Copyright 2024 by James Breitbart, all rights reserved
[2,409 words]
* * * * *The next morning, Jeannette set out two warming pills by each of the
kids’ plates. David was hungry enough to come down for breakfast
voluntarily, although he avoided speaking to his parents and siblings
until Jeannette spoke to him.
“Your gym coach wanted me to come talk to him this morning. “I think it’s to talk about your gym uniform.”
“Great, now everybody in school gets to see my mother naked.”
“I can give you a ride and drop Tommy and Natalie off on the way.”
“Fine.”
David separated from his mother as soon as they got to the parking lot
and hurried to his homeroom, where Marcus, Brendan, and Ethan were
waiting for him.
“How bad was it?” Ethan asked.
“Well, I’m grounded for two weeks, and when I get ungrounded I won’t be
able to go anywhere because I’ll be naked all the time.”
“That sucks.”
Brendan enacted the plan he’d come up with the previous night, to
dangle the prospect of being stripped by his parents and see how David
would react. “I think I might be joining you soon. Jonathan was so
excited about Tommy jerking off at recess that he stripped off as soon
as he got home and spent the whole day naked until this morning when he
had to get dressed for school.”
David rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Tommy and Natalie are loving the whole thing.”
“I don’t know if they’re just going to let him run around naked at home or try to strip us.”
“Well, at least if you do I’ll have some company.”
That statement confirmed to Brendan that David would actually
appreciate it if his friends were in the same boat, and a look from
Marcus confirmed that he was thinking the same thing.
“So, um,
Mom was kind of asking about you,” Brendan admitted, “I told her about
Jake MacDonald, but I made her promise not to tell your Mom.”
David shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. Coach Lee’s probably going to tell her anyway.”
In fact, Coach Lee was telling his mother at that exact moment.
“Before we discuss the shoes, I should tell you that David got an
erection in class yesterday and one of the other boys teased him about
it. I stopped it as soon as it started, but some of the other teachers
have told me that they overheard homophobic remarks. Do you know if
David is gay?”
“He hasn’t told us, but we know he’s having sex
with Marcus Walsh. They think they’re keeping it hidden from us. To be
honest, part of the reason I stripped him is to get this part of it
over as soon as possible.”
“I understand, but it’s difficult to keep an eye on all those kids in the locker room.”
“I’m sure.”
“We might need to change David’s schedule for his own safety. We could
transfer him to a girl’s class, but I’m not sure how the girls’ parents
would react.”
“I don’t think that would send the other kids
the message we want to send, and to be honest I don’t really agree with
splitting the classes up by gender in the first place. Couldn’t you
just let him stay out of the locker room?”
“I guess he doesn’t need to change, except for the shoes.”
“Could he wear his soccer cleats?”
“I’m afraid not, because of the spikes, but he will need the cleats and his shinguard and athletic cup for games.”
“It’s no problem if we need to buy shoes.”
“I’d hate for you to have to go to that expense, especially after the
cost of stripping your kids. To be honest, Mrs. Wagner, I’d prefer to
have the kids barefoot anyway. It’s really better for their feet not to
wear shoes as often while they’re still growing, and it teaches them
better control.”
“You don’t think that’s contributing to the teasing, is it?”
“I don’t think so. Kids actually like going barefoot, it’s their
parents who insist on putting them in shoes. The problem is that the
uniform code for the district requires tennis shoes for PE, and they’re
approved as safety equipment under the FENP program. I’m not sure if
that means he has to wear them or they’re optional.”
“Is there a second opinion you could get?”
“I can call the district’s attorney, but it’s a Friday, so I’m not sure
when he’ll get back to me. I guess you’d rather be able to go shoe
shopping this weekend if you have to.”
“To be honest, Coach
Lee, David’s pretty angry at me for stripping him. I’d like to delay
going anywhere with him in public for a bit.”
