The Volunteer

by D. H Jonathan

  Chapter Sixteen – Home

  The average looking middle-aged man next to me, whose wife was on the other side of him in the aisle seat, kept looking at my profile as if he recognized me but couldn’t quite place from where. When I wasn’t napping, I kept my gaze out the window at the landscape and clouds below for most of the flight. The guy never tried to say anything to me though, maybe because of that wife sitting next to him or maybe because he would have had to raise his voice to be heard over the constant noise of the jet engines. I kept my focus on the earth below, trying to decide if the world looked any different now that I was no longer a virgin before deciding that it only looked strange because I was 35,000 feet above it and that my sexual status didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. The plane landed at DFW International Airport on time, and I was happy to see Mom waiting for me in the baggage claim area. She gave me a hug, holding on to me for what seemed like a long time.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked, looking around for him.

  “He’s on call this week,” she said, “so he stayed home.”

  “Oh,” I said. Daddy had always had to be in an on call rotation in the various IT jobs he had held throughout my childhood, but in his current job, which he had had for over five years now, the on call weeks were never busy enough that he had to stay home by his computer all weekend. So I immediately took his absence to mean that he was still upset with me.

  “That’s a cute outfit,” Mom said as we waited for my suitcase to appear on the carousel, and I wondered for a second if she could tell that I wasn’t wearing a bra.

  For some reason, this gave me a case of giggles that wouldn’t stop. I don’t know if it was just the irony of hearing her remark about my clothes or as a cover for feeling like such a disappointment to my father.

  “What are you laughing at?” Mom said, but she started laughing herself.

  My suitcase appeared on the carousel, and I grabbed it before it could start around again. The drive home was quick with the light Sunday evening traffic, and we arrived at the house just before dark. Daddy was sitting in front of his computer typing furiously on his keyboard. Whatever he was typing he didn’t want me to see as he took pains to save and close it before getting up to greet me with a hug.

  “I’m glad you’re home and away from that school,” he said.

  “You know I’m going back though, right? I’m taking classes both summer sessions. If I do that this summer and next, I should be able to graduate almost a year early.”

  “You could always transfer to UTA and live here at home.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know how many of my hours would even transfer,” I said, thinking especially of those six advanced sociology hours. “And would my scholarships go with me if I did? No, I have a pretty set degree plan there. I’ll be all right.”

  He didn’t seem too happy with this, so I lugged my suitcase up the stairs myself to my old room. It was how I had left it, and being there made the previous two months seem like a dream, almost as if they hadn’t really happened.

  I spent the next two days at home, sleeping more than twelve hours a night, as if my body were trying to catch up from the busy semester. I tried to sleep in my regular pajamas the first night, but after an hour of tossing and turning and staring at my ceiling, I took them off and slept naked. Those crazy dreams of being clothed on campus and being unable to get undressed still persisted.

  On Wednesday morning, my cousin Sally called to invite me to go shopping with her at the Northeast Mall. Sally had long brown hair that hung down almost to her waist unless she tied it up. She was a couple of inches shorter than I was, and she weighed about sixty pounds more. When Sally came to pick me up, she waited until we were out of the house and away from Mom before asking me about the nudity project.

  “So who was it that inspired that whole thing?” she asked. “I talked to Gabby, but she says it wasn’t her.” Gabby was another cousin of ours.

  “I never did say which cousin, did I?” I said. “To tell you the truth, I was thinking of you.”

  “What? You made that whole story up? Why?”

  So I told Sally the story of Dr. Slater’s study and how I had volunteered for it and that because of the nature of the study, I had to keep the real reason I was naked a secret. I left out the part about my plagiarized paper.

  “Why would you volunteer for something like that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Those six extra hours sounded good to me. And being naked was exciting.”

  “Weren’t you scared?”

  “The first day, yeah. And the second. But it got easier. Now, I kind of wish I could be naked more often.”

  We were walking the mall by then, and I tried to imagine myself naked in the middle of all those people. I looked at them, trying to see if any of them took any special note of me, perhaps recognizing me from the Stossel show, but no one did.

  “That’s just weird,” she said. “I could never do that.”

  “I know. I said the same thing to Dr. Slater when she asked me to volunteer.” I started to say that the idea grew on me, but I left that part out. I felt a bit disingenuous for telling Sally that I had been a completely willing volunteer, but I didn’t want to admit that I had cheated on a paper. She probably would have understood though, since I had only done it so that I was able to come to her father’s funeral.

  We had fun that day though. After shopping we wound up going to a movie at the Rave Motion Pictures Theater attached to the mall and then to dinner at the Genghis Grill right outside the theater. Dad was home from work by the time I got back, but he barely acknowledged me when I came in. He was busy typing on his computer again, and whenever I would walk up behind him, he would minimize his window. The only thing that I could see was that he was in his email app, and I wondered to whom he would be typing such a long message.

