Some of them were calling to me, but I ignored them. They weren’t seeing me as a person; I was just a naked girl to them, an object. The suppressed humiliation returned, and I again felt anger at Dr. Slater for making me do this.
Determined to not allow my nudity to alter my regular activity, I took the elevator and ignored the stares I got from the people in the lobby. Diane and James were in the room when I got there.
“Holy shit,” Diane said, shaking her head. “We need to have a party or something to celebrate your coming out.”
“My coming out?”
“Yeah, little Miss Nudist.”
“I wish I had a naked girl living with me,” James said, and Diane punched him in the shoulder.
I put my binder away and pretended that Diane and James were not there making comments. I got my phone, towel, and room key stuffed into my tiny hand purse and started to head toward the art building.
“You should shave your pussy,” Diane said.
“What?”
“I mean, if you’re going to show it off, you should shave it. People don’t want to see hair.”
“How do you know?”
She and James both smiled. I had never seen Diane completely naked even though we were roommates. I shook my head and walked out of the room. It was just like Diane to suggest, and therefore criticize, my grooming choices.
I took the side stairwell and went out the back entrance to avoid my fans outside the front doors. The walk to the art department had been like all my other naked walks, with lots of wide-eyed staring and gasps. I ignored it and just went about my business. I arrived at the Fine Arts Building early, so I stopped in the art department office. Matt had mentioned something about paperwork, so I thought I would be proactive and get it taken care of. If anything, it would make a good impression on him.
The receptionist gave me the usual reaction when I walked in, open mouthed expression of incredulity.
“Hi, I’m Danielle, and Matt just booked me to model for his figure drawing class.”
“Oh. Well, I guess you would be a good fit for that job. But why are you naked now?”
“It’s a long story. But it will be in the school paper in the morning.”
“OK.”
I gave the receptionist my full name, and she looked me up in her computer. My termination from the print shop hadn’t been completed in the system, so all she had to do was change my job title and pay, making sure that I wasn’t still employed at the print shop. After signing the simple change form, I was all done. The receptionist did say that the department chair would have to sign off on it, but that that wouldn’t be a problem. She gave me a blank timesheet, and I took it with me up to the drawing studio.
Five students were setting up their easels when I walked in. I took my place on the model stand, setting my timesheet and purse down on the back corner of the platform and removing my towel from the purse.
“You’re the campus naked girl I’ve heard about?” one of the artists, a slightly overweight blonde girl with thick-rimmed glasses, asked me.
“The one and only,” I replied.
She gave a snorty, nerdy laugh and said, “Cool!”
A young guy in jeans and tie-dyed t-shirt walked into the room and came straight toward me.
“Danielle? I’m Matt.”
I smiled and shook his hand. He barely looked older than the students. “Hi.”
“You weren’t kidding when you said you didn’t need a robe. I guess you’re the one everyone’s talking about.”
“Yes,” I replied, blushing at my sudden fame.
Matt went over the kinds of poses he wanted for the gestures, demonstrating a few of them for me. When class started, I did my best, imagining myself as a ballerina, a gymnast, or a volleyball player. The gestures were almost a kind of dance, and I felt like I was performing. The longer poses were simpler. Of the three twenty minute poses, one was standing with one hand on a hip, another was sitting cross-legged on the platform with one knee up, and the third was reclining. For the one hour pose, he had me seated in a chair. I surprised myself by being able to keep still. Matt marked the position of my feet and hands with masking tape halfway through the long pose and then told me to take a break. I walked naked around the room looking at the drawings of myself, which were all amazing. Everyone seemed to see me differently, but each drawing was beautiful in some unique way. When I got back into the pose, only a little instruction was needed to get me back into the same position. At the end of the class, all the students applauded, and Matt was very complimentary. He was also impressed that I had taken care of the paperwork. Matt helped me fill out and sign my timesheet, signed it himself, and told me that he would turn it in for me.
“Are you available next Tuesday, same time, 11 to 2?” he asked before I left.
“Absolutely,” I said.
He smiled, the dimples in his cheeks stirring those familiar tingling sensations again. “Good. Consider yourself booked.”
I smiled back at him. I was going to like my new job and my new boss.
Chapter Eight - Violation
Even though my first class wasn’t until 11:00 Wednesday morning, I still got up before 7:00, showered, dressed in only my special microphone necklace, and went downstairs to check the campus newspaper rack just inside the front door of the dorm. The new edition was there, with the banner headline “Full Exposure” in large block letters. The subtitle directly underneath it was, “Naked Girl on Campus Speaks”. A black and white photo of me on the love seat was next to the article, my arm positioned in such a way as to block my nipples from view. My hip was clearly visible and very clearly naked, but no pubic hair or buttocks were showing. I took two copies, reading the article as I walked over to the dining hall, trying to ignore the stares of my fellow students. Clarissa had done a good job detailing the surprise most people on campus had received at my earliest naked appearances. She also made me out to be some kind of crusading hero, quoting the story I had given her about my cousin. If the story had been true, I would have felt really proud. As it was, I felt like I had dodged a bullet by coming up with a plausible story without divulging the secret of Dr. Slater’s study. And even though we had talked about the use of my last name at the end of our interview, she had left it off, referring to me once as “Danielle, a sophomore from Texas majoring in English and pre-law” and then as Dani throughout the rest of the article. At the end was a statement that more photos were posted on the newspaper’s website along with a warning that most of them were NSFW. It took my brain a second to translate that acronym as “not safe for work”.
