Mum and I went back to Japan to stay with my aunt and her family. My cousins are in their school's swim team, so I spent a lot of time with them." Oh,... I said, surprised. "So swimming runs in the family? Are they as good as you?" I had a vision of a squad made up entirely swimsuit-clad clones of Nao, and immediately wished I hadn't. I began trying to do the seventeen-times table backwards in my head.She giggled that lilting laugh of hers. "Not even close, but they are only eight and nine years. She made his work sound extremely tedious, yet she remained oddly vague about what exactly it was he did. We continued our conversation along more general lines as neither of us wished to discuss our families any more than necessary and I found we had very similar interests. It seems I was not the only one with strange imaginings, in fact she made my fantasies seem almost mundane in their simplicity and lack of scale. We were still talking when I noticed a troop of men marching towards the. They do that?" I was surprised. Reggie nodded. "... And people use it?" I asked. "Not many, but that's the beauty of it," he said. "Almost nobody is around." "So what are we here for Reggie?" I asked. "To see the person that puts the 'almost' in 'almost nobody'," Reggie grinned. I followed Reggie into the school. We went to the main gym first, but found it empty. "Well," Reggie started. "Maybe she left a little early. Follow me." I complied, until following him would have meant. Mike got Most-Likely-to-Lead-His-Team-to-a-Super-Bowl. Robbie got the First-Woman-in-the-NFL, and I got Most-Likely-to-be-Traded-by-Every-Team-in-the-League. I wondered if the coach suggested that one.The poor basketball teams had it the worst. As we swaggered the halls, basking in our almost glory, we kept challenging them to keep the winning tradition alive. The boy's team hadn't made the play-offs since ninety-four. The girl's team had made play-offs six years in a row, but hadn't gone the.