The conversation turned into a different direction after that – after all when there were three Class of ’88 people around, including Kayla’s mother, the subject was bound sooner or later to turn to gossip about class members and tales of days gone by. When the talk was of people Kayla knew, like Vicky and Dayna, she had some interest, but when it turned to others she’d never met, the tales got a little wearisome.

The discussion from earlier stayed with Kayla though. She rarely had the opportunity to be part of an intellectual discussion with informed adults, and it made her feel very grown-up, and it set her thinking in channels she hadn’t really considered before.

Sure, she liked going clothes-free – it had become important to her, and the chance to be able to do it around the house and with her family had been welcome. But she was realist enough to realize that there had to be some limits to it, and she had to keep it more or less a secret. While she would have preferred the freedom to go to school in the nude, for instance, she knew very well that any attempt to do it would have gotten her – and probably the rest of her family – into serious trouble. Not only would laws probably be broken, people would be offended – and her classmates would never let her hear the end of it. But wouldn’t it be nice to live in a place where it was possible.

In the course of the discussion, Dave and Shae had thrown several names around casually. Kayla had heard of Martin Luther King, who she assumed Dave had been talking about – there had been some sessions in school that had talked about him, mostly around Martin Luther King Day. The other names were mostly unfamiliar to her, except for the fact that she’d heard the name Susan B. Anthony, but had no idea why she was important. Where had Shae and Dave heard those names, and gotten familiar with them? Where had some of those ideas come from? She’d never heard her mother throwing around that kind of discussion. Then, on thinking about it, she realized that both Dave and Shae had been to college, and her mother hadn’t. Was that where they learned some of those things?

She was curious enough about it that while her mother was getting dinner on the table she found a moment to talk to Shae and ask her about those women, and where she’d learned about them. “Most of it came from a Woman’s Studies class I had in college,” Shae admitted. “They were early people in the battle for women’s rights in this country. Among other things, women have the right to vote as a result of what they started, but most women barely know the names or why they were important.”

With that thought, Kayla got a pencil and a sheet of notebook paper and asked Shae for them again, so she could write them down – and then asked Dave about the men he’d mentioned. “Those are four very interesting people everyone should know more about,” he told her. “All of them, in their own way, were fighters for human rights and the right to be different than society wants you to be. I think you’ll find that there are some good young adult biographies about Thoreau, King, and Gandhi. Lech Walesa, I don’t know, he’s newer and the theorists don’t think as much of him since he was anticommunist, but I think in time he’ll be considered right up there with the other three.”

Dave went on to explain that while he’d heard of all four of them in high school, it had been college before he really learned much about them, even though his main interest was literature, especially fiction and fantasy. “But some of the things they did make very good stories, and the kinds of battles they had to fight often keep coming up in science fiction and fantasy. They’re well worth learning about, in any case.”

They went on about their dinner, then sat around talking for a while afterward, until it was time for Dave and Shae to get Tyler and Cameron to bed. While they talked, Shae mentioned that Eve would probably be visiting at one time or another over the summer, and Kayla commented that she’d heard a lot about her and would like to meet her sometime. “I think we can arrange for that,” Shae grinned. “Among many other things, she’s a real good example of someone who fought for the right to be herself in spite of people who were offended by it. I’d be surprised if you’re not inspired by her.”

After Dave and Shae left, Kayla went to the family encyclopedia and dug out the articles on the seven people. With the exception of King, most of the articles were brief – Walesa’s especially so – but it was clear that all of them were people who had fought for their own ideas and for freedom from the existing order. The encyclopedia only told her just enough to get her interested.

After track practice the next day, she started her run home by going out of the way – not nude through the woods, even though it was a nice day – but by going by the city library, since the school library would soon be closing for the summer. As Dave had said, there were some good young adult biographies on King and Gandhi. Since she had already learned some about Martin Luther King, she started with Gandhi. Even in the dilute and abridged young adult biography, the power, idealism, and dedication of the man shone through.

What with school winding down and track practice interfering, she was several days working through the two books. Along in that period came the county track meet, and she got to run against Rachel again. This time, the results were reversed from what had happened in the dual meet with Amherst – Kayla won the mile by a couple steps, and the two girls were a long way ahead of Samantha, who was third. Kayla and Rachel each anchored their teams in the mile relay, and in that case Rachel was a couple steps ahead of Kayla, who couldn’t quite make up the deficit that Samantha had left her with. Either way, it worked out well, and both the girls knew they’d be spending a lot of time together and doing a lot of running over the course of the summer.

When she finished with the two books she took them back to the library. The librarian, an older and half-crippled woman by the name of Mrs. Hephner asked if she’d liked the books, and Kayla said that she’d been really interested in them and wanted to know more. She asked if there was anything about Thoreau or Walesa. “I know we don’t have a book about Lech Walesa,” Mrs. Hephner said. “But let me get you something.”

