Third Day (Tuesday)

Mike

I rolled into the Program Office five minutes before the bell. Dana and Teri were already there—Dana already naked, as were Maria and Jake. Marshall, Chip, and Teri were clothed: putting it off as long as possible. Only Gail was missing—last again.

Dana sat across the room from her chair from yesterday, a battered manilla folder in her lap—her pensive look a contrast to Chip’s permascowl beside her. Her hair clip today was powder-blue. I stifled a random urge to caress the line of her jaw and parked against the open wall—I stuck out in the way of others, but tough.

I tried not to stare at Dana’s lovely breasts, and watched Teri instead as she gazed into space—wearing her usual oversized flannel shirt and black jeans. Knowing how curvy she was, I wondered why—but then, she didn’t like displaying her body. Jake and Mr. Alverez were talking about where to find ‘good’ Mexican food in town—as if such a place existed. Maria was teasing Marshall, and when he claimed he didn’t have to take requests till he was naked, said, “Then I request that you fondle my tits.” Chip and his antisocial headphones just glared at his shoes. Then the outer door opened and Gail stepped in.

And Dana suddenly and unexpectedly Turned On—stood up brightly and spoke: “Okay, everyone’s here—it’s a few minutes early, but we have a lot to go through.” Her voice was firm and caught your attention—even Chip pulled his headphones down.

“Excuse me,” Mr. Skinner coughed.

Without pausing, she countered, “Homeroom hasn’t started, so we can still talk amongst ourselves. First, I have spare whistles and consent bracelets, if anyone forgot theirs,” and she held up her baggies.

Apparently our principal still didn’t intimidate her.

“Oh yes—whistle, please,” Gail said, and Dana tossed her the baggies to pass around.

“Next, I have suggested routes for getting from class to class.” She handed Maria a printout from her folder and continued around the room. “Sorry for the hardcopy. I tried to send it out, but it’s in HTML5, which is blocked on the school system—I’ll export to PowerPoint after school and try again.”

She passed me a page with my name on top. One side was filled with a wire-frame schematic of the school, covered with a tangle of lines in eight colors. The back had smaller, less-crowded versions, each with a single light blue path that was sometimes paralleled for stretches by other colors. The blue lines started and ended at my classrooms, I realized—one diagram for each period change.

She went on, “These show routes between your classes that maximize the time spent traveling with another Participant, for mutual support. The front is all your personal routes, period to period. On the back is everybody’s routes for the whole day, which is, sorry, way confusing printed like this. Sometimes these take you by a longer route than you would usually take, but never by more than 30 extra meters. It does not take into account going to your locker, ‘cause I don’t know where those are or when you do that, and it assumes everyone’s in the Commons for lunch—if you don’t go there, we can adjust it.”

On the by-period diagrams, I finally worked out, the other colors were from matching routes of another Naked, with a key code at the bottom. Clever. Very clever.

Chip was less impressed. “I usually cut through the Quad. This has me going—”

A derisive laugh from Teri.

“Baaad idea,” agreed Maria.

“Never go in the Quad as a Naked,” Gail explained. “Not unless you wanna get gang-banged.”

Which Dana summarized with, “These routes were designed as a safety measure. Any more questions?”

I raised a finger. “Why don’t you ever send me through the other elevator? There’s three of them.” I showed her on the map. “I usually take this one after lunch.”

“That would be because I didn’t know one was there,” she admitted. “I’ll correct and rerun it before I send this out tonight. Anything else?”

“Where did you get this?” Gail asked.

The bell rang starting homeroom, and Mr. Skinner immediately said, “That’s enough, Partlow.”

Uh oh—he’d dropped the ‘Ms.’

Mr. Alverez picked up his cue: “Time for everybody—that is, the rest of you—to undress. Boxes are over here as usual, towels by the door.”

Me being one of the rest of us. As was Teri, who snarled silently as she stood up. Dana again helped me with my pants. By the time I was naked, so was Teri—and I wanted to stare at her curves as much as at Dana’s. I kept having to make myself look away from one of them, remembering yesterday afternoon, only to find myself watching the other. Dang it.

All the while, Mr. Alverez pattered on about all the ways the Program was good for you, better than broccoli, better even than sliced bread with a cherry on top. Or he might has well have, for all anyone paid attention.

