Upstream

Chapter 2
The Fall

Chapter Description: With her grades plummeting and her accidents getting worse, can Vanessa make it through the semester?

“So, anything new on the rumor from State?” Vanessa asked, a hint of nervousness under her voice.

“Nothing,” Cassie shrugged, “some frat boy who used to go here thought he saw you, didn’t give a lot of details, admitted he was drunk at the time. Why?”

“And he stopped talking about it?”

“V, it’s been three weeks. There's nothing there.”

Vanessa exhaled. “Okay, thanks.”

“You okay, V?” Amber chimed in.

“I’m… I’m fine. Just been weird. Feels like someone’s trying to s-, sab-, ugh, what’s the word?”

“Sabotage you?” Cassie offered.

“Yeah… yeah, that’s it,” Vanessa nodded, rubbing her tired head.

“The wannabes are always trying to take down the queen!” Amber declared.

“I’ll look into it,” Cassie said softly, “and if we find anyone, we’ll get ‘em.”

“Okay, cool. Now, ummm, could you guys give me a bit of privacy? Sorry.”

The two other girls gave slight looks of confusion at the request, but away they went down the hallway. Vanessa, meanwhile, slid into the nearby bathroom, checked and double-checked that no one else was in it, and finally slid down her jean shorts to examine herself in the mirror.

Her pullup was wet. She couldn’t recall when she had used it, - during history class, during math class, while talking to her friends, or all of the above - but from the looks of it it was on the verge of leaking now. It was her third pair since morning, and the school day wasn’t even over.

The girl sighed. These things had been such a good failsafe early on. They spared her from embarrassment when she felt the urge to go come on suddenly during an important test, or when a small leak came out during a stressful moment. As her classes seemed to ratchet up in difficulty, and her paranoid sense that something was wrong grew, they gave her at least one thing she didn’t have to worry about.

Lately, though, she was having far more misses than makes, and the frequency and size of her accidents was clearly becoming too much for the thin garments. Trying to use the bathroom preemptively did little to help, as the girl was struggling to go on cue, and it seemed the pullups were always damp - at least - by the time she slid her pants down. A few had leaked already, and the fact that she was losing track of when she was wetting them in the first place was especially concerning.

Vanessa slipped into one of the stalls and changed herself into the last pullup in her backpack. She needed only to get through one more class and a short bus ride before she would be home, and the trainer proved to be enough for that duration… barely.

The girl knew what was coming when she sat down at the dinner table that evening. Her mother never had let up her bizarre behavior, pelting Vanessa with patronizing sweet-talk ever since the day of the college tour. More recently, she had bought a pack of thick diapers adorned with juvenile designs, and had begun insisting repeatedly that the girl wear them, ‘just in case’. And now, Vanessa was running out of pullups and excuses.

“Fine, mom. Fine,” she finally acquiesced, “I’ll try them.”

Try them Vanessa did, powdering and padding herself before she went to bed that night. And when she woke up soaked and sagging - no dream required - she knew it was time for their daytime debut.

The girl changed out of her nighttime clothes and put on a fresh diaper before turning to her wardrobe to find something that would suit it. Shorts seemed to make it completely obvious, and jeans didn’t fit at all. To make matters worse, all of her longer skirts and dresses were in the wash or at the dry cleaners, victims of leaking pullups, leaving the girl with limited options.

“Oh, no…”

Vanessa did her best to fix her pleated skirt over her diaper. Eventually, she managed to cover up the crinkling plastic, but only barely, and she knew that the slightest bit of carelessness could spell utter humiliation.

The girl clenched the bottom of the skirt with her hands through most of the morning, walking awkwardly through the halls and trying to ward off anyone she saw staring with her patented mean glares. For her classes, she tried to sit as far back as she could, striking back-row seats in physics and history, but only a spot in the middle section in English - where she was so consumed with keeping herself covered up that she lost track completely of what the teacher was saying.

