She nodded enthusiastically, taking my hand, though not without a sad look back. ‘It’s just an act’, I reminded myself, the image of that man flashing before my eyes once again. Luckily, the school wasn’t too far from there, and, sure enough, there was a playground. Nancy wanted to go straight there, but I made a pit stop at the car to drop off our bags, and to make sure that the man wasn’t following us after all. That must have just been a coincidence… It wasn’t like there was only one person in town with that kind of scar or anything.

“I’m sorry, I think I’m just going crazy,” I told Nancy, sure that she must have been thinking that I was acting almost as oddly as her, and with a lot less reason. I realized I had been squeezing her hand pretty hard, so I let go, which prompted her to start off towards the playground. “There’s something in the air, you know? It just feels like the kind of day when weird stuff would happen.”

I sat down on one of the swings, letting it carry me slowly back and forth, as Nancy clumsily scrambled up the stairs of the smallest of the three slides, giggling happily as she got to the top and propelled herself down. Why couldn’t I be like that? It was so easy for her to just let go of her inhibitions, embrace this super-brief second childhood in ways that I would never have dreamed of.

After a few more trips down the slide, she came over to the swings, sitting herself down on the one next to me, then staring at me. I smiled over at her, trying to show her that I wasn’t mad at her anymore. “Push?” she asked after a few moments.

“Sure,” I shrugged, hopping down from my swing and going behind hers. I gave her a light push, enough to produce a giggle from her. It was easy to get into a nice rhythm, and relaxing, in a strange sort of way. I found myself nearly getting lost in the repetitiveness of it, even as she started to squirm a bit, throwing off the angle of the swing slightly. “You getting cold?” I asked her. “It’s probably about time to be heading back anyway.”

She seemed amenable to that, though she stayed on the swing after I stopped pushing, until it came to a rest. She hopped down, starting to come around the swingset to me, when I noticed a wet spot where she’d been sitting. I glanced over at the other swings curiously, though mostly at the one I’d been on, to be sure I hadn’t gotten anything on the back of my cape when I sat down, but they were all dry.

As she waddled towards me, though, I could see something dripping down the inside of her legs, and it was easy to tell that the diaper cover was definitely wet. It took me a few moments to put two and two together, and even longer to try to bring myself to believe it. “Did you…?” I started to ask.

But it wasn’t like she’d bothered to answer any of my other questions that night. She had that same, blank look on her face, and I could tell that I wasn’t going to do any better this time. So I marched over to her, and pulled up the hem of her dress, expecting that, at last, to shock her out of her role. When it didn’t, I tentatively reached up for the waistband of the diaper cover, which she also didn’t respond to.

“Nancy, I’m going to check your diaper,” I announced, in case she hadn’t gotten my drift. She still gave no response, other than starting to look bored, so I pulled away the front of the cover. Sure enough, the diaper inside was pretty obviously soaked, and from the smell of them, it was from the usual method. “Nancy!” I let the diaper cover snap back into place, dropping the dress and stepping away from her. “What the hell is wrong with you?!”

But, even as I said it, I knew that it wasn’t her fault. Surely she wouldn’t have gone that far, would she? Who would do something like that? Other than, of course, someone who couldn’t help it. Like, for instance, a baby…

“This can’t be happening,” I told myself, suddenly finding myself sitting on one of the swings, head spinning with the sheer impossibility of what I was thinking. “It can’t be…”

Before I could say it enough to convince myself, I saw, from the corner of my eye, movement in the parking lot. Nancy reached out and grabbed my hand. I looked up, breath stopping short as I saw, moving towards us, the man with the scar. “Son of a bitch,” I swore under my breath. I jumped out of the swing, made sure I had a good grip on Nancy, and then I started to run.

The side door of the school was, no surprise, locked tight. I banged on it a couple times, glancing frantically behind me, Nancy squirming and fussing at my side. When I turned back to the small window set into the door, I thought I saw a flash of movement, a janitor perhaps, in a striped shirt, and then the halls were still again, devoid of any help.