Tami Beethoven

It was only later that he found out that she was a modest girl who did not want to be naked, and who had been forced into that escalating series of humiliations by Dean Jorgon and Henry Ross who were trying to get her to renounce her scholarship. And that, after Jorgon had resigned and Ross had disappeared and the whole injustice came to light, she discovered she had developed an allergy to clothes and shoes of any type.

What remarkable iron within those young features! He wrote her a letter of apology but knew that was not enough. He prayed for several nights trying to find forgiveness. Finally he met with her in the faculty lounge and asked her forgiveness in person. For a person of his pride it was not easy. She said nothing for a long moment, and then to his surprise she embraced him tearfully.

That experience profoundly changed him. Also, events in the outside world over the past couple of years had convinced him that fundamentalism was perhaps not the way to go. Fortunately most of his congregation followed him as he edged leftward. The lengthening hair was but a trivial sign of it. He peppered his sermons less and less with condemnation and more and more with social justice and compassion. It turned out not to be that hard. Support in scripture was certainly easy to find.

The idea that came to him to set up a clothing closet had such an obvious and questionable origin that he resisted it for a while, but it was simply the right thing to do. In this often cold climate there were many poor people, not so much in town but in the surrounding area, that would benefit. He was aware why he got the idea, through his partial embrace of Freud. Herr Remmler's mentor had made some penetrating observations. Rev. Stipend wanted most of all to give Tami Smithers clothes. Setting up the closet was a sublimation of that desire. Sublimation, he now knew, sometimes had its uses.

Tami and Yvette emerged from the aisles, Yvette carrying jeans, a coat, a flannel shirt, and tall leather boots. Tami carried a furry, Russian-style hat.

"You can take more," he said, then realized he was actually talking to Tami. What a cross she had to bear. Yet she carried it almost joyfully.

Tami seemed about to turn back, then said, "No, this will do. Thank you."

"Any time, my dear -- Tami."

Going back to the car, Yvette remarked, "For a cleric he is a nice man." Tami laughed.

Another quick jaunt in Tami's cold little metal crate and they were back at the house. Tami sent Yvette into the shower.

Yvette came out wrapped in a towel, with another around her hair. "Come over here." She followed the voice to the master bedroom where Tami had her "new" clothes laid out on the now completely made-up bed. Tami was rummaging through a drawer. As she bent over with a total lack of bashfulness, the brown asterisk of her butthole was almost in Yvette's face. Yvette tried not to look.

"You probably want some socks under those boots," Tami said. "Rod has some extras. Sorry I don't have any women's underwear."

"No?"

"No. I don't own any clothes of course. . . I'll be in the kitchen, calling the help center."

Yvette took her time with dressing. She couldn't help but smile as she presented herself to Tami in the kitchen. Though second-hand, the shirt, jeans, the coat, even the Russian hat, looked very good on her. This Tami had excellent fashion sense.

She felt like a little girl getting ready for a party as Tami fussed over the blouse and the coat. Absently looking at the jiggling bare nipples, she said, "Tami, your body is most fine. You could make a million dollars dancing on the circuit."

At this her clothesless host just smiled.

A few minutes later, the old VW, back in town, parked on the main street. They were about to get out and Yvette, sensing their time together was about to end, could not resist asking. "Tami. How can you stand being without clothes in this weather so cold?"

"It's mostly in the mind," Tami replied, as if having been asked this question many times and having rehearsed and refined the answer. "To some extent my body has gotten used to it. In the cold weather I eat like a pig and my metabolism is higher. Of course I can't stay out for, like, hours or anything like that. Or if it's super-cold. Keeping moving is important."

"How long have you been like this?"

"This is my fourth winter. The first one was rough. The second one, I kept testing my limits, seeing what was possible. By the third winter, I knew how to handle the cold so automatically, that I hardly thought about it."

They were getting out of the car now. A tall woman in stylishly bohemian clothes and stiletto heel boots stopped by. Next to her was a much older woman with a cane, in a big fake-fur coat and a green flowery hat.

"Hi, Tami," Assistant Dean Vanessa Congi said.

"Hello dear," the lady in the green hat, Professor Emeritus Mildred George, said in her scratchy old voice.

