The day passed quickly. It was a busy one, and there were a lot of loose ends that needed to be cleared up. One of them was to make a brief stop at Dayna and Sandy’s where she borrowed a flashy sequined gown from the pair’s extensive collection of show costuming. It was the first time since the school prom that she’d dressed up that much; this gown was even flashier than her prom gown. Kayla said she looked spectacular, and Kevin did too.

The concert itself came off well. The gym was packed to standing room only. Emily was no fan of country music but thought that the Michigan Hillbillies weren’t all that bad, considering. Dayna and Sandy did the middle set, and put on a heck of a show, ending the set with the song Emily knew Dayna and Sandy were proudest of, the intricate and powerful Experience of Survival. Following that, Dave spoke a few brief but heartfelt words, which included thanks to Emily, Shae, and Eve for their help.

Toward the end, he commented, “In my years in New York I had mostly forgotten about Bradford, but Bradford hadn’t forgotten about me. In my hour of need, it wasn’t New York that reached out for me. It was Bradford. I think I can safely speak for we New Yorkers and others who were touched directly by last Tuesday. While we may love New York, people like you here in Bradford and other small towns across the country are the heart and the soul of this nation, and we deeply thank you for it. God bless America.”

The applause was thunderous. He waved Emily over to hand the microphone back; she came over to him, but motioned Shae up on the stage to join them, holding them around the waist briefly as they waved their arms into the storm of sound. Finally, she let them go, and they descended the stairs back to their seats.

“Dave,” she said as the roar died down. “You may think you’re a New Yorker, but you’re still one of us, and we don’t let go easily. Thank you for your words, and speaking for everyone here, we’d like to extend our deepest sympathies at your loss. I don’t know what I can say beyond that besides thanking everyone for being here, and saying,” she raised her voice in pitch and excitement, “Ladies and gentlemen, Cold Spring Rain!”

When Cold Spring Rain got into their set with their big collection of amps and speakers, it set the gym to shaking like it never had before. The crowd was really up, and the band had to go through several encores. Finally, Dayna and Sandy and the Michigan Hillbillies got up on the stage with them, while Emily motioned for Dave and Shae to join them as they asked the crowd to join in with “God Bless America.” That just about brought down the house; people were cheering, and some were crying, Dave among them, touched at their show of support.

It was very late when Emily got to bed. After the show ended a bunch of the Class of ’88 members got together out at the truck stop. Some of them had come hundreds of miles for the show making it a shirttail class reunion of sorts. Fortunately, she didn’t have to work in the morning so didn’t bother to set her alarm. Once she got up and running she rode the bike over to JoAnne’s house, but there was no sign of Shae’s car, so she figured they must already be on their way back to New York. She still didn’t know what the decision had been about moving but would have been willing to guess either way.

She didn’t find out until late Monday afternoon, when her cell phone rang while she was cashing out a bunch of kids getting their after-school sugar to spoil their dinners. “I can move stuff out of the apartment next weekend,” he reported, “But I’m having real trouble finding movers on that short a notice. Shae just suggested that she saw a sign for cheap daily rates for truck rentals in Bradford, and we thought maybe you might be able to find someone who could rent a truck there and make a round trip, and maybe bring an extra set of hands to help move.”

“Yeah, sure, no problem,” she replied as she rang up a sale on a candy bar. Kevin had been a little envious of her being able to take a long, if fast, road trip, and he could drive a U-Haul, no problem. “I shouldn’t have any problem finding hands, enough people have offered to help. What do you say we shoot for Saturday at this point? If for some reason it can’t be done, like you can’t get in, let me know as soon as possible.”

“Emily, I feel like I’m already asking a lot of you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she protested. “Dave, I wouldn’t have offered to help if I didn’t want to. It’s not a big deal. I’ll take care of everything on this end. If I have any questions, I’ll call you or Shae or your mom.”

“Emily, I’ll have to do something nice for you some day.”

“Easy,” he heard her smile. “When I ask you to do something for someone sometime, say yes. Don’t worry, Dave, I’ll take care of it.”

The rush had died down considerably when Shae called back half an hour later. “JoAnne and I sent him down to the park to play with the kids,” she reported. “He’s got an awful lot on his mind and not dealing with practical stuff too well. There are some other problems. We probably could use more than just an extra set of hands. He freaked out the one time he was up at the apartment. There’s too much of Julie there. JoAnne and I will have to sort through her stuff and leave him out of it.”

