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Chapter 32 - Psychological Damage

After about a quarter hour, people from the younger group decided to go swimming and soon they organized a chicken fight with the gals riding the guys’ shoulders. No one was surprised that the team with Terence always seemed to be the winner. The guy was like a rock and didn’t budge an inch even when another team crashed into him. Soon they tired of the playing and decided to talk about a few of the topics that had come up during the pool play.

So Tamara, Peter, Barbara, Terence, Ryan, and Abi dried themselves and decided to go off to a gazebo set away on the back yard lawn, about fifty feet away from the patio and pool deck. Tamara still felt very uncomfortable with the nudity around her; she was surprised she felt that way because nudity itself didn’t really bother her. Except when it involved those sad Florida stripped kids. She recalled that, in rural Haiti, naked children were frequently seen, but they would be from the poorest areas and were always malnourished... she pulled her thoughts away from those disturbing memories. Somehow, she’d find a way to help those who were disadvantaged...

The six of them walked over to the gazebo. The parade seemed amusingly unbalanced to Tamara. Leading the way were a nude Abi and Ryan, followed by Barbara, nude, and Terence, who was shirtless, wearing shorts. And here she was, in a modest two-piece swimsuit, with a nude Peter. Her natural sense of symmetry was destroyed as her mind played with permutations of the couples’ dress in an attempt to balance their appearances. She shook her head to clear it since Barbara was speaking as they got settled in the seats, sitting by couples.

“So, Abi, exactly how did Emma find you guys with her living in Alaska—a Brit in Alaska is unusual, no? And then she finds a British family living in Maryland. There’s quite a story there, I think.”

Abi grinned and nodded. “Yeah. Grandpa found our soul sister living way up there. Emma was orphaned as a pre-teen when her mum died in England so she went to Alaska where her uncle lived. Grandpa was the U.K. ambassador to the U.S. back then and when the Naked in School Program was gonna start in her Alaska school, Emma refused to cooperate and led a student rebellion against it. When her school tried to find a way to force her to cooperate, she contacted the local consulate for support, wanting them to say that as a foreign national, she couldn’t be made to participate. That’s when Grandpa became involved. Turned out he actually knew Emma’s grandparents when he was much younger and he was keen to meet her, so he invited her to visit him in D.C. She did, as well she met Andrew, Sam, and me, and adopted us.

Terence snorted. “Somehow, whenever we talk about our backgrounds, that Naked in School crap comes up.”

“Oi, it really does,” Abi agreed. “A lot. It was a looming problem for Andrew and Sam when Emma moved here to live with us. That’s ‘cause their high school was gonna start it up that autumn. And that summer, the Program office sent people out, trying to capture Emma, too. They came into our nudist resort without permission.”

“Really? I hadn’t heard about that before, Abi,” Ryan said.

“Ah heard some ‘bout those nudist resorts,” Terence remarked. “There’s a couple ‘round the Austin area, where Ah’m from. So they were gate-crashers then? Ah heard that nudist resorts were really safe.”

“They are safe,” Abi replied. “Here’s what happened. Our resort refused to let these four guys in, so they climbed over the gate. They were called ‘Program enforcers,’ and they were sent to our resort by the federal Program Office. But those enforcers were only supposed to enforce Program rules in schools when the Program kids were being disruptive or whatever. Anyway, they snuck in, but a few of our guys, members of our resort, including my dad, overpowered them. Then they stripped them all bollok-naked, drove them to a Wal-Mart store car park nearby and chained them to a light pole there; it took hours before they got freed. It got on the news.”

“Nice. But why were they after Emma?” Barbara asked.

Abi giggled. “Retaliation, maybe. A year before, a bunch of those enforcers got sent to Alaska when Emma stopped her school from starting the Program there. When they showed up and tried to strip some kids, she had organized their getting arrested. They got prison sentences and got locked up, so Emma thinks the Program Office was retaliating for that.”

Oh really? Tamara thought. That’s something she didn’t tell me about. That woman is fuckin’ impressive.

