Kim closed the door quietly behind him and stood a moment at the top of the stairs.
Allowing his eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness, a last breath of hot and insufferably humid outside air licked his legs like a dragon’s tongue and flowed into the cool depths of the basement below.
He grabbed for the railing and cautiously slid one bare foot off the edge of the top step and down to the next.
He did not turn on the light.
He did not want anyone to be able to see into the basement from outside.
Or, for that matter, to know that he was down there.
Even though he was alone in the house all day today.
His mother was at work, of course.
His youngest sister, Brittany, was at a friend’s house.
Heather, his other sister, was at the mall with Amanda Clevenger, her constant companion from down the block.
Subdued light from the small casement windows above the laundry area gradually infiltrated the gloom.
This was enough for him to distinguish the main features of the basement.
The basement was unfinished.
It was without interior wall paneling or carpet.
It was used primarily as a laundry room, family warehouse, and a rainy-day playhouse for his two younger sisters.
In the occasional spaces between the storage boxes, and piles of toys, patches of bare cement floor peeked through among the clutter.
A couple of upright four-by-fours ran down the center as supplemental supports.
Unpainted sheet-rock partitioned half its area into two smaller rooms.
One filled by the furnace, the other with its own dim window and used for deep storage.
Kim scanned the laundry area below.
To his right stood a free-standing galvanized utility sink.
This was the size and depth of a small bathtub.
It stood between the washer and an overstuffed laundry hamper.
A massive chest freezer, its frost-clogged interior vast enough to hold an entire side of beef.
Its broad white top used to fold laundry, rumbled and coughed in the corner.
A folding card table, two diminutive chairs and some miniature kitchen appliances were scattered around the cellar.
A threadbare throw rug lay across the room,
There was an old toy box overflowing with broken toys, board games, Barbie dolls in various stages of dress and a profusion of doll accessories.
These toys seemed to squeeze out from under the broken lid and onto the rug.
This all formed the vague boundaries of the play area.
In the corner to Kim’s left were the remains of his parents’ workout room.
A foam exercise mat was draped over a stationary bicycle, and a rowing machine, and a mini-trampoline.
A set of golf clubs were leaned haphazardly onto these items of exercise.
A rack filled with chrome-plated dumbbells in a variety of weights, stood on the right of the cellar.
One of the many once-cherished items Kim’s father had left behind when he had moved out three years before, peered at its double in an antique, free-standing, full-length mirror before which it stood.
Except for the barbells, Kim could never remember which of his parents had purchased which piece of exercise equipment.
However, he clearly recalled that neither of them had really used any of it.
Unpacked moving boxes were stacked against every remaining wall.
The basement was not a very comfortable place but, despite the disorder, it was generally clean, free from bugs.
As well as this it was cool in summer.
It had become Kim’s refuge, and retreat during the past couple of weeks.
As the heat, humidity, and, most significantly, boredom had increased, he had spent more, and more time prowling around in the perpetual deep shade of the basement.
Some of the rejected old stuff, with which the basement was crammed, held a certain fascination for kim
For he was now bored with summer vacation.
At first, he had dragged out some of the old toys, board games, his Little League baseball glove, and fishing tackle,
Each particular item offered a few minutes of nostalgic distraction.
He set up the rowing machine one afternoon and imagined himself sculling across the glassy surface of a river.
He then pulled out a fishing rod and trolled for old dolls and dirty laundry.
He had dusted off his father’s old golf clubs and had taken practice swings at airballs.
These airballs he shot across the area rug into an overturned pot from the lilliputian kitchen.
He bounced on the aerobic trampoline until his hair dripped with sweat.
Another time he moved the dumbbell rack and lifted weights.
Kim flexed his scrawny arms in the mirror as he had seen his father do.
However, the humidity was much more conducive to sloth than exercise.
Although temporarily diverting, none of the stuff in the main room offered much potential for mischief.
In fact, it was ultimately a bit depressing.
This was because he was inseparable from memories of his father.
It was difficult for Kim to suppress his irritation at his dad for the way he had ripped him off this summer.
Kim was supposed to have spent August with his father in California.
However, at the last minute, his dad had apologetically canceled.
It seems that an unexpected emergency had required him to take his new wife on an extended tour of Europe, instead.
His father’s jilting and the fact that most of Kim’s neighborhood friends, especially the Kowalski twins, and Chuck Mansel, were on vacation with their families, were primarily responsible for the boredom that had gnawed away at Kim’s summer
If Kim had not found other amusements in his dim underground sanctuary, he would have already been bored with the basement, and gone back above ground, more lonely than before.
He further explored the darkest corners of the basement.
Kim continued delving into the mountains of collected debris, that was stuffed haphazardly into the worn boxes,
This was until the last uncharted territory.
This lay behind the door to the small storage room next to the furnace room.
Because this room was used strictly for the storage of things for which there was no foreseeable need, it was consistently overlooked and almost forgotten.
The doors to this room always appeared to be closed
Although the small room, was actually kind of a creepy place, Kim headed directly for it, when he reached the bottom of the stairs.
He turned the doorknob carefully as if the room were occupied by someone he should not disturb.
He opened the door just wide enough to slide in sideways.
He quickly closed it behind him, letting go of the latch only after it was shut.
The room was more faintly lit than the main part of the basement.
The light a dirty casement window which was partially obscured on the outside by a juniper shrub.
Rows of packing boxes laden with Christmas decorations, replaced curtains, carpet remnants, and other valuables, clogged one end of the room.
Bookshelves sagging with his father’s abandoned college texts, and a load of dust ran from the door to the other end.
Kim crossed directly to the corner of the room under the greasy window.
However, he discovered a faded blue bedsheet was tented over a baby’s crib.
He hurriedly stripped off the king-sized sheet, hastily wadded it into a bundle, and laid it on top of some boxes.
It was the crib that had finally seduced Kim.
This accounted for his daily clandestine trips into the basement.
It was an impressive piece of furniture, finely crafted and made to last.
It would have been imposing in an adult’s bedroom.
At almost five feet long, two and a half wide, and four feet tall, it would be the magnificent centerpiece of any nursery.
Its grandeur was only slightly dimmed by its grim subterranean surroundings.
It was a sturdy cage of turned, maple-stained spindles on both ends and sides set upon turned 3-inch wood posts.
Its head- and footboards were topped by arched cross-members and plastic teething rails, slightly gnawed, capped the sides.
A vinyl-coated foam crib bumper was decorated with baby animals in pastel colors.
These included a pink bunny, a yellow chick, and a powder-blue kitten.
A vinyl cover that waterproofed the mattress was, in turn, wrapped in a quilted mattress pad.
The cover itself was stained with overlapping yellow and coffee-colored rings.
So much so it could have been a tie-dyed wall hanging from his parents’ hippie days.
Two sealed boxes, labeled “Baby Clothes” and “Baby Stuff” in heavy black marking pen, sat tilted on the mattress.
A blue-and-white high chair lay folded under the crib, with its food tray and a hot-pink plastic potty chair stuffed on top of it.
The crib had been shoved in the small basement storage room years before.
This was with the two boxes filled with all of Brittany’s tiny clothes, and toys,
As well as this, there were other baby implements collected from throughout the house tossed on top.
These had all been promptly forgotten.
The baby items were all in good condition.
Most had been bought new for Brittany during her parents’ affluent, spendthrift phase.
They, therefore, had been expensive.
Kim could understand why they had not been thrown out.
They could have been sold, but his mother seldom got around to organizing a garage sale or running an advertisement in the classifieds.
This partially explained the vast accumulation of junk stashed in the basement.
His mother was obviously loathed to part with the items left by his father.
Even though it seemed to Kim about, as likely that Brittany would sleep in her crib again, as that his dad would remember his stuff, let alone return for it.
Anyway, the crib and its contents were out of sight and, therefore, out of mind,
This was probably unless or until the family packed to move again.
On each trip to the basement, Kim now came better prepared
However, even after having repeated the same ritual for each of the past four days, his heart still thumped so loudly.
He wondered whether he would be able to hear if anyone was coming down the stairs.
He could not explain the almost mystical affect the baby’s bed had on him.
He knew it was peculiar.
However, he was powerless to resist.
He was immersed in his findings, and totally unable to stop himself.
Kim lowered the drop side of the crib to the height of the bumper pad.
He removed the boxes and set them on the floor next to one of the rows of book boxes.
With a magician’s flare, he pulled a dish towel of white terry cloth from the front of his shorts.
A terry cloth he had secreted while in the kitchen on his way to the basement.
After wriggling his hand around in the other pocket amidst a metallic jangling as if of coins, he laid two large safety pins in the outstretched palm of his other hand.
Safety pins big enough to serve as diaper pins were not common household items.
Kim had spent most of the morning searching for these items.
He found them in a sewing kit next to the medicine cabinet.
The fact that they were not a matched pair and that one was, in fact, a bit larger than the other did not diminish Kim’s exhilaration.
Kim spread the dishtowel in the center of the mattress like a diaper.
He arranged the pins alongside,
Holding his breath, he pulled his tee-shirt over his head and threw it on top of the boxes.
He then unzipped his cut-offs and stepped out of them.
He then climbed over the lowered rail into the crib.
The vinyl of the mattress cover squeaked against his skin and the metal springs groaned under his weight.
He depressed the spring latches at each end of the drop side.
He raised them until the teething rail came level with the tall headboard.
Turning carefully on his knees in the narrow crib to a chorus of crunching vinyl and squealing springs, Kim lowered himself onto the coarse white fabric of the dishtowel.
Kim had always hated the fact that he was small for his age.
However, his puniness had proven to be the key that had gained him admission to his underground fantasy world.
Although he would begin his sophomore year of high school next month, he was a few inches shy of five feet tall.
With his legs bending slightly at the knees, he would fit easily into the crib.
He was thin of waist and limb, but his unmuscled torso seemed plump with baby fat.
He had initially panicked when he lowered himself onto the mattress and the springs sagged and creaked, thinking the crib might collapse, but it held his ninety-eight pounds.
Kim’s frail chest was bald and downy hair glowed like a pale aura on his legs.
His hips were narrow to the point that his butt seemed thin, almost bony.
His facial features were as delicate and his cheeks as smooth as a girl’s.
His limp brown hair, which strung over his ears, and almost down to his shoulders, did not detract from his effeminate aspect.
Kim opened the smaller safety pin and held it in his mouth.
He wiggled into position on the dishtowel and pulled the front half up firmly between his thighs.
He drew in his stomach, pressed his hard-on against his belly, and fastened the material together, with the back corner over the front on his left side.
He repeated the same procedure with the other pin and, with some effort, managed to attach the right corners of the towel snugly around his hips.
Although the towel was barely wide enough to reach around his waist, its excess length hung limply halfway to his knees.
Securely diapered and completely captive in his crib, his eyes closed, Kim was a picture of contentment.
He actually looked like an outsized baby at nap time.
His peaceful expression explained Kim’s intense enjoyment of the crib better than he could have in words.
He intended to play in the crib like this for an hour or so, as had become his habit.
Convinced he had nothing better to do for the day, Kim rolled onto his knees and elbows, the improvised diaper sagging loosely between his legs, and lowered himself to a prone position, his legs slightly askew.
He pressed his face into the stained quilting of the mattress pad, his damp breath releasing an intoxicatingly pungent vapor of sour milk and stale pee.
As he inhaled deeply, Kim whimpered softly and crushed himself provocatively against the mattress, in a symphony of sticking plastic and squeaking springs.
Kim was not sure how long he had laid there enjoying the blissful solitude of the basement, but he thought that it could only have been a few minutes.
He opened his eyes from darkness to gloom, which had grown thicker as the day became overcast.
