Chapter 8: Meeting a Family

Late Saturday afternoon, the teens got on Connor’s bike and rode to the Ritters’ home. They would get to meet the parents and Jennifer’s younger brother. She had a sixteen-year-old brother too, almost seventeen, Michael, but he wouldn’t be home when they arrived; he would be there later. Michael was a junior. The Ritters’ home was just to the south of the town in a very nice little enclave with homes on one-acre lots. As they pulled up at the house, they saw that the Ritters had an in-ground pool. When they stopped at the end of the long driveway, Jennifer ran out of the house and greeted them.

“I’m so glad you guys could come! Oh Drew, Stacy and I saw your Thursday game and your goal and that was amazing. I can’t believe how fast you are—you left those other players in the dust when you grabbed the ball away and then just took off like that!”

“Yeah, both my wingers were being marked close so I didn’t have someone to pass to. So I just took the ball upfield myself.”

“But how you got around those players who tried blocking you—you spun around them like they weren’t really there. Then you faked that kick with your right foot and the goalie jumped that way and you used your left to kick it in. So, so dope. Um, you said ‘being marked.’ What’s that?”

“It’s defense. Marking is when the defender stays close to an opponent to challenge them or to apply pressure and try to keep someone from passing the ball to them.”

“Like guarding in basketball, then.”

“Sure. Same idea.”

“Let’s go in and meet my family,” Jennifer said, and grabbed Connor’s hand to pull him toward the house.

Drew shot Connor a grin and he smiled back at her, shrugging.

“Such enthusiasm,” he mouthed to her and she stifled a giggle.

Enthusiastic was the word to describe the greeting Connor got from Jennifer’s parents. Her father, Frantz, shook both of their hands warmly and her mother, Eva, really made a fuss over Connor and then she turned to Drew.

“We’re not ignoring you, Drew, but meeting a relative we didn’t know we had is an exciting event,” she explained.

“Oh, I can see that,” Drew smiled.

Jennifer’s younger brother came in and got introduced. Timmy was eleven years old and was more excited about the motorcycle in the driveway than in meeting its riders.

“Can I get a ride on it? Please, can I?” he asked his dad.

“You’d need a helmet, first,” Connor told him. “If your folks permit it, and you have something for your head—a bike helmet would work—we could do a really slow ride around the block.”

“But not just now, young man,” Frantz told him. “Today, we want to meet Connor and Drew and get to know them.” He turned to them. “Jennifer tells us that you come as a matched pair,” he smiled.

“Yes sir, we do,” Connor said, smiling back. “We’ve been through a lot together and we’re kinda close now.”

“Let’s go sit down in the living room and chat a bit,” Frantz said. “Timmy, this’ll be adult talk so you might get bored. You can go play if you want.”

“Sure, Dad, I will.”

“We’ll call you for dinner when it’s time,” Eva told him.

He ran off and they got settled in the living room after Jennifer brought in a tray with some beverage selections.

“Michael had a club meeting of some kind, so you’ll get to meet him after dinner. Now I have a question. How were you able to locate us, Connor? Jennifer could only tell us a little,” Frantz asked.

Connor told them of Pastor Richardson’s efforts after Connor’s failed.

“I just knew some names that Dad had mentioned when I was younger and he said that he originally came from this area. So that’s why we came here when we left Massachusetts.”

“And that’s where the true story lies, isn’t that so? You’re an orphan, Jennifer tells us. And you came here. With Drew too. What happened at your home back there to make you leave?”

“I’ll answer that, Dr Ritter, since I’m the real reason we came here,” Drew answered. “I’ll explain.”

Both of the Ritters looked at her with curiosity.

“So I’ll start with my parents. My father never wanted children, according to my grandma, who raised me, but my mother got pregnant anyway. But my mother had an undiagnosed birth defect and her pregnancy made it worse, something to do with her heart. She died because of that when I was maybe four and I really don’t remember her at all. My father always blamed me for her dying; he never forgave me for it happening. He always ignored me when he was home. That is, when he wasn’t yelling at me for some imagined infraction. Oh, he was an over-the-road driver and his trips would take him away for weeks at a time. My grandma would take care of me when he was traveling.

“When I was eleven, he met this witch at the local truck stop and she became his live-in girlfriend. She hated me too, but since she’d go with him on his trips, that kept her away from the house. Whenever she was home, we’d fight like cats and dogs...”