  Samantha and Katie, two of my best friends from high school, invited me to a party Saturday night, and I agreed to go even though I didn’t really feel like it. Being home after the Project, as I had come to think of Dr. Slater’s nudity study now that I was out of it, was different than past visits home. My clothes never felt right, and I wondered if it was the ten pounds I had lost since spring break or if I had really been conditioned to feeling uncomfortable in anything. And Daddy’s attitude toward me and his secretiveness on the computer added to the general strangeness of everything.

  Samantha picked me up at eight o’clock Saturday evening. I promised Mom that I would try to be home before midnight but that not having a car made me dependent on other people.

  “If you need to be picked up, call us,” Daddy said.

  “I will,” I promised before heading out the door.

  Samantha had said that the party was at Katie’s house, but Katie had apparently moved since high school. Instead of going up to the front door of her new house, Samantha led me around to the gate on the side. I could hear people laughing and splashing in a swimming pool as we walked into the big back yard.

  “There she is!” I heard Katie proclaim when Samantha and I approached the patio. “Do you want a beer?”

  “You didn’t say this was a pool party,” I said to Katie and Samantha as Katie, wearing nothing but a black one-piece bathing suit, filled a plastic cup from a keg.

  “Oh, well,” Samantha said. “Now you know.”

  “But I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”

  My two friends looked at each other, eyes wide in surprise. “We didn’t figure you would want to wear a suit,” Samantha said. “After your – well, you know.”

  “Come on in the pool,” one of the guys in the water said. I recognized him as James. He and I had gone out on a couple of dates in the tenth grade, but there had been nothing serious between us.

  I looked around at everyone else, visible from the floodlights pointed toward the pool area from the eaves of the house, and saw that almost all of the guests were from my high school class. A couple of them also went to my churc
h. The guys were all wearing baggy swim trunks. Two of the girls were in bikinis, but the rest of them wore one piece suits.

  “Come on,” another guy said. “It’s not like we don’t already know what you look like naked.”

  “EVERYONE knows what Dani looks like naked,” someone else said which drew a round of laughter from everybody.

  Samantha and Katie stared at me, and I glared back at them, knowing that this had been some kind of set up. My cheeks felt flush with embarrassment. Getting naked in front of my old high school friends was unthinkable, I told myself. But that conflicted with the tingling I started feeling in my core at the thought of getting another chance to be naked in front of people, and as that tingling feeling spread to my nipples and pubic area, I knew that I would succumb to it.

  “I didn’t bring a towel either,” I said weakly.

  “We have extras,” Katie said with a wicked grin on her face.

  Samantha pulled a bikini out of the large purse she had been carrying. “I’m going to go change,” she said and started into the house. I followed her until she got to a half bath near the kitchen and closed the door.

  There was a small bedroom next to that bathroom, and when I looked inside with the light off, I saw several piles of clothes lying on the bed and floor. I stepped in and to the side as Samantha unlocked the bathroom door. She walked into the dark bedroom and set her pile of clothes in the corner near the door. I shrank into the wall near the closet in the shadow of an upright dresser, and Samantha didn’t appear to see me as she turned and headed back out toward the pool. I stood against the wall in the dark room for a full minute, thinking about my high school days and the people outside, the girls who had been my friends, the guys I’d had crushes on and the ones I had even dated a time or two. They had all seen me naked on TV or on their computers. That Stossel episode was on Youtube and had over 1.5 million views, so of course they had all seen me. They had all known me and would have been curious, especially with my new celebrity status. I stepped out of my shoes and pulled my shirt over my head and off. I still hadn’t adjusted to clothes enough to wear a bra again. I asked myself if I would have come to this party if Samantha and Katie had told me it was a pool party but that they wanted me to swim naked. My answer to them would have been no, but I would have regretted it eventually. As I slipped my shorts and panties down, my irritation with them for this apparent set up dissipated. Naked now, I folded my clothes up and set them on the floor in that shadow of the dresser where I had hidden from Samantha.

  When I walked out of the dark bedroom and passed the half bath, that tingling sensation was so strong that I was tempted to duck inside, lock the door, and get myself off. But I didn’t. That anticipation of everyone seeing me, my bare breasts and exposed vulva, was so great that I wanted to get on with it. I reached the sliding glass door and looked outside. Samantha and Katie were still on the patio looking inside through the glass. They both smiled and Katie even clapped her hands twice when they saw me. I slid the door open and stepped out onto the patio.

  “Woo hoo!” James yelled from the pool, and everyone stopped what they were doing to look at me. My God, I wanted to rush back inside and put my fingers on my clitoris until I came, which wouldn’t have taken very long. Instead I stepped forward and took the plastic cup full of beer that Samantha held out to me.

  “Awesome!" she said.

  “You really just don’t care, do you?” Katie said. “You’ll just get naked in front of anyone.”

