Dayna and Sandy traded off pushing Second Home westward through the night; as dawn broke behind them they were on the Indiana Turnpike, getting close to Bradford. The sun was barely up when they found Dean’s rig backed up to the porch of Dave’s new home. Emily had called ahead on her cell phone, and people were already arriving to help with the unloading and setting up. About all Dave and the boys had to do was stay out of the way.

During the hubbub Emily cadged a ride home, mostly to take a shower and change clothes – she still had on the same ones from Friday night. She discovered the house as neat as she’d left it, a relief. Kayla was in bed, sound asleep. Typical teenager, she thought, likes to stay up all night and get up at the crack of noon. Emily figured Kayla had probably been on the computer or the phone half the night. Out of curiosity, she booted up the computer and checked the history file to discover that it showed no activity.

After her shower, a little reluctantly she woke her daughter up, told her to get dressed, and come help with the unloading. With that she got in the minivan and headed back to the work session. Kayla showed up a little while later, having run over to the house, barefoot as usual. She seemed a little grumpy, and Emily wondered if the phone bill might show why, but said nothing. Kayla said that there had been no problems, and she hadn’t been worried or anything, so that worked out well to know that she could be left alone again if need be. Emily knew that she had raised a competent, responsible kid, after all. She introduced Kayla to Dave and the boys, and told Dave that Kayla would be available for short-term kid-sitting if needed.

It still took a few days to get Dave settled in. He registered the boys at the Bradford Elementary kindergarten the next morning; the teachers had already been warned by Emily of the loss of their mother and were prepared for problems. So far they’d taken it well, as far as she knew. Dave had never owned a car; Emily loaned him the minivan for a few days, until Vicky’s husband Jason took him out to the dealership and held his hand while he bought a new Chevy Malibu, the first car he’d ever owned. It was hard to believe that a Bradford kid could be over thirty and still be a virgin about cars …

After a few days, Dave became a regular at the Spee-D-Mart after walking the boys to school. He’d get a cup of coffee, and he and Emily would chat for a few minutes, mostly about the boys or how his working online from home was going. Occasionally there would be some kind of a problem that it helped to have local knowledge to solve, and Emily was almost always able to point him in the right direction. Interestingly, the subject of Shae never came up, and Emily knew enough not to pry.

By the time he’d been in Bradford a month, Dave seemed to be settling in and finding it wasn’t all that hard to come home after all. As far as Emily could tell, New York seemed to be increasingly far away to him.

As October drew to a close, showering and changing clothes in the locker room after gym class had become more or less routine for most of the seventh-grade girls. The majority of them would strip down for showers, like it or not, although many of them would dress and undress with their backs to the room. A little to Kayla’s surprise, Megan wasn’t one of them; probably having the example of her friend being so casual about it had helped her accept it.

Carol Lynn and a couple of her cheerleader buddies had yet to come to grips with it. Sometimes they’d skip the showers entirely, and sometimes they’d change into bikinis in the toilet stalls before showering, then changing clothes after that. Mrs. Halloran wasn’t allowing the girls as much time as she had before, so it occasionally made Carol Lynn late for her next class.

That didn’t make Carol Lynn any nicer; it made her snottier, if anything. Most of the girls in the class had been the target of her catty remarks at one time or another, but as she became closer and closer to the last of the locker room holdouts the barbs got nastier, especially toward the girls who weren’t shy about it like Kayla and Megan.

To her surprise, Kayla figured that she knew some of what was going on. Carol Lynn was one of those people who had to show off how superior she was to everyone else, and since the majority opinion wasn’t going her way she had to make herself believe she was right. Still, after a while, Carol Lynn’s teasing and insults started to get to her. Kayla was the main target of Carol Lynn’s cattiness, mostly because she’d been the one to take the lead in her opposition. Kayla tried to brush it off, but it was clearly going to come to a confrontation some day.

One day toward the end of the month Kayla came out of the shower to find Carol Lynn and a couple of her cheerleader friends sitting on one of the benches just pulling on their shoes – they weren’t showering. Carol Lynn, who was pretty well developed for her age, made a particularly snotty remark about Kayla being a “flat-chested, ugly little nudist,” and there was something about the tone more than the words that struck Kayla the wrong way.