“Oh, what a terrible story ... I...” Eva began and Drew raised her hand to interrupt her.

“Wait, it gets worse.” The others shook their heads. “Once, when they were away, the girlfriend’s son—he lived in her apartment elsewhere ‘cause my father didn’t want him in his house—came into my house when I was in the shower and attacked me. I kicked him and hit him with a toilet plunger thing and got away and locked my room’s door. Grandma reported it but the kid had an alibi. But my father blamed me for causing trouble when the cops questioned him—he even whacked me a few times on my rear, saying that I must have enticed the son. Then when I was not quite thirteen, Grandma had a stroke and went to a nursing home. She doesn’t recognize anyone any more, either. So my father had to switch jobs to local driving because of me and he blamed me for that too.”

The others were looking at Drew in shock now and Connor broke in.

“That’s about when you set up your little campsite, right?” he prompted.

“Yeah. To get out of the house and avoid Candy, the girlfriend, I had found a hidden spot in some woods in a park about a mile from the house. When the weather wasn’t too cold, I’d stay there. I set up a little hide-away and eventually had a full campsite there, and for entertainment I had books to read since there was nothing else to do.”

“It was really set up very well and completely hidden. You could get as close as ten feet away and not know that it was there,” Connor explained.

“Awful ... the father drove her away from her own home,” Eva sighed.

“Actually that wasn’t the reason,” Drew continued. “That’s the background. I left ‘cause of another reason. That moronic, stupid naked program that the high school began when I started there this fall as a freshman.”

“You got involved in that?” Frantz exclaimed. “Our state government is trying to fend off the federal government over that wacky law; so far the state’s refused to let schools implement it here.”

“That’s good ‘cause its effect on the kids is awful, from Drew’s and my experience in seeing the kids having to go through that trauma,” Connor told them.

“Did you have to be in it?” Jennifer asked. “It sounds terrible, forced to be naked and have kids grope you like that.”

“No, I wasn’t in it. But it’s why I ran away. I’ll tell you what happened with me,” Drew said.

“It’s an insane idea, both for the kids’ mental and physical health,” Frantz interrupted her. “My specialty is in pediatric and adolescent medicine and endocrinology and I’ve seen reports in the literature of all sorts of genital injuries involving those children forced to be in the Program. And the psychological damage it causes is alarming. Adolescence is a tough time for kids, particularly psychologically, and forcing this nudity on them becomes too much for lots of them to cope with. The potential for suicides becomes very high too.”

“Well, it caused me to run away,” Drew said. “They forcibly stripped the kids who tried refusing. They did that on the auditorium stage in front of the whole school and I panicked when I saw that. It made the horrible memories of my attack return.”

“PTSD,” Frantz said and then explained it to the others. “Seeing things which evoke memories of past events, plus the kinds of stress over her family life that Drew experienced, is a typical trigger.”

“And that’s when I met Connor. He calmed me down and helped me recover when I ran out of the auditorium. Anyway, soon after we met, Connor came to the rescue of two of the naked girls who got sent into the hallway right after they got stripped; they were being molested by some kids. That’s ‘cause part of the Program requires that the naked kids allow others to fondle, grope, or molest them in any ways that they want. I even saw one girl try to shove a pencil into a boy’s rear...”

Eva and Jennifer gasped and Frantz shook his head.

“ ... and I even tried protecting a naked girl I was walking with when some boys wanted her to do oral sex on them. When I did, one of them tried attacking me; he tore my top open but I stopped him. See, we kinda befriended the first group of naked kids ‘cause of Connor’s helping those first two girls, So I was with this naked girl and these three guys jumped us. When the girl refused the oral sex request, one of the boys told us that unless we did oral on them, they’d rape us. And that was even though I was clothed and not in the Program. So he started to rip my top off and push my head down to his crotch. I head-butted him and then kicked him, he screamed, and that brought help.”

“So truly terrible...” Eva moaned.

