The Daycare Regression

Book excerpt: Summer and Elise are in their senior year of college and best friends. Elise is studying social work, while Summer plans on going into early childhood education. Currently, Summer has a most unique part-time job at a daycare center called Buttons & Blocks which partners with a drug rehab center called Forever Free. Together, they offer a 100% cure for their drug-addicted clients by physically regressing them into infants and toddlers still in diapers with no memory of their drug-addicted past. To prove this incredible claim to her skeptical friend, Summer regresses Elise into a 2-year-old girl for one day. Elise is immediately hooked. She enjoys the experience of being in the body of a young child so much that she asks to return again and again. But what happens when the power to cure is misused for the power to silence its critics? Elise soon finds herself trapped in a toddler’s body unable to return, as one by one, the people who would help her escape are themselves transformed into helpless babies. She must try to figure out who is behind this and if they can be stopped — all while trying to escape the trappings of early childhood including the inexorable regression of her own mind into that of an actual 2-year-old child. That’s a lot for a mere toddler to accomplish. Will she run out of time? As it turns out, help sometimes comes from unexpected directions.