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I love the smell of a pool. I don’t know what it is—the chemicals, the suntan lotion, the wet hair, whatever. I know I’m weird. My nose just has this thing for it.
Hardly anybody knows it, but I used to be on the swim team. Matt and me. We both joined the city league when we were eight, and from then on, every summer we’d ride our bikes together to the neighborhood pool for the morning practice, then stay in the water all day racing each other and swimming laps and drills. Matt’s specialty was freestyle, mine was butterfly. Both of us were pretty good. I even won some medals over the years. Matt won more.
Somehow I thought maybe I could sneak in there with Amanda today and not have to see him. But he was just at that moment climbing out of the pool, and so of course I had to look.
I
