Chapter 36: Resort Preparations

The four nude teens trooped out through the sun room onto the deck and out to the patio, where Emma was sitting at a table with Gerry, both deep in conversation.

“Oh good, you’re here, you lot,” Emma said, turning toward them when she heard them approach as Gerry waved her greeting. “Andrew and Stuart are just getting some more loungers from the garage. The others should be here any time now.”

Tamara wondered how Emma and Gerry would react when they saw Terence’s endowment. She noticed Gerry’s eyes flick down at Terence’s groin but there was no change at all in her expression and her emotional aura remained neutral. Emma just glanced at Terence, her eyes moving up and down as she nodded her head slightly. She pointed toward a cooler and a stack of towels for the newcomers.

“Grab a drink from the cooler and a towel. The towels are to sit on,” she said. “That’s a universal nudist custom.”

Tamara had kept an eye on Terence to see how he would react to these new people seeing his size. He had noticed their glances at him and their lack of any reaction. She could sense a feeling of relief flow from him as he relaxed.

They each grabbed a towel, found seats, and Emma drew them into her conversation. Tamara was happy to sit; she wouldn’t feel as exposed while sitting.

A few minutes later, they heard voices coming from beyond a gate at the side of the house. Several voices were calling out greetings and there were welcoming shouts in response. A minute later, Andrew and Stuart came through the gate, each carrying a lounge chair, while Abi and Ryan, together with a second couple in their twenties, followed them.

Suddenly Tamara felt a very strong sense of personal presence, very similar to Emma’s charisma, as she looked at the new couple.

Yikes! Tamara thought. That charisma may even be stronger than Emma’s. It can only be from one of the new people.

“Hey, you lot,” Abi called. “We’re gonna go strip off and be out in a jiff.”

Emma told her guests, “You met Abi and her friend Ryan last week. That was her sister Sam and her fiancé with them.”

Suddenly a breeze wafted through the patio area and Tamara felt it brush her skin. This was a completely new sensation and she once again became acutely aware of her nudity. A sense of being exposed slammed into her and she looked around for something to cover herself. Peter, sitting next to her, reached over to her and took her hand.

“I felt that, sweetie,” he told her. “You got a reminder of your nudity and got self-conscious. It’s completely normal; you’ll get used to those strange feelings pretty soon and you won’t get alarmed.”

“You felt that from me?”

“Uh huh. You kinda broadcast it. Didn’t you see Emma look at you with a concerned expression?”

“Um, yeah, but I didn’t know why.”

Peter nodded. “She’s sensitive to emotions around her too. Why do you think people love her so much? Even her undergrads do. She picks up on how people are feeling and I think she unconsciously broadcasts her charisma to happy them up. It’s that smile too; it has energy in it, I swear. You know, I heard that nobody ever cuts any of her classes.”

Tamara saw movement at the house then and Abi came bouncing out.

Tamara chuckled to herself. Yep, the energy that gal has ... bouncing is the right word.

Ryan and the other guy, both wearing towels wrapped around their waists, followed behind her more sedately but were brushed aside by a blur of motion; a nude girl streaked past them, raced across the deck to the patio, and ran right up to Andrew, grabbing him in a bear hug and kissing him hard. She was the source of the personal presence that Tamara had felt.

“Missed you, Andrew,” she breathed as they separated.

“Blimey, Sam, it’s only been three weeks,” he pointed out.

“Three weeks too long. Hi there, guys,” she waved at the four teens who were staring at the scene wonderingly. “Andrew—introduce everyone—jeez, your manners,” she laughed.

Andrew shook his head in frustration. “Sure, Sis. Ah, Jay’s here now, too. Okay, attention to the front. This streaking fireball here is my sister Samantha—but you’d better call her ‘Sam’ or you’ll get scolded. And with her is her fiancé, Jay Larson.”

Jay waved. “Or you can call me ‘Jaimison’ for short, but not many people do, except my parents,” he announced.

Everyone laughed.

“Jaimison? Classy,” said Barbara. “Why shorten it?”

