Samantha looked up and down the street and said, “Yes, silly.”
I darted out to her car as she sat down behind the wheel. Just as I got to the passenger door, I heard the lock click. I pulled on the door handle anyway, but the door wouldn’t budge. Samantha sat in the driver’s seat laughing in an exaggeratedly loud voice.
“Shut up,” I said, crouching down beside the car.
Samantha unlocked the car, and I yanked the door open, climbed inside, and pulled it shut. Two months of using those little black butt towels had conditioned me into not putting my bare ass on any surface, but I didn’t have one of those towels with me. So I sat on my hip, leaning over toward Samantha.
“What are you so shy for?” she asked. “So many people have seen you naked lately, why should you care about a few more?”
“Because I don’t want anyone to call the police,” I said.
“People only call the police on naked old men, not naked college girls.”
I wasn’t so sure of that, but I didn’t say anything as Samantha backed the car out of the driveway and took off toward the airport. I looked around inside the car but didn’t see my clothes.
“Where’s my stuff?” I asked.
“In the trunk.”
“The trunk! Why are they in the trunk?”
“I didn’t want you to chicken out,” Samantha said. “Look, we’ll stop and see Chris really quick, five minutes tops, and then I’ll get your clothes out of the trunk and take you home. I promise.”
“Where does Chris work?” I asked.
“The Comfort Inn near DFW. He’s on the front desk during the graveyard shift.”
“Great,” I said, hoping that Chris would be the only person there.
“I’m only doing this because I know you want to.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“Because you’re an exhibitionist. You have to be to have done all that shit you did in California. How was Miley Cyrus by the way?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her except for that little bit on stage.”
The clock on the dash of Samantha’s car read 11:55. I wanted to call home and at least tell Daddy or Mom that I would be a little late, but my phone was in the pocket of my shorts, in the trunk.
“Remember when we went skinny dipping late at night at my apartment pool,” Samantha said.
“Yes,” I said, remembering how that memory had resurfaced during my first talk with Dr. Slater.
“I knew then that you were an exhibitionist.”
“Bull! I’m not an exhibitionist. At least not back then.”
“Ah, so you admit you are now. You were then too. You were just scared of getting caught, like now. That whole skinny-dipping thing was your idea. And then when that drunk guy came by, I had to hold you into the pool and shush you to be quiet. You had wanted to flash him. ‘He’s not going to call the cops; he’s drunk,’ you said.”
“I did not.”
“Did too.”
“That’s not the way I remember it.”
“Then your memory is faulty,” Samantha said.
We rode in silence until Samantha stopped the car right in front of the entrance of the Comfort Inn.
“OK, go on in,” Samantha said.
“Uh, no. You’re coming in with me.” I wasn’t about to take the chance of Samantha driving off and leaving me there naked.
She sighed and killed the motor. I waited until she was out of the car and standing close enough to the hotel entrance for the automatic doors to slide open before opening the passenger door. After taking a quick look around, I darted from the car into the building. Samantha giggled as she skipped into the building behind me.
“Hey Chris,” she said to what appeared to be an empty lobby, “I brought someone to see you.”
Chris emerged from the office behind the front desk, and his eyes widened when he saw me.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Dani, what are you doing here? Where are your clothes? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“It’s good to see you too,” I said sarcastically. I turned around to go, but Chris disappeared into the side area and walked out into the lobby between me and the door.
“This was Samantha’s idea,” I said.
He looked at her, saw the expression on her face, and relaxed just a bit. “Yeah, I bet it was,” he conceded. He looked me over from head to toe, and I felt that familiar tingling under his scrutiny. It wasn’t too long ago that I had thought I would wind up marrying him.
“It really is good to see you,” I said.
“Yeah. You too.” He hesitated. “But you should probably go. I could get in trouble. And they have security cameras.”
“Shit,” I said.
Samantha shrugged and said, “OK.” She took my arm and walked me back outside. “I’ll see you later Chris.”
“Bye,” he said, turning and watching my bare ass walk away.
Samantha popped the trunk with her key fob, and I grabbed my clothes and started putting them on right there in the Comfort Inn carport.
“Sorry,” Samantha said when she dropped me off at home.
“No, it was fun.”
“I know. I just feel bad about it now.”
“I know the feeling. There were times at the university when I would get carried away, and then, later, I would feel nothing but regret. Like when I stood up facing the camera on Stossel. I couldn’t believe that I had done that afterwards. It’s weird.”
“Did it ever get any better?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The more stuff I did, the more time I spent naked, the less intensity I felt, both the euphoria during and regret afterward.”
“Is that what it was like to be naked out in public like you were? Euphoric?”
I thought about that for a second before saying, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I felt, especially when it started.”
“Hmm.”
I sat there in her car for a moment, thinking.
“Listen,” I finally said, “would you help me with something next Saturday?”
“Sure. What?”
“Go with me somewhere.”
“Where?”
