Excited, and a little sobered at the turn of events, Kayla didn’t rush off a fast post on Allison’s Sanctuary announcing her victory. Instead, she took her time writing up a detailed description on the computer in Notepad, then went back through it carefully to make sure that it didn’t identify herself or where she was from in any way. Then, she edited it some more.

When she was finally satisfied with it, she got onto the forum and made a post of it. When she came back to it several hours later, there were several congratulatory posts threaded onto it, along with some personal messages from some of the regulars. Airclad sent a personal message that was absolutely envious, and said that she hoped her parents would take it that well when the time came to out herself.

Better than that, Allison sent her a personal message passing along her congratulations and asking her permission to take her post and put it among the permanent articles on the website as an example of someone’s successful coming out to their parents. Kayla agreed immediately; she was proud to think that her story and how she’d done it could be an example and inspiration to others.

When she logged off the forum a little later, she decided not to delete the history file on her home computer like she had done in the past. While it might bring up an awkward question or two if no one noticed it in the next few days, she was done covering that part of her life up from her family. Now, she wanted them to see the website and the forum, see that it was nothing dirty, just kids supporting kids in exploring a wholesome, healthy activity – and that there were other kids out there like her. She didn’t make a point of drawing their attention to it until the deleted history would have expired, but after that made a comment or two about it. To her surprise, little was said.

She found out later that on that same afternoon she had the talk with her mom, her father had also had a long talk with JJ, going over some of the same points and asking him to keep the activity in the family. Still, JJ was surprised to walk into the house with his father and find his mother and sister lying nude on the patio, soaking up the sun. By then it was getting late and they were getting little if any benefit from the sun, but the wind had died down, it wasn’t too cool out there, and Kayla and her mother had been enjoying a real adult conversation that ranged over a lot of ground. Shortly after they arrived, though, her mother said it was getting too chilly out there for her and that she’d better get dressed and get started on some supper. Kayla decided to keep her clothes off for a while, just to make things clear.

The conversation at dinner that evening was about the same old things – schoolwork, what friends were up to, and plans for the next day. It was almost as if nothing at all had changed. Well, almost nothing: JJ was more than a little curious about her body, and did more than his fair share of looking, not that it bothered her – she was pretty sure he was going to get used to it quickly. He commented that he found her being nude gross, but that didn’t mean anything, because he normally said that just about everything she did was gross, like going barefoot, putting mustard instead of ketchup on French fries, and being a runner. In other words, he was a typical little brother.

A few days later, when it was just the two of them one evening, he asked her why she was doing it. Kayla told him that it wasn’t just some crazy experimentation, she’d decided that being nude was part of what she was, part of her lifestyle, just like running and being barefoot and putting mustard on French fries, and that it was very important to her. She explained that it made her feel good and made her feel happy. After teasing her a little and saying that she was weird, he said that if that was the case he didn’t mind at all. Given that he was her brother, she thought that was a very nice thing to say.

As the next few weeks went by, the novelty of her being nude much of the time started to die out for JJ – it became common. For a while he would tease her about it, or make wisecracks about his weird older sister, but that died out too. He commented a couple times about the fact that he hadn’t said anything about it around school, because he didn’t want his friends thinking that he was as weird as his sister.

The weather warmed up in early May and stayed that way. In the middle of May, they took the winter cover off the pool. It was still pretty cool, but it was fun to get in it for at least a few minutes, which is about all it took to turn her deepening tan into a delicate blue. JJ joined her in the pool now and then, as naked as she was; she noticed that he wasn’t as shy about it as he had been in the beginning.

She carried good grades right along, which made her parents happy, and the track season kept going on. The middle school kids didn’t have as many meets as the varsity and they didn’t do much at longer distances, which Kayla knew were her strong point. For some reason no one understood she wasn’t a terribly fast sprinter and only had mediocre finishes when she ran distances shorter than a 440, and she wasn’t very good at hurdles. At longer distances she usually won her heats, sometimes by wide margins – in the meet against Mansfield she was a good half lap ahead of Samantha, who finished in second place. However, she hadn’t raced against Rachel for a few weeks, either.

She continued to deepen her friendship with the short redhead, although they couldn’t get together as much as either of them would have liked. They still got together on weekends and when they didn’t have practices, to hang out, do girl things, and to go out and run, sometimes with her brother Casey and even with her older sister Chelsea, who was right in their league for speed, though not quite as fast as the two younger girls. Rachel told Kayla that she’d been going barefoot a lot and had even tried jogging barefoot, but that on anything but bare dirt or clean grass it hurt her feet. Kayla told her that she’d have to do it a lot to get her feet tough enough to race barefoot. Both of them were really looking forward to the county meet, where they’d be racing each other for a trophy. In spite of being friends, neither of them planned on holding back.