“Well, ‘cause I can. You know, in ‘Guys and Dolls,’ Sky Masterson’s real name is ‘Obadiah,’ so I’m on firm footing for wanting a simpler name. So Andrew, who are our guests?”

Andrew rubbed his face, his continued frustration at the newcomers’ antics apparent. “Okay, if the comedians will just shut their gobs for a sec, I can finish. Good? Good. The two gals are Tamara and Barbara. Tamara is Emma’s student and Barbara’s a psych major. The blokes are Peter, Tamara’s boyfriend and Barbara’s brother, and Terence, Barbara’s boyfriend and also a student of Emma’s. Any more details than that, get them yourselves.”

Sam and Jay walked over to where the four teens were now getting out of their chairs to shake hands and that’s when Jay noticed Terence’s endowment. He stopped and his face broke out into a huge smile.

“Bro!” he exclaimed, walking over to a confused Terence. “Gimme five!” he said as he whipped off his towel.

Terence had found his match; Jay was even bigger than him.

Tamara felt her jaw drop; this was completely unexpected.

Hmm. No wonder Terence’s size hadn’t attracted any undue attention; Jay’s size made Terence look like nothing special, she mused.

Terence, dumfounded, could only follow through and slap Jay’s hand before Jay enveloped him in a man hug—and that was when Terence realized that Jay was actually taller than he was—three inches taller.

“Hey man,” Terence began. “What...?”

Jay grinned at him. “Sam said this was gonna be your first nudist trial, okay? When she first introduced me to her family’s ... um ... little hobby, I was petrified. If I was gonna be part of this awesome family, my endowment was obviously gonna be noticed real quick. But even so, I began to come unglued when the time came to drop trou. I thought everyone would call me a freak—the guys in the locker room were merciless—they would look at me strangely all the time and make stupid jokes about me. Sam said not to worry and she was right.”

Stuart and Gerry were back now and were listening in.

“In one of my commands, there was a guy with a big one,” Stuart said. “He was short but built like a tank. Powerful. Nobody thought his size was anything freakish—there was a bit of envy, though. I see that Terence is a big guy too; that’s bloody ace, both of you.”

Terence was looking from one person to another and all he saw was amusement at the situation. There were no dumb jokes or shocked expressions.

Jay laughed, “When you stood up, I realized what you must have gone through to work up the nerve to come here today and strip. Man, you seriously got my respect.”

Now it was Terence who pulled Jay into a man hug.

“Thanks for that, Jay. Y’all couldn’t have possibly done anything better t’ reassure me of my size being accepted.”

“No way. Go to a nudist resort, you see all sizes. We guys, we’re at one end of the size scale. Other guys—some are really small. No one cares. Hey man, play football, right?”

Terence told him about his short career in high school.

“Yeah, I can see it ... felt your muscles too when we hugged...” Jay said.

Terence interrupted, “Y’all’re ripped too, guy, so I’ll guess. Basketball.”

“Ha, yeah. Played college ball, center. Actually was an NCAA All-American, third team, five years ago at NC State. Skipped the draft for law school.”

“Work at Sam’s firm?” Barbara asked.

“Actually, no. Another firm. We met in law school. I was third year when she started.”

Other people had been arriving while they were talking; two more couples, friends of Stuart and Gerry, so they had gone off to talk to them. Then they came back over and everyone went through their introductions again.

Tamara had been walking around the patio and deck, mostly accompanied by Peter, talking with the various groups which kept forming and re-forming, before she again became aware of her nudity. And to her surprise, she could feel no self-consciousness anymore. She felt comfortable; actually it was more than comfort, it was a feeling of well-being. The sun and breeze caressing her skin were soothing.

This must be the sensation that Jerome was talking about when he was telling me what he felt when he went to that nude beach, she reflected.

After a little socializing among all of the people at the gathering, two separate groups gradually formed, one consisting of the older people, including Emma and Andrew, and the rest of the younger people in the other. Once again, the younger group retreated to the gazebo to chat.

As they walked over to it, Barbara asked Jay, “So what exactly was that Obadiah reference you made before?”

