The Office Betting Pool

The email arrived at 4:47 PM, just as Sarah was gathering her things to leave. "Final update: Layoff pool." She felt her stomach drop like a stone in water. Forty-seven names. Forty-seven futures reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet.

Mark, her supposed friend, had been collecting twenty-dollar entries since January. He'd called it "team building," a way to make the terror of corporate restructuring feel manageable. Sarah had refused. Mark had smiled, tight and understanding, and added her name anyway. "For fun," he'd said. "In case you change your mind."

Now she swam through the open-plan office, past rows of monitors casting ghostly blue light onto pale faces. The air conditioning hummed, industrial and indifferent. Nobody spoke. They were all swimming too—through shock, through uncertainty, through the sudden realization that their livelihoods had been entertainment for others.

Mark's desk was empty. His computer screen displayed the pool results, a cascade of names with dollar amounts beside them. Sarah's name was there, circled in yellow. Someone had written "Thursday" next to it. Tomorrow.

She sat in his chair, the leather still warm. Three months of shared coffees, venting sessions about management, him listening so carefully, nodding at all the right moments. And all the while, he'd been swimming toward something else entirely.

The phone rang. It was Mark, cheerful as ever. "Just checking in! Heard the news." His voice was smooth, practiced. "Whatever happens, you know I've got your back."

Sarah watched the cursor blink beside her name on his screen. She thought about all the times she'd opened up to him, all the vulnerabilities she'd offered like gifts. How he'd collected them, stored them, perhaps even used them to calculate odds.

"I know," she said, and something in her tone must have betrayed her, because Mark's laughter faltered. "You saw the pool, then?" It wasn't a question.

She stood up, the chair rolling behind her. The office was empty now, just her and the fluorescent lights humming overhead. Somewhere in the building, a elevator dinged. Someone else was leaving, maybe forever.

"It's just business," Mark said, but the defensive edge had crept into his voice. "Everyone played. Everyone knew the risks."

Sarah walked to the window. The city below was a grid of lights, each one someone's life, each one someone's calculation. She wasn't angry anymore. She was just tired of swimming against currents she couldn't see.

"I never played," she said. "But I still lost."

She hung up. Outside, rain began to fall on the city, thousands of drops making thousands of tiny pools in the asphalt. Somewhere, someone was winning. Somewhere, someone was losing. And somewhere, a friend was just another word for someone who knew your number.