Chapter 6: Friendships Forged

On Saturday morning, Kevin rousted Denise out for a morning run.

“Hey, up and at ‘em,” he whispered in her ear as he shook her. “We’ve got to get back into shape.”

“Go ‘way,” she muttered. “Still tired...”

“Hey, you need to get your circulation going. Be good for you.”

“Aahhh, okay, but a short run today, okay?”

“Sure. We’ll start with some stretching.”

Their home was near a park, so the two jogged to it and ran around one of the paths, soon returning to the house. As they arrived, they saw two people emerge from the back of their house.

“Hi there,” Kevin called. “You’re living here, right?”

“Yeah,” the guy answered. “You must be Kasey’s son?”

Kevin grinned. “Honorary son. I’m Kevin Coris and this is Denise Roberts, Kasey’s daughter. We’re back from the Far East.”

“That’s right, Kasey told us you’d be getting home around now. I’m Roger Denison and this is Ayame Asano, my girlfriend. Really nice finally meeting you. Say, we’ve got an errand to run but we’ll be back in two hours. My sister and her boyfriend should be home by then too, she was at an away basketball game. Will you be home? We can all meet then if you want.”

“Sure. Lookin’ forward to it.”

Late that morning, Roger and Ayame, together with the two others, knocked on the front door and Denise welcomed them in.

“Hi again, guys,” Roger greeted her. “This is my sister, Cindy, and Tom Emerson. Cyn, Tom, you’ve heard about Kevin and Denise from Kasey.”

Denise invited them into the living room and they all found seats.

“We were so lucky to find this rental,” Cynthia said. “This house and the apartment are just wonderful and your mom is so sweet. Wow, did she ever give us the third-degree when we came for our interview. She was a little concerned about our relationship,” she giggled. “The four of us—she saw how close we are.”

“Yeah, I can see it now, too,” Denise said. “Oh! Your hair! You guys must be twins!” she exclaimed, looking from Cynthia to Roger.

“Guilty as charged,” Roger grinned. “And Ayame is our cousin, too. Tom’s the odd man out.”

“Not in my book, bub,” Cynthia growled at him. “Actually Ayame was adopted by our aunt and uncle; they live in Japan and adopted her when she was a child,” she commented to Denise.

“And we’ve become more than cousins,” Roger smiled, “so your mom wanted to unravel all of our relationships. She now knows almost as much about us as my parents know,” he laughed. “We passed, happily. She didn’t tell us much about you guys, though; she said we’d have to meet you to find out.”

“Well, there’s not a lot to say,” Denise began. “I grew up in North Carolina, in the Triangle. Went to school there and moved here after Mom got transferred to Atlanta. Kevin is the one with the story; he’s the world traveler.”

“I suppose. Yeah, I was born in Indonesia and spent my childhood living all over the Far East. My mom was a diplomat and my dad ran an NGO—non-governmental organization—to provide health and other services to needy people. I came to the States at the start of my junior year because my folks wanted me to go to college here.”

“So you’re living away from them all this time?” Tom asked.

“Um, well, they died in a bombing a month before I came here last year. I don’t have any siblings, either.”

“Oh!” the four guests exclaimed and offered their sympathies.

He briefly explained about his parents’ loss in the terrorist attack and finished, “Yeah, it was such a shock, obviously, and I terribly miss them still ... Ayame? Are you crying?” Kevin asked in concern.

“Ah, sorry, yes, I remember my parents and others ... I too lost my family...” she sniffed.

Roger hugged her and she dabbed at her eyes.

“Ayame’s whole family died in a fire—you were six, darling? Yeah, her entire family, but somehow she survived. My aunt and uncle adopted her. I’ve known her since she was seven and we’ve lived in Japan during two of my dad’s tours there, so we grew very close. Dad’s in the Marines,” Roger explained.

“Wow,” Kevin sighed. “We’ve got lots in common ... Well, after that shock—losing my parents, and the culture shock of coming to the States, then on the first day in school, I get hit with this idiocy, the Naked in School nonsense. That’s where I met Denise. She was called to the office and I was registering—I had just arrived in the office—and got pulled into it because the kid who had been selected had moved away.”

