Naked in School
The Vodou Physicist
Chapter 11 - Unstripped in Florida
The following week, Tamara was at the medical school following school, and after her MRI study session, she went to see Tim Saunders, the medical center’s engineer. Tim maintained the center’s electronic diagnostic equipment.
“Hi, Tim,” she called as she went into his shop.
“Hi, short stuff,” he answered. “Got a new mod for the MRI today?”
“Ha. You wish. If I invent something, I won’t let you touch it. You make circuits that do weird things.”
Tim had shown her a little box he had made which had nine LEDs on it that blinked in a random pattern. He insisted the blinking had a pattern but only the most intelligent people could see the pattern. So when he wasn’t looking, Tamara popped the box open—it just snapped together—and peeked. It was a simple hack; inside was a tiny counter/display-driver integrated circuit, a timer IC, a couple of resistors, a capacitor, and a 9-volt battery. And the LEDs.
“Still raggin’ me about my toy? Tough. I get more positive comments about that thing than anything else I do around here. So how may I help you today?”
“I wanted to see if you had a fourteen-inch length of superconducting #16 or #18 gage wire you don’t need. You had some from the MRI coils.”
“Sure. What’s this for?”
“Tell you in a bit.”
She took the wire and took a little cardboard tube about one-and-a-half inch in diameter out of her backpack. She wound the wire carefully around the tube, leaving about two inches free on each end, and taped it to hold its shape. When that was complete, a second trip into Tamara’s backpack yielded a cheap disposable film camera with a built-in electronic flash, but Tim could see that the flash lamp itself had been removed. Tamara popped off the camera’s back and a little circuit board was exposed.
“This one actually has a decent power IC. I need your soldering iron; I got a larger cap to install.”
Tim watched as she replaced the capacitor on the board, then changed the camera’s battery holder from a dual AA to nine-volt. Next, she got an envelope from her backpack and dumped a number of components—several diodes, resistors, and transistors, and a few miniature switches—onto the bench.
“I changed the battery but the power IC still needs three volts so I have to add a little circuit for that. The nine-volt battery is better than the double-As for low current and high voltage for this use,” Tamara remarked.
She clipped a few components on the camera’s power board and soldered several components from her envelope into the existing circuits, then carefully taped them so nothing would make a short-circuit.
“Can you grab me that digital voltmeter?”
Tim brought it to her and she attached the meter’s leads to wires on the board and switched on the little camera circuit; Tim could hear the whine as the oscillator began charging the flash’s capacitor.
“I changed the battery. Now this should charge the main cap to over 400 volts instead of 320 volts, and the fly-back transformer should produce 4000 to 6000 volts when fired.”
“What are you doing? A high voltage discharge circuit and superconducting wire coil ... oh shit! You’re not building an EMF pulse generator. Please tell me you’re not. Girl, that can cause some serious havoc, you know.”
“He he. It’s in a good cause. You have a nail or big screw you don’t need and a little flat piece of copper?”
He dug into a box of parts and produced the items.
She clipped one test lead to the nail and the other to the piece of copper, laying it on the workbench. Next, she took the other ends of the leads and clipped them onto the terminals where the xenon flash tube used to be connected, and then used a jumper to bypass the camera’s shutter switch.
She turned to Tim. “I need an insulated needle-nose pliers.” He handed one to her. She looked around the bench. “Oh, good. I’ll use those insulated gloves too. And you might want to turn off any nearby electronics.”
Tim groaned. “Sure. Nothing is on right now—oh, the ‘scope. Okay, it’s off.”
“You sure?” she asked and Tim nodded. “Phone too?”
“Oops,” Tim said and pulled his out to turn off.
“Okay. Here goes.”
Holding the nail with the pliers, she touched it to the copper strip. There was a loud crack and a bright flash of light and some smoke as the nail fused itself to the strip.
Tamara gave a little whoop. “That’s perfect. Now to add the coil.”
