Wake up sleepy head

By request of AunaKoishiNoel

I’m having such a nice dream. SpongeBob is teaching me how to play flute on his nose, but he keeps sneezing! Silly SpongeBob. It would be pretty yucky in reality but in my dreams I just laugh at his cartoony white snot from his long nose. Suddenly the world begins to swirl and fade.

“Wakey wakey Alice, we have a big day ahead of us.” My big sister Hannah’s voice intrudes on my dreams, her hand gently shaking my shoulder.

“…hmmm… maybe.” I’m now awake enough to sense my surroundings, but still not enough to really care. But I do love my sister, so for her I’ll consider waking up… in a little bit.

She laughs at my sleepy face. “No, we don’t have time for that this morning. The doctor is coming to see you, so you need to be ready.” Her soft voice, the most caring one I’ve ever known, fills me with such a sense of contentment as to be completely counterproductive to her goal. But I do manage to wake up just enough to realize I’ve gotten uncomfortably warm under my blanket. My sleepy mind has the perfect solution, and I roll onto my side towards Hannah’s voice and slide my blanket off in the same sleepy motion.

The cool air feels nice on my skin, and I pull up the bottom of my oversized shirt that I use as a pajama shirt to let the feeling spread up my stomach to my training bra.

“Alice!” Hannah sounds flustered. I wake up a little more and open my eyes. Her eyes running up and down my body as her cheeks flush deeply and her mouth bites her lower lip to stop her smile from splitting her face, all of it sends a jolt through my spine as I realize I am showing her my big girl diaper and training bra.

Adrenalin blasts through me and I sit up to quickly put my oversized shirt back down and cover myself. “Hannah! Don’t look! I’m awake. You can go now!” My face heats up to be redder than hers.

“Don’t be silly. The doctor will be here soon and you still need to eat breakfast. Now let your big sister help you out.” Against my protests, Hannah pulls me closer and pulls off my pajama shirt. She checks my diaper, which thankfully is dry, and helps me into my clothes. We don’t have much money, so I’m wearing an old light pink blouse that used to be Hannah’s and is still too big for me, and a skirt light blue skirt with yellow ducks on it that is originally mine, but is too small now and lets my large diaper peek out the bottom.

I make my way down from my upstairs bedroom to the kitchen. Like every room in our house, it’s small. Our parents didn’t leave us with much when they abandoned us. When I was small they got into a car accident with me in the back seat.

Calling it an accident seems a little generous, as from what I’ve heard they were drinking heavily and crashed into the very expensive restaurant they had made reservations at, scraping past several high end cars in the parking lot along the way. It was a miracle no one got seriously hurt… except me. Bouncing around the back seat, I don’t really remember much of that day. Apparently my neck twisted and pinched a nerve, weakening it in a way that meant I would never have normal control over my body ever again. It could have been worse, I could have been fully paralyzed or even dead. But instead my body just felt fuzzy everywhere. I didn’t have as much sensation or control as someone else my age, and doctors were all certain I would never be able to control my body normally. Even walking down the stair, I carefully grasp the railing as my balance keeps me teetering on my feet. Somewhere around here is a wheel chair for me, but I refuse to give in. My legs are perfectly healthy, I just can’t control them well. And of course, my bladder control is near nonexistent. If I’m awake and thinking about it, I can hold it back for a bit. But any distraction, or if it grows too strong, and my body refuses to even consider listening to my request not to release.

I totter carefully to my chair, an oversized high chair with a folding table built in. Hannah got it for me so I could be sat securely without worrying about sliding around, something I struggled with in chairs with smooth surfaces. I climb up into my seat and lower the table, happy to have it secure me in place so I could relax my muscles without fear of sliding off. Hannah hums away as she cooks breakfast, what looks to be scrambled eggs, the ketchup already out on the table. Hannah has diligently taken care of me since the accident, being more my parent than sister, and certainly more of a parent than the two cowards who ran away. Between the medical debt for my hospital stay, the legal fees for drinking and driving, the increased insurance premiums after the insurance payed what it was willing to, and all the money they owed to the restaurant and other car owners that exceeded what the insurance company would pay out, our parents decided to fake their own ****.

Which would have resulted in a decent pay out of life insurance for us… if they hadn’t faked it by shooting a cheaply edited video of them cheesily saying goodbye to the world and driving off a cliff… with the editing skills of a child who just learned what a computer was. And then they mailed it to the police. How did dead people send their suicide video to the police? Excellent question… Hannah says we are better off without ‘those giant idiots’ in our lives even if they ditched us with their debt. Thankfully a lot of the debt was deemed untransferable to us. But not all of it. My medical bills in particular couldn’t be escaped. Hannah tries to keep our money problems from me, but it’s hard not to know.

We moved into a foster family at first but only until Hannah became 18, which was 6 years ago. She worked hard to become my guardian as soon as she could. She had a part time job at 16, and helped me homeschool for as long as I can remember since I couldn’t really go to regular school.

Things started to change about a year ago though. Hannah has been having a doctor see me regularly for a while now, but ever since I turned 18 she’s been extra careful to schedule a doctor to come visit me. I get regular shots, and Hannah gives me lollipops after every visit. So I have that to look forward to.

Hannah finishes my food and puts it in front of me. She picks up a soft plastic fork and gets a bite ready for me. “Say ‘ah’ Alice.” I roll my eyes at her. But… I do sometimes struggle with the plate to mouth motion. I blush as I open my mouth wide to let her feed me. Hannah always takes such good care of me.

Once she finishes feeding me she helps me down and into the living room to watch TV while she prepares her own meal, some kind of white goopy stuff she makes like a milk shake. I don’t know why, but she won’t let me try it. Or smell it, or get anywhere near it. I only occasionally see her eat anything else, but she won’t tell me why. Oh well, she’ll tell me one day, and in the meantime I look through our selection of old DVDs. There’s SpongeBob, Blue’s Clues, some episode collections of Sesame Street, and more. All of them have an age rating well below 10 years old, but that’s all Hannah lets me watch. She should trust me more, I’m a big girl… I mean, not literally. Whether because of the accident or just bad luck in what I inherited from our parents, I was always going to be looking up to Hannah, and my friend Jill, and most likely anyone else I met.

I waste time watching some SpongeBob, since I had that dream earlier. Ever since I passed the high school homeschool program I really haven’t had much to do but lounge around the house playing with my toys. I’m still mad about my grades. I passed, but only because my good grades outweighed my bad ones. Which is their fault! Hannah checked the materials they sent and no where was there any ‘sex-ed’ lessons. What even is that? Hannah told me it can’t be that important since she didn’t remember it from her time in school. I could tell she was embarrassed to admit she didn’t remember it, her face was flushed as she told me. Several other lessons, from biology and literature mostly and a bit from history, were also missing. But I’m a smart girl so I guess it’s okay. Hannah kept apologizing to me for not being able to teach me better, but it’s not like it was her fault they didn’t send all of the material.

I watch SpongeBob, and I still laugh at all the silly things he does. But I can only get so much enjoyment out of the thousandth rewatch of these episodes. I wish we had enough money to buy all the episodes ever. I know there are more, but Hannah says we can’t afford them all.

I hear Hanna take a phone call on the wired phone in the kitchen. She sometimes calls it a land line phone, which I think is silly since all phones are based off of lines running over the land. She comes into the living room a moment later smiling at me. “The doctor will be here in just a minute.”