Chapter 20

Sunday afternoon, when it was time for Darryl to drive Lisa home, literally the entire Parkhurst household gathered to send her off. It was certainly a far different Lisa than had arrived just a week and a day earlier. The embarrassment over her body was still there as she stood in nothing but her sandals, accepting hugs and well-wishes from everyone. It seemed that the blush covered every bulge and roll on her, but it was just the fact that she was exposing it all that was the most striking.

Sweet, meek, beaten-down Lisa could no longer be seen in the expression on her face. Instead there was a determination that was so strong it almost made people shrink back in the face of it. Behind the determination, there was anger and something new for Lisa - confidence.

It was hard for Bert to keep his eyes dry as he watched the others send Lisa off. They had said their farewells privately, and they would undoubtedly see each other at school in the morning. Lisa had sworn that she would not miss a minute of the girls playing with him.

It had been strictly an instinctive desire to help her, to save her life, that had led him to invite Lisa to stay at their house and then to share his bed. The nights that they had slept beside each other had revealed so much to him, as well as apparently turning her around. In trying to help her survive the Program, he had been forced to look at it through the eyes of one of its most vulnerable, most frightened victims. It had definitely shaped what he hoped and planned to do to protect his fellow students.

Darryl insisted that Lisa ride up front with him and he kept up a steady one-sided conversation. He pulled into a park a few blocks from Lisa's home and stopped the SUV. "Last chance to change your mind and dress," he told her.

"Are you trying to talk me out of it?" she asked.

"Not at all. I just want to make sure that you really are prepared," he told her. "Do you want me to drive up as close to the house as possible, or do you want to walk from the street. From the street, there is a better chance of the neighbors seeing you."

With a resolute set of her jaw that was becoming familiar to those at the Parkhurst residence, Lisa said "From the street. It will upset Mother more to know that the neighbors saw my fat." She could not hide a quiver in her voice that belied the bravado of her words.

"Tell you what, Lisa," he offered. "I'll walk with you and carry your bag."

"You'd ... you'd do that?"

"It would be an honor," he said with feeling. He got out and grabbed her bag from the back end. Then he came and opened her door to give her a hand down. She may not have been able to take that first step if his gallantry had not augmented her courage, but with his help she was soon standing on the side of the street in front of her house, trying to remember how to take steps.

Lisa had younger brothers thirteen and eleven. Often, that was a very bad things for a teenaged girl. It just seemed that having a sister two or three years older brought out the strongest 'pest' urges in early pubescent boys. Lisa's brothers were typical in that respect. However, both of them had long ago picked up on their mother's attitude toward their sister and just like everyone else, they reacted to Lisa's sweet nature. Between their normal bouts of teasing and terrorizing, they would sometimes display surprising amounts of sympathy and support.

The younger brother, Derrick, had been watching out the front window and saw Lisa's head through the windshield. With no more information than that, he yelled out "Lisa's home!" and headed for the front door, where he and his older brother, Randy, ended up elbowing and jostling each other to be the first one out. Size won, and with exuberance more suited to seven-year-olds, they barreled through the door to greet the sister whom they had missed more than they would ever admit.

Classic slapstick comedy could have used the ensuing scene of the boys realizing their sister's nakedness. Actually, only the oldest, Randy, realized it at first, since he was first out the door and Derrick was screened behind him. Randy stopped dead, unable to understand and accept what his eyes seemed to be telling him. Derrick slammed into him from behind, knocking him flat on his face on the lawn. With his big brother no longer in his line of sight, Derrick did the same sudden stop and freeze when he saw his naked sister.

Darryl led Lisa up the driveway, off to the side of where her brothers were frozen in their comical tableau. Of all of the things about going home naked that she had envisioned, this certainly could not have been anticipated. She stopped for a moment, as frozen as they were, but it was Darryl who brought her out of it. "They're as shaken up as you are. You've got to take charge."

She gasped and looked at him with real fear, but his smile and his gentle push toward the boys restored her courage quickly. Letting go of Darryl's hand, she stepped onto the grass, holding out her arms in an unmistakable invitation to a hug. "I've missed you guys so much!" she told them.

The boys' eyes fastened on her body were harder to stand than Bert's first view of her. Had it not been for the 'practice' with Bert's family, she would have fled in terror. Instead, she kept walking as Randy scrambled to his feet from where he had been knocked to the ground. About six feet away, she stopped, arms still outspread and feet slightly apart.

"This is me, Guys, fat and all. Might as well get a good look. You'll be seeing me this way a lot. Sorry I don't look like the girls at the pool. Can I have that hug, anyway?"