“Hey. Back it up a moment,” Terence said. “Y’all said Emma refused t’ be in the Program, but she’s a nudist now?”

“Well, what she didn’t like was being forced,” Abi replied. “And the idea of a forced nudity program in Alaska is right barmy, wouldn’t you say? When we first met her, my sibs and I told her that we were nudists and that we all thought it was ace. We told her then about all the brilliant stuff we did at our resort and how it wasn’t at all like the Program. No one was forced to do anything. So when our family was planning our annual holiday at the resort, Dad told her that we all wanted her to join us, and if she did come, she could keep her kit on. Except in the pool, but you know about that. So she said she’d go with us. The rest, well, here we are, aren’t we?”

“The Program keeps coming up,” Ryan commented. “I wonder who here was actually in it. I wasn’t. I went to school in California and the Program hadn’t gotten to our school yet. It got there right after I left. Even though my family were all nudists, I’m not sure how I would have coped if I had been in it. Abi wasn’t in it either; I know it was running in her school but she had diplomatic immunity.”

Terence put up his hand. “Ah’ll start. Simple; Ah went to a private high school. Since the school got no federal bucks, they didn’t have it and never even considered running it.”

Abi laughed. “Even though I was exempt, as Ryan said, I have a story about what happened in my high school before I got there. Sam was starting as a freshman when the Program began there. They picked her to participate even though they had gotten her diplomatic immunity letter a month before school started. But they ignored her letter. So Sam, bless her, did a one-person destruction act on the Program in her school. When she was called onto the stage to strip at her assembly, she turned her stage time into an anti-Program rally and told the whole school that nobody could be forced to strip off. She announced that kids were legally protected ‘cause being forced to strip was an assault and holding a kid to strip him would be a sexual crime. She threatened the principal that if he touched her, or if any teacher did, she would charge them with sexual assault.”

Tamara grinned. “I want to meet that gal! She’s my kind of woman!”

“Also, she turned the idea of participating in it into a joke,” Abi went on. “She told everyone that she wasn’t refusing to be in the Program. She said she would do the Program but do it while keeping her kit on. The kids all thought she was crackin’ brilliant. That really got the officials’ knickers in a twist but they couldn’t do anything about shutting her gob. She ran her anti-Program campaign for the entire time she was in high school.”

Barbara laughed. “We needed someone like her at my school. Definitely.”

“I’ll go next,” Tamara remarked. “The Hopkins people here know that the Program never got started in my school. But if it had, I would have wanted Sam there for sure.”

“Aye, she was brill,” Abi said. “Andrew saw her on stage, how she made the principal look like a helpless clown... he even started to try to chase her off the stage before he realized how dumb that would look. Then when I got to high school, though, the Program was a little different to the year before. The school officials tried to make it like a game or something, to convince kids to show how brave and adventurous they were. So they tried to tamp down on the forced sexual stuff. Sometimes that worked, but mostly it didn’t. I kept my head down, didn’t I; Mum said not to make waves like Sam did, and I got my exemption ticket punched. Barbara...? Peter...? Peter, you haven’t said anything.”

Tamara saw Peter shudder. Shudder? What? She thought. Then she sensed a faint yellow taste.

Fear? What’s he afraid of? She put a hand on his shoulder.

“You okay, Peter?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m good. We had the fuckin’ thing in my school and it almost put me into the nut house. But my shrinks told me that the more I talk about it, the more it will help me get over those bad memories,” Peter said quietly.

“Crap, man, what happened?” Terence asked.

Peter shook his head. “Um, let me tell it my way... I’ll lead up to what happened.”

Tamara put her arm around his shoulder. She gathered up a calming light green taste and “pushed” it gently around the two of them; she could feel his tension drop away.

“Oohh, your arm feels so good like that, Tamara,” he sighed. “It suddenly made me feel better about talking about this.”

Barbara looked at him intently. “Really, Peter? You think you can talk about it now? You’ve always...”

Peter raised his hand. “Something about Tamara. She’s giving me comfort; I can feel it coming from her.”