The light was triple-filtered through the near opacity of cloud, juniper bush, and filthy window.
He was drowsy and disoriented.
He was bathed in a film of sweat.
This seemed to condense on him in the humidity, like beads of water on a glass of iced tea.
His hair was lightly tacked to his forehead, and his skin was glued to the mattress pad at every point of damp contact.
He sat up too quickly and banged his ankle soundly on the sidebars.
As he suddenly realized with a twinge of guilt, and embarrassment that he was lying in the crib with a dish towel pinned on as a diaper, voices from beyond the room gradually invaded his consciousness.
The diminishing quiet was then pierced by the sound of high-pitched giggling as the basement door opened.
As quick as that happened, it was rent by the thunder of its slamming closed.
A bright triangle of electric light pooled under the door into the small room as the stairs quivered under a clatter of footfalls.
Kim froze in fear and alarm, balanced precariously in a half-sitting position,
his right hand gripping the plastic teething rail of the drop side.
He had really screwed up – Heather was home!
The other voice was loud, shrill, demanding, typically bitchy, had to be Amanda’s!
Kim glanced around himself in sheer terror.
He could not be found by Heather, and Mandy sitting in a crib wearing a diaper!
Rivulets of sweat ran past Kim’s ears, and down his blanching cheeks as he strained to keep still.
If he were not in the crib, he might be able to hide, either behind some of the boxes or under the crib itself.
If he could only reach his clothes on the floor, he might minimize the devastating humiliation by at least getting dressed.
His slightest movement, however, made the plastic of the mattress pad crackle loudly as he pealed free, with the springs scream harshly as his shifting weight ground metal on metal.
“Oh my God oh my God,” he thought,
“This can’t be happening!”
He resigned himself to the fact that he was trapped.
His only chance was to hope they would go away.
Kim sat trembling and listening, over the wind-tunnel noise of his stricken breathing and the roar of his racing heart, as Heather, and Mandy hefted the heavy lid of the chest freezer in the next room.
Both of them were chattering like excited squirrels.
He had enough trouble deciphering the giggle-laden idiom in which the girls communicated under the best circumstances.
In his present condition, it was all he could do to make out an occasional word.
Nevertheless, he thought they mentioned popsicles.
It sounded as if Heather were shoveling through the freezer in search of some.
Of all his sister’s friends, Mandy was not only undeniably the cutest, but she was also the most annoying and intimidating.
Kim figured that, like most kids he knew.
Mandy’s worst traits could be fairly blamed on negligent parents.
This meant absentee parents, single parents, and step-parents.
Like Kim, Mandy had one of each.
Mandy claimed she never saw her father anymore because of his second wife.
The fact was, she could not refer as her stepmother without puking.
Her stepmother was an evil bitch, and she hated her.
Mandy assured everyone that her step-mother held her in equal esteem, which Kim considered being a point in the step-mother’s favor.
Mandy saw little enough of her mother.
She regarded her mom, whom she called “Carol” both to others and to her face, more as a peer than a parent.
This seemed to reinforce Carol’s conviction that she was staying young and hip enough to truly understand, and relate to her teenage daughter,
With this in mind, Carol was proving her a successful mother according to some distorted, baby-boom generation ideal of parenthood.
Preoccupied with advancing her career, selling insurance, and salvaging some romance while she was still a young 35, and unquestionably attractive, Carol left Mandy to do pretty much as she pleased.
Mandy was spoiled rotten and presumed that she would never be denied anything she wanted.
She had learned at an early age that any resistance by an adult, especially an adult male, could be overcome by coquettish entreaties and she became a habitual flirt and shameless manipulator.
On the rare occasions when she did not get her way, Mandy launched counterattacks more brutal, inflicted wounds crueler, and exacted retribution more severe by several degrees of magnitude than the circumstances could possibly warrant.
Her regal bearing and condescending manner may have simply been defenses to shield her many insecurities, but that did not make them any more endearing.
Not only was she constantly irritating, but she seemed to know it and, frequently, to enjoy it.
In short, Mandy could be a total bitch.
Heather had earned a reputation for being as practical, level-headed, and ambitious.
Kim was a shiftless daydreamer, and Kim would have expected her to exercise better judgment than to hang out with the likes of Mandy.
Nevertheless, for reasons that would probably make sense only to teenaged girls, Heather and Mandy had become instantly inseparable from the day they met.
Kim had always suspected that Heather and, to some extent, Brittany, made it their goal in life to drive him crazy, but Kim could handle their taunts and foolishness and they had never fully succeeded.
Since Mandy had become a regular visitor, however, Kim had been going absolutely nuts.
Kim’s muscles were aching from the effort of posing like a statue, his head felt ready to burst with the mounting tension and anxiety, and, in his desperation, he finally committed a severe tactical error.
While the girls seemed to be on the opposite side of the basement from the small room, he decided to seize the opportunity and grab for his clothes.
He rose up on his knees, the mattress creaking and the springs wheezing, and encumbered by the thick mat of terry cloth between his thighs, waddled to the side of the crib.
He leaned over the rail and, as he reached for his tee-shirt on the nearest box, he rested his weight briefly on the crib rail.
It was immediately obvious that the spring-locks had not fully latched into the corresponding notches in the uprights.
The drop-side of the crib slipped down suddenly, no more than an inch, but with a screech like a locomotive locking its air-brakes, until the spring-locks on either end shot into the next set of notches with the clap of a steel-jaw trap slamming shut.
There was no question about it now “ he was dead!
The girls in the next room fell briefly silent,
then Kim could clearly hear the doorknob turning as Mandy haughtily demanded,
“What’s in here, anyway?”
Kim held his breath again and wished as hard as he had ever wished for anything that the girls would suddenly leave,
that the door would become stuck, that he would disappear into another dimension,
that nuclear war would be declared, that a tornado would destroy the town,
that he would die before the door opened. Unfortunately,
it was already too late – Mandy stood silhouetted in the open doorway.
Kim stared at Mandy like a fawn in the headlights of a Mac truck, too stunned to move.
He would be the first to admit that Mandy was a total fox,
which may have been what bothered Kim the most about her. She was about as tall as Kim,
but slender and supple as willow,
which created an illusion of height.
She wore bright red shorts.
They made her slim legs seem impossibly long.
Her long, full hair was bleached a few shades lighter than her sandy eyebrows
Her hair did not seem so much to fall from her head as to rise up from behind her shoulders,
contributing to the wild look that she so carefully cultivated.
The back-lighting set it aglow like a blonde cumulonimbus cloud billowing on the horizon at sunset.
Mandy had devoted careful attention to her striking features.
She had done so ever since she had discovered how to employ her physical charms to get what she wanted, which had probably been shortly after her birth.
The pouty curves of her lips were glossed to a berry-stained vermilion.
Her teeth had been orthodontically re-aligned into perfect white rows transected by the single chrome wire of her retainer.
The prominence of her cheekbones was accentuated by a translucent blush.
A flock of tiny freckles scattered across the bridge of her slightly upturned nose as if flushed from hiding by a predator.
She had plucked her eyebrows into elegant little punctuation marks.
Her naturally long eyelashes were dense with mascara.
Her eyelids bore the slightest smudges of gray as if she had rubbed the sleep from them after handling newsprint.
Mandy insisted that her eyes were blue, but they had always looked dark green to Kim, as hard and luminous as polished malachite.
Mandy flicked on the light in the small room but did not move.
Her jaw slack and her eyes as big as jade poker chips, transfixed by the bizarre tableau she had stumbled onto.
Her face was as blank as a nudist’s laundry list as she murmured in a low voice hollow with disbelief,
“Oh my God.”
Across the basement, Heather extricated herself from the freezer and looked quickly toward Mandy.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Oh my God!” Mandy exclaimed more loudly. “It’s your brother!”
Kim recoiled to the farthest corner of the crib from the door, where he huddled with his arms clutched to his chest like a modest girl caught topless.
“Uh, I thought you guys were at the mall,” he stammered, not knowing what else to do or say.
Mandy continued to gape at him as Heather slammed the freezer lid and crossed the basement to gawk at the spectacle.
With an expression that amply demonstrated that she did not yet believe, let alone comprehend, the ridiculous scene, Heather replied absently, in a toneless emotional than the voice that gives the correct time on the telephone,
“Oh, we, ah, got bored.”
The spell was suddenly broken and as shock transformed into recognition, a grin slid across Mandy’s face and onto Heather’s like sunshine in the wake of a fleeing cloud shadow.
As Mandy’s gaze locked onto Kim’s eyes, which were wild with fear, Heather scanned around the room and asked,
“And just what have you been doing?”
Mandy briefly tried to hold back the laughter that was obvious in her eyes, then began to giggle behind the hand she had slapped over her widening smile.
Finally grasping the essence of Kim’s predicament, she answered for him.
“It looks like Baby has been taking a nap,” she giggled.
Heather now glared at Kim.
“Are you wearing diapers? Why were all the lights off? And what are you doing in the crib?”
“I was just g-goofing around,” Kim stuttered.
“I was just seeing what it’s like.”
Without listening to Kim’s lame response, her look quickly shifted from inquisitive to accusatory as Heather stated with finality,
“I’m going to tell Mom!”
Kim cringed against the headboard of the crib as if he hoped he would be morphed to a liquid state and flow through the bars.
He was utterly shit-faced with panic and dread looking, appropriately, like a trapped mouse.
He tried desperately to think of something to say.
“No, wait, please Heather,” he mumbled before the words choked in his throat and tears welled in his fear-stricken eyes.
Mandy lowered her hand from her mouth, revealing a smirk that was even more sinister than usual.
She cupped her chin in her palm in what she believed would look like a pensive attitude.
“The poor baby is gonna start crying,” she said, turning to Heather, her voice oozing with feigned sympathy.
Then, in a conspiratorial tone, she said to Heather,
“Let’s go out here and talk a minute.”
The girls exchanged a knowing look and started out the door.
Mandy paused and with an exaggerated leer said to Kim,
“You stay here and be a good baby, okay?
In fact,” she continued as she bent over beside the crib, peachy cheeks peeking at him from beneath her shorts and her boobs bouncing under her tank top like handballs,
“we’ll just take your clothes with us to be sure.”
She plucked his shorts and briefs from the floor,
Heather grabbed his tee-shirt and the girls shut the door behind them.
Kim toddled across the crib on his knees to a cacophony of crunching plastic and howling springs and fumbled with the latches to the crib’s drop side.
His vision jumped with each hammer of his pulse like the jittery picture broadcast by a video camera sitting on a drumhead.
He was gulping air through his mouth, panting loudly, his mind echoing a chorus of remonstrations.
The chemical by-products of his passing adrenalin rush were bursting from his pores as beads of sweat.
This caused his hands to shake so violently that it took three attempts before he successfully manipulated the spring latches, and lowered the side of the crib.
As his feet swung down to the concrete floor, he was hyperventilating and becoming nauseous.
He staggered and almost tripped over one of the boxes.
He leaned on the crib for balance and waited for his giddiness to subside.
He managed to reassert his will enough to regain his focus and a portion of his wits.
He urgently groped for an idea that would give him some hope of controlling this disastrous situation before it hurtled past in its own accumulating momentum.
He surveyed the room while frantically evaluating the slim possibility of escape.
He might burst through the door and tear past the girls and up the stairs, or boost himself on boxes and try the casement window.
The absence of his clothing made a flight through the neighborhood impractical, however, and the girls could still report him to his mother.
He briefly debated whether it would be less embarrassing to flee naked or in the floppy, makeshift diaper,
He then quickly unhooked the pins and unfastened the dish towel.
He wrapped it around his waist lengthwise, as if he were exiting the shower, but he had to pull the small towel tight to overlap its ends.