“I’m sure I can find someone,” Emily replied. “It’s no big problem.”

“Good,” Shae replied. “If you brought a couple cars along with the truck, that’d also solve the problem of getting JoAnne, the kids, and him back to Bradford.”

Once they were off the phone, Emily turned to the truck problem. She was just leafing through the phone book when Dean Sallows drove up in his pickup to get gas. Dean was another ’88, and drove a big Kenworth eighteen-wheeler all over the country. What were the chances that he’d be able to help out?

“Everything I do is contract stuff for General,” he shrugged. “I know I’m going to be heading back from Boston Saturday with only a partial load, but I don’t know if they’d go for it.”

It took Emily seven minutes and two phone calls – one to Wes Russell, the manager of the General distribution plant in Bradford, the second to corporate headquarters in Denver – and the truck problem was solved on a grand scale. The only problem with that is that it cut the number of seats coming back from New York, but it only took a few minutes to come up with another idea on that one.

“Sure,” Dayna replied when Emily explained her idea to her. “Since we’ll probably be coming back Saturday night, that’ll give the kids a place to crash and make the trip easier on them. We better bring some sleeping bags and air mattresses, since the adults will probably be pretty pooped by then too. The only thing is that there’s only so many we can haul.”

Kayla was disappointed to be told that there wasn’t going to be room for her in the motor home on the trip.

But it turned out to not be as big of a disappointment as she thought.

Her mother explained to her that it would only be two nights and a day she’d be home alone, since JJ already had plans to take a weekend camping trip with Lute and his family. She could stay all by herself, and if she got nervous about anything, Andrea and her family were right up the street. “Mom, I’ll be fine,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

She had a smile on her face Friday evening when she stood on the curb watching and waving as Dayna drove the motor home away from the curb, carrying her mom and dad, Sandy, Jason, and Vicky, Scott and Sonya Tyler, and Aaron Heisler. Not only did her folks trust her to stay overnight by herself – a first – she could use the time alone. Since school had started, and now that the days were getting shorter and cooler, nude time had been getting more and more precious, especially outdoor nude time. Now, unless something happened, she’d have thirty six straight hours, far and away a new record.

But there was something else. Ever since school started, Carol Lynn and a couple of her cheerleader buddies like Sarah had been rather snidely calling her a nudist, mostly because Kayla was comfortable with changing clothes and showering after gym, and they were still very chicken about it. That set Kayla to thinking: while she liked not having clothes on, did that make her a nudist? The dictionary hadn’t been a lot of help: “1. naturist. 2. the practice or cult of going nude for hygienic reasons.” When she looked up “naturist” it just pointed her back at “nudist” and the second definition didn’t seem to apply to her. More research seemed necessary.

She thought about asking Dayna or Sandy, since she’d heard the story about them staying at a nudist park in Florida. But she didn’t think about it very long, since as much as she liked the two they were her mother’s friends, and asking them about it ran the risk of them telling her mother. So that was out.

She doubted that there would be anything much in the school library that could help her out with the question, and people would be snoopy, so she didn’t even try. There was a much better source of information available, but the only problem she’d had was figuring out how to use it without getting caught. Now, she’d have the chance.

Kayla’s parents monitored their kid’s Internet use fairly closely – not looking over their shoulder at every page, but spot checking and looking at the browsing history file on occasion. They’d been doing it a little more often since JJ had gotten caught last summer looking at some dirty websites that slipped through Surfwatch, the blocking program her dad had installed on the computer.

But, back last summer, Kayla had been hanging out with Bree at her house one day, and Bree was a computer whiz. She’d already forgotten more about computers than her parents would ever know, and Bree had told her there were several ways around Surfwatch – while her folks had put it on her computer, she could disable it any time she wanted to. It seemed just a little too complicated to Kayla – it involved editing several files just the right way, and putting them back the right way later. But Bree had also showed her how to edit the history file. That was simple enough; Kayla had done it a few times just to make sure she could in case there ever was a time she wanted to look at a website that she didn’t want her parents to know about. This filled the bill.

