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Chapter 20 - Turning the Tables

Monday came, and when nothing spectacular happened before the scheduled assembly and the kids walked unimpeded into the auditorium, there was a real sense of letdown. Tamara took a seat in the center, about ten rows back from the stage. She ensured that no one sat directly in front of her by “suggesting” to nearby kids that there was chewing gum stuck on the seats there, yuk.

As she expected, Dr Barello had decided to let Mr Laguerre run the show. He was standing on the empty stage and was using a microphone on a stand while three teachers stood near him, two men and a woman. Tamara recognized the woman; it was Miss Tina Pierce, a P.E. teacher, and most of the girls disliked her for her bullying attitude toward those kids who weren’t athletic and the rumor was that she liked girls—the buff ones. Tamara had experienced a few problems with the teacher too; she had noticed that Tamara was a very talented volleyball player and had excellent speed and form when she ran on the track and had begun pressuring her to join the volleyball and track teams. When Tamara had refused, the woman began bullying her too.

Tamara had also deduced several things about Mr Laguerre’s nature from sensing his emotional aura. He was interested in the Program because he was somewhat of a voyeur; Tamara had noticed how the man’s emotional state changed when a pretty girl passed him. Not only did his eyes follow, his libido surged too. She didn’t know much about the other two men, but she could feel the emotion of excited anticipation from them.

Okay, they’re all sort of perverts too, she decided.

“I want to welcome everyone to our much-delayed assembly about our Naked in School Program,” Laguerre began. “With me are your P.E. teachers. When the time comes, I’ll be calling up onto the stage the selected Program participants for the week and have them undress. For those who need assistance or are unwilling, these teachers will help.”

Some moans and hissing sounded from the audience. Tamara turned on the maser she had built into her backpack, the one she had tested on her rats. She turned its power up to maximum and kept it aimed at the group standing on the stage.

Laguerre began describing the Program rules from the booklet that everyone had gotten.

“The Program requires that all participants be totally naked, between now and midnight on the coming Sunday, during school hours and also while attending any school-sponsored activities. You mustn’t make any attempt to hide or cover yourself; doing so is a Program violation which can result in your being required to repeat your week. If you don’t complete the Program, you won’t be allowed to graduate.”

Tamara watched the teachers as they became more and more uncomfortable, beginning to shift around and fan themselves with their hands.

“When you’re not in class, then you must permit other students to touch, fondle, or play with your sexual parts—that’s what we call ‘Reasonable Requests,’” he went on.

While she was beaming the RF waves at them, she was close enough to lock into one teacher’s after another’s eyes as she “pushed” a pinkish-green taste at them, one that she had found would make the suggested person quickly give into subconscious impulses.

Laguerre was visibly sweating now as he tried to keep his composure.

“In the classroom, during the beginning... of any class, participants are allowed... ah, um, to masturbate to orgasm with or without assistance of another student—we call that ‘Relief.’ Err, ah, um... And teachers can choose to use Program students for any necessary... ahh... teaching demonstration, such as a model for sex studies in biology... aah... or as a figure model in art or photography.

“Boys and girls on the Program, err... must use the rest room facilities and locker rooms and showers of the opposite sex. Those of you... ahhh... who are in sports or performing arts... will participate in those activities naked as well.”

Making eye contact with the teachers on the stage, Tamara started “pushing” hard the suggestion that the extreme heat and the Program and the required nudity and the discomfort and the pretty girls and it was okay to be naked—for all of these reasons, they all needed to join in with the Program’s required nudity too. She wondered if her doing that could even work; it was such a long shot and the weakest part of her plans for wreaking mayhem. But something in her thoughts had assured her that the people on the stage, being so interested in voyeurism as they were, would be susceptible to that suggestion. Even so, she was amazed and gratified by what followed.

Sweating profusely now, Jude Laguerre forgot all about the rest of his planned instructions and muttered, “Oh, hell,” and began to tear off his clothes. The others on the stage, yielding to Tamara’s “pushed” emotion which made them surrender to their subconscious impulses, followed Laguerre’s lead and quickly followed suit. Within a few seconds, the four were standing there, on the center of the stage, naked, staring blankly at each other and at the turmoil that had erupted in the audience. They couldn’t understand why everyone out there was in such an uproar.