Ohmygod, Tamara thought, he’s a latent empath! No wonder I’m attracted to him.

Barbara looked at Tamara, who nodded back. Barbara made the finger “okay” sign, circling her thumb and finger. Tamara winked back. Peter missed the whole exchange; he was gathering his thoughts.

“I need to say something about me when I was a kid,” he began. “I was a very shy and withdrawn kid. I did fine in school except when it came to participate. If I got called on, I got tongue-tied. So my folks got some advice and had me take singing lessons, of all crazy things. Starting when I was seven. And guess what? It worked, not big time, but enough that I didn’t pee my pants if I got called on. Anyway, when my family moved to Maryland, living next to me was this girl, I grew up with her, basically, for eight years. Her name’s Amy Pierson and we were very close.

“She was as shy as me, but was better in class participation. She and I both took those singing lessons. But we really didn’t have friends; we were each other’s friend.”

Barbara broke in. “They were like the two nuts in a peanut shell. They were cute together. The teachers let them be themselves, too.”

“Yeah, until high school, that is,” Peter said bitterly. “Amy had developed a physical problem. It was delayed puberty. The two of us were well over 14 years old when we started high school. I still remember how Amy looked at almost 15; she was maybe 4 feet 9 inches and couldn’t have weighed more than 75 pounds. That’s how big a typical eleven-year-old girl is. And she had zero chest. You can imagine what happened to her in high school. How those bitch girls teased and treated her.”

“Peter got into such trouble trying to defend her,” Barbara interrupted. “I did too, trying to watch out for my shy, nerdy brother, to defend him. I was a year older so I couldn’t protect him and Amy all the time.”

“She did a good job, though,” Peter complimented her. “So Amy went to the doctor’s and they did a whole bunch of tests. An MRI showed a benign tumor of the pituitary gland... adenoma? I think.”

Ryan nodded. “Yeah, that would be the right term. They’re uncommon in kids, the larger sizes, anyway. I’m assuming it was a non-functioning pituitary adenoma?”

“If you mean that it wasn’t producing any hormones, yes, that’s right. It was doing something to the gland to keep it from her starting puberty,” Peter told him.

“I’ll show off what I learned then,” Ryan grinned. “That’s called ‘hypogonadotropic hypogonadism’ which means that the gonads aren’t producing sex hormones because of a problem in the pituitary gland or hypothalamus. Docs like to show off with fancy words to describe simple concepts.”

The others laughed.

“Did they do surgery or radiation?” Ryan asked.

“The parents didn’t want radiation and the doc recommended against it anyway. Too small a target on her,” Peter answered. Ryan nodded in agreement. “But they wanted to postpone surgery and try hormone therapy first, but they knew that would take maybe two years to show anything. How do they get in there, though? The pituitary is under the entire brain.”

“It’s a little tricky. You can reach that area by going through the back of the upper nasal cavity, through the sphenoid sinus there. The procedure’s called transsphenoidal surgery and it’s done through the nose or from behind the upper lip.”

“Eeww,” a few of the listeners said.

Peter nodded. “So, when they first told us about the Program, they said the selections of kids would be random. What a damned lie. It was crazy; we were both picked, Amy and I, the same week, spring term in our freshman year. Her parents had told her that they requested an exemption for her. Amy obviously still looked like a little girl. I was surprised that I reacted so strongly to being selected since I was brought up being a nudist. But what I saw with the Program going on all that fall wasn’t nudism; it was cruel, disgusting, and depraved, how the girls were treated. And the things they forced the guys to do. The anguish of those poor kids having to go through that shit was just tearing me up.”

I was right, Tamara thought. A strong empath.

“But Amy wasn’t a nudist and she also had all that psychological damage done to her by the girls over body-image stuff. When they called her to the office in the week’s announcements naming the Program participants, she fainted. The emotional shock I felt from that was immense, seeing what happened to her, and that’s probably why I had such a strong reaction myself.”

I was wrong. Not a strong empath. A super empath.