Before she touched the circuit board, she took a screwdriver and used it to short out the capacitor pins on the board, just as Tim was about to tell her that the capacitor might still have a remaining charge. Sure enough, there was a little snap and a spark could be seen. She did it again with no result and she nodded.
Tamara disconnected the test leads and soldered the ends of the coil she had made to the flash lamp connector pins. Then she cut the circuit board’s lead to one end of the coil end and wired it to the camera’s shutter button and the other shutter button lead to one side of the fly-back transformer’s primary.
She told Tim, “The original circuit could have the flash lamp in parallel across the output because it wouldn’t fire until the xenon gas was ionized. I had to bypass that. Gotta put a switch in the charging circuit too.”
She did that.
“Now the test. First, though, some cosmetics,” Tamara said as she took a piece of heavy-duty aluminum foil from her backpack, folded it into four thicknesses, and cut a circle in the center of the foil. She pressed that opening over where the camera lens projected out on the camera’s front. Then she folded the wire coil so it looped around the lens, lying over the foil.
“Electrical tape, please. Oh, it’s right there.”
She covered the foil and wire loop with the black tape.
“Four thicknesses of aluminum should protect the LT3420 power IC. Tim, you have some of those RFID inventory tags? I know you keep a batch here.”
“Is that what you built? A RFID killer? Damnation. Okay, let me get a tag. Hey, do you also have a reader in your magic backpack?”
“No, just a phone app,” she grinned. “It works okay too.”
She turned her phone on and opened the app. She had to put the phone right next to the tag before the app responded.
“Works,” she said, displaying the number stored in the tag. “The phone emits only a tiny amount of RF power so you have to get it real close to read the chip.
“Now the test. Let me turn off my phone first. I calculated what the range of this setup should be and it’s a max of five meters—little less than 20 feet.”
She turned on the charging switch and the faint whine could be heard; then the ready indicator lit up.
“Here goes nothing,” Tamara said and put the RFID label next to the camera.
Using an insulated screwdriver... “Take no chances” ... she grinned at Tim ... she pressed the shutter button. There was a little pop.
“Oooo. No smoke or flame. Good sign,” Tamara said with a smile. “Now to see...”
She turned her phone on and opened the app. When she passed the tag over the phone, there was no response and she smiled triumphantly, “Sweet!”
She tried it on the front and back of the phone and there was no change on the screen.
“Do you have another one? Sitting in your metal cabinet file over there, they’re both shielded and too far away to be affected by this EMF.”
Tim brought one over and she tested it; its number popped right up.
“Tim, can we sacrifice this one? I want to be sure nothing burnt out in the camera itself.”
“Oh, sure; why the hell not?”
Tamara repeated the test and was overjoyed when she saw that the device still worked and that the new tag was dead now.
“Tamara, you aren’t gonna do anything...” Tim began.
“I didn’t make this to do anything evil,” Tamara told him. “I’m not using it to get into trouble.”
He slowly nodded.
Tamara thought, After all, helping kids feel better isn’t evil, is it? And I certainly intend not to get into trouble.
“Okay, last test. Your RF field detector, you have it down here now—not up in the MRI room?” she asked him and he nodded. “I want to measure the power flux density this thing puts out at five meters, two, and one. Set it to the RF spectrum power analyzer function, please. That’s about five meters where you are right there, good. Ready? Here goes.”
She fired the device and then tried it at the closer distances.
“Wow. Good results. At five meters, only 12.5 watts per square centimeter; two meters, about 63 peak; at a meter, about 250. The pulse length is five milliseconds. So cell phones nearby should be okay and most other electronics too. I wonder how this would affect a RFID reader unit if it’s reading when I pop my device?”
She checked the time. “Oh look, we’ve been having way too much fun here and I have to get home soon now.”
They said their goodbyes and Tamara left the shop.
Now I’ll need to see how they work on a Florida chip, she mused. But how can I get one? Maybe Beauford... Oh! What a great idea! I wonder if Dr John can get any of the chips from his clinic or if he knows of how to get any—rejects, maybe?
