Previous Chapter

Chapter 72 - A Naturist’s Philosophy

Tamara did like Peter’s synthetic muscle idea.

“Peter! That’s a wonderful idea. I had an idea that the solution that Sonny came up with seemed to work more like a muscle fiber than the rod that I had originally visualized, but then we got to talking about bureaucratic stuff, like my giving him more funds for the project, and forgot about that line of thought. When we get back to the cabin, I’ll check on the characteristics of muscles to see how this polymer fiber stacks up, and email my patent guru to add your idea to the claims. I’m gonna add your name as an inventor too. Tom, I’m very open about sharing credit for innovation, so if you have an idea, let me know. I’ll pay for any of your own patent legal work, even if I’m not a co-inventor.”

Tom smiled at her. “That’s very generous. I think that I’ll like trying out this project.”

“Good. Peter tell you about my NDA policy?”

“Oh jeez. He sure did. Damn, you guys are real sharks, aren’t you?” Tom laughed. “I’ll be happy to autograph one for you.”

“It’s ‘cause when you work with me, I like to free-associate my ideas and my lawyers insist that I should protect them.”

Tom nodded. “Sure. In my engineering curriculum, there was a course on entrepreneurship and we had a whole unit on patents and intellectual property.”

“Yeah, we did too,” Peter said. “Hey, that was a sophomore class. Tamara, you skipped the sophomore year EE curriculum, so I guess you didn’t take that class.”

“Ah’m thinkin’ that she might be able t’teach it, actually,” Terence chimed in.

He had walked up while the others were speaking.

Tom turned to him and Terence grinned back. “That gal just whips out patentable ideas all th’time,” he said. “Her ‘n’ Emma too, but Tamara’s in her own league. Hey, how many patents are y’all a co-inventor on with th’other Hopkins faculty, anyway?”

Tamara shrugged. “Don’t really know, now. Maybe six to eight in the last year, but the university patent office is doing most of those, not my legal team, so I haven’t kept up with those. So maybe twenty.”

Tom looked at her. “Damn,” was all he could say.

~~~~

By mid-afternoon, some of the members of the Winsberg-and-Gibson clan began rolling in and Peter and Barbara got busy introducing everyone. When the evening came, the whole family decided to have dinner in the restaurant. Kevin and his group immediately became popular with the cousins, especially since four of them had been knighted by England’s queen. A telling of their story was demanded by everyone.

Denise laughed at the attention she was getting. “Hey, you guys; Tamara was knighted too, you know!” she chided the group.

“We know,” JoAnne shot back, “but she’s a cousin, so she doesn’t count. She’s not a famous celebrity like you!”

That drew laughter.

Gradually everyone began separating into smaller groups and began drifting apart, some going to the pool for a dip and some to the pavilion to listen to the DJ music there. Tom had noticed that all during the day, Amelia had seemed to be much more withdrawn than anyone else and that Jeremy had been staying close to her and, Tom assumed, whispering words of encouragement to her. Tom was very familiar with the problems of the acclimatization of a new nudist. His stepfather had been one, and his journey to becoming comfortable in a social nudism environment had been a difficult one. So Tom decided to see if he could help support Jeremy and talk to Amelia about being a new nudist.

“Hey, guys,” Tom spoke to them as they were leaving the restaurant. “Got some time? I’d like to chat a bit.”

“Oh, sure, Tom,” Jeremy said. “We’d like to get some peaceful time for a bit; it’s been such a rag today and Amelia’s knackered.”

Tom laughed. “Okay, translation?”

Amelia grinned at Tom. “Goodness, that’s proper queen’s English, Tom! Today’s been a rowdy time and I’m kinda worn out.”

“Oh, sure. I love your accents; make you sound like royalty. Anyway, this nudism business is a whole new experience for you, too, I can see,” Tom commented. “I heard that you both have no experience with social nudism.”

“No, we really don’t, but we did do some smaller group activities with Denise and Kevin where everyone was starkers,” Amelia told him. “They were very self-contained and structured. Nothing like this.”

