The Volunteer

by D. H Jonathan

  Dr. Slater sat at Diane’s desk chair and took a deep breath. “Danielle is our subject for a study involving people’s reactions to and interactions with a constantly nude person. For the past week, we’ve been observing her and, more specifically, the people she comes into contact with. It will take a long time to analyze the data we will have collected once the project is done, but the results so far have been interesting. For instance, Danielle has had little association with her frequent acquaintances before she stopped wearing clothes, but she has managed to form new friendships with more accepting people. It will be interesting to see if her former associates ever re-initiate contact with her.”

  “That’s the craziest idea for a study I’ve ever heard of,” Daddy said.

  Dr. Slater then went into the same sales pitch she had given me Monday morning, although she had to describe Andrew Martinez’s history at UC Berkeley to my parents since they had never heard of him. She talked about the same TV shows and magazines she had mentioned to me and how these things seemed to be signaling a shift in attitudes toward public nudity.

  “And you think that’s a good thing?” Daddy said.

  “I do. Past studies have shown that more frequent exposure to nudity promotes the de-sexualization of the human body. Being nude is to be free and pure, not sexual. The use of pornography, and especially the rate of pornography addiction, plummets when people routinely see each other in the nude. We’re not so concerned about sex when we can see others as they, as we, really are. Hiding the body, always covering ourselves, brings about such stress and anxiety. And of course, the biggest obstacle to more commonplace nudity is government. If this study can show that not only is exposure to nudity not harmful but actually beneficial, perhaps it can trigger a reversal of the plethora of anti-nudity laws we have all over this country.“

  “I disagree with you on so many levels,” Daddy said, “but I’m not going to go into that now. My question is, why would my daughter, raised in a Christian home by conservative parents, ever volunteer for such a study.”

  My parents both turned toward me, expecting me to answer. I looked at Dr. Slater, and she gave a very slight nod of her head.

  “I volunteered because…” I trailed off, trying to figure out how to tell them. “You see, I had this paper due the week that Uncle Robert died. I didn’t want to miss the funeral, so I kind of stole someone else’s paper.”

  “You cheated,” my father said.

  “Yeah.”

  I looked down at my body, covered by the thin sheet.

  “What does that have to do with this whole naked study?” Daddy asked.

  “I was going to get suspended and lose my scholarship. Dr. Slater said she could get the suspension lifted and the scholarship reinstated if I volunteered for this. So I did.”

  “So you blackmailed her,” my father summarized to Dr. Slater.

  “Mr. Keaton, your daughter committed a serious violation of university rules and ethics. By all rights, she should have received her suspension. But, I also needed a volunteer for this project. I had the power to get Danielle’s suspension rescinded. So I made her an offer, and she accepted. It’s that simple.”

  My parents looked at each other, and my father slowly shook his head. The room was awkwardly silent for what seemed like several minutes but was probably only a few seconds.

  “OK,” Daddy said. “You’ve had her naked for a week. I think that’s enough humiliation for her. And it ought to be restitution enough for this paper you say she cheated on.”

  “The study is to study behavior patterns toward a nude person over a long period of time. To do that, the subject has to be continually nude for at least two months. I had wanted the study to last for an entire semester, but I had to make allowances to get Danielle. I’m hoping that these last two months of this semester will give us enough data, but I do anticipate future studies with other subjects.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe this,” Mom said. “You people are all out of your mind. You are really going to make my baby run around naked for two whole months in front of God and everyone just to pay for some paper she cheated on. Unbelievable!”

  “It’s OK, Mom,” I said, finally finding my voice.

  “No, it’s not OK,” Daddy said, still looking at Dr. Slater. “I ought to sue you and the whole school. This could come under cruel and unusual punishment.”

  “This is not a punishment, Mr. Keaton. What your daughter is doing is contributing to a valuable scientific study.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Dr. Slater looked over at me. I had been frightened and horrified by my parents’ sudden appearance, but now I was just angry. I was an adult twenty-year-old woman capable of making my own decisions, but they were trying to take charge of me like I was still a little girl. I think Dr. Slater saw something of that anger in my eyes.

  “Why don’t you ask Danielle what she wants?” she asked my parents.

  My father and mother both looked at me. “Well?” Daddy asked.

  My hands were shaking from a tangled mess of fear, anger, embarrassment, and contrition. But I managed to push the sheet off my body and stand up, fully naked, in front of my parents. Daddy took one glance at me and then looked at the floor.

  “I signed up to do this,” I told them. “I didn’t want to at first, but I saw it as a way out. And I was scared to death that first day. But it has gotten easier. And I told Dr. Slater that I would do this for the entire two months, and Daddy, you always told me to follow through on my word. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Dr. Slater was smiling like a proud momma while my real mother’s frown lifted slightly.

  “But you just seem so vulnerable,” Mom said.

  “I have a team of people who follow and monitor her interactions around the clock. They are ready to step in at a moment’s notice for any emergency.” Dr. Slater reached over to my bed, grabbed the first aid kit, and held it up. “For instance, this.” She set it back down and said, “Your daughter is probably the safest student on campus.”