“It is terrible, both for the kids who have to be naked and for those who are embarrassed for them.” Drew agreed. “You know, we kept hearing these claims from the teachers that this stupid program encourages respect for our bodies from others and reduces your body-shyness. That was a total crock. The naked kids are actually shown zero respect. In fact, what Connor and I saw was that any naked kid was treated like nothing more than a sex toy. When we went out in the halls during class changes, it was open season on those poor kids; they had to allow anybody who asked to grope them or worse. Some kids never even asked—they just grabbed who and where they wanted. There was this rule that said you couldn’t refuse that groping, so that made it easy for everyone to do whatever they wanted to you. So what do you think stuff like that teaches us? It doesn’t teach respect or build self-esteem; it destroys it. In that single week, Connor and I witnessed verbal abuse, physical attacks, and kids being deliberately dragged.”

“Ah, ‘dragged’?” Eva wondered.

“It’s teen slang. Means ‘humiliated.’ Yeah, I totally agree,” Connor put in. “Those assaults—a number of naked kids were roughed up—were really bad, but the humiliation that’s forced on the kids is huge. And that’s done by the teachers. For example...”

He went on to describe the Biology class demonstration sessions which they had witnessed.

“And the girl was so traumatized by them, that she had to go on anxiety meds and was like a zombie the rest of the week too,” he concluded.

“And that was just what we saw happen during the first week,” Drew picked up her story. “The following week, I got called to the office where I was told that they had picked me as that week’s naked victim...”

“No!” both Jennifer and Eva exclaimed.

“But I yelled at the principal that I refused to do it and then ran out of the school. Since the principal had told me that the Program was a law and I would be forced to get naked, I realized that I’d need to run away to escape being forced. And that’s when Connor found my hideout; he had decided that he’d never be in the Program either, and he offered to help me run away. He told me that he had been thinking of running away too, so I’ll let him tell you what happened to him. Connor, it’s your turn.”

“No, wait. First, so you left your home and ran away? And your father has no idea where you are?” Frantz asked.

“Sir, I spoke to Drew’s father that evening, after she ran out of the school. Went to his house to see if he knew where she was. What a cold man. He didn’t seem to care at all about her; he was angry that the cops had been to his house to question him about her whereabouts. He basically said that he wished that he could get rid of her.”

Again, Jennifer and Eva gasped.

“I see. Well...”

“One thing more. Drew and I got hooked up with a lawyer here and he said that Drew’s father would be legally called an ‘unfit parent.’”

“That’s exactly right; that’s how it sounds,” Frantz agreed.

“So I knew that I couldn’t deal with being forced to go through what I saw happening to those naked kids,” Drew elaborated. “And there was nothing to keep me living in a hostile home situation. So I made this rash decision to run away, with only sketchy plans about how to support myself.”

“That’s how lots of runaway kids get into terrible trouble, as I’m sure you must realize,” Frantz said gently.

“Sure. But my mind was clouded by that panicked feeling and I wasn’t thinking straight. That’s when Connor rescued me and brought my thinking back to reality.”

“I guess that’s my cue,” Connor spoke up. “You’ve already heard a bit about my past. Drew’s family life was appalling, but mine was quite a bit better, at least until my father started with the drug scene. He had lost his job and then he got into dealing, then manufacturing, drugs.”

The Ritters were shocked at that news.

“He was an okay father, though. Took care of me. But then he had an accident in making some meth and it blew up, killed him, and the fire destroyed the house. I got put into the foster-care system.” He looked at the others’ shocked faces. “Yeah, pretty bad, I know. I never touched that crap, you know. I hated what Dad was doing. Anyway, I got away from the fire but knew where Dad had stashed some money. I kept that as a secret ‘cause living in group homes is the pits and I planned to try to run away myself at some point. Nothing definite, ‘cause of inertia; I just survived day-to-day.

“Then the Program came to my school, I ran into Drew, literally—in her panic, she ran right into me when she dashed out of the auditorium—and we became friends. She told you about that first week we spent experiencing all that Program garbage and that’s when I decided that, like Drew, I would refuse to participate. In her case, she told you that she ran away when they picked her. In my case, I knew that if someone tried to strip me, like they did with several kids who refused, I’d fight back. If I did, I could really hurt someone bad and I’d wind up in legal trouble for that. So when I found where Drew was hiding out—her little campsite—that made up my mind, and I offered to go with her. I had enough money and the bike for transportation and had two years of planning a getaway behind me.”

Drew glanced at Frantz as Connor was speaking, expecting to see disapproval on his face. Instead, his face showed something different, an almost admiring expression.