Kim looked like he was wearing one of Mandy’s mouth-wateringly skimpy stretch mini-skirts.
He was again pondering whether he might not have appeared less ridiculous in the diaper than a tube skirt.
The girls were whispering the last details of some plan.
As they nodded and exchanged a quick series of “OK’s”, they struggled to squelch their laughter.
As they turned their attention back to Kim, however, their suppressed giggles stampeded into hysterics.
“God, Kim,” Heather blurted between chuckles, “You are really weird!
First, you’re wearing a diaper and now you’re in a mini-skirt.
It’s just too weird!”
Mandy’s eyes sparkled with derision
However, her voice was husky, breathy.
“Actually, he might be kinda cute as a girl, but he sorta sticks out in the wrong place.”
She slowly tilted her head downwards to dramatize the lowering of her gaze to Kim’s terry-covering.
“I think I like him better as a baby, though.”
Kim fidgeted nervously, holding the towel together with his left hand.
“Uh, look girls, ” he babbled, “I can explain….”
Mandy interrupted him.
“Don’t worry, Kim,” she said, taunting him again with phony concern.
“Heather decided not to tell on you, didn’t you, Heather?” She gave Heather a sly look from the corners of her eyes.
“At least she won’t if you’re a good boy and do exactly as we say.”
Kim’s eyebrows arched quizzically and he drew one corner of his mouth to the side in his best imitation of a defiant sneer.
He sensed his arrival at a pivotal juncture and concluded that he must act now to take command of the situation.
For if he does not take command now he risks hopeless entanglement, in the web of sticky circumstances being woven around him.
He took a deep breath and two steps toward the door.
“Nice try, you guys,” he said with all the calm authority he could muster,
“But I don’t think so…”
As Kim reached the door, Mandy and Heather moved to the threshold and stood side-by-side, blocking his exit.
Kim hesitated, then launched himself between the female barricades like a running back slashing through the line for daylight.
As he did so his hand still clutched the towel as if he were carrying a football on his hip.
Kim was stopped abruptly, however, his momentum crushed as though he were the target of a head-on flying tackle by some kamikaze linebacker.
Mandy leaned in close to Kim and though her eyes still sparkled with mirth, her voice had become menacing.
“You’re not going anywhere yet, Baby,” she advised with a squeeze of her hand for emphasis.
Heather stepped to one side and with an air of nonchalance said,
“The hell with him, Mandy. Let him go.”
The trepidation began to drain from Kim’s shell-shocked expression.
He should have expected Mandy to pull some power play, but he could count on steady, reliable Heather to defuse the confrontation.
Kim offered a weak smile of relief to Heather, who continued,
“If he would rather have to explain to Mom and,” she added with the confidence of an auction buyer who knows she cannot be out-bid, “Dad and the shrink they’ll send him to why he hides in the basement wearing diapers, that’s fine.
Who knows? Maybe it will even get around school that Kim’s a pervert.”
Kim searched Heather’s face for clues to the degree of her sincerity.
“That’s a bunch of tosh!” he scoffed. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Just try me!” she replied, her eyes narrowed to a fierce glare.
As Heather spit her venomous threats in his face, Kim felt his chances of bluffing his way out of this mess slipping away like beads of quicksilver.
Apparently, he could not count on Heather, after all.
He was less disappointed, however, than mystified.
As he read the brazen challenge written on one girl’s face, then the other’s, he realized that he must have underestimated the extent of Mandy’s unwholesome influence over Heather.
Heather was obviously an enthusiastic participant in this plot against him, if not the main instigator.
He stared at Heather, knowing he was beaten.
Because of her proximity in age, Heather had always waged an intense competition with Kim in practically every endeavor.
Kim frequently lost these contests, in part because he was oblivious to the rivalry.
As the eldest child and the only son, it had seldom been necessary for Kim to exert any effort to impress his parents or other authority figures.
He was similar to Mandy, in fact, in presuming that a certain amount of respect and privilege was his due and it never occurred to him that they might have to be earned.
Heather played the tortoise to Kim’s hare and overcame the natural bias that favored Kim by sheer force of will.
She had become the “brains” of not only the family but of her school, the intellectual all-star and recipient of every variety of academic award, from perfect attendance to Honor Roll.
She was also immensely popular with both her peers and those in authority.
In her freshman year in high school, she had served as class president,
She was elected to the student council,
She was the workhorse of the homecoming dance committee,
She swam the anchor leg of the medley relay on the girl’s swim team,
She was a photographer for the yearbook,
She led the Earth Day litter clean-up, and finally, she made the cheer squad.
Last winter, she had even volunteered to read newspapers to the elderly at a local rest home, despite Kim’s sarcastic assurance that she already had a lock on the Nobel Peace Prize without more high-profile altruism.
Heather was about as tall as Mandy and a bit shorter than Kim.
Her appearance was as conservative as adults would expect for a serious, intelligent young lady.
The outsized lenses of her designer eyeglasses magnified glints of light that played in her brown eyes and gave her an owlish look that perfectly complemented her intellectual demeanor.
She wore her long, straight brown hair pulled back tightly behind her head in a ponytail, exposing a broad expanse of the forehead from which a few blackheads and blemishes rose like remote islands in a calm sea.
Heather’s figure was not so lean as Mandy’s and she had a less graceful carriage.
She looked athletic and solid,
The swimming of countless laps having built up her shoulders until they were as broad as Kim’s and her arms until they were bigger than his skinny limbs.
The taxi-yellow of her shorts, which were a shade longer than Mandy’s, offset the rich tan of her sculpted and well-toned legs.
Although Kim knew that he should be uncomfortable evaluating the appeal of his sister and usually was,
he could not avoid noticing that her cheerleader’s thighs were crowned by a gently rolling rear that could have been drawn with a French curve.
Heather shared the same delicate facial features as her brother – narrow smile, generic nose, thin eyebrows, fair complexion, dimpled chin and raised cheekbones _ all discreetly accented with a slight application of cosmetics.
The siblings so much resembled one another, in fact, that except for Heather’s glasses and hairstyle, Kim could have been looking in a mirror as he tried to measure the strength of her resolve.
Through gritted teeth, her disgust and impatience manifest in her strangled tone, she asked, “Well?”
Kim’s face was contorted with frustration as he finally blinked, broke eye contact with her, and looked at the floor, acknowledging defeat.
“Yeah, okay, fine,” he growled. “Whatever.”
Mandy’s expression softened to a comforting, maternal smile as she relaxed her grip on Kim.
“There, now, that’s a good boy.”
She laid her other hand on Kim’s shoulder and with light pressure steered him toward the crib.
“We thought you would be because all we want is for everybody to have fun.
So sit and relax,” she said, nudging him down onto the edge of the mattress.
Kim sat with the towel still wrapped tightly around him and pressed his knees together to impede the girls’ view.
Packing as much tedium into his voice as possible, he asked, “So what are we going to do?”
Mandy stood back a few paces near the center of the room.
“Well, since you wanted to see what it’s like to be a baby, we thought we would show you.
It’s been pretty boring around here and we all need a new game to liven things up.”
Kim maintained the dull inflection that implied he might find it more interesting to watch The Weather Channel on TV for a few hours.
“So you want me to play house with you, is that it?”
“Sort of,” she replied with a lilt that told Kim there was more to it.
Mandy’s attitude performed another quick change and, as she turned toward Heather, her manner became businesslike.
“Are these the boxes you meant?” she asked, extending one running shoe toward the boxes on the floor with a chorus-line flick of her knee.
Heather rotated the larger box until the label faced her.
“Yeah, I’m sure they are,” she replied.
“When the crib and all was put in storage, I remember we packed all of Brittany’s baby stuff into a couple of boxes.
This one that says ‘Baby Clothes’ should have some cloth diapers and stuff. Mom was environmentally conscious in those days and tried not to clog landfills with Pampers.”
Heather bent over the box and ran her fingers along the top edges in search of a seam in the clear tape with which it was sealed.
Mandy knelt beside her as Heather ripped open the top panels.
The girls rummaged around in the box.
Then Mandy commented, “Yeah, there’s a ton of great stuff here.
Let’s take it into the other room.”
Their attention returned to Kim sitting glumly on the crib.
“What should we do with Baby Kim to keep him out of trouble?” Mandy asked.
Heather noticed the high chair stashed under the crib, and said,
“I think I have the perfect solution.”
Mandy took Kim by his arm and he docilely allowed himself to be led to the opposite end of the small room.
Heather pulled the chair from under the crib and carried it into the main room of the basement.
Heather unfolded the high chair.
The chair was a standard Fischer-Price model with tubular chrome legs,
The arms and frame of white molded plastic,
The seat cushions of royal blue vinyl speckled with a white tulip pattern.
This set it on the rug in the middle of the play area.
The tall back of the chair was about three and a half feet off the floor.
It came level with Heather’s chest.
She unbuckled and adjusted the white web belts that encircled the occupant’s waist.
The belts were connected through a loop to a similar holding strap.
Meanwhile, Mandy located a white plastic footrest and the wide eating tray under the crib and dragged them over to the high chair.
Heather wiped the white plastic clean with a rag from the laundry hamper.
She then snapped the footrest to the metal bar that swung between the front legs of the chair and leaned the tray against its skinny legs.
“OK, Kimmie,” Mandy cooed in infantile articulations as she patted the seat of the high chair.
“Come over here and we’ll put the baby in his high chair.”
She smiled wickedly at him.
Kim was listless, resigned to his helpless condition, grasping the towel at his waist as if it offered the last grip on sanity.
He shuffled toward Mandy and stood contemplating the chair.
It looked spindly and un sturdy, and the seat seemed too narrow for even his slim hips, the arms set just over a foot apart.
“There’s no way I can fit in that seat,” he stammered.
“And besides, it won’t hold me. It’ll break.”
Mandy suddenly grabbed Kim’s terry-covered ass and quickly ripped the small towel away and pulled it out of Kim’s hand.
Before the fact that he was totally exposed could even register in Kim’s confused mind, he heard a loud smack and felt the hot sting of Mandy’s hand slapping his bottom.
With gritted teeth, she said fiercely, “If Baby doesn’t behave, he will get a very hard spanking.”
Kim was so stunned by both the fact of the blow and its force
Mandy seized one arm and wrenched it painfully up his back toward his shoulder blades, forcing Kim to bend over with a whimper.
Mandy was not only meaner but stronger than he thought.
“Now, sit down!” she commanded.
Steering him by his twisted arm, Mandy turned Kim around and pushed him down onto the seat of the high chair.
The plastic arms hugged his hips, but the seat offered ample room for his narrow ass and the legs supported his weight easily, barely creaking as his feet lifted off the floor.
As she buckled the straps around Kim’s waist and pulled them taut, the crotch strap pulled the towel up his thighs.
Mandy grabbed the large tray and, with exaggerated cheerfulness, said,
“That’s a good baby. See how easy it is when Baby behaves?”
She then lined up the runners on the underside of the tray with the arms of the chair and thrust it none too gently toward Kim, pinning him against the back of the seat.
He laid his arms across the tray and his dangling feet sought the perch of the footrest.
“This is ridiculous, you guys,” Kim meekly protested,
In response, the girls just stood before him and giggled baby-talk comments about their trapped and blushing toddler.
Kim felt like the prize specimen in a butterfly collection.
“Come on,” he pleaded. “This is really uncomfortable and really embarrassing.
Somebody could come down here or look in the windows.”
Heather patted him on the head as she and Mandy went back to the small room, which added to his humiliation, and replied,
“Be nice, Kimmie; we’re just getting started,” which only heightened his trepidation.
The girls returned and set the two boxes from the crib on the carpet next to Kim.