She headed back into the back part of the library and was gone for several minutes. She came back, carrying a book with a green and cream cover, no dust jacket. “Kayla,” Mrs. Hephner said, “I’m going to tell you right now that this is a tough read for someone your age, so take your time and don’t try to rush through it. It’s written in old-time language, and there will often be times that you’ll want to back up and understand what he was really saying. There are those who say that this is one of the most dangerous books ever written by one of the most dangerous men to have ever lived. Henry may not speak to you. If he doesn’t, you won’t be the first. If he does, he can change your life. This isn’t a library book, it’s out of the used book sale. If he doesn’t speak to you, just bring it back. If he does, it’s yours to keep.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hephner. I promise I’ll read it carefully and try to understand it,” Kayla said, taking the book from the librarian’s hand.

When Kayla got home, she found JJ there with Lute. They had a video game going on the TV – a real shoot-em-up, with the volume turned up so loud it made the windows rattle. She’d had hopes of going out by the pool clothes-free and having some quiet time to dig into what looked at a glance to be to hard read indeed, just like Mrs. Hephner had said. But there were other options, so she got out a backpack from school, loaded a beach towel, suntan lotion, a bottle of water and the battered old book, then started barefoot across the field, through the growing dark green sprigs of the young corn. As soon as she was out of sight below the hill on the far side of the field, she stopped, took off her clothes, put them into the backpack, and walked the old two-rut through the woods to her favorite spot on the far side of the hill.

It was a nice day for early summer, a touch on the cool side, but the sun beating down made it more than tolerable – in fact, close to ideal. Even with the spray bottle it took her a while to get doped down with the suntan oil. Once that was completed she spread out on her towel, opened the book, and began to read: “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only …”

One of the things that Kayla had really looked forward to doing in the summer months was going to some running events with the Bacon family. Over the course of the winter she had gotten to know them fairly well – Rachel, of course, but Casey was only a few months older, though in the next grade.

Rachel’s relations with Casey were pretty much like Kayla’s relation with JJ – which is to say, only barely tolerant and often contemptuous. In the beginning, Kayla basically took her cue from Rachel, and didn’t pay Casey a whole lot of attention. But, perhaps not surprisingly, somewhere along in there she started to think that maybe Casey wasn’t that bad after all, and kind of cute in a way. He was no less interested in getting out and running than his sister, and often they made a threesome, especially when Kayla was out visiting at the Bacons, which happened a couple times a week.

There was a network of lightly used gravel roads between the Bacons and Bradford, and they made for nice places to go running and just enjoy being outside. Sometimes the runs were hard, but other times they were just jogging along, getting a few miles in at a speed slow enough to talk about things that interested them.

In those running miles with her friend, and sometimes with her friend’s brother, Kayla never brought up her interests in going clothes-free, but they were never far from her mind. Somehow, she wanted to bring the subject up to Rachel, but for some reason or another the time never seemed quite right.

The weekend before school was out, the Bacons took Kayla to a running event down in Woodstock, Indiana. This was a street race through a town, starting in the early morning, with 5k and 10k races. The cross-country races Kayla had run in the fall had mostly been 5k races, with a few 4k races for middle school runners. She had done well with them, and had trained at 10k – it was about the distance of her favorite route from her home to Rachel’s, after all – so she’d been looking forward to running the longer distances. Both she and Rachel signed up for the 10k race.

The race seemed longer at a race speed than it did at a jogging speed. Kayla and Rachel, who was also running her first 10k, started out at what they thought was about the right speed, and pulled out ahead of the rest of the women in the race, running about ten places back from the leading men. It proved to be a little fast for the long haul; at about seven kilometers one of the older women caught up with them, then another and another in the next couple kilometers. They gritted their teeth and held on the best they could, and were getting pretty tired when they hit the finish line, finishing fifth and sixth among the women, Rachel slightly ahead. Still, they were first and second in their zero to fourteen girls’ age group, although that wasn’t anything to crow about since they were the only two girls in that age group.

“One of the things you have to learn to do in a longer race is to learn how to pace yourself,” Mr. Bacon told them over ice cream afterwards. “You have to be fast enough to win and slow enough to win. There’s nothing wrong with a top-ten finish in a small race like this, but I think both of you know you can do better, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t be thinking of doing a half-marathon or a 20k if you keep up your training.”

“Sure, I’d like that,” Kayla said, and Rachel agreed. The thought of longer races both challenged and fascinated her; at one time she’d never thought she could do a marathon, and now she was looking forward to trying.

A few days later, when Kayla was again at Rachel’s, the weather had turned quite a bit warmer. Rachel’s family lived in an old farmhouse, and the air conditioning didn’t get up to Rachel’s upstairs room very well. The girls had been hanging around there, uncomfortably warm, and Kayla had been wishing that she could take her clothes off so she could cool off more. But she still hadn’t raised the nudism issue with Rachel, mostly because she didn’t want to risk driving off such a good friend. Still, when Rachel made the suggestion that they go out and get on a few miles but keep the pace down, Kayla wasn’t about to turn her down, especially when Rachel suggested that they go through the woods where it might be a bit cooler.