The kids in the audience couldn’t believe their eyes, while the teachers in the auditorium aisles began running around, trying to find blankets or something to cover the naked teachers; finally two teachers went up on stage and persuaded the naked four to go into the wings.

Tamara shut off her maser, congratulated herself, and thanked the lwa. She was sure that they had played a hand in that performance. Now, let’s get people out of here while there’s still an uproar going on, she thought.

She slipped away to a dark corner of the hall, took out her mike—which she had prepared by taping some layers of cloth and aluminum foil over the working end—and in a quavering voice, spoke.

“This is what the spirits do when teachers plan to mistreat our children. Now, children, leave this hall of meeting and never obey any improper demands to remove clothes. Ale byen vit pou yo pa bezwen plis nidite! I, Anansi, the spider trickster spirit, have spoken.”

The broken, garbled voice boomed out of the auditorium’s speakers, but the words were understandable, even the Kreyòl, “Depart quickly lest more nudity is needed!” The kids reacted with shouts of approval and laughter when they saw that many teachers were among the first people to flee the room; several were actually running.

The shouts were heard: “Yeah, Anansi!” ... “Love the spirits!” ... “Way to go, Anansi!”

Keeping her “small” aura of projection, Tamara moved closer to the front of the hall, near the wings where the naked teachers had gone. She had seen Barello go up there a minute ago and was curious to learn what her teacher victims thought.

“I’m so fuckin’ embarrassed!” she heard Pierce exclaim.

“Whatever possessed you to do that?” Barello asked.

“‘Possessed’ is exactly the word!” shouted one of the male teachers. “Something in my head demanded that I ... damn! The heat! It was so damned hot up there too—look, my clothes are soaked.”

“The auditorium is cool,” Barello objected. “There aren’t any floodlights—how was it so hot?”

Laguerre spoke, “I was sweating rivers and then it came over me like a compulsion, I had to strip. Not only I had to, it was like—ah, doing that was proper, since this was the Program.”

“The Program is for the children, not the staff, let me remind you,” Barello told him dryly.

The other male teacher interrupted, “Why is all this shit happening? ‘Spirits’ taking over the P.A., fiery floors, tampered locks, crazy bells ringing randomly—all of them are like scenes out of ‘locked-room’ mysteries. And disembodied voices too. I know that I was possessed somehow. I always thought voodoo was just superstition, but this is way too much...”

“Yeah, Patricia, can you explain this crap away? I’m not gonna be able to face my kids again—this was fuckin’ mortifying.”

“Well, Tina, I really can’t answer. There really does seem to be some strange power at work here. We had a service guy spend a day here trying to find the problem with the school’s bells and he found nothing.”

Mrs Leonard had joined them and she spoke now.

“It seems that all the recent problems have occurred when we try to have an assembly. What if we just call the children to the office and start the Program week like that?” she asked.

“We tried that once or twice. The P.A. stopped working, remember?” Barello told her. “Look, we’re solving nothing here. Let’s just try to get the day back on track now.”

When Barello got back to the office and tried to use the P.A. to ask the students, who were milling around everywhere other than where they belonged, to go to their classrooms for the current appropriate period, she found that it wasn’t working again—and then the school period-change bell rang. It was midway through the second period now—the bell should not have rung then. Angrily, she slammed the mike stand down on the counter and stalked into Leonard’s office.

“Maria, how are we going to get the children back? The P.A. stopped working again and the stupid bells are screwed up again too!”

Tamara slipped away to a quiet alcove that led to an emergency exit. Good. No one here, she thought, relieved. Have to work fast.

She got out the wireless mike and with a deep, raspy voice, she intoned, “My treasured children. You have seen the anger of the spirits, now you must return to your studies. I will cause the bell to ring now—go to classrooms. I, Papa Ghede, have spoken.”

Tamara activated the bells, then she went to the office.

“Hello, Mrs Leonard, Dr Barello. Anything for me to do?” she asked innocently. “It’s all been crazy today and I guess there’s just a half period now, or what? The bells keep going. And who’s been in here using the school P.A.? The kids are going crazy with those weird announcements.”

The two women looked at each other and shrugged.

“Tamara, I wish I could answer. I’ve truly lost control of this school,” Barello moaned. “Let me check this thing again.”

