Pictou woke up suddenly, and he looked down at the damp sheets. He’d wet the bed again! Mirabel, his mother, came in and took off all the bed sheets to wash and hang out in the backyard.
Later, as she threw one over the washing line, Mirabel gazed sadly at her son, who gazed back sheepishly.
“Oh, Pictou,” she said, “Your father is going to be very angry with you.” Pictou had a frightened look. He knew what his father was like when he was angry.
At that moment, Stewiacke and his friends, Hantsport and Aspotogan, passed by the back yard fence and caught sight of Pictou. They pointed at him.
“He’s wet the bed,” they chuckled meanly. Pictou overheard and gasped. His embarrassing habit had been uncovered again…
Pictou rushed into the kitchen. He was so overcome with shame he needed an escape. He grabbed a knife from the draw and made a few cuts to his arm. He started to bleed and felt a strange relief. The physical pain distracted him from the mental trauma. Hearing his mother enter from the backyard, Pictou quickly wiped away the blood and pulled his sleeve back down.
Later at school, while Pictou was struggling with hard sums in double Maths, Stewiacke and his friends were in the toilets, hatching a nasty plan to inflict more humiliation on their favourite victim.
“I say we should tie him up to the flagpole in the playground so that everyone in school will see him!” Hantsport scoffed.
“Then they’ll all laugh at him!” Aspotogan sneered.
“He won’t be able to stand up to all that abuse from everyone!” Stewiacke hooted. They all looked at each other, grinning maliciously.
“LET’S DO THIS THING!” they shouted in unity. All three punched the air with their fists.
Back in class a nervy Pictou wet himself. His classmates saw the puddle under his chair and began to mock him.
“Piss-pants!” one of them jibed in a demeaning tone.
“Pee-pee!” another jeered.
Pictou shuddered with embarrassment.
“That’s quite enough of that,” said Miss Snow-Lake, the teacher. She went up to Pictou and wrapped her arms around him, shielding him from all the mockery.
“Pictou,” she murmured soothingly. “I know you’ve got an overactive bladder. It’s an illness, so it’s no laughing matter, is it, dear?”
“No,” Pictou replied, shaking his head slowly and solemnly. “Not at all.”
“Why don’t you go to the toilet and get changed. Your mum’s put an extra pair of y-fronts in your bag.”
Pictou nodded and left the room. He crept down the corridor towards the toilet, clean underwear stuffed in his pocket.
Unbeknownst to Pictou, Stewiacke, Aspotogan and Hantsport were waiting behind the toilet door, ready to pounce. Pictou pushed the door open…
He gasped in horror. But Stewiacke and co. weren’t being their usual intimidating selves – instead, they were peering at him, their hands clasped together, their eyes sparkling with pity.
“Huh?” Pictou thought, looking confused. Stewiacke and co. were supposed to be bullying him!
“Oh goodness. Did you pee yourself, my beloved?” Hantsport asked in a sickly-sweet voice.
“Oh, dear, dear, dear,” Aspotogan sighed, far too deeply. “That’s not very good.”
“Come here,” Stewiacke called, his voice too kind to be true. “I’ll change you.”
Pictou looked perplexed as Stewiacke coiled his arm around Pictou, with overflowing affection, and led him down the corridor. Hantsport and Aspotogan followed.
Pictou began to wonder why Stewiacke wasn’t changing him in the toilet.
“Maybe he’s taking me to the school nurse to clean me properly?” he thought.
Stewiacke and his friends stopped outside the door of a storage room. Beside it was a fire alarm.
“Students can’t go in there,” Pictou thought to himself, rather confused.
Stewiacke pushed Pictou to the floor. Then he lifted the cover of the fire alarm and pulled the trigger hard to activate the alarm, which began to shriek.
“Oh my goodness!” thought Pictou, petrified. Stewiacke and his friends began to guffaw. Stewiacke unfastened Pictou’s belt, pulled off Pictou’s trousers and dragged him out into the playground. Hantsport and Aspotogan followed.
They tied Pictou to the flagpole with his trousers. Pictou tried to scream but they gagged him by tying his belt around his mouth. Stewiacke and friends cackled and hid behind a tree as everyone in school rushed outside for the fire drill.
Teachers instructed the students to line up in an orderly fashion, which they did (or most of them, anyway). Each teacher took the register, including Pictou’s teacher, Miss Snow-Lake.
“Pictou?” she called when she reached his name. All Pictou’s classmates looked around for him, but they couldn’t see him anywhere in the line.
Then they heard whimpering from above and looked up… and spotted Pictou, wriggling from the flagpole.