  Mom and Daddy looked at each other again. Daddy started to say something, but Mom shook her head.

  “I’m doing this,” I said in a firm voice. “And I will be all right. I might even become a stronger person because of it. I definitely feel different than I did last week.”

  Daddy sighed and stood up. “All right then. We don’t agree with this at all. And I think you are setting yourself up for future problems. You know that once photos of you wind up on the Internet, there’s no getting rid of them.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve thought of that.”

  “If this study is successful,” Dr. Slater said, “seeing photos of nude people engaged in regular every day activity will become a lot more prevalent. Pictures of her will just fade into the rest of the bunch. Hopefully.”

  “I doubt that,” Daddy said.

  “I do have to ask that you keep everything I’ve told you here confidential,” Dr. Slater said. “The reasons given for Dani’s nudity don’t matter to me a bit as long as the people around her don’t realize that they are the actual subjects being studied. If they did, they would alter their behavior, and we would not get the honest results we’re looking for.”

  “OK, whatever,” Daddy said.

  Dr. Slater looked at them and then at me, standing naked in the middle of my room. Daddy still refused to look at me. Mom had looked away too.

  “I’ll leave you to visit then,” Dr. Slater said, rising to her feet. “You all have a good rest of the weekend.”

  She walked out, closing the door behind her. I sat down on the edge of my bed, but I didn’t cover up even though I wanted to.

  “You hurt your toe?” Mom said.

  “Yeah, I caught it awkwardly on the steps outside. It’s OK though. Just a scrape.”

  “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to frighten you. Your father showed me that news report, and I couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t you tell me about this when we talked?”

>   “Ha!” I said. “I wouldn’t have begun to know how to even bring that up.”

  “Well.”

  We sat there in silence for a minute before Daddy said, “Do you have any other secrets?”

  I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking at me. “No.”

  “Ok. Well, we had better get going.”

  “OK,” I replied, not protesting at all.

  “We got a room at the Riviera in Palm Springs,” Mom said.

  “Nice,” I said. I would have asked to join them if I could leave campus. And if I wasn’t naked.

  “And we fly back tomorrow night,” Daddy said.

  “Well, you have fun,” I said. “At least you get a nice weekend getaway out of this little trip.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want me to walk you down?”

  “No,” Daddy and Mom said in unison.

  I couldn’t help but feel a stab of disappointment that they didn’t want to be seen with me. But I think that part of them still couldn’t process that I was routinely naked all over campus. It was my life for the moment, as strange as it seemed.

  Daddy stood up, and Mom and I rose. It had only been a week since I had seen both of them, although to me, it felt a lot longer. We really had nothing new to talk about except my participation in Dr. Slater’s project, and my parents clearly didn’t want to talk about that now that they knew the details.

  “You keep those grades up, and don’t cheat anymore,” Daddy said.

  “I won’t.”

  He stepped over and gave me an awkward hug. Having his hands on my bare back felt strange and unnatural. The hug lasted just an instant, long enough for him to feel the awkwardness as well, I think. Mom stepped over and gave me a hug too.

  “You take care, and we will see you in May,” she said as she pulled away.

  “We love you,” Daddy said.

  “I love you too.”

  They both left, and I let out a big long sigh. I collapsed on my bed and couldn’t stop the tears. I was such a disappointment to them, and part of me felt that they were right for thinking of me as a little kid. How had I gotten myself into this, singled out to be the lone naked person surrounded by clothed people? I couldn’t stop the tears from coming as I was overwhelmed with sadness, frustration, humiliation, and anger. When they stopped, I sat up in bed and took a deep breath to compose myself.

  Walking out of the sociology department office on Monday without any clothes, I remembered thinking that the absolute worst thing that could happen would be running into my parents. The worst had just happened, and in only the first week, but I had survived. I was still naked, and my hopes of a college degree were still intact. I could do this. Once today was over, I would have completed six days. I was one tenth of the way through it. Nothing in any of the subsequent weeks could possibly be as challenging as what I had faced in these first six days. I washed my face in the bathroom and then headed back to the men’s dorm to rejoin Liz and Audrey and the guys.

  Chapter Eleven – God and Fame

  I stayed in my room most of Sunday due to the pain in my toe, going out during the day only to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner down at the dining hall. I slept in, but as I lay in bed, I thought about my parents and my home. I had gone to church throughout my childhood and teenage years, and I remembered my youth pastor saying at one point that the overwhelming majority of kids who grow up attending church regularly stop going as soon as they move out on their own. Being the dedicated Christian I thought I was, I told myself at the time that I would never do that. But since I’d been away at college, I had only gone to a church service three times, and all three of those were during my freshman year. I had yet to go during my current sophomore year. Sunday mornings just seemed to be a time for sleeping in.

