Like most of humanity, Alexa would never in a million years have guessed how her world would be turned upside down in just a few weeks. She had been expecting a stress-free few months finishing up her final semester, and was looking forward to graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree, with honors. She had only needed a handful of credits, and had finished all the challenging courses her program required, so during the first few weeks of the semester she had been cruising through the easiest period of her college career and generally enjoying life.
Then the damned Coronavirus came along and wrecked everything; her course sessions abruptly turned into a series of herky-jerky video calls. She'd accepted a great job offer with a prominent tech company, but that all went to hell with the tanking of the economy.
By mid-March the entire campus had closed down, with all students being told that there wouldn't be any in-person classes after Spring break. While Alexa wasn't forced to leave town, since she lived off-campus, all of her friends had to move out of their dorms; since their courses were all now meeting online they went back to live with their parents, leaving Alexa without anyone to hang out with. She considered moving back in with her folks too, but since her college town was almost virus-free and her hometown was hit pretty badly she agreed with her parents that it was probably better that she stay put for a few more months.
With minimal coursework and no social life at all, Alexa picked up some more shifts at her convenience store job; with half of his employees having left town, the store owner was glad to have her. The extra hours allowed Alexa to put some money away to eventually help her move on with her life, and she didn't have anything else to do; with all the students and most of the faculty gone as well, her life had been reduced to working or Netflix. No friends, no bars, no restaurants, no campus events...no fun. She was aware of how much better off she was than many people, but couldn't help finding it all fairly depressing.
Even with half of the store staff gone, there generally wasn't much for Alexa to do. The store's customer base was almost entirely college students or employees. Once the stores in the small shopping center adjacent to the store were declared non-essential and shut down, her shifts more often than not had exactly zero customers. Martin, the store owner, confided in her that the only thing letting him keep the place open was a generous government-backed loan program; if he kept the doors open and kept his employees on the payroll the loan would be forgiven.
Despite working solo most of the time, other than some light cleaning and re-stocking a few perishable items Alexa had almost nothing to do. Most of her shifts were spent reading or watching TV. She was thankful to at least be working days now, with Martin, one of his cousins and one or two other part-timers taking care of the evenings and overnights.
The running joke between Alexa and Martin as his shift ended and hers began consisted of Martin asking her, "You sure you'll be able to handle it?"
To which she inevitably replied, "Relax, boss, I got this!" This was usually the last conversation she had with another human until whoever was working the evening shift arrived to relieve her.
The truth was, though she could easily handle the small bit of actual work involved, the boredom was driving her crazy. One Wednesday in the middle of April she had forgotten to bring her book, so she spent most of the day flipping around the available channels looking for something worth watching. Mixed in with all the doom and gloom on the news channels there was a short segment that actually made her smile!
At a college a couple of states away, a masked (cheap surgical mask, of course) woman had been seen streaking across the mostly deserted campus almost every day for the last week! A news crew had staked out a spot she was known to frequently pass and actually got her to stop and be interviewed. Despite the heavy blurring done to make the story safe for broadcast, it was clear she wasn't wearing anything!
"I just thought the world could use some dumb fun right now, and this is all I could think of!" she told the reporter, laughing, "Besides, it's actually crazy fun, you should try it!"
"Thanks for giving us something fun to cover, or should I say uncover?" the correspondent said, grinning.
Alexa groaned at the reporter's cheesy comment, but had to admire the woman's daring, and thought her behavior was actually pretty generous considering the state of the world; as silly as it was, the mystery woman had certainly made Alexa's day a little more tolerable. She caught the segment a few more times that afternoon, laughing each time she saw it.
Seeing the video of the streaker made Alexa think about her crazy New Year's Eve escapade. Her naked adventure that night had been more about overcoming her own boredom than brightening the day of any bystanders, and was only made possible by her drinking a bit too much champagne, so she and the TV streaker had very different motivations.
In Alexa's case, being seen hadn't been her intent, at least not at first! Different as their streaking was, Alexa could definitely appreciate the woman's "crazy fun" comment, and though it hadn't been any kind of plan she was sure she had given a couple of men something pleasant to remember.
The one regret Alexa had about her brief taste of exhibitionism was not getting a photo of herself in mid-adventure; she'd never done anything remotely like it before and was sure she never would again, so she sort of wished she had some documentation of her one wild night.
She even thought if there was a photo showing her nude in the store but not showing her face, as long as she wasn't recognizable she could tape it up next to the photo of another woman who had become something of a store legend by getting naked there one night a few months before Alexa began working there.
Alexa liked to think that a photo like that might someday inspire some future employee the way the first woman's photo had given her the idea to do something so outrageous!
Over the next several days Alexa continued thinking about the streaker; at first, she just remembered the actual news segment, less than a minute long but memorable because, well, how often do you see a naked woman on the news?
Eventually, she began thinking about what it would be like to see the streaker in action in person, and wondered how many people might have already seen her.
From there it was a natural jump to start thinking about the logistics involved. How far did she run? Where did she get undressed? Did she place clothes at her destination or run in a loop back to her starting point? Did she strip in front of anyone or stay out of sight until she began running? Did she actually try to be seen or just leave it to chance? Did anyone she knew even know about her streaking?
By the time a week had passed since she had seen the streaker on TV, Alexa had begun to move beyond theorizing about how the streaker in the news might go about her daring behavior.
Just as a sort of thought exercise to fend off boredom, Alexa began to think about how best to do a streak if one wanted to; where, when, and how to leave clothes behind, whether to strip in view of anyone or emerge from a building or car already naked, how to be sure to have clothes safely waiting at the end of the route, and a few dozen other details, not least of which was whether to try to accomplish the streak undetected or intentionally allow oneself to be seen!
She laughed at herself for spending so much time on such a pointless exercise, but it was a fun way to pass time, even if she couldn't think of anyone she knew who would be likely to ever actually do such a thing.
Her own one-time-only experience with public nudity had been an impulsive, champagne-fueled bit of madness, being a lightweight when drinking and being bored had combined to overwhelm her usual sensible personality; what she was doing now was just a harmless way to kill time.
Though it was true that she found imagining herself naked somewhere out in the world mildly exciting, it wasn't anywhere near the top of her list of fantasies, and definitely not something she could see herself trying. She guessed that she was probably the least likely of her circle of cautious friends to ever do such a thing, not that any of her gang were particularly likely to flash their body either; even the girl in their group who had once entered a wet t-shirt contest insisted she never could have done so if she hadn't downed several Long Island Iced Teas before deciding to enter.
Once Alexa began to focus on the logistics of a still very much theoretical plan for a streak, she spent more and more time thinking through each detail. Options were developed, considered, and either rejected or incorporated into her plan. Somewhere along the way she had begun calling it a plan, not because she expected anyone to use it as a guide to actually doing a streak, but because she found that imagining someone actually carrying it out made her think more clearly about how best to achieve her goals.
The goals led to a set of rules, developed as she began to consider her many options, which were written on the first page of a notebook she began using to keep track of her ideas and write up the entire plan for the streak from beginning to end; without thinking about it, Alexa had begun treating the proposed streak like one of her school research projects, with multiple drafts and revisions.
In large print on the first page of the notebook, Alexa wrote:
1) Run (or walk) from one point to another outdoors while I'm completely naked.
2) Distance covered should be at least ¼ mile, preferably longer.
3) Being seen should be possible, but not necessarily probable.
4) Other than by choosing the route and timing, I can have no control over whether or not I am seen.
5) I MUST do the streak during daylight hours.