“Ah, yes. It was pretty lame, right? But, see, there is this guy, see? And we hear his name is mentioned on Broadway; it is Damon Runyon, and the guy is a short-story writer, see? Now he writes this one short and calls it ‘The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,’ and it gets so much press that it is seven-to-two odds that it comes in as a winner on Broadway. But dolls of the name Brown do not make it into the lights so good. So the handicappers are looking for a catchier name: They pick ‘Guys and Dolls,’ and it is a sure bet...”

Everyone started to laugh when Jay launched into his attempt to sound like a Noo Yawker and Barbara interrupted, “Yeah, I heard of Damon Runyon and read two of his stories in my American Lit class. You sounded just like his stories, so funny. The accent, not so much. But what about Obadiah?”

“Okay. One of the main characters is Sky Masterson, a gambler. He hides his real name, probably because he’s embarrassed by it. But he’s a high roller; other gamblers know that the sky’s the limit for him, so that became his nickname. So if Runyon can make up a sweet nickname, I can too. Besides, it’s easier to spell.”

Barbara looked at Sam. “Is he always like this?”

Sam chuckled. “No. He’s just being cheeky now but still on his best behavior. Usually he’ll have mentioned three authors, four statistical examples, and one legal citation by now. We’re lucky he only stuck to one author.”

Everyone laughed while Jay smirked at them and told Sam, “Hey, you do it too. Get you to tell a story and we’ll even find out about the weather then and what everyone was wearing.”

“You got me there. Hey, details are important. Say, you chappies. Abi told me something that twigged my sense of coincidence. We have ten young adults here, age 26 and under—which means all of us have been in high school while the Program was going. I saw a statistic somewhere, a few years back, that 70 percent or so of the kids who finished high school in the last eight years were participants in the Program. That means that seven of us here should have been in it. None—sorry, Peter ... erm, one quarter of a person among us was in it. That’s just 2.5 percent, not 70. How’d we get so many non-participants to all randomly collect here?”

Abi giggled. “She’s doin’ it again. Sam gets an idea and wrestles it to death. We’d better humor her or she’ll come up with another weird topic.”

Terence grinned. “Ah got an uncle, a lawyer. He’s like that too. Maybe it’s a lawyer thing.”

“I think that the answer is that we aren’t a random group,” Tamara said. “Don’t start me on randomness, ‘cause I can talk for an hour about that. Here’s the answer, Sam. First, three in your family had exemptions. That didn’t stop you from getting picked yourself, but it did get you out of it, after all. Second. Emma also had an exemption, but it wasn’t honored, so she simply got the whole thing stopped before it even started. Third. Three of us came from a school with no Program. Fourth: One got excused after two days for a legal reason and another was a coattails case; they were afraid to select her. That leaves one, Jay. It sounds like you weren’t in it, Jay.”

“Right, it’s another case of not having started in my school yet,” he said. “It didn’t get to Wichita, Kansas till two or three years after I graduated.”

“So you see, Sam?” Tamara finished. “We’re not a random collection of people; also, we’re too small a sample size for any statistical validity. Now, let me address your point a different way. Ignoring that they didn’t fully participate, three of us were selected for the Program: Emma, Sam, and Peter. One person went to a school that never ran it, Terence. And six of us went to schools where they did, or should have, and for one or another reason, weren’t there when the Program should have run. Seventy percent of six is a bit over four. Those four, plus three, makes your seven. So—no coincidence needed, Sam; our group meets your stats. Okay?”

Everyone looked at Tamara in awe and then at Sam, who was speechless.

“Damn, Tamara, I’ve never seen Sam rendered speechless like that,” Jay chortled. “Good job!”

Peter laughed. “See, a scientist speaks so we’d better listen. Never challenge Tamara when it comes to math. Hey, when we got undressed inside, we saw these Program boxes...”

Sam, Abi, Ryan, and Jay all began laughing, Abi harder than the others.

She told Sam, “It’s all yours, Sis. Tell ‘em about your Program days and those boxes.”

“All right then, Sis. Remember, you asked. I’m so long-winded, I’m gonna bore them to tears. You realize that, right?”

“But do you have an off switch?” Barbara giggled.

“NO!” Abi, Jay, and Ryan shouted simultaneously.