Coach Lee
dismissed Mrs. Wagner and got ready for his first class of the day,
which happened to be the one with David, Ethan, and Jake. He pulled
David aside, and told him that since he didn’t need to change, he could
wait outside the locker room while everyone else dressed out, then went
into the locker room to tell the class that they would be spending
another day barefoot.
“Why do we have to go barefoot just because Wagner’s naked?” Jake asked truculently, “It’s gross.”
“Actually it’s good for your feet,” Coach Lee explained, “we can
discuss it next week in health class, but for now do it because I’m the
teacher and I said so.”
Jake waited until the coach was out of
earshot to complain further. “That pervert’s probably got a foot
fetish, too.” In fact, Jake didn’t actually suspect David’s foot
fetish, and was just making things up to be cruel, but hearing him say
that made Ethan nervous that Jake had somehow either overheard him the
previous day or intuited the reason for his erection.
David
was also worried about being found out, and eager to avoid a repeat of
the previous day. He decided to reduce the risk of arousal by
studiously avoiding looking at anyone else’s feet. It did the trick of
keeping his penis tamed, but meant that he wasn’t really paying
attention to his surroundings, and totally failed to notice the
dodgeball Jake MacDonald had vindictively lobbed at him until it
collided with his shoulder.
He was the first student ‘out,’ but Ethan soon joined him on the bench, having gotten out on purpose so they could talk.
“Hey,” Ethan whispered, “I think Jake’s onto you about the…” he gestured to his bare toes.
“Fuck.”
Ethan rubbed his foot sympathetically over the top of David’s, but
David jerked his out of the way. “Don’t do that! You’ll give me a
boner.”
“Good point, but maybe we could come over after school?”
“No you can’t. I’m grounded, remember?”
“Shit, you’re right.”
Ana Roseblatt got out and walked toward the two of them, causing them
to cut short their conversation. When class ended, David took another
cold shower even though he was neither hard nor sweaty. He just wanted
to avoid the rest of the class for a couple of minutes.
He was
successful in avoiding Jake until lunch. The boys went to the library
again, but Jake had decided to hunt them down, and followed them in
with a couple of his henchmen. The librarian was on her own lunch
break, so there was no adult to protect them.
“Hey, faggot,” Jake snarled at David, “I’d better not catch you looking at me in the locker room.”
“I wasn’t even in the locker room.”
“Well, I’d better not catch you looking at me in class either, queer.”
Marcus had decided the previous night that he was going to pay any
social or disciplinary price needed to protect the boy he loved, and
stood up to confront Jake. “Don’t call him that.”
“What?”
“Faggot or queer or whatever. Don’t call him that.”
“What, are you queer too?”
Marcus advanced toward Jake, getting in his face and making it clear
that he was several inches taller. “Yeah, I am. Actually, David’s my
boyfriend, and I don’t like people messing with my boyfriend. So don’t
call him a faggot, or queer, or whatever else you little dipshits come
up with. And get the fuck out of my face.”
Jake backed down
and walked out of the library. Marcus sat down next to David, knowing
that Jake was going to tell everyone in the school that he was gay to
get back at him for making him back down, but oddly at peace with it.
“You didn’t have to do that,” David said.
“I did,” Marcus put an arm around his boyfriend’s shoulder. “for me. I
couldn’t watch you get hurt like that and not do anything about it. If
you’re going to get bullied then we’re going to get bullied together.”
Meanwhile, Coach Lee had spent his own lunch break on the phone with
the district’s lawyer. On being informed of the Wagner’s predicament,
the lawyer performed a keyword search of the state statutes and found
an obscure provision in an 1895 law that had never been overturned,
holding that school districts could not prevent a child from attending
barefoot if they didn’t own shoes. The state law overrode the
district’s uniform policy, meaning that the school had to give David
full credit for completing PE barefoot.
Coach Lee called
Mrs. Wagner to tell her the good news, and almost as soon as she got
off the phone with him she received another call from Coach Topol at
the elementary school.