“They had called my name too, but I stayed with her. But instead of taking her to the nurse, a teacher carried her to the office and they woke her with a cold wet towel. Then they force-stripped her; she was shrieking and crying. They stripped me too, but I tried to fight them, so a couple of teachers held me down and they cut my pants off.

“The Program official told me then, that he was giving us a second week as a penalty. Amy for fainting and me for not going to the office immediately and for fighting. When they dragged the two of us out of the office into the hall, naked, something in my mind just went away. I was dying inside. I couldn’t help Amy. I could only stand there and watch as the other kids made her into a toy, playing with her body. She was screaming and then just collapsed.”

“I got there just then,” Barbara interrupted. “I saw what happened and just waded in, shoving kids away. Amy was totally unconscious and had bruises everywhere. Not a teacher anywhere, either. I got someone to help me carry her to the nurse and I called 911 and her parents. Her parents went to the hospital with her. Turns out that Amy responded exactly like a rape victim does—but even worse; she had the previous psychological damage from all the harassing. She couldn’t come back to school—her parents sued and even got a big settlement. They moved away within the year, too, and that broke Peter’s heart. Peter and I still keep in touch and Amy is a little better, but she’s really changed. She’s become nervous, suspicious, and can’t maintain a relationship. She’s still getting therapy. But this is about Peter and what happened to him.”

“Yeah, what happened to Amy just tore me up, but I wasn’t in my body anymore. I was outside of it, watching. Kids were poking me and pulling on my cock and all, but I felt nothing. The bell rang and I stood there; I couldn’t get my body to work. Someone, maybe a teacher, led me to a classroom. I have no idea if it was the right one. During that class, I began to connect with my body, enough that I could tell it what to do. I saw that someone had brought my books. All I could think of was Amy.

“I remember watching myself walking from one class to another. Kids were stopping me for those ‘reasonable requests’ that the Program requires. I just stood there and watched. I felt nothing. I don’t even recall hearing much, except when someone told me to stop, I stopped.”

“I saw him like that,” Barbara said. “I found him in the hall after I left the nurse’s when Amy went to the hospital. She was still crying so hard, her body was shaking. Anyway, Peter looked like a walking dead person in the movies... you know, a zombie. Totally vacant eyes. When he looked at me, I saw a spark of recognition, but it went away. I asked him if he was okay... all he said was a whispered, ‘No.’”

“I think I remember that, sis. I was trying to untangle my thoughts. I think it was that day, maybe the next, when a teacher decided I should be an anatomical model. I totally blanked out who the teacher was. It was either in my health class or biology class, but they had maybe twenty weeks of Program kids to use as models before that week so they needed yet another demo? Anyway, someone must have told the teacher that I hadn’t gotten an erection yet. So apparently the lesson was to get me to have one.

“The teacher got me hoisted up on the table at the front of the room, and totally unnecessarily, she pointed out to the class all of the obvious external parts. It seemed like I was watching all this from a point about three feet above me. She pulled and pushed my cock, stretching it up to show my balls, while trying to do something to stimulate me. I couldn’t feel anything but I saw her fingers working on me.

“When she finished her show-and-tell, she asked the kids in the class to come up, one by one, to get a really close view of me and to handle the parts on display. Then she mentioned that it would be instructive to see if any student had the skill to produce an erection in the subject, me, since the subject did not get one when she tried. See, I thought she was trying to do something.

“The parade began. Kids pulled on my cock. Kids sucked on my cock. Even a few boys. Kids fondled my balls. Kids licked and sucked on my balls. Someone even tried to stick a finger in my ass but she stopped that. I wouldn’t have felt that anyway; I felt nothing. I felt nothing even when I noticed the teacher’s look of disappointment and defeat when the entire class had a chance at manipulating my parts, and got absolutely no response.”

“What a bloody awful story—a terrible experience,” Abi said and the others nodded. “What happened to you to cause that... oh, it’s an out-of-body experience, right?”

“Barbara knows about that. My experience is one reason she wants to study psychology.”