A faint odor of mothballs wafted from the armloads of material the girls dug from the open box.
They were back to their usual excited banter as they withdrew an item, held it up for display, passed it back and forth, and commented how cute or adorable it was.
Kim stared dumbly at the floor, waiting.
Heather spread a flannel sheet depicting pink teddy bears holding pastel-hued balloons over the wide white surface of the chest freezer.
Mandy began to arrange their nursery supplies on the nearby card table.
They found two more sets of crib sheets,
cloth diapers in several sizes and styles,
waterproof pants of opaque plastic,
training pants of vinyl-backed terry,
bibs,
dinky formal dresses,
rompers,
ruffled rhumba panties,
a sunbonnet,
a pink satin quilt and tiny matching pillow,
booties,
footed flannel sleepers,
nighties,
and piles of other infant apparel.
They quickly emptied the other box, which clanked and clattered with baby bottles and dishes, a bathing basin, teething rings, mobiles, rattles, and a baby_shower’s worth of other toys and accessories, which they also arrayed on the table.
Heather then tossed the pink baby pillow onto the blanketed chest freezer as Mandy spread a cloth Curity diaper across its surface.
“I think these will fit fine,” she told Heather as she carefully matched the corners of another cloth diaper to those of the first, creating a single, thick, multi-layered diaper.
Heather bounded up the stairs.
“I’ll be back in a sec with some baby powder and stuff,” she called over her shoulder.
Mandy smiled malevolently at Kim, who remained pilloried in the high chair.
“This is going to be so much fun!” she promised with the anticipation of an executioner at a sentencing hearing.
Kim stared glumly down at the plastic tray that pinned him to the seat of the high chair, as inanimate as one of the many other misfit objects condemned to the basement.
He was hoping he might be as quickly discarded and forgotten as they had.
Mandy was uncharacteristically quiet as she busied herself preparing Kim’s diaper.
She crossed to the box of baby clothes, retrieved a small pre-fold baby diaper, and neatly arranged it in the center of the larger, flat Curity diapers she had spread on the freezer.
She then covered it with yet another of the flat diapers.
Heather soon returned with a canister of baby powder from her mother’s bathroom.
She set the baby powder beside the waiting diaper on the freezer-top changing table.
Heather then went on to inspect Mandy’s handiwork.
“I put lots of padding in this for extra absorbency,” Mandy explained as she smoothed the wrinkles from the finished product.
“I never changed such a big baby before,
Do you remember how we used to babysit that dumb Johnston kid
He was the one who could soak through two toddler-sized disposables?
I figured I’d better make it plenty thick for Kim.”
“Good idea,” Heather agreed.
She patted the small mattress of a diaper with approval.
Then turning to Kim, Heather said,
“Well, Kimmie, we’re all set.
Now you get to find out what it’s like to wear a real diaper.”
Kim remained catatonic as Mandy slid the tray from the high chair and laid it against the rear legs.
“Changing time, Baby Kim,” she sung cheerfully.
She unbuckled the safety belt and released the strap that gnawed at Kim’s lower regions.
“Come on, get up, Baby,” she coaxed.
Mandy stood directly before the high chair,
hand on hip,
towering over the listless boy cringing in the seat.
“Baby’s going to trade this silly old towel for a nice clean diaper right now!” she said impatiently.
She yanked at the dishtowel that was still wrapped around Kim’s waist.
A last pocket of resistance bubbled up through the defeat and apathy that entranced Kim
Kim held fast to the towel with both hands.
“No way, Mandy,” he protested.
“I’m not about to walk around like this in front of you guys!”
Mandy’s calculated kindness dissipated in a flicker of annoyance.
she tried in vain to persuade the reluctant baby.
“Look, Kim, we’ve got tons of babysitting experience.
You’re no different.”
Kim had been pushed as far as he would go.
“Not a chance, Mandy,” he replied.
“I’d rather be ratted out to Mom than walk around like this for you.”
Kim looked Mandy in the eye and started to rise from the chair.
“Game over,” he stated conclusively.
“Go ahead and tell on me.
I’m outta here.”
Mandy’s strained smile quickly reverted to her more familiar but more fearsome scowl.
She planted a hand firmly on each arm of the little chair,
She leaned to within inches of Kim’s face and glared furiously at him.
“I thought you understood that you will do everything we tell you, Baby.”
She shot the words at him like machine gun rounds.
“Babies do not talk back!
Babies do as they’re told!”
Kim could no longer hold her stare.
As he lowered his eyes, in sudden fury Mandy pinched his face between her thumb and fingers.
She forcefully jerked his head around to meet her stone-cold countenance.
“You drop that towel now,” she growled,
“And get yourself over to that changing table!”
She squeezed Kim’s mouth into a painful oval,
her fingers pressed deeply into his cheeks, and shook his head back and forth.
“Do you understand me? you little brat”, she screamed.
Kim tried to blink away the welling tears of frustration that again threatened to betray him.
He desperately sought a glimpse of Heather in the farthest corner of his vision.
“Heather, please,” he sobbed through lips still compressed by Mandy’s grip.
“This is too much,
it’s going too far.”
With a gesture of complete disgust, Mandy suddenly pushed Kim’s head back, releasing his cheeks from the vise of her fingers, and cocked her open-palmed hand above Kim’s face.
As Kim cowered from the anticipated slap, Heather finally intervened and gently laid her hand on Mandy’s raised arm.
“Come on, Mandy, he’s right.
Making him wear diapers is one thing,
but to make him go-round with nothing is…well…too nasty or something.
Besides,” she added,
“I don’t really want to see my brother in that way.
Mandy now aimed her temper at Heather,
“Well, maybe I do!”, she shouted
The pink glow in her cheeks, inflamed by her tantrum, deepened a shade as she realized too late how that sounded.
As both Kim and Heather stared at Mandy, she looked away in embarrassment, then hastily stammered,
“I mean, uh, how can you diaper a baby if it’s dressed?
It’s just stupid.”
Always the diplomat, Heather put an arm around Mandy’s shoulders.
“It’s okay, Mandy, we’ll work something out,” she said in a calming voice.
Then with a sly grin,
she added,
“Besides, Kim’s skinny butt is nothing to look at anyway.”
Simultaneously and with an equal measure of incredulity, Mandy asked,
“How would you know?”
Then with a flash of recognition, Kim remembered the cabin his Dad had rented last summer.
He remembered the bathroom that he and Heather had shared, which adjoined each of their bedrooms.
So the noises he had heard from Heather’s room while he used the bathroom had been Heather spying on him!
He only hoped that she had not figured out that he had also taken every opportunity to peek under his door at her.
It was Heather’s turn to become momentarily flustered before dismissing the subject with an absent “never mind” and a wave of her hand.
Regaining her poise, she said,
“Look, I’ve got an idea.
Kim, you get up on the freezer with the towel around you,
pull the diaper up over the towel, and then pull the towel out,” she ordered.
“That way, you can stay covered the whole time.
Mandy, go pick out some cute diaper pins.”
Heather smiled at each of the others in turn to solidify the consensus,
then with a cheerleader’s zeal chanted, “Okay, let’s go!”
As Mandy went to the card table and began sorting through the various accessories the girls had excavated from the boxes,
Kim cautiously approached the freezer, gripping the towel tightly with his left hand.
He boosted himself with his free hand,
sat on the edge of the freezer,
then as the thin sheet metal buckled and popped under his shifting weight, awkwardly scooted his behind across the blanket,
He elevated it a few inches,
Then plopped it down in the middle of the diaper.
He laid back,
spread his legs beneath the cover of the towel,
Then pulled the front of the diaper up.
Heather held out her hand and demanded,
“Okay, now give me the towel.”
Kim wiggled around under the diaper and sheepishly produced the towel, which Heather tossed into the laundry hamper.
She handed the baby powder to Kim and said,
“Here. Put some of this on.
We won’t peek,” she added, as she sauntered over to join Mandy at the card table.
Kim’s mood was rapidly changing from apprehension to titillation, from anguish to elation.
He assumed the girls correctly suspected that he had failed to take advantage of his several opportunities to bail out.
Kim decided to cut his losses
Secretly a part of him, at least, wanted to play this game.
After all, despite the embarrassment of having been maneuvered into this situation by Heather and Mandy,
Kim had to admit that he was getting what he had yearned for
a chance to wear a real diaper.
He twisted open the top of the baby powder,
verified that the girls were still busy at the card table,
then lifted the front of the diaper and sprinkled a dusting of powder over his lower regions.
The gentle touch of the powder settling softly on him sent Kim’s imagination raging,
while the distinctive perfume of the powder and its indelible association with babyhood unleashed a flood of conflicting memories and emotions.
In particular, he recalled an experience that was among his earliest independent memories,
one that no adult had since mentioned
one that he could, therefore, be certain was a true memory and not someone else’s story to which he had added mental images.
Kim gazed at Heather, who appeared to be tying her shoes beside the card table,
He thought on the irony that she had been indirectly responsible for his recent activities in the basement.
When Kim was younger his parents had undertaken the traumatic and difficult task of toilet training him.
Kim now had some appreciation for the problems of having a baby in diapers.
Kim could understand why his parents had been anxious for him to graduate to using the toilet,
Kim was convinced that they had rushed him into the process before he was emotionally ready.
For many trying weeks, Kim continued to have regular accidents.
For these, he was
severely chastised,
screamed at,
even spanked.
It seemed to Kim that his new little sister, the interloper who had become the center of his parents’ affections, was luckier than he.
It also seemed that Kim had been transformed into the object of their scorn and anger!
Then one summer evening after dinner, Kim messed his pants.
He knew that he was supposed to ask his Mom to take him to the toilet when he had to go,
However, his loathing for the toilet exercises overwhelmed his sense of responsibility,
So instead of asking mommy to take him to do toilets
He sought out a corner of the living room and filled his pants.
He was soon called back to where his family sat before the television set and he was quickly betrayed by his strong odor.
His parents both went absolutely ballistic at his indiscretion.
“If you’re going to keep going to the bathroom in your pants like your baby sister,”
his father yelled,
“then you will wear diapers like your baby sister.”
Kim was totally ashamed as his parents verbally chastised him in the living room,
His mother then spanked him until he was very sore indeed.
Kim was then made to stand sobbing in the middle of the room as his mother laid out some of Heather’s diapers.
Crying and helpless, his Mom sprinkled his scorched bottom with baby powder and pinned on the diapers.
As Kim waddled around with the thick diaper between his legs, his parents mocked the big baby who dirtied his pants and still had to wear diapers like a baby girl.
To ensure that the lesson sank in, for several days Kim was permitted to wear only a diaper,
plastic pants and a T-shirt around the house.
It was now evident that his parents’ scheme had backfired.
Although Kim had been mortified by being treated like a baby, he had also been secretly thrilled to be lucky enough to get the same kind of attention as Heather by being forced to wear her diapers.
He had rediscovered that secret thrill just a few days ago.
Kim closed the powder and pressed the bulky diaper snugly.
“It looks like Baby Kim is ready for us,”
Mandy commented brightly, her eyes wide in comic exaggeration and focused on Kim’s diaper,
“I found some cute little pink teddy bear pins for you, Kimmie,” she announced as she dangled them above Kim’s face.
From Kim’s horizontal perspective, the girls seemed to hover far above him.
Both were like inflatable characters in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade,
Both were gigantic, as they leaned across the freezer and pulled the corners of the diaper together at his waist.
He felt very small as Heather snapped the first pin shut and Mandy gently rolled him away from the basement wall to fasten the pin on that side.
Kim held his breath.
Being attended to by two lovely girls awakened another memory, this time from kindergarten.
The memory from kindergarten had been about when the pupils had afternoon”nap time,”
As the teacher dimmed the lights and the pupils unrolled the resting mats.
