Chapter 42: Crimestoppers

Noises from outside their room woke Tamara Sunday morning. It felt early, so she reached for her phone to check the time. It was 7:08.

Jeez, it’s early, she thought. Who’s up now?

Then she realized the sounds were actually coming from outside the cabin. She sat up and peered out the window. It was Barbara, and she was speaking quietly. Craning her neck, she could see Terence and two others; they were facing away so she couldn’t tell who they were. And Barbara was apparently leading a little tai ch’i lesson. That was interesting. Now fully awake, she ran her fingers through Peter’s hair and kissed his ear. He muttered something in response.

“Okay, sleepyhead. Your sister’s out greeting the sun and you’re vegetating in here? Up and at ‘em!”

Peter groaned. “Yeah, yeah, okay. I’ll bet she’s doing tai ch’i. She does that early when we’re out here. She says doing it in the open is spiritually refreshing.”

“Well, she’s got a group doing it too.”

“Last year she got Audrey and Janice into doing it,” Peter yawned.

“Okay, that’s who those are. And Terence. I’m a bit stiff; let’s stretch out and go for a run. That gets my body revved up for the day.”

“Slavedriver,” Peter muttered.

When they left the cabin, they waved at the group outside, and did ten minutes of stretching on the lawn. Then, just as they were to begin a light jog to the trailhead, three of the cousins emerged from the cabin next door, Susan, Ernie, and Mike. Then JoAnne popped out of her cabin wearing running shoes and a sports bra.

“You guys going for a run?” Ernie asked.

“Yep,” Peter answered. “Want to join? Need to stretch?”

“I already did,” JoAnne said. “I’ll run with you to start.”

“We did a little stretching inside,” Audrey answered. “You run on the river trail?”

“Right,” Peter replied. “Let’s let Tamara set the pace; she keeps a good one and she’s steady. JoAnne, you can run ahead if you want. I know you other three were good for the five miles last summer. Still good?”

“Sure,” Mike replied.

They began the run and Tamara started out next to Mike, both running in front of the group.

“How are you doing with Theresa?” Tamara asked him as she set a moderate warm-up jogging pace.

“Oh, it’s awesome. She’s great and so is Marcia. I like them both but Theresa’s special. I think she likes me.”

“I think so too, but don’t push her and don’t be a jerk either. I’m sure you’re not like that, but I have the feeling that she’s a bit sensitive; maybe she’s had a bad relationship.”

“Damn, Tamara, how’d you know that? She tell you?”

“Nope. So she shared a painful personal experience with you already? Mike, she really trusts you, you know, if she did that. She’s telling you two things. First, that she’s been hurt and wants your support to help her heal. And that she likes you enough that she trusts you to be that support.”

“I know what you mean. Marcia told me something like that too.”

“Well, stud, looks like you have two conquests, then. But be careful; romantic attachments with two gals can be awkward. Did you talk to their brothers?”

“Oh yeah, and they’re tight. Jack and Toby are both gonna be freshmen and Toby’ll be in my school too, so I told him and Theresa all about it. Say, you know about Toby’s real name?”

Tamara laughed. “Yeah. I do. Funny. Okay, enough jawin’, as Terence says. Here’s the trailhead; time to pick up the pace now.”

As Tamara picked up the pace, JoAnne took off, sprinting, and quickly left them behind.

The remaining five of them finished the run mostly in silence now; only a few words of encouragement were exchanged when one or another of the runners began to flag during the last mile.

They showered after the run and when they returned to the cabins, the odors of breakfast cooking drew them to the main house.

When Tamara walked in, Shelly, Mike’s mom, looked up from the bowl of batter she was mixing and rushed over to her, grabbing her in a big hug.

“I want to thank you, dear, for helping Mike. He’s like a new person now.”

She looked over at her son, who had gone over to his father and sister and was talking happily with them.

“He told me how you helped him over his shyness and introduced him to, um, Theresa, right? And her dad will be at the labs. Dave and I are going to invite her family over for dinner here in a few days. Maybe you could come too? Mike says that Theresa likes you too.”

“Oh sure. She seems to be a sweet person and her brother is a real hoot. Too young for Janice though; he’s just starting high school.”

Shelly laughed. “Yeah, well, Janice has her eye on someone. She met him in her accounting class last spring and they’ve dated a few times. We’ll see how that goes.”

After breakfast, Ernie and Frank grabbed Peter before he and Tamara got to the door to leave the house.

“Hey Peter,” Ernie asked, “Question. Frank and I were talking to a couple of your friends yesterday, Herb and Gary...”

“Yeah, I saw you guys talking ... what’s up?” Peter answered.