When everyone was sitting again, Mr. Alverez asked, “Anything anyone want to discuss about the Program?”

Maria held up her map. “Good idea, Dana. Thanks.”

Dana nodded. “Send me corrections today, and I’ll post it through our study-group tonight.”

Last night, she’d set up an online study-group using all of our school accounts—”to share class notes for anyone who missed something (and exchange notes about the Program in general),” according to the description. The parenthetical being all anyone had posted about—it was clearly the real reason it existed.

“Anything Program-related?” Skinner said significantly.

Dana raised her hand. Skinner scowled, but didn’t prevent from Alverez from acknowledging her. “It’d be very helpful if there was a bike-rack on this side of school.”

“I don’t think,” Skinner said, “it would be worth the expense. Hardly anyone uses the one we have.” Skinner looked to Ms Jackson for confirmation.

“So far this year,” Jackson said mildly, “there’s been over a dozen locked up there every day.”

Skinner humphed. “Most of them, no doubt, perma-parked.”

“All but one disappear at night.”

Skinner humphed again. Then to Dana, “We’ll take it into consideration. Anything else actually Program-related?”

Said like that, of course there wasn’t.

“One more minute of homeroom,” Alverez announced, giving us implicit permission to talk amongst ourselves. Jake, Gail, and Maria started comparing maps, while Marshall asked Dana something about his.

Teri picked up her pack and walked over to the door—the quicker to get out of here when the bell rang, I realized.

Which put her near enough to me, I could feel the heat from her body. I spoke quietly to her. “Yanno, if you strip before the bell, it’s on your terms.”

She scowled, still looking at the door, but then nodded.

“Thirty seconds,” Dana called out, gesturing us together. “Everyone gather.”

Everyone clustered around me—Teri even let Dana pulled her in. I took Teri’s other hand, with Gail on my other side. I was very aware of Teri’s smooth brown flank. Then it hit me: here’s a gorgeous, bare-naked cheerleader I was barely glancing at—what was I coming to?

Within the huddle, Dana said, “We can do this—together.”

“Together,” Gail agreed, and several of us echoed her. Not Teri or Chip, though.

Dana opened her mouth to say more, but the homeroom-end bell went off. Teri dropped my hand and was out of the room before it even finished ringing.

“No running, Ms Florez!” Skinner called after her. The rest of us were between him and the door, however, and she got away—more power to her.

I waited for the others to clear out—and Dana also stayed behind, packing up her supplies. I was surprised Skinner hadn’t vanished her baggies of safety equipment. But not as surprised as I was when Ms Jackson approached her.

“Have you shown this to Mr. Falcon?” she asked, pointing at my map. “Or Dr. Liu?”

“Uhhh,” Dana said, as close to completely flatfooted as I’d ever seen her. “Nnno?”

“Just a friendly suggestion,” Ms Jackson said.

I was nonplussed myself. Liu taught physics—somehow, I’d gotten the idea Dana was in chemistry with Teri.

One more sign, I thought, of how hard the Program was hitting me.

Teri

I got past the usual outside-the-Office crowd without harm or hindrance before it gathered, no thanks to Dana’s little encounter session. Not that, if I hadn’t been impatient, I would have minded much. On a good day, I might even have appreciated it.

This week was as far from being a good day as a jock gets from not being a fucking jerkass.

By which I mean, yes, at the bottom of the stairwell I got bogged down in requests—all from jocks, none of whom let me move a step. Nor gave a second glance at my red bracelet. When the bell for first period rang, five sets of hands were feeling me up, including in my ass-crack, and not all of them belonged to boys. I’d learned Dana’s lesson from yesterday, though—I just started walking, pushing between them.

“Hey!”

“Playtime’s over,” I snarled without looking. And marched upstairs to English.

English was, well, English. Or British Lit, for us 10th graders. We were starting out the year with everybody’s favorite fanfic writer, Shakespeare. I mean, seriously—he ripped the entire story of Julius Caesar straight from the headlines of history, and his other plays are just as unoriginal. (Yeah, okay, Midsummer, the plot’s apparently all his own—we probably just haven’t looked hard enough.) He’s brilliant, though, at retellings: putting his own spin on characters, bringing out the stories implied by his sources—which is exactly what fanfic is all about.

