimsuit, something she was loath to do as her backyard wasn’t private and she could be seen from many of her neighbors’ windows. Anyhow, even if she could do that, she’d leave plenty of evidence of what she did for Mary to see. Feces didn’t just seep into the ground the same way urine did.
As her urge had gotten increasingly desperate, she’d even tried to be let back inside. Mary had never let her in before, but maybe she’d be lenient this time.