"This is my friend Yvette," Tami said graciously as she shuffled around the back of the Beetle to turn off the bypass switch. Yvette shook hands with each, a little ladylike clasp. As the naked girl came around to where they were, Professor Congi said, "That's a beautiful shade of hair, Tami."

"Oh thanks." Tami looked down at her pubic patch. This made Yvette half cover her eyes.

"I see your nails all match your hair color," Mrs. George said admiringly.

"I did them myself."

"It looks professional."

"Gee thanks," Tami said, blushing over and above the usual flush from the cold. As they looked down she lifted a foot and spread her toes. The plum-colored toenails, graced with crystals of fresh snow, sparkled in the bright morning sun, a strange and beautiful sight.

Professor Congi looked a bit further up. "Did you also color your clitoris?" She remembered what Tami had been like as a sophomore.

"No," Tami laughed, looking down there with the rest of them. She spread her labia with her thumbs. "That's just my lips. See, on cold days she stays inside." The little pink clitoris, lighter in color than the lips or the hair, poked out wetly and tentatively in the cold brightness as the two older women, bundled in their winter clothes and boots, looked appreciatively, Mrs. George leaning on her cane.

"Hi!" Professor said playfully with a little wave.

"Hi hi," Tami said in a high-pitched singsong, with little jerks of her internal muscles making the clit jump up and down twice. The older women got quite a kick out of that.

Yvette, feeling faint, stood up and looked at the blue sky and took a deep breath. After some minor chit-chat the two grown-ups left.

As they were getting Yvette's bag out of the car, her mind returned to the main subject of her curiosity. "And this fourth winter?"

"What?"

"You said how you dealt with going through the first three winters. This is your fourth. How is it?"

"Well," Tami said, standing next to her. "Now -- it's -- fun!!"

She kicked snow up with her toes, pressed it down on the other foot, then all in the same motion with a soccer player's skill kicked the little snowball right into Yvette's face just as she said "fun"!

"Eeeek!" Yvette brushed it away but it was followed by another. She ran behind the car, laughing, and decided retaliation was necessary. When she emerged a big sloppy snowball hit Tami right on her tanned concave tummy. This elicited a left-handed curveball that hit the shoulder of her coat.

The two young women ran around and around the Beetle, Yvette clumping around in her boots, bits of snow flying back from Tami's toes. It was not a fair fight, of course. Tami seemed to be a natural pitcher, and could produce an "eeek!" whenever she hit Yvette's face or neck. Landing snowballs on Tami's naked skin, already used to the cold, did not have the same effect.

The Quebecois girl was flushed and disheveled when Tami brought her into the help center, but was cheerful and smiling which would make her easier for the case manager to work with. "Thank you, thank you, merci," was all Yvette could say as she said goodbye to her naked new friend, hugging her tightly, enjoying the soft feel of the breasts crushed against her coat, and even betraying a sniffle or two, only partly from having been out in the cold.

Part 5

"I have come into your life to redeem your image of bio majors," said Gretchen, a tall, blonde, blue-eyed, somewhat chunky girl Tami's age. "We are not all dweebs. We are not all virgins. We do not all spend our time trying to make Tami Smithers miserable with fourth-grader antics. In fact, MOST of us are not any of that."

Gretchen had made this declaration to Tami three years ago during their freshman year, sharing a salad in the dining hall after a particularly odious episode of abuse from Gretchen's classmate Lorinda and her friends. On that occasion Tami, having been outfitted for the day with the bristle bra and dildo panties ostensibly for scientific purposes, defended Gretchen against chatter that was too loud not to be overheard, spreading their opinion to half the world that Gretchen had faked a sprained ankle to avoid a big exam. Standing in the middle of the circle of dweeby girls outside the bio building on a gray spring day, the 18-year-old Tami labored to articulate her protest amidst the internal frictionings and vibrations activated by the remote controls that had somehow made their way into their hands.

