By the time Emily pulled the bike into the parking lot of the ball field at Garrison she had mostly worked out in her head what would have to be done and how to go about it. She noticed early on that JJ was on the field with his team, the Hornets, and really, getting over here to watch at least part of the action had been on her plan of the day. Kevin was helping coach the team, so she caught his eye to let him know she was there, then leaned on the fence and followed the game. It was cool out there in the breeze but the sun was beating down on her leathers to the point where she was actually warmer than normal.

The game was winding down, the first round of the semi-finals. The Hornets wound up winning 7-4, so they’d have about an hour break before the finals. During the break JJ was messing around with his friends, so Emily pulled Kevin over to his truck. They got in the cab, out of the wind, and she gave him a summary of what had happened over the course of the last few hours. Kevin got several snickers out of the stunt that Kayla had pulled on her mother, and said he could imagine how flustered Emily would have been since he would have been even more flustered.

Then he found out that Kayla had told Emily that it hadn’t been a smart-ass thing, she liked going without clothes, and liked being a nudist. “Kids,” he snorted. “You can’t figure them out, just like women. When you got a girl kid, that’s two strikes right there.”

Emily went on to explain her visit with Jason and Vicky, and that she agreed with their conclusion – go along with it, set some reasonable limits, and let it burn out. If they drew a line in the sand over it Kayla would feel like she had to cross it just out of spite. “The only problem is that it’ll be awkward for a while, especially for you and for JJ,” she said. “So I feel like I ought to get clearance from the both of you before I go to her on it, and realistically I need to do it before you get home.”

Kevin thought for a moment. “I guess I don’t have a problem with it, if it makes her feel awkward going nude in front of me. Although, thinking about the last few weeks and having seen her nude on occasion, I don’t think it’ll bother her at all.”

“I agree,” Emily said. “It comes down to JJ and how awkward it will make him feel. Worse comes to worst I can tell her to just keep it out of his sight, and yours, for that matter.”

“I can’t speak for him,” Kevin said. “I know I would have felt very awkward about it at his age. But the situation is a little different. About all we can do is ask him.”

It took a few minutes to get JJ over to the truck. Emily gave him a very brief summary of the events of the morning, and told him about how they thought they should handle it, leaving out all the recriminations and second-guessing she’d been going through.

“No big deal, Mom,” he said. “I’ve already seen her naked, she’s seen me naked. She’s naked a lot of the time anyway, why should this be any different?”

“JJ,” Kevin asked, more out of curiosity than anything else. “When has she seen you naked?”

“Well, she’s been going from her bedroom to the bathroom and back naked, so I figured it was all right if I did it too. Like I said, no big deal.”

Kevin let out a sigh. “Emily, get used to it,” he said. “They’re just going to go on surprising us, and that’s that.”

“When this all happened this morning my initial thought was that this is her first day as a teenager,” Emily sighed. “And that’s not even factoring in JJ.”

“Do you want me to be the one to lay down the rules?” he asked.

Emily thought for a moment. “No, I think I better do it,” she said finally. “This is too good an opportunity to miss to mention another few points I’d like to raise, and I think I can do it better than you.”

It was cool back on the patio, but out of the wind and in the sun it wasn’t too bad. Sometimes a cloud would go over the sun and it would get chilly real quick, but fortunately the sun never stayed behind the cloud for long.

Kayla had decided to get dressed and go for a run as soon as her mother left on the bike, mostly because she wanted to be nude when she got back. It hadn’t escaped her that her mother’s real reason for hopping on the Harley might be to go talk to her father about her being nude and what they should do about it. That was the real downside about doing it this way – she’d hoped to bring it up to both of them so they couldn’t confer behind her back. She’d had no chance to explain how she felt and why she was doing this to her dad, and it could easily get lost. There was a very real chance that when her mother came back it would be with direct orders to get some clothes on and keep them on. If that happened, so be it; it would be back to sneaking around in the woods and waiting for them to be gone. Fortunately, summer was coming and it would be easier then.