~~~~
At school the following day, she saw her new friends at lunch.
“Hey, if somehow your chips stopped working and your parents knew they didn’t work anymore...” Tamara started.
“... then we could wear clothes?” Sylvia finished. “You bet! But how can that happen?”
Tamara leaned in close to them. “This is a huge secret, but I think I’m onto something. You can’t tell anyone, right? Until I make arrangements.”
They agreed to keep the secret.
When she was leaving the lab for home the next time that she was there, she recalled that Dr John should be at his apartment now too, and his apartment was close by.
When Dr John came to the door, she asked him, “Is there any way I can get one of those Florida RFID chips, like if you needed to take one out or something?”
John grinned at her. “Sue told me that you’re really against the SiF program. Are you going to try to use them in an anti-stripping campaign?” She shrugged noncommittally. “Well, be careful. Messing with them when they’re implanted is illegal, you know. Just don’t get caught. I’m sure you have a plan. Okay, the chips? We’ve gotten some that couldn’t be used because their packaging was damaged and they weren’t sterile anymore. If we still have them, I’ll bring them home tomorrow.”
Tamara was very happy about that. “I’d think that the state would want to keep track of them?”
“Well, what I heard is that the nurse tells the county office that issues the tags that if their sterility is compromised, they’re destroyed to prevent accidental use. Oh yes. We might have others too. Parents buy them and have to take them to a doc. Then they may get buyer’s remorse before the procedure. Or the kid convinces them not to do it.”
The following day, Dr John brought home three chips; he called her and she went to get them.
~~~~
The next time Tamara was in the hospital on her way to the MRI lab, she passed a nurse wheeling a medication cart. On the top of the cart, she saw several small metal vials with a screw cap, about two inches long and three-quarters inch in diameter. She stopped and asked the nurse about them.
“We have them in the gift shop. They have a screw cap and are waterproof and can hold pills. Most people who need nitroglycerine caps for angina keep a few in these. They go on pendants or key chains.”
Tamara stopped in the gift shop and saw they came in a pack of two for only $5, so she bought a pack.
There goes the rest of my allowance for the week, she thought. But it’s worth it.
Now that she had the actual chip to test, when she got home, she tried the RFID reader app on her phone. When she brought the chip next to the phone, a string of digits and letters appeared.
Hmm, just an alphanumeric sequence. They must link it to a central database, she thought. At least they don’t store personal info on the chip.
Then she put a chip in one of the pill tubes she bought. Her phone app couldn’t read it.
I don’t want to sacrifice one of my chips to try to zap it. I have a better use, she reflected. I have an idea for Saturday.
The following day at school, Tamara began her plan. At lunch, she spoke to her friends.
“Hey, can you get maybe six more kids to go to the mall with you? Then we’ll have six in clothing, me, and you three. Being in a large group should shield you from being singled out if the SiF alarm sounds while your chip is still working. Then we’ll see about how to kill the stripping program for you. But secrecy still, okay? Are you gonna go through with it?”
They agreed. Tamara showed them the app on her phone. She held the phone up to Sylvia’s arm and showed her the code that displayed; she repeated that for the other girls.
“So you see how the officials can detect that you’re stripped—they can see the code, using the readers they have.”
The girls looked at her with wide eyes, amazed.
~~~~
On Saturday, Tamara met her friends and the others as they walked over to the local shopping area. Tamara was carrying her backpack. It wasn’t a true modern mall shopping oasis; it was a block filled with many shops and was roofed over and had several entry doors at each end. It was a favorite spot for the local teens to hang out. All of the shop and main entrance doors had the “Stripped in Florida” scanners and cameras. Giggling to herself, Tamara slipped one of the three chips she had out of its little metal tube as the group passed by the scanner. The alarm went off and there was a frenzy around the door since many people were passing through that area.