“You know,” she said rather loudly to Megan, with the intent that Carol Lynn would overhear her, “Mom has always taught me that I should never be ashamed of my body. I was created to be unique and that I shouldn’t wish I looked like someone else, because they probably wish they looked like me. But I’ll bet these cover-up perverts who won’t take showers are ashamed of theirs.”

That got Carol Lynn’s attention, just like she intended. “Who are you to be calling someone a pervert, you little nudist bitch?” Carol Lynn yelled, and a couple of her friends laughed at the exchange.

Although Kayla had thought of herself as a nudist since the day she’d discovered Allison’s Sanctuary, she wasn’t about to let Carol Lynn call her that, especially the way she meant it. Already steamed, Carol Lynn’s remark set the red flags to flying. She threw her towel on the floor and still fully nude stormed over in front of Carol Lynn – it was only a few steps so she didn’t have time to get up. “I’m not the pervert here,” she yelled. “You’re so in love with your panties that you won’t take them off. That makes you a pantie pervert. You’re no better than the rest of us, you only think you are.”

Perhaps Carol Lynn saw the fire in her eye as Kayla stood over her, hair wet and stringy, fists clenched and ready to let her have it. No one was laughing now; it was deadly quiet, and it was clear that one wrong word and there was going to be a fight in the locker room.

Fortunately, Megan defused the situation, just saying quietly, “Kayla, don’t.”

That was enough to bring Kayla to her senses. “Pantie pervert,” she sneered again, then turned and walked back to her locker as Carol Lynn rushed to finish changing and get out of the locker room, knowing that she’d been faced down.

Later, over lunch, Megan was grinning about the scene. “Kayla, you looked like some naked warrior princess standing over her like that,” she grinned. “All you needed was a magic sword.”

“Well, I was mad,” Kayla said, a little abashed.

“It was worth it,” Bree giggled. “Just to see the look on Carol Lynn’s face. She can dish it out but she can’t take it.”

Naturally, the incident was all over the middle school by the end of lunch hour, virtually all of the girls and at least some of the guys had heard about it. Kayla made a point to not call Carol Lynn a “pantie pervert” again, but she heard it used a dozen times or more that afternoon, always accompanied by giggles – and always aimed at the cheerleader.

Carol Lynn didn’t come to school the next day, but the day after that when it came time for gym class everyone noticed that she stripped to the buff and showered like everyone else. She didn’t say much of anything, but strutted around in an apparent attempt to show how much better developed she was.

Kayla realized she’d won that round and gained an enemy – not that Carol Lynn hadn’t already been an enemy. She didn’t say much about it around school – that only sealed the victory – but she felt like she had to tell someone, so the first chance she got, a couple days later, the story was the subject of her first post on Allison’s Sanctuary.

In the beginning, Kayla had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to post there at all, partly because she didn’t want anyone to know who she was, or her parents to find out in some odd way. She figured that most everything she wanted to know would come up in the forums sooner or later. On top of that, it would be impossible to check the board with any regularity, since she had to do it when everyone was out of the house and have time to edit the history file when she was done.

But it was just too hard to pass up telling about a victory like that, so after some thought she decided to risk it. She’d been thinking about it for nearly a month, and had come to the firm conclusion, like many others on the board, that there was no way she would reveal her name, where she was from, or anything like that. After some thought, when she registered herself on the board it was under the username “Barefoot” – she was surprised it wasn’t taken already – and just gave her location as “USA.” She had to give an e-mail address, so she set up a free account on a server called Zapmail and didn’t give them any more information, either.

It was several days before she was able to check the board again, to discover that her post had set off a long string of responses, some of which were of the “good going!” nature, and others that related other people’s locker room incidents. This was something interesting to learn, that such things were not unique to Bradford; there proved to be a lot of cruel teasing and insulting that goes on among kids of that age, not just girls either. Several people reported a poor self-image and low self-esteem as a result of that kind of teasing. Once again, the knowledge that she wasn’t alone helped her to ignore Carol Lynn’s subsequent barbs, which were no less nasty but at least didn’t include nudism. It was an important lesson, and not only in finding out who the bigger person was.