So, when she heard the V-twin rumble of the Harley pulling into the garage, she braced herself, expecting her mother to come storming right out onto the patio and give her hell. But that didn’t happen. A minute went by, then two, and then she began to allow herself to think she might have gotten away with it after all. Or else, the shit was really going to hit the fan …

What happened was about the last thing she could have expected. She was laying on her belly when she heard her mother say from behind her, “Kayla, mind if I join you?”

“No, Mom, the more the merrier,” she said in a flat tone, expecting the worst.

She was a little surprised to see a large beach towel being laid down on the deck next to her. She turned her head to watch her mother lay down on it – as nude as she was! “Have you been out here long?” her mother asked casually.

“No Mom, not long,” Kayla said, trying to stay casual. “I decided to go out for a run, and I just got back a little while ago.”

“Good,” her mother said. “Vicky and I tried laying out nude one time when we were about your age and we got our butts well and truly sunburned.”

“Mom?” Kayla asked, a little amazed now and showing it.

“Well it was the middle of the summer and we had pretty good tans, except for where our swimsuits were,” her mother laughed. “So I mean it when I said we got our butts burned. It really hurt.”

Kayla couldn’t help but giggle at the thought of her mom at her age with a red butt from lying out in the sun. “I think I know better,” she laughed. “Andrea made sure I was pretty careful about it last summer. We’d come back from a run, tear off our clothes, jump in the pool, and lay in the sun to dry off.”

“Does Andrea know about you going nude around the house?” her mother asked lazily, pulling her hands up to put her head on them.

“No, Mom,” Kayla said. “We came out here a few times last summer, but that’s been about it. I don’t see her much at school, just at practices, and she’s mostly been hanging out with some guy.”

“Do any of your friends know about it?”

“No,” Kayla replied, starting to realize that she wasn’t quite as home free as she thought she might have been at first. “I haven’t told anyone. Well, the girls in my class know I don’t mind being naked while I’m changing clothes for gym, but they don’t know about the rest of it.”

“What rest of it?”

“Oh, the coming home from school and taking off my clothes until someone gets home, the laying out in the back yard and swimming nude last summer, and like that.”

“Have you ever done it anywhere but around home?”

“Some,” Kayla admitted. “Back last fall when the corn was tall I went across to the woods now and then, but I don’t think anyone ever saw me.”

“You might be interested to know that there’s a path that takes you through the woods to a little hill on the far side. I haven’t been back there for years, but there used to be a real neat place to go lay in the sun. That’s where Vicky and I got our fannies red that time. It’s probably all grown up now.”

“There are a couple places out there where it could still be done,” Kayla replied noncommittally. She hadn’t actually lain out in the sun there very much because she could do it enough in the back yard, but she’d walked nude there. From the direction the questions were taking her mother probably suspected that too.

“Kayla,” her mother said. “Does the name Steve Sharp mean anything to you?”

“I don’t think so,” Kayla replied, wondering what this was all about. “Is he any relation to Mr. Sharp who has the insurance agency?”

“Steve was Mr. Sharp’s son,” Emily said. “I’m very sorry I haven’t told you this before, and even more sorry that he’s been forgotten. He was in our class in school. He was a nice kid, and pretty smart, but he was hugely fat. He wasn’t any taller than you are, but I know he went over three hundred pounds and four hundred wouldn’t have surprised me. How do you think he was treated?”

“Probably kids made fun of him a lot,” Kayla said without thinking about it.

“That’s an understatement,” her mother sighed. “He was literally tortured by kids who saw him as different, as someone who was easy to make fun of because he was different. Kids at that age can be very cruel, Kayla, and you know that. He was an easy target, and it made his life hell.” She sighed and continued. “I wasn’t as nice to him as I should have been, but at least I can say that I never went out of my way to hurt him for the fun of it. There were a number of kids who did. Now I’ll bet you’ve seen some of that.”

“Yeah, I have,” Kayla said. “Not bad like that, but there are kids who get teased and picked on more than others. There’s this one girl, Carol Lynn Hastings, who puts everyone down if they’re not a member of her little group, because she thinks she’s better than everyone else. But there are some kids who get picked on because they’re easy to pick on and can’t fight back. So what happened?”

