Chapter 4: The Research

The three days of suspension stretched before me like an empty, sun-bleached desert. Time, which had been a frantic, screaming thing, now became slow and viscous. I was a ghost in my own house, a museum piece of unresolved trauma. But the conference room had lit a fuse. The anger wasn’t a hot, blinding flare anymore; it had cooled into a hard, focused coal in my chest.

I spent the first suspended morning at the dining table, my laptop glowing like a portal to a world of rules. The world that had judged me.

My searches were clumsy, fueled by rage and a shaky understanding of how anything worked. “Can a school suspend you for not wearing clothes after an assault?” “Legal rights, bodily autonomy, teenager.” “Is public nudity always illegal?”

The results were a swamp of legalese, forum rants, and news articles about very different situations: nudist colonies, protestors at political rallies, obscure religious exemptions. It was overwhelming. The words blurred. Precedent. Statute. Litigation. My head ached.

I took a breath, trying to emulate the cold, methodical tone of the articles. I needed to be a researcher, not a victim. I narrowed my focus.

“Arizona Revised Statutes indecent exposure.”

I found it. ARS 13-1402. My heart sank as I read. “ ... exposure of the genitals, anus or female areola ... in a public place ... with intent to alarm...” Intent mattered. The alarm was subjective. But I was a minor. The word “female” glared at me. A category. A designation for my specific kind of crime.

Then I found a footnote, a link to a case summary: Templeton v. Rios,2(018). My pulse quickened. I clicked.

It was a state appeals court case. A man, an artist, had been cited for nudity while painting en plein air in a remote part of a state park. He’d argued it was a form of expressive, non-sexual activity protected under the state constitution’s free expression clause. He hadn’t won outright, but the court had remanded the case, stating that “non-sexual nudity as a component of personal expression or philosophical identity may, in limited circumstances, warrant First Amendment consideration and is not per se indecent.”

The language was dry, but it was a crack. A tiny, legal fissure. Philosophical identity.

Could being a girl who refused to be shamed for her own skin be a “philosophical identity”?

It sounded absurd. Grandiose. But the law dealt in absurdities and grandiose things all the time. It had terms for everything. Maybe it needed a term for this.

I scribbled notes on a legal pad I’d found in a drawer: Templeton v. Rios. Expressive conduct. Not per se indecent. I wrote down the statute number for indecent exposure, then circled it and drew a question mark.

My mother moved through the house like a careful stranger. She’d stopped telling me to put on clothes. The battle had moved to a silent, internal front. She’d bring me a glass of water, leave a plate of food on the table, her eyes avoiding direct contact with my body, as if my nakedness were a blinding sun. We were orbiting each other in a tense, fragile truce.

On the second afternoon, she came and sat at the table across from me. She looked at the legal pad, at the dense blocks of text on my screen.
“What are you doing?” she asked, not unkindly.
“Trying to understand the rules of the game they’re playing,” I said, not looking up.
She was quiet for a moment. “And?”
“And it’s a game stacked in favor of the house. But there might be ... a procedural loophole. A different game we could force them to play.”
“A loophole.” She repeated the word slowly. “Amara, this isn’t a tax form. This is your life. They are not going to let you walk around naked because of a loophole.”
“They didn’t ‘let’ me be stripped, either,” I said, finally meeting her eyes. “But they found a way to make that my fault. I’m just learning their language.”