Let me just start off by saying that I have never seen Katie's parents naked, ok? I never have, and I never want to.
Katie had been my best friend since middle school, when she and her family moved to my neighborhood from California. Today, Katie and I had taken our last final exams of high school, and to celebrate, we were sleeping over at her house. We were going off to far-flung colleges in the fall, and vaguely I was aware that there was hard work and late nights of studying ahead of me. I'd been told it was harder than anything I'd ever done before.
But for right now, I got a small thrill every time I reminded myself that I had no homework left, no summer reading left, nothing. I was done!
Katie and I were in her family room, watching as many of the silly movies we had rented from the grocery store as we possibly could.
Look, guys, let me make this clear right from the start: Katie and I were not and are not lesbians. If you want to know what I was wearing, you pervert, I was wearing jeans and a college t-shirt, and yes, I had on plain white panties and a bra underneath them.
Katie was dressed similarly. Sorry, no silky nighties or prancing around in nothing but our moist, see-through panties. This isn't that kind of a story.
One thing, though, if you like this sort of thing, ok, our feet were bare, and we had painted our toenails together earlier in the afternoon. I'm happy for you if that floats your boat. But here's the thing.
I had known for a while that Katie and her parents had gone to nude beaches when they lived in California.
I could never quite understand that. My own parents were divorced, and whenever I stayed with my dad he was pretty uptight, never even walking around in pajamas like my mother did. We never went to the neighborhood pool together, at least not once I started to go through puberty. And the thought of being naked in front of either one of my parents, much less both of them, and dear God the thought of them being naked in front of me, was just not something that could ever get itself inside my head.
Katie had eventually even told me that, now that they lived here in the east, she was still allowed to be naked inside the house at any time she wanted to be. It simply wasn't an issue, she said. The same was true for her older brother, who by this point was already away as a freshman at college. As time went by and they assimilated into eastern urban living, the way it played out was that any one of them might go from one room to another, like from the bedroom to bathroom or back again without getting dressed, and they would think nothing of passing another family member in the hall along the way. But they did not go out of their way to be nude in their new home. It was not like it was "all naked, all the time." I don't think I would ever have gone to Katie's house if that was how it was.
Still, Katie was assuring me tonight, the house rule was that clothing, inside their home, was always optional.
Always.
We had been bitching about the lame senior prank that our class had come up with. We had picked a day in early May, just before finals started, and the senior class decided we would all ride our bikes to school that day. The class president had even worked it out with the local police department that the roads in the area of the school would be closed off to cars that morning, and even the Mayor had agreed to ride her bike along with us. Sure, it was pretty lame, but in the modern world, if we had tried a senior class prank like all of us cross-dressing, or impersonating our teachers or something, we probably would have been arrested and expelled from school.
Still, that night after the last exam, Katie and I were throwing out ideas for better senior pranks, and as the evening went on, our ideas got wilder and wilder. When I half-jokingly suggested that we should go skinny dipping in the pond that was about a half of a mile from Katie's house, she wouldn't let it go. Every time I came up with a newer idea, Katie was still stuck on the logistics of how we could get to the pond and where we would hide our clothes and what we would do while we were there in the nude.
I never actually agreed to go skinny dipping with her, but by about 10:00 at night we were both showing signs of being seriously tired. That's no surprise, as we had just been through a tough week of final exams. As we watched our movie, I noticed Katie fading in and out of sleep. Then I woke to find her touching my shoulder and whispering to me. "Hey, let's go get a nap." It was me this time who had fallen asleep. "Ok," I managed to say through my sleepiness. "Let's meet in my room at midnight and we'll go outside," she said, with a wicked smile. I raised my head, intrigued by the expression on her face. "We're going to go skinny dipping tonight. Meet me in my room at midnight," she paused, looking at me, and then added, "and be naked." She gave her shoulders a little shake as she said "and be naked" that said she was really enjoying this idea.
I was shocked at her attitude. I could, I guess, understand and go along with her idea that we would go to the pond at midnight and, in the darkness, get naked behind the trees and go skinny dipping, but this was not at all what she was suggesting. She wanted us both to get naked here in our respective rooms in the house, and then take our bare bodies outside into the neighborhood, and walk the half-mile to the pond without any clothes on, and go for a swim. And then, of course, we would have to walk back.
It should go without saying that, at that point in my life, no one had seen me naked (not since I was a babe in diapers, anyway). Strolling out through the night air with no clothing on might have been a normal occurrence for Katie, but it was a new and unthinkable experience for me.
I was staying in the "guest room" in Katie's house -- really, her brother's room, until he had gone off to college last fall. To "be naked" when I showed up in Katie's room, as she had just suggested, meant that I would have to undress alone in the guest room, then sneak down the hall of her parent's house in my birthday suit to Katie's room , and then the two of us would have to go outside and walk the half-mile or so from her bedroom to the pond, both completely naked. In all of the time, from going to meet up with Katie in her bedroom, to leaving her room into the outdoors under the moonlight, to swimming in the little neighborhood pond, and then all the way back, Katie was expecting me to be bare-assed naked. And to make matters worse, much of the distance, as I thought about it, would be out in the wide open, midnight or no midnight, with no cover for our 18-year-old bodies. Anyone who drove by or jogged by or walked their goddamn dog by would see our naked young bodies and there was really nothing Katie and I would be able to do about it.
This, naturally, was why Katie had suggested it in the first place.