College or Cribs

Chapter 24
Before and After and What Happened Meanwhile

Chapter Description: Sherry and Chris drive home from their date.

Before and After and What happened Meanwhile

11:55

“I don’t know, Sherry, it was pretty good, but it was probably the weakest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies so far.”

“Chris, that’s because it wasn’t a Mar-“

“Sure, it had Spider-Man AND Iron Man in it, but they cast Tobey McGuire as Spider-Man.”

“That wasn’t Spider-Man and you kn-“

“Iron Man still had some of the best lines, but I wish there would have been a little more action.”

“Chris we didn-“

“I mean it was cool to watch them fight, but did it really have to be with their tongues?”

“CHRIS!”

“What?” Chris said a little too dumbly, turning his head to see Sherry’s profile as she drove.

“That wasn’t an Avenger’s Movie, Chris,” Sherry huffed with bemused exasperation in her voice. “That was Satan’s Alley.”

“Yeah,” Chris countered. “Avengers, Colon, Iron Man Versus Spider-Man, Colon, Satan’s Alley.”

“Chris, that wasn’t the movie-“

“I SAW THE MOVIE I NEEDED TO SEE!” Chris exploded in over-the-top rage that would have made a young Jim Carrey Proud. There was a brief moment of silence, the hum of the engine being the only thing that filled the inside of Sherry’s car, before both exploded into laughter.

Chris laughed so hard he couldn’t keep his eyes open and slapped his knee repeatedly. Sherry, needing to keep her eyes on the road and her hands on the wheel, settled for pounding her fist on the steering wheel as a way to show appreciation while still maintaining her composure.

“But wait,” Chris said thoughtfully as their shared laughter died down, “I thought you wanted to see a chick flick for our date. Why’d you pick a movie about two gay monks during the Spanish Inquisition?”

“You didn’t think it was good?” Sherry asked teasingly. “Watching two hot movie stars make out and imply that they’re sexily boning each other?” She winked at Chris.

“Eh…not my thing. A little too artsy for me to want a repeat viewing, but it was good for what it was,” he concluded. “Seriously though,” Chris pressed. “Why’d you want to see that one? I’d have thought you’d want to see something like ‘Heart of Texas’ or ‘My BFF’s Boyfriend’.”

They had come to a red light. Perfect timing. Sherry turned her head to Chris, and gave him a long unblinking stare. She did not smile. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes popped. “I SAW THE MOVIE I NEEDED TO SEE TOO!” she bellowed.

Both of them guffawed at that, and it took the blaring protests of another car for either of them to realize that the light had turned green. Sherry wiped her eyes before she pressed on the gas and continued to take her boyfriend home.

This was the life. The old Chris was back to his old self. Finally, summer could begin in earnest. Chris had been acting strangely for more than a week. He kept vacillating between two extremes. Half the time, he seemed to be worried, and stuck in his own head, like he was hiding something not just from her, but from everyone. And everything, even the things that made perfect sense sounded like a poorly constructed lie. Chris was great at jokes, but he was just the worst liar.

The other half of the time, he seemed normal, but something seemed off. He had seemed like himself, but the more she thought about it in retrospect, it was more like he seemed like the memory of himself. She remembered some of her time with Chris earlier this week, but there were parts that felt less like memories and more like the imaginary construct of a memory.

For example, there was her memory of their first date this summer: It had started as a romantic walk in the park, till Chris has slipped and fallen, ass first, into dog shit. Not to be dejected, Chris smiled through it and they rushed to the nearest clothing store so that he could buy a new pair of pants instead of having to make a side trip back home.

“Once we get home, I’ve got the feeling that I’m never gonna get out of there tonight,” he had said.

Then, right when he had been in the men’s dressing room to try his new “replacement pants”, his little sister, Samantha had called. Chris, big dumb medical genius that he was, had left his cell phone in the ruined pants, and Sherry had taken the initiative to gingerly root around the crinkling, rustling, plastic shopping bag they’d been stashed in and dug the ringing phone out of the pants pocket.

“Hi Sammy,” Sherry had said.

“Sherry! Hiiiiiiiiii!” Samantha greeted. “Um…is my brother there? I wanted to see if I could bug him for a few minutes before you guys got dinner and stuff.”

“He’s a little busy right now,” Sherry had told the girl. “He’s busy changing his poopy pants!”