In math class, her last of the day, the girl secured a spot in the fourth of five rows, and sat down as slowly as she could to avoid making any crinkling noise. She shuffled obsessively in her seat as the teacher began handing out the last week’s tests, but found her attention turning quickly to the pile of papers tossed in front of her.

Forty-three.

In her entire academic life, Vanessa had never received such a low score. It was one thing for her grades to slip as they had been doing throughout the year so far - something she chalked up to stress and senioritis. But this was on a far different level - this could prevent her from graduating on time altogether. Vanessa gulped nervously, and then leaned forward to better examine the result.

Leaning forward, as it turned out, was a terrible mistake.

The girl was still trying to make sense of the first page of the test when she heard a snickering behind her. As it dawned on her what the noise meant, her face went briefly pale and her head turned up slowly.

Then, gathering up a burst of energy, Vanessa swerved her head around and gave the meanest glare she could to the boy seated behind her. Quickly, he stopped laughing and softly put both hands up as he turned from her gaze.

With that momentarily under control, Vanessa turned once again to the other crisis of the day, trying her hardest to make sense of what went wrong on her test. She had hoped there had been a mistake in grading, or at least some sort of simple misunderstanding on her part that she could point to as cause for the result, but no.

For page after page, the girl was left completely baffled by what had been asked, unable to make any sense at all of what she should have put down in the answers, or what she did - even when it was marked correct. Frustrated, she shoved the test into her backpack and tried her best to focus on the rest of the class, though the vast majority of it flew over her head.

When the bell finally rang, Vanessa knew there was one more thing she needed to do. Patiently, she waited in her seat for the other students to pack their bags and get up, making special note of the boy who sat behind her. When he rose, she followed, tailing him until he was out in the hallway, where she finally grabbed his shoulder to confront him.

“Hey,” she said harshly, sticking a finger against the boy’s chest, “I don’t know what you thought you saw back there, but if you say a word, I will ruin you. I will fucking ruin you. Got that?”

“Yeah, yeah…” the boy mumbled, trying to turn away. He was a head taller than Vanessa, and he knew her secret now, but still her reputation had a way of making people nervous.

“I said, got that!?” Vanessa’s voice was even angrier now, her face a bright red.

“Got it.” The boy said timidly, again making a surrendering motion with his hands before backing away.

“Good.” Vanessa exhaled and lowered her hands back down to her skirt, where she would hold them tightly until the end of her bus ride home.

That evening, Vanessa did some shopping, buying as many long skirts and loose-fitting dresses as she could find, desperate to avoid another incident like the one in math class.

For the next several weeks, the girl fell into an uneasy rhythm. Classes and homework continued to be a struggle, but at least she felt she could focus on them rather than her personal troubles. She used every tool at her disposal to try to get by, from paying off school nerds to do her homework for her (with kisses - they really were a pathetic bunch) to cheating off classmates when time came to take tests. And each day, she would return from school in a sopping wet diaper, desperately in need of a change. It was embarrassing, certainly, but at least it meant she wouldn’t have to worry about making it to the bathroom - well, most of the time.

It was during a history test in the middle of October that a sharp cramp suddenly struck Vanessa, and the girl recoiled, pressing a hand against her uncomfortable stomach. With barely over ten minutes remaining in the class period, she held on hope for some time that she might be able to wait it out, but the need to go was growing faster than she had ever felt it. With beads of sweat forming on her forehead, finally, she decided to make a run.

“Sorry, it’s an e- gotta go!” She blurted towards her confused teacher, before shooting down the hallways. With the rest of the students mostly in their classrooms, Vanessa ran as quickly as her long skirt allowed, desperately trying to fight off the growing pressure inside her.

She made it to the bathroom and flung it open, just as a powerful new cramp arrived.