“A nudist resort just outside of Decatur.” I glanced over and saw the frightened look on Samantha’s face. “You wouldn’t have to get naked,” I explained. “I found the place on the AANR site, and I wanted to go and see how it felt to be naked around a bunch of other naked people.”
“What am I supposed to do there if I stay dressed?”
I shrugged. “Sit around and drink beer, I guess. The only place where you have to be naked, at least according to their website, is the pool and hot tub.”
“OK,” Samantha said. “I guess I owe you after tonight.”
“Yes, you do,” I said before wishing her a good night and getting out of the car.
The next week seemed to crawl by. My period started Monday, so I spent a lot of the week either in a bad mood or just not feeling well. Daddy worked a lot, but when he was home, he still seemed withdrawn and standoffish. Mom worked too, so I had the house to myself for most of the time. I wished I still had the car I had used during my last two years of high school. Daddy hadn’t wanted me to drive all the way to and from Palm Desert, and he didn’t want the car just sitting here taking up space in the driveway. So we had sold it, and I had used the funds as spending money during my first semester at Coachella, before I got the job in the Copy Center.
The good thing about having the house to myself was that I got to spend a lot more time naked. I made and ate my lunch in the kitchen, watched TV in the living room, and even did my laundry all while naked, something that would have been unthinkable before I went away to Coachella. I thought a lot about that last conversation I’d had with Samantha on Saturday night about how my emotions had been on a yoyo at the beginning of the Project and how that yoyo seemed to slow down the further along I got in it. I started writing about that first day, trying to remember and describe ever
y little thing that happened and how I felt about it. (If you’re reading this now, you will realize that my writing went far beyond that first day.)
Samantha and I talked several times on the phone, and she faithfully showed up at the house at ten o’clock Saturday morning which happened to be the start of Memorial Day weekend. I told Mom that we would be gone all day, and when she asked where, I just told her we were going to the lake with some friends. The drive to the nudist resort took about an hour, although we extended that by stopping at a Panda Express in Decatur to eat lunch. I had made a reservation via email earlier in the week, so our check-in at the resort was quick and painless. A friendly Filipino lady wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts confirmed our information and took the money for the camp’s day fees and then offered to give us a tour of the grounds on her golf cart. I quickly got undressed, leaving my clothes in Samantha’s car, grabbed my beach towel and got in the cart. If the fully dressed Samantha was uncomfortable squeezed in between naked me and the topless resort manager, she never let it show. We saw the two pools already populated by several nude people on lounge chairs, the clubhouse, the volleyball and tennis courts, and the hot tub and sauna.
That day, at least the time spent at the nudist resort, was one of the most blissful, relaxing times I had ever had. After the golf cart tour, we were taken back to the office, and we drove Samantha’s car back down to the pool area. We had brought a cooler full of snacks and drinks and found a nice shady table on the deck. Most of the other nudists were over forty, but a group of younger people, calling themselves Young Nudists of Texas, were holding a special “Nude Olympics” there, with all kinds of events: tennis, horse shoes, tug of war, and what seemed to be the resort’s favorite pastime, water volleyball. Samantha eventually tired of being the only person wearing clothes and stripped down to nothing.
The water volleyball was a blast. I played in four games, with whichever team I was on winning three of them. Samantha and I also spent a lot of time just sitting around the table by the pool, drinking and talking with the other nudists. They were all amazingly friendly, and with all of us naked, there didn’t seem to be any class distinction. The people we talked to could have been CEOs or garbage collectors or anything else. We were all just people enjoying ourselves in the great outdoors. The members there invited us to their big potluck dinner that evening even though we hadn’t brought anything, so we stayed and ate way too much food.
As I sat in the clubhouse eating a dessert of banana cream pie and listening to two different conversations, I realized that I hadn’t once felt that tingling that had stayed with me almost all the time during my two naked months at CVU. Among the nudists, I was part of the norm, a naked person among naked people. That feeling that I craved, and it was only then that I realized I did crave it, was nowhere to be found at the nudist resort. I had felt it the week before, when I had been the only naked person at the pool party, and I realized that what Samantha had said was true: I was an exhibitionist. I thought about Dr. Slater’s nudity study and realized what a gift it had been, being able to go naked in the general world and, once I got past the humiliation of being forced to be naked, to enjoy those feelings of freedom, exhilaration, and euphoria.
Still, the day at the nudist resort had been so wonderfully relaxing that I knew that I could be both a nudist and an exhibitionist and that I would be visiting nudist resorts regularly for the rest of my life. After dinner, Samantha and I were invited to stay for the regular Saturday night dance. I, of course, didn’t want to leave, and Samantha was also having a great time. I went to the car and dug out my phone to call Mom and tell her that we would be out late. I was surprised to see twelve missed calls on my screen, eight of them from Greg.
Instead of listening to the six voice mails, I dialed Greg directly.
“Danielle,” he answered. “What the hell is going on?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He gave a little laugh of disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, how could you do this?”