Tom nodded in agreement. “You mean like a massage class. Right; Denise did mention that you guys were in those classes with them. Well, those classes are nothing like this experience. Getting used to a big boisterous nudist group like this family uses a huge amount of psychic energy. Your thoughts probably kept jumping back to ‘why the heck am I naked?’ all day. Right?”

“Oh yes! That’s it, exactly,” Amelia exclaimed. “You must know a lot about nudism, I guess.”

“I do. I grew up in a nudist family, just like Barbara and Peter did. But their family has a much older, ah, pedigree than mine. My sister and I grew up as nudists and we couldn’t understand why all the kids in our school couldn’t be nude when they wanted.”

“Oi, don’t talk about kids being naked in school,” Jeremy said with a scowl. “Amelia and I had some bad experiences with that rot.”

“Sorry. But that wasn’t exactly what I meant,” Tom apologized. “I didn’t have all that great a time in it, myself.”

“You had to do it?” Amelia asked. “In high school?”

“Yeah. But we can get to that part a little later.”

“But... but if you grew up as a nudist, then being in the Program should’ve been no problem,” Jeremy objected. “Anyway, why do you say you thought kids should be naked if they wanted?”

“Personal philosophy. I’ve always strongly believed that growing up in a household where nudism was practiced was the best possible upbringing. My sister and I were taught from our earliest childhood years that our natural state didn’t need clothes. Being with other nude kids—and adults too—at our resort, which was virtually our second home, we could see the complete lack of concern that everyone had about seeing folks’ naked bodies and that meant that showing our own bodies wasn’t a big deal.

“For me as a kid, it seemed like seeing people who were wearing clothes, I mean people not at the resort, like when shopping and at school, was where it felt weird. Then, before my resort friends and I even hit puberty and got interested in the other sex, we had learned that naturism wasn’t about sex; we had learned that nudity was a state of being and that sex—for my friends, for my sister at age thirteen, and me at eleven—sex was a private activity that the adults did, not kids.

“Obviously this familiarity with nude bodies made us nudist kids less fixated with sex as opposed to the other kids in school, the textile ones—damn, the talk I heard in the school locker room about this guy getting to see that girl’s tits or about that other guy getting some upskirt flashes—to them, naked bodies were the forbidden fruit; seeing girls’ nudity was almost like a lottery win. No, I take that back. Actually ‘scoring’ was the real win. Anyway. But then that idiotic naked Program started up in my high school late in my senior year and the Program’s nudity was totally all about sex and nothing except sex. More about that in a sec.”

“That’s exactly right!” Amelia exclaimed. “In my school, the very first thing they did was forcibly strip a girl in front of the whole school and then tried to make her wank herself!”

“Damn, that’s awful... you need to tell me what happened, but hold it for later. I was talking about growing up as a nudist. So I think that there were real and important benefits to being in a nudist family. I’ve heard that kids who’re brought up as nudists are less likely to contract a sexually transmitted disease, and guys are less likely to get a girl pregnant or teen girls get pregnant, than non-nudist kids who’re driven by hormones or peer pressure—or both—to engage in risky behavior. Another thing, I could see that many of my textile classmates had far more anxieties and hang-ups about their body image and most were fixated on how kids of the opposite sex thought about how they looked, than I did. My body is all me; I own it, and I’m proud of myself. That’s what nudism did for me, it gave me a positive body image and lots of respect for girls too. I firmly believe that our world would be a better place if more people embraced mixed-gender social nudity. People certainly would be less sex-obsessed, anyway.”

“Wow, that’s persuasive,” Amelia said. “You almost sold me. You mentioned that you had to be in that Naked in School thing. Jeremy told you that we both had horrid times with it in the U.K. He had it in his school and also, when my school tried to start it, that’s when they stripped that other girl, the one they tried to make to wank herself. And I was attacked then by several adults who tried to strip me but Jeremy saved me. My school never had the Program start, ‘cuz Denise and Kevin, Jeremy too, got it stopped there.”