The thirteen-year-old, Randy, was unable to move, the blood fleeing to his distended penis quite likely robbing him of the brain function needed for conscious motion. Derrick was not as affected sexually and he had always been the most affectionate toward her. Almost knocking Randy down again, he darted to his sister and accepted the hug. They were about the same height, but he had the slight build of the rest of her family and he weighed a lot less than she did.

Derrick especially was a devotee of minimal necessary attire and wore just shorts in the hot weather. The feeling of bare skin against her breasts was almost enough of a shock to make her lose her balance. Derrick's unfeigned glee at seeing her, though, and his apparent lack of of concern over the intimate contact reassured her.

Still hugging Derrick tightly with one arm, Lisa held out the other and said "Randy, I really need that hug." He walked over almost reluctantly and attempted an 'auntie hug', where only their shoulders made contact. She wasn't having any of that and pulled him close with arm strength that surprised him. "It's OK, Randy. These are just boobs you're feeling and that's just a hardon you've got. Embarrassment is gonna have to disappear around here pretty fast."

Thinking for a moment, Lisa called out "Darryl, could you take these guys for an ice cream. I think they should miss the explosion." To the boys, she said "Go with him. He's a really nice guy. I'll see you later."

Darryl walked up to the front step and deposited Lisa's bag, then came back to shake hands with the boys and lead them to the SUV. Lisa suddenly remembered that there were probably neighbors watching and felt some urgency to get inside. The problem was, inside was the really hard part. Oh, it had been difficult with her brothers, but the surprise and even awe on the their faces actually gave her a little thrill.

She was not sure how her dad would react, and she hated to make him feel bad. She had to do this, though. Somehow, she had to shock her mother, Beth, and she was certain that this would do the job. If only she was ready for the anger and tears that she knew would result.

Well, she was ready for the anger with plenty of her own. Starting with the absolute terror of exposing herself a week earlier, she had worked through shame and embarrassment to something approaching euphoria the last few days. In the days that Molly had been back home, Lisa had drawn so much strength from her. Molly had not caused her to become angry. She had done that on her own.

And flying to those meetings and talking to the crowds! That was the experience of a lifetime!

Maybe she was even enjoying being naked, as crazy as that seemed. Even so, she should not have been forced into the choices she had to make. When Molly had explained that going naked made her feel that she had given away something that was precious to her, Lisa had understood instantly. No one should have the right to make her do that. Her mother could have stopped it, but she would not listen to Lisa's feelings and fears. Her dad could have, too, but he had never bucked her mother, so Lisa never really expected that and did not harbor any anger at him.

It was anger on her mind when she walked into the house and straight back to the family room, where she was sure she would find her parents. She was right, and the explosion from her mother was everything she had anticipated. After a few moments of immobilizing shock and wordless motions of her mouth, Beth leaped to her feet and began screaming.

Beth's first actions were ludicrous, as she interposed herself between Lisa and her father, Roger, apparently to stop him from seeing his naked daughter. She tried to push Lisa out of the room. That did nothing to ease the girl's anger. Tempted to shove her mother, Lisa instead took both of Beth's hands and held them in her surprisingly strong pianist's grip.

Rebuffed in her attempt to preserve propriety, Beth went vocal - very vocal. It had been Molly who had counseled Lisa to hold onto the anger to keep from wilting under her mother's assault, and Lisa focused on what Beth had forced her into, almost to the point of being deaf to the screams and shouts.

First came the orders to put clothes on, repeated several times at escalating volume, with ever wilder gesticulations. When Lisa just stood impassively for the first time ever under such an assault, Beth finally realized that a major change had occurred. She stopped short of hitting Lisa, who had braced herself for the blow. Instead, she turned to her husband and implored him to make Lisa get dressed.

Roger was still sitting down, while Beth had been jumping and stomping around as she yelled and screamed. He just stared at his wife until she became quiet, then turned to Lisa and asked "Why?"

"What did you expect me to do, Dad?" she demanded, trying to tone down the belligerence.

"Well, we thought you would just get through it like all the other kids," he answered lamely.

" ... and decide to lose weight, right?" she hissed. He was not the villain, and she knew it, but she could talk to her mother through him without addressing her directly. For right now, that was perfect.

"I couldn't just strip and walk around school. I must have told you a thousand times, but you just would not listen. I thought I only had one choice. I was deciding how to kill myself." That produced a gasp from him and a shriek from her mother.

"Why would you kill yourself just because you had to go naked at school?" her mother screamed.

"Dammit, Mother! Unless you can spend the whole evening naked the next time you entertain your friends, DON'T YOU DARE say that to me one more time! Can you do that? Huh? Can you serve those three couples naked?"

"That's not fair!" her mother shrieked. "That's different. We're adults - we're all married. They're our friends. It would be too embarrassing!"