A deafening “WHAT?!” blared over the speaker followed by howls of cackling laughter, followed by a panting and breathless “heh…heh…seriously?” Sammy had sounded a little hopeful and slightly disappointed when Sherry explained the situation more thoroughly. But, then again, what little sibling wouldn’t love the thought of their older brother or sister just humiliating themselves by actually dropping a load into their pants, (and on a hot date no less)? Sherry assumed that her little brother would have had equal fits of laughter had she and Chris’s situations been reversed.

The night had gone on to further disaster, when at the pizza place they had chosen for dinner, Chris realized that thanks to his new pants, he didn’t have enough money to pay for a full meal for both of them. Being a misguided but well-meaning idiot, Chris stubbornly insisted that they not go Dutch for dinner and got nothing while she ate a small pepperoni pizza. Hey, if he was going to be a big dummy about it, and let his chauvinistic pride get in the way, she was going to make him regret it. By the end of the meal, he was practically drooling, and she decided to mess with him by giving him a single piece of pepperoni. He devoured it.

The last straw for Chris’s morale that night happened at the movie. They had already gotten the tickets via website, (My BFF’s Boyfriend thank you very much for rubbing it in, Chris), and Sherry had finally convinced her boyfriend to let her “treat” him to snacks from the concession stand. Luck was not with them however, because Chris’s extra-large fresh squeezed lemonade had ended up spilling all over the front of his pants when the bottom of the cheap paper cup gave out.

The poor thing had looked like he had been about to cry, so they got out of there, and she let him take her home so he could end the night with at least a little dignity intact. When he had messaged her the next day, obviously wanting a redo, she had had the grace to tell him that she had had a good time. Truth is, she had indeed had a good time; it just probably wasn’t the good time either of them had expected going in.

Rethinking all of the accidents involving his pants, caused a picture to spring forth to Sherry’s mind. She imagined herself holding Chris up on her hip, like he was a baby, with him pouting and wearing nothing but a t-shirt and a very large Pampers. The image brought a wry smile to her lips, but the disturbing thing about it was that to some part of her, it seemed more “real” than what had really happened. Imagination seemed more genuine than memory.

So although, this wasn’t their first date since they both came home for the summer, this felt like the first “real” one. This one had counted. This one mattered.

“Why’d you have me drive anyways?” Sherry wondered aloud.

“Uh…just in case.” Chris managed.

“In case of what?”

“In case I was still drunk after the movie.”

“But you didn’t have anything to drink.”

“Oh, well, then can we stop by a liquor store on the way home?”

“You are such an idiot.” she smiled. The pretend image of her boyfriend in a giant baby diaper was soon replaced by the very real image of her boyfriend in an adult diaper a few days ago when she walked in on him.

He had wanted her to find out on some level, Sherry knew. He had wanted her to find out that he was a bed wetter, and getting caught was his subconscious way of not having to talk to her about it. Little had he known though, that she had already been onto his little “secret”.

Sherry had traveled up to his school for Valentine’s Day and had broken into his room. Chris’s roommates had let her in easily enough, and she had gotten right to work. She had bought a whole package of cheap Valentine cards- the kind that went on sale in packages of twelve to twenty four so that elementary schoolers could buy a heart shaped “Let’s be friends” card for everyone in their class- and began strategically placing them around the room.

She had turned them into coupons of a sort, writing flirty things ranging from “Good for 1 Backrub”, or “7 minutes in heaven” to “Go directly to second base,” and even “Good for one BJ, no payback required.” She had been getting pretty good at hiding them. Hiding them under his bed, or on the blades of his ceiling fan, when she had gotten the idea of putting one of them in his closet.

She had flung open the door and knocked over a pile of dirty clothes. That was typical. Chris didn’t do any kind of laundry unless he absolutely had to. Typical male. At least these hadn’t smelled like complete ass, so she wasn’t gagging. As she bent over to pile the clothes back up, she briefly considered hiding one of her coupons under the pile of clothes. That way, he wouldn’t find it till he did some damn laundry.

Sherry was reaching for the “Good for one BJ, no payback required” card, when her eye fully registered what was at the bottom of the clothes pile. They were plastic, and square, and looked smooth to the touch. She picked one up and turned it over in her hands. It crinkled as she slid it from hand to hand. Even though it didn’t look the typical part- it wasn’t white but more of a medical off green- it was definitely an adult diaper; an “adjustable medical incontinence brief” some might have labeled it. There were several of them in a little stack, right under the hill of dirty clothes Sherry had knocked over.