“Do what?” I said, still reeling from Greg’s language. I hadn’t ever heard him utter a cuss word before.
“Where have you been all day?”
“Out,” I replied. “Away from my phone. What is going on?”
“Did you not listen to my voice mails?”
“No,” I replied, getting irritated now. “I saw your missed calls and just decided to call you right back.”
“Well, you should check Drudge Report. You are all over the news again.”
I closed my eyes and imagined the security video at the Comfort Inn. Somehow word had gotten out that I was running around naked back home here in Texas.
“I mean, how could you?” Greg continued which made me think that this was more serious than showing up on a hotel security video.
“Maybe if you told me exactly what you’re talking about, I could answer that.”
“You really don’t know? OK. The Dallas Morning News printed a story about how you cheated on a paper and that Dr. Slater blackmailed you into doing the nudity study and then forced you to lie about why you were naked. All the major networks picked it up. Dr. Slater may lose her position here because of this.”
“Oh my God,” I muttered in disbelief.
“Sylvia Smith has already been fired. She wasn’t a tenured professor, so it was easy to get rid of her. Dr. Hallum, the University president, resigned. Dr. Slater’s been hung out to dry, and if she goes, I don’t know what’s going to happen to the rest of the sociology department.”
I sat down in the passenger seat of Samantha’s car, feeling suddenly sick to my stomach.
“The university’s Board of Regents is holding a special emergency hearing this next Friday to decide whether to initiate a forced dismissal of Dr. Slater or not. Luckily, getting rid of someone with tenure isn’t a simple thing.”
“Shit,” I said.
We were both quiet for a moment, listening to each other’s breathing.
“Is it true, about the paper you cheated on?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Who did you tell about it?”
“No one.”
“Then who told this newspaper person about it?”
“It had to have been my father,” I replied.
“Well, fuck a duck.”
I sat in the car looking at the approaching darkness and tried to remember when my flight back to Palm Springs was supposed to leave. Summer classes started a week from Monday, so the dorm would be open the Friday before, the day of the hearing. I was supposed to fly back some time on Saturday, but now I knew I had to go back Friday morning. What would Daddy say when I told him to change my flight?
“What time is the hearing?” I asked.
“Three o’clock.”
That would give me time to get there if I could get a morning flight. “OK, I’ll be there.”
“I’m sure you will,” Greg said. “You’re their star witness against Dr. Slater.”
Before I could counter that, Greg hung up.
Chapter Seventeen – The Hearing
Samantha and I left the nudist resort right after my phone conversation with Greg. I listened to the six voice mails while she drove us back to North Richland Hills. Four were from Greg. He was fairly calm in the first one, but the agitation in his voice at being unable to reach me seemed to grow with each subsequent message. The other two were from a representative of the Coachella Valley University’s Board of Regents requesting my presence at a closed door hearing on Friday. When I called the number back to tell the guy that I was planning on attending, he asked me to not speak to the media regarding any of this until after the hearing.
We were at the point where Highway 287 merged with Interstate 35W in north Fort Worth when Greg called me back. I was tempted to not answer when I saw his name on my phone display. How dare he be angry with me just because I wasn’t surgically attached to my cell phone! But I answered after four rings.
“Hello,” I
said.
“Hey. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten so bent out of shape.”
“Yeah.”
“Where were you today?”
“I was out in the country where the cell signal is questionable at best,” I said, deciding that I didn’t want to reveal that I had left my phone in the car for several hours.
“Well, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry that Dr. Slater did that to you. None of us on the research team knew about the suspension. We just thought you had volunteered on your own to get the six semester hours.”
“But you knew about the six hours,” I said.
“Yeah. And if she did blackmail you, then I suppose she deserves to be fired. I just – I don’t know what’s going to happen to all my work. She’s my main faculty advisor, and I’m so close to that doctorate now. Do you know how much work I’ve put into it so far?”
“I can’t imagine,” I said. We were both quiet for a moment before I asked him, “Were you surprised that she would use that plagiarized paper to get me to do the Project?”
Greg sighed. “Surprised? Yes. Shocked? No, not really. She’s very demanding and usually gets her way, one way or another.”
“Well, OK.”
“Are you flying in Friday?” he asked.
“Yes, I’d better be now.”
“Let me know what time and I’ll go to the airport and pick you up.”
“OK. Thanks. I need to let you go. We’re almost home, and I need to go have a talk with my father.”
“Good luck with that,” Greg said.
“Thanks. The good thing is, at least he waited until after my grade report was issued.”
After I ended the call, Samantha looked over at me with a questioning look. “What is all this about?”
So I told her the whole story, since it was, according to Greg, all over the news now.
“That explains a lot,” she said when I had finished. “A lot of people around here just thought you had lost your mind, been drinking too much California water or something.”
“Nope,” I said. “I’m still sane. At least I was at the beginning of the Project.”
We had reached my house, and Daddy’s car was in the driveway next to Mom’s. I steeled myself for what I knew would be a confrontation.
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