"Don't you get it? My friends are at school. That's not all, Mother. Are you willing to let the men play with your boobs and your pussy? Squeeze you ass chee..."

"Lisa! How can you talk like that? Oh, God! What has happened?!" her mother cried.

"What has happened is you condemned me to something you could never do," Lisa spat out. "I couldn't do it, either. I really was ready to kill myself."

"Then why this?" Roger asked softly, gesturing at her body.

"A very nice, very caring guy got very upset when I said I would kill myself. He told me about a place I could run away to. I thought that's what I would have to do.

"But then he kept talking to me about how hard it would be to leave home and live in a dorm with strangers. He told me that if I did, the Program people would have won. YOU would have won!" she said angrily, pointing right at Beth.

"He wouldn't let me give up and run away. He convinced me that if I practiced, I could stand being naked. So I'm practicing."

"But ... but" her mother sputtered, "we aren't like that around here. We don't show ourselves. It's not right in front of your family! What about your brothers?"

"They were pretty surprised, but they gave me hugs and welcomed me home?"

"They WHAT? Oh, my God! How could you let them?" her mother shrieked, hysteria threatening to override the anger.

"Oh, come on, Mother! They see naked girls all the time. They'll get used to it."

"You mean ... you mean ... it's not just today?" That came out as a whimpered plea.

"As terrified as I was, I need lots of practice," Lisa stated. Her mother was starting to look pathetic, and Lisa felt hardly any guilt at the pleasure it gave her. She decided to see if she could really destroy her mother. It was revenge, and she knew it, but she could not stop herself.

"I'll let you decide if it would be better for Dad or for the boys to help me get used to the touching," Lisa said as off-handedly as she could manage.

"T ... touching?" her mother squeaked, not wanting to believe what she was hearing from her once sweet and passive daughter.

"Yeah. You know about the reasonable requests, don't you? How the boys can touch me anywhere, any time they want? I couldn't stand that if it just started happening to me and I wasn't used to it?"

"But you can't expect your father ... your brothers ... ohhhhh! That would be so wrong?"

"Wrong? Is it less wrong for some horny kid with dirty hands to be pawing at my pussy?" she hissed. When her mother could only generate a gurgling sound, Lisa, really lit into her. "It's wrong for anyone to touch me unless I want them to. It's horribly wrong. But you, Mother, decided it was OK. Now, you get all upset when I want the guys who care about me the most to help me get used to it. Would you rather just have me slit my wrists? Move away? What would you rather have me do, Mother? Huh? What?"

Lisa ended up shouting at her mother in a way she had never before done. The poor woman had collapsed into a chair and could only shake her head in an attempt to deny that this was happening.

"I think you'd better leave us for a while, Lisa," Roger finally intervened. "I think you'd better put something on. Your mother can't take this."

"Sorry, Dad. No clothes. She pushed me into something I couldn't take. This is what I need to survive what she sentenced me to. It's either this or I go to Hooverton. Now she has to live with it." Lisa did go up to her room, where she fell onto her bed, exhausted emotionally and physically.

When Darryl returned the boys, they tore into the family room, saw that Lisa was not there, and made a bee-line for her room. Their mother made a futile attempt to stop them, and dashed after them. Lisa had guessed what was happening. The boys had entered her room and she stood closing the door when her mother arrived. "This is my room, Mom. I want to spend some time with my brothers." With that, she slammed the door and locked it.

There was no sense of victory at the Pritchard complex. Jason, Carter, and everyone else in the know was leery of some kind of clever move by the Administration. It was generally accepted that the Program had been stopped, but there had to be more to it than that.

It was not a surprise that the voucher bill had been essentially rejected. Jason had known how extreme that demand was. Rejection of vouchers was his justification for not bargaining to stop the ads. It was a certainty. His decision to stop the ads anyway was instinctive. Not telling the opposition of his decision should keep them off balance. The President's surprise move of stopping the Program but not trying harder to stop the ads had certainly generated confusion in their camp.

The arrival of Patricia and Ben at the complex was certainly interesting. The fact that the woman who had 'recruited' them stayed right with them and managed all of the introductions helped a great deal, but they were still viewed as suspicious 'defectors'.

It was while the introductions were still going on that Carter Olson, with her usual doggedness, proposed that a group of them listen to the recording of Jason's conversation with Joe Richter Saturday night. Wanting to make any possible use of their expertise and knowledge, Jason insisted that Patricia and Ben be included in the group.

The group sat down late Sunday afternoon, and as they were preparing to listen, Ben asked if he could say something. "I speak for both of us when I say that we truly do want to help in any way that we can. We have talked between ourselves and we are in agreement. Neither of us were in the jobs we held because of strong belief in the Program. They were jobs - good jobs. Like probably too many people in our day, we did not spend time thinking about the right or the wrong of what we were doing.

