Chapter 38: Coming Clean

Soon everyone had gotten the car unloaded. Barbara and Peter, being old hands at this, had given Terence and Tamara a list of what to bring—and more importantly, what not to bring. Prominent in that second list was clothes; they wouldn’t need much clothing. One of the dances in August was themed Polynesian and dressing up in costumes was encouraged, Barbara had told them. If the costume was a bit revealing, so much the better.

They had brought food and beverages; Peter and Barbara told the others that while the restaurant and lunch-stand food was quite good, it was pricy. Peter’s parents and their other relatives would be providing most of the meals, so the four friends brought enough food and drinks for two weeks of lunches and lots of snacks. And several cases of bottled water.

“We all need to keep hydrated,” Barbara had told them.

High on the “must take” list were sun screen, spare towels, sun glasses, and a hat or two. Cover-ups were recommended for Tamara (“Nudist or not, sometimes it can get chilly at night,” Barbara had told her). Slip-ons or sandals for the pool area, sneakers for playing any sports or going on a run, and sturdy shoes if they wanted to hike the nature trail. Tamara brought her laptop but promised that she’d keep her working on it to a minimum. She wanted to keep in touch with the patent attorneys since she had developed the details of her latest discovery into two more patent applications.

Earlier that week, together with one of Emma’s engineers, she had finished developing a chip which seemed stable and, when energized, could reliably produce the powerful magnetic field she had observed. But further work needed to be delayed until the techs working on the fabricator could produce a few dozen for scale-up and destructive testing—this was to learn the operational limits of the circuit. Tamara brought her thoughts back to the present; Barbara was trying to get her attention. They had just finished putting the food away.

“I said, do you want to hit the pool for a bit and then have lunch out there?” Barbara asked. “The guys are stowing the coolers in the car so they won’t be in the way in here. These cabins are nice but they have zero storage space.”

“Okay, that should be interesting. What do I need to take?”

“Your towel. Always have a towel wherever you go. For the pool, having a second towel is handy. One to lay on and one to dry off with. Sun screen and sunglasses. A hat if you want. And a bottle of water. Keeping hydrated when it’s hot is important.”

Soon the four friends were walking off to the pool.

When they got to the gate at the pool, Peter told his guests, “Let’s grab some lounge chairs and dump our stuff. Then we need showers—using soap. We frown on people who just let the shower water get them wet and hardly use any soap. The idea is to wash off your skin oils and sun screen. That keeps the pool water clean and helps with its chemical balance. You can shower outside there, or inside if you prefer.”

Tamara looked at the showers on the side of the building and at the man and woman who were soaping themselves up, and giggled, “I’ll go outside. For the experience. I never thought that I’d ever be taking a public shower.”

They showered and then went into the pool.

“Oooh, nice,” Tamara said as she slid off the side into the deep end while Peter cannon-balled in next to her.

Terence also jumped in but Barbara just sedately used the ladder.

“Wow,” Terence exclaimed. “This feels awesome. Better’n Emma’s pool, actually. Jeezus, no wonder skinny-dippin’s so popular.”

Barbara laughed, “I never asked you. You never did this as a kid?”

“Never. Where Ah grew up, there weren’t any likely spots close enough,” he answered.

Peter had paddled back to Tamara and asked her, “What’ya think, sweetie?”

“Damn, it’s really nice. The water feels like silk on my skin, not like Emma’s pool.”

“Oh, right,” Peter said. “This is a salt-water pool. Emma’s uses chlorine—that water feels harsher, somehow. Instead of putting chlorine directly into the water, there are electrolysis cells that break down the salt in the water to generate chlorine so the chlorine levels tend to be less harsh.”

Several minutes later, a few teen girls came to the pool; Barbara knew them and introduced everyone. Then they had lunch at the lunch stand. After lunch, Peter suggested a walk around the grounds and by this time, Tamara had lost count of the number of people she had been introduced to. It was afternoon; the sun was hot; yet there were plenty of people playing on the various courts. They watched part of a tennis game and a highly competitive péntaque game. Tamara was fascinated by the pickleball game that she watched. Then Barbara suggested a game of minigolf.

“Don’t bet on this with her,” Peter joked. “She’s a shark.”

Sure enough, Barbara beat them all handily.

And Tamara realized that ever since they had left the cabin that morning, she had completely forgotten that she was nude. She mentioned that to Peter, who hugged her happily.

“That’s really great, honey. So coming early was a good idea?”

“Oh yeah. Now it’ll feel like your family will be coming into my space, rather than the other way around. Does that make sense?”

“Sure it does. The resort and people here won’t be new to you, only my family, so it’s like they’ll be your visitors. You have the control of the situation, in a way,” Peter told her.