Ernie went on, “Gary’s family is having a reunion later this week at the resort. He’s got cousins in the Atlanta area goin’ to high school there and they have a new kinda program that started up there. It’s called the ‘Avery Program’ and Audrey and I heard that my school was lookin’ into startin’ it up.”

“Is it like the Naked in School crap?” Peter asked. “That’s just what the world needs, a new social-engineering program in schools.”

“We don’t know anythin’ about it and neither does Gary. But his cousins came in yesterday evenin’ and he said they’d all be hangin’ at the pool around 9:30. All of us are gettin’ together—us high-school kids, that is. I wonder if you can meet with us, talk to them, since you were the only one in the naked Program, so you might know what to ask.”

“Sure, I could try to think of something, when I hear a bit more about it.”

A little while later, the cousins’ entourage left for the pool. With Peter and Tamara were Audrey and Ernie, Mike, JoAnne, and Frank. Barbara decided to come too and Terence followed. When they got there, they found Gary talking with five new kids. He introduced them.

“Hi, Peter, all you guys too. These are my cousins from Atlanta and Athens in Georgia. Joe and Grace go to high school in Athens, they’re a junior and freshman this fall, and Nora, she’s a senior and Nate and Nick, sophomores—you can see they’re twins. They live in Chamblee, right outside Atlanta.”

Everyone introduced themselves to each other and then Gary spoke. “So the high school that our Atlanta cousins go to started this new thing this past fall, the Avery Program—it’s named after the university there—and Nora told me that it was the brainchild of an Avery student two years ago? Right, Nora?”

“Yeah,” Nora answered. “The official name is Avery-Denison Program. This gal and a few of her classmates had an education course project. They had to do some kind of curriculum design using the Naked in School Program as the design basis. But we heard that her group objected to that, and since the naked Program was being dropped all over the state, they came up with this new version. It has her name on it ‘cause she organized their project and was the primary designer of the whole thing.”

“So there’s no nudity in it?” Ernie asked. “My school is considering starting it.”

“Nope, all textile,” Nate said. “And we think it’s pretty gucci, too. We had it this past fall, right when we started high school. Nora had it in the spring. The whole class does it together and it was wicked fun.”

“What do you do in it?” Audrey asked.

“I’ll tell them,” Nate said and his siblings nodded. “It was like two weeks long, ten school days with a double period each day. It was instead of the P.E. class but there was P.E. as part of it. We began with this kinda bonding exercise—like making out with your girlfriend but no kissing, just touching in ‘safe’ places,” he made finger quotes. “And almost every guy gets to pair up with each gal, to hold her and caress her. And all the gals get to do that with the guys too, caressing us, that is, caressing our hands, arms and backs. That was wicked awesome—some of the girls in my class are stone foxes. That was only a little part of it, too.”

“Damn,” Ernie said. “This sounds really good.”

“Yeah, it was. The next part they had us doing had lots of tough physical activities and the bonding part helped lots, ‘cause we had lots of boy-girl close contact, like guys needed to pick up and carry girls—and a few times, a gal even carried a guy. That was frikkin’ awesome. That was part of doing some problem-solving games and most of them were super-hard, both mentally and physically, but were really fun to figure out how to solve it and then to do it. Another part was role-playing as a whole class. In those sessions, we learned about how to ignore peer pressure to keep someone from trying to make us do something dumb. Another thing we learned was how to set sexual limits like on a date, if someone gets too pushy. And we also had some role-play sessions about gossip and slander and the damage they can do to reputations and relationships.”

“Wow,” Peter exclaimed. “This is nothing at all like the Program—in fact, it’s just the total opposite. And this was invented using the Program as a design template?”

“Well, I told you that the Denison group was opposed to the naked Program,” Nora said. “We were told that they used the official Program objectives and followed them exactly and came up with this version. It was designed to build a trusting and respectful relationship between the kids and emphasized teamwork through cooperative problem solving and taught how social stigmatization of other people hurt not only them, but you too.”

“Again, wow. Nate, was that all? This sounds like you all had a great time with it,” Peter said.

“For real. We absolutely did. You know, we even had sessions where we learned how to give each other massages. We did the girls and the girls did the boys. That taught us how to give pleasure to each other with our hands without needing to do any sexual stuff. We wore bathing suits or some girls wore sports bras and yoga pants for the massages. The best part? Maybe after three or four days, I felt so close to everyone in my class, that I hated to leave school every day. And after doing the Avery Program, it feels like all my classmates are like family—brothers and sisters. Nick and I can’t wait till we get back to school in a few weeks to see everyone again.”

“That happened in my classes too,” Nora said. “Most of the kids really liked it, but a few kids in my year had problems with some of the more intimate stuff.”