“Oh, just begin,” Tamara said. “If I fall asleep...”

“ ... we’ll just toss you in the pool,” Abi smirked.

“All right, you dorks, enough,” Sam said. “You all know that back when I was in high school, Andrew was then too, that Dad was a diplomat? In the U.K. embassy?”

They all said, “Yeah.”

“So when the Program came to our high school, Andrew was starting his junior year and I was a freshie. Abi was two years behind me. We were scared about being in the Program; heard lots of horrid things, both rumors and reports from kids from other schools. But Emma had filled our heads with how she and her mates had bolloxed the Program in her school and got it canned there. But she had found out from a lawyer there that there were state laws that protected kids from being forcibly stripped, so she told me and my sibs that we legally could resist being forcibly stripped. That’s ‘cause all state assault laws are part of the criminal code which supersede the Program rules, and Program rules aren’t part of any law. The federal Program law only applied to schools; it required that schools which received federal funding must run the Program.

“When she came to live with us, Emma had also told my folks that foreign citizens, including children of diplomats, would be exempt from being put in the Program, if their governments said so—that fact was also mentioned in the Program booklet.

“So Mum got the embassy to have the State Department send letters to our school claiming diplomatic exemptions for Andrew and me. But all of us—Andrew, Abi, Emma, and me—had spoken earlier to a bunch of kids at our resort about their Program experiences, and hearing that rubbish got me bloody cheesed off by the very idea of the Program; kids shouldn’t be forced to allow themselves to be humiliated. Emma told us how, in her school, how she had become the leader of the resistance and how that had gotten her into more trouble. So she told us to simply tell the kids what their rights were and not to tell them not to participate.

“When school began that autumn, I told every kid who’d listen, that doing the Program was their choice and theirs alone, and if a teacher touched them, they could claim assault and battery. So when the school held the first Program assembly on the second Monday after school began, the principal was calling kids’ names to come up to the stage, where they would have to strip off. He called my name as a freshman participant. Obviously my anti-Program militancy got someone, probably the Program coordinator person, to ignore my foreign exemption, so my name was put in as a punishment for being so vocally anti-Program.

“So when I got called, I walked up to the stage and proceeded to call out to all the kids in the auditorium, telling them that it was their right to choose not to get starkers and that no one could forcibly strip them without suffering criminal consequences. The principal tried to get me to shut my gob but I guess he didn’t want to be seen chasing after me around the stage, so he just was stood there whilst I loudly warned him that if he or a teacher touched me, I’d have him arrested.

“Then I got this ace idea. I announced to everyone that I was not refusing to be a Program participant; I would participate in the Program whilst wearing my togs. All the kids laughed at that and when I finished talking, I told the kids on the stage that I was leaving it now and if they wanted, they could follow me. Every single one followed me off the stage, so the principal had to end the assembly and send everyone back to their classes, but he warned everyone that there would be punishments coming.”

“But even if you were wearing clothes, what about the touching and demos and stuff?” Barbara asked. “That’s part of the Program too.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I hadn’t thought it all through when I announced my ‘clothed Program,’ so I had to wing it for those things. For the reasonable requests, I told the kids I would pose and they could look all they wanted, but it wasn’t reasonable to touch me, even over my clothing. That would be groping and not cool. And class demos? For the rest of the day, when teachers asked why I wasn’t starkers, I told them I was doing a new Program version, a clothed Program, and I’d cooperate any way they wanted but I would stay clothed. I just ignored the opposite-sex locker-room tommyrot. The principal and the Program coordinator were right brassed off at me and the principal rang my parents to meet with him; Mum said he was fixin’ to give them an earful. Instead, my mum and dad gave him the earful. That was the start of my destroy-the-Program campaign.”

Peter prompted, “So, the boxes?”

Sam chuckled. “Yeah. I wanted to somehow continue to mock the Program, so the next day, when I got to school, I found that several kids had been bullied into participating and those bloody clothing boxes had been set out there for the stripping show. It was cool that day and I happened to have a sweater on over my top and was wearing a skirt over loose yoga pants. So I stripped off the sweater and skirt and put those clothes in a box and walked off.”