She turned the P.A. mike on again and tried, “This is Dr Barello.” Leonard gave her a thumb’s up and she nodded. “Classes will resume now on the regular schedule. Please be orderly during class changes; today has been ... unusual. That is all. Thank you.”

She walked over to a chair in the waiting area of the office and slumped into it.

“Maria, what’s happening here? Is Edison really haunted?”

Leonard could only shrug her shoulders.

One week later

The following Monday, Barello had decided not to try to start the Program with an assembly—she’d have Mr Laguerre—of whom little had been seen all week—bring the participant list to the office to call the selected students to come to the conference room to strip.

Laguerre took out a very rumpled-looking envelope from a folder, turned on the mike, and tentatively spoke into it.

“Attention, Edison students. This is Mr Laguerre. We are commencing calling participants to begin the Program this morning, so when I call your name, take your backpacks or whatever, and report to the office. I will call you by grade, beginning with the twelfth.”

He read the list of eight names and waited expectantly. And waited. Finally, with five minutes left in the home room period, he announced the names again, adding, “If I called your name, you must report. If you fail to do so, you will have a second week added to your Program participation.”

Nobody came to the office and the bell rang, ending the period. A teacher stopped into the office.

“Jude, can I see that list?” she asked and he handed it to her. “Ah! Where did you get this? All these kids graduated last year.”

Laguerre looked helplessly at Miss Wojinsky.

“I printed that from the school’s Program database; the app selects students randomly,” she explained.

Barello came out of her office. “Jude, you have the backup list?”

“Yeah, the one supposed to be for week two. In my office.”

“Please get it and read it when the period starts,” Barello told him.

When the next period began, he began to announce the names; he got five names read before Barello stopped him, her face turning bright red with anger.

“Stop, stop. You’re reading the names of teachers, stop,” she shouted.

Confused, he looked at her and at the list. Its format clearly matched the Program database’s participant printout.

Barello went to the secretary’s desk. “Claire, does that database allow reprinting of names?”

“Sure. I have three sets generated, for three Program weeks. I can reprint a past selection.”

“Could you print weeks 2 and 3, please?” Barello asked.

She did and Barello looked at the Week 2 list. All teachers’ names. She looked at Week 3 and it had the names of past graduates. She showed the list to Wojinsky.

“How could that happen, Claire?” she asked. “We sent the list of our current students to the national Program Office last year just before they shut down the agency. They sent the database back together with the participant selection app.”

“I just used the app exactly as it came, Patricia,” she told her. “To access that database, it needs two keys, the password and a one-time token that the Program office computer emails to the registered school after I enter the password. No one can make changes without having those credentials. I accessed the database just once; that was when you told me to print the lists for the first few weeks. I gave those three lists to Mr Laguerre.”

“Hmmm. And his lists are the same as what you just printed. I saw the trial list you printed out in the fall when we first got the database from national; it had all current student names. So how did they get changed—and how did teachers’ names get added?” Barello asked, frustrated.

Everyone looked at each other and shrugged.

“Well, can you run the app and get a brand-new list?” Barello asked.

“Okay. Be a minute. I need to log in and request an access token—oh, what if their computer is no longer—okay, no problem. Here’s the token.”

She entered it and selected the option for a randomized list of eight names, two students per grade.

“Oops, there’s an error message... what? It says ‘No Data’?”

Barello looked over her shoulder. “Can you display the names, like in an on-screen list?”

Wojinsky pushed some keys and a blank screen appeared.

“There aren’t any names now in there now. They were there a few weeks ago. I don’t understand...”

“Can you enter names manually?”

“Only by typing them in one by one and each name takes four screens to go through. See, first I need to enter my password, select ‘New entry.’ Then on the second window, the student’s grade. Third screen, the student number. The final one, the last name, first, and middle. They didn’t set this up to be done manually since they wanted to keep the lists as tamper-proof as possible. With 847 kids, manual entry would take days? Weeks?”

“Okay, let’s send the student list to the Program Office computer. That’s how we got the database to begin with, right?”

“Okay.”

She found the student list that they had sent out the prior October to the national Office of Social Awareness and several minutes later, a message arrived:

“Host or domain name not found.

Name service error for name=listgen.osa.gov type=text/encrypted; char-set=null: Host not found.”