The County Cross-Country Championships were held at Amherst High School, the next school to the east of Bradford, toward the end of the month. Kayla had run on the Amherst track once before, and liked it – it had more up and down than the track at Bradford, and that made it harder but more interesting. That time, in a dual meet, she’d wound up finishing third behind two girls from Amherst; she thought she could have done better if she hadn’t had to wear those lousy shoes.

Mrs. Halloran would let her do gym class barefoot – she knew her mom had talked to Mrs. Halloran about that – but a similar approach to Mr. Beverson, the cross country coach, hadn’t budged him from the position that she had to wear running shoes. He wasn’t real clear about why, either, just that it was the way things were going to be. Mr. Beverson wasn’t a teacher, just a mail carrier, so that may have had something to do with it. On the other hand, he’d been coaching girls track and cross country for a long time, and from what Andrea had told her, while he made you work, you had more fun doing it than kids on other teams.

Kayla didn’t think she had much of a chance of medaling at the meet. There were the two Amherst girls who had beaten her at the dual meet, and this was their home track, and there were kids there from other schools who had also beaten her in previous middle school meets. Still, she was one of the two best, if not the best, of the Bradford middle school team, so she wanted to at least put in a good showing. Besides, her folks were there, JJ was there, and even Mr. Patterson was there to watch – and with a surprise, so was that very tall blonde named Shae who Kayla had heard so much about but never met before the concert the month before. Although it had been before Kayla was born, Shae was still considered the best girl athlete, and maybe the best athlete period, that Bradford had ever produced, and just having her there made Kayla want to do well.

So it was with just a little consternation that Kayla felt a shoe loosen just as the one-minute warning for the start of the race sounded. She bent over to snug it up and retie it, to discover that her shoestring had broken.

Given two or three minutes, she could have re-threaded it enough to make do, but there was less than a minute now, no time for that. There was only one thing to do – she untied the other shoe and kicked them both off. Taking off her socks wasn’t a problem since she didn’t wear any. Just leaving her shoes lay, she got set to start, realizing that this might be her one chance to prove that she was faster without shoes than she was with them.

There was a brief countdown; she heard Mr. Beverson yell “Kayla!” just as the gun sounded – apparently he’d seen that she’d taken off her shoes – but she ignored him and took off running as hard as she could go.

For as much as Kayla was good at distance running she wasn’t quite as good at sprints, and she was perhaps tenth when they’d run off the first couple hundred yards before the course necked down. But by the time she’d gotten past the one-kilometer mark she was just passing one of the Amherst girls for second, with the little red-headed girl who had beaten her before not all that far ahead.

The course at Amherst wound around a lot, with several lobes out of a central area, so it was fairly easy for coaches and spectators to get to several places to cheer their runners on. As Kayla sped past the first good viewing spot she heard her mom and her dad and Mr. Patterson and Mr. Beverson yelling, “Go, Kayla! Go!” as she slowly closed in on the redhead.

It took her most of the next two kilometers to close to the heels of the Amherst girl, who apparently heard her coming and reached down inside her to find a little extra something to stay in front. Kayla only gained inches on her over the next kilometer; they passed the four-kilometer post and the last spectator spot with the yelling parents and coaches going wild.

The finish line was in sight when Kayla passed the redhead once and for all, but she could hear the girl right behind her, so she reached down deep for her last ounce of strength and raced toward the finish tape. The Amherst girl faded a little in the last hundred meters, so Kayla had maybe two meters on her as she crossed the finish line, exhausted and triumphant.

About all she could do was pull to the side, put her hands on her knees and try to catch her breath. She felt dizzy, but soon realized that the Amherst girl was right next to her trying to catch her breath too. “Great race,” the girl finally was able to puff. “I just couldn’t hold you off.”

“Great race,” Kayla puffed back. “I thought I was never going to get past you.”

“That’s the toughest race I’ve run all season.”

“Me, too. Wow, you’re fast.”

“You are, too,” the girl replied, getting her breath back. “How can you run like that without shoes?”

“That’s how I run most of the time. Your feet get pretty tough.”

“I guess,” the redhead nodded, standing up. “Hey, I’m Rachel.”

