I wrote this piece for my reading series, Confessions. I’ll also be uploading it to the Confessions Substack, which you can subscribe to here. The Substack is an archive of the pieces read at the event.
At the reading, there is an anonymous “confession booth” in which the guests are encouraged to write a confession. Those confessions are then added to the pool of prompt options for readers at the next event. Being both aesthetically cohesive as an event, and generative for the writer, the night becomes something that exists between literature and theater, the readings somewhere between stories and monologues. Anyways…
Odette Aurelia Clayton-Johnson
I remember taking the AP Calc test my sophomore year of high school–I’m really smart–and… I had to piss really bad. Like, really bad. I’ve never had to piss so bad in my life. I tried crossing my legs, and it didn’t help, so I crossed them tighter. I still had to piss. I uncrossed my legs, and grabbed my crotch to hold it in, and wiggled around helplessly, accidentally arousing myself. At one point I thought to myself… if only I was wearing a diaper. I think that’s when it started–or maybe not started, no, that’s not where it started, but that’s the moment it surfaced in my subconscious. I couldn’t focus on the rest of the test. I got a 4. I should have gotten a 5–I’m really smart. But all I could think about the entire time was wearing a diaper… though I had forgotten I had to pee.
Instead I imagined my boyfriend, well, he was my boyfriend back then. Zack Peck, 5’11”, captain of the football team, yes, I imagined Zacky peeling each of the sticky, plushy straps off of my hips, and when he opened the diaper and said “did somebody go poo poo in their dipey?” I fluttered my big little eyes up to meet his, blinked twice, and said… “oopsies.”
That’s when he shoves the binky into my mouth, bends me over his knee, wipes me down with a cottonelle wipe, then spanks me saying, “bad girl!” “No,no,” I respond, and I cry, but not in a tears welling in my eyes kind of way, I cry in a waaahhh waaahhh waaahhh kind of way. I wail and I scream and he spanks me again and I’m crying and crying and that’s when the test moderator said “5 more minutes.” I was not even close to being done. Good thing I’m really smart.
I never told Zack about this. I was scared he’d think I’m weird. I lost my virginity to him at sixteen, and we experienced passionate love and sexual bliss ever since. We were that couple. He loved it when I sucked on his thumb. I did that a lot. It kind of became our thing. But then came graduation. I went to Yale for comparative literature, because I’m really smart. They accepted the 4 I got on my AP calc test for college credit, which was a huge relief. He went to Penn State on a football scholarship. I knew long distance wouldn’t work out. When we broke up, I started wearing diapers.
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