Each charge at kindergarten had been required to bring one of these mats to school,
One of Kim’s best friends and one of the most popular boys in the class, little Jimmy Gilliam, dragged his mat over to lie next to Kim.
Talking was forbidden during nap time.
However, the teacher frequently became inattentive.
This meant the charges could get away with messing around.
However, Kim’s hopes of plotting recess antics with little Jimmy were dashed,
This happened when two of the prettiest girls in the class, Nancy Stringer and Marcia Baker, placed their mats on either side of little Jimmy’s.
Although it did seem weird to Kim now that the concepts of popularity, and beauty had significance even in kindergarten.
That was definitely how he remembered it.
When the teacher finally left the classroom, the girls devised a game.
They announced to little Jimmy, in whispers and giggles but loud enough for Kim to hear all, that they were the mommies and had decided that Jim was their baby.
The girls pulled their mats edge-to-edge with little Jimmy’s, got on their knees, and pretended to be changing their baby’s diapers.
Jim put up a show of resistance
However, he ultimately allowed Nancy and Marcia to lift his legs over his head.
Whilst this was being done they applied imaginary baby powder to little Jimmy.
They then spread his legs as they pulled the imaginary diaper to his waist and affixed invisible diaper pins.
They pulled fantasy baby pants over his shoes and up his legs over little Jimmy’s jeans.
They then offered little Jimmy an invisible baby bottle at which he pretended to suck.
When the teacher returned and the lights came on, ending nap time, the girls quit their game.
Kim never mentioned the incident to little Jimmy, who had not seemed particularly embarrassed while playing along with the girls, but it had left a powerful impression on Kim.
Kim had often daydreamed about Nancy and Marcia after that, fantasizing that the girls had chosen him to be their baby.
Mandy let Kim roll onto his back again, then ran her fingers around the waistline of the diaper to check the fit, nodded approvingly, and tugged at sides to straighten it.
“Okay, the Baby’s diapered,” she pronounced.
“Now, get up,” she commanded.
In a state of dream-like excitement and to the groans of the freezer-top as it strained under him, Kim obeyed.
No sooner had he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the freezer, , than Heather lunged at him, arm outstretched as if to stab Kim in the face.
Before he could react to Heather’s attack, she had forcefully thrust an object into his mouth from which a shoelace dangled.
Mandy quickly grabbed the laces from behind him and knotted them tightly together.
“There! That’ll fix him,” Mandy said vengefully.
“Baby will keep this pacifier in his mouth until Baby learns to hush!” she declared triumphantly.
Kim was stunned by the pacifier’s sudden invasion of his mouth.
The force of the pacifier was smashed against his lips, and crammed against his tongue by the tight shoelace.
He gagged at the faint taste of old rubber and ancient sour milk that permeated his mouth.
The taste seemed to creep up the back of his throat and into his sinuses.
Kim reached to loosen the bow behind his head,
However, Mandy slapped his groping hand, saying,
“Oh no, Baby mustn’t touch!”
Kim slumped his shoulders in resignation yet again and grumbled unintelligibly through his obstructed orifice.
“Okay, Kimmie,” Heather said. “Let’s see what else we have for Baby to wear.”
Mandy eagerly presented a pair of vinyl-coated white rhumba panties with bands of ruffled pink lace that fanned out stiffly in bustled rows across the backside.
They surrounded the leg openings, which would tickle a baby’s chubby thighs as much as it did Kim’s fancy.
“These baby pants are just darling, but I think they’re going to be too small,” she sighed as she stretched the elastic waistband to its limits.
Kim’s disappointment was greater than Mandy’s,
However, when she was able to pull the diminutive leg openings only to Kim’s knees.
In the meantime, Heather had located a pair of undecorated baby pants of opaque plastic.
“Try these, Mandy,” she suggested.
“They’re toddler-size, says they’ll fit babies over 35 pounds.”
Each girl struggled to pull the narrow openings over Kim’s feet and up his legs,
Howervrt when the waistband reached Kim’s diaper, the vinyl drew taut around his thighs, they again abandoned the effort.
“Christ Almighty!” Heather responded.
“They might be a tight squeeze without the diaper, but they’ll never fit over it.
I guess they don’t mean they’ll fit everybody over 35 pounds, at least not if they’re wearing a huge diaper.”
“It’s going to be hard to keep Baby dry without plastic panties,” Mandy said.
“Hey, Heather,” she mused, “We need to make a shopping list and see what we can find for Baby at the mall tomorrow.”
“Great!” Heather replied.
“Baby will have to survive without his baby pants today.
Anyway, what else is there?”
Mandy next picked out a dinky, white sunbonnet with a ruffled lace brim.
It was festooned with a large pink bow on the back and matching pink ribbons that hung from the sides.
“I think this is the biggest one,” she informed Heather.
“It says, ‘Size 15 Toddler,’” she read from the tag.
“Let’s try it,” Heather replied, as Mandy pulled the baby hat firmly onto Kim’s head, squashing his ears, and knotted the ribbons together under his chin.
As if they were dressing a doll, the girls admired their creation from different angles.
“Now that’s really sweet,” Heather concluded.
“How about a bib?” Mandy asked.
“That’s a one-size-fits-all item.”
She rejected several from the accumulated supplies,
She then held up a pink semi-circle of terry cloth trimmed with a white-lace border and sporting an embroidered white lamb in the center.
“Let’s try this cute little lambikins,” she said, as she hung the bib over Kim’s hairless chest and pulled it tightly against his throat.
“Perfect!” Heather advised. “I think it’s time to let Baby see how cute he looks.
” She took Kim’s wrist and led him off the freezer to the full-length mirror by the exercise equipment.
Kim walked bow-legged behind her, the massive diaper stuffed in his crotch preventing his thighs from closing.
Kim almost swooned in shock and delight as he was confronted by his own image.
He peered out shyly from beneath the lacy brim of the baby bonnet.
This reminded Kim of a barnstormer’s leather crash helmet and made him look, he thought, like the cartoon character Rocky the flying squirrel.
Although the pink bib was too small to serve its intended purpose of catching spills, it nevertheless made an outsized contribution to the infantile effect.
The pacifier, he could now see, was a toddler-sized “Nuke”.
It had a contoured rim of translucent pink plastic molded over his lips and a ring of the same material.
This rim flapped loosely when he moved his head.
The girls had woven the shoelace, which Heather had removed from one of her running shoes, through holes on either side of the plastic rim to make a very effective gag.
Although the diaper was pinned snugly around his waist, its thickness gave Kim a rolly-polly appearance, his skinny frame made fat in the middle by the heavy padding of fluffy, white cloth.
In awe, he ran his hands over the soft, billowing diaper, feeling as if he were bundled in a cumulus cloud.
Kim was startled from his revelry by Mandy’s condescending pat on his padded behind.
“See, you do make an awfully cute baby,” she assured him.
For once, Kim was not about to argue with Mandy, even if he were able to speak because he agreed with her assessment completely.
He was adorable. “You love it, don’t you Baby?” Mandy whispered knowingly.
The slight affirmative nod of Kim’s head was clearly noticed by Mandy.
The girls had set out to embarrass and belittle Kim, to make him seem small and inferior.
But Kim was secretly ecstatic at their success; he was being humiliated into ecstasy.
Heather admired a lacy pink party dress with a short skirt of stiffly ruffled crinoline.
“Baby clothes are just too cute!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah, it’s too bad they’re all so small though,” observed Mandy as she examined a tiny red plaid, pleated skirt, and red top decorated with a teddy bear applique in matching plaid.
“Well, babies usually are small,” said Heather, who was an expert at explaining the obvious.
Mandy refolded a cotton nightgown.
The nightgown was spattered with pink valentines.
She returned it to the box on the floor with a sigh.
“None of these clothes are going to fit a baby his size,” she complained, pointing at Kim.
Kim had been remanded to the high chair.
The High chair’s narrow seat pinched Kim’s bloated rear end, while the thick diaper lifted his butt like a pillow.
As well as this it swelled against the bottom of the eating tray, filling all available spaces like packing foam, rendering him practically immobile.
“All we’ve got are baby girl clothes, anyway,” Heather replied.
“There’s nothing here for a baby boy.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Mandy countered.
“Babies are, you know, like sexless.”
“You mean genderless,” Heather corrected.
“Yeah, well, both, I guess,” Mandy mused.
“You can hardly tell if a baby’s a boy or a girl.
They look kind of the same, and a lot of baby boys are treated like baby girls.
Some parents don’t cut their boy babies’ hair and even make them wear little dresses.
About the only way to tell them apart sometimes is by the color
blue for baby boys and pink for baby girls.”
Ever practical, Heather responded,
“Well, we don’t have any blue or pink baby clothes to fit Kimmie.”
Mandy remained pensive.
“You know, not all baby clothes are small,” she ventured.
“When you think about it, some adult clothing is like big baby clothes.”
Heather looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“Well, just think about it – baby tees, baby doll nightgowns, you know.
And they have rompers for women that are just like big versions of rompers that baby’s wear.”
She nibbled at her pouty lower lip and wrinkled her forehead as if contemplating deep philosophical mysteries.
“You’ve got all kinds of jumpers, plaid mini-skirts, schoolgirl outfits.
I’ll bet you have some clothes that would fit Kim and will look babyish,
especially with his diapers and bonnet and all.”
Mandy smiled wickedly at Kim, who shook his head in a mild and ineffectual effort to protest Mandy’s evolving plan.
Heather, on the other hand, lit up with excitement.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she replied.
“God, I even have some of those one-piece footed pajamas that my aunt and uncle gave me last Christmas.
I could probably find some great baby outfits.
I guess big babies just have to be girl babies,” she decided.
“Or sissy babies,” Mandy smirked.
“So let’s go,” she said impatiently.
“What about our sissy Baby?” Heather inquired, nodding toward the forlorn figure in the high chair.
“Why don’t we take him – or,”
Mandy amended,
“‘her’ with us?”
As Mandy approached, Kim shook his head vigorously and reached to unplug the pacifier from his mouth.
It was one thing to play baby in the surreal gloom of the basement playroom.
However, it was quite another to parade around upstairs in broad daylight.
What if somebody were to see him through the windows?
What if someone came to the door, or Brittany or Mom came home unexpectedly?
Kim was again seized by panic.
Just then Mandy again seized his hand and gave it a stinging smack.
“Dammit, I told you not to touch that pacifier.
Whatever you have to say, we don’t want to hear it.”
Mandy’s words had a military cadence as she leaned over and barked orders in Kim’s face.
“Now you will come upstairs so we can finish dressing you, Baby, or you will be severely punished.”
Then looking over her shoulder at Heather, she said,
“I’m really sick of Kim refusing to cooperate.
We need to do something to guarantee that, uh, ‘she’ will be a good baby.”
“I think you’re right,” Heather said.
“Look, I’ll go up and check it out, make sure the coast is clear.
I need something to drink, anyway. You want anything, Mandy?”
“Do you have a Diet Pepsi?” she asked.
Then, as an afterthought, Mandy said,
“Wait a minute, I’ve got an idea,” and pulled Heather aside.
Kim could hear only excited, conspiratorial whispers punctuated by an occasional giggle.
When the girls ended their conference, Heather called,
“I’ll be right back,” and again bounded up the basement stairs.
Sensing both renewed foreboding and a chance to divert Mandy’s attention from her latest plans, Kim waved an arm frantically.
“What do you want now?” Mandy asked him irritably.
Kim pantomimed holding a cup, raised the invisible vessel to where his lips were concealed behind the pacifier, and tipped his head back.
“Oh, I get it!” Mandy crowed.
“Baby wants a bottle!”