Wojinsky looked at Barello. “They must have shut that machine down or something.”

Barello thought for a moment. “How did you get the token then?”

She tapped some keys, then, “That used a different address. Something at Login.gov. Probably that one works for all the agencies.”

“Can we pick names from class lists at random?” Laguerre asked.

Barello shook her head. “We’d need school board authority. They told us principals not to deviate from any of the selection and record-keeping policies of the old federal Program rules.”

~~~~

To add to her headaches, the following day, Barello got a visit from the district superintendent. Claire Wojinsky, the office secretary, had overheard the conversation and as she had become friendly with Tamara, she swore her to secrecy when Tamara arrived at the office later that day. She wanted to share this latest juicy gossip.

“I heard him say that there was a grievance filed by the teachers’ union; that four teachers were forced to undress in front of the entire school,” Wojinsky told her.

“Wow, a grievance? What does that mean?” Tamara asked.

“It’s a complaint against school management. They said they were forced to get naked.”

“I was there, I didn’t see anyone being forced. They said it was hot and started stripping.” Tamara told her.

Wojinsky chuckled. “Wish I saw that. Anyway, that’s what Dr Barello told him. That they weren’t forced—they were all alone on the stage. Then he told her that they said because the place was so hot, they were forced. Dr Barello laughed then and told him she was in there too with two dozen other teachers; that the room was quite cool, and nobody else got undressed. Then she began talking about how the teachers had told her that they were ‘possessed’ somehow.

“Then they began talking about why Dr Barello hadn’t started the Program here yet and it sounded like Dr Barello took out a folder. I heard a plop sound and she said, ‘Read this.’ It was quiet until he said, ‘You know, this stuff isn’t believable,’ and she answered, ‘There are plenty of witnesses to everything written in that file, I assure you.’

“He asked when Edison was going to begin running the Program. I heard her say something like, ‘We had a staff meeting. At that meeting, more than 90 percent of my teachers told me that they would have absolutely nothing to do with the Program... it wasn’t in their contracts, and they were afraid that they would wind up naked like those four teachers.’ Then she said, ‘We can’t even select students. Somehow, again supernaturally, a highly secure and encrypted database got corrupted and then deleted. I sent a request in to the board to use another selection method.’

“He told her that he saw that request but the board was hesitant to allow any changes. So she asked him how she was expected to select students and they were quiet for a bit. Then he asked if I could enter the names—she told him it would take me weeks, longer with all my other jobs. Then they discussed how they would try to handle the teachers’ grievances and he suggested that he would get people from the school district—a lawyer, a HR person, and a few board members to come to the school, look at Dr Barello’s file, and speak to a few teachers here about what they observed. They plan to come here Monday at 10 a.m.”

Tamara planned to be ready for that meeting.

Late February

It was late February, usually the coolest time of the year for Miami, but for south Floridians, the mid-60-degree morning temperatures felt cold. The school heating system was on to warm up the building after an unoccupied weekend. The school officials were to meet in a multipurpose room close to the offices. On the Friday before the meeting, Tamara put a small baby monitor microphone and transmitter on a shelf behind a planter in the room. Then she found an excuse to drop off a meaningless memo to Garcia and “suggested” that he misplace the keys to the climate control panel in the mechanical room.

When Tamara got to the school at 7:15 a.m. that Monday morning, she took out her tablet, connected to the school’s WiFi network, and looked for the link to the environmental controls. She opened the app and used Garcia’s password to log in. She found the zone for the multipurpose room and disabled its automatic setting, boosting the temperature setting to 80 degrees. Then she changed the system password. It could only be reset manually now, or by using her own tablet. The scene was set.