"We are not ideologues. Sadly, we are not completely sure of just what we believe and do not believe. We are more than willing to listen, learn, and be convinced. Maybe, for the first time, we will find some ideas worth getting behind. I guess what I'm asking is that you give us a chance.

"There is one other point I want to address," Ben went on. "A good deal of money was laid out to recruit us away from Summer Friedel's staff in order to weaken her during a critical time. It was part of a campaign that seems to be won before it started. What was spent on us could easily appear to be wasted.

"We do not ever want to be viewed as freeloaders. It is our desire to justify what was spent on us in any way that we can."

On that note, Carter started playing the recording. It was on the second time through that Jason slapped his forehead dramatically. It happened when he made his jesting suggestion that the schools could be shut down until the voucher bill was passed to get the ads stopped.

"That's it! Son of a bitch! He's going to shut down the schools!"

"You're right!" Carter agreed. It's perfect."

"But what excuse will he use?" another staffer asked. "Did anyone important just die or something else to memorialize?"

"Security threat to the schools!" Carter almost shouted. "That has to be it!"

"Get Porter Arragon," Jason said. "We can at least steal his thunder. This will give Porter that big boost we've been promising her. If the Program is really dead already, there won't be many more chances."

"Think she'll go on our hunch?"

"What has she got to lose. She can always phrase it that the Administration is 'contemplating' closing schools."

"That's as bad as 'diplo-speak'," someone joked.

Porter's first thought was 'no way!' She did not shoot from the hip. Carter was persuasive, though, and with the explanation that the Program was already dead, Porter saw that she had better roll the dice right then. It could be the last chance for a while.

"Porter, we are 99% sure that this is a ruse to make the Program disappear quietly without seeming to shut it down," Carter said.

"You expect me to write THAT?" Porter asked in disbelief.

"You can always use the 'some analysts speculate that... ' bit," Carter replied.

Ben, who was with Carter, added "Or you could say 'according to an informed insider'."

"Uh, if I say that, will it damage anything Pritchard is trying to do?"

"Oh. Great question. No, actually, it will help. If Garrett's aim is to make the Program disappear, then it is too our advantage to keep it visible as long as possible."

"There's something I don't understand," Porter mused. "He can't keep the schools closed forever. Won't it still look like a shutdown of the Program when school opens again?"

"Well, Porter, you really can think like a reporter," Carter chuckled. "That question will be stealing most of the sleep in the compound until we come up with an answer."

"Can I, uh, publish the answer when you figure it out?" Porter asked.

"That's the intent of the deal we made with you."

Porter chose a middle-of-the-road attribution for her item. "There is speculation among insiders that an announcement later today will close all public schools across the nation for an indefinite period starting tomorrow. The ostensible reason for the shutdown will be a recently uncovered, serious, but not location specific terrorist threat to the schools. Calls to Homeland Security did not uncover anyone willing to comment on the speculation.

"Some analysts contacted were skeptical of a true terrorist threat. They were of the opinion that the shutdown of the schools was to allow the Administration time to deal with the extremely damaging ad campaign that was briefly mounted against the Naked In School Program. One knowledgeable person believed that the shutdown was part of a plan to make the Naked in School Program 'disappear' quietly without seeming to capitulate to the barrage of criticism. The fact that the negative ads have stopped lends credence to the theory that those running the ads have won and the Program will be terminated.

"Information freely available on some anti-Program websites describes massive legal action against school districts, school administrators, and individuals involved in forcing students to disrobe and submit to the other requirements of the Program.

"The two young people who initiated the current furor over the Program by appearing on a nude broadcast with yours truly have conducted several rallies around the country this past weekend. The rallies were to encourage high school students to engage in a variety of activities that would challenge or subvert the aims of the Program. This is Porter Wagoner of KCLY in Crosley."

Porter's station manager started beating on every other manager and every network executive that he knew to get the spot the maximum air time. He was strictly interested in the potential news and revenue value. Having seen the exposure value of the whole Program controversy, he was more than happy to forget politics for the time being.

Regardless of its slide from its early mantra of 'fair and balanced' toward just another liberal outlet, Fox News was the first to pick up the piece. As usual, all it took was one network, and within two hours of recording the spot, Porter was once again a national figure, this time on purpose.

"Dammit! How the hell did this get out?" Garrett stormed after being shown Porter's spot. "We have to make that announcement RIGHT NOW!"

"It takes at least thirty minutes to assemble the press corps," Press Secretary objected.

"Then we go without them. That should eliminate some embarrassing questions. Did you finish the statement? That's all we'll give them for right now," Garrett snarled.