“It went on like that for years and years,” her mother said. “One day not long after he got his driver’s license his mother sent him to the store in her car to pick up something, a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, I don’t remember now. A couple of the kids who had been hardest on him, twin brothers, were out driving their pickup and decided to have some fun, so they played chicken and ran him off the road. Well, that was so much fun for them that when he got the car back on the road they decided to play with him some more.”

She went silent for a moment, long enough that Kayla said softly, “Mom?”

Her mother let out a breath and continued. “He couldn’t take it anymore, so he stomped his foot on the gas and rammed the two of them head on at over a hundred miles an hour, just up the road from the knife shop. All three of them died. Now, from what I’ve just told you, who was at fault?”

“The kids in the pickup,” she said. “They shouldn’t have been picking on him.”

“They shouldn’t have been picking on him,” her mother agreed. “But there are people around this town who think that Steve was at fault because he should have let the kids in the pickup have their supposedly innocent fun. It used to be a very touchy subject and still is to a few people. It got nasty enough that when someone from one family would put up a memorial, someone from the other family would go out and tear it down, or dump gas on it and burn it, or something. But that was later. The point is, Steve was a target whether he wanted to be or not, and in the end he paid for it.

“Now, we had another kid in the class who was also that kind of target because of something she had no control over. You’ve met Shae. Do you like her?”

“Sure,” Kayla said, wondering where all of this was going. “She’s real pretty, and she’s lots of fun.”

“Shae wasn’t all that pretty back then, although she was lots of fun. She was all arms and legs and stood head and shoulders above everyone else, and kids were just about as cruel to her as they were to Steve. Things were different for Shae, though. She wasn’t a great student, but she was a superb athlete, so that gave her more status, especially with the school administration. Even the teachers didn’t like Steve, so they weren’t as nice to him as they could have been. On top of that, Shae can be very intimidating. Even back then she was big enough that you wouldn’t want her to hit you, even most of the boys, and she would’ve hit back. Shae got through school because she refused to let little people and small minds get to her. Now, I know you’ve got some pretty tall kids in your class, nothing like that, though. Have you ever seen them walk slouched over because they don’t want to stick out above someone else and be a target?”

“Yeah, Mom,” she said. “I guess I have. Samantha Van Dusen, on the track team with me, you know?”

“Samantha is a nice girl, but she’s hardly even tall compared to Shae. Now, Shae’s mom was over six feet and her dad taller yet, and they brought Shae up to be proud of who she is. They would get on her big time if she slouched like that. Well, one day, I can’t remember if it was fifth or sixth grade, but the teacher made what sounded like kind of a smart remark about Shae being so tall. She was just a little twerp, hardly taller than some of the kids in the class, and I’m sure she meant it in a good nature, but Shae didn’t take it that way. Now, I don’t know if it was Shae’s idea or her mother’s, but the next day she came to school wearing high heels. I don’t mean little ones, they were like four inches. She’s got such big feet that she can wear very high ones. Well, of course the teacher had to say something about that, and Shae told her that since she was a freak anyway, she thought she’d enjoy being able to look even farther down on little people with little minds. Though she didn’t say so, everyone could tell she meant the teacher as well as other kids.”

“That’s pretty good,” Kayla giggled. “Did she get away with it?”

“She did and she didn’t,” her mother smiled. “She got lectured and sent to the principal’s office. The principal called her mother, who came down and, in terms your father would use, ate the principal and the teacher a new asshole. She agreed that Shae shouldn’t have said it, but pointed out that the teacher should have known better than to make such a cruel remark in front of the other kids in the first place. I don’t know what all happened, but a few days later the teacher was suspended and we had a new teacher for the rest of the year. But every day after that, all the way through school, and as far as I know right down to today, the only time you don’t see Shae in high heels is when she’s barefoot or on the gym floor. If they made high-heeled sneakers she’d wear them there. Now, this is a woman who is over seven feet tall in heels now. You know Shae is there when she walks into a room. I could tell Shae Kirkendahl stories the rest of the afternoon, but it’s getting away from the point I wanted to make. The point is that Shae got picked on after that, but it’s harder to pick on someone for being tall who’s wearing heels to make herself even taller. Not only did Shae refuse to let being tall bother her, she threw it back in the faces of the people who teased her about it.”