  “That’s what I did for two months,” I said.

  “Unbelievable,” Katie said, looking me over from head to toe. “How can they let you do that and not arrest you?”

  I shrugged and said, “It’s California.”

  I stood around drinking my beer enjoying being the subject of everyone’s gaze. As soon as I finished, I set the cup down and stepped into the pool. It was only May, and the water was still cold. The pools in Texas were never temperature controlled like the ones at CVU. They had to keep them controlled out there because the pool water would reach the temperature of a hot tub during the brutal summers.

  Once I was in the water up to my shoulders, everyone talked to me normally. I enjoyed visiting with all of my old friends. Every once in a while, under the water, my hand would brush over my bare vulva, my finger caressing my clitoral hood, making my whole body shudder. A fantasy of getting out of the pool and masturbating to orgasm in front of everyone, all of my old friends, entered my mind. But I could never really do that. How could I even contemplate such a thing? What was wrong with me?

  I stayed in the pool for a couple of hours, until Samantha offered me another beer. I got out and took one from her, enjoying the feeling of being wet and naked in the warm breeze. Everybody, especially the guys, turned their attention to me once I was out of the pool. I had to pee, but I was still wet with no towel. I sipped my beer and waited until I had air dried enough to go inside to relieve myself. And I relieved myself in more ways than one, giving myself a quick and sudden orgasm after I finished peeing. When I was done, I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror. After my orgasm, my pink labia were poking out from between the folds of my vulva, making me look more sexual. There was nothing I could do about it, so I dried my hands and walked back outside.

  I spent the rest of the night out of the water, talking with the other guests, mostly guys since they were the ones trying to crowd around me the most. At some point, Katie got Samantha to take a picture of her and me together, and that opened the floodgates for everyone else. I posed with each person attending the party individually and then in small groups. I couldn’t count how many photos were taken of me. But after the Project and all the photos and videos of me floating around in cyberspace, how could I say no? I would say that I didn’t care, but I found the whole thing stimulating, posing naked for the camera. By eleven-thirty, no one had left the party. I caught up to Samantha and told her that I needed her to take me home.

  “OK, hold on,” she said.

  Samantha disappeared into the house while Katie and James asked me when I was going back to California. When Samantha came back outside, she had changed out of her bikini and back into her regular clothes.

  “Hey, I’ve got to go,” I said to Katie and James and everyone else standing around trying to either talk to me or just get another good look at me.

  “Awww,” some of them said in disappointment.

  I headed into the house to get dressed, but when I got into the dark bedroom, I couldn’t find my clothes where I thought I had left them. After turning the light on, I saw everyone else’s clothes, but mine were gone. I stormed back outside, right up to Samantha.

  “Where are my clothes?”

  “Relax,” she said, “they’re in my car.”

  Most of the people standing around snickered.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Come on, I thought you might enjoy a little naked in public adventure.”

  “Umm, this is Texas, not California,” I reminded her. “I can’t get away with that sort of thing here.”

  “Relax, we’ll be careful. Someone would love to see you, but he was working tonight and couldn’t come. I just texted him and told him that I would bring you by.”

  “Who?”

  “Chris Strong,“ Samantha replied.

  “What!” Chris had been my boyfriend throughout most of my senior year. We had promised to stay together after high school while I went off to Coachella Valley University and he started out at Tarrant County College, but as usual with such relationships, we had drifted apart during that first year. “No,” I said.

  “What? You don’t want to see Chris?” Samantha asked with a tone of amusement in her voice.

  “Well, yeah, but not like this.”

  “Chris sure wants to see you.”

  Everyone at the party was standing by listening to all of this. I grabbed Samantha’s arm and pulled her to the side, near the gate and out of earshot of the rest of the party guests.


  “What are you trying to do?” I whispered to Samantha.

  “I thought it would be funny. A little joke on Chris.”

  “A little joke?”

  “Come on, you know you want to. When you were on that show, Chris was pissed because he never got to see you naked when you were dating, and now, there you were naked in front of the whole world.”

  Samantha was right; I did want to go see Chris like this, in my Naked Dani persona. At least, that part of me did. But I was still afraid of getting caught by the local police. How would I ever explain to Daddy why I was arrested for indecent exposure after what he had seen at the college? Would he even believe me if I told him that I was at the mercy of Samantha, my old best friend whom I now barely knew?

  “OK,” I said, deciding that the best way to avoid getting into trouble was to get my clothes back as quickly as possible, and the only way I saw to do that was to cooperate with Samantha.

  “Awesome!” Samantha cried. She turned back to everyone else and said, “All right, we’re going. Bye everyone!”

  There was a chorus of farewells as I waved at everyone still gathered around the pool in wet swimsuits. I walked out the gate and crept beside the house until I got to the corner. Samantha had parked in the driveway and was getting in her car.

  “Is the coast clear?” I asked.