Kim shook his head, but Mandy, mimicking the gesture, overruled him.
“Babies do not drink from cups, they only drink from a bottle,” she said.
Mandy grabbed a glass baby bottle and rubber nipple from the card table and rinsed them in the large laundry sink.
She then filled the bottle with cool tap water.
She screwed the nipple in place and sat the bottle on the tray of Kim’s high chair.
She looked at Kim sternly and said,
“I’m going to loosen this gag so you can drink your bottle, Baby, but so help me, if you make so much as a squeak, the pacifier goes back in to stay and you get nothing to drink”.
She laid her index finger under Kim’s chin and lifted his head until their eyes met.
“Do you understand this time, Baby?” she demanded.
Kim nodded meekly.
“Okay, good.”
As she reached behind his head to untie the shoelace that held the pacifier in his mouth, Kim was smothered against Mandy’s soft chest.
“There,” she said at last.
The pacifier fell from Kim’s mouth and hung loosely from the shoelace around his neck.
Before Kim could even catch a breath, Mandy thrust the nipple of the baby bottle into the space the pacifier had vacated.
“Drink up, Baby,” she coaxed as she tilted the bottom of the bottle toward the low basement ceiling.
Kim sucked eagerly as the cool liquid flooded his dry mouth and throat.
Kim drained the bottle and handed it back to Mandy,
Mandy then patted him on the head and in mocking baby-talk said, “What a good wittle baby!”
She fixed the pacifier in Kim’s mouth again, refastened the laces behind his head, and asked sweetly,
“Does Baby need to go pee from dwinking her bottle?”
Kim shook his head unconvincingly.
In fact, Kim had been in the basement for two hours and had developed a strong urge to urinate.
Somehow, despite the near-total impotence of his current predicament, Kim felt the loss of bladder control would cost him any last vestige of power.
If this was to happen,
It would leave him completely vulnerable to the girls.
He vowed that he would not give in, no matter how loudly nature called.
“Oh come on, Baby.
I know you want to be just like a real little baby and wet your diapers,” Mandy goaded.
“Just relax and do it.
Mandy won’t mind.
Mandy wants Baby to pee in her diapers so Mandy and Heather can change Baby,” she tempted.
“Is Baby sure she doesn’t need to pee just a little?”
Kim again wagged his head in the negative.
“Okay, Baby, but Mandy does.
Actually, I’m about to burst,” she informed him.
Mandy crossed to the utility sink and began rooting among some boxes stored beneath it.
“Ah,” she said after a moment.
“This is excellent!”
Mandy approached Kim’s chair from behind and commanded,
“Give me your hand, Baby.”
As Kim reluctantly reached toward the back of the high chair, Mandy latched onto his hand with sudden strength.
Then as quickly grabbed the other, which was hanging limply over the side, and pulled it backwards to meet the first.
As Kim grunted through his pacifier and tried to squirm loose, he heard a sharp tearing sound and felt his wrists entwined in wide, sticky ribbons.
When Mandy released her grip, Kim wriggled his hands against the gluey restraints that securely bound his arms.
Mandy popped up in front of the high chair again, brandishing a roll of silvery duct tape.
“This is great stuff,” she said admiringly.
“It’s good for all kinds of things.”
The tape screeched as she unrolled a six-inch length and ripped it free of the spool.
“It can keep a baby’s hands out of trouble,” she explained,
“and it can keep babies from peeking at things they shouldn’t see.
Now close your eyes, Baby,” she ordered.
As Kim dodged his head to one side in a futile effort to escape her onrushing hands, Mandy brusquely stuck the strip of tape over his eyes, then pressed it fast to his forehead and temples.
Kim’s consternation was so great this time that he was frozen with dread.
He could neither see nor move and was completely defenseless against whatever cruel scheme Mandy had in mind.
He wondered what could be taking Heather so long upstairs.
Kim felt the eating tray being withdrawn from his lap and heard Mandy lay it on the floor.
Kim blinked in shock at both the sudden brightness of the shadowy subterranean light of the basement and, Mandy’s boldness.
As she slid the eating tray of the high chair back into place, Kim glanced at the soaking diaper that now spread limply over his lap.
The thick cloth had not absorbed evenly,
so while the back remained fairly dry,
the front had overflowed and formed a small puddle under the high chair.
As Mandy locked the tray into position, the door at the top of the stairs wheezed open.
Mandy hurriedly skipped over to the foot of the stairs.
Mandy had assumed a pose of nonchalance by the time Heather called down,
“Mandy, give me a hand, will you?”
Mandy took the steps two at a time, then bounced back down holding two soft drink cans.
“Oh, great!” she sang.
“I sure need this Pepsi,” she said, popping open one of the cold cans.
Meanwhile, Kim noticed that the stairway was illuminated by a brilliant light beamed from the top.
It was as if Heather were shining a powerful flashlight into the basement gloom.
She negotiated the steps one at a time, slowly and unsteadily, as if she were not looking where she was going.
She leaned her left shoulder and hip against the wall for support as she awkwardly descended into view.
Kim was temporarily blinded as the spotlight fell on him,
He then refused to believe his eyes after they had adjusted.
Their mother’s camcorder with attached video light was perched on Heather’s shoulder.
It was aimed directly at Kim!
From outside the bright circle of light, Mandy laughed and exclaimed,
“Smile, Baby! You’re on Candid Camera!”
Heather panned slowly around the basement,
zoomed in on Kim’s stricken eyes framed by the lacy brim of the baby bonnet,
then tilted down for close-ups of the pacifier gag that silenced him,
the pink bib,
the eating tray of the high chair clamped snugly around his waist,
his diaper marinading in pee
and the expanding puddle beneath the chair.
She stopped taping,
extinguished the light,
lowered the camera,
and squinted at the dripping high chair, bewildered.
“What happened here?” she asked.
Taking a long swallow of her beverage, Mandy replied casually,
“Oh yeah. Baby started messing around when I gave him – or ‘her’ – the bottle,
so I had to tape her hands.”
Heather, who only now noticed that Kim’s arms were pinned behind the chair, continued to stare.
“No, I mean why is the floor all wet?”
“Oh that,” Mandy said as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
“Baby couldn’t hold it and wet herself.”
Kim was going berserk,
miming outrage,
clawing futilely at the bonds on his wrists.
again doing his best to dispute Mandy’s version by shaking his head.
He could hardly believe that Mandy could be such a goddam blatant liar.
But he was as furious at himself as he was at the lying little vixen who had done this to him.
He should have known better than to trust that bitch Mandy for a second.
Yet like a complete fool, he had allowed her to manipulate him into one of the most embarrassing situations of his life,
An embarrassing situation Heather was now documenting on videotape.
Now he could not even tell his side of the story,
However, he was forced to mutely accept Mandy’s lies.
When he got out of this mess,
he vowed,
he would make Mandy pay.
Heather peered at the floor,
She then studied Kim’s hysterical attempts to deny his guilt.
She summarily interrogated him.
“What do you mean ‘No’?
You are obviously soaked,
and by the smell and color of your diaper, it’s obviously not just water,” she stated.
“That’s so typical of this little sissy Baby,” Mandy whined.
“He, I mean, ‘she’ is a little liar.
How can you even try to deny what a little pants-wetter you are?” she asked Kim indignantly.
“I guess we really need to find some plastic pants for Baby,” she counseled Heather.
“That’s for sure,” she concurred.
“We can’t let him drip all over upstairs and I don’t want him getting my clothes and stuff all wet.
In the meantime, I’d better find something to clean up this puddle.”
Heather rested the camera on the card table.
With the exasperated sigh of one whose, work is never done, she began digging through the laundry area in search of cleaning supplies.
Mandy sat the soft drinks on the table, while Heather handed her a bucket and mop fetched from behind the dryer.
As Mandy lethargically pushed the mop around the floor under the high chair,
spreading the puddle rather than absorbing it,
Heather threw a couple of old towels on the edges of the wet spot.
She then dragged them through the liquid with her foot.
The girls alternately cursed Kim and teased him as they collected the sopping towels and wrung the mop into the bucket.
“We should have known better, Heather,” Mandy said.
“Kim wasn’t just pretending to be a baby.
He really is one.
Kim is a hopelessly immature,
drooling,
pants-peeing,
thumb-sucking
high school baby,” she lectured.
“Kim’s probably been a bed-wetter his whole life, too.
I’m really surprised Kim was ever let out of diapers.”
Kim glanced at both girls for any sign of recognition,
However, Mandy just simply gave him she practiced wicked leer.
If Heather knew or remembered anything of his childhood traumas, she did not let on.
But Kim could not hold back the memories that flooded his frenzied brain.
As the girls wiped at the drips from the bottom of the chair, Kim felt his cheeks burning in frustrated rage and unbearable shame.
This was as his past continued to intrude on the present.
Kim remembered that he had liked school well enough during kindergarten and first grade,
At the time his family lived in suburban Chicago.
Easily intimidated by authority figures, Kim had been sufficiently well behaved to be liked by his teachers,
However, he had been wild enough to get along with the other kids.
Then, about halfway through the second grade, another monumentally humiliating incident had permanently changed him.
It has also changed the attitudes of his teachers and schoolmates alike.
Kim’s regular teacher, Mrs Bartlett, a matronly type who thought of Kim as a prize student, was absent one afternoon.
Although Kim had seldom conceived of teachers as real people, in retrospect he realized that they occasionally had appointments with doctors and other obligations during the week, just like everyone else.
Mrs Bartlett informed her class that a couple of fifth-grade girls would be in charge for a few hours while she was gone.
The students were to study quietly and obey the older girls until her return.
To a second-grader like Kim, the fifth-grade girls seemed mature and sophisticated.
From his vantage point in the front row, Kim observed them gossiping and giggling,
There was no doubt they were discussing worldly topics.
Ones that he would not understand for a few more years.
Both girls were rather cute.
Kim developed an instant crush on these urbane and grown-up young ladies.
Kim busied himself with whatever time-wasting homework Mrs Bartlett had devised to keep the class occupied in her absence.
This was until, after about an hour, he realized he had to pee.
The strictly enforced protocol in Mrs Bartlett’s classroom was that no one left their desk without first raising their hand and obtaining permission to do so.
The well-mannered child that he was, Kim assumed that the rules continued to apply during the temporary tenure of the fifth-grade girls.
He dutifully raised his hand to request permission to go to the bathroom.
As his arm became sore from holding it above his head,
However, Kim realized that the foxy fifth-grade ladies were so caught up in their own giggled conversation that they were completely ignoring their younger charges.
Kim’s urgency soon increased to desperation.
Despite waving his arm frantically to attract the girls’ attention, they continued to ignore him.
As a stickler for rules, Kim could not believe it.
These older girls whom he had so much admired just moments before were irresponsibly betraying Mrs Bartlett’s trust.
They were indeed failing to monitor the class as they had been instructed.
With horror, Kim found himself confronted with a serious dilemma:
he would either have to break the rules,
risk leaving his desk and wandering the halls without permission
or he would wet his pants.
With his legs crossed and his face turning beet-red with the strain of holding his bladder, Kim tried to screw up the courage to simply get up and go to the bathroom.
After all, the fifth-grade girls were oblivious to the entire classroom.
The girls surely would not even notice him leave.
On the other hand, he would have to walk right past them to reach the door.
Kim was scared to death of the potentially dire consequences of such flagrant disobedience of the rules.
He had never figured out why, but in the end, he could not force himself to leave his desk.
It had been as if the desktop that sprawled across his undersized lap,
its yellowed surface cracked and worn by a generation of chubby-handed pupils wielding giant pencils, possessed some magic similar to that of the high chair that entranced him and pinned him to his seat.
