On Saturday morning, Kevin rousted out Denise 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.”
“I know, 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. 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 is 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. 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 family died in a fire—you were six, darling? Yeah, her whole 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, 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, 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...” Denise went on.
“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, “remember in 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 changed the damned Program. 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.
“...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 with no regard for 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; 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.
“I guess we’re outmatched there, then,” Kevin said. “I didn’t do organized sports in high school in Korea; I did taekwondo, but I did a lot of swimming, running too. And Denise—I guess it never came up, sweetie, did you do any sports before we met?”
“No; you did get me started in running, though.”
“Kevin, I do see you’ve got a swimmer’s build. You never competed?” Roger asked.
“Nothing formal... just against others in my schools. All my schools didn’t have enough kids to make a team. And the athletic kids go to schools where they can compete, but as an embassy brat, the security limited me to go to schools where it was safe and those were small.”
“Would you consider working out with the high-school team?” Roger continued. “We’re just getting started this week. Had a few sessions last week but those were just stretching and limbering sessions. We start early morning on Tuesday. You can show me what you can do then.”
“Well, okay, you’d be there regularly?”
“Sure. There’s a teacher, he’s the nominal coach, but they made me the actual coach because of my experience. The teacher is actually the soccer coach, filling in since they don’t have anyone who was actually a swimmer,” Roger said.
“Um, I’d like to know more about the Program stuff Cindy mentioned,” Denise interrupted. “That makes me kinda nervous. I got carried away last year at our old school but I felt, you know, safe there—the principal was a tough guy but he became one of Kevin’s best fans there. Kevin has this way of persuading adults and he talked our principal into making the Program tolerable. What you said, Cindy, kinda scares me.”
“Kevin, you mentioned that you guys were in the Program in your old school,” Cynthia said. “I know of a couple of new kids who moved here this year who did the Program in their old schools too and they were told they wouldn’t have to repeat it here. So, Denise, just try to ignore anything that might bother you, but you should be okay.”
Denise looked doubtful. “We had this nasty, awful man who was the Program official at our school. He got arrested, but he made things so bad...”
“There aren’t any more federal Program people in the schools here after the shakeup,” Cynthia said. “So the way it runs is up to local rules, I think. Now one of the assistant principals is in charge at Merritt. The other schools do that too, I think.”
“Say, Cyn, old Mr Thomas retired end of last month, right?” Roger asked. “They’re hiring a new assistant principal, I heard.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard,” Cynthia said. “So tell us a little more about your fantastic website, Kevin. It’s wicked awesome that one kid could thwart the resources of an entire country like you did. Apparently you hid the server so well that no one knew where it was.”
“Oh, I just had great help. Knew the right people. And the kids at my school were great; a couple were absolute tech wizards.”
“It looks so professional, though, not like a lot of blogs high schoolers have,” Tom put in.
“Yeah, we were kinda lucky; there were kids who were good at design and also good writers who volunteered. And kids who knew how to get publicity out, too. I said it was really a team effort.”
“So now that you’ve moved away, are you gonna get out of the anti-Program movement? Will the website fade away?” Tom asked.
“Tom, you know, I had intended to stay in North Carolina till I graduated. But with Denise’s mom in Atlanta, and Denise wanting to move, I realized that I didn’t want to do my senior year at my old school because I’d just get dragged back into supporting the Program the way Denise and I had been doing—making it fun for the kids who were participating. I hated being torn by conflicting feelings, objecting to the whole idea behind the Program while helping the kids enjoy participating in it. So by moving away, I no longer had to keep up the facade of supporting it. And the website isn’t going away. I set up a kind of little foundation to keep it running as long as the Program is around.”
“Um, let me get this straight. You set up a ‘little’ foundation? Just you?” Cynthia asked, incredulously.
“I had legal help. I don’t talk about it, but my folks left me some money,” Kevin said quietly. “But I still want to do what I can to stop the Program. There’s still the problem of the federal control over its being run in schools—the federal curriculum itself,” he commented.
“Um, Cindy had idea...” Ayame started, “Cindy, can I tell him?”
“Sure.”
“Cindy thought of the Tenth Amendment. I learned in Civics last year that education is for states, not federal. Cindy told her lawyer that the Program is against state’s rights and can be challenged.” Ayame finished.
“Wow—yeah! Shit, that’s super! And no one thought of that before? What did your lawyer do about it?” Kevin exclaimed.
“Well, nothing. He’s a Marine JA officer. Told me that the Marines won’t pursue a constitutional challenge,” Cynthia responded. “He said I’m on my own.”
“Fuck that,” Kevin responded excitedly. “I’m gonna let my lawyer know. He’ll love this one and I know he’ll take it on. Is that okay with you? It’s your idea, after all.”
“Sure, that’d be great. However it gets done is fine with me—with all of us,” she commented. “Hey, all this talk about the Program is getting to me. Let’s change the subject. So guys, what do you want to know about Merritt, or even Avery? Denise, your mom said you’ll be going there for college,” Cynthia asked.
So the conversation turned away from the Program and concentrated on the high school’s classes and teachers, based on what the twins had heard about the school from students in their Intro to Ed course and from their student coaching there. They also told Kevin and Denise about their college experiences and Tom and Ayame chimed in with their own viewpoints.
They were still at it when Kasey returned to the house in mid-afternoon and found the six of them talking animatedly, so she asked everyone if they’d like to have dinner together and they agreed. After dinner, Cynthia invited Kevin and Denise upstairs to their apartment to see the photos of their Marine base graduation.
“You don’t see something like this very much—it’s kinda unique,” she said as she pulled a photo album off a shelf. “There was a Marine general and a Navy admiral handing out graduation certificates. Beats a high-school principal in my book.”
