The Dead Pool

Margot stood by the office's betting pool on the whiteboard, studying the names scrawled in dry-erase marker. The pool had started as a joke—who would be the first to quit after the merger—but now it felt like a curse. Her own name appeared twice, written in different hands.

"You going to erase yours?" Daniel asked, appearing beside her with coffee staining his tie.

"I can't bear to look at it anymore," she said, truthfully. The layoff notices had arrived that morning, sealed in envelopes thick as winter ice.

They'd been friends once, before Daniel started sleeping with the VP. Before the pool stopped being a joke and started feeling like prophecy. Margot watched him now—his handsome face slack with something like guilt, maybe, or pity—and realized she'd been bearing this particular burden for months. The knowledge. The waiting. The slow erosion of trust.

"I hear they're letting people go in waves," Daniel said, too casually. "Like the tide."

"I'm wave one," Margot said. It wasn't a question.

He flinched. "I tried to—I couldn't—"

"Save it."

The betting pool stared back at them, a cemetery of names in waiting. Six colleagues, futures quantified in twenty-dollar increments. Someone would win three hundred dollars when Margot's name was crossed off first. She reached for the marker.

"Don't," Daniel said.

She crossed off her own name anyway, the marker squeaking against the whiteboard. Then she wrote beneath it in small letters: *PAID IN FULL.*

"What does that mean?" Daniel asked.

Margot capped the marker and dropped it into the trash. "It means I'm not drowning anymore. It means you can keep the three hundred dollars."

She walked past him toward the elevator, already composing her resignation letter in her head. The betting pool would remain there, a monument to everything they'd lost while playing games with each other's lives.