But what could I do to stop her dismissal? I couldn’t perjure myself to the Board; I would have to answer all their questions and tell them exactly what Dr. Slater had done to persuade me to take part in her project. But I could also say that I was glad she had done it, that I had experienced so much, learned so much about myself, and even become famous. But I knew that, in light of all this evidence, just my saying these things would have little or no impact on the members of the Board. I had to do more than just tell them what participating in Dr. Slater’s nudity project had meant to me. It was a longshot, but I knew what I had to do.
I was ready when the door to the hearing room opened. Dr. Hallam and a woman I had never met before entered the conference room and froze in their tracks when they saw me.
“Um, you’re Danielle Keaton,” the woman finally said.
“Yes.”
Dr. Hallam nodded to me as he passed by and exited through the door to the hallway.
“I’m Dr. Cynthia Jones. I’m a member of the Board of Regents. Please come in, I guess.”
I followed her into the hearing room. The other seven members of the board, five men and two women, sat in a semi-circle on a raised platform on one side of the room, each of them behind large stained wood desks, arranged so closely together that their corners were touching the corners of the desks next to them. Dr. Slater and another man were seated at one end of this semicircle, facing it. At the other end sat a stenographer, busily typing on her stenotype machine until she saw me and paused for just a few seconds, her eyes wide in shock. Dr. Jones gestured me toward the leather upholstered wooden chair in the center of the room, also facing the platform. I padded in my bare feet to that chair, ignoring the looks of shock on the faces of everyone in the room except Dr. Slater. I placed the little black towel I had taken from my carry-on bag onto the seat of the chair and stood in front of it, waiting for direction from someone about whether to sit or stand when I took whatever oath I expected I would have to take.
“What is the meaning of this?” one of the men asked. “Should this even be allowed?”
“Miss Keaton,” one of the other women said, “why are you not dressed?”
“Because after the study I helped Dr. Slater with, this is how I prefer to be.”
The members of the board all looked at each other. Some of them leaned over and whispered to each other. Dr. Jones took her seat at the end of the semi-circle, and the man in the middle, whose nameplate read, “Melvin Miller, Chairman” beat on his desk with the gavel.
“Let’s have order, please.” When the room quieted, he looked at me and said, “Please sit down Miss Keaton.”
I sat, and the questions started. Each member of the Board seemed to take turns asking the questions, and through my answers I told them everything about how I had gotten a copy of Amanda’s history paper and edited it to make it look like mine, how I had been caught by Dr. Finfrock and been sent to a disciplinary hearing, and how Dr. Hallam had called me the Sunday before classes resumed and told me to go see Dr. Slater. I went through the entire story of that first meeting and how, if I accepted the deal, I had to strip right then and leave Dr. Slater’s office naked.
“How did that feel, walking out of that office with no clothes on?” Dr. Jones asked. It was the first question about me rather than about something factual that had happened.
“Scary,” I said after a pause. “Humiliating. Embarrassing. Exciting.”
“Exciting, how?” she asked. “Sexually?”
I probably blushed at her blunt question. “It was more the sense of adventure that made it exciting. I was doing something I had been taught that I wasn’t supposed to do.”
“But being naked in public didn’t arouse you sexually?”
The man sitting next to Dr. Slater spoke up then. “Objection. Dr. Slater’s study had nothing to do with sex, and this line of questioning to Miss Keaton seems inappropriate at best.”
“Your objection is noted,” Chairman Miller said.
The room got quiet for a moment until I realized that they were all waiting for me to answer.
“At times, yes,” I admitted.
“I take it by your appearance here that you grew to like being nude on campus,” one of the men said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why is that?”
I paused to think of the right words. “Because of the freedom. We’re all living, breathing human beings with bodies, but we always cover those bodies, put up barriers between ourselves and nature and each other. The more comfortable I got in my own skin, the more I realized what a rare and special gift Dr. Slater had given me. Me, of all people.”
The questions continued, and I told them how I hadn’t wanted to do the Stossel show, especially since I knew that my body would be seen uncensored by my friends and family back home.
“But Dr. Slater forced you to do it, using the contract you signed?”
“Yes.”
“And after the show aired, how did you feel?”
“I was mortified. Regretful. At least at first. Now, I’m glad I did it. It did make television history.”
I don’t know how long the questions lasted, but I must have sat in that chair for at least an hour. I knew the questioning was coming to an end when they asked me what I thought should happen to Dr. Slater.
“If this Board determines that the evidence suggests Dr. Slater committed the crime of extortion against you to secure your participation in her study, we would therefore turn over the minutes of this hearing to the District Attorney. If that happens, would you want to press charges against Dr. Slater?” The question came from Chairman Miller.
“No,” I said promptly and with force. “Absolutely not.”
“Would you like Dr. Slater’s employment with the university to be terminated?”
“No, I would not.”
“Why not? After all she’s done to you, forced you to do?”
“Because if she goes, what happens to all the data from those sixty days I spent nude on campus? I don’t want it to have all been for nothing. And there’s another reason. I was brought up Christian, taught to love our enemies, to be both giving and forgiving.”
“That all sounds fine and dandy,” one of the other Board members, the one who seemed the crankiest, said. “I sense a bit of Stockholm syndrome here. You think you can come in here naked and help Dr. Slater stay out of jail, maybe even keep her job. Then you get dressed and go on your way. There doesn’t seem to be much resolve or commitment there.”