  I didn’t have a car, so the three services I had attended had all been interdenominational ones right on campus. So technically, I could still go. I didn’t know how well they would receive a naked girl though. For all of the arguments that I had read about how simple nudity wasn’t a sin, I was sure that the big issue they would throw up at me would be that thing about not causing your brother to stumble. Before going down to breakfast, I Googled “naked in church” and got a lot of weird results. I did see one photo of a fully naked woman standing in church surrounded by people dressed in early twentieth century clothing. It took me a minute to realize that the guy standing next to her was actor Hugh Grant. When I read more about the picture, I learned that it was a still from a 1993 movie called Sirens.

  I navigated to Netflix and was pleased to see that I could stream and watch the movie there. Before watching it, I went down to eat breakfast, making it to the serving line a mere two minutes before it closed. The dining area was just about empty as I sat down by myself to eat. Of course, the few people there couldn’t take their eyes off of me. A couple of guys got up, bused their table, and carried their trays right past me on their way to the dishwasher conveyer belt.

  “Wow,” one of the guys said, shaking his head, his eyes never leaving my breasts.

  I scarfed down the rest of my food before they could come back and try to talk to me. It had been the head shaking more than what he had said that had gotten to me. I questioned myself for the thousandth time: what was I doing? My situation was just absurd, being naked, letting anyone and everyone see all of me, my breasts, my butt, my vulva. The thought, as usual, both embarrassed me and aroused me. Putting myself on constant display was exciting and humiliating, but at least I had that excuse of having to do it to save my scholarships. I really had no choice, and the more I thought about that, the more my suppressed anger at having to remain naked started to come to the surface. Dr. Slater and her backers were making me expose myself. How could they get away with such a thing?

  I jumped up, grabbed my butt towel, threw my tray and used dishes onto the belt, and hurried back into the women’s dorm. My toe throbbed, but I could at least walk without a visible limp. Taking the elevator up, I rushed into my room, locked the door, and spent the next ten minutes bringing myself to three orgasms. What was wrong with me? In the space of thirty minutes, I had gone from thinking about going to church service to masturbating. What was this project turning me into? This wasn’t the me I had grown up with.

  Once I had caught my breath, I made a quick trip to the restroom, came back, and removed the gauze from my toe. I put some Neosporin on it, left it uncovered, and propped my foot up on a pillow I borrowed from Diane’s bed. I turned on the Sirens movie and watched the entire thing. It was a pretty decent light comedy about a minister and his wife visiting an artist’s compound. Of course, this artist used nude models quite a bit, something I had just gotten a taste of in the art department here. The scene with the woman naked in church was part of the minister’s wife’s daydream. She hadn’t actually been naked in church in the story.

  Why was I so concerned with being naked in church? I hadn’t been in a year, so why did I suddenly have the urge to go to a service? Was it because my parents had just been here, and that I had spent my entire life with them going to church every Sunday? I didn’t know. Maybe I had the urge to go to church for the same reason I felt I had to masturbate so much more often, to keep myself from going crazy, to stay on the right path and not become something I didn’t want to be. Of course, it was too late today to go to service, but if I felt the same calling next week, would I go? And how would I be received if I tried to go naked? Would the pastor or others ask me to leave?

  I pushed all these thoughts aside as my cell phone vibrated. It had been ringing so much that I had to keep it on silent and check every incoming call. I didn’t answer most of them and just let them roll to voice mail. I still had twelve messages that I hadn’t even listened to yet. The number calling now was one I recognized though, so I answered it.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi Danielle,” Sylvia said. “How are you on this lovely Sunday?”

  “I’m OK. I hurt my toe yesterday, so I’m just hang
ing out in the dorm.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK though. I can walk without a limp.”

  “That’s good because I have some news for you.”

  My stomach clenched. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear her news. “OK,” I said with a bit of waver in my voice.

  “Camera crews from three different local stations will be here filming on campus tomorrow. They want to get footage of you walking across campus and going to class. Maybe even a few shots of you in class if your professors are OK with it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, tomorrow. Isn’t that exciting? You are big news!”

  “Great,” I said with as little enthusiasm as I could muster. I wasn’t news; my naked body was.

  “I pulled your schedule. I hope you don’t mind. You have swimming for fitness from 3:00 to 3:50, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. Those will be great shots. And when you’re done, the stations all want to do separate on-camera interviews with you. I’ve got them scheduled back to back to back for four o’clock right there outside your dorm.”

  “Outside?” I said.

  “Oh yes. They all wanted to show you in a campus environment, out in the sunshine. So make sure you pack extra sunscreen to put on after your swim class.”

  “OK.”

  “I’ll be there in the morning with them. You don’t have to do anything extra until the interviews at 4:00. Just go to class like you usually do, and the camera crews will do what they do.”

  I took a deep breath, resigned to my fate. This is what Dr. Slater wanted, probably part of her plan all along, to see how the world reacted to Naked Dani. “All right,” I said.

  When I hung up, I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall and thinking about how much my life was changing. I would forever be known as Naked Dani. People would be looking at pictures of me naked for years to come. Perhaps when I am old and gray, I will look back and be glad that the world will remember me as a youthful naked girl, but right now, it just seemed like I was going to be judged an exhibitionist slut. At least my parents already knew about the project, had even seen me naked outside on campus. Nothing else could be as bad as that.