Unless Chris was even more dedicated to getting into med school than she thought, and that med school had even stranger requirements than she had been led to believe, something very odd was going on here. So, feeling that she wouldn’t have gotten a straight answer out of Chris, she did the thing that she reasoned any twenty-something gal who found potentially incriminating evidence in her boyfriend’s closet would do: She went on his computer and checked out his internet history.

As luck would have it, Chris’s browser had been left open- he likely had rushed out somewhere, hopefully to get her a good Valentine’s gift. Strangely, or rather, not so strangely, his browsing history only went back to earlier in that morning. Obviously, he had been clearing his browsing history. But forgetting that one time had let his secret out to her as she found….

Incontinence message boards! At least half a dozen of them! Support group after support group after support group for people who had urinary control issues. She couldn’t tell which online screen name belonged to Chris; he at least had covered his tracks well enough so that the websites didn’t automatically sign him in, but sure enough, it appeared that her boyfriend had hidden diapers in his closet for a fairly good reason.

Sherry had expected that day to find something akin to porn, or a weird type of fetish, but instead she found nothing of the sort. Of course, she decided to double check and did a few google searches, but they turned up no results for “diaper porn” or “diaper fetish”. How bizarre had that double whammy been? Not only had Sherry discovered a deep dark secret that Chris had been harboring for God knows how long, but she had also found the exception to Rule 43: There was no such thing as diaper porn.

The thing is, Sherry felt that Chris needed to tell her all this on his own terms, and not be found out. So she carefully re-hid the medical briefs under the dirty clothes, cleared his history for him, and found another place to hide the “BJ” card.

Looking back on the memory, she imagined the incontinence briefs she had found as baby diapers, but made for adults. A plastic backing perhaps, but with a pastel print. Something generic but undoubtedly meant to be babyish, like little building blocks that spelled out “BABY”. Of course, it was still actually an adult diaper in function if not aesthetic, so it had four tapes instead of a standard baby diaper’s two.

Had she found that sort of diaper instead of the medical briefs, she imagined, she would have been just as startled at first, but would have come to the same kind of acceptance. If this was a part of Chris’s life and had been part of him for God knows how long, then as long as she wouldn’t lose him, she’d let that be a part of her life too. It was the same principle as the bed wetting problem really. Also the thought of Chris, wearing not only diapers to bed, but baby clothes, giant onesies and what not, seemed kind of cute in a funny way.

Once again, the imagination seemed more real than the actual memory to her, and she suppressed a shudder for some unknown reason.

It wasn’t until just a few days ago when Chris allowed himself to slip up again, and let her “catch” him.

Now that THAT had happened, they were back in a better place together. They were both two young people who were physically attracted to each other, and two friends, maybe even best friends, who enjoyed each other’s company.

The clock on her car’s dashboard blinked 11:59, and Sherry realized that Chris was being a little t0o quiet.

“Something the matter?”

“No.” Chris shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat.

“You’re watching the clock pretty closely, like you’re nervous.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve gotten quiet. Are you worried about the time?”

“….Kinda.” Chris admitted.

“Why? Wait. Is your dad still mad about the bedwetting thing? Does he have you under some kind of curfew or something?

Chris scratched his head nervously.

“Not exac-“

12:01

Sherry looked into her review mirror. Chris had stopped moving, finally, and appeared to be at last dozing in the car seat.

“Finally, kid,” Sherry muttered under her breath, beginning to turn back into the Cole’s neighborhood. Chris was a good baby most of the time, just like the other kids were, but when that little booger didn’t want to sleep, it was an ordeal to get him to finally give up the ghost and nod off.

“Mamamamama?”a tiny babbling voice questioned from behind her. Well, shit.

“No honey, no Momma, yet,” Sherry cooed just above a whisper, praying that the baby would go back to sleep.

A drowsy bit of babble that could have been mistaken for “Was worth a shot” came from the infant, and then everything went quiet as he fell back to sleep.

When she pulled into the Cole’s driveway a few minutes later, Mrs. Cole was already there to greet her, wearing a long, fluffy, and powder white bathrobe.

