Tale #93: Speeding Up, Slowing Down:

Tale #93: Speeding Up, Slowing Down: (Content Tags: Drug abuse, braindrain, messy and wet diapers, blowout, humiliation, degradation, high school protagonist, broad strokes) There are no shortcuts to success, at least none that aren't toll roads. Hard work is hard work, and if someone can't keep up, then that's just where the chips land. Becoming the valedictorian is the epitome of that diligence, and it isn't enough to just want it, you have to also earn it. Andy hadn't earned it. He'd earned a lot of things by the end of his shortcut, but none of them were any good. The cruel irony was that he couldn't have become valedictorian without the shortcut, but after coming out the other side, he wasn't even fit to graduate. Andy was above average in most ways; he was smart, he was social, and he was sporty. Being so good at so many things had given him somewhat of a complex though, one that fostered unhealthy entitlement and an ego that refused reality. He had to be the team captain, he had to be the prom king, and he *had* to be the valedictorian. This obsessive need to be the best was not completely his fault. His parents had always pushed way too hard, and it'd never been acceptable for him to be seen as anything other than exemplary. His parents were highly successful professionals and complete narcissists; him and his siblings had always suffered their expectations, but none were more oppressive than the ones for Andy. His older sister, Serena, had already paid her academic dues; she'd been valedictorian and she was set to graduate college with magna cum laude. She'd set the bar as the firstborn child, and she'd set it as high as it could possibly go; exceeding what she'd accomplished would be nigh impossible, which meant he had to focus on at least matching it. His younger brother, Milo, was in fourth grade, and was in no way meeting the expectations that Andy and their sister had expertly cleared at that age. The younger boy had poor grades, a propensity to fidget, and was still wetting the bed. After two perfect children, the third was an embarrassment. Milo had been so consistently mediocre that their parents had lowered their standards for him. Sure, Milo was still punished and ostracized for his failures and shortcomings, but he wasn't focused on as much as Andy was. Milo was a failed project that caused anger and embarrassment, while Andy was a promising one that required the utmost attention and direction. Their final sloppy solution for Milo had been to basically pay a doctor off to diagnose him with ADHD and get him medication. They thought that he needed more mental stimulation, and if not, then at least they could point at him as being hindered. After briefly trying the pills, Milo had immediately hated them and refused to actually take them. Funnily enough, while his parents had just been looking for an excuse, they'd been right on the money. He'd later reconsider his haste, when he gave it a second go and discovered how effective they were for him in smaller doses, but there was a long road between the two events that was just littered with Andy's mistakes. It'd been an essay that'd done it. The thing that had triggered his descent into being a dumb diaper-dooker. While already trying to juggle a million other things, and under the immense pressure that the spot of valedictorian was getting further away, Andy had opted for another path. Some of his older friends, who were already in their first or second year of college, had talked about the drug culture of upper education. Weed and booze were a given, and party drugs were what made the weekends, but there was another drug that was less 'recreational' and more 'performance enhancing'. Adderall. A powerful stimulant used to ease the symptoms of ADHD, but also wildly effective for someone who just needed a boost. The grind of college was enough to make some students turn to it, and Andy's friends couldn't see too many downsides to it. So Andy stole his little brother's supply, and he started to use them with worrying frequency; it started off as just a special occasion, but then it began to be for every cram session, and then every homework assignment, and then so on and so forth. In a shockingly short amount of time, Andy had become addicted to stimulants; besides the Adderall, he also drank a huge amount of caffeine and was already vaping nicotine. Andy had never felt so on top of all his work! Why didn't *everyone* use this stuff all the time? It'd be a while before side-effects became more obvious, and he'd run into a different problem before that: his little brother was wanting to give his medicine another chance. Only, when he went to dig into his pill bottle, he found out that it was nearly empty! Milo didn't initially suspect that his older brother was responsible for that, since the younger boy was unaware of what they would do for someone who didn't really need them. Milo didn't make a big fuss about it, because he really couldn't. Their parents had been under the impression that Milo was actually using the pills all this time, so the boy couldn't mention that he'd been lying about that, lest he get in more trouble! What the boy *did* do was hide his supply when the new bottle got picked up. He wasn't sure who had been stealing them or why, but it just seemed like the thing to do to keep their location a little more secretive. This sudden shift meant that Andy had to start buying his own, and their street