Chapter 73: Program Redux

“Right. Happens in England too,” Jeremy agreed. “So London—actually many cities of the U.K., especially from Birmingham and south—have a large Muslim population. Almost 7 percent of the country’s population now, I think, are Muslim. And most are very conservative, which means that the gals mostly wear the hijab, but a lot even wear the burqa. Anyway, under Islamic law, a girl who exposes her hair, and especially one who wears tight clothing, anything which reveals the body shape, is committing a major infraction against her modesty and against her family’s honor, isn’t she. So imagine if a Muslim girl is stripped starkers in school and made to go to classes that way.

“During the time that I was living there, I saw several news reports of Muslim girls who got put in the Program, got stripped by school teachers and when their family members found out, those girls got murdered. It’s called an ‘honor killing’ but it does nothing for anyone’s honor. Four cases in two years, actually.”

“Damn, that’s terrible”... “Barbaric”... “Totally evil”... “How could they?” ... Their own family?”

“It’s true though. That honor stuff isn’t anything to ignore, either. It affects others, besides family members. I don’t know if you guys know anything about the shootings in the Charlie Hebdo magazine office in Paris, maybe a dozen years ago. That was because the terrorists thought that the magazine had slighted Prophet Muhammad. Well, honor killings and revenge attacks still happen and they happen in London too, a few over the past ten years that I heard about. One of them was against my school’s head teacher. His auto was destroyed with a petrol bomb and fortunately, he wasn’t in it. It happened because a Muslim girl in my school got put in the Program and got forcibly stripped. I happened to be in the school office when the teachers pushed her, starkers, out of the head’s office and into the outer office, and I was able to protect her modesty by covering her with a window curtain I pulled down and getting her out of the school before any of the kids saw her. Got into huge bovver over that...”

“Huh?” Frank asked and others looked puzzled.

“Jeremy really talks like a Brit,” Tamara giggled. “I love it. Emma does too, so I’ve picked up some of the lingo. ‘Bovver’ means trouble. Like how Cockney speakers say ‘bother.’ Go on, Jeremy.”

“Right then. Got in trouble. Dad got the PM—prime minister—actually the ambassador did—to tell the head teacher to back off—that I had acted properly. That was the week I got put in the Program myself; that’s why I happened to be in the office when they stripped off that girl. I had been arguing with the head about being selected; I knew it wasn’t random as they claimed it to be. I know that I got put in the Program because I was so bloomin’ outspoken against it. So I was the only kid left in the office when two teachers dragged that poor, terrified kid into the head’s office, stripped her there, and then shoved her out. But I learned something important about my temper the first day I was in it. I lost the plot a few times...”

At the blank looks, Jeremy stopped. “Ah, right ... I ... erm, lost my temper. Happened a few times that day and next and I actually hurt some blokes when they attacked me, and then I nearly twisted a girl’s arm off after she grabbed my cock from behind me and yanked it. That hurt and I reacted, but it scared me, how I could act that way with a girl.

“But the corker came the second day in a bio class. We were on an ecology unit and the bloomin’ arse of a teacher asked me to demonstrate how to wank.”

Amelia, Denise, and Kevin shouted, “Jack off!”

“Sure. So I went all snarkey on him, told him I didn’t know exactly what he wanted me to show and that he should demonstrate what he meant, like a good teacher would do. The whole class realized that I was taking the piss with him but he went ballistic and tried to send me to the head teacher ... okay, those blank looks mean I need to translate again. ‘Take the piss’ is a totally common saying in the U.K. Means to mock or to be sarcastic about something. Well, I refused to go by myself; I told him that he’d need to come too and lay his complaint there. That did it for me in the Program; I was shot of it after all that rot. I had kept my togs in my rucksack, so I got dressed right then and there.

“That led to another verbal tussle with the head teacher when he found out that I had taken myself out of participating, but I showed him where lots of parts of the Program were in direct opposition to the school’s pupil handbook, and by following the Program rules, pupils were violating the school’s own rules. I asked him how he could possibly justify and support such a conflict and told him that the Program made a mockery of most of the school’s behavior rules. So we agreed to an armistice. He wouldn’t force me into doing the Program and I wouldn’t interfere with the Program in the school.”

“Damn, Jeremy,” Tom said. “That’s an amazing story. Yeah, I can see you going into law.”

“Oh, Jeremy did way, way more than that,” Denise said. “He basically schooled the entire British government on how the Program violated not only many British laws, but also their education department regulations and international law too. The MPs—that’s the members of Parliament—who attended one meeting with us, criticized the reps from the U.K. Program office, telling them essentially that they needed to put some lawyers on their staff who actually knew the law; it appeared to them that a year-11 pupil with no legal education knew the law better than the government’s own lawyers.”

“So you all got knighted ‘cause you stopped the Program there?” Frank asked.

