Some New Disaster

Chapter 4
Lesson III: Potty Training

Chapter Description: Exactly what it says on the tin

When Miss Berdette brought out a potty chair -- peculiarly large enough for a teenager, but just barely -- and placed it in front of the classroom in the exact location where Derek had sat only minutes before, the remaining six F-students felt chills rattle their spines such that they were certain they’d collapse, crippled, to the floor. Some of them intentionally tried to piss themselves where they stood in a failed campaign to eschew the indignity of whatever was to come. But Miss Berdette had been prepared for such cheating; some of the F-students were cheaters, after all. The pupils who sought to escape their plight in this manner found that their toilet training had been temporarily rendered superhuman. Whatever they had inside of them was only going to come out at their sadistic instructor’s leisure.

“Ben,” called Miss Berdette. “Come over here.” A frigid permafrost coated the Bieber-haired 18-year-old’s heart as he found himself approaching the potty chair.

It was a queer contraption. Ben had seen them before but, as an only child, his last recollection of one was anchored 16 years prior. He didn’t even realize that Children’s Television Workshop was in the business of licensing them... but, sure enough, there was Elmo, waving happily from the bottom of the setup. A strange, yellow, plastic “guard” stuck out from the front -- which Ben didn’t remember from his youth but whose purpose the young man quickly deduced.

“Now, kids,” announced Miss Berdette, addressing the lion’s share of the class, “potty training is a very delicate affair. It has to be done at the right time. It can’t become the focal point of a young boy’s life.”

In the back of the classroom, the Department of Education employee was scribbling text furiously on a sheet of loose leaf. No one paid him any heed.

“It cannot become the sole factor by which he is judged. Especially when he’s only two years old. It can leave a deep and lasting impression if you continually tell him he’s not allowed to turn three unless he grows out of diap--”

The tip of the anonymous stranger’s pencil broke. He retrieved another writing implement at once.

“Get on with it,” Ben said, his voice shivering. “Let me get my passing grade.”

Miss Berdette regained herself. “Fortunately,” she said, “Ben here is perfectly ready to use one. Ready in more ways than one. Aren’t you, Ben?”

The teenager was at once very sorry for rushing things along. His bladder was instantly full. Painfully so. Ben whipped both of his palms to his groin and pressed against his jeans, bending over slightly and biting his bottom lip. Suddenly, the potty chair didn’t look so ridiculous, so humiliating. It looked like his savior. A way to get rid of the worst physical agony he could recall having in years.

Scrambling, Ben undid his belt, dropped his jeans in front of the gawking rabble, stumbled awkwardly onto the white-and-teal plastic bowl, and centered his ass atop the opening in hopes that his actions would be fast, nondescript, and quickly forgotten.

The teenager looked down at the little yellow outcropping and remembered that it was a shield meant to protect his pee from spraying all over the place. And, when Ben lost control of his bladder, he discovered himself to have been right. The contents of his insides hammered against it and were dutifully directed into the container atop which he sat.

The sound of the affair was wholly unique. Tinkles, then splatters, then a hollow, echoing collection against the smooth plastic bottom of the toddler’s waste container. When the water level rose just high enough, the splatters became splashes -- a constant, seemingly unending rush of urine pouring out of the boy. He stretched his legs out along the floor and unconsciously delivered a drawn-out “aaahhhhh” of relief as the pressure drained completely out of him.

The very tableau was almost too much for Ben’s classmates to handle. Several A-students worried ironically that they’d lose their own bladders into their pants at the unadulterated hilarity of the sight. An 18-year-old, legs splayed, pissing against the urine guard of an Elmo potty chair, groaning with a degree of vocal relief far beyond his traditional idiom... and all so naturally, as if he rushed home every day to do the exact same thing. Little did Ben know at the time, he was liable to be using his potty chair all throughout college. At least.

“Now, class,” Miss Berdette taught, “that’s how you get your little boy to use his potty chair. Offer him a lot of praise, coax him along, like--” -- the teacher patted the top of Ben’s head as he peed -- “‘That’s such a good little boy, Benny! Soon you’ll be a big boy and can use a real toilet, just like every other boy your age!’”

The teenager whined as he held onto the sides of the chair. He felt as if he were seeing the world as a nightmare through two tragically sober windowpanes.

Ben’s nightmare came to a merciful end when he heard the sound of two logs of crap fall into the flood of piss he had expelled. He had resigned himself to such a conclusion just seconds prior, when he had felt his rectum fill up with a load.

“Stephanie?” Miss Berdette asked. “Will you come over here, please?”

But Ben hadn’t expected that.

Stephanie, the fifth F-student called to participate in the day’s final-final exam, had been the boy’s girlfriend for the first three years of their high school careers-- and his ex for the last. He had dumped her for someone twice her bra size, and the level of vindictiveness she harbored for him was beyond any rational measure. Rarely was Ben intimidated by people or circumstances, but he had made a special point of segregating himself from Stephanie. She was clever. Far more clever than he. And Ben didn’t want anything to do with that. The only explanation for her failing home ec grade was arrogance.

Suddenly, the 17-year-old girl felt as though her F-grade just might have been worth it. “I’d love to.”

“Stephanie,” stated the teacher, “when a little boy uses the potty chair, it’s up to his caretaker to wipe his butt.”

Ben went ice cold.

Miss Berdette handed Stephanie the box of baby wipes. “Do you think you could demonstrate for the class?”

The girl grinned wickedly. “I think I could.”

And so it was that Miss Berdette’s 12th-year home economics class bore witness to Stephanie cleaning off her ex-boyfriend’s poopy butt. Ben sniffled as he lifted each cheek, revealing the streaks that had been left there, permitting full view to his peers as Stephanie ensured that the boy’s whites would stay white. The matter didn’t take very long, but it measured a decent 48 hours to the male senior, and his subsequent demotion to “Friendship is Magic” briefs didn’t do his self-image any favors.

“So,” Miss Berdette explained to the class, “do that several times a day, every day, for many months, and eventually your boy can stay out of Pull-Ups and in little-boy underpants for the duration of the day. At night, well... no promises can be made to that effect for at least the first few years.”

She turned to face Stephanie. “And conventional wisdom holds that you should simply sit little Benny atop it at regular intervals during the day, whether or not he needs to go... because, eventually, he will. It’s all part of raising a child.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to go to the bathroom, and then the science lab, to wash out Ben’s potty. Might as well get your practice now. I’m not sure his current girlfriend is going to want to have much to do with an 18-year-old who needs a potty chair.”

Having held it back for so long, Ben finally surrendered to crying.