Not that I’d get Ms Browning to admit it. She probably thought fanfic was killing western civ.

While Browning tried to prod the class into coming up with a single original thought about Brutus and Cassius, I studied Dana’s map. It was, I had to admit, a clever idea. Flawed, of course—in addition to everything she mentioned, the routes didn’t avoid the more crowded hallways. But it was startling to learn how close I was to everyone—I could, if wanted to, meet all seven fellow Nakeds over the day. I didn’t really want to, but Dana was right about safety in numbers. I was not proud—not about this.

Something else niggled me. Just as I was putting it away, I realized: she said she’ll “rerun” it tonight. She came up with a program to generate this? That was somehow even more impressive than working out them out by hand. I didn’t even have a clue how.

Of course, here I was, studying her map like it was a clue to getting close her—you know, the person I was keeping at a distance. I put it away for real and read the rest of Caesar while pretending to pay attention.

(For the record, Brutus had the right idea.)

Before first period was bad enough, but the real trouble came on my way to math—during which I was to somehow intersect with Marshall, Dana, and Mike. I’d gotten maybe ten meters before getting sucked into the Request Bog—again, all jocks. At first it was just grabbing my boobs and pussy, but then a pair of guys made me “shake my booty” for them. Humiliating, but it also got me out of their reach: a quick turnaround, a quick shake, and I bugged outta there—only to run into a trio of girls from the volleyball and basketball teams, wearing their letter jackets for tonight’s volleyball game.

With Sam smack in the middle.

“Oh girl,” she practically cooed, tickling the air at me, “it is so request time.”

I actually goggled at her. “What, you’re going to feel me up?” Freezing like that gave the other two the chance to cover me on either side, and the shorter one, Sam’s friend Tam, reached for my boob before I could even wave my stupid bracelet. I warded her off: “Ya gotta ask first.”

Sam looked affronted. “It’s not like I can’t,” she said and reached for my crotch.

I caught her just above the wrist and held firm, locking all my muscles: arm, shoulder, core—imagining myself a solid block of stone. A trick Bud taught me, down at the rec center. She tugged but couldn’t break my grip—or even make my arm budge. Heh.

“Let go,” Sam said, tugging harder. Holding still wasn’t as hard as I expected. I still shifted my stance, for better balance.

“Even if you had asked,” I said, “there is no way in all the 50 hells of the 12 worlds anyone would agree that it’s reasonable for my sister to molest me.”

“Uh, yanno?” her other friend said, “she’s got a point, Sam.” She had blonde hair in cornrows—did white girls still do that?

Sam tried suddenly shoving toward me, and then pushing down with all her weight, but couldn’t move my hand more than a centimeter.

“You’re dead meat, Teri,” Sam snarled. With her right arm reaching across her body like that, she couldn’t easily get at me with her other arm. Nor could she pry up my fingers.

I snorted. “Like that’s supposed to be a threat? I already am, to you.”

Tam said, “What do you mean?”

I looked steadily at her. “You’re wolves. She threw me to you.”

The bell rang. I let go just as Sam yanked, and she stumbled back into Tam.

“Come on, guys—we’re gonna be late,” cornrow-girl said. As if they weren’t already.

As the three hurried off, I took a deep breath—then studied my hand. That had felt ... interesting. I mean, my sister has a rep for being strong for a girl. As in stronger than most boys, including some wrestlers. Part of it, just now, was catching her arm in an awkward angle, where it was hard for her to apply force. But even so, it had been far easier than expected to stand fast. I smiled to myself. Years of weightlifting really were paying off.

Better yet, I hadn’t lost control. She probably wouldn’t even bruise. I’d done exactly what I wanted.

“Teri!” Mike called out behind me—with Dana right behind him. Catching up, just like yesterday. Only, of course, this time I’d dealt with the situation myself.

“You okay?” Dana asked, stopping beside me. “More trouble?”

“Duh,” I said, finally looking at her. Her eyes were steady and worried at the same time.

She caught the whistle about her neck. “Use it when you need it.”

“Come on, guys,” Mike said as he rolled on ahead.

Dana caught my hand, the one I’d held my sister with, and pulled. I let her drag me onward.

“It hadn’t gotten to that point yet,” I told her.

