Abigail, deep down, was not entirely satisfied with Chantelle’s half-apology/half-blame-shift. Sure, her story checked out, and she was feeling incredibly bitter toward Hayden for instigating the sequence of events, but did that really give Chantelle no choice but to do what she did? She stewed quietly to herself. She would keep the peace for now, but there was no way Chantelle was off the hook, she thought to herself. Not by a long shot.
Rina shuffled forward on her knees and fed the DVD into the player as Teagan finished microwaving the popcorn and the other girls settled in on the floor in front of the TV.
“Hayden, come sit here!” Brylee called out, patting a spot on the floor between her and Abigail.
With every part of his mind and body screaming “NO” to him, he dragged his feet over to where they were sitting, and carefully lowered himself down, acutely aware of his positioning of the opening at the bottom of the towel as he lowered. In an awkward effort, he finally managed to plonk his behind onto the carpet. As he did so, the top of the towel loosened around his waist, and he swiftly readjusted it to make sure the sets of hawk-like eyes poised to his left and right didn’t catch an unwelcome glimpse down the top. The two girls giggled in stereo either side of him.
A very basic home-made DVD menu flashed onto the screen, with the options:
- Sixth Birthdays!
- Family Camping Trip!
- Seventh Birthdays!
- Bath Time Fun!
- Swimming Lessons!
“Please, Rina, can we-” Hayden began in a desperate plea.
“Careful what you say next, bro.” Rina interrupted.
“But this video... This is too much, and you know it!”
“There are five of us, and we literally have you surrounded. Remember our agreement.” She warned.
Hayden let out a groan and punched the floor in frustration. He was genuinely trapped.
“So hang on,” Teagan said, as she lowered two bags of freshly microwaved popcorn down to the floor, “The menu has Sixth birthday, and then Seventh, and then... Is this all chronological? Are we about to watch you guys taking a bath at age seven?!”
“Not entirely,” Rina explained, “This is a compilation Mom and Dad put together of our bath times over the years. We stopped bathing together at age five. After that, Mom and Dad decided to give us privacy from each other, so Mom would supervise me in the bath, and Dad would supervise Hayden. Of course, dad was pretty much the sole camera operator, so there’s a bit of footage with baby me in it up until the joint baths stopped, but the last fifteen minutes or so of the compilation is just Hayden.”
“At age seven?” Abigail questioned through a mouthful of popcorn.
“Yep, six and seven!” Rina giggled at the sight of her friend almost choking in disbelief.
“Everything okay out here?” came the voice of Mrs Bradstone from the doorway at the end of the hall. Everyone jumped.
They turned to see Mrs Bradstone wrapped in a white bath robe, drying her hair with a towel.
“Yeah, everything’s fine, Mom,” replied Rina, “We were all talking about when we were little kids, and I’m just gonna show these guys some of our home videos.”
Mrs Bradstone furrowed her brow as she spotted the highlighted option on the DVD menu.
“Uhh, Hayden... are you sure you’re okay with the girls watching that one?” She enquired, with a tone of concern.
Hayden could feel all eyes in the room drilling into him. This was the moment. He gulped.
“Of course not, you crazy cow! How could you even think for a moment that someone my age would be okay with this?!?” Was what he screamed inside.
Knowing the consequences however, what came out, was a fairly convincing, albeit slightly shaky “Yeah, it’s no big deal.”
His mother frowned in confusion.
“Because you remember what happens in it, right?” She pressed.
If it wasn’t for her ignorance of what was going on right now, it would seem like his mother was deliberately turning the crank on his humiliation. The girls suppressed the urge to explode with glee at how much Hayden was clearly squirming inside.
“Y-yep,” Hayden exhaled loudly, “I’m only a baby in it. It’s no big deal”, he repeated, as if trying to convince himself as well as his mother.
“A seven year old baby!” Teagan whispered, out of earshot of Mrs Bradstone.
The towel-clad boy winced.
“Well... Okay,” She paused, before adding “...If you’re okay with it...” in a very confused voice. She began to head down the hall to her room, before turning back to address Hayden again.
“You should put your pajamas on though, sweetie. You’ll catch a cold sitting there in a wet towel.”
