The Pool of Survivors

The office pool started as a joke. A macabre little betting sheet on the breakroom wall: WHEN DOES ELENA DIE? The slots ran from "Before Christmas" to "Spring 2027," with names scrawled beside dates in Sharpie. My coworkers had wagered five bucks each on my expiration.

I was fifty-two, newly diagnosed with Stage III pancreatic cancer, and apparently, a lucrative investment opportunity.

"I'm going to fucking kill them," Sarah said, slamming her fist on my hospital bedside table. She'd been my friend since we were twenty-two, through three marriages and two miscarriages between us. Her dark hair fell over her face—still thick, still gorgeous, while mine fell out in clumps in the shower drain.

"It's fine," I said. It wasn't fine. I cried about it later, when the morphine kicked in and the ceiling tiles started swimming like fish.

What nobody knew: Sarah placed her own bet. For twenty dollars—four times the usual stake—she'd scrawled her name next to the furthest date: "NEVER."

That was the kind of friend she was. The kind who'd bear the weight of everyone's skepticism, who'd sit beside me through chemotherapy sessions reading trashy romance novels aloud when I was too nauseous to lift my head. Who showed up at my door every Sunday with papaya from the Vietnamese market on 5th Street because she remembered I'd loved it in Hawaii, back when we were young and believed we had forever.

The papaya became our ritual. She'd slice it open, black seeds glistening like pearls in the orange flesh, and feed me pieces with a spoon. We ate it on the balcony of my apartment, watching the city pool across the street—the water blindingly blue, impossible—while I grew thinner and she grew more terrified.

"You have to bear this," she told me once, months into treatment, when I wanted to quit. "You have to bear it because I can't."

So I bore it. The nausea, the bone-deep exhaustion, the terror that every headache might be the end. When my hair started coming back in—patchy, soft, gray—I ran my hand over it and wept. Sarah cried with me, her fingers threading through the strands like she was touching something holy.

Three years later, the pool is gone. Someone took it down after I passed the "Summer 2028" date, though I still see people glancing at me sideways, calculating. Sarah still comes over with papaya every Sunday. We eat it on the balcony, watching the pool across the street, talking about everything and nothing.

Her twenty-dollar bet sits framed on my bathroom shelf next to the cancer-free scans. A bet she technically lost—because even gambling requires an expiration date, and friendship, like love, is foolish enough to bet on forever.