“Yeah, I did hear about that; what you guys did was fantastic. And Denise told me that you know how Cindy and the rest of her Avery gang, together with my group at Georgia Poly, discredited everything about the Program.”

“Yes, but if you were a nudist, why did the Program bother you so much?” Jeremy asked. “You didn’t answer that one.”

“Simple, because it sexualized the kids—both those who were forced to be naked in it and everyone else too who had to see all the crap those kids had to endure. The Program had the opposite effect to what we were taught about proper treatment of other people. That was respect for others, respect for the privacy of their bodies—no forced and involuntary objectification by others. The way it forces the victim kids to be embarrassed and humiliated is cruel. And I don’t need to mention how their being coerced or forced to perform sex acts in public is... well, totally immoral.”

Amelia nodded emphatically. “That’s exactly why me and Jeremy were opposed to it as well. And if you were a nudist and had problems with it, how much worse would it be for a kid without that background?”

“Sure; I think it was,” Tom agreed. “Add to that the fact that in a nudist environment, virtually everyone is nude. In the high school, only a few kids were nude each week. So they became targets.”

“And I’m glad the Program is gone everywhere now, I think. Say, you told us about what it was like growing up as a nudist. How did your family become nudists, anyway?” Jeremy asked.

“My folks were nudists when they themselves were growing up, actually. Mom and Dad met at a resort as young kids and both of their families were naturists—their families were nudist resort members and Mom and Dad grew up together at the resort. They went to different elementary schools but eventually came to be in the same high school. Mom said that both of their families practiced home naturism too and the rest of both of their families and their friends, too, weren’t judgmental about Mom and her brother and sister or Dad and his sister being naked around their homes as kids and pre-teens.

“Say, I should mention that this period was when society was kinda permissive and open; the high-school swimming classes were done with the kids nude and several beaches were clothing optional too, so lots of kids skinny-dipped. This was southern California, after all. They even had naked group psych sessions—naked encounter, they were called.

“Anyway, Mom said that her parents sometimes covered up or even stayed clothed when friends were over. And no one paid much attention to their kids—that was Mom and her siblings—being naked at home, Mom told me. Her parents would usually be naked too but kept a coverup handy if they had visitors. Mom didn’t care if her mom’s visitors saw her nude and frequent visitors were used to her and her siblings being nude too. Mom told me that most people were fine with that and some of them even told Mom’s parents that they themselves didn’t need to put on their robes if they didn’t want to. Grandma was so open about home nudism that she made a few converts to nudism too; Mom said that her mom had convinced several of her friends to become nudists. But at times, a visitor would tell Mom’s parents that they were uncomfortable with having their nude kids around, so Mom said that she’d just hang out with her sibs in one of their bedrooms till the visitor left.

“I don’t remember hearing much about Dad’s childhood because he died when I was eleven, that was before I got curious about my folks’ childhoods. He was a Navy pilot and got shot down during one of those Middle East wars. But Mom told me that his family home life was much the same as hers.”

“Oh, how awful about your dad. Sorry to hear about that. So that was the way your household was when you were little; it was just like your grandparents’ households with home nudity?” Amelia asked.

“Yeah—pretty much. My sister’s two years older and we were very close growing up. Still are. When I was about thirteen, Mom met a great guy and got remarried, but he wasn’t a nudist. We—my family—got him to try it. I mentioned earlier that he had a hard, awkward time of getting into it but now he loves it too. So that’s how I noticed that you, Amelia, seemed to occasionally look uneasy. Is it getting any better?”

“Oh, sure. It’s ‘cuz part of my childhood was spent in a Muslim community, I think. You know how the girls have to cover up, and in Indonesia, even the less-observant cover up too since it’s a custom. My dad’s family isn’t at all observant, but my mother’s whole family is very conservative, almost radically so. So I grew up in a culture where being naked is incredibly wrong and those are the thoughts I had to wrestle with. You know, Jeremy got in trouble for protecting a Muslim girl’s honor when they stripped her in his school.”

“Jeez, now that’s a story I’d like...” Tom started to say when a bunch of the others found them.

