Copyright 2024 by James Breitbart, all rights reserved
[2253 words]
* * * * *Early, the next morning, five boys gathered in Marcus Walsh’s
bedroom. “So, I’ve been thinking about what to do about David,” Marcus
said.
“We can’t tell an adult,” Joey responded, “they’ll just
do some lame assembly about bullying and that will make everyone bully
David to get back at the principal.”
“And now they’re going to
go after you too,” Scott added. “I heard Jordan Guzman’s mom talking to
my mom about you, she was trying to convince my mom you’re a bad
influence or something.”
“Fuck that bitch!” Marcus shouted angrily.
“See, that’s how I know you’re gay,” Scott joked in a bid to relieve
the tension, “no one who’s into girls would want her to get fucked for
fear they’d have to be the one to do it.”
“And if Jake already told everyone, then beating him up won’t do any good,” Brendan said.
“So, there’s something I had in mind,” Marcus admitted, “and maybe if
everyone already knows I’m gay, it won’t make much difference.”
“What is it?” Brendan asked, thinking he already knew the answer.
“I was thinking that if I got stripped it would take some of the heat
off David. My parents are kind of thinking about stripping me anyway.”
“Mine, too,” Brendan said, “and what would really help David would be
if all five of us got stripped. Then there’d be a critical mass of us.”
“That’s a huge deal,” Ethan objected, “I mean, you’re not just asking
us to get in a fight for him or something. This is going totally naked
until we turn 18.”
“Not 18, just one year at a time,” Ethan
corrected him, “I looked up the rules for Washington. And on the bright
side, we might be able to talk our parents in to letting us buy booze
and weed.”
“Still…”
“You know, they strip a lot of
swimmers in Florida,” Scott added. He swam in the town’s rec league
every year and was planning on trying out for the school team when he
got to high school.
Joey looked at his watch. “Can we hurry this up?” I’m supposed to meet my Dad at 10:00.
“And my parents want me back by 9:30 so we’re ready for temple,” Ethan added.
“Can we agree to sound out our parents, and maybe practice being naked at home?”
Everyone agreed, and went their separate ways.
Ethan got a surprise a couple of hours later when he got to temple.
Jonathan’s best friend at temple was Ben Rosenzweig, who waved the
Maybaum’s over to his pew. As he stood up, Ethan realized that he was
shirtless, and when they got to the pew, confirmed that he and his
younger brother Jordan were both totally naked.
“Woah! You got stripped!” Jonathan exclaimed, a little loudly for the surroundings.
“They talked me into doing it,” Mrs. Rosenzweig told Sheri.
“My friend Tommy at school is stripped too,” Jonathan continued
excitedly, “he gets to go to school and everywhere naked now, and at
recess he…”
Sheri cut her younger son off before he could
provide a more detailed explanation. “Maybe we can continue this
conversation after the service.”
After the service, the
Rosenzweigs and Maybaums went out to lunch at a café near their
synagogue. Jonathan told his friends all about Tommy’s demonstration at
recess, and they reciprocated by telling him all about their adventures
masturbating in various public places. Everything they said made the
experience sound like a world of fun for Jonathan.
“Can I get stripped?” He asked on the ride home. “I’ll take out the trash every night and…”
Jonathan’s father interrupted him before he could make any more
promises. “Your mother and I need to talk about it first. It wouldn’t
be fair to strip you without stripping your brother.” The older
Maybaums had previously considered taking their sons on a nude Florida
vacation, having heard that it would build up their confidence, but
they had been put off stripping them in Washington when the Wagners
made it seem like a family affair. Ben and Sheri Maybaum were a
corporate attorney for a telecommunications company and a realtor,
respectively; both occupations that put a premium on looking
professional. Neither one of them wanted to show up at work in the
nude, but neither of the Rosenzweig parents had been stripped either.
If they could strip their sons without enduring it themselves, that was
another matter. “For the time being, you can both stay naked when you
change out of your good clothes and see how it feels.”
Brendan
took that remark as an injunction, and removed all of his clothes when
he got to his room, hanging his khakis and dress shirt up in his
closet. It felt somewhat odd to be lounging around naked in his room,
but not at all unpleasant. After a few minutes, his father came
upstairs to sound him out.
“How does it feel to be naked?”
Brendan was careful to phrase his response neutrally. “It feels…different.”
“You’re not too cold are you?”
“A little, but they gave David some sort of pill that makes him warm regardless of how cold it is outside.”
“So, do you think you could handle it?”
“It’s not the cold I’m worried about as much as being naked in front of
other kids. You know, kids are being really mean to David.”
“Well, I hope you’re standing up for him.”
“Marcus wants the five of us to get stripped. He thinks it will take the heat off of David.”
“He’s probably right. The more a single kid stands out, the more of a target he is.”
“So you think I should get stripped?”
“I think you need to decide that for yourself. How far are you willing to go for your friend?”
Benjamin Maybaum knew that the group of five friends had been very
supportive of Brendan when he had a difficult time adjusting to middle
school, but he didn’t know the full story. Brendan had carefully
avoided telling his parents about the anti-Semitic bullying he’d
endured, because he knew that they would complain to the school and
make it worse, and they had all avoided telling any adult that the
bullying had ended when the five of them cornered Larry Barton, the
ringleader of the bullies at the time, as he was walking home from
school and beat him up. It had worked, but Brendan knew that if Larry
had wanted to he could have gotten him in real trouble. David had
risked going to juvie on his behalf, so wasn’t it only fair for Brendan
to risk a year of public embarrassment for David? Brendan couldn’t
escape the conclusion that it was.
