Running with the Office Bull

The betting pool on Eleanor's mental breakdown was up to three grand when Marcus finally cornered me in the breakroom. He was a bull of a man—chunky gold watch, suit that cost more than my car, and that particular brand of corporate sociopathy that thrived in mergers and acquisitions.

"She's going to crack before Friday," Marcus said, pouring himself a coffee from the machine that always produced sludge. "You want in?"

I'd been running from my gambling debts for six months, ever since the online poker site decided my credit limit was merely a suggestion. Now here I was, running away from empathy instead of toward it.

"She's my friend, Marcus."

"Friends don't let friends work eighty-hour weeks for equity that'll never vest." He smirked. "Also, she's not your friend. She's your competition for that senior analyst position."

That was the thing about office pools—they weren't really about the money. They were about deciding whose humanity you could afford to discard.

Eleanor had started missing deadlines. Her daughter's leukemia was back, and the hospital bills were piling up like snowdrifts in a blizzard she couldn't outrun. I'd seen the collection notices on her desk when I dropped off the files she'd forgotten to pick up.

The next morning, I found Eleanor by the outdoor pool behind our building, fully clothed, feet dangling in the water. She was staring at her reflection like it belonged to a stranger.

"Marcus thinks you'll break by Friday," I said, sitting beside her.

"Is that the office pool?"

"It's at three thousand now."

"Inflation." She pulled her feet out, water dripping onto her pencil skirt. "You know what's funny? I started running again. Every morning at 4 AM. Thought it would help clear my head."

"Did it?"

"No. But the bull—the one inside me, the one that kept telling me to push harder, be better, prove myself—that son of a bull finally got tired."

She looked at me, and I saw something I hadn't noticed before. Not defeat. Peace.

"I'm not coming back on Monday," she said. "I'm taking the severance package Marcus offered to make me quit quietly."

"That was generous of him."

"It wasn't generosity. It was damage control." She stood up, wringing out her hem. "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"

I thought about the gambling debts. The emails from creditors I deleted unread. The apartment I couldn't afford. The running I'd been doing my whole life—from one city to another, one job to the next, one mistake to the next.

"I don't know," I said.

"Figure it out," she said. "Before you end up like Marcus—betting on other people's misery because you forgot how to feel your own."

She walked away, leaving me by the pool. I took out my phone, opened the betting app, and deleted it. Then I called my sister. It had been three years.

"Hey," I said when she answered. "I need help."