“Hey, here’s where you guys went,” Mike Gibson, one of Peter’s cousins, called as they approached. “A bunch of us voted and we wanna hear some Program stories.”

Peter was with them and looked embarrassed. “Wasn’t my idea but I couldn’t talk them out of it,” he apologized.

The intruders included all of the cousins who were at the resort this weekend: Mike Gibson, Madeline and Melodie Richardson, JoAnne and Frank Winsberg and Audrey and Ernie Winsberg. The older cousins had only planned to come for the final weekend. With the cousins were Cindy, Denise, Kevin, and Peter.

Peter continued, “We’re meeting Tamara, Barbara and Terence. Barbara said that she’ll protect us from being hounded to tell our stories if we get too uncomfortable. Like me.”

“Yeah, but we wanna hear about the Program in England too,” Mike said as some of the others nodded, smiling.

“What, you guys perverts?” Tom grinned. “That crap’s all in the past, thank god. Why the hell would anyone want to re-hash it?”

Peter was making a thumbs-up gesture to Tom. “Yeah, Tom. You said it,” he said.

“I think it’s morbid curiosity,” Denise suggested. “They want to see what they missed.”

“I tried to convince them that they’ve already heard all about my brief time in the Program and what happened to me,” Peter complained.

“Yeah, but that was when you were crushed by what happened to Amy,” Mike objected. “That wasn’t like a real Program experience.”

“I beg your pardon?” Denise broke in. “A real Program experience? Anyone who’s been in it, no matter what happened in their participation and how long it was, had a real Program experience.”

Mike looked down, abashed. “Sorry...”

“I definitely concur with that, Denise,” Jeremy said as Peter looked at Denise and nodded to her in gratitude.

“Aw, we just wanted to hear some ... um, sexy stories,” Melodie offered. “The way we’ve heard about the Program, that was an exciting time to be in high school with sexy stuff always happening.”

“I think we need to set a bunch of people’s heads back on straight,” Kevin chuckled. “Seems that the Program’s become a legend just after its own time. Let’s find the others and give these perverts an earful.”

“Yes!” Ernie pumped a fist. “Let’s go.”

They found Tamara, Barbara, and Terence at the pool talking to some teens, including Peter’s resort friends Gary and Herb, and when Mike saw who was with them, he rushed over.

“Theresa!” he shouted, hugging his girlfriend. “Wow! You said you weren’t coming till next week. Damn, this makes my day, no, week!”

Theresa giggled. “Change of plans. Mom went to visit her sister while Dad’s still working, so that’s why Toby, Marcia, and Jack are here.” She pointed to the pool.

Peter began introducing everyone, including his resort friends, and those in the pool got out to be introduced too.

Mike looked at Marcia. “Jeez, Marcia, lookin’ good! You’re a soph now, right? Missed seeing you last summer.”

“We took a big trip last summer so didn’t get to come here,” Marcia answered. “You ‘n’ Theresa are still a real item, too.”

Theresa grinned at Mike, hugging him around the waist. “Yeah, Marcia, we are.” She looked at Mike. “Marcia says she has a boyfriend too but he’s not a nudist. Hey, Marcia, is he a keeper?”

Marcia blushed. “Let’s say that he’s a work in progress.”

“Um, I don’t like the sound of that,” Mike told Marcia. “If he’s not treating you right or not respecting you, you should think about how you really feel about him.”

“Hey, everyone,” Ernie called, “we’re going into the clubhouse for that talk about the Program.”

“What’s that?” Theresa asked.

“Um, we asked Peter’s friends about what happened to them in the Program,” Mike told her. “They were all in it. Um, mostly all. You wanna hear about it?”

Theresa nodded, then Marcia did. Toby, who had been talking to Gary and Herb, heard, and called, “Me too!”

Gary and Herb, shrugging, decided to tag along too. It had become a big crowd. After everyone got settled in the clubhouse, they began looking at each other, wondering how to begin, so Barbara took charge.