Gretchen, hobbling unnoticed toward them on crutches, would never forget the scene. "She's -- ohhh! -- more dedicated than you -- ohhh -- will ever -- beeeee!!!!!" The girls squealed with delight as the last word stretched out under the influence of the vibrations and bristlings as Tami crested. "Woo hoo! Another one! Up to fifteen!" said Betsy, reading the LCD display on the tiny pubic covering. "Come again, baby!!" Lorinda joined in, immediately renewing the assault. Tami's body bounced up and down like a marionette, her feet slapping crazily on the cold concrete, as they coordinated their attack, sliding the rheostats up and down in unison and enjoying Tami's words cadencing up and down accordingly. "You are acting so -- imm -- mm -- mature . . . If she d - didn't have to g - go to the same class she wouldn't -- OHH!" (she arched her back here) "have anything to do with youu . . . Kchkk . . .Eeeeeee!" Her eyes bugged open as the rear dildo vibrations were shot up to maximum.

They saw Gretchen and fled. At the risk of letting her crutch drop the lame girl put her arm around Tami's bare shoulders as her quaking gradually ceased. When Tami was breathing more or less normally and it seemed none of the dozens of remotes at large were in range, they went to the dining hall, Tami walking stiffly under the influence of the dildos and bristles that still rubbed on her and within her with every step.

Since then Gretchen, who had been hanging out with Tami but had not gotten close, became a good friend, and after the graduation of Jen and Rebecca and Marisol, probably her best friend on campus. Tami, without any effort, inspired deep devotion in anyone who got to know her, and Gretchen was no exception. From a different but equally conservative background as Tami -- Gretchen was from a straight-laced dairy farm family in upstate New York with a fiancé in the Army -- she and Tami put their work ethics and majors together and developed a joint term project, developing a biodegradable polymer from which fabric could hopefully be made that both insulated against cold and breathed in the heat.

So it was that they could be found together, at 10:30 a.m., in the biochem lab in Rockley Hall. Gretchen, in goggles and an apron, had poured the contents of a test tube onto the aluminum substrate. Tami, holding her goggles up to her eyes because her allergy did not allow her to put the straps around her head, watched from behind, glancing downward to make sure her feet were not touching anything on the floor that looked like a chemical stain.

The solution partially dried on the aluminum amid a slight cloud of smoke.

"We're getting there," Gretchen said.

"Do you think my nucleotide formula was correct?"

"I assume so. Your calculus is a lot better than mine."

"Maybe we need less alkyne," Tami said.

The solution was supposed to dry almost immediately, then be rolled into a thread for weaving. This was the third try and they were getting close. Their professors had already given them an A for the project but both had further ambitions for it.

Tami looked at the clock and smiled. "It's almost showtime."

Gretchen smiled behind the goggles. "You're really making me go through with this, right?"

After cleanup they were on their way to Thayer Hall, where the "Department of Fashion Technology" classes were held. Professor Wanamaker, looking quite the denizen of the fashion world with his ascot and paisley shirt, sat in the back of one of the basement classrooms while his Reinventing Fashion class did their midterm in-class reports.

There were three scheduled today. Tami, who was only minoring in Fashion but, being Tami, was headed for an A, was first up.

Bracing her hands behind her on the front table where her papers lay, Tami stood bolt upright in front of the class, giving them an unembarrassed full frontal view of her statuesque nakedness. Her topic: measuring bra size.

"My, uh, project is on a very basic topic, but I think one that maybe could be done better." Tami had little trouble with public speaking, having been Vice President of the student government in her sophomore year. "I think you girls, anyway, could identify. I remember --" she looked up at the ceiling, maybe a bit uneasily, her big toe twisting onto the dusty tile floor, "buying a bra that I was sure was the right size, only to get home and it was, like, too tight, or else I was swimming around in it. Or maybe, did you ever," she said, looking at a couple of the female students toward the front, "maybe you hadn't eaten all day, and your, uh, breasts" (one could tell that in this classroom setting she had stopped herself from saying "boobs") "were far apart, like this" -- she looked down and, cupping her breasts, separated them -- "and the bra didn't bring them together, or if you ate a lot of pizza or something, they were bigger and more mooshed together" -- the ideal model for what she was talking about, Tami compressed her breasts so that they met -- "and the bra pulled them apart?"

Some sounds of agreement and nodding from the female students. There were three male students, and being gay they were less interested, but polite. Tami was popular with them too.

Wanamaker said, "So what is your solution, Tami?" Tami didn't need it but, after years of seeing students freeze up while giving oral reports, he automatically interjected to help things along.

