Lifelines in the Glass

The office party was in full swing, cheap wine flowing like hope during a bull market. I found myself trapped near the buffet, nursing a lukewarm drink and watching Marcus hold court. He hadn't changed in ten years—still the same charismatic predator who'd made my life hell, now doing it to someone else.

I traced the lifeline on my palm, sweating through another memory: Tom, my desk mate, his eyes red-rimmed from another of Marcus's "performance reviews." Tom had kept a goldfish bowl on his desk, Leonard, who'd circle endlessly in his glass prison, oblivious to the toxicity swimming around him. The day Tom quit, he left Leonard behind with a note: "Can't take him with me. He's used to captivity."

Tom and I had promised to stay friends, but we didn't. That's how these things go—the bullied scatter like startled birds, too ashamed to maintain witness to each other's humiliation.

"Spinach?" Marcus's wife materialized beside me, offering a platter. "Earth-to-earth, you've been staring at nothing for five minutes."

I blinked. The spinach lay in dark, damp clumps, garden-fresh and persistent. "Sorry. Just remembering."

"Remembering what?"

I looked past her at Marcus, now laughing with someone young and terrified. "A friend who got away. A goldfish who couldn't."

She raised an eyebrow, maybe recognizing something in my voice. "Tom?"

"You know Tom?"

"Everyone knows Tom." Her smile softened. "Marcus's favorite cautionary tale. Except Tom started his own company last year. Sold it for eight figures."

The room tilted. Somewhere, Leonard was still circling in his bowl, and Tom had learned to swim oceans.

"Funny," I said, finally taking a spinach leaf. "I thought he was the cautionary tale."

"We all did." She touched my palm, reading nothing there but remembered lines. "Until he wasn't."