The door closed behind her with a click, but the world on the other side might as well have cracked open a different lifetime. It wasn’t the sterile chill of a Trial chamber. It wasn’t a fake nursery or a digitized daycare. Ivy knew this place with the bone-deep certainty of memory—the flicker of overhead lights, the posters laminated and curling at the corners, the smell of pencil shavings and carpet glue clinging to the air like it had never left.

It was her third-grade classroom.

Room 103.

She knew it by the faint stain on the whiteboard tray and the crooked class calendar that always skipped Tuesdays. Her feet—no, her diapered bottom—rested awkwardly on one of the woman’s hips, her tiny frame absurdly small against the cotton blouse of Ms. Adler, her teacher from over a decade ago. The teacher adjusted her grip with the same maternal ease as before, as if hoisting a toddler mid-lesson was simply part of the syllabus.

“And remember, class,” Ms. Adler said, her voice the same warm hum Ivy remembered—steady, assured, just the right mix of maternal and scholarly, “when we reduce fractions, we’re always looking for the smallest form it can take.” She clicked her marker against the whiteboard with a flick of the wrist and continued sketching out a series of math problems as if Ivy weren’t squirming gently against her ribs.

Ivy stared at her, lips parted, stunned into stillness. The softness of the teacher’s touch, the scent of dry-erase ink mixed with old hand lotion.

She turned her head slowly, dread creeping up like water rising in her lungs, and scanned the room.

Every desk was filled.

There was Andrew Turner, still chewing on his pencil like it owed him money. Jessie Morales is in the back, doodling dragons in the margins of her worksheet. Riley Summers, humming softly as she adjusted her glasses. All of them just as they were—third graders frozen in the amber of her recollection. Not one of them looked older than they had been when she’d known them.

But then she saw her desk.

Front row, left side, third in.

And someone was sitting there.

Her heart hiccupped. That wasn’t a classmate. That was Eli—the same Eli who’d flunked out in Trial Five, the one who used to pace like a caged dog, muttering about patterns in the floor tiles. He was seated properly now, pencil in hand, scribbling onto his worksheet with a furrowed brow. He wore a uniform that matched the others—khaki slacks, tucked-in polo—but his eyes… There was a hollowness to them.

She twisted in Ms. Adler’s arms, trying to angle herself for a better look. The movement earned her a casual bounce from the teacher and a faint hush of fabric as her diaper squished gently against the woman’s hip.

“Little wiggler today, aren’t we?” Ms. Adler teased, her tone playful but distracted. She offered no further explanation, just continued circling improper fractions with her marker as if it were the most natural thing in the world to hold a baby-sized Ivy while doing so.

The students didn’t look at her. A few cast glances. Some even smiled. One girl—Melissa?—waved briefly before returning to her notes. It was as if her presence made sense. As if this baby version of Ivy belonged here as much as the chalk dust and the squeaky swivel chair behind the teacher’s desk.

The floor beneath her didn’t tilt. The lights didn’t flicker.

And yet everything inside her screamed that something had gone wrong.

She looked again at Eli, who now smiled faintly as he handed his worksheet forward to a girl with braces and a glittery pen. There was no struggle in his eyes.

Ms. Adler continued her lesson, her voice as soothing as a lullaby.

And Ivy sat there, a helpless child in the arms of her third-grade teacher, dressed like a toddler, diaper rustling softly with each bounce, watching the faces of her classmates—contestants and children alike—blur together across the timelines of her life.

Ivy let out a slow, unwitting yawn, the kind that sneaks up from somewhere behind the eyes and unfurls through the jaw like a curtain being pulled back. Ms. Adler’s eyes flicked down from the board, catching the gesture in that way teachers always seemed to—some mix of maternal radar and years of seeing kids nodding off behind textbooks. The marker paused mid-swoop.

“Oh, sweetpea,” she said, her voice slipping into that warm timbre that made every sentence sound like a bedtime story. “Are you hungry?”

There was no chance to reply. Not in protest, not in confusion, not even in startled recognition. Before Ivy could muster the vaguest shape of resistance, she was in motion again, swept up with a practiced ease. Ms. Adler cradled her as though it had always been part of the day’s lesson plan. A shuffle of limbs, a shift of hips, and Ivy found herself curled against the teacher’s side, the crook of the woman’s elbow nestling her head like a favorite pillow that had once known her shape. The blouse rustled faintly beneath her cheek, and the scent of laundry starch and faint lavender lingered just above the warmth of skin.