“And another reason to run, as I told our lawyer, was that I was afraid that some of Dad’s more unsavory contacts would find where the county had moved me to, and they would come looking for me to tell them where Dad’s money and drugs were hidden...”

“Oh, dear!” Eva exclaimed. “You poor children! What terrible things for so young.”

Jennifer was sitting there, stony-faced; her eyes were wet with unshed tears.

“Goodness! Dinner!” Eva said suddenly when she heard a timer ding. “Jennifer, honey, please come to help.”

They got up and went to the kitchen.

“Those are some of the most heart-breaking tales I’ve heard, and in my job, I’ve heard plenty,” Frantz said when they were alone. “You both look like clean-cut, intelligent young adults, older than fourteen though...”

“Sir, I’m actually fifteen,” Connor said. “Lost a year in the system while the county was shuttling me around to different short-term homes. But I’ve always looked older.”

“Drew, you do look older than fourteen. Must be your height and build. But your face still shows signs of a preadolescent. This is my professional curiosity speaking now. Could you stand up, please?”

She stood.

Frantz took a hard look at Drew and then asked her to stand straighter.

“Drew, if you don’t mind, can I ask you some personal questions? As a doctor?”

“Um, I guess.”

“Connor, can we have some privacy for a minute? You can go...” Frantz started, but Drew stopped him.

“If it’s about my body, it’s okay if he’s here. We don’t keep anything from each other,” Drew said.

“It’s about your physical development, Drew. Won’t answering questions about that be embarrassing?”

“You mean my boobless chest and boyish look? We’ve sorta discussed that, so my talking about it now won’t be embarrassing.”

“Okay, then. Yes, you have no chest development, but with the light top you’re wearing, I see good muscular development there. Strong legs too. Are you athletic? Ah, sure you are. Jennifer mentioned that you play soccer.”

Drew chuckled. “Yeah, been playing soccer since I was nine. Fall, spring and summer programs.”

Connor interjected, “Your running too.”

“Right, I run at least five miles four or five times a week.”

“How long have you done the running?” Frantz asked.

“Started when I was eleven and built up to what I do now.”

“Do you menstruate yet, Drew?”

“Periods? No—oh, they asked me about that stuff at my last physical, so I’ll tell you about all that and what I learned then. I haven’t started puberty yet, at least, no hair on my genitals or under my arms. No periods yet. But I think my breasts might be starting to grow a bit since the nipples are getting puffy and they’re itchy sometimes. The nurse who did my physical told me that my puberty was delayed, probably ‘cause of my sports.”

“That’s likely correct. Have you had a good, balanced diet?”

“Um, that’s been a kinda problem a lot for me. I told you how I stayed away from my house lots to get away from my father’s girlfriend, so I had little food options at my campsite, where I cooked on a campfire.”

“Oh, my. That’s appalling. Well, here’s what I believe is happening with you. When youngsters engage intensively in competitive sports during their childhood and early adolescence, it may affect their pubertal development. There are plenty of variables involved, such as training intensity and frequency, nutritional status, and psychological stress. What you told me of your living conditions before and now tells me that you’ve been under extreme stress. I also can tell that your body seems to have minimal body fat, and low amounts of body fat can be another cause of delayed puberty in girls. Have you been able to improve your diet lately?”

“Oh yeah. I’m finally getting decent meals all the time now.”

“Excellent. I believe that you do show the signs of delayed puberty resulting from intensive exercise plus metabolic and psychologic stress. Basically your body is favoring the activation of your adrenal glands, resulting in the elevation of stress hormones—which will cause muscle mobilization and thus their development, in place of activating your ovaries, which is delaying the production of your sex hormones. A good diet and reduction of stress should allow pubertal development to begin. In fact, female athletes who don’t begin secondary sexual development by the age of fourteen should get a full workup, but in your case, since your BMI appears to be in the normal range—high, but normal for an elite athlete, I’d say you could wait a year; your development should be fine in a year.”

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Jennifer was talking with her mother.

“Mom, is there a way we can do something for them? Those were awful stories, just awful. And they’re such nice kids. I like Connor; he’s really cool, and Drew’s such a sweet girl. You know, Drew’s on April’s team and April and the other girls say how nice she is. And Connor’s...”

“You’re getting all wound up again, dear. Yes, I agree, they need some kind of help. That lawyer they mentioned, I wonder what kind of help he’s giving them.”