“Yeah, he had what’s called ‘dissociation’; ‘out-of-body experience’ or OBE is another term. I’ll be writing my senior thesis on dissociative disorders so I’ve done a lot of research on it so far. There are differing theories, naturally. The arguments are over whether dissociation itself is protective or pathological. Some psychologists call it a disorder and classify it with schizoid personality disorder or even schizophrenia. The theory I prefer is that it’s a normal, in fact, it’s a healthy response which humans, in their evolution, developed to allow them to recover from intolerable physical or emotional trauma. That was in a psych journal article I read that discussed the topic extensively.”

“What happened with y’all in the Program after that?” Terence asked.

“Oh, it wasn’t over yet. My parents were shocked when I got home that first day, as you’d expect. They tried calling the principal who basically told them to get lost. I was still freaked out about Amy; I called her parents and they told me that she had finally quieted down and was resting and was being treated for shock. They were medicating her. The worst problem for me was that when I finally did get to see her some weeks later, she had a bad reaction—apparently seeing me triggered her PTSD; that’s something that can happen to a victim if they see a trigger, and I was the trigger since the last thing she recalled seeing when she went into shock was me. Anyway, when I went to school the next day, it was cold out so we were supposed to strip in the commons area. I couldn’t force myself to strip anyway; it reminded me too much of what happened to Amy. I got dragged to the office where they stripped me again and got another week added to my sentence. Telling me that drove me further into what Barbara calls my ‘zombiehood.’”

“Jee-zus!” Terence exclaimed. “Effin’ monsters! Were your school officials that cruel with everyone?”

Barbara answered, “They were awful—many teachers were, but the principal was the chief dick.”

“Yeah, seems like I became their chief target that week. Later on the second day, I got called to the office and got yelled at for being unresponsive to reasonable requests and not cooperating in the class demo and not doing the public masturbation that they call ‘relief’ and yada, yada. I was mentally off somewhere but I must have heard the words ‘cause I remember them now, but then? Nothing was getting through. I did hear that they were going to find someone to make me respond.

“I don’t even recall the class... oh, yeah, it must have been history. It was Mrs Whelan’s; she enjoyed humiliating the Program kids in her class. That’s where they had an older girl come in. I recall that the girl was naked. She rubbed herself all over me and tried to get me to rub her breasts. I couldn’t; my arms were boneless and they wouldn’t work. Then the girl looked at me, she grinned and took my package and fondled it. No response. So she went to her knees to get to my cock better. She took it between her finger and thumb to wiggle it, trying to get me to respond. I felt nothing. She tried stroking it, but I still felt nothing at all. Next, she tried licking the head like a cat and nothing happened then either, so she shrugged and then took it into her mouth, slowly sliding her mouth back and forth over it. After a minute, she gave up.

“That’s when she told the teacher, ‘I can’t get any response at all, Mrs Whelan. Nothing. Look at him; he’s not even here. His eyes are—spooky. He’s scary. I’m done; let someone else try, not me.’”

Barbara spoke then. “I saw what he looked like when he was in the halls the second day, walking to class. He was stiff, walking like he was on stilts, jerk left, jerk right. I heard kids calling him a zombie, and they began giving him a wide berth. Some kids even looked scared. It was scary to see his eyes. They really looked dead.”

Peter went on, “I got called to the office a couple of times that day but nothing they said registered. I suppose if you talk to someone and they don’t respond in any way to you, that eventually you realize that nothing is registering. I suppose I was threatened with being put on the Program for the rest of my life, or whatever, but I have absolutely no recall of that. I was somewhere else entirely.”

“So obviously you’re with us now, so how did that ordeal end?” Tamara asked.

“My grandpa—Mom’s dad—has some cool connections I never knew about back then. You know my mom’s a Naval Academy grad?”

The Hopkins students did know that.

“So she got her appointment because my grandparents were politically connected. Well, they still are. Grandpa was a friend of the guy who was the governor of Maryland back then. Tuesday, Mom had called Grandpa and told him about me. On that Wednesday morning, my third Program day, a state police car stopped at my house to bring me to school. So crazy; the frikkin’ governor had sent him; it was the deputy commander of the state police. He brought me and my parents to the principal’s office and told him that if I was bothered with any more Program nonsense, the State Police would arrest him and every teacher involved and hold them for investigation of sexual assault and battery on a minor.”