The bottle appeared, conjured from the folds of some nearby bag or desk drawer—who could say in a place like this, where memory masqueraded as architecture. Its plastic nipple pressed gently against her lips. Ivy turned her head and gave a muffled sound of protest. But the motion only earned her a gentle coo, a brief shushing hum, and a firmer nudge from the waiting teat.

Her mouth opened, more reflex than will.

And then came the milk.

Warm. An almost sweet, bland fullness, the sort that crept along the tongue and slid down the throat with the slow, deliberate pace of a dream you hadn’t meant to have. She groaned faintly around the bottle, every instinct recoiling against the familiarity, against the ease with which her body accepted what her mind rejected. Yet still she suckled, rhythmically, obediently, and with a dull resignation that numbed thought like a fog creeping over the tide.

Ms. Adler rocked her gently with one arm while continuing to draw fractions on the board with the other, as if this was the most normal thing in the world.

“When we simplify eight-sixteenths,” she said, tapping the numbers with the marker, “we look for what fits into both. What divides them evenly, what makes the pieces smaller, simpler, clearer?” Her words were meant for the room, but they curled inside Ivy’s ears with an odd resonance, as if Ms. Adler were speaking to something deeper, something folded beneath Ivy’s skin, beneath even the surface of memory.

Each sway of her body translated into a motion Ivy could feel—a slow, pendulous shift that rocked her from spine to toes. Her diaper crinkled with each subtle tilt, a whisper of plastic and padding against the hush of the classroom. The students did not react. No whisper of mockery, no stifled laughter, not even surprise. It was as if they didn’t recognize Ivy, and, she supposed, who would, given how she looked now.

Ivy’s eyes wandered back to Eli, her vision bobbing slightly with each rock of Ms. Adler’s hips. He leaned into his desk now, engaged with the girl beside him, lips moving in quiet conversation. His hands moved with fluid confidence across his paper, but his posture was too perfect, too stiff, like a child carved into place. His face wore a smile, thin and tight, like the waxy grin of a doll.

Was that what she looked like now?

She sucked harder without meaning to, a pulse of frustration surging in her chest and vanishing just as quickly, smothered beneath the rhythm of feeding. The bottle made a faint squeak as it emptied fraction by fraction, each gulp mapping her further into the fiction. Her limbs dangled now, slack and swaddled, her body complicit even as her mind resisted. Her thoughts tried to scatter, but they were caught in the syrupy tide of this place, caught in the folds of something that didn’t quite care what she wanted.

Ms. Adler leaned down then, her breath stirring the soft hairs at Ivy’s temple. “You’re such a good little helper,” she murmured, not whispering exactly, but not speaking loud enough for anyone else to hear. “Just like always.”

That phrase—it pricked like a thorn under her skin. Always?

The bottle’s nipple slipped free with a gentle pop. Her lips were too slow to close, and a droplet of milk ran down her chin. Ms. Adler wiped it with her thumb before Ivy could even register the sensation.

“Much better,” the woman said.

The marker clicked again.

“Let’s move on to mixed numbers,” she announced to the class, her voice once more rising to fill the room.

Ivy lay against her teacher, stunned by the simplicity of it all. By the insidious charm. She wasn’t trapped in some horror-show nursery or tech-choked nightmare this time. No, this illusion—if it was one—was crafted from memory. Or, perhaps, Ivy was dreaming. That was by far the simplest explanation for everything.

The knock came with a peculiar cadence—two soft raps, a pause, then one more, like an afterthought or a signature. It barely registered at first, buried beneath the lull of Ms. Adler’s rhythmic swaying. But then the door creaked open just enough to slip someone through. Ivy felt, more than saw, the shift in the room’s attention.

A familiar face peered in, smiling as if she’d never left. The hair was shorter now, curled tighter around her cheeks, but the eyes were the same—bright, shrewd, a little too observant. Miss Calderon. Seventh grade homeroom. Ivy recognized her instantly, the way you realize old furniture in a house you haven’t visited in years. Part of her wanted to recoil, to vanish into the crook of Ms. Adler’s arm and hope the moment passed. But that wasn’t how things worked here.

“Ah, just in time,” Ms. Adler said cheerfully, as if this were part of some tightly choreographed routine. “She’s a little sleepy, but she’s been an absolute darling this morning.”

Before Ivy could muster the will to twist away, before she could even formulate a question, she felt the shift—arms repositioning, limbs gently jostled, the sudden absence of one maternal presence giving way to another. She was passed off like a cherished book or a classroom prop. Miss Calderon opened her arms and caught her with ease, folding Ivy close in a firm cradle, her voice a syrupy blend of familiarity and condescension.