She glanced back and up at me as she fast-walked, and nodded. “Keeping things in control by engaging them is good.”

I managed to keep a straight face. She had no idea.

We arrived in math with hardly any time left for relief—not that we wanted it. Dana and Falcon again exchanged barely noticeable nods as she sat down beside Mike in his front-row parking space. I went to the back as usual, of course. As I sat there, I looked at my hand and flexed it.

I followed even less of the lecture, that day, than the day before.

Dana

I cannot lie—I would not have minded relief in algebra. Before and after first period, I’d gotten a lot of reasonable requests to explore my naked body, almost all from girls—many of whom knew how to caress another girl. Had word gotten out about my breakup with Tara? —that I’m not just Out, but Out And Available? Except most seemed to be either athletes or cheerleaders. So maybe, yanno, random.

Even more than relief, though, I wanted time to figure out what just happened to Teri. I didn’t have that either—not with polynomial factorizations to focus on.

After class, I checked with Mike, who confirmed none of library study rooms had been freed up. So I asked Falcon if we could meet in this classroom after school.

“Need a refuge?”

“Need study space—library’s booked up today.” We could work in the main reading room, if all else failed, but that would leave us exposed. Well, more exposed.

“Ah. Well, I’ll be coaching the Chess Team over in the physics lab, but I can keep the room open for you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

More softly, he added, “I’m holding you in the Light.”

Which helped, actually, that reminder of Clarity. “Thank you,” I said, just as softly.

I hurried out to catch up with Teri. Along the way, I saw a few kids holding my consent bracelet flier—excellent. Gary and Karen from the GSA had taken on handing it out. One girl was folding a paper airplane out of hers, but at least she’d seen it.

Teri wasn’t far down the hall—caught in a knot of girls, all wearing letter jackets. As I came up, one spotted me and said, “Oh! Even better. You,” and she pointed at me, “I request that you two touch each other.”

“Umm’kay,” I said. “How?”

“Feel each other’s breasts.”

Teri turned to me, and I faced her. Her eyes were glassy, but not in a dangerous way—more as if she was utterly weary of what was going on. A response they probably didn’t like—thus their trying something new.

I reached out and cupped the undersides of Teri’s breasts—they were larger than my hands, with larger aureolae than mine—as she started slowly and lightly patting mine in turn, using just her fingertips.

“Oh, by the way,” I told her, in as normal a voice as I could, “I found a meeting room for study-group.”

“Oh. Okay,” she said, as if utterly bored by the universe.

“You do know,” I added, “that I don’t want to do it like this?” I tried to pretend that I was talking about the weather in Iowa—that her fingers didn’t make my skin tingle and nipples tighten.

A flicker in Teri’s eyes. But her voice was as bored as ever. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”

Which almost made me break out of my role. Okay, yes, she probably just meant she knew I wanted to caress her for real—but it sounded like she did as well. After yesterday’s rejection, did I, maybe, have a chance? Even just a bi-curious one?

The bell rang, bringing mixed relief and disappointment. I caught Teri’s hand, waved “Bye now!” at the girls, and started walking through them towards chem, leading Teri in my wake. Around the corner in the hallway, she started chuckling.

“That was almost fun, fucking with them like that.”

I glanced up—her smile was almost wicked. “Mess with them too badly, though, and they’ll make it worse,” I said mildly.

“Oh, don’t I know,” she said, bitter in her voice.

We stopped outside the our classroom. “You have history with them?”

She shrugged. “They play with my sister.” The girl who, yesterday, had tried to ignore her bracelet. Play as in on the same team, I assumed—but maybe also in bed? I hadn’t yet worked out who was Out at Bridger, especially among the older students, but the requests this morning made it seem possible.

To Teri, though, I just nodded. I had nothing else to offer her—other than a quick hug, skin against skin, head between her breasts. She even held me in return, before heading in.

We actually had a couple minutes left of relief time, but after that sobering reminder, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. It almost certainly wouldn’t be seductive to Teri, doing it in front of her. Not to mention, given Vicky was queer, I didn’t want to push her buttons. Despite what I’d said yesterday, that thought made me a little uncomfortable.

Cadwallader continued recapping our assigned reading. I wondered, vaguely, if she had designed this lecture style to work with the Program, with its interruptions throughout the first five minutes of class.