Barbara continued the story. “I was there too ‘cause I had witnessed some of what had happened with Peter. The principal began to say that what the school was doing was all legal and that the police had no authority. The major just grinned and said something like, ‘Okay, this is how it is. One. The Maryland attorney general is starting an investigation of you and your subordinates for violating the state education code provisions for proper student supervision. Two. He’s assembling a grand jury to investigate possible charges against you for sexual assault and battery. Forced stripping of anyone is a felony under Maryland law, your Program notwithstanding. Three. He will be recommending a charge for endangerment of a minor for your treatment of Amy Pierson. She didn’t receive proper medical attention when she fainted. From the information I was given, you knew that she had a medical condition. Her fainting could have been caused by a medical problem, possibly diabetes, not just shock, and in a child, if proper care isn’t quickly received, they can die. You would have been up for negligent homicide charges if that had occurred.’

“And he continued with a warning, ‘So I’d strongly suggest that you stop forcing young Mr Winsberg here to continue to be in your naked Program. If I get a single report that he’s been bothered, I will send troopers here to arrest everyone involved. I really don’t think you’d like to see how we’d treat you, either. We do strip searches of folks who aren’t cooperative, and we will treat you as an uncooperative perp. We might not have a prison jump suit in your size, either. Want to get put into the general population butt-naked? We could arrange that. Want to see if the governor means business? He’s really pissed off that the children here were treated worse than inmates, and I heard that he tore your school board chair a new asshole. You’ll be hearing from your school board soon, I’d imagine.’ Then he left after giving me his card and telling me to call his number direct if Peter was bothered any more.”

“Damn,” Terence said. “That’s... Ah don’t know what to say. So, Peter, y’all were okay after that?”

“It took a long time to get me back to normal—well, my own normal. Especially with how the kids looked at me after those two days, but I had no real friends, anyway. Just Amy and now she was gone. What happened afterwards was that, for several years, I tended to wear lots of layers of clothes when I went to school. I became more withdrawn and isolated, spending all my free time in the library where the books were my safe haven. I went back to being unresponsive in classes.”

Barbara mentioned, “I overheard some of his teachers talking about him; they were really concerned about how Peter reacted after being put in the Program. One teacher said that before the Program, Peter was always attentive and his participation was acceptable, but afterwards he became much more withdrawn, both in classes and in places like the commons and lunchroom, where the kids gather to talk; Peter was always by himself, never with another student.”

“So how did y’all make the cut for getting the Clarke scholarship? Didn’t your classroom grades take a hit? And there’s a big service requirement,” Terence asked.

“My teachers knew what had happened and cut me a lot of slack. I always got top grades. So they graded me just on my work, not class participation. And thanks go to Johns Hopkins for the service requirement,” Peter answered. “I did a number of community service projects through university groups, along with the summer and special courses I was enrolled in. And I helped in my town’s senior program too. It was just in the high school where I had those problems; Barbara says it was how my own PTSD was triggered by being in the classrooms; it brought back the bad Program memories.”

“But what about seeing the Program kids after you got out of having to do it?” Tamara asked. “Didn’t seeing that crap affect you?”

“Sure... that’s why I remained so isolated and withdrawn. It protected me a little from having to experience the suffering the other kids were going through.”

Jeez. I need to think about how to talk to Peter about his empathic sense, Tamara thought.

Peter looked at Tamara. “Anyway, no more Program talk. I need to talk about something else. What were you asking me about before? You asked me about my body being... um...”

“...toned? Yeah. Nice body,” she smiled.

The others agreed.

Terence added, “Hey, guy, Ah’d love to have a workout buddy and y’body shows y’all know what y’all’re doing. Wanna partner up this year?”

Peter laughed. “Sure, I could use the discipline. Promise you won’t make me muscle-bound?”