“There’s my favorite little helper,” she murmured, brushing a lock of hair from Ivy’s face. “You’ve gotten even cuter since seventh grade.”

The classroom changed around them as if breathing—walls stretching and blinking into tiled linoleum, posters now crowded with puberty-positive slogans and world history timelines, desks taller and more scarred, with stickers half-peeled and Sharpie graffiti hiding beneath the varnish. A different smell now, too. The faint tang of disinfectant overlaid with the ghost of cafeteria pizza and eraser rubber. Locker sweats. Pencil lead. It was middle school alright.

She was carried through it all like a trophy.

Miss Calderon cooed and hummed softly, stepping to the front of the room with the pride of a teacher showing off a new bulletin board. Then, with the same matter-of-factness as rolling out a projector cart, she lowered Ivy into a baby bouncer stationed by the whiteboard. It gave way beneath her with a slow, springy groan, the rubbery canvas tensing beneath her diapered bottom as she settled. Her limbs flailed briefly, and the harness snugged around her. She bounced once, twice, cheeks flushing as she struggled to maintain some semblance of posture. Her legs kicked out instinctively, her arms braced the sides, but it only made her bob harder.

The room didn’t laugh. Instead, there were coos, and somehow that made it worse.

Scattered at first, then more persistent. One of the girls—someone Ivy half-recognized from math class, maybe Jessica with the pink glasses—giggled and whispered something to her neighbor. Another boy, lanky and too tall for seventh grade, leaned sideways in his chair and gave her a soft wave.

Contestants. Some of them, at least.

And yet... they were playing along, just like before.

Each one blended seamlessly into the classroom scenery. Their faces tugged at Ivy’s memory with the delicate pinch of déjà vu, but something had changed in them, or maybe in her. Either way, none of them looked surprised to see a diapered Ivy bouncing at the front of the classroom. If anything, they looked delighted.

Her cheeks burned hotter. She tried to sit up, but the design of the bouncer made that nearly impossible. The best she could manage was an awkward lean forward before the frame reeled her back like a slingshot, sending her into another gentle bob. The motion only amplified the rustle of her diaper, the noise impossibly loud in her ears.

Miss Calderon had already begun the lesson.

“Alright, class,” she said brightly, gesturing toward the board now filled with notes Ivy couldn’t remember being written, “today we’re reviewing proportional reasoning. Who can remind us what a ratio is?”

Hands shot up, and the classroom whirred to life.

Behind her, the board flickered like a camera shutter. Ivy caught it in her peripheral vision, barely there. Enough to remind her that this wasn’t real, it couldn’t be. And yet the pressure of the harness across her chest was real enough. The rise and fall of the bouncer.

She watched the students, answering questions, scribbling notes. Some offered her covert smiles, while others stared too long, as if she were part of the curriculum. As if she were something to be studied.

And all the while, she bounced.

Trapped in a child’s seat inside a memory stitched together with unsettling precision, caught between a math problem and a hallucination too vivid to be dismissed.

It started as a quiet churn low in her abdomen, a gurgling protest that cut through the distant hum of the lesson and the soft, rhythmic creak of the bouncer springs. Ivy shifted, trying to ignore it, willing her body into stillness as if that alone could stave off what was coming. But her stomach clenched again—tighter this time, unmistakable in its intent. A rolling cramp pushed forward, and the sensation bloomed with a traitorous warmth. Her breath hitched. Her legs jerked slightly in the bouncer's stirrups, and she gripped the fabric seat as though bracing against a storm.

It happened slowly, cruelly. Her face flushed with the effort as her body betrayed her. Muscles relaxed against her will. The thick padding beneath her shifted to accommodate the mess, squishing and ballooning as she filled it. Heat spread across her bottom, smothering and inescapable, turning the already infantilizing bouncer into something obscene. Her toes curled as the scent began to rise, faint at first, but unmistakable. She froze, every fiber of her body locking tight as the last remnants of denial evaporated.

She knew, she knew they would notice.

And one of them did.

A girl in the second row—a brunette with pigtails and a sweatshirt two sizes too big, her voice pitched in that perfect tweenage singsong—let out a delighted gasp, finger outstretched like she’d discovered treasure in the wild. “Miss Calderon!” she called, eyes bright with triumph. “She’s got a poopy face!”

The words landed like a hammer wrapped in velvet. And the silence that followed was louder than any bell.

The room turned.