Tamara slipped the chip back into its tube and about a minute later, some security guards ran up, one waving a portable scanner. He started pointing it at all the clothed people, not realizing that the scanner wasn’t a truly directional device. After several minutes they gave up. Tamara repeated her stunt at several other scanning stations around the mall and that’s when her three friends began to realize that something was up. The last time the guards came running, Tamara, being careful to be a distance from her naked friends, triggered her “camera” just as the guard pointed it at one clothed girl.
“Damn,” the guard exclaimed as he looked at the device’s display. “The dumb thing quit.”
The other guard came over and they both tried to get it working with no success.
Good! Tamara celebrated. It knocks out the portable readers. Let me try the ones at the shop entrances.
She exposed her chip and walked past a shop sensor; the alarm went off as Tamara quickly covered the chip and fired the camera. The alarm stopped in mid squawk.
Time for phase two, she decided, after zapping about a dozen similar door sensors.
Sylvia and Julie were still with her, Sondra had to return home, and the other clothed kids had wandered off to somewhere else.
“You guys feel brave now and want to try getting dressed? There will be no consequences at all,” Tamara assured them.
“What do we do?” Julie asked, a little fearfully.
“I have clothing for you to wear. A top and shorts, in my pack. Let’s hit the ladies’ room.”
The restroom doorway was equipped with a sensor too. It made Tamara wonder just how much money had been spent on “Stripped in Florida” infrastructure—it would probably take fifty years or more of registration fees before the infrastructure costs were recovered, she guessed. So much for making money for the state.
Inside the room, the three slipped into the handicapper stall.
“You ready to go through with this?” she asked. “Your chip will stop working soon, so when you leave here, you’ll have to be dressed,” Tamara said as she took two pairs of clothes out of her backpack.
“You really can do that?” Sylvia asked.
Tamara nodded.
“I’m in,” Julie said, and then Sylvia nodded.
“Sit down,” Tamara instructed them and pointed to a bench in there. “Remember when I tested your chips?”
They nodded.
She took her phone out and showed them that the chips were still working. Then she put the phone back into a pocket in her backpack—one lined with some metal foil she had obtained from Tim—as she surreptitiously triggered the camera.
“All done,” she announced as she stood up.
“What? ... “How?”
Tamara took out her phone and waved it over both girls’ arms. Nothing appeared in the display.
“You didn’t feel anything in your arms? No tingle or warmth?”
They both said “No.” Then Julie: “What did you do?”
“Just something I figured out that cell phones can do,” she dissembled as a subterfuge in case officialdom traced her campaign back to her. “But you can’t tell anyone I know how to do it. Did you find out if any kids in the school actually want to continue being naked?”
The two girls looked at each other. Sylvia said, “We didn’t actually speak to everybody, but enough of us stripped kids know a little something about each other.”
“Yeah, even the kids who liked being naked at first are gettin’ real tired of it,” Julie commented.
“So if on Monday it turns out that everyone’s chip gets zapped, no one would be brokenhearted?”
The two girls looked at each other and both shook their heads.
“Okay, here’s the test now. Put on these clothes and we’ll go out. The alarm won’t go off. If it does or if you’re afraid it might, then just duck right back in here and you can strip again. But you won’t have to.”
They left the restroom and the alarm at the door remained silent. The three girls high-fived one another. Then Julie looked at Sylvia; they grabbed each other’s hands and shouted at each other, “Shopping!” Then they squealed, “CLOTHES!”
The girls grabbed Tamara and hugged her. “You’re a lifesaver, girlfriend!” Sylvia gushed
Julie began crying. “I never realized how much my clothing meant to me. It was... was... was how I felt to me... I mean, how I expressed myself. With no clothes, I lost that. It made me feel empty inside. Tamara, thank you for giving me back to myself again!”
Tamara could only nod back happily. She felt a glow of joy.
They went shopping. Tamara had just enough money from her Friday allowance to splurge on a cute top that she fell in love with.