One thing Kayla hadn’t let Rachel in on was her interest in going without clothes. Rachel knew that Kayla wasn’t shy about changing clothes in front of her – and the redhead wasn’t shy about changing clothes in front of Kayla, either. The more Kayla thought about it, the more it seemed that Rachel might be a good person to let into her secret, but decided to put it off till the time seemed right. Having the pool quite a bit warmer figured into that too. She hoped it would work out, since it would be so nice to have a friend her age to share those adventures with.

There were times that Kayla didn’t go nude around the house, and one of those times was when they had guests in. That could be really awkward, Emily thought. At least Kayla seemed to understand and wasn’t making an issue out of it, but she dreaded the day that someone answered the door for the wrong person while Kayla was lying around the living room reading teen magazines or watching TV in the nude. The doorbell ringing unexpectedly had sent Kayla scampering for her room several times without getting caught, but Emily suspected that JJ might not be quite as circumspect about giving his sister time to get out of sight.

Dave Patterson and his boys were at the house once or twice a week, and from the beginning it had been understood that Kayla wouldn’t go nude around them. Not that Emily thought Dave would have minded had he been warned, but it might be hard to explain to the boys – or equally hard to keep them from saying something in the wrong place or to the wrong person. Kayla apparently agreed, and had no problem getting dressed one evening toward the end of May when they’d been invited for dinner, something that had happened every few days during the winter.

This time, Dave brought an unexpected guest with him – Shae! Though Shae had been in and out of town all winter to see Dave, Emily had only seen her rarely, and then not for long. “Well, stranger,” Emily gushed. “What brings you to these parts?”

“Long story,” Shae smiled down at her as she ducked under the doorframe, which was several inches lower than her head. “What it comes down to is that we’re on hiatus for the summer, so I figured I might as well spend the time with Dave and the boys.”

Shae’s pregnancy was no longer any secret around the Holst household, or in general for that matter, although Emily had no plans to publish anything about it in the Courier – but then, she didn’t usually do it for anyone else, either, unless the pregnancy was germane to the story.

This was the first time that Shae had been to dinner with them; though Kevin, Kayla, and JJ had met her, it had only been briefly. Now, they learned that she was the kind of person who filled a room – not just from being so tall, but that she had a bright and bubbly spirit and was a lot of fun to be around. A lot of her height was in her very long legs; when she sat down in one of the living room chairs she seemed a lot more like normal size.

Dinner was still a short time from being ready. It was in the oven and wouldn’t take long to serve when it was done, so Emily took the opportunity to sit down in the living room and catch up on things. “So,” she asked her blonde friend, “how long are you back for this visit?”

“All summer,” Shae smiled. “I may have to make a trip or two back to the city to do some looping and take care of business, but I’m pretty much planning on staying with Dave and the boys for a while. We’re going to see how I get along in Bradford.”

“Does that mean that you’re going to be staying, Dave?” Emily asked. She hadn’t been seeing much of him the last few weeks, since things had slowed down at the Courier and Emily had brought Janine, her former assistant at the Spee-D-Mart, in part time to help with some of the work.

“No,” Dave replied. “In fact, unless Avalon gets canceled over the summer, the plan is for all of us to head back to the city in August in time to get the boys in school. Back before we came here last fall, I registered them for this fall at a private school not far from Shae’s apartment.”

“Boyce Day Academy,” Shae explained. “It’s not bad at all. I’ve been over there a couple times to check it out. I went over dressed as Avalon’s Shaella Sunrise one time, and gave a little performance for the kids. They seemed to enjoy it.”

“I’ll bet they would,” Emily asked. “Tell me though. Doesn’t it get a bit confusing to be using your real name for the name of your character on Avalon?”

“Sometimes it gets very confusing,” Shae smiled. “When I first went on Charley’s House, which was the predecessor to Avalon, it was only going to be for a single one-week block. The writers got real lazy and didn’t even come up with a different name for me. Then Shaella Sunrise proved to be a hit and we were stuck with it.”

“That means you’re planning on having your baby in New York then?” Emily asked.

“Yes,” the tall woman answered. “In fact, that’s part of the reason I’ll have to make a couple trips back over the summer, to see my OB-GYN.”