The fact that JJ had been able to find some dirty sites that slipped through Surfwatch meant that the program wasn’t perfect – at least it was worth looking to see if there was something that could tell her what she wanted to know. In fact, this time the blocking program might be a help, since it would block dirty sites and might let less harmful ones through. If it didn’t work, she still had the option of calling on Bree without telling her what she was looking for.

Thus it was that Kayla was heading inside as soon as the motor home disappeared around the corner, and was stripping off her clothes while the computer was booting up. A little to her surprise, she found that Surfwatch didn’t let just a little on the subject slip through, it let quite a bit through, and occasionally it was dirty, all right. While it was interesting in a way – and often gross – it wasn’t exactly what she was looking for. Early on, she learned that “nudist” and “naturist” were almost but not quite interchangeable, and a lot of people apparently didn’t understand the difference. “Nudist” seemed to refer to someone who went nude because they wanted to – which fit her. “Naturist” referred to people who went nude because they wanted to feel closer to nature – which also fit her, but a little differently. She was comfortable with describing herself with that definition, if only for the fact that other people might not know what it meant, especially a dork like Carol Lynn.

As she worked her way through a series of websites, it slowly dawned on her that most of them were aimed at adult readers – not that it was “adult” material, but it involved things that only adults could do, such as go to places like nudist camps and nude beaches. But here and there she ran across brief references to teen nudists and teen naturists.

Eventually, she decided to start over with a new twist. She went back to the Google main page, and typed in “teen naturist.” Google came up with hundreds of sites of course. Several of them seemed familiar, like she’d already visited them. Surfwatch blocked several, but on the third Google page she came on “Allison’s Sanctuary,” and it proved to be exactly what she was looking for.

The page was really very simple, on a free server, and all text – no photos at all, not even any graphics. But there were several articles there that really seemed to hit on what she was trying to find out. On the very first one, titled “How I became a naturist”, Kayla discovered that Allison was sixteen, and had become a naturist at twelve, just like she had! She’d explored being nude, sleeping, hanging around in her room, walking in the woods nude, just like Kayla had. At first it had all been a secret, but after some months Allison had gotten up the courage to tell her parents about it – and to her amazement, they didn’t mind too much! Since then, she’d been to nude beaches and everything!

Kayla read the story in amazement. She wasn’t alone!

She read down through some of the other stories linked to the main page. Some were sort of similar, some were way different – but virtually all of them seemed to involve teenagers, often younger ones. The last story on the page was entitled “About this site.” Only now did she learn that it was based in Australia – no wonder some of the slang and spellings had seemed unfamiliar! Allison screened every post in the forum before it went onto the site, to keep out perverts and crusading “textiles” (which Kayla now understood to mean people who insisted on everyone wearing clothes), and to keep it by teens and for teens. She kept the type size on the page small, so it would be hard for someone to read over a shoulder. Kayla wasn’t quite sure how much to believe of that – she knew pretty well that people on the internet didn’t have to be what they said they were – but on the basis of that she figured the forum was worth a look.

It was. There were several different sub-forums on various topics, with hundreds of topics and what had to have been thousands of posts! A day and a half wouldn’t be enough time to go through it, it could take weeks to read everything. She selected a sub-forum almost at random, and started in reading. In only a few minutes she came to realize that while the page might be based in Australia, there were teens from all over the world who posted on there – she saw at least a dozen countries represented before she lost count. A lot of posts were from the US, and many from England, but she saw several others. There was even a kid with the handle of “Airclad” who posted with a location of “Southern Michigan, USA” although exactly where wasn’t clear.

There were all kinds of teen naturists, too. Some only could sleep nude in bed with their doors locked, and a few didn’t even dare to do that. Others were more or less out to their parents, and were allowed to be nude in the house and back yard – some apparently went a little further than that, and had all sorts of nude adventures. There were even a few kids who were living full time in nude communities! How wonderful that had to be!

People had lots of reasons for wanting to be nude, and they varied. A lot of the discussion was based on the fact that most textiles equated nudity with sex, but most of the kids, especially the ones with more experience, found it was no problem getting past that quite soon and were then able to differentiate the two. Just because you were nude didn’t mean that you were looking for sex. Kayla thought real hard about one long series of posts that seemed to agree that guys thought a girl in a tiny bikini was sexier than a nude girl was. That seemed a little strange to Kayla until she read the discussion, which made the point that all a bikini did was direct people’s attention to the parts that were covered up, making them a mystery. When they were exposed, there was no mystery, they were just a person. The logic seemed a little slippery to her, but when she thought about it she realized that the posters had a point.