“That’s a myth,” Terence grinned. “Too much muscle won’t make y’all so stiff y’can’t move. The way Ah was trained included speed and flexibility in addition to power. Partner?”

“Deal.”

Barbara smirked, “Don’t you love it? Take a joke about being muscle-bound and turn it into a lecture about strength training. That’s a geek through and through.”

“Y’know, Ah got a question,” Terence said. “Ah hate to bring up y’all’s bad experience again, Peter, but what all happened in the school to the principal and the others after all that?”

Barbara answered. “Yeah. The governor raised a shit-storm and the school board had to investigate. The principal got canned at the end of the school year and the teachers who were involved with any abuse got reprimanded or fired. The school board couldn’t do anything about the Program coordinator; he was a federal employee, but the state AG had him charged him with two counts of aggravated assault. I guess I never heard if there even was a trial, so maybe there was a plea bargain.”

“Hey guys,” Ryan said, “let’s stop rehashing old bad memories now, okay? It’s really getting hot out, how about hitting the pool again?”

They all agreed and trooped back to the pool. Tamara looked around the back yard. At the back of the property, there was a tall stockade fence and it appeared that there was a wooded area on the other side of it. On one side of the yard, the trees there were thick, so she assumed it was a natural area. The other side of the yard had a screen of tall junipers; the house on that side couldn’t even be seen.

Abi noticed her looking around.

“Checking out my sis’ yard’s privacy?” Tamara nodded. Abi grinned. “It’s total. We’re set into the corner of a protected wilderness area on two sides, there’s a river back out there, and the next neighbor is way over there,” she said, pointing past the junipers. “That’s why they bought here, It’s close to her lab and really private. That’s why we named it Emma’s Home Resort. They have friends come out here lots; they’re all nudists, so when she mentioned that she was having people from Hopkins over, I assumed you lot knew about her version of a nudist park.”

Tamara grinned. “And that’s why the two of you pranced out, what did she call it?”

“Starkers,” Abi laughed. “Hard to drop the British lingo.”

“I just love all your accents, though,” Tamara said.

Abi looked at her. “Yours is cute too. Kinda like Jamaican, but... a bit lilting and nasal?”

“I’m Haitian and grew up speaking French, English, and Kreyòl. The Kreyòl is a lot like the speech in Jamaica sounds—on some of the other islands too. You’re hearing a little of the French lilt and nasal sound too. My dad says the French that he and his family spoke was occitanismes; that’s spoken around the Bordeaux area. He thinks his European ancestors came from that area. Dad’s amazing; he can listen to French spoken and tell where they’re from.”

They had jumped into the pool while talking and Peter waded over to Tamara.

“I took a year of French in high school but then dropped it ‘cause I couldn’t participate in the vocal recitation parts. Maybe you can help me learn it?”

“Sure,” Tamara smiled. “Comment vas-tu, tu t’amuses?”

“Huh. Let’s see. ‘How you go...’ Oh. ‘How are you doing, um, having fun?’”

“Right, or a closer meaning for the last part is ‘enjoying yourself?’ It’s a reflexive construction. Okay, let’s try to speak French when we’re alone. That should be kinda cool when we do tech stuff.”

“Ooff. I’m sorry I asked.”

“Hey. French tech uses lots of words you’d recognize.”

Just then Andrew came out of the house with a platter, heading for the barbeque grill, and Emma followed with a tray, pitcher, and plastic cups. Tamara stared at Emma. She hadn’t seen her undressing before.

I thought Emma was a charisma powerhouse before, Tamara marveled. Jeez, Emma’s like a frikkin’ goddess. That glow! Am I seeing an aura here?

She heard a gasp from Peter. He was standing next to her in the waist-deep water, transfixed as he also looked at Emma.

“My god, is she glowing or is it my eyes?” he wondered. “That’s crazy; it’s not possible!”

Tamara felt something brush her thigh and looked down. Peter’s eyes weren’t the only thing that seeing Emma had stimulated on him.

Woah, nice, Tamara thought. Oh, I guess that’s the first one I’ve ever seen erect. Gorgeous.