“Yeah, and you know what Kevin did?” Denise exclaimed. “He saved my ass. He rescued me from having to do the Program...”

“He what?” four voices interrupted.

“He got you out of it? Holy shit, this I gotta hear,” Roger said, excitedly.

“Yeah,” Denise went on. “The Program official guy, he was a real thug, he was gonna grab Kevin to strip him and Kevin just threw him on the floor, jumped on him, and forced him to let all the kids in the office go out...”

“Goddamn,” Cynthia exclaimed, “you’re damned straight we’ve got things in common. Holy shit. You guys must be our soul brothers. That’s exactly what we did. We got called to our school’s conference room where they sprung the news on us. Roger and I, well, we know judo, and we fought off five of them. There were two gym teachers, two hired guards, and the Program guy; they tried to grab us but we kept throwing them till they had enough...”

“Wow, Denise,” Kevin cried, “listen ... remember in those very first forum posts—those kids—twins—who fought off being forced? It was you guys! Someone wrote up your story and put it on our website. Yeah, it was in one of the first bunches of posts that the site got and I remember how closely it matched to what happened with me.”

“Um ... You said ‘our website,’” Cynthia looked at Kevin sharply. “Care to elaborate?”

“Ahh, I slipped. Uh oh. Well, maybe it won’t matter, after all, we’re on the same side, right? Anti-Program?”

“Very,” chorused the twins.

“Okay, yeah, that site—it was kinda my idea...”

Denise interrupted. “Hell, Kevin, you did everything for that website but build the damned computer it runs on!”

“Oh, c’mon, Denise. There was our whole team...”

The other four were staring, mouths agape, unable to speak.

“Yeah, and that team did everything you told them to do. You even got your Indonesian contacts to set up the hardware and layers of security...”

“I just asked how those problems—the government finding the server—could be solved...”

The four guests were watching the discussion in wide-eyed awe.

“Whatever. You also broke up that child-trafficking operation; Kevin, you’re too damned modest! Guys, Kevin got the Presidential Medal of Freedom for the stuff he did, and he never talks about it.”

Cynthia finally gathered her wits. “Holy shit. Un-fuckin’-believable. You’re the kid in those news reports. Single-handedly brought down the entire damned Program organization. Here we were, trying to figure out how to kill it from within, and you clobber it right at the top! We gotta talk a lot more, goddamn it, much more, about this. Let me start with what we’ve been trying to do...”

The four college students began to explain how their Program resistance movement began in the conference room of their high school less than two years earlier.

Kevin interrupted, “There’s another thing in common. You guys know judo...?”

Ayame interrupted, smiling. “Think it’s more than ‘know judo.’ Both international champions, won medals in Japan. Cindy best in world, is gold medal. Roger is bronze.”

“Damn—I’m just third dan in taekwondo,” Kevin grinned. “Remind me not to pick a fight with you guys.”

“Say, taekwondo uses lots of judo moves,” Roger put in. “We’ve gotta compare sometimes.”

“Hey, let’s not get distracted,” Cynthia warned. “So our school had lots of students from Marine families and the culture of the military, especially of the Marines, is personal honor; the Program was a direct threat to our honor, our families’ honor, and that could affect the Marine too. So that was at the root of our resistance...”

She continued her explanation, covering their activities all the way through her study group’s report of the Program’s effect on student performance.

“That’s very impressive, Cindy,” Denise said when Cynthia had finished. “In a way, it does much more than what Kevin was able to do. You know, Kevin was being reactive. He was responding to threats that came his way, one after another. First, he protected me from the Program. Then he found a way to protect the other kids in our school from the worst effects of participating. While he was looking for some kind of information to help protect others, he discovered that child-sex ring that had infiltrated the Program.