While Brendan was
discovering the Rosenzweig’s new identities as FENPs, Joey was
discussing matters with his father on the drive from Pinnacle Bay to
Seattle. Joey’s parents had divorced when he was in fifth grade, and
his mother had moved to Pinnacle Bay to take a job as a school
counselor. His father was supposed to get visitation two weekends a
month, but Joey’s older sister Cassie had begged off this weekend
because she was studying for the SATs, and Joey had asked to push his
departure back from Friday evening to Saturday morning when he got the
text from Marcus.
“So what was the big emergency last night?” Leon Stewart asked his son.
“So, you know that FENP thing where parents can sign their kids up to have to go naked everywhere?”
“I’m very familiar with it. Actually, I thought about signing up for
the LANP program when it first became available, but I didn’t want to
spring that on you without a heads up.”
“Yeah, well David Wagner’s parents signed him up for it without any warning at all, and he’s the only naked kid in our school.”
“Is he getting teased?”
“Oh yeah. And the worst part is, he’s gay, and this really obnoxious
kid name Jake figured it out and started making fun of him.”
“I didn’t know he was gay.”
“Neither did anyone else, except Marcus. They were like secret
boyfriends, until David got an erection in gym class and Jake figured
that meant he must be gay. So now Marcus thinks that we should all get signed up for FENP and that way the bullying will be spread out among all of us instead of just David.”
“That’s certainly an admirable decision, but I think your mother would have the final say.”
“I know, but I wanted to know if you think I should do it.”
“I do. Aside from helping your friend, I think you’ll be happier
naked.” Leon decided to take his son out to lunch, where he could
further probe some of the issues the conversation had raised.
“So, you were talking about David being gay earlier.”
“Yeah.”
“Is part of the reason you’re upset about what’s happening to David that you think you might be gay?”
“Maybe. I don’t know if I am or not.”
“How so?”
“When I first started being friends with those guys, we used to do kind
of sexy games with each other, and I still think about guys sometimes
when I…you know…”
“Jerk off?”
“Yeah. But other times when I jerk off I think about girls. Is that gay or not?”
“The word for someone who is attracted to both men and women is
bisexual. The truth is, most people are a little bi but lean one way or
the other. You might find that you prefer boys or girls when you get
older, or you might turn out to be 50/50, but either way is perfectly
fine. I think having more opportunities to explore your interests would
be good. Your mother gets the final say on stripping you, but you can
practice going naked in the house if you want.
When they got
back to the little bungalow where Leon lived, Joey stripped naked, and
his father joined him. It was a guy’s evening of video games and joking
around, interrupted only when Leon put on a robe to answer the door for
the pizza boy, and both guys decided that they were physically more
comfortable in the nude.
While Joey and Leon were chowing down
on pizza, Ethan was putting the finishing touches on chicken alfredo.
His mother had died the year previously after a two-year battle with
breast cancer, another link in the chain of good and bad fortune that
bound the six boys together so closely, and in an effort to make things
easier for the family during her illness, he had taken on much of the
cooking. Ethan spooned the dish onto three plates, one for him, one for
his father, and one for his younger sister Amanda, and his father, and
shared a quiet dinner with them. His father noticed that something was
off, and joined Ethan in the kitchen after dinner to wash the dishes.
“Is everything alright?” he asked.
“It’s my friend David. His parents stripped him, and he’s getting a lot
of teasing for it in school, so Marcus thinks we should all get
stripped.”
“Hmm…you know, I had thought about it for you and
Amanda. I know it would be hard for you, but I think Amanda would
really benefit when she’s a little older.”
“How so?”
“Just being comfortable with her body. You know, it can be really hard for girls.”
“I know.”
“But we don’t have to make a decision right now.”
“I can just let the guys know you’d potentially be open to it.”
Scott was actually the last one of the six to broach the subject with
his parents. With four boys, they had been busy all day. Scott had
karate practice, his youngest brother Drew had a soccer game, and the
oldest, Brandon, had a JV track meet. When he got home, Scott removed
his gi and walked naked back into the living room. This wasn’t actually
that unusual. Scott’s mother, Kalena, was a Native Hawaiian, and sought
to impart her culture’s casual attitude toward nudity to her sons. They
were all quite used to being naked in the house, and skinny-dipping off
the dock of their sound-front house in the summer, but also quite aware
that others in town didn’t share their attitude.
Kalena took
no notice of her son’s nudity, and drafted him into peeling potatoes
for dinner, which gave him a chance to talk to her semi-privately in
the kitchen.
“Hey, mom. Have you ever thought about stripping us?”
“We’ve been discussing it, but I wanted to make it a surprise. How did you know?”
“I didn’t actually,” Scott went on to explain David’s situation and Marcus’s proposal.
“Well, that’s certainly an argument in favor of stripping you.”
At that moment, Brandon walked into the kitchen, also naked. He had
just showered after getting home from his track meet, and filled a
glass with water from the refrigerator.
“Scott and I were just talking about getting you all registered for the Family-Enforced Nudity Program,” Kalena informed him.
Brandon was unsurprised. “Yeah, Adrian Walsh has been texting me about that.”
“Since when are you friends with Adrian Walsh?” Scott asked.
“He’s texting everyone in the high school with siblings in middle
school,” Brandon explained, “it sounds like Marcus came out of the
closet pretty spectacularly.”
“Yeah, he made Jake MacDonald run away like a coward.”
“The rumor going around is that Jake is planning something to mess with the two of them – Marcus and David.”