Lying didn’t get any easier the second time around. But they didn’t question me, especially since I left with a towel and a pair of swim trunks. Instead of going to my “job” at the pool, I met Victor and Curtis and we went for a bike ride. Technically, Curtis, Victor, and I live just outside the city limits of Tacoma, Washington, in a suburb called Fircrest, where the pool is. It’s so the burbs: yard gnomes and plastic birdbaths and cul-de-sacs everywhere you turn. But we live in the older burbs—built in the sixties and seventies. Since our families’ houses were built, newer ones have sprung up beyond them. The houses are bigger, along with the SUVs, and the yards are smaller, landscaped with gravel and small patches of bright emerald-green lawn. The streets are eerily deserted, and everything seems to be hidden behind fences and gates. No matter where you go, it feels like you’re in someone’s back alley. In other words, these newer suburbs are somehow even more lifeless than the old ones.