They had been out in the woods a few times before, sometimes but not always by the pool in the creek that Rachel had shown her back in the winter. Rachel set a fairly fast pace in the heat, through the woods, across a field, through another woods and across another field into a third woods, which didn’t seem familiar until Kayla realized they were heading down into the creek bed. Then, she realized that Rachel was leading her down to the swimming hole. This, she thought, might just be the time …

Rachel slowed down as they approached the still waters of the pool in the creek. “I’ll bet that water would still be chilly, but it would feel awful good right now,” she said tentatively.

“I didn’t bring a swimsuit,” Kayla smiled, “but I don’t need one if you don’t.”

“Yeah, right,” Rachel said, looking surprised. “After all, we’re both girls, aren’t we?”

It took only seconds before their clothes were lying scattered on the bank of the creek, and the two nude girls were in the water. The bottom proved to be gravelly, rather than the mud that Kayla had expected, and the pool was shallower than she had thought, nowhere over her head. She was a fairly good swimmer, and they splashed around for a while. Rachel showed Kayla how the current ran through the far side of the pool, and how she could get a good ride out of it.

The water was on the cool side to be comfortable, so they didn’t stay in long. “It sure would be nice to lay out in the sun somewhere to warm up,” Kayla suggested. “We couldn’t do it very well down here in the shade. Is there a place where it might be sunny?”

“Sure,” Rachel said. “Just at the top of the hill. Do you want to put your clothes on before we go up there?”

“Do we have to?” Kayla shook her head. “They’re all damp and stinky. Maybe what we ought to do is to hang them up so they could at least dry out a little, and just go up there and get some sun in the nude.”

“Sounds just fine to me,” Rachel smirked. They busied themselves for a moment or two hanging up the T-shirts, shorts and underwear they’d worn, and then Rachel led her up a faint path to the edge of the woods. There was a nice little grassy spot that seemed just made for lying out in the sun. The only problem was that there was some grass stubble that didn’t look like it would be too much fun to lie down in, but Rachel went over to where there was a white plastic bucket, opened it, and pulled out a blanket.

“Something tells me you’ve been here before,” Kayla smiled.

“Whenever I can,” Rachel told her. “I just like to lay out here and get some sun where it’s peaceful and I won’t be bothered.”

Kayla glanced at her friend. While there were obvious tan lines from where she’d been running in shorts and a T-shirt, there were none further up her hips that might have been caused by a bikini. “You like to lay out here in the nude, I bet,” she grinned, as Rachel lay the blanket down.

“Oh, yes,” Rachel grinned. “It always seems so special. I mean, it’s sort of like the way things are really supposed to be. How about you? Do you like sunbathing nude, too?”

“I sure do,” Kayla laughed as Rachel lay down on the blanket and motioned for Kayla to join her. “I lay out on the patio some, or if JJ has friends around there’s a spot out in the woods that I go to.”

“You lay out nude while your brother is around?” Rachel asked. There seemed to be no astonishment in her voice; she was just checking the point.

“Oh, yeah, it doesn’t bother him. Dad either,” Kayla smiled. “Mom even comes and joins me sometimes. JJ doesn’t lay out, but sometimes he’ll get in the pool with me nude, too.”

“You are so lucky,” Rachel said. “I’d like to be nude around the house, but I’m really scared that my parents would say no. Has your family always let you be nude like that?”

“No,” Kayla told her. “I only discovered a year ago how much I like to be nude, especially outside, and I was like real scared what my folks would say, since they’re kinda straight. So I decided to just be nude a little more and see what they’d say. I mean, like I slept nude and didn’t try to cover it up. Then I started not bothering to cover up when I went between my room and the shower, and like that. My folks saw me like that a few times, even my brother saw me, and nobody said anything. So one Saturday morning when only Mom and I were home, I decided to push it a little more. I went downstairs only wearing panties and started watching cartoons on TV. My mom asked me if I planned to get dressed, and I said maybe not till afternoon when I went out to run and was that all right. She really surprised me when she said, “You can be naked for all I care,” so I took off my panties. She just shook her head and walked off.”

“So then what happened?” Rachel asked, a surprised look on her face.

“Nothing much,” Kayla smiled. “After a while, I got up and helped her with the chores and then we had lunch, with me still nude, of course. After lunch, she got on her bike and rode off, and I figured she’d gone to talk with Dad and she was going to come back and tell me to get some clothes on and keep them on. But she came back a couple hours later, and came out on the patio nude … Rachel, what’s the matter?”

“And … and … you talked for a long time about kids that she went to school with,” Rachel forced out, barely able to talk but gushing words at the same time. “And how people got down on them, and how you shouldn’t let just everyone know you’re a nudist, right?”

All of a sudden two and two snapped together for Kayla. “Rachel,” she said. “Have you ever looked at a website named ‘Allison’s Sanctuary’?”

“Almost every day,” Rachel exclaimed with rising excitement. “My God, I never dreamed that you’re … Hi, Barefoot, I’m Airclad.”

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