Chlorine and Goldfish

The pool was empty when Elena found Marco there, floating on his back like a corpse in a B-movie. She'd tracked him to his sister's place in the suburbs, the one with the inground pool they'd all drunkenly christened four summers ago. Before everything.

"You're not answering my texts."

Marco didn't move. Water lapped at his ears. "That's because you're not my friend anymore, Elena. You're my boss."

"I promoted you."

"Into a pyramid scheme where everyone above me gets richer and everyone below me drowns. That woman in Analytics? She killed herself last week. Did you hear?"

Elena's chest tightened. She had heard. She'd also heard that Marco was next in line for her position when she moved to corporate—the golden child of the department, the one who'd actually built the systems now grinding people into dust.

She slid into the water fully clothed. The shock of cold made her gasp. Marco finally looked at her, really looked at her, and she saw it: the way he used to look at her in college, before the promotions and the equity and the slow erosion of whatever they'd been to each other.

"Remember those goldfish we won at the fair?" he asked. "The ones that died in three days because we didn't know how to take care of them?"

"We were nineteen."

"We were irresponsible. And we thought we could just buy new ones."

"Marco, what do you want from me?"

"To remember what it felt like to be the kind of people who couldn't keep anything alive. Before we became the ones who don't care if we do."

He reached underwater and found her hand. His fingers were pruned, soft as the bodies of those dead fish. Elena thought about the email in her draft folder—resignation letter, unsent. She thought about the pyramid they'd built, and how she'd convinced herself that climbing it was the same as not drowning.

She squeezed his hand and didn't let go.

"The water's cold," she said.

"Yeah," Marco said. "But we're in it together."