“So, Dave,” Emily said, “that means that you’re going to move back to New York permanently then?”

“We still don’t know yet,” Dave sighed. “For next school year, probably. After that, it depends on how we both like it here, how we both like it in the city, and whether Avalon is continued for another season.”

“Which is one big question,” Shae sighed. “Back at Christmas, it looked like it was going to wrap permanently this spring sometime, but over the winter the higher-ups decided that they want to shoot one more season and a few fitter pieces to update old episodes of Charley’s House. So that complicated things, but it’s one of those things that needs to be done. I can’t really walk out on it, especially since they squeejawed the shooting schedule around so I won’t have to be on camera until about November.”

“I don’t understand why they’re canceling the show,” Kayla said. “I mean, I figured it was something like Sesame Street or Mister Rogers that goes on forever and ever.”

“No,” Shae shook her head. “I knew from the beginning it wasn’t going to be that way. In fact, it’s held on longer than I expected. What you have to remember is that Avalon only appeals to kids of a very narrow age range, say two to five or six. Cameron and Tyler are a little old for it, but they still like watching it for some reason.”

“Because we like Shae,” Tyler piped up. “We get to see her more that way.”

“It’s wonderful to have loyal fans,” Shae grinned. “The thing of it is that the show is written so that it doesn’t reflect current events. That means that once there’s a collection of shows built up, after three or four years they can start the same run all over at the beginning with a whole new audience. CTN is a very low budget operation, and it’s much cheaper to show reruns than it is to continually shoot new material. I’ll continue to get residual payments for it for years because it’ll be more or less current until the tapes wear out. That’s why we still see all those old Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons from back in the thirties and forties. They’re just as funny as they ever were, cost nothing to shoot, and only a small fee to run. There has to be a continual parade of new shows, but it’s a relatively small portion of the total, and especially for that age range. Kayla, while it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if your kids watch Avalon, they likely won’t know that it was shot years before.”

“So what happens with you after the show ends?” Emily asked.

“Good question,” Shae shrugged. “That’s part of why I’m spending the summer here, and then most likely the four of us will spend the winter at my apartment on Staten Island, so we can give it a fair comparison with all of us living together.”

“The house we’re in is awful small for Shae, compared to her apartment,” Dave added. “But for a few months we can make do. If we decide to move back here we’re talking about building a custom house with doors and ceilings her size. Or, we might do it somewhere else, we haven’t decided. A lot of it depends on how things go this summer.”

“So are you getting married, or what?” Kayla asked.

“We’re getting married,” Dave said. “When is still an issue, and unfortunately it’s my issue. Let’s just say when the time is right.”

While she didn’t know a lot about it, Emily knew from little bits and pieces that Dave had told her over three months that he was still agonizing over Julie and was concerned that Shae being pregnant was dishonoring his wife, even if only in his own mind. She knew that he and Eve had held several discussions about it, but apparently it wasn’t settled yet. She wondered if having Shae here for the summer might help – or if being with her in New York for the winter might make it worse. But there was no way to ask that politely in this group, and maybe not one on one either.

“Well, Shae,” Emily said as she reached for a way to change the subject, “if there’s anything we can do to make things go easier for you while you’re here, feel free to ask.”

“I doubt that Arnie Perkins would think very much of someone coming over and taking a chainsaw to the door headers,” Kevin smiled. “But if you want it done it can probably be arranged.”

“Thanks for the offer,” Shae grinned, glad as Emily of the change in subject. “I’ve been ducking my head under low doors for years, and I think I now may finally be getting used to it. Part of the reason that I wear heels most of the time is that it brings door frames down into my field of view so I can see to duck them. I still have whacked my head more times than I want to think about.”

Emily had heard that story before, and granted that there was a degree of truth to it. She glanced at Kayla; she’d told Kayla the real reason – at least one of them – why Shae wore heels. She knew it was painful in a different way, and hoped that Kayla would be able to recognize that.

“Mom told me that you used to say that since you were a freak anyway that there was no point in stopping halfway,” Kayla commented to Emily’s relief. That was another one of Shae’s standard lines that she’d heard since middle school, and again there was a degree of truth to the statement. “I haven’t watched a lot of Avalon,” Kayla continued, “but it seems like a real neat way to give the message that it’s all right if people are different from you.”