Vicky leaned close. “I heard what happened yesterday, with you and Tara.”

So I was, indeed, current news. I made a non-committal sound.

“I really am sorry, for—yanno. I knew she’d had a girlfriend, but not that you were still a thing. Not at first.”

I had to look away. Teri was watching me, and caught my eye. I smiled slightly, then turned back to my lab partner. “Thanks.”

“Not now, but, sometime later, if you wanna hang out...”

No, definitely not now. I met her eyes and said, “We’ll see.” She was attractive, after all—if I could work with her a while, become better friends, maybe something more could happen.

As for working together, we actually got to—our first lab-work of the semester. It was only practice with pipettes and graduated cylinders, as if we’d never used them before (like, yanno, all through General Science last year), but it required pairing with our lab partner. The whole thing was very old-school: we had to record everything hardcopy on a worksheet. Vicky and I finished quickly and for the rest of class talked quietly about YA fantasy novels.

When the bell rang, Teri and I both packed slowly, to give the halls time to clear. Cadwallader cast a skeptical glance at us a couple times—Participants are discouraged from hiding in classrooms between periods—but said nothing.

Instead of zoning out in her own thoughts, as she usually did, Teri studied me for a while. Off my silent question, she asked, “What’s with you and Vicky?”

“Um—I have history with her.” I made myself meet her eyes.

Hers narrowed a little. “She’s your ex?”

“Heh. No, an ex of my ex. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that happened while we weren’t yet ex.” Which sounded more confusing out loud than intended, but Teri just nodded, eyes still narrow.

“This would be the messy part you mentioned?”

“Part of it,” I admitted.

Teri winced in sympathy, and the room lights flicked on and off twice as the bell rang, starting lunch. Cadwallader looked up and around nervously.

“Ooo-kay then,” Teri said.

Jake and Maria were across the hall again, waiting for their crowd to finish dispersing.

“Hey, girl,” Jake said to Teri, “what’s hanging?”

“The apple—not far from the tree,” she shot back.

He chuckled, and nodded to me. “Still steady, I see.”

I thought for a moment he believed I was still going steady with Tara, but no, he meant that I was steady, as in solid—unmoved. As if. “As a rock that is not silent,” I said, though the context of the psalm was not exactly appropriate.

“Come on, guys,” Maria said, heading for the stairs, “let’s get some food.”

Teri followed her, but Jake stopped when saw me standing still.

“I was going to—” and I gestured behind me, in the general direction of my locker.

“Whatever it is can wait, Miss Rock—put some lunch in you first.” With a hand on my bare shoulder, he shepherded me after the girls.

I let him. He was right, really. And besides, since I hadn’t made it to my locker yet, my sandwich was still in my pack—probably mashed halfway flat by now. I could catch up with Gary and Karen after eating—and they were likely down in the Commons anyway. I wanted to sound them out on starting a student group dedicated to escorting and monitoring Participants between classes, similar to the Angels in California only more organized, before I took the idea to Alverez. Besides, this was a good chance to talk with other Participants—catch up in person.

The other three went through the cafeteria line, so I found a table for us off to one side—or rather two of them, as the ones along that wall are all small. By the time I pushed them together, the others joined me with their lunch trays. Teri, the largest of all of us, had the least on her plate. Given the food did not look or smell appetizing, I didn’t exactly blame her.

I munched on lunch while they dug in, listening to the sounds of cafeteria chatter and clatter.

Maria peered at my sandwich. “Is that—bologna?”

“Tofurkey, sliced thin.”

She blinked. “You’re a vegetarian? In this state?”

I shook my head. “Mom is, from when she lived out East. I eat meat, but this is what we have at home.”

Maria pointed at the cafeteria line. “Right there—go.”

“Honestly? This tastes better.”

“Heh.”

Teri was frowning at Maria. “So you worry about how much I’m eating, but Dana’s bit of smushed whole-wheat, you give a pass?”

Maria waved that off. “She’s just a bit of a thing.”

Teri drew herself up. Before this could devolve into fat-shaming or worse, I broke in, “By the way, any more suggestions for the maps?”

“Yeah,” Gail suddenly said behind me. “Put room numbers on it, so I can figure out which way is where.”