“You guys were being proactive. Instead of just reacting to events, you got out in front of them and forced them into directions where you could manage them. Even your study—that’s an example of being proactive too; gathering information and using it to prove a point. In a way, while Kevin was always in a defensive mode, you guys took on the Program with a frontal attack!” Denise finished.

Roger laughed. “You know, we’ve joked a lot about our Program resistance being like a battle—or maybe a war; I think it’s because of our Marine background that we think of it that way. You know what they say: the best defense is a good offense. We just brought Marine tactics to bear on the Program threat. We recruited our troops, marshaled our forces, and stormed the beaches. Taking no prisoners either, by the way. We’ve heard that the kids in our old high school are keeping up the good fight, too, and our resistance model’s spread to some of the other schools in the area—mostly those that have a lot of military families. California has a number of large military bases.”

“Wow, your way was so much better than the route I took,” Kevin mused. “You kept your ideals and still resisted. And even got others to join in. I tried to change the way the Program worked so the kids having to do it wouldn’t freak out. But there’s one thing that I really, really regret having done and that was against everything I believed in, too.”

“Really? What was it?” Tom asked. “Look at everything you accomplished.”

“Well, just like you guys, I really objected to the public sex in school. I even told the principal that the Program was a government sanctioned form of sexual molestation and rape. I hated the public nudity too because it singled out kids for sexual exploitation and humiliation. So I tried to fix those problems and the way I did came out ass-backwards. See, I had the feelings of those poor, scared kids in mind. Denise was out-of-her-mind terrified when she came into that office the first day and it made me almost physically ill to see her that way. And seeing the fear in those other kids’ eyes hurt me too. I guess I’m very sensitive to people’s feelings...”

Denise had wrapped her arm around him and nodded her head forcefully when he said that.

“ ... so when I saw the kids in distress, I reacted to protect them. And I’m not happy with the result, because I just turned their bad experience into one that they seemed to enjoy. I gave no regard to the morality of what I was doing; I had abandoned all of my personal morals in the way I reacted to their distress. Instead of resisting, I took the easy way and showed them that it was okay to get naked and okay to do sex acts in public. God, I’m so embarrassed to think about what Denise and I did to help those kids, and by doing it, we actually helped the Program. We helped the kids with their fear and humiliation, true. But how? By replacing it with damned exhibitionism, that’s how! I guess I just wasn’t strong enough to resist the siren call of sex. And it changed Denise too; she became a bit of an exhibitionist.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I did,” Denise agreed. “But I felt safe doing that—I had your support and besides, I knew lots of the kids in my school and wasn’t threatened by them, I think. But, darling, all the kids we helped were so grateful for what we did; they all looked up to you like someone to emulate. Didn’t that make you feel better about it?” she asked.

“How can something be both right and wrong at the same time?” Kevin groaned. “That’s what’s bothering me. I wanted to set a standard for moral behavior. I wanted to help others, too. That’s the dilemma, satisfying both of those things. But as a social experiment for personal development, it looks like the Program is shaping up to be a complete failure.”

“And how it’s run is so random, too,” Cynthia observed. “Last year Rog and I took an Intro to Ed course, that’s where we did that study, by the way, and we observed in two different high schools. There was no resemblance at all between the Programs in the two schools.”

She gave a quick summary, supplemented with some comments from Roger.

When Kevin and Denise heard Cynthia mention Merritt High School, they both came to full attention with a jolt.

Denise exclaimed, “Merritt? You were observing there and that crap was going on? That’s the school where we’re going! Oh, shit.”

“Both Cindy and I are student-coaching there, too; the coaching is a service project of our sports teams,” Roger said. “Cindy’s on Avery’s basketball team and I’m on the swim team.”

“And I’m a couch potato,” grinned Tom. “I do keep up my swimming, though.”

“And I’m their official cheering section,” laughed Ayame.

“Hey, Ayame plays a mean game of volleyball and she’s quite a diver too,” added Cynthia. “Tom and Roger were on our high school’s swim team and they won the state meet two years running.”

“And Cindy was on basketball team, won in state for two years, too,” Ayame continued the bragging for the twins.