With his right hand still hovering in the air, supported at the elbow by his left, which rested on his desktop, Kim finally lost control.
At first, only a few drops spurted from between his tightly closed legs,
However, the drops became a trickle
Then a flood as his aching bladder deflated rapidly and involuntarily.
As Kim’s pants became saturated, the warm urine flowed down his legs and, over the edge of the plywood seat onto the floor.
In shame and defeat, Kim slowly lowered his arm,
lifted his desktop, and looked numbly at the assorted school supplies he stored within it,
praying that after being ignored for so long, he would not be noticed now.
It was Sandra Koslowski, a cute little girl who sat in the desk to his, who blew Kim’s cover.
While leaning over to retrieve a dropped pencil, she happened to glance in Kim’s direction.
She stared at the floor a moment before her gaze climbed upward in search of the source of the puddle that surrounded Kim’s chair like a moat.
Her hand suddenly shot into the air and, of course, was immediately spotted by one of the fifth-grade girls who had successfully ignored Kim’s raised hand for almost an hour.
“What is it, Sandra?” the girl asked pleasantly.
Sandra turned her head slowly toward Kim and said quietly, “Kim is all wet.”
The fifth-grade girl examined the puddle under Kim’s chair, gawked at his soaking pants, whispered something to the other fifth-grader and began to giggle uncontrollably.
Meanwhile, the commotion began to spread in widening circles like ripples on a pond.
The entire class eventually looked up from homework,
broke off gossiping,
stopped scribbling notes to be passed at recess and focused its attention on Kim.
Kim was again possessed by an urge, an instinct, to run out of the room and escape his humiliation,
However, whatever power had prevented him from getting up to go to the bathroom continued to hold him fast.
As their giggles subsided, the fifth-grade girls retrieved a mop, bucket and some rags from the cloakroom adjacent to the classroom.
As Kim remained planted helplessly in his desk, they swabbed the puddle beneath him.
The girls spoke directly to Kim only once, when one of them inquired why he had not asked to go to the bathroom.
Kim mumbled through the fog of his embarrassment that he did not know.
“Boy, I guess I don’t remember what babies second-graders are,” the other girl remarked.
When the floor was clean and the girls were replacing the implements in the cloakroom, Mrs Bartlett returned and received a full report of the incident.
Emerging into the classroom, she called Kim to her massive desk before the chalkboard,
glanced at his wet pants,
and said simply,
“I think you’d better go home and change.”
Kim had never been so relieved to get out of school.
As the brisk autumn breeze chilled his drenched thighs, Kim concocted what seemed to him a plausible excuse for his wet pants and his early return from school.
On entering his house, Kim told his mother,
who did not work then,
that the bully of his class, John Aspinal, had pushed him down in a puddle of rainwater on the playground.
To Kim’s amazement and great relief, his mother bought the story.
She sympathetically told him to get into some dry pants and stay home for the balance of the afternoon.
Unfortunately, Kim had to return to school the next morning.
A few of his best friends mercifully accepted the story about his falling in a puddle on the playground,
However, the taunting by the rest of the kids began immediately.
Kim was heartbroken when Nancy Stringer,
one of the cute girls who had been in his class since kindergarten, challenged his alibi.
She asserted that Kim had not been wet when she had seen him come in from recess yesterday.
“I think you wet your pants,” she opined loudly.
Upon hearing Nancy’s pronouncement, John Aspinal chimed in
He made the claim that everyone knew Kim wet his pants,
that he did it all the time
and was nothing but a big baby.
Kim crept through the halls of school with his head down,
He attempted to ignore the catcalls and smirks of his fellow students,
However, he knew that vicious rumors were circulating about him.
At the end of the day,
one of the longest of Kim’s young life,
lovely Marcia Baker accosted him on the sidewalk and asked in an embarrassed but eagerly curious voice whether it was true that Kim still wore baby diapers.
Although he denied it,
he wistfully thought that he might as well wear diapers,
This was since he was sure that everyone in school believed the rumor.
Within a few weeks, other news at school had replaced the stories of Kim’s indiscretion,
Although Kim was still treated as an outcast by most of his peers, he had successfully lived down the incident.
Kim came home from school the day after a parent-teacher conference, however, to discover that his shame would not be allowed to fade away so easily.
His mother greeted him at the door with a reproachful but concerned look and stated that Mrs Bartlett had confided to her about Kim’s accident a few weeks before.
She had then discussed this serious matter with Kim’s father.
Kim was to understand that while wetting his pants in school was unacceptable behavior, he was not going to be punished for the incident itself.
His mother tried to look aggrieved as she complained, “But Kim, you lied to me about it.
You falsely accused some other boy of pushing you into a puddle.
While it is bad enough that you wet his pants, lying to me is unforgivable.
You will be punished for lying, not for having an accident.”
His mother’s disingenuous words were belied by the nature of Kim’s punishment, however.
She led Kim into the living room where, in the center of the carpet, she had laid out a diaper,
safety pins,
ointment and baby powder as she had years before.
While Kim wailed and pleaded, his mother then diapered him,
Explaining that he would be kept in diapers at home for the ensuing week.
If he failed to learn his lesson, however, and either told another lie or had another accident, the sentence would be extended.
“And if you do anything bad at school again, you will be wearing your diapers at school, too,” she warned.
Kim humored his parents by pretending to hate his punishment,
However he again secretly enjoyed “the baby treatment.
He dreaded the prospect of having to wear diapers to school, so Kim behaved himself,
However, he found himself looking forward to getting home to his diapers.
He was deathly afraid that his friends might learn of his secret.
With this in mind, he made excuses to prevent them from stopping at his house on the way home from school.
On the final day of his punishment, Kim avoided the bathroom all afternoon.
Soon after his mother had wrapped him securely in his soft diapers, Kim soaked himself.
As he had anticipated, he was condemned to another wonderful week in diapers.
Kim was aroused from his daydream by Mandy’s grating voice commanding him to stand up.
The girls had finished mopping the floor and Mandy had unlatched the tray table from Kim’s high chair.
Heather leaned over him and was about to unfasten the chair’s web belts when she realized that they, too, were very wet.
“Ugh!” she yelped. “I don’t want to get pee all over my hands.”
Uncharacteristically, Mandy took charge.
“Here, I’ll do it, Heather. Move.”
She seemed to give Kim’s sopping diaper an extra squeeze
She worked at the belt buckle, unaffected by the dampness, perhaps because she knew its true source.
While Heather bathed the others in the bright video light and resumed taping,
Mandy went behind Kim and raised his arms, still joined at the wrists, above the back of the high chair.
With a tight grip on his encumbered arms, she steered Kim toward the chest freezer.
The wet diaper sagged heavily between Kim’s legs and tugged at his hips.
As the spotlight followed their progress, Mandy narrated the bizarre scene that Heather was recording.
“As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, Heather and I were shocked to discover that Kimmie here,
Heather’s brother and my neighbor, have been spending his summer vacation down in the basement wearing diapers and baby clothes.
He likes to sit in a high chair like a baby, lay in a crib like a baby, and drink from a bottle like a baby.
We thought he was just playing at being a baby, but,”
Mandy reached her hand around Kim’s waist and patted the front of his diaper to demonstrate its wetness,
“we were even more shocked to find out that he wets his diapers like a little baby, too.
Kimmie is obviously too much of a baby to take care of himself, so we are going to take care of Baby from now on.”
They stood before the chest freezer, where the girls had spread an unopened white plastic trash bag in the center of the blanket.
“We need to waterproof Baby’s wet diapers before we finish dressing the little darling, so we’re going to put this on,” Mandy concluded as she pointed to the plastic bag.
“Hop up here, Baby,” she ordered.
Inspired by the painful pressure of Mandy lifting his bound wrists toward his shoulder blades, Kim climbed onto the freezer and positioned his wet butt in the middle of the bag.
Mandy pulled the plastic between Kim’s damp thighs to his waist,
She overlapped the front corners with the back
Then peeled another long strip of silver duct tape
With this, she fastened the bag like a thin plastic diaper over his wet cloth diaper.
After she had tucked the edges of the plastic around the diaper’s leg openings, she said to the camera,
“Well, it’s not perfect, but if Baby does wet again, it’ll at least keep Baby’s clothes and the furniture dry.”
“Okay, Baby, the coast is clear,” Heather called from the kitchen.
“Come on up.”
Kim stared numbly at the rectangle of harsh light at the top of the stairs until Mandy prodded him again from behind.
“Let’s go, Baby. Off to Heather’s room,” she directed.
Kim mounted each step as if it were a huge obstacle, with the weariness and reluctance of a prisoner climbing a gallows.
His wet diaper had chilled noticeably from exposure to the basement air and chaffed his thighs as its soaked weight sagged and swayed with every movement.
His makeshift plastic pants crinkled soft accompaniment to his awkward, bow-legged gait and the excited pounding of his pulse.
Kim emerged from the dim subterranean nursery into the fluorescent brilliance of the kitchen.
He peeked out from under the brim of his baby bonnet just long enough to spot Heather silhouetted against the bay windows of the breakfast nook.
She was peering at him through the camcorder.
He blinked back the light and quickly looked down,
He felt like a notorious fugitive futilely attempting to avoid the prying lenses of news cameras after his arrest.
Kim tried to put all thoughts on hold,
to block all incoming data from his overwrought brain,
and focused on the somnambulistic shuffling of his bare feet across the cool and shiny linoleum of the kitchen floor.
Bits and pieces of Mandy’s tireless banter for the camera filtered through Kim’s trance:
“We finally coaxed Baby to come out of,
well, not exactly the closet,
but out of the basement…
the public debut of the big baby girl…
the little diapered debutante…
just need to get her dressed up…
a fashion show of infant apparel from Europe’s finest designers…
what every fashion-conscious big baby will be wearing this fall…
an outfit cute enough to do justice to this cute baby butt,” she concluded, patting Kim again on the behind.
“Oh, wait a minute,” Mandy continued.
“Heather, I think we can un-tape baby Kimmie’s hands now.
She’s being a much better baby.
Are there any scissors?”
Heather stopped filming and clanged through a couple of drawers filled with silverware and utensils
She then handed over a pair of large shears to Mandy.
After unraveling the gooey bands from Kim’s wrists,
she led him to the sink and ordered him to wash his sticky hands.
As Kim stood at the sink,
Mandy broke Kim’s self-imposed state of suspended animation by suddenly calling out from behind him,
“Hello, Mrs Larson!”
Mandy was waving with exaggerated enthusiasm toward the window above the sink.
Kim finally saw their neighbor,
goofy old Mrs Larson, engaged in her daily obsessive/compulsive ritual of picking up every dead leaf and scrap of litter from her lawn,
as she looked up and waved back.
Kim had forgotten,
not only that the windows were open,
but that because the kitchen was as bright as the overcast, gray afternoon,
the illuminated interior of the house would be clearly visible from outside.
Mandy slapped Kim’s squishy, plastic-coated rear and cheerfully commanded,
“Wave to Mrs. Larson, Baby!”
Instead, Kim ducked below the level of the kitchen counter,
reminding himself that Mrs Larson was nuts anyway,
reassuring himself that she could not have seen anything.
“You’re making me cross again, Baby,” Mandy seethed.
“You can’t spend your whole life hiding,” she sneered derisively.
“After all, if you don’t behave, you’re going to be a movie star,” she added, glancing to confirm that Heather was filming again.
“I’m sure your geek friends will love to see our video of how baby Kim spent her summer vacation in diapers.
You could be the next Shirley Temple.”
From behind the camcorder, Heather suggested,
“If Baby is more comfortable on the floor where she can’t be seen through the windows,
then maybe we should just let her crawl around the house.”
Mandy was obviously delighted.