“Look, it’s a real photo album,” Denise remarked as Cynthia opened the book.
“Sure—most people keep their photos in the cloud and look at them on their phones,” Cynthia responded. “I do that too, but I picked up the album habit from my mom; she likes to look at whole pages at a time and have larger photos also. And so do I. So here’s the graduation.”
“Wow, there’s an honor guard too,” Kevin remarked, looking at the photos. “Like I saw at diplomatic receptions at our embassies. Those Marines who were attached to us were some really cool guys, too. One of them took an interest in me when I was learning karate in Japan—I was just twelve, I think. He even let me use him as a punching dummy.”
“Ah, you live in Japan too?” Ayame asked.
“Oh, yeah. And Hong Kong and Thailand too. Um, Watashi mo sukoshi nihongo, Ayame hanasu.”
“Hee, hee... Sore wa okashii, anata wa Igirisu no akusento de hanashimasu!” she responded.
Roger and Cynthia laughed, Tom and Denise looked at each other and shrugged.
“So what was that all about?” Tom asked.
“Yeah, this is way cool. Our new friend also speaks Japanese,” Cynthia grinned. “Like another thing we have in common. Kevin said, ‘I speak a little Japanese too, Ayame,’ and she answered, ‘It’s funny, you speak it with a British accent.’”
“I know,” Kevin said. “I learned in elementary school and Sensai was British and most of the kids were from the American and British embassies. There were some Australians and Canadians too. I’m way rusty, though. My Korean is much better. Denise knows some Korean, too.”
“Yeah, whatever a six-week crash course can teach,” she objected, looking up from the photos.
“Well, you could communicate okay, you know. I thought you did pretty good,” Kevin assured her.
Denise had been leafing idly through Cynthia’s photo album. She flipped the page.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “My goodness—oh, my...”
Cynthia leaned over and looked, then laughed.
“Ha. Denise found our photos from the resort, guys. Hey, honey, it’s okay to look,” she told Denise.
“Resort? These are at a resort? You guys go to nudist resorts? Oh, my...” she said, staring at the photos.
“Tom introduced us—long story. He was in the Program and actually completed it; he was used to the nudity. Cyn and I—Ayame too—we had major problems not only with the sexual parts of the Program but also its public nudity requirement and Tom really pushed us to try to get over our nudity phobias. So we tried it out and actually had fun. See, look at those pictures of Ayame on the board and in mid-dive,” Roger explained. “She’s good.”
“Oh, also, how beautiful,” Denise breathed. “Ayame, you’re gorgeous.”
“Ah, thank you, Denise.”
“Um, do you guys still go?” Denise asked haltingly.
“Hey, darling,” Kevin broke in, “are you actually interested in that? You still have your exhibitionist bright-red kimono?”
“Ha! You kept yours too!” Denise chortled. “Admit it, you had fun too!”
“Hmmm. Another sexy story appears here, I sense,” Ayame prompted.
Denise grinned at her. “This was from when we were first helping some really terrified frosh and sophomore girls who had to strip. Kevin had this idea to get them to remove their clothes along with him, item by item, and make it like a game; then he invented this nude full-body greeting embrace and all the kids in the Program really got into that. So his idea worked but kinda backfired.”
“Backfired big time,” Kevin remarked. “I thought it would be a one-time thing, but when we met those girls in the lunchroom later, they insisted on repeat hugs—with Denise and me naked—and I just couldn’t refuse. It would have absolutely broken their hearts, I could sense, and undone what we had done earlier to help them. So we had to undress. And that happened again, later in the day.”
“But people thought we were in the Program too and Kevin and I were getting Requests, so I came up with the idea of clothes we could remove quickly,” Denise continued. “I had seen a kimono in a shop. They were red and came in a size that would fit Kevin too.”
“So Denise bought them and sprung the idea on me,” Kevin went on. “Shit, she was so hot in that kimono. I’m not ashamed that I was proud that she was my girlfriend. So the two of us played at being exhibitionists for the damned Program for our junior year—that’s a big part of my discomfort, you know. And why I’m glad we left there.”
“So tell me,” Tom said, “are you guys interested in nudism—the social kind, that is—at all?”
“I don’t have any particular problem with nudity,” Kevin commented. “When I was growing up in Japan, my family went to the onsens a lot—the coed family ones too, so it was no big deal. In Korea we went to the jjimjilbang, like a bathhouse-resort. Going to those was an experience. What’s the attraction about a nudist place?”
Tom explained the kinds of activities that all the clubs and resorts he had been at featured and about the kinds of people who enjoy the lifestyle.
“So you think you’d be interested?” he finished.
“Maybe,” Denise said slowly. She looked at Cynthia. “You got over your inhibitions to do that? And you wouldn’t do it in school?”
“It was like two different worlds, Denise,” she answered. “You know in school, since you did the Program yourself, that you’re nude while most everyone else isn’t. So you immediately stand out; your nudity calls everyone’s attention to you.”
“It’s right,” Ayame interrupted. “I saw how at the resorts that nobody stares at the others. In school everyone stared at the naked kids.”
“Tom had to ease the rest of us into getting comfortable with being naked outdoors,” Roger put in. “I’d think that with your school experience, you’d have no problem at all.”
“But, um, what about...” Kevin started.
“Erections. Yeah. Every newbie guy asks that,” Tom grinned. “You’d be surprised at how that’s not such a big deal. It happens; you carry a towel with you everywhere—you use it to sit on. Either wrap the towel around you or jump in the pool. Nobody even cares. You don’t march around showing it off, though, that’s offensive. So are you guys interested? We actually were planning to go next weekend. The temps still should be in the upper 70s.”
“Kevin? You want to?” Denise asked.
“Sure, darling, I’m game,” he answered.
“Tom? Can we tell you tomorrow?” she asked.
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