Kayla read and read and read, until finally she just couldn’t keep herself awake any longer – it was after midnight, after all. Regretfully, she logged off from Allison’s Sanctuary, then off the net, and thought to edit the history file before she shut off the computer in case something happened and she couldn’t get back to it. Still excited at her discovery she headed off to bed. She had other things she wanted to do tomorrow, like get some nude hiking in – and with the corn tall, she could go nude right out the back door and not have to take her clothes off once she got to the woods. But most importantly, she wanted to spend some more time in the archives of her new favorite website.

She fell asleep with a great sense of relief. Yes, she was a nudist, a naturist – and it wasn’t all that strange; there were kids like her all over the world!

Over the course of nine years, Dayna and Sandy had put 285,000 miles on their original motor home, which they called Home mostly because it really was for several years. Home hadn’t been new when they bought it, and eventually reached the point where it would cost several times what it was worth to repair it. It had always been a little too small and the shower was worthless, so a couple years ago they’d traded up to a new vehicle, which they naturally called Second Home. The new motor home was twice as large as the old one, burned at least twice the gas, and was five times as expensive.

It was from a seat in Second Home as they crossed the Verazzano Narrows Bridge that Emily got her first good look at where the World Trade Center had stood three weeks before – she hadn’t been able to see it on her earlier trip. They took the Queens Expressway and the tunnel to the Battery, and all of a sudden they were there. They were still quite a ways away from where the towers had gone down but everything was a mess.

It wasn’t a great distance to the loading dock for Dave’s apartment building, which towered many stories into the sky itself. It turned out that Shae had organized everything about as well as could be done. While Dave was there, he and Eve remained on the loading dock to keep an eye on things – and to keep him out of his apartment.

Many hands made light work, and it all went pretty smoothly, with Shae and JoAnne separating out Julie’s clothes to give to charity, and keepsakes to take to her parents. They wrapped it up sooner than they expected – as apartment dwellers, Dave and Julie hadn’t collected the amount of stuff that people with large houses often did.

After a lunch from supplies in Second Home, there was still plenty of time before the truck was expected, so the people from Michigan took a walk over to a place where they could see the ruins of the World Trade Center. It was a huge mess, a somber, smoking pile of rubble; Dayna and Sandy had seen it standing, and could barely believe their eyes. All were pretty sober and somber themselves when they got back to the loading dock.

Somehow in the rush Emily had never gotten around to telling Dave about the truck. It was interesting to watch his eyes pop out when Dean pulled in with the Kenworth, Sallows Brothers Trucking lettered on the side, towing a huge trailer with the tool-belted beaver logo of General Hardware Retailers.

Dave just shook his head and sighed, “Emily, I said you don’t do things halfway, and that proves it.”

The loading went quickly, and Dean hit the road, not wanting to deal with street level New York traffic more than necessary. The rest of them loaded up into the other vehicles and headed over to Shae’s apartment, where Vicky and Melissa had been left with the boys – she’d wanted to be a part of the thing and offered to contribute that much, plus a huge pot of spaghetti.

It was getting along in the afternoon when they loaded up Second Home for the trip back. Emily settled into the dinette, prepared to spend a little time in the round-robin gin rummy game that had gone on for most of the trip. She glanced up to see Dave and Shae in each other’s arms, a serious kiss going on between them. This was no goodbye kiss between friends – this was a heavy-duty lip lock that went on and on. Those two really mean it, Emily thought – and all of a sudden realized what was really going on. No wonder Dave wanted to get out of New York! Julie was less than three weeks dead, she needed the respect, but the temptation of being around Shae might be too much … might have already been too much …

Finally the two came apart; Emily thought she heard a faint suction pop. With obvious reluctance Dave slowly turned away from the tall blonde and got in the motor home, settling in the shotgun seat next to Sandy, who was driving.

I wonder how that’s going to come out, Emily thought. I’ll bet I’ll be seeing Shae again before too long …

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