~~~~
On Monday, Tamara, Julie, Sylvia, and Sondra stood, dressed in their uniforms, at the main school door as the kids filed in. Tamara had zapped Sondra’s chip the day before, after swearing her to secrecy.
Whenever a naked kid came by, Tamara fired her zapper. She managed to “convert” almost all of the kids that day. With about 520 students, there were only 47 in the SiF program. She missed just six.
Of course, there was a clamor about Julie, Sylvia, and Sondra being clothed. If they were wearing clothes, the door sensors should have sounded an alert. The sensors at the school door were checked; they were still working. The three girls were paraded through the main doors again and the alarm didn’t sound. They tried another door with the same result. Police were called and their portable scanner did not indicate the presence of a chip in the girls. Without knowing the implanted chip code, there was no way to field-identify a stripped child by name. The responsible county official, she was the “Stripped in Florida” supervisor for the county, was contacted. She came to the school and asked that the girls’ parents be called.
Tamara found out later what happened. The facts as known were presented by the county supervisor. The girls’ parents had signed a permission form which allowed their child to have an identifying chip implanted into her body for the purpose of becoming a “Stripped in Florida” participant and that the form also stated that the parents would responsible for ensuring that their child would follow the SiF rules. Therefore the non-functioning chip had to be replaced.
Apparently Principal Lombard was not a fan at all. She had disagreed with the supervisor. She pointed out that the agreement gave permission to have AN identifying chip implanted and that had been performed. The law did not require that a second chip be implanted if the first one failed. Florida law was clear that only the child’s parents could give permission for having a program chip implanted; this had been done and the parents’ responsibilities had been fulfilled since their children had had their chips implanted. Despite the fact that the chips were no longer working, the parents could not be forced to subject their children to having a medical procedure performed—having another chip implanted. Federal regulations gave parents the right, in most cases, to refuse medical procedures to be performed on their children.
And while that argument was going on in the principal’s office, the word began circulating in the school’s classrooms and hallways that the chips of virtually every naked kid no longer worked, and chaos ensued. Word quickly got back to principal’s office and the situation of the three girls had to be shelved for the time being; the principal was needed to help control the resulting disorder.
By the following day, the state office which ran the SiF program, alarmed by this situation, arranged to send technicians to the school building to check it for electronic interference issues because obviously there must be some kind of electronic problem in the building which was damaging the chips. And Tamara was happy to hear from her three friends that their parents weren’t angry with their newly clothed daughters after they learned that their daughters’ chips no longer worked. As Tamara had figured, any novelty for them had run its course.
After school that afternoon, Tamara visited as many places as she could get to on foot, zapping sensors and, whenever she could get close to them, zapping naked kids’ chips too. And during the next several weeks, she circulated widely, zapping sensors and kids in random areas, while walking, riding a city bus, and going shop to shop. As the zapped chip bearers began to discover their new status, word spread widely about how it was now possible to get out of the program, but only if you happened to be somewhere in Miami at the proper time. The police had totally given up the job of checking for clothed kids who should be naked, so even those kids whose chips were still active took the risk of dressing, realizing that the police wouldn’t bother them.
Outside Miami, it was different. But Tamara had done further testing on her three loose chips. She found that a 1-½ inch-wide band of four layers of aluminum foil wrapped around the arm where the chip was implanted would block a reader, even if the RFID reader was as close as nine inches. So she prepared a little text document which showed how to easily modify an elastic upper arm band to incorporate the foil layer, and for short-sleeve wearers, the bands were available in flesh colors, and she gave the instructions for how to get the chip-reading app for smart phones to test your own chip. She sent the document by anonymous emails to newspapers in various high schools and to many college newspapers. The instructions were widely copied and re-posted all over the web. Florida officials couldn’t do anything about those postings. Free speech is a federal right.
As a result of Tamara’s campaign, new sign-ups for the program slowed greatly and even tourist participation dropped. Police departments in most jurisdictions, their officials not happy about the added duty of chasing after clothed children who should be naked, relegated this task to the lowest possible priority.