All the other students turned to see Pictou too, and they all began to roar with laughter.
Stewiacke and his friends sniggered from their hiding place.
All the students whipped out their phones and began to snap some photos, the flashes of all the cameras almost blinding Pictou. Some of the teachers tried to stop them, but noisy laughter drowned the teachers’ stern demands.
“This is definitely going on my Facebook wall!” one of the students yelped. Pictou squirmed about on the flagpole, unable to bear all this humiliation.
Meanwhile, Stellarton, Pictou’s father, was at work in his design studio, taking his lunch break. As he ate his sandwich at his desk, he logged on to Facebook. Suddenly, one of the posts caught his eye.
It was a photo of Pictou tied, gagged and bound to the flagpole in the school playground.
Gasping, Stellarton began to feel anger building up inside him.
“He did that to himself, didn’t he?” he growled.
“He’s going to be in for a right good thrashing when I find him!” he bellowed, punching the computer screen.
At that moment, Stellarton’s phone rang. A very serious voice was speaking.
“This is Miss Snow-Lake, a teacher at your son’s school. It’s about Pictou. Something terrible’s happened….”
“I know. I’m looking at the photo of the little brat right now,” fumed Stellarton.
“It’s not Pictou’s fault. He’s been badly bullied about his bladder problem, poor thing. And I assure you, we will catch the culprits,” said the teacher.
Stellarton felt guilty for blaming his son. He glared at the photo and posted a message underneath demanding that it be removed immediately, failing which he would contact the police.
Later that day, when Pictou had returned home, he was surprised to see Stellarton standing at the top of the stairs, home from work earlier than usual. Stellarton looked very serious, rushed down the stairs and raised his hand.
“Well… I guess this is it,” Pictou thought, bracing himself from Stellarton’s forthcoming smack.
But much to Pictou’s surprise, Stellarton just played with his own hair nervously.
“I… I’m really sorry, son,” he stammered, sitting him down on the sofa in the living room. It was then he noticed blood on Pictou’s sleeve.
“Pictou,” he said seriously. “You’ve been hurting yourself again, haven’t you?”
Pictou nodded fearfully, afraid of what Stellarton might do.
“Pictou, I know you’ve got low self-esteem,” said Stellarton soothingly. “But hurting yourself isn’t the way to deal with your problems.”
Stellarton went to the kitchen to get the first-aid kit and he returned to the living room. He cleaned Pictou’s gashes with some cotton wool and antiseptic cream.
“Pictou, I know that sometimes you become anxious. Sometimes you blame yourself for wetting the bed and getting bullied, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Pictou replied, nodding sadly again.
“Well, that’s where your low self-esteem stems from,” Stellarton told him. “But being bullied is never your fault. Bullies may act all strong and intimidating, but in reality, they’re just weaklings. You’re the one who’s got the strength, Pictou. You just aren’t confident enough to show it.”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Stellarton said. “You know that photo they took of you?”
“Yes,” Pictou replied unhappily. Thinking about that shameful photo of himself only made him lose even more of his confidence.
Stellarton went upstairs to the study and turned his computer on. Pictou sat down on Stellarton’s lap.
Stellarton saved that embarrassing photo of Pictou onto his computer and used his extensive image manipulation skills to cut Pictou out of the photo, replacing it with a photo of Stewiacke.
As Stellarton worked his magic on the photo, Pictou began to feel a little bit better about himself. What the bully had done to Pictou was now being done in return on HIM. Stewiacke certainly wasn’t going to enjoy that at all.
The next day, Pictou woke up. He touched his duvet; it wasn’t wet. He did need the toilet though, so he hurried there before having yet another accident.
When he went downstairs, he noticed a gift box beside the TV. Curious to find out what it was, he picked it up and tore off the wrapping paper…
To his amazement, it was a brand-new computer! Stellarton came in and saw Pictou carrying his new computer.
“That’s for you, son,” he smiled at him. “Aw, thanks, dad!” Pictou beamed brightly. “Could you teach me how you did that picture on your computer, please?”
“Well, yes,” said Stellarton. “There’s another surprise in that case over there.”
Pictou rummaged in the case and took out something rectangle-shaped, also covered in wrapping paper. Inside was a beginner’s guide to Photoshop.
“Oh, wow!” Pictou exclaimed happily.
“That’s for you to learn all the basics,” Stellarton said. He then came closer to Pictou and wrapped his arm around him lovingly.
“But, of course, learning from a book will never replace good old fatherly tip-sharing.”
Pictou smiled, and he began to get on with learning how to do Stellarton’s ‘magic tricks’ on his photos, with Stellarton at his side.