“I’ve elected myself as the emcee for this little event,” she said in an authoritative voice. “So that makes me the ref and no one argues with the ref if she decides things are too difficult for someone to recall their memories. Got it? And all you cousins know about Peter’s experience. Peter, have anything you want to say about the Program?”

“Totally no, just glad it’s done with.”

“Okay. You all know Peter’s story—the cousins, at least. If not, see him privately. Now you might not know it, but we’re honored to have some world celebrities here,” Barbara told the group, smiling at how everyone began looking around the clubhouse to see who might have entered. “To end your suspense, a bunch of people with us in our group here are the ones who got the Program ended, not only in this country, but in England too.”

Murmuring, some of the youngsters looked around while Kevin’s friends all grinned.

“Kevin, want to tell everyone what happened to the Program when you and your friends got involved?”

Kevin laughed. “Sure. We all got involved because we were dumped into it. Um, I think that the only people here who knew about the Program before they actually got involved are Cindy and Tom, right? And Denise, of course. I was shanghaied into it on my very first day when I appeared in school in the U.S....”

Denise interrupted, “And stopped it cold in our school. He disabled the Program official and forced the principal to suspend it for a week—and then he spent that week organizing the students and getting the principal to agree to make changes to make the Program ... um... actually almost fun, rather than the horror it had been the previous year.”

“Denise, lots of people helped...”

“Hush your mouth. The ideas were yours and you did the organization. And somehow got the law enforcement people on our side too. Guys, Kevin is the one who discovered that the national Program office had been taken over by those child kidnappers and got the feds alerted.”

That drew some exclamations of awe.

“How’d you make it fun?” JoAnne asked. “There are all kinds of stories about it being so bad.”

Denise explained how they had turned the first-day introductory stripping into something like a team-building exercise and got changes made to reduce the humiliation and non-consensual factors [Kevin and Denise Naked in School].

“But that didn’t end the Program... after the Program office scandal, it kept on going,” Audrey said.

“It did, but while Kevin and I were trying to make the Program more kid-friendly and reduce its terror-inducing reputation, our friends in California were having their own experience with it.”

“I guess that’s my cue?” Cindy laughed. “Mine and Tom’s. Okay, in southern California, some high schools had already started the Program maybe a year and a half before my school did. The school had sent out letters to parents in one late fall about the Program and gave its starting date as the following fall. So we knew a little about it, but not many details. Then what I later heard happened is that the feds sent a Program official to our school earlier than originally planned, so the school moved up the start date with no prior notice, surprising all of us.

“I had been in Tokyo at a judo tournament with my brother just before the spring term began and the two of us got called on the first day of the term. We walked into a room and their announcement took us totally be surprise. There was no way in hell that either me or my brother would strip. They had a few P.E. teachers and rent-a-cops in the room who tried to grab us, but I did mention judo, didn’t I? They couldn’t lay a hand on us. My dad’s a top-ranking Marine NCO and our school was on the Marine base, so Roger, my twin bro, and I, organized the Marine kids to resist and refuse to participate [Roger and Cynthia Naked in School].

“The fed official got more rent-a-cops in to try to force participation, but the kids at my school were so riled up that they mobbed them and roughed them up; our Marine military police came in and took over; then the Marines took over the school’s security from the locals. So Roger and I never participated. Tom got picked the following week, though, and he did participate, but about 90 percent or more of all the kids refused.”

“Why didn’t you refuse too, Tom?” Mike asked.

“Was a nudist anyway and didn’t have any problem with others seeing my bare body. But Cindy mentioned organizing the kids? She and her friends sure did. She and her Marine friends got things like the ‘reasonable requests’ and naked classroom demos stopped cold—you know about those?”

Everyone assented but Theresa asked, “How could you do that? I heard that kids had to do those demos and requests.”

Cindy laughed. “For the requests, you guys know what a Roman phalanx was?”

There were blank stares.