Turning around to pick up the papers, giving the class a view of her beautifully formed butt, Tami turned back to say, "The problem arises from the, uh, conventional method of measuring bust size. Look at page 137 of the Basics of Design text."

They could all see a slight sheen of sweat on Tami's face and her concave tummy, but this was not due to nervousness. It was well known that in the winter Tami, with her increased metabolism, often felt hot after spending some time indoors. Also this basement room was stuffy. Tami looked at Claire in the back row. "Claire, could you read the first step in that list, on the left?"

Claire, a very thin Asian girl in a silk puff-sleeve blouse, white jeans and high-heel black boots, found the page and said, "You mean where it says measure rib cage, then across nippples?"

"No, before that. The first step."

"O.K. 'Step One. Stand upright in a bra that fits correctly.'"

She looked up at Tami who had a little smile on her face. It sank in quickly. Wanamaker laughed and so did some others. With a big smile Tami said, "Now how it tells you how to measure the rib cage and across the nipples, but first you have to wear a bra that fits." She was a little animated now, moving her hands, her breasts jiggling. "It's like the joke about the germ killer that says, 'use only in well-ventilated area'. But if it was well ventilated, there wouldn't be germs in the first place.

"My solution involves some calculus," she said, turning to the blackboard, making some of the students groan. Wanamaker good-naturedly said, "O.K., people." As she wrote Tami held the papers in her right hand, her butt jiggling ever so slightly, quarter-phase glimpses of her bouncing breasts sometimes being seen. She was drawing a section of a cone, some curves, an integral... "Make it understandable, Tami. I don't want to clip your wings but we've never had a math major in this class before."

Tami got into the explanation of it and most of the class could partly understand, or thought they did. "My model is that of a parabola. Almost all women have breasts that can be fitted into parabolic cups. I made some computer models."

The room went dark and the big screen to the side lit up. A purple torso with two blue parabolic solids jutting out with some equations on the bottom in a neutral font. "Ooooo," someone said teasingly. "Finally, someone uses our new flat-screen," Wanamaker said.

"This is the paraboloid of a C cup. And now, D, and double D, or E in the British system. Here's B and A." A few more images and Tami darted to her right and turned the lights back on. "You can see that, with the breasts free and not wearing a bra, the cross-nipple measurement is plugged into the parabolic formula, and you translate that into cup size."

"How do you know this would be comfortable for all women?" Wanamaker said.

"Breasts are more pliable than even a lot women think, at least I believe so. I'll show you." Tami walked forward so that she was between the two students in the front row. "This would be a spherical model," she said, grasping her breasts from the front with her palms almost flat against the nipples. "From there you can go to the paraboloid, then the hyperboloid." She cupped her hands around her breasts, then squeezed a slight bit and then a bit more. "Finally there is the cone shape." She squeezed now so that her nipples were sticking out. "This was the 'bullet bra' from the 1950's." She stood in profile, both hands on one breast now, squeezing toward the base with one while the other pulled out on the nipple, extending out from her body quite a ways.

"And those were very uncomfortable, I hear," Wanamaker said.

"But that's because of the materials used, which were specifically designed to extend the shape. If the softer fabrics are used, and of course, if the bra size was measured correctly to begin with..."

"It sure looks like you're squeezing your tits out," another girl said, then looked back at the professor. "Sorry about the language, but it looks painful."

"I ask everyone to try it, all you women, next time you're in the shower," their naked classmate said. "It's not as bad as you think."

Wanamaker thought of saying, "All I can think of is B & D pornography, where women get their breasts tied up and clipped," but of course he didn't. As a heterosexual male, he had a fascination with breasts that practically no one else in his field shared.

"Anyway," Tami said, "we're not talking about conical projections, like that bra Madonna wore in the '90's. They would not be a good idea anyway just before you're period when you naturally have lumps, especially around here," she said, lifting her arm and tracing the side of the mound under her shaved armpit. "My model is with paraboloids. And now, my real life model," Tami said.

Gretchen, leaving her coat on the chair, got up from her place near the door. Protectively draped in her white sweater, she bashfully folded her arms in front of her as she stood next to Tami, a tall girl slouching, looking down at her uneasy suede boots next to Tami's confident bare feet.