“Oh, um, it’s not really wet, actually.” He lied.
“Still, I’m sure you don’t want to accidentally flash the girls” His mother chided. The girls erupted disproportionately in reaction to this comment, the pent-up nervous excitement they were all concealing taking this opportunity as a viable escape in the form of immature giggles.
Hayden’s mind scrambled for some sort of justification. As he looked around at the giggling girls, he haphazardly pieced together the most logical explanation he could think of on such short notice.
“I- Uh, It’s okay Mom, I have underwear on under this. This is... This is like a makeshift skirt! I’m just one of the girls tonight!” he blurted out.
The girls nodded along to his awkward explanation, desperately trying to stifle their laughter.
Even Mrs Bradstone couldn’t help but laugh at this explanation.
“I couldn’t be more proud of my kids!” she chuckled to the girls, shaking her head and disappearing down the hall.
There was a moment of stunned silence as everyone processed what had just happened. Teagan was the first to vocalize this.
“Oh. My. God! Did we just get the green light from Mrs Bradstone to look at her son’s you-know-what?!” she whispered excitedly.
“It’s from when I was a kid! I look completely different now!” Hayden blurted out in a voice on the verge of tears.
Everyone stopped and looked at him.
“Sounds like someone’s already trying to justify his teeny peeny before we’ve seen the evidence!” His sister teased.
“It’s not- This isn’t- Rina, please!” Hayden was now struggling to form a cohesive sentence, but the desperation in his voice spoke paragraphs.
“Oh, I can’t take it!” Brylee squealed, bouncing up and down eagerly, “Play the damn video!”
Rina very deliberately lifted a finger into the air and after letting it hang for a moment, swooped in and stabbed at the ‘Play’ button on the remote.
The screen went black, and the video began.
The first image to appear on the screen was two babies, less than a year old, laying in diapers next to a small plastic tub. Rina immediately hit the fast-forward button on the remote.
“Anybody object to me skipping straight to the recent stuff?” Rina asked.
“It’s not recent!” Hayden insisted, “I was still just a kid!”, he grumbled, pounding his fists at the ground. This was completely unfair.
“Okay, let me rephrase then. Anybody object to me skipping straight to the stuff where Hayden is closer to the age he is now?”
Hayden shot a glare at Rina, and the girls laughed. No objections were made about Rina’s navigation of the video.
The girls watched in silence as glimpses of the two children flashed by on the screen. For the most part, the two children were concealed in bubbles, but as the video gradually skimmed forward to age four, then five, there were a few momentary glimpses of young Hayden standing up in the bath. Every time there was a momentary glimpse of his young naked body on the screen, Hayden felt like he was receiving an electric shock. These moments were also punctuated with squeals from the girls.
This was all too much for Hayden. Each time an image flashed by of his tiny toddler genitals, it was like a sucker punch to the stomach. He had seen this footage before, and knew that his penis was small back then, but was it really that small? He couldn’t do this. The footage was fast approaching his solo baths at age six and seven, and as soon as Rina stopped the fast-forwarding, the girls would be exposed to far more than fleeting glimpses.
Unable to take the anxiety anymore, Hayden lunged forward to eject the DVD before it was too late.
As he began to scurry forward on all fours, he felt a hand hook into his towel at his lower back.
“Aaaaagh!” He groaned, now so mortified he couldn’t even find words. Re-tightening his towel, he fell back into his place between the two sleeping bag girls. He could still feel the hand holding the towel just above his butt, threatening without words to remove it if he tried anything like that again.
Before anything could be said by any of the girls, sound started coming from the TV and all attention was immediately diverted to it. Rina had resumed playback.
This was it.
The girls watched with wide eyes as a six year old Hayden in Astro-Boy underpants appeared on the screen beside a bathtub filling with water, and hooked his thumbs into the waistband. With a single, carefree motion, six year old Hayden pulled the underpants down and kicked them off, and all eyes in the room were glued to the first of many shots of his tiny penis jiggling as he straightened up and stood in profile to the camera.
The room instantly exploded with shrieks, squeals, gasps and giggling.
Hayden felt like he was drowning.