I went through the serving line and got a heavy breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and biscuits covered in gravy. I wasn’t normally a breakfast eater, but yesterday’s art class had caused me to miss lunch for a second consecutive day. Luckily, there hadn’t been a swim class yesterday to drain almost every ounce of energy from my body like Monday. Still, I knew I couldn’t get by on just one meal a day, so I dove into my breakfast. Liz and Audrey walked in, spotted me, and sat across from me after going through the serving line.
“Good morning,” Liz said.
“Hey.”
“I saw a certain naked girl on the front page of the paper this morning,” Audrey said with a grin.
I smiled back at her, my mouth full of food, and pushed one of my copies to her.
“In England, they used to put those girls on page three,” Liz said, and she and Audrey both laughed. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I just let the comment fly over my head.
“Hey,” one of two guys said to Liz. I had seen them both before, but I’d never talked to them. One was taller than the other, but both were athletically built with finely combed hair and smooth skin.
“Hey Zack,” Liz said. “Sit down. Our under-dressed friend here is Dani. Dani, this is Zack and Bruce.”
I shook their hands, noting that the taller one was Bruce.
“Hi Dani,” Zack said. “T
hat’s a heck of a way to get famous.”
They both sat down, and we all started talking. I ate my breakfast, looking around at the rest of the dining hall. The people who used to sit with me all the time were at a table across the room. As far as I recall, none of them had ever talked to the any of the people at my current table. I wondered what Dr. Slater would think of these results, the avoidance of my old friends and the draw of new ones. At least, I hoped they were friends. After what had happened with Brandon yesterday and as exposed and vulnerable as I felt, I questioned everyone’s motives.
I could tell from the way they talked and their hand gestures that Zack and Bruce were gay. It made me wonder about Liz and Audrey. Were they lesbians? They had invited me to a bar called Mary Ellen’s, so I made a mental note to look that up once I had looked at my photos on the school newspaper’s website. Diane’s “coming out” comment from the day before came to mind, even though I wasn’t gay and had never even felt attraction to another girl. Here I was sitting at the table for gays, lesbians, and nudists.
After breakfast, I went back upstairs to get on my computer and look at my photos. They were amazingly vivid high definition shots of me. I was, of course, fully naked, but I had a smile on my face and not the sultry look like I seen on the models in the few adult magazines I had looked at. The photos of me seemed to depict a girl who just liked to be free and naked. And while the full frontal photos were rather explicit, they didn’t seem dirty or pornographic. I just looked like a free spirit, plain, with very little makeup. I was OK with them on the university website, given that everyone on campus sees me naked on a daily basis anyway. I just hoped that no one back home saw them.
Diane stirred, farted, and sat up in bed. She looked at me as I closed the newspaper site and switched to my report for Dr. Finfrock’s class. I had just about finished it the night before, along with writing the assignment about the “Bartleby the Scrivener” story.
“Morning,” I said.
“Hey.”
She stumbled up, grabbed her stuff, and headed toward the bathroom. I got to work on revising and proof-reading my paper. It wasn’t anywhere close to being as good as Amanda Johnson’s report, the one I had plagiarized, but it would suffice, I thought. Diane walked back into the room after twenty minutes or so wrapped in a towel, her dirty pajamas in a bundle under her arm. She would normally put on panties and jeans or shorts under her towel before removing said towel with her back to me to put on her bra and shirt. For some reason, seeing her now in her towel made me think about the comment she had made to me yesterday.
“So you think I should shave, huh?” I said.
“What?” Diane looked at me in a daze, still not fully awake. She had never been a morning person.
“You said I should shave my pubic hair.”
“Oh, yeah. I did say that. Yeah, I mean, if you’re going to go around showing your pussy off to everyone, you ought to shave it.”
“Do you shave yours?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Let me see.”
Diane frowned and said, “No,” with emphasis. “I’m not going to show you my kitty.”
“Why not? I show you mine.”
“You show everyone yours since spring break. And even I never saw yours before the break. I mean, seriously, what the hell happened to you?”
I stood up and tossed one of the copies of the campus newspaper onto her bed. “Read that.”
Diane dropped her dirty clothes bundle and picked up the paper. “Holy shit,” she said.
As she read with an open mouth the article about me, I grabbed the side of her towel and gave it a slight but sudden tug. It fell to the floor, and Diane squealed, dropping the paper and trying to cover herself.
“What are you doing!?”
Her pubic region was indeed shaved, and I thought it made her look like a little girl. Her small A-cup breasts added to that impression, making me wonder if her boyfriend James wasn’t a latent pedophile.
“Bitch!” she said, picking up her towel and wrapping it back around her.
“Hey, you suggested it. I just wanted to see what I might look like. I’ve never shaved down there. I kind of like having a little bit of hair so I don’t look too girlish.”