“What kinds of problems? How intimate did it get?” Barbara asked. “It sounds to me, like, how the Avery Program works in schools would be a fascinating thing for psychologists to study.”

“Some kids didn’t want to do the bonding part,” Nora answered. “That was the most intimate part and there was lots of cuddling and close body contact with the kids just wearing their P.E. shorts and tops. A few kids in my group were squicked out by that and refused to do some of the cuddling stuff.”

“But they weren’t forced?” Peter asked.

“Oh no. The teacher let them do as much as they were comfortable with. They did do all the games and role-play parts just fine. They skipped the massage parts too. They just didn’t want to do anything that came close to personal touching—the two girls had serious boyfriends, but a couple boys didn’t like it too. All the other kids were fine with them skipping those parts; no one cared that they didn’t want it.”

“Oh, wow,” Audrey sighed. “I was worried about that program coming to our school. Now I’m not. Ernie? Whatta you think?”

“It sounds good to me. So this is like a P.E. class, like in the gym?”

Nora nodded. “Yep. That’s how it was done last year but we heard that this fall, they’re gonna stretch it out over the full term instead of concentrating it all into two weeks. Makes the scheduling easier and if a kid is absent one day, he won’t miss so much.”

“Well, it sounds like a great activity, so I hope they start it by us,” Ernie commented as Audrey nodded.

“Hey, guys,” Gary piped up, “if you’re done asking questions, how ‘bout some water volleyball? We can play till lunch. But don’t let Tamara and Terence be on the same team or we’ll all get creamed!”

Everyone laughed at that and after showering off, they got in the pool and began playing. That’s when the group learned that having Tamara and Barbara on the same team was bad news too. For the opposing side.

Soon it was lunchtime and the group broke up to go to their respective sites. Tamara’s group walked back, discussing what they had heard about the Avery Program. Barbara resolved to look into the Avery Program when she got back to school. Maybe there could be a research project in there somewhere; that would look good on grad school apps.

After lunch, all the kids had decided to split up. Some gals wanted to do the minigolf and the guys wanted to shoot some hoops. Tamara decided she wanted to take a dip in the pool and just lay out for a while. She asked Barbara what she was doing.

“I need to find Nora to pick her brain. I thought of a few questions; I might check out the Avery Program as a research topic in school. Gary said he reserved a pickleball court for his gang after lunch, so they’ll be there. Then I need to stop in the convenience store. I’ll get to the pool after that.”

When Tamara and Peter arrived at the pool, the area around the water slide was busy with about eight tween girls who were using it and frolicking in the water below the chute and on the deck next to the slide’s ladder. Tamara and Peter got showered off and then went down the steps into the water.

Peter looked at the girls, then told Tamara, “There’s supposed to be an adult here to watch them, but I don’t see any of their folks around ... oh, there’s Jamie.”

A teenaged girl had just rounded the corner from the snack bar, carrying several bags.

“She must have left them to get some food,” Peter went on. “She’s fourteen and I know that she’s had junior lifeguard classes, so the kids are okay with her. The other people on the deck weren’t paying any attention to the kids.”

“Yeah, but look at that guy sitting opposite to the slide,” Tamara said. “He’s been watching them but in a, well, covert, way. And he’s a little too far from us for me to read him, but I’m getting some bad tingles when I look at him.”

“Yeah, I also noticed him when we got here, and something’s been bothering me about him too. Let’s keep an eye on him and see what happens,” Peter said.

A few minutes later, Jamie called the girls over to a table where she had set out the bags and the girls in the pool hopped out and the others ran over to her. She had brought them drinks.

“You guys need to get drinks now—keep yourselves hydrated,” Tamara heard Jamie say, and then felt Peter stiffen beside her.

“What?” Tamara asked.

“That guy,” Peter said. “When the girls went over to Jamie, he reached over to his cooler box and shifted it a little. I noticed him doing that a few times, but he never opened it to take something out.”

“Now that you mention it,” Tamara replied, “I remember seeing that guy at the volleyball games yesterday. I thought it was strange how he had that cooler sitting on a folding chair next to him. Everyone else’s coolers were on the ground—if they had one with them at all.”

“Damn,” Peter cursed. “I heard about guys concealing cameras in coolers or beach bags before. I’ll bet that’s what he’s doing. Let me go find out.”

“Will you be okay?” Tamara asked. “I’ll stay a bit behind you and back you up. You know, my superpowers.”

They both chuckled. They got out of the pool and Peter walked over to the guy.

“Say, mister,” he addressed the guy, “I represent the resort owners; my family is an owner here, and I’d like to do a rules check.”