She nudged Peter and whispered, “I’m really glad the Naked in School Program had no lasting bad effects on that thing down there, stud. Nice one you’re sporting.”

If Peter could have blushed any harder, he would have burst into flame—despite being in the water.

“Sorry... I’m sorry...” he started.

“No don’t be. It’s fine; I like what I see. Anyway, Emma. She’s awesome, right?”

“Yeah. Who would know she’d look like that? Her clothes mask who she really is. I feel waves of happiness and welcoming just flowing from her,” Peter marveled.

Tamara turned to him. “You really are empathic, aren’t you? And that’s the main reason you had such a bad reaction to the Program, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Is that okay? I hope that doesn’t bother you.”

“Not one bit. You know, we...”

Just then, Stuart called; he and Gerry had emerged from the house with a huge bowl and plastic plates.

“Okay, you lot, come get some salad,” he called.

Tamara and Peter found a seat, sitting across from Stuart, and they began to chat. Stuart was interested in her accent. He told her it sounded sort of French. Tamara agreed that it was, and told him what she had told Abi earlier.

“I’ve been to a lot of places around the world—never the Caribbean,” he told her. “Or Florida either. Before you moved to Miami, had you been to anywhere else?”

“Never. And I couldn’t even enjoy my first plane trip; I was on a stretcher in a plane with no windows.”

She told them about her medical airlift trip.

“But soon after, I did get to take another airplane—we went to Washington a few months later,” she said.

“To do touristy things?” Stuart asked.

“Um, not really, but we did get shown around a bit. Dad got the Medal of Honor awarded.”

That news caused a small commotion and Tamara had to give the details. When she mentioned that her dad had used a carbine, pistol, and British knife in the battle, Stuart was all ears.

“British Royal Marines knife?” he asked. “A Fairbairn-Sykes, do you think?”

“Yeah. That’s it. Long thin blade, very very sharp. Scary.”

“Hmmm. Know why he had that instead of the U.S. Marine-issue knife?”

“Yeah, my great uncle gave it to him when Dad was little. Oh, right. He had been in Korea, oh, and in the Royal Marines too. He taught Dad about combat and that’s why Dad became a Marine. But that was way before I was born.”

“Blimey, could it be? A Haitian Royal Marine,” Stuart mused. “Do you happen to know his name?”

“Dad called him ‘Uncle Dan.’”

“Bloody hell,” Stuart exclaimed. “Could it possibly be Daniel Jean-Baptiste?”

“Dad’s mother’s brother... yeah, that was her family name, so yeah.”

“I’m gobsmacked. No wonder your dad got the Medal. Color Sergeant Jean-Baptiste is a legend in the Royal Marines; one of the most decorated Marines from that era. Your dad had one of the best teachers. I served in Afghanistan roughly around the same time as your dad. Possibly we even crossed paths? I’d love to meet him. Is there any chance he’d visit this area?”

“I’m sure they’ll come to my graduation next May. Before that, it’s possible. I’ll ask. And what’s a color sergeant, anyway? Funny name for a rank.”

“The rank goes way back in history and in the U.K., only the Royal Marines have retained that rank,” Stuart replied. “Their original role was to protect the officer who carried the regimental colors in battle; that was a vital position for tactical reasons because in battles, soldiers oriented themselves on the colors. Later, the rank was used to recognize those sergeants who had demonstrated their courage on the field of battle and that’s how it’s currently used in the Royal Marines; plus it’s the top NCO rank, just under the warrant officers. The U.S. Marines use that title too but it’s not a rank. In their case, the Corps’ color sergeant is the commandant’s ceremonial representative and serves as the sergeant of the Corps Battle Colors Detachment.”

“So it’s both a rank and an honor too,” Tamara said.

“Basically.”

Soon the rest of the meal was served and enjoyed. After another hour of socializing, the group began to prepare to leave, thanking Emma and Andrew for a wonderful time.

Nothing about nudism was discussed on the trip back to Baltimore, to Tamara’s relief. She had a lot of thoughts to process about what she had seen and heard.

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