I tilted my head all the way straight back to look up at her—which gave me an odd view of the undersides of her breasts. Not that I was complaining, mind, but it was not the usual perspective, even for short little me. “If I labeled all of them, you couldn’t read it,” I said. “How about just your start and end rooms, on the by-period maps?”

“That should work.” Then to the others, “Hey, guys,” and she crouched between Maria and me—my neck thanked her for that.

“How’s your day been?” I asked her.

“Comme ci comme ça. Had to stand at the whiteboard all trig—got marker dust all over me.” She shuddered theatrically. “I hate trig.”

Maria and Jake laughed. I smiled politely, as I’ve learned to do when girls claim math is hard.

Then to me, more privately, Gail said, “Hey, is it true you’re the girl Tara broke up with?”

I nodded carefully. Apparently we were even bigger news than I thought.

“We knew, some of us, that her steady was a girl, but not who it was. Sorry things got so messy, at the end.”

“Thanks.” I managed not to add, ‘I think.’

From my other side, Teri looked at me, as if suddenly seeing me for the first time. “Wait—you’re the reason Tara Sarkisian stopped putting out, last spring?”

I had no idea what to say to that. I mean, Tara had never hidden, when we first got together, that she’d slept with a lot of guys—she even used it to try pushing me away. As if past history mattered. I still felt a pang of missing her.

“Girl, you are some kind of trouble,” Teri muttered, as much to herself as to me.

Trouble indeed. It was as if breaking up hadn’t untangled me from Tara.

Mike

At the start of third period, I was starting to feel a little sour. It’s not like a guy wants to be the designated victim of state-sponsored molestation (as Teri might put it). But, yanno—not getting a single reasonable request all morning felt like rejection—like avoiding the crip. I was seriously tempted to take relief in French, just to make my classmates watch me—make them see me as a sexual object.

I didn’t, though. I once heard something about how hatesex is like acid on the soul—and jacking off at someone sounded a lot like solo hatesex, which had to be even worse. Better to just withdraw. Leave them to themselves.

Maybe Maria would be interested in some fooling around again at lunch. Or Teri might want mutual consolation. Or Dana.

Mme. Gomez, by the way, is the only language teacher I’ve heard of who lets you request or decline relief in English. I declined in French anyway.

After class, rather than following Dana’s recommended route, I took the long way around to the far elevator—that hallway isn’t as crowded and her way wouldn’t meet up with anyone till the cafeteria, anyway. And because it wasn’t as crowded, it was impossible to miss running into Nate, coming the other direction.

“Oh, uh. Mike.”

“Hi. Long time,” I said. Three months—not since summer camp, when we’d fooled around a bit, us and another boy.

“Um, right—been busy. You know.” He looked everywhere but at me—and always well above my waist.

“Yeah, I know.” I almost managed to keep the bitter out of my voice.

“Right. So, um. See ya.” And then he booked it past me.

I watched his back till he disappeared down the stairs. I know I didn’t keep the bitter out of my face.

I knew he, at least, wasn’t an avoid-the-crip type—he’d been happy enough to engage in a little mutual scratch-the-itch with me, even if he didn’t go beyond handjobs. Salazar and I had blown each other, and even kissed some, but Nate hadn’t. No, this was good old-fashioned gay panic—as if being seen with me, it’d be obvious to anyone that we’d had sex. Of course, the way he’d acted made it obvious something was up.

Knowing this didn’t help my mood, though. Nate Terifin, meet Tara Sarkisian.

In the hall ceiling, the last fluorescent light in front of the stairwell flickered out. A second later it blinked back on as the next one turned off—which came on as the next in turn went off, and so on: it was like a dead space was heading straight towards me, down an industrial equivalent of a holiday-light string. Kinda freaky, actually—I backed up to the wall before it passed over me, and then watched as it continued down to the other corner of the building.

Ooo-kay then.

Technically, I’m not supposed to use the elevator on the gym wing to go down to the basement, only between the first and second floors—the basement exit is near a boiler and a furnace and who knows what all else, where no students are allowed. Of course, that’s one reason I like to take it anyway: it’s gloomy and grimy like an industrial factory, and in winter puffs of steam make it even more atmospheric. Another reason is more practical: it puts me on the open lounge side of the Commons, which is easier to navigate than the cafeteria tables.