Tale #154: The Borderline:

Tale #154: The Borderline: (Content Tags: Humiliation, intellectual shame, messing, pull-ups, school setting) He was apparently on the borderline. That's what had been the conclusion of those tests and those visits to a 'specialist'. What exactly did that mean though? What kind of line was he atop, and what were the two sides of the field that he was between? Borderline *retarded*. That was the conclusion, at least as it was smugly explained by his younger brother. Danny was right at the split between being cognitively normal (though obviously at the lowest end of that) and being mentally retarded (and inversely at the highest functioning end of that). It wasn't an easy thing to accept, though it hadn't come out of nowhere; Danny had long known himself to be less intelligent than his peers, as evident by the sheer struggling of his academic career and the fact that he always ended up feeling stupid in the face of his studies. He'd always been embarrassed by that; it was a heavy burden to haul, to be demonstrably dumber than everyone his own age, and to even be shown up by kids that were younger, like his little brother for example. He'd effectively flunked every grade that he'd been enrolled in, and it was only two things that kept him in an age-appropriate grade: the first being that their family moved around frequently and so testing scores were poorly kept, and that the school system did everything possible to not make a child repeat a grade. But now that they were allegedly in their longterm home, and being enrolled in a far less forgiving school system, everything had come back to haunt Danny. He was in sixth grade, but none of his academic skills matched that: his literacy was still at the basics, his mathematics were several years behind, his general knowledge was lacking, and even his emotional intelligence was clearly stunted. Only a few weeks into the semester, and the administration had been adamant about having him tested. For the first time, his dimwitted nature hadn't been brushed off as simply being simple, but had instead been scrutinized to the point of requiring analysis. There were some other things that had hinted in this direction too, aside from just being dumb; he was still a bedwetter, his mental and physical maturity was clearly undeveloped, and he'd been very late to pottytrain, with frequent pooping accidents being a reality up until he was around six. None of these on their own were smoking guns, but they were given new context by his new label. His IQ was in the seventies. Split between a normal life and one where he ate crayons on the puzzle-mat floor of the special education classroom. The borderline. Danny had never seen the inside of the retard room at any of his other schools, but he'd heard rumors and had cultivated enough tropes to have an idea of what it was probably like: drooling morons that probably wore diapers because they crapped their pants otherwise. He refused to think of himself as being anything like that. He knew he wasn't smart, but he also knew he wasn't *that*. Not everyone agreed on that though. His little brother, for example, had become very comfortable with slinging around the 'R' word in reference to him; there was a misguided sense of pride from the younger boy about the fact that his mental superiority was now being so greatly vindicated. Jacob was only nine, but he was pretty obviously the smarter of the two; the only brother that Danny could prove better than was Perry, but Perry was a literal toddler that dooked in diapers. According to Jacob, Danny would be joining Perry on the whole diaper-dooking matter; it was apparently an inevitability of being a 'retard'. This would unfortunately pan out as true. The more likely culprit should have simply been the stress of his new label, or the subconscious suggestions that arose from Jacob's harsh words, but Danny did start to have accidents again, just like he'd had all those years ago. The first occurrence was shortly after his intellectual diagnosis; he'd been anxiously brooding about what it meant to be borderline retarded, and his thoughts had been such a flurry, that he hadn't noticed the urgency in his bowels. He'd been watching cartoons with his younger brothers, though not truly paying attention, whenever it happened. One moment he was ruminating on what retardation actually meant, and the next had his nostrils filling with the fresh, fetid fumes of hot poop. He'd casually pulled back on the waistband of Perry's Pampers, but he didn't see anything inside the back, and then he shifted and felt the squelch underneath his own buttcheeks. His briefs were absolutely *loaded* with stool. Danny tried to quietly sneak off to take care of it, but Jacob hadn't let him get away with the deed so easily. Much like Perry's waistband had been tugged back, the same happened to his sweatpants from Jacob, and his dirty deed was revealed to the two younger boys. "Danny! You POOPED yourself! I *knew* you were a dummy!" Danny wished he could say that it was a one-time thing, but it simply wasn't. In a horrible feedback loop, it became such that the stress of soiling himself only propelled him more deeply into a state where further accidents were an inevitability. It only took two weeks of these intermittent accidents for him to lose his underwear. His parents put him back in Pull-Ups, seeming to readily accept this regression as being an obvious conclusion to his newly discovered mental capacity. They even spoke more slowly to him, with a cooing wilt that was reserved typically for Perry. Once he was in training pants every day, Danny's resolve crumbled more fully; he felt less and less capable by the day, as if he was accepting the things that Jacob had put in his head as being raw facts. In the realm of psychological warfare, Danny was unarmed and unguarded. The situation would worsen at school for him too. His grades suffered worse than before, now that his confidence in his own capabilities had crumbled, and he was facing the anxiety of going to school with a Pull-Up under his pants, which he obviously worried would be revealed. In the short time that he had been attending the new school, he had already gotten a reputation for being dimwitted, at least compared to his peers. It hadn't yet reached a point of total ostracism or humiliation, but it had limited the pool of people who would deign to be his friend. His classmates weren't mean about it, at least not yet, but he was seen as 'ditzy'. Gym class had been the most troublesome aspect so far, since he was supposed to change into his gym clothes in the locker room, surrounded by other boys in his class. Considering he no longer wore regular underwear, this became a tricky part of his day. The first couple of times, he had waited until