Vanessa froze in place. In front of her was another girl, who had just finished washing her hands, and whose eyes had turned towards the noise of the door being thrown open. And inside of her… it was too late. As much as she tried not to push, it was coming out, filling the seat of her diaper as she just stood there, momentarily dumbfounded.

She needed to act fast.

“What are you looking at!?” she yelled, with as much authority as she could, and the other girl turned her head away.

Vanessa gulped and took a few steps quietly sideways towards the nearest stall, before sliding in and closing the door. Once inside, she waited to hear the other girl leave before breathing a sigh of relief and removing her skirt.

Vanessa sat on the toilet seat with her head in her hands. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing there - her full diaper had already taken care of all her business - and she wondered if it was even worth having gone there at all. After all, the girl she just ran into didn’t seem to notice what was happening right in front of her, and her diaper was equipped to handle the accident. Maybe, she wondered, this was just another case of an unnecessary distraction.

She sighed. There were only a few weeks left until the end of the midterm season and the school’s traditional fall break. She was close, she assured herself. She would make it there, and then she could deal with whatever was happening to her.

With a new goal in mind, Vanessa returned to her history class, gathered her things, and skipped math, taking the opportunity to recuperate - and more importantly, to change into a clean diaper.

The next few days wore on slowly. Vanessa’s classes, it seemed, had gone from hard to impossible, and the girl could scarcely understand a word her teachers said. Midterm season was in swing, and peering at others’ answers seemed to be her only way of earning any points at all.

A physics test early the next week proved particularly brutal, as it seemed that even looking at her classmates’ papers gave Vanessa no idea of what answers to write. Every symbol looked foreign, and every question read like gibberish.

Painfully bored, the girl stared out of the classroom window and towards a busy playground in front of the neighboring elementary school. It looked… pleasant, peaceful, and exactly like where Vanessa wanted to be. Longingly, she sighed.

At lunch, she gave in to her temptation, sneaking from the high school campus and onto the elementary one. The children were all inside, giving her the entire playground to herself. For the first time in weeks, she felt at ease.

Vanessa slid on the slide, swung on the swing, and finally made her way to the jungle gym, her favorite of them all. There, she climbed and swung and jumped and flipped, while the crisp autumn air hugged her skin.

But as she was hanging upside-down on her knees from the monkey bars, with her skirt flipped nearly over her head, Vanessa caught sight of what looked to be a first grade class that had just made their way out for recess. And as she looked around at the shocked faces of the students and teachers, the girl knew she had done something very, very wrong.

They saw.

Panic began to set in, and the girl dropped to the playground turf below, landing on her hands before scrambling back up to her feet and fixing her skirt. Breathing heavily as her situation set in, she gave a nervous look around before breaking for her high school.

Vanessa ran as quickly as she could, nearly tripping over herself several times along the way, but she made it to the entrance intact. Then, taking no time to recover, she jolted down the hallways, desperately pushing several students out of her way as she tried awkwardly to maintain both her speed and dignity.

She finally did trip, landing on her knees only a few feet in front of her friends, but she got up almost instantly, brushing dirt and off of her skirt as she launched into a nervous ramble:

“I think they mighta catched me!” she blurted.

“They… what?” Cassie raised an eyebrow.

“They catched me!” Vanessa repeated, frustrated that her friend wasn’t hearing her. “Or they mighta. I don’t know I was playing at the playground and I know I shouldn’ta and I’m sorry but it looked fun and I wanted to so I did but some people saw me and I don’t know what they saw but now I’m scared what they’re gonna say an-”

“Okay, okay,” Cassie said calmly, holding a hand out to calm her friend, “we’ll take care of it. If anyone says anything, we’ll make sure people know it’s a lie.”

“Okay okay thank you thank you.” Vanessa leaned back towards her locker, finally beginning to catch her breath.

“You… you alright, V?” Amber asked, a worried look on her face.

“Uhhh, I think so,” the girl lied, “just been kinda hard lately.”