“It was for a bunch of things and mostly Denise and Kevin organized it all,” Amelia answered. “They did two major things. One, Denise and Kevin stopped the Program from happening in my school and gave the board of governors an alternative to do instead, that was the Avery Program, and then they got that new Avery Program all set up, trained the teachers, and got the government’s backing for it. And got government money for it too, can you believe it? And two, Denise showed the government officials the horrid costs to the country if they continued to run the Program; the costs she showed them were based on the studies that Cindy’s group had done. When the officials actually ran their own numbers, they saw that Denise was exactly right. Seeing those costs actually scared them more than having a few kids assaulted, raped, or driven to suicide each year.” She stood up now and continued, “Absolutely, that’s how those berks at our first meeting acted; they didn’t care about what happened to those kids. Those rape and suicide cases were covered in the tabloids, and I scolded those berks that those children’s blood was on their hands.”

Everyone stared at her. Amelia was electrifying them all with the sheer intensity of her words. Sweet little Amelia had somehow turned into a forceful, angry presence; she even seemed to grow taller as she spoke.

“You heard Amelia. Well, she did just the exact same thing with the Brit department ministers too,” Kevin told the group. “They’re like the U.S. Cabinet officials. She really ripped those people a new orifice; they had no response to her accusations. She told the ministers about all the major social problems that were being caused by the Program and by running it, the government was actually torturing and killing its youth. Amelia’s other contributions were just as important; she helped redesign the Avery Program to work better with England’s very diverse pupil-body demographic. Those are some of the reasons why the queen knighted both Amelia, and Jeremy too.”

“So Jeremy helped in keeping your own school from starting the Program before the Avery Program was set up there, Amelia?” JoAnne asked.

“Er, not exactly that way,” Amelia responded. “My school wasn’t publically supported, so it should have been exempt from having the Program. Parliament’s law only applied to state-funded schools; mine was tuition-based. But the Program people found a loophole and forced the school into having it, actually extorted them, truthfully. Kevin and Denise went to a meeting where the school’s governors explained that the school was boxed in and would lose maybe 40 percent of its pupils if the government acted, but even after all the parents there still objected, the governors wouldn’t budge. So Denise and Kevin worked with me to make a flyer that urged all the pupils to resist and not participate, and I snuck the flyers into school and left them so kids could find them.

“When the day came to start the Program, there was an assembly and pupils’ names got called and most of those kids refused to go to up to the stage; some of them even ran out of the assembly. The Program people had sent a bunch of thugs to be there and when the kids started running away, they began grabbing some kids at random and I got grabbed too. The thugs took this one Muslim girl, tore off her hijab, and ripped her clothes off, her panties too, and one of them jammed his fingers into her privates. She had the FGM—you know, the genital mutilation that’s practiced in some Islamic areas? Good, you know about that. So she was hurt badly down there by that berk.

“Two of them began stripping me too, but before they got my panties off, Jeremy got there and stopped them. He had been trying to push his way through the commotion in the audience rows and aisles and was finally able to get to the stage. He pulled the one berk off me, the one who was holding my arms so I couldn’t get free, and threw him so hard he slid all the way across the stage. Then he was like a maniac, a ninja, and took down the other two big berks. He threw both of them into some chairs on the stage.

“My arms got free when Jeremy pulled the first one off me and the one berk, the one who was trying to pull my panties off, tried to grab me, so I kneed him in the bollocks so hard that he collapsed, and that’s about when the bobbies arrived. I didn’t know Jeremy before then, but he had saved me from having a serious injury, ‘cause the previous week I had surgery to heal a botched FGM that was done to me a few years earlier.”

There were gasps from the others at hearing that she had also experienced a FGM.

“Yeah, I was 12 then and an aunt had signed me out of school against Papa’s orders and she took me to a cutting ceremony; I didn’t know what she had planned. The school called Papa when they realized that the aunt didn’t have permission to sign me out and he realized what had happened and where she was taking me. He got there in time to keep the woman from finishing cutting me, but the wound I had there never healed properly. So that’s why I was in London with Denise and Kevin; it was to get the special surgery to repair the damaged nerves. So that’s my own Program horror story. And I told the government people how the Program tortured kids exactly the same way as the genital mutilation did—they were both a horrid, forced, involuntary way of trying to modify a girl’s sexuality.”

Cindy went to her and hugged her.

“My god, Amelia, that’s simply terrible, what you went through. Are you alright now? Was the nerve damage repaired?”

“Oh yes, the doctor was amazing and found two kinds of damage in there. A grainy lump thing and a neura thing.”

Cindy nodded, smiling. “I like those terms better than the medical ones. He found you had both a granuloma and neuroma, I take it.”

“That’s right. Those are the words. Adhesive things too.”

“Sure. Definitely adhesions, caused by incomplete and improper healing. You must have been in considerable pain, then,” Cindy observed, sympathetically and Amelia nodded, blushing. “Two years like that?”

“Err, it was closer to three years, and yes, the pain never went away. But some of my friends at school were cut too and as well, their pain was always with them.”

Cindy shuddered. “What a horrible, inhuman, and barbaric practice.”