“Fuck off,” Diane replied, pulling her panties up under the towel.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to smooth things over.
“I’m not like you,” she said. “I can’t just do what you’re doing. Aren’t you embarrassed? It’s not normal to run around naked.”
Two days ago, I would have agreed with her. But constant nudity was my new normal, something I had to do to get my coveted degree, and I had to at least partially embrace it or be thoroughly miserable for the next two months.
“It’s just a phase,” I said. “I’ll probably grow out of it by the end of the semester.”
“God damn, I hope so.”
I returned to work on my computer as Diane finished getting dressed and left the room. My classes that day went better than they had on Monday. I was less fearful and a little more confident than I had been on that first day. Dr. Trostle gave a little giggle when she walked into the room and saw me, but she didn’t single me out. The other students seemed less distracted this time, and she didn’t feel the need to interrupt her lecture to regain everyone’s attention.
Trying to go through my regular pre-nudity routine, I left that first class of the day, walked across campus back to the dorm, and went straight to the dining hall. People generally eat breakfast and dinner at varying times, but lunch was different, with almost everyone in our two dorms eating all at once. This was my first lunch time visit to the dining hall since my nudity had started, after skipping lunch Monday and missing yesterday due to my new job. The noise was loud as I approached but got eerily quiet after I walked through the glass doors. With everyone watching me, I took my place at the end of the line, just behind three guys whom I had rarely seen and who appeared to be in their mid-twenties. They had a surprised expression on their faces and looked me over before I smiled at them. They smiled back and quickly turned away. I turned my attention to the rest of the room. Just about everyone I was used to seeing on a daily basis was here, and they all were now getting a view of my completely naked body, some of them for the very first time. I couldn’t have handled this on Monday, but after more than 48 hours of constant nudity, I was better able to accept it. Many people would turn away when I looked at them, as if they were ashamed of being caught looking at me. I had to smile, thinking that those reactions were exactly what Dr. Slater was looking for. I looked up and saw three black half globes protruding from the ceiling at equidistant points, part of the new video system installed in all of the campus buildings over the past two years, and hoped that they were catching all of these reactions. Since I was blackmailed into volunteering for this project, I was surprised that I even cared. But then again, I didn’t want to have had my clothes and my dignity stripped for nothing.
“You’re Dani, right?” one of the guys in front of me said.
“Yes. How could you tell?”
He smiled and blushed. “I read the story this morning. I’m Dan.”
“Hi Dan,” I said, shaking his hand.
“I’m Ted,” one of the other guys said, “and this is Steve.”
“Hi,” I said and waved at them.
“I was surprised that it was legal for you to be naked everywhere, especially here in the dining hall,” Dan said.
I just shrugged.
“Do you remember the name of the court case that set the precedent?”
I paused, not knowing what to say. I had, of course, seen no such thing on the AANR website as I had claimed in my interview with Clarissa. I had just gone by what Dr. Slater had told me.
“We’re in the law school here,” Ted offered.
“Ah,” I said. “I don’t remember.”
“I’ll have to look it up,” Dan said. “It would make an interesting study.”
&nb
sp; We had reached the serving area, and I took a tray from the stack and watched as the women passed my tray down, filling it with my requested items, and we all moved along the line.
“You said you were pre-law,” Dan continued.
“Yes.”
“Well, I hope you’re ready to give up all semblance of a social life when you get to law school. We spend all of our time doing research in the library.”
“It’s a ridiculous amount of work,” Ted added.
Steve, who hadn’t said anything yet, leaned over to Dan and whispered something in his ear.
“Oh yeah,” Dan said and turned to me. “Would you like to sit with us?”
“Sure,” I said, hoping that they could give me some insight into law school.
As we walked out of the serving area, I saw Liz waving at me. I smiled at her but nodded my head toward Dan, Steve, and Ted, then shrugged. I followed Dan to a table in the corner where several other older students sat. I soon learned that they were all law students as well. Just hearing them talk about their professors, assignments, and lack of social life was almost enough to put me off law school. But I couldn’t think about that now. One thing at a time, I told myself. The guys at the table all took long looks at my breasts throughout the lunch, but I was getting used to that. At one point, I looked up and caught Liz glancing my way while she talked with Audrey.
So far, I had been invited to both the queer and law school tables while being shunned by my former friends. And actually, it wasn’t fair to say that they had shunned me. I just hadn’t felt comfortable being naked around the people I was used to associating with when I was still fully clothed. I looked at the table where I normally sat and where the normal conversations were going on without me, although most people there kept looking in my direction. I resolved to sit with them during tomorrow’s lunch.
Diane was gone when I got back to the room after lunch, so I logged onto my computer and saw an email from Dr. Biden asking if I could stop by his office after my classes ended to talk about the assignment that would substitute for my Chemistry lab. I wrote him back and told him that my Spanish class ended at 2:50 and that I could meet him right after that. My swimming class only officially met on Mondays and Fridays, but I would sometimes swim in the pool on Wednesdays anyway. Depending on how long the meeting with Dr. Biden took, I might do that today, I thought.
The Volunteer Page 10