“You know, that sixty day experiment is not something I would have ever signed up for or done voluntarily. But when I’m older and looking back on it, I know that it will be one of the few truly special times in my life, when I discovered who I am, that I can put shame and embarrassment aside and stand tall and brave and beautiful. What Dr. Slater has given me is something that I can never repay. Just an amazing experience. And you want commitment, evidence that this isn’t some kind of show? All right. I will commit right now to staying naked on campus at this university, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, from now until I graduate. And if I go to law school here, I’ll stay nude throughout that too. I just ask you to please allow Dr. Slater to continue her research, to go through the data, write her articles and her books, and make what I’ve done so far something worthwhile, that benefits all of humanity, that helps us all become more open, more honest, and more free.”
The Board of Regents fell silent, and while I tried not to look directly at Dr. Slater, I saw her wipe the tears from her eyes.
“Thank you,” Chairman Miller said. “You’re excused.”
Dr. Jones got up from her spot on the end of the semi-circle and walked me back to the conference room. I had folded my dress and put it and my shoes into my carry-on bag. I picked that bag up and walked out into the hall, naked, and instead of taking the back stairwell, I walked out into the throng of media outside the main door of the hearing room. When they saw me, they all converged, cam
eras pointed at me, microphones shoved into my face, questions from so many people that I couldn’t discern any one in particular.
“I’d like to say,” I said and waited for everyone to fall silent before continuing, “that over the two months of that nudity study, I came to respect Dr. Slater and what she was trying to accomplish with this project. I hope the Board sees fit to allow her to continue the work. Thank you.”
I put my head down and started walking forward, ignoring the countless undiscernible follow-up questions and the incidental contact with my breasts and buttocks as I made my way through and out of the throng. I felt good, empowered, and exhilarated. When I stepped outside, the hot late afternoon sun felt bright and loving on my bare skin. Greg, who had been sitting on one of the benches near the entrance of the Administration Building, stood up, smiling and shaking his head when he saw me.
“Oh my God,” he said when I got close to him. “What happened in there?”
I told him all about it as we walked to my summer dorm to get myself checked in, from what I heard over the air conditioner vents to what I had told the Board.
“So you’re going to do it?” Greg asked. “Stay naked for the rest of your time here at the college?”
“I might as well,” I said. “I enjoy the feeling of being naked; everyone on campus is used to seeing me this way; and, all my clothes are still locked in Samantha’s trunk.”
“Except for your yellow dress,” Greg added.
“Well, I need something to wear for my trips home.”
Epilogue
The Board of Regents censured Dr. Slater, placing her on probation for a year, but she got to keep her job. The University offered to reinstate the two female students who had been suspended, with free tuition for the rest of their degree plans to avoid any lawsuits. I went to Human Resources during the first week of the summer session and asked that Sylvia be rehired. I was still getting a lot of requests from the media, and I knew Sylvia could handle those. Dr. Slater put in a request as well, and Sylvia came back the following week.
The summers here are so brutally hot that not many students take summer classes at the university. As I’m writing this in early July in the extended weekend break between the first and second summer sessions, yesterday’s high temperature at the Palm Springs Airport was 116 degrees. The high number of tourists that seem to wander onto campus makes up for the lack of students and faculty, and most of the tourists seem to always be on the lookout for the naked girl. I suppose it’s like how every visitor to Loch Ness always looks for the monster, Nessie, except in the case of Coachella Valley University, the naked girl actually exists. If tourists approach me nicely, I’ll even pose with them for photographs. Greg, of course, worries about my safety since I don’t have a team of research assistants following me around day and night anymore, so he bought me a can of pepper spray to carry in my little hand purse. I doubt that I will ever need it, but it’s nice to have, just in case.
The good thing about living in the dorm in the summer is that I was assigned to a single room, without a roommate, and the absence of that second bed makes the room seem so much bigger. I have applied to keep this room for the fall semester, but I haven’t heard anything yet. The air conditioning has trouble keeping the building cool enough at night, so I’ve taken to sleeping on the top sheet completely uncovered. So I really am naked all of the time. I looked at my calendar and counted 176 days between that hearing and my flight back home for the Thanksgiving holiday. That will blow my 60 day naked record out of the water if I can make it. Of course, I don’t have Dr. Slater and her contract forcing me to stay nude, only a non-binding commitment I made in front of the Board of Regents. But I am holding to that commitment, especially since I find staying nude to be easier now than ever. It’s just a part of who I am, no matter how much my father complains about it.
Two days after Sylvia called me to tell me that she was back on the job, I stopped in the deli in the Student Union to buy an iced tea after my morning class. Dr. Slater stepped up behind me as I was in line.
“You are looking more tan than ever,” she said.
“Yes. This desert sun will do it to you.”
After I ordered and got my drink, she touched my arm before I could leave.
“I want to thank you,” she said. “You didn’t have to do what you did. And you really didn’t have to do this,” she added, looking down at my naked body.
“But I wanted to do this. I love it. I love the feeling, and I love being the center of attention everywhere I go. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I leave this college and don’t have this freedom anymore.”
“Perhaps you doing this now will bring about that freedom in other places.”
“I hope so,” I said.
“You know, we have thousands of hours of footage of you from the project. A major Hollywood director has approached me about using some of that for a documentary. I don’t want to say who it is, but you would recognize the name if I told you. I want you to know that I will make sure that you are included in the deal, that you get well compensated.”
“Thank you,” I said. The thought of movie goers seeing me naked on screen caused that little tingling sensation to kick into a higher gear.
Dr. Slater and I stood looking at each other for a moment before I decided that it felt just a bit awkward.
“Well—“ I began, meaning to tell her good bye.
“But thank you for what you said and did in that hearing,” she said before I could finish. “I thought I was a goner for sure.”
“It was nothing.”
“Why? Why did you do it? I used you, manipulated you, and you could have taken all that out on me.”
“What good would that have done? It would have made me a vengeful, spiteful person. And I don’t want to be that person. Before I left the house, my mom told me to remember who I was. And waiting to go into that hearing, I did.” I shrugged and said, “I’m Naked Dani.”
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