“Thank you so much for doing this, again,” Mrs. Cole whispered as she gingerly unbuckled her infant son from the car seat and lifted him up into her arms. Almost instinctively, Chris stirred before nuzzling her neck and going back to sleep. “Drives always get him to go to sleep…eventually.”

Despite how tired she herself was from this far-too-long night of babysitting, Sherry nodded. “...Eventually…” she agreed.

“Thank you again,” Mrs. Cole said once more, handing Sherry a wad of bills for her services tonight. If Sherry had had a boyfriend, this might be how much he would have spent on a date. “Christopher, Chris’s father I mean, is working tonight and I didn’t want to have to wake the girls up so we could go on a night drive.”

“Yeah, I getcha,” Sherry said. “The little guy’s not really any trouble. Do you want your car seat back?”

“No,” Chris’s mother said. “It’s late and that thing’s a pain to install and uninstall anyways. How about you hold onto it for now? As long as you’re going to be home for the summer, you can do some more sitting jobs for us, and it might come in handy.”

Sherry would have objected, except she really didn’t have any other plans. And a little extra spending cash wouldn’t hurt either.

Chris’s mom went on, swaying from side to side. “Besides, I wouldn’t mind a little more free time for myself. Maybe catch up with some old friends, or keep tabs on my husband.”

“Keep tabs doing what?” Sherry asked, not thinking. There was an uncomfortable silence for a minute.

“Okay, well, you have a good night, Sherry.” Mrs. Cole said without further pause. “We’ll give you a call sometime soon. Alright?”

“Alright,” Sherry took the out, and then got back into her car and drove home.

Sherry didn’t bother to turn on the radio or play any music on the drive home. She didn’t even talk to herself. To say that she suddenly felt odd was an understatement to say the least. She was in tears by the time she parked at her own house. She felt like she was going mad. Her mental recollections of the night were a boring, if slightly frustrating-at-the-end-babysitting job like she had done dozens of time for the Cole’s and their kids. But emotionally she suddenly felt like she had just lost something. Not lacking something like there was something missing in her life or a void to fill in her heart; but the more she thought of little Chris sitting in the car seat in the back, the more she felt as if something had been taken from her.

She had never had a boyfriend or girlfriend. She’d always been too busy with school, her service clubs, and sorority. She didn’t think of herself as asexual either. She wanted to find someone to spend her life with one day, she just simply didn’t have the time. She didn’t even have the time for a summer fling because she couldn’t find anyone her own age that appealed to her. Everyone who had stuck around after high school was the sort who repulsed her, and those who had gotten out of town had never came back, even for Summer Break. She didn’t have anyone in her life outside of her immediate family other than the Cole’s.

But what Sherry felt suddenly wasn’t loneliness, but heartbreak. Just thinking about that baby made her feel as if she had been dumped. Sherry had never been dumped, mind you, you need to be seeing someone to break up with them, but when she thought about that baby, she felt terrible. As if someone very close to her, someone she had loved, had had a choice between her and something else, and had not chosen her. Someone she had loved had looked her in the eyes and said “Not right now. You’re not good enough. I need a break.”

And so it was that Sherry Gilmore, liberal arts major and summer time babysitter, went to bed crying.

**************************************************

"From the Journals of the Esteemed Yet Very Humble Professor Bumble:

Perhaps the greatest magical artifacts that have ever existed yet to elude my grasp are the Cameos of The Great Game. They have many names: The True Philosopher’s Stones, The Twin Destiny Diamonds of Desire and Despair, The Fool’s Jewels, The Fruits of Fortune and Folly, and The Either Ores are but a few of the nicknames they’ve accumulated over mankind’s relatively short existence.

What little is known about them has been discovered by those who are drawn into the "Game" with them, and the lucky few, myself included, who seem to know enough of the ways of magic to pierce past their veil of illusion and interview the Game’s Players.

To call their capabilities "Godlike" would be an insult to gods everywhere, as deities have a tendency to enjoy being known. Then again, it is said that the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing man he did not exist. Yet, every demon that I’ve come across in my travels swears they have no idea where these damnable things came from. So perhaps the Cameos are the greatest trick that the Devil wishes he could take credit for.

While their origins remain shrouded in mystery, their capabilities are thankfully more clearly defined. The Jewels are drawn to people’s fantasies and terrors. They feed off and amplify a person’s greatest ecstasy and miseries, and their Game is one of extremes. The Game is simply a question given life: Is it better to live a life of absolute selfishness and whimsy, or a more noble existence to face a hard truth in the face of unblinking sorrow so that mankind might learn from your plight?