After dinner, they heard music and noticed some people dancing in the Pavilion, so they went over there. Even though it was still quite warm outside, there were about a dozen couples and they had brought a Blue-tooth speaker and were playing tracks from someone’s phone. Barbara and Peter knew several couples so they all chatted for a while and danced a few times. Tamara even danced with Terence several times, and when, on one of Terence’s dance moves, Tamara felt a soft, wet thwack on her hip, she giggled and poked him in the ribs.

“Jeez, Ah’m sorry...” he began.

“Oh, no, don’t be,” she laughed. “When that happened, I got the weird thought, ‘I’m being beaten by a wet noodle,’ so either you’re getting a bit aroused and leaking...”

Terence gasped in shock and checked himself; then he chuckled, “Damn sweat. Yeah, my cock’s wet. Not what y’all thought. And Ah resemble y’all’s suggestion that it’s a noodle. Most gals referred t’ it as a wreckin’ bar.”

The two of them began laughing and of course that attracted the curiosity of some of the nearby dancers.

“Hey buddy,” a guy, who had introduced himself as “Jim,” asked, “what’s the joke?”

A few others came closer. When Tamara told them what had happened and what Terence had said, there was more laughter, and several of the girls told him that they thought that he looked simply awesome and his endowment was just stunning. And none of the guys made any off-color comments other to say that his high-school dates must have been twits not to appreciate him. Terence was walking a mile high after hearing those comments. After a while, the group began to break up and the four friends decided to get showers before returning to their cabin.

After the shower and while they were walking back, Tamara asked Peter, “Is this how everyone is here? So friendly and open?”

“Pretty much. When I was in high school, visits out here helped me keep my sanity. I had this awful dichotomy I had to constantly face. In school, the Program was running with all of its compulsion and coercion and all those negative emotions beating on me. Anguish, fear, even panic, from a lot of kids. I hated Mondays; new kids were called then, so I could feel everyone’s dread; then kids were called and another round of fear began. Even hysteria in some cases. But on the other side of the coin, coming here, when people got nude, there was serenity, happiness, and pleasure. Respect. No demands that naked people do repugnant things or allow others to do them to themselves. My visits here fortified me for when I had to be back in school, and I was able to use the images from here to help me deal with what I saw in the school.

“Jeez, that’s an awful picture you’re giving me,” Tamara said. “Your empathy did you no favors. Is it still as strong? I can feel how you respond to people here; you seem to reflect their happy feelings when you greet them.”

“It took me three years, but by my senior year, I had mostly figured out how to throttle down some of the worst of it. Of course, in my senior year, I wasn’t in high school every day; I was in that advanced college program, so I had those classes away from the school. That was good, because Barbara wasn’t in high school that year; she was in college. She was my lifeline for those three years and would help me whenever I began to feel overwhelmed.”

They had gotten to the cabin now, but stopped to talk on the porch. They sat on a twin seat swing there as Terence and Barbara went inside.

“What exactly did you feel?” Tamara asked.

“I guess I made a mistake with Amy. We had opened our emotions to each other and I got carried away. I loved being attuned to her feelings and that she could feel mine. And then things changed when we got to high school and the Program began. It was bad right from when it started. The first assembly, where they made kids strip, was awful and some of those kids were actually volunteers—they did it to get it over with. During the entire fall term, the emotions I felt were bothersome and made me withdraw a lot and I know that the teachers noticed. It was really bad for Amy, though, and that also affected me, so I kept close to her to support her. And those things we did together to help us in dealing with all that abuse crap we saw was probably the reason they picked the two of us.

“It was on that Monday morning when they called both our names that I finally came unglued. I had such a strong empathic bond to Amy that her panicked response cut me to my soul. I told you about that when we were at Emma’s house that first time. Fortunately, after that state cop’s visit, they did leave me alone. Completely. The teachers let me be and if I couldn’t stand the Program sights, like if a teacher was using a kid in the classroom, I’d just go to the library for that period. And if a class had a Program kid in it, I’d arrive five minutes late to miss the show. No one said a word about that—must have been that trooper’s threats ‘cause they really let me be. I had really good psychological help too and the shrinks I saw were able to help me see that how I responded showed that I had an extremely strong moral sense and my reactions were protective measures, not a mental illness.”

Tamara hugged him. “I’m glad it’s all over for you and also that the Program is all done with too,” she said.

“Yeah ... and my cousins—you’ll meet them tomorrow—told me that their local high school stopped it last year. Finally.”

“Were they ever in it?” Tamara asked.

“They live in Frederick now. Mike had just started as a freshman when they stopped it. He said that in the year before he got to high school, many kids were refusing even then. Janice is a college senior like us, but she didn’t go to high school in the U.S. Uncle Dave and the family were in Germany then and now he’s stationed at Ft. Detrick. So, no. Hey, you told me that you’d spill some of your ‘state secrets,’ remember? The ... ah ... mischief you got into.”