price was rough, even for an underclass kid with a fat allowance. Once he'd gotten to the point where he was using two or three pills a day, those side-effects finally began to rear their ugly head. There was the simple stuff, like dry mouth or elevated heartbeat rate, but those really weren't the issues that Andy was concerned about. Long-term and heavy abuse of stimulants, for one who doesn't need to take them, can lead to the loss of bladder and bowel control. Enough heavy use can also cause brain damage, and not in a temporary way. If Andy had known any of that, then he might have been more cautious about the shortcut he was taking. It started with some infrequent bedwetting, and then some mild dribbling in his pants during the day; that put him in good company with Milo, who was still a bedwetter himself, though for more normal reasons. Andy tried to hide the bedwetting, but after a while, such a secret couldn't remain hidden. Shamefully, that meant having to start wearing 'protection' to bed. And then the fecal incontinence began to rear its ugly turtle-head. He'd been studying the first time that had happened; he already wore Depends during the day to handle the dribbling, and then while zoned in on his coursework, he let loose a sticky lump into the back of the shoddy adult pull-ups. He hadn't even noticed that he'd shit himself for fifteen minutes after it had happened; he was focused so entirely on his schooling, that the hot load pressed against his ass may as well not have existed. When he *did* notice, it freaked him out and he wondered how the hell something like that could have happened. Andy was too ashamed to consider seeing a doctor or even telling anyone the problems he was having. His parents had already been extremely disappointed in him for wetting the bed, and it was only through his amazing grades that they retained any faith in him at all! He couldn't mention to them that his bodily control was failing him during the day too. Finally, once the soiling began to happen every day, Andy realized that he needed to personally address the problem. It was getting hard to hide the fact that he was shitting in his Depends, and it was getting concerning too, so Andy took the plunge on doing some research. That's how he discovered that he'd been causing these problems with his own poor judgment. It was the Adderall that was causing this! For any normal teen, that would have been the moment that they decided to get clean and stop using the medicine, but the decision was much harder for him to make. He was in the final stretch of the semester, and he was within spitting range of securing that valedictorian spot! What was another month of embarrassing accidents? After he graduated at the top of his class, then he could worry about weaning himself off of the stimulants! If he did that, then he was sure that things would return to normal afterwards. Milo would actually be the first one to realize that Andy's accidents were far more comprehensive than simple bedwetting. Andy had been tasked with taking the boy to go buy him some new Summer clothes; what could have been a simple errand between brothers, would wind up being a lesson in humility for the older of the two. It'd been while trying to explain to the kid why he should try dressing with a little more maturity, instead of filling his wardrobe with 'meme' shirts and the like. There was an irony to that, to be dictating the ins and outs of maturity, all while wearing 'adult briefs' under his own pants like an invalid. He'd just been finishing his diatribe when he felt a large mass push into the Depends with a swift departure. It was bigger than what most of his messy accidents had been like up until this point, and it was the first time that he'd been genuinely worried that the disposable briefs may not be up to such a monumental task. Worse than that, the turd hadn't slipped out quietly, but had been propelled crackling with a low, rapturous fart. There really hadn't been any hiding it from Milo. Between the smell of poop and the noted lump in the back of his pants, even a slacker like Milo could determine what his older brother had done. Further pressing on the matter, and on the mushy bulge, had yielded the admission that he was wearing the same garments during the day that he wore during the night. Andy didn't expound upon why he thought his bladder and bowel control had degraded, but he did command his little brother to keep it to himself. Milo appeared amenable for the time, but there was certainly an unspoken agreement that Milo now had leverage; that meant keeping the boy happy, which for this shopping trip had meant buying him a new game. It would also mean doing Milo's chores and playing the part of chauffeur, which was aggravating, but better than the alternative. If Andy could just make it to graduation, then he could spend his Summer getting off the Adderall, and his toileting issues would go away! With those gone, Milo wouldn't have anything to hold over his head, and then things would be as they should be. He ran into another problem the week before finals would start; his dealer got nabbed, which meant that he'd have to source a different supply. He had already nearly been out when he tried to re-up, so things were urgent. Having no time to make inroads with another supplier, Andy had to act desperately, and that meant returning to how things had been at the start. Andy needed to nab the pills from his little brother. Unlike the first time