“Hi, I’m Kayla.”

“Holy crap,” Rachel shook her head. “Look at that!”

Kayla looked where Rachel was pointing toward the finish line, where Samantha, the Bradford girl who she sometimes beat and sometimes didn’t was only now crossing the line, in third. There was some space behind her, then a whole cluster of girls.

“Yeah, holy crap,” Kayla replied. “Rachel, we kicked their butts.”

“Big time,” the redhead agreed.

They stood there talking while the rest of the runners finished, which took a while. When they finally got their times, it proved that both of them had lowered their personal records for the course by nearly a minute! Clearly they’d pushed each other to new heights.

Kayla was quite surprised that Mr. Beverson didn’t come over and congratulate her or chew her out for daring to run the race without her shoes. Her mother and father came over, along with JJ and Mr. Patterson and Shae, who all congratulated her, along with Rachel’s parents. They stood around talking for a few minutes until Rachel noticed that Mr. Beverson was involved in a heated discussion with the Amherst coach and the referee.

Finally the referee came on the loudspeaker and said, “A protest of the finish by Amherst has been disallowed, so the winner of the middle school girls’ race is Kayla Holst of Bradford, followed by Rachel Bacon of Amherst. Samantha VanDusen of Bradford was third.” He went on to read off the names of the top twenty, and announce that Bradford had won the team trophy.

With that, both the Bradford and Amherst coaches came over to where Kayla and Rachel and their families and friends were standing. “Kayla, that was a terrific race,” the Amherst coach said. “I’m sorry I had to lodge a protest about your not wearing shoes, but that’s one of those things that has to be done to clarify the rules sometimes. Either your or Rachel’s times would have won the varsity girls’ race. And, Bill,” he continued, turning to Mr. Beverson, “it looks to me like you’ve got another Zola Budd on your hands.”

“I’m beginning to think so too,” he smiled.

“Zola Budd?” Kayla frowned.

“It was mostly back before you were born,” the Amherst coach smiled. “She set a couple world records and ran in the Olympics barefoot.”

“All right, Kayla,” Mr. Beverson said, “you’ve proved your point about being faster if you’re not wearing shoes.”

“No,” Kayla smiled, and put her arm around the Amherst runner. “I was faster because I had to work so hard to beat Rachel.”

Mr. Beverson smiled. “I have a feeling that if these two keep after each other we’re going to be seeing some interesting things happen the next few years.”

Just days after Kayla’s trophy from the County Cross-Country Championships went onto the top of the bookshelves in the Holst living room, Emily won a totally uncontested election to her second term on the city council. The other seat at odds on council was also uncontested, and Vicky’s mother Mignon Varney won it, replacing Frank Wolohan, who had previously announced he was retiring and moving to Florida. Emily had known Mignon all her life and figured she’d do well on the council, as something like only the sixth or seventh woman to serve there.

Dave Patterson continued to settle into life in Bradford, and from what Emily could tell from their discussions when he picked his morning coffee up at the Spee-D-Mart, he was starting to pull things back together in his life. One of the things that went along with his working online from Bradford was that he had to go to the office every so often to have face-to-face meetings and consultations. The only problem was that it was a six-hundred-mile commute one way. The first time he made the New York run, he was gone for five days and came back noticeably subdued; apparently ghosts still hung over him there. He mentioned that he had talked to Eve while he had been gone, but it wasn’t clear to Emily whether he’d stopped in Philadelphia and seen her, or if it had been at Shae’s, or what. Emily knew from JoAnne that Dave had planned to stay at Shae’s while he was in New York, but there had been no comment about that, either.

Shae’s appearance the weekend of the cross-country meet was a bit of a surprise; she’d been in Bradford only a month before, and that one was after an absence of nearly three years. Again, nothing much was said about the visit other than she’d been looking forward to seeing Dave’s boys, but by the middle of December Emily thought she’d detected a pattern where she and Dave were together for a long weekend every other weekend. Apparently Avalon took a break in shooting over the holidays, since Shae spent almost a week in Bradford that trip. Emily had the two and the boys over to dinner one of those nights, and over the course of an evening of friendship nothing much had been said that led her to think that the two were anything but good friends. Still, there had been that kiss, and it made the gossip in her wonder.