Tamara was happy. She felt that she had righted a significant wrong.
Little Haiti, Miami, Florida: mid-February
Tamara had recently turned 12 and was looking forward to the end of middle school. She’d be starting high school in the fall and her friends in grade 8 at Thomas Mann were looking forward with anticipation and a little anxiety too, at starting in a new school. One major cause of anxiety was that the Miami-Dade School Board was still deciding whether and how it would begin the Naked in School Program in the county’s high schools.
The school board didn’t want to start it in all high schools at once and didn’t want to run it in schools which had less than a 95 percent graduation rate; the board members felt that adding a mandatory nudity program on top of the Stripped in Florida program would cause too many issues. They were still trying to deal with the nudity in the schools which had uniforms—all of the K-8 schools in Miami did, and dealing with uniformed kids and naked kids going to school together was an administrative and class control nightmare. Also, adding required children’s nudity as part of the state’s social culture had actually defeated the prime purpose of requiring uniforms in the schools, which was to minimize any social distinctions caused by the quality and even the manufacturer of the children’s clothing.
~~~~
One day at the end of February, Tamara was summoned to the school office. When she went into the little conference room adjoining the office, she was surprised to see several people there but not Mrs Lombard.
“Please sit,” a woman told her. “I’m Mrs Gebbers and I’m an attorney for the school district. This is,” she pointed, “Detective Jessert, Miami Police; Mrs Bennett, the county ‘Stripped in Florida’ supervisor; and Mr Monters, from the SiF program’s state office.”
Still standing, Tamara asked, “Where’s Mrs Lombard? Shouldn’t she be here?”
“Principal Lombard isn’t in the school today, but she isn’t involved with this matter,” Gebbers said.
“It’s her school and I’m a student here. She should be here. And if a police person’s here, I want my parents here, too,” Tamara stated.
“I can protect your rights, miss, since I’m an attorney,” Gebbers claimed.
Still standing, Tamara shook her head. “Not if you work for the school, you can’t. You can’t also represent me. That’s a conflict of interest and you should know that,” she insisted.
“Oohh,” Jessert exclaimed. “Watch yourself with her, Claudia,” she said to the lawyer.
“Anyway,” Tamara told them, “I’ll be standing right here until you call my parents. Then I’ll speak to you when they come.”
Gebbers whispered in Bennett’s ear, who nodded and left the room.
“Mrs Bennett’s calling your parents now. Please sit down and we’ll talk.”
After a minute, Bennett came back in and nodded to Gebbers.
“Your parents are on the way,” Gebbers said. “And Detective Jessert wants to say something first.”
Jessert began, “I’m here about a complaint from the Stripped in Florida administration. There was a problem in this school a few months ago involving a large number of children’s RFID tags failing. State law makes it a felony to tamper with them, and SiF officials told my office in the Miami Police Department that you somehow were involved. Also, we were given information that you found a phone app that destroys the tags and I want you to hand your phone to...”
“Wait,” Tamara said. “Before you continue, my parents have to be here. Mrs Bennett,” she looked at Bennett, then stared into her eyes; Bennett looked away. “Oh, so you never did call them. That was a sham,” Tamara accused them.
“Why do you say that?” Gebbers asked her. “She said she called.”
“First,” Tamara enumerated, “she wasn’t gone long enough. My mom is working right now and she keeps her cell off. And calling the hospital directly, it takes a few minutes to get through the voice menus just to get to her department. Second, Dad always has his phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’ at work. The only calls that go through are mine and Mom’s. Third, when I looked at that woman, she wouldn’t meet my eyes. I know when I see someone trying to lie.”
Monters stood up. “Whatever, we want you to tell us what you know. One of your friends was heard to mention that she knew someone who could turn chips off and thought she used her cell to do it.”
Tamara thought for a second. Must have been Sondra; she moved away after Thanksgiving and was always a bit of a gossip.