“It sure is,” Barbara agreed. “That’s a chilling way to finish our tales of Program experiences. Agreed? So, gang, are you satisfied? Heard enough about what you missed ‘cause the Program’s gone now?”

There was general agreement that their curiosity was sufficiently slaked and some of the younger ones were visibly shaken by the stories.

Then Marcia raised her hand and Barbara apologized, “Ah, I didn’t ask if there were any questions. My bad. What’s up, Marcia?”

“Um, maybe this is too embarrassing...” she faltered.

“Hey, you’re with friends here; just ask and we’ll just give you the naked truth,” Barbara reassured her and Marcia laughed, together with the others.

“Um, it’s something my boyfriend told me. Tom mentioned it earlier—it’s blue balls. My boyfriend’s been urging me to do sex with him. He says that if I go to a nudist resort, I should know all about having sex and I’ve been teasing him by refusing. He says I’m giving him blue balls from frustration.”

Theresa was incensed at hearing that. “Marcia, he’s disrespecting you! You told me that he also doesn’t like that you come here, that he should be the only guy to see your naked body and you’ve refused to get naked with him. Besides, the old ‘blue balls’ line is just a guy’s ploy to get into your panties.”

“Hold that thought for a few seconds, Theresa,” Cindy broke in. “But first, Marcia, this guy’s bad news. The pressuring you that he’s doing is a red flag. Guys who do that are all about themselves and you’d just wind up as a conquest at best or with a bad rep at worst. You need to drop him, you hear? But about blue balls? Guess what? Medically, that’s a real thing and not a boy’s myth. One of the medical names for the condition is ‘epididymal hypertension.’ I know, giving something a medical name makes it more real...”

Laughter.

“ ... but this one is really real. Certain conditions, and sexual stimulation is one of them, can cause a buildup of fluids in the epididymis of the scrotum. Here’s an anatomy lesson for you. The epididymis is a tightly coiled ductile organ in the scrotum that receives and stores the sperm manufactured in the testis from where it travels on to the seminal vesicles via ducts called the vas deferens. Each testis has an epididymis attached to it. These parts of the scrotum can become engorged, causing a feeling of pressure or even a dull pain in the groin. So ‘blue balls’ does exist, but no one has ever observed that any parts actually turn blue. But the discomfort does happen and it’s real.”

“Huh, I didn’t know that,” Tom said. “Is there a treatment?”

Cindy started to laugh. “Oh, certainly. Very simple and effective. An orgasm. Works every time.”

Everyone else began laughing too.

“Seriously, Marcia, is your so-called boyfriend really pressuring you?” Cindy asked.

“Um, yeah ... it’s why I don’t want to be naked with him too. I’m uncomfortable with that thought.”

“See? There you go; your subconscious is warning you,” Cindy told her. “All couples’ relationships are based on mutual respect and that seems to be lacking with this boy. Tell him directly and firmly that you don’t want to keep seeing him. He’ll try to convince you that he’ll change; don’t believe that for an instant. They don’t change, at least until they mature more, but that could be years later. Just tell him you’re done.”

“Yeah, Marcia,” Theresa said. “But he might start spreading rumors or lies about what you did with him or that you were an easy lay. I had that happen, remember? Remember what I did?”

Marcia giggled. “Oh yeah, that was epic.”

Now the others were clamoring for details.

“Go tell them,” Theresa said.

“This guy claimed that Theresa was a slut and whore when he came onto her and she refused him after they had been dating for six months, right, Theresa?” Theresa nodded and motioned her to continue. “She was in his house doing schoolwork and when they finished, he began trying to make out with her and then started demanding that she let him fuck her. Then he tried to pull off her top. So she grabbed his crotch and squeezed it hard, then grabbed her backpack and got out of there.

“When he started bad-mouthing Theresa the next day, claiming that she was a nympho and an easy lay, she started a rumor with the girls in school that when she tried to give him a handjob, she had a problem finding his cock, it was too small to find. Well, that rumor spread like wildfire.”

Everyone chuckled as Theresa nodded. “Yep. After what I said, people would look at him and snigger and he had problems getting dates. My family moved away from there maybe four months later, so I don’t know what happened since then.”

Everyone agreed that Theresa had handled that problem creatively and soon the group broke up.

Tamara went over to Peter. “That was a really intense bunch of stories,” she sighed, “and even from the limited sample size here, the problems they mentioned show that the Program did way more harm than good.”

Peter agreed, saying, “That was my own experience too, sweetie. Glad it’s all in the past now.”

“Say, I want to head to our cabin now to check on my latest patent application. I want to see about modifying the claims to include your idea and add you as a co-inventor,” she told him.

“Okay, I’ll come with. I haven’t paid much attention to patent apps, so this will be educational,” Peter said.

After Tamara fired up her laptop, she did a brief search for muscle characteristics.

“Sonny told me that he can make the polymer fibers pretty much as long as I want, but as they get longer, the amount that it contracts decreases,” she told Peter. “So if we try to make an actual muscle to use in a prosthetic, he needs to find a way to bind shorter fibers together so that they all act in concert...”