“That’s not easy to do,” Kayla said, thinking about it.

“No, it’s not. There was another boy in the class who got picked on quite a lot too. He was small, less than five feet, and very frail. Everyone said he was strange, and in truth he was. He, like Steve, was picked on, beaten up, put down in every way imaginable, and was even less able to defend himself than Steve had been. Well, one day some kids did something to him that was particularly cruel, and like Steve he’d had enough. He went home and got a gun and was going to even things up before killing himself. The only thing that kept it from being a school shooting like there were a lot of a few years ago is that he confided in the one kid in school who he thought would understand, since she was even more of a freak than he felt himself to be.”

“Shae?” Kayla frowned. “Mom, I think I’ve heard part of this story. You’re talking about Eve McClellan, right?”

“I am,” her mother smiled. “I know you’ve never met Eve but I hope you’ll get the chance some time. She’s quite a warm and remarkable woman. Anyway, Shae took the gun away from him, and that was the first time Denis told anyone that he thought he was supposed to be a girl. Now, none of the rest of us knew anything about this for a dozen years, our tenth reunion, and I hardly believed it then. But to go back to the beginning, Denis, and that’s what I have to call him in those days, Denis was born with a birth defect in that he was what’s called intersexed. That means he had some physical characteristics of both sexes. It’s rare, but not unheard of. When he was a baby the doctors thought he leaned more to the male than the female, so they did the surgery to help him in that direction but didn’t know they’d guessed wrong. When we visited Eve and John a couple years ago, Eve’s parents told us that the doctors didn’t make it all that clear to them, so they went along with the doctors’ choice. But the reason that Denis was so strange to the rest of us was that the girl that he was supposed to be was fighting it out with the boy he thought he was, and was told he was supposed to be.”

“Yeah,” Kayla said thoughtfully. “That would make him seem pretty strange, I guess.”

“I didn’t realize how strange it was until I knew the truth,” her mother smiled. “Shortly after that, Denis and his parents decided that things had to be made right. Shae was in on the deal from the beginning and they might not have been able to get away with it if she hadn’t been able to cover for him. I know that up until the tenth reunion I thought that being a transsexual was something pretty sick. It wasn’t until Eve explained it that I learned better. The thing I’m trying to say is that we already thought Denis was more than a little strange, many even thought gay. How do you think we’d have handled it if we’d known he was a transsexual, a boy becoming a girl, not understanding the background?”

“Pretty bad,” Kayla nodded. “He might have gotten killed.”

“They all knew there was that risk,” her mother smiled. “The only way they avoided anyone else finding out was absolute secrecy. Only Denis, his parents, and Shae had any idea of what was going on. No one else in the school knew for another ten years. More than that, it was closer to twelve from when it started to when we found out. By that time, we not only could see the results, but the rest of us had grown up a lot too.”

“Mom, can I ask why you’re telling me all this?”

“Because there are some important lessons in these stories, and some things that need to be made clear. I want us to both understand we’re talking about the same thing. Now, what did these three stories all have in common?”

“Well, the kids were all put down pretty bad.”

“Right. Why?”

“Well,” Kayla sighed. “Because they were different from the rest of the kids.”

“Right again. You know I pretty much like my classmates, but even I will agree that we weren’t all a bunch of angels. Now, there’s one other thing I’m fishing for about all these stories having in common. What is it?”

“The kids didn’t have any choice about being different from the rest of the kids, that was the way they were.”

“Exactly, they had no choice. You do, and you’re choosing to be different from the rest of the kids. Being different carries risks with it, doesn’t it? Especially when people don’t understand those differences and are afraid of them?”

“OK, Mom, I get it. You’re saying that I’m making myself different because I want to be a nudist.”

