Chapter 4

August drifted into September and the football team the Bayside Screaming Gulls was three victories into their season. Paul Wilcox, senior player, team co-captain, and recruiting prospect of several universities strutted in the halls of the school gleaning adoring looks and hopeful ones from most of the senior and junior girls. Those same girls were hissy fitting over the fact the one girl Paul seemed to concentrate on was the new junior with the eleven-year-old body, the confirmed nudist, the girl who called herself Waif.

The girls with one thing on their minds didn’t know that Wendy Ann Ingrid Farrell was helping Paul maintain his eligibility to play football by tutoring him in physics and calculus. Paul was a great athlete, but not a rocket scientist when it came to math and sciences. Waif having an affinity for surfing and swimming, passions Paul shared, was able to work tutoring into those activities showing Paul practical applications for math and science. Paul rose from a probationary D grade of barely passing earned just before the first game to a solid C+ in both the physics and calculus classes. His other grades were solid B+ to A- in English, German, World History, and Contemporary American Issues.

“I am putting you in for an honorary varsity letter in football,” Paul told the girl at his side.

“Sure, I am the size of the pole you use to mark the line of scrimmage. What did I do to deserve a varsity letter? Also, wise guy, where would I wear it?” Waif chuckled at the irony of her wearing a varsity sweater over, uh, well nothing else.

“I would not be player eligible if not for you. Moose, Bear, and Whale all say the same thing. You are like another coach for the team, an academic coach,” Paul grumbled. Moose, Bear, and Whale were the linemen who blocked and opened running room for Paul on offense. All had been in academic trouble before Waif volunteered to help Paul and that extended to tutoring whoever on the team needed help.

Waif would sit in the locker room, bare legs straddling the bench, and show the players how to work the formulas in math and science or edit the papers due in English comp or history, correcting spelling and punctuation in the boys’ drafts so that the papers turned in for grading showed the knowledge each had. “You know how much the playbook means to Coach?” She would ask the player and always get a yes for the answer. “Well, consider that the other teachers have their playbooks, also. They want to know if you can run the plays assigned to you in their subjects. If you cannot express to them that you understand their subject they cannot pass you with good grades. Without good grades, you cannot play football. So, let me help you get the grades you truly deserve.”

She was so much a fixture in the locker room and around the training rooms that the slender nude girl was barely noticed as being bare. The day she had followed Whale into the shower room demanding to know where his book Report on Moby Dick was so that she could review it for content was the day she realized none of these boys recognized her as a girl.

Eighteen teenage boys were in an open shower room and there among them was one four-foot-eleven undeveloped girl who was acting more like a nagging nanny than a high school girl in an awkward situation. The other eight players were in the training room being iced down or having sprains taped.

“Hey, Waif, you need shampoo?” Bear called from a shower head two down from her confrontation spot with Whale. The irony was that Richard Richards, called Dick by his family got his team nickname from his size and name Whale being a derived portion from Moby Dick. Yet, he had problems dealing with the book from which he was given his moniker.

“That and a towel, Bear, but first I need your Left Guard to tell me where he put the flash drive with his book report,” Waif called over the water and noise of showering teammates.

At that, seventeen players turned on their teammate. Peer pressure shortened shower time and the large teenage boy and the slight teenage girl found themselves looking at the screen of a laptop computer fact-checking the report Whale had prepared.

“The guy who tells the story about the boat and the whale,” Waif sighed reading what Whale had committed to bits and bytes. “Whale, what is the opening line of the book?”

The blank look on his face told the entire story. “Call me Ishmael,” “Whale did you read any of the book? What was the Captain’s name? The name of the whaling ship they were on? Where are the facts to prove you have actually read the novel?”

She sighed, “I know a book that long is a challenge and many things will be unfamiliar to you. But, if you do not succeed in this, you leave a hole in the line of your team. That puts the whole team at risk. Worse yet, you put your future at risk. You know, I’ve been sick most of my life and my only escape from my illness was the written word and math. While my body withered I tried to keep my mind active. You need to do the same thing, Whale, you lift weights and push tackling sleds and run plays and have a fit body to show for it. But, someday, that body will fail you. Without exercising the other muscle that needs it, your brain, where does that leave your future?”

The other twenty-five boys in the training facility were silent. Waif may have hit a soft point in all of their psyches or perhaps it was just respect for a girl who wore a naked body bearing the reality of life’s fragile nature.

Paul coughed and then said, “So say we all, Whale. You know what Coach says, only seventy percent of us will go on to play in college and less than seven percent of college players go on to be pro ball players. If this is it for your sports career, what are you going to do for the rest of your life?”

Waif set down an outline of what she needed Whale to do by their next session. “That report is due before Homecoming in October, Whale, I guarantee you a B on it, minimum if you follow this game plan. I have a feeling your team is going to be on your backside to make sure you do, but anyway, I will see you again Thursday.”

“She looked around and in her best imitation of the tough one-room school teacher, called out, “Paul, physics tomorrow, John, Geology, and Mike I want to see your Geometry quiz so we can go over the ones you missed.”

The girl who had aspired to become a varsity cheerleader had become the team mother instead.

Sean Gottet sat in the small conference room in the school with Tom Smith, president of the regional school board, and Dorothy Suarez the high school principal. Tom Smith was speaking, “So, you see Doctor Gottet, we have observed the first two weeks of this new program and we approve of the change in the level of respect and courtesy student to student and student to faculty. Our feeder school boards take exception to only one aspect of what you call the program. That is the ‘relief’ issue.

“We, as a unified district, believe that the goal of this experiment is to create a school uniform and a uniform student body. Eventually, having all students attend classes in their natural state is the goal of the sending districts. However, the implicit humiliation in the public stripping of those chosen by lottery to participate in the Program and the concept of sexual release are not aspects of the program we wish to instill or install into our program here at Bayside. The sending districts which adopted the NIS use a behavior modification for teasing and harassment of the offender publically paddled, either in the classroom or at a weekly disciplinary assembly. No school official does the paddling. The offender is paddled either by a parent, a guardian, or the parent of the victim child.