“Guess not. Okay. A phalanx was a military formation where a large number of troops stood shoulder-to-shoulder in three or four ranks deep, all pointing their spears outward. They advanced like that and the formation was used to penetrate enemy lines, kind of like a human tank. That’s what we organized, and the naked kids were escorted from class to class while being protected in the middle of a phalanx formation like that. Without the spears, though. So no one could get close to a naked kid to make a request.”

“Awesome” ... “Way cool” ... “Wish I had seen that” ...

“Also my group of Marine kids—and lots of civilian kids helped too—disrupted any attempts at classroom demos. They were very creative and did... ah, call it classroom civil disobedience. Since most everyone in the class took part, the teachers had no one to single out to punish. And no one bothered with relief sessions because there was no sexual teasing between classes. You know about the relief part of the Program, right?”

Some of the group—the younger girls mostly, didn’t.

“Okay, this might be a shock then,” Tom said. “The people who thought up the Program rules and requirements figured that with all of the sexual stimulation that the kids would be getting, they’d be so frustrated and sexually charged that they wouldn’t be able to think in classes. Relief was supposedly to prevent having the boys get what’s colloquially called ‘blue balls’ and be unable to concentrate. So at the start of each class, time was set aside to allow the boy to jack off or have someone help him to cum. In the first year that the Program operated around the country, the rule allowing relief applied just to boys, but then girls were added in the second year. Done in front of the classroom, public masturbation, hand or blow jobs, or even the gals getting eaten out, for educational purposes. What crap.”

“Thanks, Tom,” Cindy said. “Roger and I totally refused to do the Program, as I said, and all of the kids who had a Marine parent also refused, ‘cause the base commanding general ordered that those parents have their children refuse to participate. I guess the kids loved it since they could oppose authority and not get punished...”

“But weren’t kids forced?” a voice called.

“At first. I said that some teachers and guards tried it on us and we used them for judo practice. But then the general sent the base MP unit out and the MP presence stopped any further threat of force. Some kids did do the Program, though. Some of the kids’ parents made them do it and some were afraid of the school’s threat of their not graduating. Tom did it ‘cause the nudity was a non-issue for him. But even though he participated like an obedient student, he still had a run-in with the Program official about his participating, though.”

Tom nodded. “Oh, right, what a moron he was. If you were in a school activity while on the Program, you were supposed to do it naked. Like sports. Think about playing football naked, okay? Think that would work? No? You’re right. Well, I was on the swimming team and although swimming naked is just wicked awesome, it doesn’t work for swimming naked races. And guys, don’t try a naked racing dive, okay? I think it would hurt the gals too. But in a different place.”

Some listeners laughed while a few girls pressed their hands against their breasts, scowling thoughtfully.

“So that stupid Program official laid into me about my wearing my competition suit but I gave it right back to him and told him where he could stuff his objections. So my week being naked in school was weird and stupid. I have nothing memorable to say about it. But Cindy had a simply awful experience that was directly related to the Program. You wanna tell that? Is it okay?”

“Um, it’s okay, but you can tell it,” Cindy said, looking very uncomfortable.

“Sure. Cindy’s very sensitive about this but she knows that what happened was not her doing,” Tom went on, now having captured everyone’s undivided attention.

“Cindy’s cousin Ayame was living with her family that term and was a kind of visiting student in the high school. She’s Japanese and had already graduated high school in Japan; she was taking classes in an American school to get used to English ‘cause she was going to college in the U.S. She was Cindy’s cousin ‘cause Cindy’s aunt and uncle, who lived in Japan then, had adopted Ayame when she was little and had lost her family. To skip over lots of details, in retaliation for Roger and Cindy’s being involved in interfering with the Program, that idiot Program official had added Ayame’s name to the list of participants. But she wasn’t even a regular student in our school; her name wasn’t in the list of names that were used for the random Program selection. Roger found that out when her name was announced for participating that week and he went to the office to get it straightened out and the secretary saw that Ayame’s name shouldn’t have been added. But on the following day, the Program official had arranged to have Ayame kidnapped from the school.”

Everyone gasped.