“That’s my point, Kayla. You’re setting yourself up for a lot of risk and maybe big problems if you tell people that. ‘Nudist’ is a very loaded word because people don’t understand it and read more into it than is there. We don’t have to like it, but that’s the way it is. To top it off, we’re in a sensitive position because of me being the mayor and the editor of the paper. Being both of those is tricky. A little while ago while I was thinking this out I had the bike out on the Interstate, and I wound it up to 125. It was really a thrill until I realized that if a cop stopped me the local paper would have to get on the mayor’s butt about it. Now where does that leave me?”

“OK, Mom,” Kayla sighed. “I’ll wear clothes. I don’t want to, but I don’t want to cause problems either.”

“I’m not saying that,” her mother smiled. “It’s fun to lay out in the sun without your clothes, to go skinny-dipping, or go hot tubbing in the nude with friends, and like that. I’ve done it a few times but apparently not like you have.” She let out a sigh and continued. “Last winter Scott and Sonja invited us to go to a nude beach in the Caribbean with them next winter. Your father and I haven’t said no. We haven’t said yes, mostly because it’s expensive and we’re not sure we can afford it, and not because we’re against a few days of laying around a beach in the nude.”

“Mom, go if you can. I’d love to.”

“I know you would,” she smiled. “I’m afraid it might make you just a little too jealous too. But it’s not a question that we can answer now, and we certainly couldn’t say yes if you got in trouble or we got in trouble because of your being nude. What I’m saying Kayla is that I’m not telling you not to do it. I’m telling you to be careful. Now, let’s go back to those three stories for a moment. There were three different ways there that the kids coped with being different. Steve just took it until he couldn’t take it anymore, then exploded. Shae took the very thing that people teased her about and shoved it back down their throats. Denis hid the secret and hid it well. As much as I’d like to see you make a Shae thing out of it, I don’t think you can. You’re going to have to keep it secret. It doesn’t have to be all the way a secret, but some parts of it have to be.”

“Like what, Mom?” Kayla asked, very surprised at the turn this discussion had taken.

“Like I said,” her mother smiled. “ ‘Nudist’ is a loaded word that people don’t understand. Look, let’s use an example. I’m planning on being just a little looser about pool rules and having friends over next summer. Suppose you have three or four of your friends over, it’s a hot day, the pool looks good, but no one brought swimsuits. You can say, ‘Oh, we don’t need suits, no one can see and we’re all girls anyway.’ The odds are that the next thing you know everyone will be in the pool naked. Right?”

“Well, yeah, maybe, if no one else is around. There might be one or two friends who would feel a little funny about not joining in.”

“Right,” her mother smiled. “So what happens if instead of that you say, ‘Oh, we don’t need suits, I’m a nudist and never wear one anyway?’ Your friends aren’t going to understand what you mean, they’ll think you’re different and be scared of you. What’s more, it’s going to get all over the school in seconds if girls are anything like they were when I was your age, and I don’t think they’ve changed. And then the only way you have to cope is Steve’s, unless you can somehow find a Shae way to do it. I don’t know if there is one.”

“Well, there is, kinda,” Kayla smiled. “Back when we started gym classes last fall Carol Lynn thought I was sick because I wasn’t scared to change clothes in the locker room. She never would and got on me about it. I called her a pantie pervert because she was so in love with her panties she wouldn’t take them off, and some of the other girls who would shower started calling her that too.”

“Shae would be proud of you,” her mother laughed. “But that’s a special circumstance, and it won’t work for most things. Now, another thing that’s bad about calling yourself a nudist is that people will think that you like having your clothes off because you want to have sex. You and I know that’s not the same thing. At least I hope you do. But a lot of people, probably even most people, don’t understand that.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Kayla said, “I realize that. But you know, when Andrea gave me those bikinis last summer I got to thinking about it one day and realized that wearing a bikini is sexier than being nude, because it draws attention to the parts that are covered up.”