he was alone to change or had changed clothes in the bathroom, but his coach had gotten on his case about being late or taking his sweet time. So, he instead started to wear his gym shorts under his pants, so that he never had to reveal the fact that he was wearing training pants. This strategy helped, but it was far from perfect; the gym shorts were pretty short, and not at all baggy, which made him feel self-conscious about whether or not the bulk of the garment was showing through the fabric, or if the waistband may poke above. He tried a few different things to mitigate the risks, such as wearing briefs over his trainers, or tucking his gym shirt in; he'd look in the mirror and cringe, thinking that his butt still looked kind of big. Things worked out at first, for a time, but it was an inevitability that things would eventually fall apart. That collapse would come on an otherwise insignificant day; he'd been walking to the locker room, head in the clouds, and whenever he passed the threshold of the changing area, he snapped back enough to realize something warm and sticky was pressed against his hiney. It was too late to simply leave, since he'd made his way far enough in to be spotted by the coach, and he really didn't want to have to tell the man what his malfunction was. How exactly was one supposed to even bring that up? 'Hey, coach? I crapped my pants. May I be excused?' It simply wasn't feasible, at least not if he cared about retaining any shred of personal pride. It really wasn't as black and white as he was seeing it, but it spoke to his lack of wit, that he couldn't conceive of a less blunt way to find a leave; a smarter boy would have just asked to see the nurse, or fibbed and said he left his gym clothes in his main locker, but then again, a smarter boy likely wouldn't have been in a Pull-Up, nor would he have made doo-doo in it. A borderline-retarded boy would be wearing trainers, and such a dummy would be pooping in them. It spoke to the label that Danny found himself plastered with. An alleged imbecile, such as himself, would also think that it was in any way practical to pretend that the poo wasn't there. And so Danny proceeded as he normally would. He slid off his pants, he changed his shirt, and he stuffed them in the tiny gym locker that had been afforded to him. Every motion brought the steaming lump to his attention, and while the locker room smelled of sweat and cheap body spray, the undeniable fumes of his feces were like a grim beacon. He sat on the bench to get his shoes back on, struggling a little with tying them, while feeling the sticky load flattening across his pale buttcheeks. Danny figured that he would at least evade attention if he wasn't toddling around with a clear bulge on his backside, but he still felt anxious about the odor becoming a problem. Funnily enough, it wouldn't be the smell that ended up sinking him, at least not alone. The coach told all the boys to hang tight for a few minutes, so that he could coordinate gym supplies with the other class, and that's when things would go sideways. Stuck in an unsupervised room, surrounded by energetic middle school boys, they would quickly find their own entertainment. He'd gotten distracted by the oddly pleasant sensation of the smeared mess, so he hadn't been paying attention to the little game that the others were playing, at least not until he became an unwilling participant in it. Suddenly, he felt cool air against his bare thighs, and he looked down to see that his gym shorts had been yanked down to his ankles. He didn't immediately process what was happening, or what the consequences would swiftly become, but his classmates didn't waste any time in informing him of them. There was a brief silence after the initial giggles of the pantsing, followed by a few muffled snorts: "Nice briefs, *baby*." If it'd ended there, then Danny could have lived with it. If they had seen his skidded tighty-whities, stretched across his trainers like a diaper cover, and had only teased him over not having boxers, then things would have been fine. That wouldn't be how things went down though. That wouldn't be the end of the conversation. It wasn't immediate that they realized what they were truly seeing, but the one that pulled his shorts down was the first to make a niggling comment that brought everything tumbling down. "Ugh, you reek! Do you not wipe, or what?" The wiry brat asked, pretending to pinch his nose. That garnered closer attention to his backside, to the brown streak that had been permanently impressed upon the cotton seat, and that closer look quickly turned into a spectacle. His underpants looked puffy, and the briefs didn't completely hide the training pants to begin with. "Dude, look! He's got something else on?" "Like a cup?" "No, more like..." "Is that a *diaper*?!" His face got red as a cherry and he bent down to grab a hold of his shorts. As he did, the anxiety and the position was enough to cause a conniption in his delicate tummy; Danny suddenly let a big fart rip into his seat, and enough of a remnant turd crowned to produce a fresh lump of stool in his seat. The fabric of the underwear tented out a bit as the solid log of excrement pushed out from his slackened sphincter, and all doubts were erased from the minds of his audience. "Oh, gross! Dude is shitting himself!" "I guess Danny *does* need diapers! Hahaha!" "Wow, I knew he was dumb, but this..." Their cutting words were hurtful, but Danny knew that the real pain had only just begun. He'd been lucky to avoid being discovered the last couple of weeks, but even as is, he had already been on the receiving end of some level of mockery for his dimness. Now that they saw him shitting himself, in a 'diaper', there would be no quarter from the needling words of their petulant mouths. He at least had the wherewithal to avoid insisting that it wasn't a diaper around his waist; it would only make him sound more like an overgrown toddler to whine about the differences between diapers and pull-ups, and it would be a moot point, considering he'd taken a dump in them. With tears welling in his eyes, he swiftly pulled his shorts back up, getting momentarily caught on the fresh lump in back, and then he made a fast waddle for the exit. He knew he'd get in trouble for leaving without informing the coach, but the circumstances felt severe enough to not worry about those sorts of consequences. What mattered right now was leaving this chamber of shame to go get cleaned up. It was the first in a multitude of embarrassments that would come to define how he came to be perceived, and it would also be another big push to put him into a classroom that he really didn't want to be a part of. He was on the borderline for now, but it wouldn't take much to push him to one side of it.