Monters was continuing. “When we questioned that girl, she said that you were with her and two other stripped kids at your school when all those chips became inactive. And during the previous week, there was a strange incident at that little street mall near here involving a lot of scanners which stopped operating. When we reviewed the mall’s security tapes, we saw that you were in the mall at that time.”
Jessert broke in. “I insist that you hand over your cell phone.”
Tamara shook her head. “I don’t have it with me. They’re not allowed in school and you’d need a search warrant anyway. None of what you said matters. I’m at that mall lots, and the girls are my friends, so we were always together. You’re just trying to cover for... um... a lot of shoddy R-feed things or whatever you called them going bad.”
“Mr Monters and I want to take you with us to our office so we can question you more fully,” Bennett told her.
Tamara thought quickly. Can I ‘push’ four people at once? Maybe if I can get them confused first.
First, she “pushed” Bennett, gathering some ochre taste and sending it at her. She whispered to her, “You need to take Detective Jessert to your office, not the girl.” Then she said aloud, “I don’t care if you want to take Detective Jessert away...” and while Bennett was trying to clear her mind from the mental jumble that Tamara had caused, Tamara turned her attention to Jessert.
Oooh, ochre taste is just right, she thought.
She “pushed,” using ochre again, saying very quietly. “You’re aware of a great danger in the school. Kids are gonna die,” then aloud, “You need to find the guy with the ray-gun, not me. He’s just outside. He’s who you want.”
Jessert blinked at her, started to say something, but then turned and ran out the door.
Now with Bennett being confused, there were just two remaining people in the room to go and both were looking slightly bemused at the other twos’ behavior. Tamara realized that she needed to work quickly, so she directed her gaze at Monters and spoke his name; he looked into her eyes and shuddered.
She whispered to him urgently, “You hate spiders. Look, they’re crawling all over you, going up your legs and I see some in your hair. They’ll bite you—get them off.” She projected the tastes of fear, dread, and confusion at him.
He began twisting around, slapping at himself, and shouting, “Get them off me! They’re in my clothes! Gotta get somewhere—gotta get them off...” as he ran out.
Tamara turned to Gebbers, who was watching in shock as the people around her were behaving like they had gone crazy. She locked eyes with Gebbers.
And “pushed,” saying commandingly, “You’re an evil, lying, and deceiving person. It’s said that lying and deceitful people should burn, and that’s what’s happening to you. You have the worst sunburn you ever felt and it’s like your skin is blistering. You need to get it treated before your skin falls off. And the next time you lie, it’ll happen again!”
She “pushed” all the tastes, the dark gray of doubt, the bright red of pain, the pale yellow of fright, at the woman, who shrieked and ran out of the room.
Bennett looked into Tamara’s eyes. “What’s happening here? I’m so confused...”
Hmmm, ochre worked, but there’s something better. Tamara thought and then “pushed” a greenish-brown taste at her.
“You’re confused because you have no idea why you’re here. You can’t remember anything about chips that don’t work. Anytime you try to think about them, the confusion will return. In fact, any thoughts of RFID chips will make you confused. You should be in your office, right?”
Bennett’s eyes widened. “Oh! I’m late! I’ll miss my appointment!” and she rushed out.
Tamara giggled to herself. Oooo. I like that greenish-brown one. Yeah. Use it on Monters ‘cause he’ll come back—his briefcase is still here.
Jessert came back into the room, panting.
Tamara innocently asked her, “Did you catch him?”
“What the fuck’s going on... where’s everyone?” Jessert panted. “What the hell happened here, anyway?”
Tamara fixed Jessert with a stare and let an aura of greenish-brown taste flow out toward her.
“You really hate jobs that involve trying to chase after naked kids. Just the thought of working on those cases makes your skin crawl, doesn’t it? Especially this case, so you will try to never think about it again.”
Another one down, Tamara rejoiced as Jessert fled. Shit, my head feels like it’s gonna explode.