“I probably wouldn’t have gone on Charley’s House in the first place if that hadn’t been one of the main underlying themes,” Shae replied. “It’s very difficult to deal in subtle messages when you’re aiming them at kids younger than Tyler and Cameron. You have to make them broad and easy to understand, perhaps at the risk of oversimplifying them. Fortunately, kids understand make-believe in a way that most adults don’t. A little kid, not an adult, who’s twice as big as they are is something that isn’t going to happen in the real world, but it makes a nice platform to get the message across that we have to be tolerant of differences in others.” She let out a sigh, and continued, “We’ve made progress in that area as a society in a lot of ways since I was your age, kids. But in a way, things are getting worse, too.”

“How do you mean that?” Kayla asked.

“Like I said, we’ve made real progress in making people more tolerant of differences in who and what people are,” Shae shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s being a New Yorker and having been touched so personally through Dave by what happened last September, but it seems to me that people are getting less tolerant of differences in what people believe, and what they were raised to believe.”

“I don’t know but what Shae is right,” Dave nodded. “I think a lot of it is the fact that we have become a global society more quickly than our various cultures have been able to adapt. Now we’re paying the price in ignorant reaction, much of it disguised as religious fundamentalism. That excuse is being used in many societies, especially including ours, as a justification to keep people from choosing how they want to live their lives.”

Shae shook her head. “I don’t know if I totally agree with Dave on that,” she frowned. “Really, most people choose to live their own lives their own way and are content to let others live the way they choose. But there will always be someone who thinks the way someone else lives is wrong and needs to be stopped, and often be forced to live their way. Their reasons can be religious, cultural, sheer personal prejudice, or whatever.”

“Wow,” Emily said. “This discussion sure got deep in a hurry. But I have to point out that there have to be some limits.”

“Of course there does,” Dave said. “I mean, most societies would agree that a law, ‘Thou shalt not steal thy neighbor’s car,’ makes sense and is justified. But where you have different societies interacting in an increasingly smaller world, there isn’t always that agreement. For example, some societies require that women wear burquas. Others allow women to wear bikinis, or even less. The bikini wearers would like to see the burquas banned, and the burqua wearing society would like to see those bikinis covered with burquas. Each group sees the other as offensive. Who is right? My view is that neither viewpoint should be allowed to dictate to the other one. ‘Doing what you do is offensive because it insults my view of morality’ is all too common an argument, and all too often wrong.”

Kayla looked thoughtful for a moment, then asked, “You’re saying that we should be free to do what we want to do,” she said. “OK, just suppose that I wanted to go to school without wearing clothes. You’re saying that I should be able to do that.”

Crap, Emily thought. How did we get to that subject so quickly? “Since you’re still a minor, I might have something to say about that,” she said in an effort to derail that line of thought.

It didn’t derail. “In theory, in a totally free society you should have the right to do just that,” Shae nodded. “In practice, there would be a lot of people intolerant of your decision to do it, mostly because it offends their idea of morality. That’s enough people that you’d be badly outnumbered. Frankly, if there’s nothing in your community that offends you, then you are not living in a free society. Tolerance involves letting other people do things that may offend you, so you also have the right to do something that offends others.”

“Right,” Dave agreed. “While this nation is founded on the premise that people have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, those rights have to be continually fought for and defended against the forces that want to take those rights from you. In theory, Kayla, you should have the right to go to school without wearing clothes. However, if you wanted to do it, you would face a long and uphill fight to be able to enjoy that right. But if you chose to fight it out, you would be following in some hallowed footsteps that were made by people with names like Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and Walesa. I have to point out that the trail they laid led through the cell blocks of various jails along the way, and for much of their lives they were considered to be little better than nutcases.”

“Not to mention people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and especially Amelia Bloomer,” Shae smiled. “Amelia started the battle for the right of women to wear trousers in 1848. It took a century and more for that battle to be won. While I see girls in high schools wearing even less than your mother and I were allowed fifteen years ago, if you started a movement to allow full nudity in school it might be won in time for your great-great grandchildren to enjoy it.”

“Maybe not,” Dave shrugged. “Things move faster now than they did then. Unfortunately, with the rise of religious fundamentalism and general movement toward reactionary thought, I think we’re moving away from that direction. And since things are moving faster and it seems like the reactionaries are winning more, it may turn into a battle to keep your granddaughters out of burquas. Even your daughters.”

“I’d rather have the choice to not wear clothes than be forced to wear something like that,” Kayla said thoughtfully.

“So would we all,” Dave nodded. “However, if we don’t fight for the right to have that choice, it could be taken away from us.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.