“On that day, I happened to be in the hall, returning to class after delivering papers to the office—that was my own Program week so I was naked and the naked kids were given various duties like running errands and stuff—when Cindy and Roger heard that Ayame had just been taken out of the school. Roger was sitting near the door and was out of the room like a flash. Cindy was further away and when Roger ran out, their teacher went to the door to call for him to return and managed to delay Cindy from getting out of the classroom long enough so that she couldn’t catch Roger as he ran for their car. When Cindy did manage to get around the teacher, she tore out of the classroom and barreled headlong right into me. Now at this point, I didn’t know Cindy at all, although I was aware that she was Roger’s twin sister; Roger and I were members of the school’s swim team. Anyway, when we collided, Roger was out the building door, going for his car, and because of our collision, Cindy couldn’t catch up with him—so she didn’t have a way to follow Ayame. I did, and offered to try to follow Roger. Remember—I’m naked here. So here I was, getting myself involved in a naked car chase scene.”

The others laughed, enthralled by the story.

“Anyway, cut to the end of the chase. Cindy called 911 on her cell as Roger and I, both driving like maniacs, caught up to the kidnappers. Ayame had a miniature cell phone that her father’s electronics company was developing—she was able to talk to Cindy and Roger on it and used Japanese so the kidnappers couldn’t understand her. We were able to catch up with the car she was in and Roger cut it off and forced it to the side of the road; I pulled right behind the kidnappers’ car, blockading it with mine, so they couldn’t back out. Cindy leaped out of my car in a hot instant and a heartbeat later, she was at the kidnappers’ car, demanding that they let Ayame go. But a second later, the two goons had jumped out too and one of them pulled a gun on her.”

Gasps.

“Yeah, some scene, right? I was dying to jump out to help, but Cindy had warned me to stay put and let the 911 operator know what was happening. Yeah, I’m gonna help Cindy, me being naked and going against a gun too? Anyway, one of the goons reached out to grab her—he lunged for her with both arms out, and she pulled the slickest, sweetest martial arts move I ever saw. In an instant, that guy was flying through the air. But the guy with the gun had moved around, maybe to get a better angle to cover Cindy, and the goon she threw slammed right into him. As he landed on the gunman and both went down, there was a gunshot, and neither was moving.”

Cindy was looking pale and Tom gave her a reassuring hug.

“Meanwhile, just as Cindy threw the guy, a state trooper and a Marine MP unit pulled up at the site, so all the cops saw what went down. Within three or four minutes, the whole place was crawling with MPs, deputies, detectives, and troopers. Then her dad arrived with another bunch of MPs and the shift commander, and the excitement began to wind down.”

“What happened to the kidnappers?” Herb asked, his voice tinged with awe.

“This is what bothers Cindy. Both died, almost instantly.”

Gasps.

“Yep. When he went down, the gunman pulled the trigger and the shot hit the other’s heart. And when he fell, the gunman’s head hit an anchor point bolt of a guard-rail cable and the section of the bolt sticking up went into his skull. The officials called it a felony murder by the gunman and an accidental death caused by a felony assault using a firearm. The cops certified that Cindy’s judo throw was taken in self-defense.”

Sighs.

“I still think that if I had waited a few minutes...” Cindy began.

“No, the cops were very clear on that,” Tom insisted. “You were well justified in how you responded. That jerk was about to grab you; you could have become a hostage and they’d have gotten both Ayame and you. Who knows what would have happened then. Those two were the sole cause of their deaths and they were felony lawbreakers besides.”

“Yeah, what was that kidnapping about, anyway?” Madeline asked. “Why was she grabbed out of the school? How could that have happened?”

Cindy’s face was rigid with anger now. “That turd who the feds sent to our school had this rogue federal contract operator do it. Let me back up. The Program office had enforcers, they were called that name, who were authorized by the Program regulations—not any law, mind you—to come to a school and detain a misbehaving student. They had no law-enforcement powers; they had more of a school disciplinary function. Some were actual fed employees and some were contractors. In California they used contractors. So these rogue enforcer contractors were given the names of students to pick up from the school and Ayame was one. But as Tom mentioned, she wasn’t actually a student eligible for the Program. Her name had been added maliciously. So law enforcement charged her detainment as a kidnapping.”