She sat down and laid her head on the table for a few minutes to try to still the pounding. After five minutes, Monters came back in; his clothes were all rumpled and disheveled. Tamara was nowhere ready, but she forced herself and stared at Monters and marshaled her greenish-brown taste, but it had more of a yellowish taste now.
“You’ll never get rid of the spiders as long as you stay in your job. Every time you want to think of a stripped kid, the spiders will return. In fact, the further away from Florida you go, the further you’ll be from those nasty spiders. And the sooner the better,” she “pushed” before getting to her feet and staggering to the door.
I need to get to the nurse before I faint, she thought. And I know that yellow-tinted taste I “pushed” just then—it’s fear along with ... not memory loss, but with memory association... But... Whatever... Works.
That evening she told her parents what had happened.
“And the nurse gave me a couple Tylenol and let me nap for an hour. I told her not to call you, that I got those headaches occasionally after my surgery but not as frequently anymore. That this one was because I got anxious when the police detective was asking questions.”
“That was quick thinking, sweetie,” Wilson said. “Is the principal in tomorrow? Mom and I want to go see her.”
“Yeah, she should be. She was out for an administrators’ meeting. Say, I think those goons knew she’d be away. Yeah, they did know. It was something about how they reacted when I asked why she wasn’t there.”
Early the next morning, Nadine called the school and got an appointment at the end of the day. When the Alexandres arrived, Lombard apologized.
“Sorry about Tamara. That should have never happened. I’ve told my staff that no one, even police, is to meet with a child during school hours without my being there. They had convinced the assistant principal that if a cop was there, that no school official needed to be. No more.”
“Do you know what happened?” Nadine asked.
“Only that they were looking into the events of last year when all those children’s SiF tags failed,” she answered. “And after five minutes or thereabouts into the meeting, some kind of disagreement broke out. One person raced out of the room and started running around the halls—the cop, my staff thought it was. The plainclothes cop. Another ran into the teachers’ men’s room muttering that something was crawling on him and he was pulling at his clothes. A few minutes after that, they began running out of the school, one at a time. It was all very strange. Your daughter went to the nurse then with a headache. We checked on her today and she’s been fine.”
“She was okay when we got home yesterday too,” Wilson said. “Tamara told us that they started to ask questions and she told them that you had to be there...”
“Smart girl...” Lombard interrupted.
“Agreed,” Wilson continued, “or that they needed to call us. Then she said they began to disagree about what to do, as you said you heard, and then everything got so confusing to Tamara that she went to the nurse.”
Lombard nodded. “That agrees with what I was told. And it gets even stranger. The district superintendent called me this morning. He wanted to know if I had any idea why their lawyer quit yesterday, claiming she had an urgent family situation. He also said that he had been recently contacted by the Stripped in Florida county office to inquire if two students who had been registered in this school were still here, and gave me their names. I told him that their families had moved out of state last year and he said that was odd, since the county had reports of their SiF tags being registered as clothing violators by scanners in this area; had they possibly come to the school as visitors, perhaps? I told him no, that they hadn’t come by the school. And, again this morning, I heard from another city school principal, a friend of mine, that the county SiF program supervisor had quit yesterday afternoon with no notice. Both that lawyer and the SiF county person were here yesterday morning. Does Tamara know what they were arguing about?”
“I think that she was wishing she could just get out of there,” Wilson laughed. “That scene really scared her.”
“I can imagine,” Lombard agreed. “No child should be forced to meet adults under adversarial circumstances without proper supervision. I’m just glad she’s okay.”
The couple left the school, and once outside, Nadine hugged Wilson.
“I’m so impressed at how you totally sidestepped Lombard’s direct question without it looking like you were avoiding it, but also not giving anything away, dear,” Nadine told him.
“Hah. You learn that in the Marines. Never reveal anything to a third party unless the third party has a need to know. About this? No one needs to know.”
But someone, in a sense, now knew something was afoot. That person had become alerted when Tamara had begun to unleash the full force of her abilities.
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