The Betting Pool

The spreadsheet lived on a shared drive called 'Office Supplies' but everyone knew it as the Pool. When Elena would finally crack. When the merger announcements would stop being delayed. Who'd be the first to disembowel themselves on the altar of quarterly projections.

Elena found it by accident—a hair caught in the sink of the unisex bathroom, platinum blonde and impossibly long, wrapped around the drain like a dead thing's intestines. She recognized it immediately. Sarah from Accounting, whose desk faced Elena's, who'd been taking three-hour 'lunch breaks' with Marcus from Legal. Marcus, who'd promised Elena he was working late again. Marcus, whose wife was pregnant with their second child.

The Pool had forty entries. Elena's name wasn't among them. But Sarah's was—she'd put five hundred on 'Elena files for divorce by Thanksgiving.'

'You're going to bear it, aren't you?' Sarah asked later, by the pool where they'd all gathered for the corporate retreat. The water was that impossible blue that doesn't exist in nature. 'That's what you do. You bear things.'

Elena remembered finding the hair. Remembered walking past Marcus's office that morning, hearing him laugh at something Sarah said. Remembered the betting pool, the way her colleagues had wagered on her marriage like it was a horse race.

'Actually,' Elena said, pulling a folded resignation letter from her swimsuit, 'I think I'm done bearing things.' She dropped it in the pool. It floated there, a white paper boat on artificial water, while fifty faces turned to watch. 'The pot goes to whoever files first. That's the new game.'

She walked away barefoot, leaving her heels by the diving board, as someone's phone chimed with a notification: another bet placed.