that Andy had gone stealing, his little brother now actually used his medicine and thrived off of it. Milo still wasn't a phenomenal student, but he had been doing noticeably better than before, and he had a much tighter control over his own attention span. Since Milo actually used the medicine now, he would notice if it started to go missing... So Andy did something despicable. He might not have been able to find an Adderall dealer, but he *was* able to find some pills that looked pretty much the same. These pills were pretty much garbage-tier 'supplements' that likely didn't even contain what they claimed to, but they had an uncanny resemblance to the pills that his brother had. While Milo was at soccer practice, Andy snuck into his room and found where the boy kept his medicine, and then he swapped them out. His brother would be in turmoil from the sudden withdrawal, and already having clipped the edge of summer school, he might end up failing the fourth grade. It was sad, but Andy justified it in his mind by determining that having to go to summer school or repeating a grade, would help Milo take his studies more seriously. Andy spent so much time trying to make excuses for himself, that he didn't bother to read the pill bottle at all. He had no clue that Milo had been switched to a stronger dose, which would set Andy up for his final fall. He popped one of them before he left, and got so geeked out that he didn't realize that he'd dropped the packaging of the fake pills behind the younger boy's cluttered desk. The rest of the week would go smoothly for Andy. He studied for so long and was so fixated, that he was oblivious to the fact that his accidents had gotten much more severe, as well that his ability to function without Adderall was completely diminishing. Milo on the other hand suffered and he couldn't figure out what was wrong with him; he'd worked so much harder the last couple of months to pull himself out of the trenches, and now he was about to blow it on his final tests of the year! Finals would come to pass. Andy absolutely killed it, getting perfect scores in each of his classes and just barely getting the vaunted slot of valedictorian! Milo would fail just enough to not pass the threshold for fifth grade, which meant he'd be going to summer school. For Andy, that meant accolades and congratulations. That meant a much better range of universities that would want him! For Milo, that meant getting yelled at and grounded, with their parents final comments being to get his room clean. One wouldn't think that writing a valedictorian speech and cleaning a bedroom would be tasks that held a connecting thread, but they would both lead to huge ripples that would impact Andy's future. Milo would find the packaging to the fake pills that he'd been duped with, while Andy would take one more pill than usual, so he could really 'cook' on this speech he was writing. Andy definitely cooked, but it wasn't his speech, rather his brain. The teen had already been damaging it for months with his stimulant abuse, and this final foray had taken him over the edge. Funny enough, the brain damage would have been noticeable earlier on, if he'd stopped taking the pills long enough to see where he 'slowed down' to. He only noticed it when his sentences started to get sloppy, and then incoherent, and then he was having an extremely hard time reading back what he'd earlier written. It'd been warm that day, so he'd been seated at his desk in a tank top and the Depends, and his top was slowly becoming wet with his own drool, while his adult pull-up had long been wet with his own piddling urine. Finding himself slow down, he took *another* pill, and that did it. His chin was wet with slobber and the once respectable teenager was helplessly shitting himself like a mushbrained retard. He was too slow to even notice that he was shitting himself; his Depends just became fuller and fuller, loaded with his hot and squishy excrement. Milo had gone to tattle, once the younger boy had put two and two together on what had happened to his medicine. The grade schooler would then follow his parents to Andy's room for a big confrontation, and that's when the discovery would be made that the 'promising' graduate had pushed himself too far. Finding him sitting in his own stool, farting uncontrollably and soiling himself even more, it became clear that Andy was no longer a proper valedictorian. He hardly seemed worthy of graduation at all! In his journey to 'speed up' his brain, he'd ended up becoming slow as molasses; without any Adderall, he was rendered little better than a special ed retard with shit for brains, and with the drug, he would still be slower than what he'd started as. He tried explaining himself to his family, that he'd only done this to get the edge that he needed, and that things weren't as bad as they seemed. Then he stood up, and another juicy fart would splatter his Depends with even more mushy filth; the leg gathers had already stained a sickly brown, as well as the back paneling, but now it would appear that he had a blowout and streaks were coming down the backs of his thighs. The yellowed front had also begun to leak, letting little dribbles down the front of his thighs. Before anything else, the next step forward would be putting him into a real diaper; something that could stand up to the kind of thing that he'd now be regularly doing. As for being valedictorian, or graduating at all, that would be another matter...