Circumstances Scene 19

Jack quickly found the beverage selection of his menu and asked for a Coke. Chastity asked for a Sprite. The waitress disappeared to fill their orders, leaving the four in silence. Jean and Mary looked over the teenagers’ expressions as surreptitiously as they could from behind their menus; both teens were looking over theirs as well, and they noticed that Jack seemed a little more anxious than he had before, and that Chastity’s expression was fairly bleak. Indeed, her whole attitude seemed to have dampened since the morning revelation of their temporary incontinence. That was cause for concern between the two nurses, especially since the week had only just started and they already were sitting on a royal mess.
A couple of minutes later, the waitress came back with their drinks and asked if they were ready to order. Jack was, and by some stroke of good fortune, everyone else was as well. The waitress started with Chastity. “I’ll have a short stack of pancakes, please,” she said, much to the private relief of everyone else at the table.
“Would you like any sides with that?”
“No, thank you.”
“For you?” the waitress said to Jack.
“I’ll have the stack of pancakes, with a side of hash browns,” Jack said.
“Okay…” the waitress jotted that down and took Jean and Mary’s orders, collected their menus, and then vanished once again to post them for the cooks.
Jack sipped at his Coke, darting private glances at Chastity every now and then, who seemed lost in abject contemplation of the table’s surface. Every little bit, he noticed, she would absently take a drink from her Sprite. He was starting to worry about her, and hoped that she snapped out of her funk soon. It wasn’t like they were going to be stuck in diapers for longer than a week. Jean and Mary had both pretty much said so, and they were nurses who had done this sort of thing before, so that had to mean something. Didn’t it?
When their food arrived, it was eaten largely in a tense, nervous silence. Jack and Chastity ate, Jack with a bigger appetite than Chastity fairly well cleaned his plates while Chastity ate all but about the last quarter of her pancakes, and the two nurses ate more or less all of theirs. The silence apparently got to Jean, who stood up and motioned for Mary to follow her. Mary did so, with a confused expression on her face. The waitress had already cleared away their dishes, and even with the nurses gone, Chastity still remained silent. “Hey,” Jack said to her. “Wake up.”
She looked at him, and for a moment, the melancholy left her features. “I’m here,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
“Still upset about this morning?” he asked quietly.
Chastity nodded. “It’s going to take me a while to get over it.” She smiled a little for him. “But I’ll get over it.”
Jack nodded. “Yeah,” he said, but that was all. The nurses came back, and they all left the restaurant. The ride back to the school-turned-laboratory of sorts was quiet and uneventful, which was cause for a little further concern for the nurses. When they did get back to the school, Jean decided it was time to have the teens fill out a couple of questionnaires about the products they’d used so far. She took them into the entertainment room and Mary brought the forms for the diapers, sleepers, bottles, and cribs. After explaining the forms a bit and telling the teens what sort of feedback was being looked for, they left them in peace to fill them out. “Well, isn’t this a jolly barrel of crap,” Jack mused as he looked over the first form he was going to fill out; one about the thinner diapers. “Did you think they were comfortable,” he read.
“Well, what did you expect?” Chastity asked. “It is a generic questionnaire… even if it is about baby products.”
“Yeah, true,” Jack muttered as he wrote something down for it. He couldn’t honestly give negative feedback… yet. The crib questionnaire was the most interesting, though, with the sleeper sheet following a close second. “Was it too stuffy,” he read. “These folks get a little too into their work, I think,” he mused.
“Tell me about it,” Chastity agreed. Jack looked up at her, and noticed that her disposition seemed to have improved a bit since breakfast. Maybe the pancakes had been prepared with a dash of cheerfulness rather than a muscle inhibiting formula, Jack thought wryly. He hoped it lasted, he thought as he went back to finishing the forms.
“Jack?”
“Hmmm?” He looked up at her again.