“That’s good thinking,” her mother smiled. “Most people don’t think it through that far, but then, most people aren’t around naked people enough to be able to think it through. Kayla, I’m going to be honest and say that I never thought it through that far until the first time I got into the hot tub nude with Scott and Sonja and the others, but right now I’m glad I did or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

“Then I guess I am too,” Kayla smiled. “Look, Mom, about having sex. There are kids in my class who are doing it and I can already see it’s causing problems. I don’t want to think about it until I’m out of high school and maybe not then. But I’m not going to even consider it until then.”

“That’s a discussion I’ve been planning to have with you sometime soon,” her mother said. “And that was about the conclusion that I’d hoped to draw out of it too. At your age it can cause an awful lot of problems. It’s just not worth the risk, though not everyone sees it that way. But you can see about how being nude and having sex can get mixed up in people’s minds.”

“Yeah, Mom, I had to work it out too.”

“Good enough. I think we’re both coming from close enough to the same place that we can understand each other. Now, I want to work out some guidelines. I don’t mean hard and fast rules, I mean just some ways we do things that we may want to change from time to time, and there may be some good reason to not stick real tight to them all the time. I don’t want to be arbitrary about this, I want your input. First, you and I both know a couple of lesbians. That’s a loaded word, right? Now, we all know they are, but have you ever heard them use that word about themselves? I never have and I doubt they even use it between themselves. They’re just good friends as far as the world is concerned, even though the world knows better. ‘Lesbian’ defines it too well with a loaded word, so they avoid it. I think we’d all better avoid the word ‘nudist.’”

“Yeah, Mom. In a way I kind of hate to do that because I’m proud of it. I sometimes think of myself as a ‘naturist.’ It means the same thing pretty much, but it’s a word a lot of people don’t understand, or they confuse it with ‘naturalist’, which is something else entirely.”

“Right, but enough people do understand it that it’s probably a good one to avoid too. You get the intent of what I’m saying anyway. Next, what would you say if we relaxed any implied rules about having clothes on when it’s just family here at home? I’m including your dad and JJ in that. You probably won’t catch your dad except maybe between the bathroom and the bedroom, or maybe once in a great long while in the pool. JJ, I don’t know. You might be better able to guess than I would.”

“I’ve caught him a couple times,” she admitted. “I don’t know about around the house though.”

“Maybe we should ease into it a little with him, and not run around in our birthday suits all day, at least not right at first.”

“You too, Mom?” Kayla said with amazement.

“Probably more like your dad, between the bathroom and the bedroom, maybe in the pool once in a while, although I’m certainly enjoying laying out here in the sun with you even if it’s on the cool side.” She let out a sigh, then continued. “We did run around the house bare a fair amount when you were real little, but we thought we’d better back off of it, mostly because we thought it might set a bad example. Maybe we were wrong, but what’s done is done. Anyway, does that sound reasonable?”

“Sure, Mom. I don’t have any problem with it.”

“OK, that’s just with family. With other people around, it’ll have to be case by case, and if in even the slightest doubt, keep your clothes on. If you have questions, ask first. As to your friends, if a deal comes up like a bunch of girls fooling around in the pool like I was talking about when your dad and JJ aren’t around, that’s probably all right. Let’s rule out mixed parties for now until we see how JJ takes it. Maybe later it could be done but I’d just as soon we didn’t do it now.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready for it either,” Kayla nodded. “A story like that could get around the school and easily get taken the wrong way. Heck, it could with an all-girl group too.”

“Then you understand. Choose even the girls very carefully. Beyond that, if you go out to the woods or something, be very careful that no one sees you. Maybe you’ll want to keep clothes close by just in case.”

“Maybe,” Kayla sighed, “but it’s a real thrill to be out in the woods and know that you’re way away from your clothes.”

“I never tried it like that,” her mother admitted, “but I can see how it would be a thrill, like doing 125 up the Interstate on a motorcycle. But there’s an obvious risk if either of us get caught.” She shifted position a little, and said. “You have any questions?”

“Not about that, Mom,” Kayla snickered. “But I put suntan lotion on before I came out here. If you didn’t you’d better turn over before you sunburn your butt again.”

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