Dozens of heads swiveled in eerie synchrony, eyes locking onto Ivy with laser-like precision. She could feel their gazes like physical weight pressing against her flushed cheeks, her trembling hands, her sagging, swollen diaper. Someone giggled. Another snorted. And then the ripple started. Chuckles bubbling to the surface, whispers curling through the desks like smoke, stifled laughter disguised as coughing.

Ivy didn’t cry, although she wanted to.

Instead, she sat there, jaw clenched, tears stinging her vision but refusing to fall. Her breath came in shallow gasps, her chest tight, her face a crimson mask of humiliation as she bounced in her poopy diaper. Each bounce pressed the mess beneath her, squishing it further, reminding her of the shame with every rubbery creak.

Miss Calderon’s face shifted from mid-lesson brightness to awareness with startling smoothness. She approached the front with careful steps, like a performer closing the curtain on an act gone awry. Her voice cooed once again, wrapped in sugary affection laced with practiced authority. “Oh, poor little Ivy,” she said, crouching down to eye level with a patronizing smile. “Looks like someone made a stinky-poo, didn’t she?”

The class giggled louder.

No one questioned why a young woman was now the helpless centerpiece of this absurd scene, rocking in her accident while surrounded by classmates who treated it as a spectacle. Because to them, it seemed, she was nothing more than a baby, and babies pooped themselves. It was anticipated of Ivy, expected even, and somehow, that made the shame bloom even brighter.

The bouncer squeaked again.

And Ivy sat there, cheeks burning, trying to find air in a room that suddenly felt too thick. Trying to swallow the bitter truth that this wasn’t a mistake. That someone—something had built this place. Layer by layer. Grade by grade. Memory by memory. All of it tailored to reduce her, to recast her as something less.

The door clicked open just as the laughter swelled to its cruelest pitch, as if the timing itself had been orchestrated by some unseen conductor watching from the rafters. For a heartbeat, the room froze—giggles stilled mid-breath, eyes flicked toward the entrance—and in stepped a girl who didn’t belong in this memory. Or perhaps she did, in that strange way dreams pull from forgotten corners. Her hair was pulled into a lazy bun, her posture casual, her eyes alight with something warmer than the mocking smirks around her. Leah Torres. Ivy knew that face instantly. The same girl who had snuck her answers during Chemistry finals, who once talked her into skipping gym to eat vending machine Pop-Tarts under the bleachers. Her old friend. Her actual friend.

But something in the way Leah’s smile curved now—it was off. Softer, yes. Affectionate, even. But tinted with the kind of fondness you’d show a baby in a stroller, not an old high school partner-in-crime. Her gaze fell on Ivy’s flushed cheeks and her clearly sagging diaper with zero hesitation, no flicker of disbelief or alarm. She stepped forward, purposeful, and with all the ease of someone picking up a toddler from daycare, she scooped Ivy out of the bouncer and cradled her effortlessly in her arms.

“Hi there, baby,” she cooed, brushing a hand gently against Ivy’s hairline, cradling her against one shoulder with practiced ease.

“What is happening?” Ivy gasped, voice rising in a brittle spike of panic, “Leah, what’s going on?!”

The response was not shock, nor confusion, but a light chuckle—genuine, familiar, maddening in its calm. “What’s going on,” Leah echoed, shifting Ivy slightly to support her with both arms, “is that somebody here made a stinky, and somebody here’s about to get a clean diaper.” She winked as if that were the punchline of some inside joke they’d long since shared.

“No—wait, hold on,” Ivy struggled, squirming in the woman’s grip, though her limbs felt clumsy and slow, weighed down by the bulk of her diaper and the humiliating squish that accompanied every shift. Her captor—her friend—just bounced her gently as she strode confidently out of the middle school classroom.

The hallway twisted. One moment, they were between posters of “Growing Up Healthy” and awkward anti-vaping slogans; the next, they were flanked by sleek lockers and college prep flyers. The lighting changed subtly. Harsh fluorescents softened into amber pools, casting long shadows that seemed to stretch like limbs. They’d crossed into high school territory.

She knew it before they entered, before the door swung wide. Twelfth-grade civics. Mr. Bramley’s room, the one with the always-broken clock and the crooked American flag. But now, at the front of the room where the teacher’s cluttered desk used to sit, there was something else. A large, padded mat, clean and cartoonish, decorated with smiling animals and pastel clouds, stretching across its surface as if it belonged there. A diaper changing mat.

Leah strode straight toward it, speaking with a singsong lilt that was unmistakably teasing. “Let’s get you changed, baby girl. Don’t want you getting a rash during lecture, do we?”