“And shit,” Tom finished, “the fallout from that was epic when the Japanese government found out what had happened. The following fall, all of the Program officials in the entire state got removed—and then the federal office itself got shut down two months later anyway. But that didn’t end the Program either; it took a while for states to stop running it. Anyway, Roger and Ayame and Cindy and I wound up in college in Atlanta. I had been accepted to Georgia Poly and the others to Avery. And in our second years in college, we met Kevin and Denise.”

“Yeah, turns out we rented an apartment in a house owned by Denise’s mom,” Cindy grinned. “We met these two dynamos and learned we were so much alike, that it was uncanny. So all of us together, plus teams of students from both of our colleges and with major contributions from Kevin; Denise did stuff too; we put together a couple of research projects which finished up by that May or June. The publicity around our publications caused such a public commotion that politicians everywhere couldn’t shut down the Program fast enough. And the Avery Program was the major direct result of one of our research projects—actually a college course term assignment.”

“So that’s how the Program in the U.S. got stopped,” Tom finished. “I was the only one of Cindy’s Marine friend’s group to be a participant in it, but my personal experience was that I simply spent a week walking around the fuckin’ school bare-assed naked. Wearing sneakers—no way my bare feet would touch those filthy floors and I didn’t want to risk sandals slipping off on the steps. That was such a weird experience in itself, being the only nude person in a whole group. Amelia and Jeremy, I know you must have a few tales about the Program in England. Hell, you’re f’ing knights for helping to kill it there.”

“I had one Program experience in England myself,” Denise broke in and everyone stared at her. “Ha, yeah, I was picked to participate in a crazy off-the-wall naked-in-college program that the U.K. government was trying to start up in their country’s college—I should say university—ed schools.”

Everyone began shouting, asking for details [Naked in School - the Exported Rebellion].

“That wacky idea was supposed to show future teachers what the experience of being naked in school felt like to school kids, but guess what? A uni environment, especially an urban one, is nothing like a secondary school, right?” There were nods. “Of course I took a leaf from the book that Cindy wrote, the part about ways to thoroughly refuse to participate, and also took guidance from Kevin’s mantra, which is to always work from a position of strength. I refused, thoroughly, and then got a bunch of uni students together and told them how to refuse thoroughly as well.”

“Yeah,” Kevin chuckled, “she did it so thoroughly that her shutting down the Program in the ed schools, within two days of her encounter it was stopped and within two weeks, word about the college program’s collapse had gotten to the Brit prime minister. And then the U.S. president heard about it; when he heard that Denise, with only a tiny bit of help from me, did it, he wanted to hear the whole story. He even arranged to see us while he was visiting London.”

“Actually, he came from Brussels to London specifically to see you guys,” Jeremy told Kevin. “Dad told me that.”

Again, faces filled with awe looked at Kevin, Denise, and then at Jeremy.

Denise smiled at the group. “Jeremy’s dad is the deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy in London.”

“Denise killed the naked-in-ed-school program within two days of her starting school there,” Jeremy said proudly. “She met with the kids who had been picked and told them how to fight back. So they did. Two days and gone. And for my own experience in it, I didn’t know anything about that sodding high-school program until I began school in London in mid-year of my year ten. Dad had gotten his London posting and when I started school that spring term, there were these bollock-naked kids all over the bloomin’ place. And the girls I saw were getting pawed all over. The kids who had to be starkers were in awful shape—the best of them were mostly resigned to reluctantly doing it but most were right terrified about what they were going through, weren’t they.”

“Jeremy, tell them about the honor killings,” Amelia prompted.

“Honor killings?” Melodie asked in shock. “I heard about those, but in uncivilized places, like tribal Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not in England too?”

“In England too,” Amelia affirmed.

Next Chapter            Return Home

Copyright © 2023 Seems Ndenyal. All Rights Reserved.