“Sure. A big part of who I am is my religion. I told you a little about Vodou and how it’s been criminally misrepresented for over two hundred years or so.”

“Yeah, I remember. It’s nothing like the movies make it out to be.”

Tamara nodded. “Or even the touristy areas of New Orleans, either. Vodou’s a religion that has roots in west Africa and when the slaves who were brought to Haiti tried to continue observing it, their overseers began stopping its practice, so in response the slaves combined it with a lot of similar elements in Catholicism and they were allowed to practice that version. It’s not a formal religion in that there’s no hierarchy; the priests and priestesses teach others in a kind of apprenticeship. Okay. So an important part of our beliefs is that a spirit world exists and we can interact with it and the spirits who occupy it. We call them lwa; I mentioned them to you.

“But the most important part of this is that the lwa actually exist; probably not as actual physical entities but as human-generated actualities. In other words, they don’t seem to exist unless people will them into existence. We do that through meditation and our worship rites. Now, I have a skill or ability that may seem to be a superpower ... don’t look at me like that; you have something like it too.”

“What? That’s crazy! What the hell do you mean? I don’t have a superpower!”

“Sure you do. You’re a super-empath. So apparently was Amy. And Emma’s a super-charismatic, or whatever the word is. Listen. You know that sometimes a person will come into a busy room and everyone stops talking and looks to see who came in?”

“Sure. That describes Emma,” Peter said.

“And consider yourself. You told me that you just about collapsed when Amy did. You felt what she did, right?”

“Um, well ... yes...”

“Plus you felt the terror of other kids forced to strip. Know anyone else like you? Besides Amy.”

“Um, well ... no...”

“So what would you say if I told you that I could do both what Emma does and what you do?”

“Um, well ... freak out time! Tamara, what are you saying?”

“Just this: when I was little, I figured out that I could quote, ‘do stuff,’ unquote,” Tamara began. “It started when I didn’t want to be disturbed—I was maybe seven or eight. I’d be reading a book and didn’t want to be bothered, so I made it so that I wasn’t. To my parents or other people around me, I wasn’t there. When I suddenly popped up, it scared the hell out of them. I also found that I could affect people’s emotions and stuff when they were close.”

“How can that be? This is crazy. Really?” Peter asked.

“Ah, a demonstration is in order. Please don’t get mad, okay?”

“What are you do ... shit, is that you? Stop!” Peter exclaimed.

Tamara had “pushed” a faint yellow taste to him.

“Peter, I sent a ‘fear’ emotion to you. Now bear with me...”

She gathered a greenish-brown taste and “pushed” that and Peter began looking around wildly.

“Where are we?” he gasped. “Why am I naked? Why are you naked? What’s going on?”

Tamara removed the tastes.

“I just gave you ‘confusion.’ See? In very limited ways, I can send different emotions to people, but I can also sense their emotions too...”

Peter interrupted, “Jeez, that’s so crazy. Damn, Tamara, but that’s a fuckin’ powerful superpower. You could rule...”

Now Tamara interrupted him, “Nope. Never. I can’t use it for evil or personal gain. I told you that the lwa, our spirit mentors, so to speak, allow me to use that ability but I know with absolute certainty that if I misuse it, it will be gone. When I used it in the past, it was always to help those who needed help—or to put evil right.”

“Jee ... zus. This is so fuckin’ crazy. Do you know how it works, though?”

“I’m getting ideas. What I sense seems to me to be like tastes, but now I think it’s more like odors, and they have a kind of color that makes up part of what I sense. But my eyes don’t see anything. I read in a medical text that there’s a term for sense confusion, ‘synesthesia’; this is usually used to describe the ability to see colors or hear sounds when smelling certain odors. I kinda ‘hear’ the colors too. My mom told me that Granmanman could see people’s auras and a lot of my ability is like hers was, apparently. I’ve done a lot of reading about electrical activity in the brain, neurotransmitters, and pheromones. I got involved with MRI stuff ‘cause I learned that it could show how brains worked and that building better MRIs could help others.

“So in a roundabout way, I’ve come to where I can describe how my ability works ... maybe. Still interested?”

“Oh yeah. This is so crazy, Tamara.”

“It sure is. Okay. My mental control—emotion control is more accurate—is fairly close range. If I want to affect someone, I need to make a huge mental effort to, um, I think of it as ‘gathering a taste of a certain color,’ and the color, I guess, is just a tag for the emotion I want to project. It feels like a taste to me, but perhaps it’s really an odor and I’ll explain that in a bit. Then I focus on the target for the emotion and ‘push’ the taste to him. If it’s a pure emotion, like I did with you, then that’s all. The person reacts. How strongly seems to be a personality trait of the person. For example, an evil person will have an intensified response to an emotion which resonates with his evilness. I’m not being boring, I hope.”