The pool deck was a suntrap and the walls around it blocked any wind that was coming off the lake. She was supposed to be careful of the sun, because the antibiotics made her skin sensitive, but instead she lay right back in it, the sun’s hands all up and down her body, and she read for as long as she could stand it. When she thought she might ignite from heat, she hotfooted it to the edge of the pool.

This wasn’t really swimming. Not really. The water boiled with too many kids. She jumped in, body pole-rigid, and was grateful for its cooling, but there was nowhere to swim to. The water was sterile, almost dry with chlorine. She dunked under, opened her eyes to the sting and pulled herself along the bottom, fingers gripping blue tiles. Legs everywhere. A foot jabbed into the small of her back. A nebula of hair drifted past her face. She got out, knowing it had been a waste of time but glad she’d at least tried, and padded wetly over to the wall that faced the lake. She was just tall enough that she could rest her arms on its top ledge and look out. The wind lifted her hair, dried the chlorinated water from her face, tightening the skin. On the horizon where lake-hazy blue met sky, a line of pale-white sails paused, like commas. Today the lake was rough and dark, and the big lofty trees in front of the beach stretched their arms and made music in the wind. A few people were there in the lake, windsurfers and bathers. But generally, other than Carolina Cho of course, people didn’t bother. Too many stories having to do with the pollution, or of weird stomach bugs and infections.

Off to the right, the rocky, curved arm of Ashbridges Bay, where sailboats docked and sometimes the filtration plant spilled its shit. Anouk imagined the girl swimming, her red-capped father following in the canoe. She, Carolina, she could have been out there in the chop, just then. Swimming right through all of it.

The next day, Anouk packed a bag with a towel, water, a jam sandwich and a packet of Creon pills. On her bike again, this time she continued west along the trail past the Olympic pool, and through the park that lay to the north of the bay. Beyond this, the path moved inland and ran parallel to an expressway and a sad-looking greenbelt. She’d never ridden this far before, and when she came to a fork in the path, she took the left turn down Leslie Street, assuming this would take her to the spit.

She was riding through an area that she would write about when she was older. This story would be part of a series about Lake Ontario, which would also include a piece about the Scarborough Bluffs, and about the Toronto Islands. And these stories would not be written in a private notebook kept in a little girl’s desk, but would be run in a national magazine.