When the people arrived for the meeting, she went to the empty adjoining room and turned on the monitor receiver. When she heard the door shut and a voice say, “We’re all here? Good,” she kicked the heating in the room’s zone up to its maximum, 92 degrees. She could hear Barello explaining the events of the past five weeks and then some teachers told their stories. Then a board member—they had identified themselves—asked why Edison hadn’t started the Program.

A teacher replied, “We won’t take part. If we do, this place is haunted, it really is. We told you what happens if we mention it—and now you just did.”

“Why’s it so hot in here?” a voice asked.

Another said, “Look, hot air is coming out the vents here. Don’t these windows open?”

Another teacher said, “See? Haunted.”

Barello said, “The ground floor ones aren’t designed to open. I’ll call the custodian.”

Tamara heard her on her cell phone, she guessed, but her voice was too low to hear.

Meanwhile, a board member was asking about the “haunted” claim and a teacher began explaining.

Barello’s phone rang and she answered. It was quiet for a minute and then Barello spoke.

“Well, if I were superstitious, I’d say we angered the spirits again. The heating system is running full blast, the custodian is locked out of the automated and manual controls, and only this particular zone in the school is affected. He can’t shut it off because he can’t find his keys. He suspects that he left them at home this morning. And the school’s backup key isn’t in the locked keybox where it’s kept.”

Now it’s time for act two, Tamara thought.

She pulled out the wireless mike and a little audio recorder/player. During the weekend she had recorded a little script and used an online voice synthesizer with a distortion filter and frequency shifter to record, in an ultra-bass, hollow voice, an announcement.

“Children, our holy school has been invaded by outsiders who are attempting to bring evil to you. I am preparing them for the nudity which they try to plan for you by first bringing fire. They find that it’s warm now. They will learn what it means to be truly warm in my fires of death soon, unless they cease trying to inflict their immoral ideas on you. Sispann, moun, oswa soufri pou transgresyon ou kont lwa a! I, Lord Kalfou, lord of darkness and fire, protector of children, have spoken.”

Then the school’s period bells started ringing over and over.

“What did he say? Was that Haitian?” one of the visitors cried out in alarm.

A teacher answered, “Kreyòl. It was Lord Kalfou; he’s our spirit of life and death. And other things. He said, ‘Cease, humans, or suffer for your transgressions against the lwa!’ The lwa are our spirits, like the Catholic saints.”

Barello spoke dryly then, “Just before the four teachers on the stage threw off their clothes and got naked, they got hot—just like it’s happening here, you know. Just saying. I’m not waiting around; I’m leaving. We’re adjourned, correct?”

There was a rushing sound as people gathered their possessions and hurried out.

Tamara killed the heat, triggered the zone’s air-conditioning, and restored the passwords; then she closed out of the app. She kept listening for sounds in the room and heard the two teachers talking in there. They were speaking Kreyòl.

“Heat don’t bother you, Irina?”

“I grew up in Haiti. This is nothin’. Damn, Rosie, I never believed my folks when they said that lwa possession was real. They say that the lwa can’t do anything in our world that has a material effect but they can mount people and get them to do strange things. No way could any one person be behind all the stuff happened here and, hell, today! That voice! Gave me chills. All the other lwa voices were different too. The kids are right; this school’s haunted!”

Still chatting, both left the room and Tamara began to clean up any traces of what she had done.

Mission accomplished, Tamara thought smugly. But that teacher was spot on; lwa possession was the key to her abilities, but not quite in the manner that Vodou tradition believed.

Then she wondered... was her ability tied to the very high mental activity in her brain, or was it the lwa who were stimulating those areas? Ha, she mused. Which came first, chicken or egg?