“I noticed your kids in school naked the past couple of days.”
“We’ve stripped them all.”
“Even David?” Coach Topol remembered David from his own elementary
school days. He had been a gifted athlete, but had something of a
temper. Coach Topol didn’t think he would have reacted well to being
stripped.
“Yes, although he’s not happy about it.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance he’d be willing to serve as a model for our presentation on puberty.”
“At the moment, you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, although
I’m hoping he’ll get used to it. My husband and I are registered for
the LANP program if you just need an adult body.”
“I was
really hoping to get a demonstration of masturbation, but I’m not sure
if the other parents would approve of you and your husband doing it.”
“Tommy would be happy to.”
“Yes, I heard about his presentation at recess yesterday. The cold won’t bother him, will it?”
“Oh no. They give us these pills. I don’t know how they work, but I took my morning walk today totally naked and I felt fine.”
“Hmm…you might want to ask the kids’ doctor about possible side effects for those.”
The kids’ pediatrician happened to be Marcus’ mother. Jeannette called her at her office, and she recognized the number.
“Jeannette, are the kids okay.”
“Oh, it’s not an emergency. I’m sure Marcus has told you that we’re nudists now.”
“He didn’t mention anything about that, but then he hardly talks to me these days.”
“David is the same way. Well, now he’s furious with me, as you can
imagine. But, the reason I’m calling is that they prescribed us these
pills that regulate our body temperature, and Tommy’s PE teacher
thought I should check with you about side effects.”
“Oh, I’ve
heard about those pills. They work by increasing the rate at which your
body burns fat. The main side effect you’ll probably notice is needing
to eat more. It’s great for adults because you lose wait, but a kid
might end up losing too much weight. It’d probably be a good idea to
move up their annual physical by a few weeks.”
Dr. Walsh
decided to ask Marcus what was going on when she got home, but before
she could do so, he had conferred with his brother Adrian, a high
school sophomore who was old enough to know more about the world than
Marcus, but young enough that Marcus could trust him not to just agree
with the adults on everything. Marcus began the conversation bluntly.
“I came out at school today.”
“What the hell did you do that for?”
“David’s parents signed him up for that stupid FENP thing, so now he
has to go to school naked and he got a boner in gym class and Jake
MacDonald started calling him a fag, so I got in an argument with Jake
and Jake said I was queer and…”
Adrian cut off his brother’s
rapid-fire verbiage. “You came out because you thought that Jake would
split his attention between the two of you and that would make things a
little easier for David?”
“Yeah.”
“That was really brave of you.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t think it was brave?”
“The thing that would really make things easier for David was if he wasn’t the only naked kid.”
“You want Mom and Dad to sign you up for that program?” Adrian was a
little worried. He was familiar enough with the Stripped for Florida
program to know that families typically stripped their kids all in one
go, which meant that if Marcus got stripped, he was likely to as well.
“I don’t know. It’d really suck, but it’s not fair that David is stripped and I’m not.”
“It’s not, but that’s his parents’ fault, not yours.”
“Yeah, but it turns me on to look at him sitting naked in class. I feel like I’m taking advantage of him.”
“I think you need to figure out what he wants before you make any decisions. Why don’t you go over to his house tomorrow?”
“He’s grounded.”
“Then get all your other friends together and figure out how far you’re all willing to go.”
It turned out that Dr. Walsh had had the same idea on the drive home.
She began by telling Marcus about her conversation with Mrs. Wagner,
and gave him a chance to tell his version of what had happened at
school that week. It omitted him coming out and almost fighting with
Jake, but he admitted that David was being made fun of.
“You know,” Dr. Walsh suggested, “it might help David if you got stripped too.”
“Were you thinking about stripping us?”
“It was in the back of my mind. You know the stripping program in Florida has done a lot of good.”
“It hasn’t done much good for David.”
After dinner, Marcus texted Scott, Joey, Ethan, and Brendan with instructions to meet at his house the next morning.