“Yeah, excellent!” she shrieked.
“Babies are supposed to crawl anyway.”
She bent over Kim, who cowered against the kitchen cabinets.
“So start crawling, Baby,” she instructed.
“We don’t have all day.”
Heather skipped through the dining room and sat on the living room floor.
As she aimed the camcorder back through the dining room at the door to the kitchen, she said,
“I’ll get some baby’s-eye-view shots as you guys go by.”
Kim placed his still-wet hands on the linoleum,
rose to his knees and crawled from the kitchen across the dining room toward Heather,
thankful that the rest of the house was carpeted.
As he reached the living room, Kim hesitated and surveyed the room.
This was in an effort to avoid looking at Heather and her camera.
He was relieved that the large picture window facing the street was above his head,
However, he soon realized with chagrin that the narrow windows that framed the front door offered a view of the entry hall to anyone who might be on the front porch.
He decided that he would crawl quickly past the front door
to the stairs that led to the bedrooms just to be safe.
Kim was also intrigued by his lilliputian perspective on the world.
Although he occasionally sat on the living room floor to watch TV,
he could not recall having this same sense of smallness.
At eye level, the cluttered surface of the coffee table seemed as broad and long as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.
The worn, over-stuffed sofa soared up from behind the table like a soft mountain of cushions.
The pole lamp in the corner could have been a standard bearing a bank of floodlights at a baseball stadium.
Even the reclining chair he had inherited after his father abandoned it,
along with the family,
seemed as insurmountable as the cliff face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley.
Just as Kim spied a miniature plastic arm sticking out from behind the stereo cabinet,
solving the week-old mystery of the disappearance of Brittany’s “Baywatch Barbie,”
he felt another slap on his bottom.
He looked up dumbly at Mandy,
who towered over him like the fifty-foot-tall woman in a sci-fi flick,
and realized another advantage of his low-angle viewpoint.
Mandy smacked Kim again.
“How dare you peek at my underpants, Baby!” she scolded,
pretending to be indignant.
“When I want you to see my panties,
I’ll show them to you, Baby,” she teased.
“Now come on, get upstairs.”
As planned, Kim scuttled on all fours across the entry hall
up the carpeted stairs to the second-floor landing as fast as he could,
while Heather captured video footage of his waddling,
diapered butt from behind and Mandy rattled on about wardrobe items that might be suitable for an outsized baby.
Kim awaited the girls on the landing,
loathe to enter Heather’s personal sanctuary without her,
then crawled behind them into Heather’s room.
Heather’s bedroom had always made Kim uncomfortable.
For one thing, its decor was ultra-feminine, almost an idealized little girl’s room,
like the aristocratic bedchamber of a fairy tale princess.
When their parents divorced,
their father had sought to assuage his guilt over depriving his daughter of a perfect family life by buying her a fantasy bedroom,
with white antique furniture and an abundance of lace, ruffles and frills.
The centerpiece was a four-poster bed with a ruffled white canopy embroidered with pink rosebuds and a fluffy matching quilt.
Small lace-trimmed pillows were piled luxuriously against the decorative headboard.
A vanity with a large mirror in an intricately carved white frame was covered in cosmetics and bottles of lotions,
As well as this a short stool with a seat upholstered in soft white fabric and rimmed with flouncy ruffles sat before it.
On the opposite side of a dresser with bas-relief butterflies etched into the drawers was a free-standing,
full-length mirror,
which reflected a diminutive rocking chair and wall shelves displaying a collection of stuffed animals across the room.
A door backed with a full-length mirror stood ajar on the other side of the bed, opening to a closet.
The room was lit by lamps strategically placed on bedtables, dresser and vanity,
topped with frilled damask shades and by a lone window framed with draperies in the pattern of the bedspread.
The few places where the walls themselves were visible between the ample furnishings were papered in a pink rosebud pattern echoing that of the bed covers on a field of pure white.
The other thing that disturbed Kim about Heather’s room,
however, was that it was a complete mess,
a disaster area.
For someone with a well-deserved reputation for intelligence,
drive and organization in most aspects of her life,
Heather was a total slob.
Only small patches of carpet could be seen between piles of dirty laundry,
shoes, empty bags of cookies and chips,
teen magazines,
half-read paperbacks,
videotapes and compact discs.
The bed was a riot of clothes that had been considered then rejected as the outfit of the day,
curlers,
a blow drier and assorted makeup.
Empty cola cans and water glasses seemed to grow like mushrooms from the tops of the dresser and tables.
Lingerie hung from half-open drawers and doorknobs and a bathrobe was draped over the rocking chair.
The surface of the dresser was a garden of high-tech gear:
a portable TV,
stereo,
camera equipment and video supplies.
School awards, souvenirs, and knick-knacks tumbled from shelves and dying houseplants lined the dusty window sill.
“God, Heather,” Mandy groaned.
“Glad you finally got around to cleaning your room,” she added sarcastically.
“We’ll never find anything for Baby Kimmie to wear in this landfill.
There isn’t even a place to sit,” she moaned.
Heather was sufficiently discreet to avoid creating photographic evidence of her own slovenliness and had stopped filming.
“No problem, Mandy,” she replied.
“Just give me a sec.”
In moments, Heather had scooped up armloads of laundry,
trash, and miscellaneous junk
She dumped them into one big pile in a corner behind the bed.
Mandy vaulted onto the center of the hastily cleared bed,
laid back,
then rolled onto her side and smiled at Kim.
Kim remained on his hands and knees just inside the doorway.
“Do you think you can dig out those tennis panties we were talking about, Heather?” she asked.
Heather disappeared into her closet.
“They used to be my Mom’s,” she said from deep inside the bowels of the closet.
“They were kind of big and dorky, so I never wore them, but they should be stashed in here somewhere.”
After ejecting various articles of clothing like a dog digging for a buried bone, Heather materialized and tossed a handful of lacy cloth to Mandy.
Mandy held up the panties by the waist and said admiringly,
“These are really cute, and they’re as close we’re going to get to those baby rhumba pants that wouldn’t fit.
Come here, Baby,” she called to Kim as if calling a puppy.
“Let’s try these panties on.”
The tennis panties were a white synthetic material over a cotton liner.
They were shaped like old-fashioned women’s briefs, with a high waist and low-cut leg openings.
Their lackluster and rather dowdy appearance was completely transformed, however, by inch-wide bands of pink lace that circumscribed the leg openings and scalloped across the back in four ruffled rows.
Kim waddled to the side of the bed and as Mandy held open the elastic waistband.
He then stepped into the tennis pants.
Mandy slid them up his legs and over his plastic-covered bottom,
Mandy’s enthusiasm was now uncontrollable.
“Oh, that’s so-o much better than that industrial-looking plastic bag and tape,” she cooed.
“So much cuter and more babyish.
What do you think, Heather?” she asked.
Heather rubbed her hand across Kim’s frilly butt, making the rows of lace stand up smartly and sending a shiver up Kim’s spine.
“Very nice,” she mused.
“No wonder I never wore these.
They’re made to fit a buffalo butt – or,” she added, “a big diaper butt like Kim’s.”
Heather went to her dresser and began rifling the drawers.
“And I have just the perfect top to match,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m sure you do – if you can find it,” Mandy laughed.
A minute later, Heather did.
“Here we are,” she announced, displaying a cotton baby-doll nightie with a pattern of randomly splattered pink flower petals.
“This came with some matching boxer-short bottoms,” she explained,
“but Baby just needs the nightie.
Arms over your head, Kimmie,” she instructed.
She pulled the nightie over Kim’s bonnet,
adjusted the elasticized scoop neckline on his shoulders
and straightened the puffy, lace-trimmed sleeves that were so short they looked like frilly epaulets.
The lacy hemline barely reached Kim’s waist and left his ruffled bottom fully exposed.
Heather plucked the baby bib out from under the nightie and smoothed it against his chest.
Mandy was again ecstatic.
“Now that is awesome,” she declared.
“The perfect outfit for when Baby is taking a nap in the crib or playing indoors, like today.
We may need something a bit more formal when we take the Baby outside, though,” she added,
smirking as Kim’s face went pale at the prospect.
“Aw, don’t worry, Baby,” she consoled
as she rose from the bed and patted Kim on the head condescendingly.
“Not today. Maybe Baby can play outside tomorrow.”
Turning to Heather, she asked,
“How about some booties or baby shoes?”
Heather rummaged in the dresser drawers, returned to the closet and retrieved a pair of black patent leather shoes.
“What do you think about knee socks and Mary Janes?” Heather inquired as she handed the items to Mandy.
“That’s what every baby girl should wear,” Mandy agreed.
“Come and sit, Baby,” she told Kim while motioning toward the petite rocking chair.
As Kim sat, he felt the slight rustle of the lace on his bottom before his weight settled on the spongy, saturated bottoms of his diapers.
Mandy knelt before him and rolled the white, cable knit socks over his feet and up to his calves to his knees.
“It’s a good thing the schoolgirl look was in last year,” Mandy said as she struggled with the shiny, black shoes.
“Otherwise, we never could have found baby shoes any bigger than Brittany’s.”
They were a tight fit, nevertheless, and Mandy ordered Kim to stand.
With the pressure of Kim’s weight and Mandy’s skillful manipulation of a shoehorn, his feet were finally, if somewhat uncomfortably, crammed into the shoes.
Mandy pulled the instep straps as tight as she could and buckled the shoes in place.
Kim wobbled unsteadily on the slightly stacked heels,
which were the only feature that distinguished the shoes from authentic Sunday-best baby shoes.
“Okay, time for Baby to model her sweet little baby girl outfit,” Mandy announced as she stood.
“Oh, Heather,” she added, “Make sure you get this on videotape.
Now, Baby, walk toward Heather and do a little pirouette for us, then stroll over to the mirror and take a look at yourself.”
As had become habitual by now, Kim silently obeyed.
As he approached the mirror, he tried to avoid seeing his image,
However, Mandy noticed and commanded, “Admire yourself in the mirror, Sweetie.
I want to see just how big that diaper will get in front.”
As he did, Kim gasped in wonder and breathlessly drank in his infantile image:
frilly bonnet,
pink pacifier stuck in the middle of his face,
pink shorty nightgown with frilly sleeves,
baby bib,
he white plastic covering his wet, bulky diapers peeking out from under the tennis panties,
over-the-knee socks and glassy Mary Janes.
“Now turn around and look at your ruffled butt,” Mandy instructed.
Again, Kim did as he was told and marveled at the perky rows of lace encircling his inflated bottom.
Mandy gently patted Kim’s diaper again, this time on the front.
Watching in the mirror as Mandy pressed against him from behind and rubbed the front of his diaper, Kim’s eyes met the emerald reflection of hers.
Her soothing smile for once seemed genuine, friendly and guileless.
Kim was perplexed by his own feelings.
An hour ago, he thought Mandy was the world’s worst bitch.
now, he suddenly wanted to hug her,
to thank her for having done this to him,
even to kiss her.
As if the mirror reflected their thoughts as well as their images,
Mandy quickly pecked Kim on the cheek instead.
Kim felt a strange giddiness,
an exhilarating sense of liberation that seemed to arise because, and not in spite, of his complete captivity.
He had taken a leap of faith,
gone beyond the point of no return,
made a fateful decision to play along with the girls that had relieved him of all authority to decide and left him with no choice but to go with the flow of events that were no longer in his control.
Because he had no options,
no power to choose,
however, he had no responsibility for any consequences and was, therefore, immune to the anxiety and guilt that were the inevitable price of the exercise of free will.
Now that the girls were in charge,
how could he be blamed for whatever might happen?
How could it be his fault that he was dressed as a baby or that his diapers were wet?
There was nothing he could do about it.