“Well, it’s Friday, and at least break is only a week away,” Amber offered.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

One more week, she told herself. One more week, and she could finally get away.

The weekend did bring Vanessa some reprieve. Afraid of what she would do if she went out, the girl spent the entire time resting at home.

The week that followed, however, quickly became torturous.

The overwhelming sense of confusion that the girl already felt in her classes seemed now to extend well beyond. She struggled to read DMs and texts, couldn’t figure out how much to pay for lunch, and found herself lost at all the complicated words her friends used when they gossiped. It was all just stress, she reminded herself, but she had never experienced stress quite like this.

When her long-dreaded math midterm arrived, she found herself stuck… trying to remember which way the V pointed in her name. She scribbled it facing in every direction, but nothing felt right. When she finally gave up, not even wanting to attempt whatever math she was expected to know, she turned to staring at the classroom clock, but found that she had no idea what it read.

Finally, mercifully, the bell rang, and the girl went home, her test pages still blank.

That night, she found herself again on the river, underneath a clear, blue sky. This time, she could see the wreckage of her old rowboat in front of her, being carried away by the current, while Vanessa herself seemed to be in a basket of some sort.

She wasn’t moving backwards, at least, but it seemed she wasn’t moving much at all. Her basket was rocking steadily back and forth, staying bizarrely in its place as the stream rushed past. And behind her, the girl could see a waterfall, from which she could make out the faint sounds of a baby’s cry.

Vanessa woke up and rubbed her eyes. It was the last day before break, and it was Halloween. Midterms were over, and the mood at school would be festive and friendly. She had managed to keep her diapers - now on the verge of leaking after a long night of sleep - a secret from everyone who mattered, and, at last, she could say it was almost over. The break would allow her to recuperate, relax, return to school in full form, and get back on her way to being queen.

Shortly after lunch, however, the girl began to get the creeping sensation that she was being laughed at. All around her, she could hear snickering and derisive whispers, and she felt, somehow, that they were pointed at her.

By history class, as she examined the room from the corners of her eye, she realized it was real.

The girl stormed out as soon as the bell rang, finding her friends chatting at the end of a long hallway.

“What’s going on?” She demanded, interrupting their conversation, “Did someone say something?”

“No, no,” Cassie assured her, looking puzzled, “no one said anything.”

“Then why is everyone laughing at me!?” the girl fired back, “Something’s happening, an’ I wanna know what it is!”

Cassie and Amber gave each other a nervous look, gulping before shifting their eyes back to their longtime leader. After a short pause, Amber broke the silence.

“I think… um, they might be laughing because you… uh… you kinda smell. Sorry, V.”

“I sm-” Vanessa stopped in the middle of her question as the odor, and the realization, hit her. Her diaper was messy - filled to the brim, as it probably had been for hours - and she had had no idea at all. The laughing around her suddenly made perfect sense, and it was growing louder and louder.

The girl fought back a shriek and left without a word, her face crimson from trying to contain the riot of emotion inside. But when she marched to her locker, she found a familiar, unwelcome sight in front of it.

“Well, if it isn’t the talk of the town. Cupcake?”

It was the new girl, dressed in a long black robe and wearing a pointy hat atop her head, offering what looked to be a dark chocolate cupcake with orange frosting.

“What the-”

“Well, it’s Halloween. And it’s my birthday! So I figured I’d offer everyone some cupcakes. Or were you just surprised I could talk?”

“I-” Vanessa had no time for this, and she was ready to burst, “I don’t want your cupcake, you, you…” she stammered, face reddening, looking desperately for any word to use, “you poopypants!”

“Really?” the girl in black chuckled, pulling back her cupcake and taking a bite, “That’s what you’re going with?”

Vanessa had no response, and she simply stormed off in a huff, shaking impotent fists as she stomped away.

Had she put two and two together, she might have been more suspicious of this strange girl in the pointed hat, but putting two and two together was getting to be well beyond her grasp.