To do this, the Diamonds use magic to alter the perceptions, abilities, and memories of the world around their chosen player for a set amount of time, with both Desire and Despair getting equal amounts to present their cases, till finally, their chosen victim must select one reality or the other.

It is the magical equivalent of splitting a man’s life into scales and unbalancing them so that all of the gold ends up on one end, and the other end has nothing, and The Game is merely deciding which side of the scale the man wants his entire reality to be based in. In modern parlance, it’s the equivalent of hacking reality’s hard drive and putting in a patch to change life for good or ill, and it’s up to one person to choose which update to download. For the most part, the rest of humanity remains blissfully unaware that anything has changed at all.

While one might argue one Ore over the other, there are inherent downsides to each choice.

Those who choose the Blue Stone of Folly are in for a very hard remainder of their lives, no matter how long or short it may be, but they’re given a certain clarity and wisdom that those born on either side of humanity’s glass ceiling lack. Those who choose a life of desolation in the Game have seen how the other side lives, lived it themselves for a time, and found it wanting.

Socrates himself went from being a distinguished war hero to a societal gadfly, yet his experiences on perception determining reality and human nature paved the way for future philosophers all over the Western World. Granted, he was forbidden from ever writing things down by the terms of his Game, yet he found a loophole in his disciple, Plato.

In the end, his revolutionary ideas were condemned for his time, and he was forced to drink burning hemlock for corrupting the youth. A small price to pay, he told me the night before, and worth it if others could learn from his example.

Most who choose the Red Stone of Fortune live such extreme and unbelievable lives that they are later remembered in the public consciousness as fictional; if they are remembered at all, having little to no impact on the world as a whole. Within ten years of Willy Wonka’s death, Roald Dahl was suddenly credited as Wonka’s author and creator instead of his official authorized biographer; Wonka’s amazing confectionery concoctions became nothing more than licensed rip-offs of the Nestle Corporation.

Ian Flemming’s accounts of one agent, 007, were his government’s scandalous equivalent of Edward Snowden, but now the formerly top secret accounts of Mr. Bond are remembered as fantastical over the top fiction; all because the Stones found a drunkard janitor named Jimmy who didn’t know what went into making a proper martini.

And who knows how many have chosen their Desires and gone completely unnoticed? Not all desires are so desirable once they are known by one’s neighbors, and even the Cameos have their limits. They can change perception and memory, but not human nature. Thus a man may get away with marrying his pet donkey, and everyone will see in its place his wife, and it would be perfectly normal, but bestiality is still very much a crime.

Arthur got his Camelot and his Guinevere, but eventually Guinevere strayed back to her lover before the Game and ran off with Lancelot, and Camelot eventually crumbled as Chivalry ultimately works better as an ideal than a practice. Oh, dear Arthur. That one had such promise.

While their origins are unknown, and their capabilities more clearly defined with time, their motivations, if any, are still somewhere in a hazy gray area. There’s no evidence saying they existed on this reality before mankind, but it is believed they’ve been with us from the start. Could they be drawn to a human’s tendency towards extremes? We tend to picture our lives as happiness or sadness, instead of little drips of both. We gorge ourselves in one country while another country starves to death. Something either IS or ISN’T. We, as a species are extremely lopsided and not often given to middle grounds.

Are the Gems even sentient? Yes, they talk, but they themselves are particularly focused on matters related to their specific realm of experience. Desire does not concern itself with matters of scarcity, nor does Despair trouble itself with matters of plenty. They’re like two songbirds that only know one song apiece and will not or cannot learn each other’s tunes. All that seems to concern them is the Game, the purpose of which still remains a mystery.

Fortunately, my travels have recently led me across the path of yet another one of the Game’s Players, and it seems to me that his Game has not yet ended. If I act quickly, perhaps I can teach him the rules in a way that will not offend either the Ruby or the Sapphire, and we might both yet benefit from the experience. I must be careful though, lest I trod too heavily.

The last time I got sloppy, I had to fake my own descent into Hell, lest I be drawn into the Game, and poor Kit Marlowe got stabbed shortly after he adapted the tale for the stage. Had it not been for me, better men than Bill Shakespeare would be venerated as "The Bard."

For Now,

"Professor Bumble"