~~~~

Word of the happenings at Miami Edison wasn’t restricted to the Haitian community in the surrounding neighborhood, which, of course, was fascinated, amused, delighted, and appalled—all at the same time—by the stories which were emanating from their high school. Haitians are by nature, an open, fun-loving people but are highly protective of their culture and beliefs. They were a people who knew persecution, beginning from their enslavement in western Africa, their brutal treatment as slaves on the island of Hispaniola under the French in the colony of Saint-Domingue, until they achieved freedom in 1804. That was achieved through a bloody revolt which most Haitians believe was led by a few lwa-inspired patriots. Even so, the brutality against them never really stopped and continued through most of the twentieth century, until the brutality of economics mostly overtook the brutality of their governments. Yet the people of Haiti persevered in their beliefs, maintaining strong connections to their African ancestors through their customs and worship.

It was now the expatriates of Haiti living in Miami who were amazed that suddenly their saints, who Haitians venerated as their guides to learn pathways to achieve a better life, now appeared to be real. They were no longer appearing in their temples of worship; they were manifesting themselves in the community’s high school. To the community, Miami Edison High was becoming a holy place.

But to the outside community, the strange events at Edison High fueled the conspiracy theory industry with an entirely new focus, and the Miami police had to post special details to keep gawkers, and those with more malicious intentions, at bay. Members of the press were flummoxed by the events and enlisted experts from every possible field, from nuclear physicists to faith healers, to get coherent explanations for their listeners and readers, who were demanding answers. Of course, none of the “experts” could solve Miami’s “locked-room” mystery. To accomplish everything that was known to have occurred would have taken a conspiracy of many people; that fact was widely acknowledged by expert and commentator alike. But the people who would have been necessary to be part of any such conspiracy had themselves been victims of the incidents—which the conspiracy supposedly caused, a tautological nightmare.

The high-school kids in the rest of the Miami area—all of Florida, in fact—were greatly envious of the Edison kids, who had neatly avoided experiencing the Naked in School Program—for the current year, that is. And now there were rumblings coming from Tallahassee, as well as other state capitols, that state legislators were getting tired of their constituents demanding that the states end the Program and might be ready to do so.

At the end of the spring term, various news media outlets ran a story originating out of Atlanta; a university group there had conducted and published a study of the academic effects of the Program on student high school grade performance. The study had documented evidence which had been collected from close to 500 sources and discovered that students in high schools running the Program scored, on the average, one full letter grade lower than the same school did the year prior to adopting the Program. A “B” grade had become a “C” grade under the Program, they reported.

There was a companion study published too; it contained a summary of the different kinds of results which had been reported in postings on the anti-Program forum, covering reports involving positive consequences as well as the most adverse. Adverse medical and health issues were reported in that article, as were all types of sexual abuse, ranging from menacing threats up to rape with physical injury. The report also noted that the Program was assumed to be the precipitating cause of at least three suicides.

Armed with copies of these studies, parents all over the country descended on their law-makers to demand that they stop the Program in their states. But Florida was slow to respond; the members of the legislature were still dealing with untangling the morass that trying to run the SiF program and the Naked in School Program together had caused.

Tamara kept abreast of these developments as the spring term drew to a close and she wondered if she would have to go to battle against the Program again in the fall. The news on the social front was encouraging. Now with the opposition of many parents becoming evident, she hoped that this would translate to either legal challenges to the Program or that states would simply stop requiring it.

She planned a busy summer. She wanted to try for a Clarke Scholar award and was determined to get a perfect score in the SAT exam she’d be taking in the fall. When she looked at sample math and physics problems from past Clarke Scholarship exams, she felt that she had a solid grasp of those areas and could almost do those problems in her sleep. She felt that her weak spot was in the essays, so for the summer, she registered for two university courses: one in expository and critical reading and writing and the other in creative writing.

Tamara was an avid follower of the news and current events and frequently discussed these topics with her parents, who also liked to follow news events closely. Her dad especially was keen to keep abreast of current events and had a sound knowledge of world history. That was a hobby of his and Tamara found herself hard pressed to successfully challenge him on historical issues. Having such a background, she thought that writing about current events wouldn’t be difficult. She had already begun to read the literature works listed on the Clarke Scholarship website, outlining their plots and the narrative devices their authors used. She had noticed that past essay questions never asked factual questions about the work’s plot, they asked thoughtful ones which required an answer that explored the author’s character development or the author’s treatment of the story’s character interactions. No Cliffs Notes summary of a work would help in answering questions like those.

Tamara spent a quiet but busy summer, taking her classes and working in the medical school lab, where she was attempting to build a small version of her maser using the miniaturized RF generator circuits she had designed for the MRI coils. She wondered about the maser’s heating properties as compared to a typical microwave oven. The ovens operate at a frequency of 2.45 gigahertz, she knew, while masers in general operate between 0.3 to 300 gigahertz, and the maser of her design operated close to the frequency of an ammonia maser, 24 gigahertz. When she checked some references, she found that microwave frequencies in the range of her maser could penetrate the outer layers of the skin to a depth of about 0.75 millimeters—so they definitely heated the skin.

Tamara felt that she had made some major accomplishments in helping kids this past school year. She was gratified to notice, during her travels around Miami, that these days she was seeing virtually no naked kids anywhere and furthermore, Florida had stopped advertising its Stripped in Florida program, both for residents and tourists as well.

I hope I made a difference for those kids, Tamara thought, as she reviewed her junior year in her mind.

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