As expected, and typical of what they’d come to expect, the new management at Macy Controls chose Christmas Eve to announce that the plant would be closing for good at the end of the week. Fortunately for those involved it didn’t come as much of a surprise; for a year or more the signs had been clear that the end was near. Kevin stuck it out till the end, along with some others, mostly because they all planned to draw unemployment for a while – in Kevin’s case, to ease the transition to working at MacRae Knives.

Mike Austin was still working on the old Gulf station through December, but in January Jason and Kevin moved the blacksmithing and machining parts of the operation from Jason’s back garage to the new shop. Finishing would stay at Jason and Vicky’s house for a while yet, mostly because it simplified Vicky’s taking care of Melissa, and some steps might stay there for a long time for that reason. For over a year they’d been going to knife and gun shows and other sales opportunities when they were in reach, and that continued. Usually it was either just Kevin or Jason who went to the shows, most of which were one-day affairs held in armories or gyms. Sometimes both of them went, and occasionally Emily and even Vicky went along to help out, or just for the change of scenery.

Kayla surprised Emily by announcing that she wasn’t going out for volleyball, the winter girl’s sport. Emily made the suggestion that it might be a good chance for her to try cheerleading, but her daughter brushed it off without the dignity of a comment – and that was no surprise at all. What did prove a surprise was that Rachel Bacon, the girl who Kayla had raced against to such an epic finish for the County Middle School Championship, lived in the country just over the school district line, only about six miles away! Somehow, as the two battled each other while outdistancing the pack a friendship had been kindled. The two of them got together once or twice a week now, with parents usually providing the transportation – but on the nicer days as fall turned to winter, they might provide it themselves, by using it as an opportunity for road work. Then, when they got together, as often as not they’d go out running! It would be interesting indeed to see what happened when girls’ track rolled around in the spring, only a couple months away now as January turned to February.

Along in the middle of the first week of February Emily was working at the Spee-D-Mart one morning, trying to get some paperwork caught up during a slack period when Sharon Van Tyle walked in. Sharon was the owner of the Spee-D-Mart and a string of other convenience stores that had been started by her husband, who had died back when Emily was still in high school. Emily had gotten along well with Sharon for a long time, and knew that she was getting up there in years. “Are you here by yourself?” Sharon asked.

“Janine comes on at noon and I go off at one,” Emily explained.

“Good,” Sharon said. “Emily, I’ve been trying to figure out a nice way to tell you this, but I think maybe the best way to do it is just to come right out and say that I’ve sold the store.”

“You have?” Emily replied, unable to think of anything more intelligent to say. She’d known for years that Sharon wasn’t going to keep it forever, but had hoped when the time came that she’d at least have a shot at buying it. Maybe it was just as well; with the knife business getting started it would be a real strain to add the hassle of also buying the store. “Who to?” she managed after a minute.

“To Country Market,” Sharon said flatly. “They’re expanding their store, and they want to tear this down to enlarge the parking lot.”

It was not totally news to Emily – well, the business about the building getting torn down was. The chain had purchased the main grocery store in town the year before. Through her council connections Emily had been led to understand that an expansion was on the drawing board, but there had been nothing like a site plan or details that had even gotten to council unofficially. “I had no idea they had that in mind,” she said.

“They want to tear it down next spring so they can take the gas tanks out and do the environmental testing,” Sharon told her. “My understanding is that they need a year’s lead time on that before they can build. So we’ll be closing the store at the end of April. I’m sorry it had to come down this way, Emily. You’ve been a good and loyal employee for many years, but I’m selling the rest of the stores to F&P Food Marts, and they’ll want to bring their own employees in.”

Emily understood perfectly. She wouldn’t even be able to work for Sharon elsewhere, not that she particularly wanted to work outside of Bradford, anyway. But it looked like she might have to. “It’s OK, Sharon,” she said sadly. “You have to do what you have to do.”

“Emily, I’d be happy if you can stay on through the closing,” Sharon told her. “But I’ll understand fully if you get another job and have to move on.”

“I … I don’t know what to tell you,” Emily replied honestly.

“Whatever you decide will be fine with me.”

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