[Brackets] Read Free

he had been eavesdropping on Nera talking about her weekend while he wrote. He had even given up ten dollars without thinking much about it. In fact, he would have preferred to keep that money. 
    Now Nera turned on Tom accusingly. “Tom, you didn’t brief Cole about Opening Day?”
    “I thought you did,” Tom said. “We better do it now.” Tom motioned Cole over to his desk. He sat forward, his receding hairline glowing under the lamps. Glancing covertly at Anne Marie’s office, he began to speak in unnecessarily low tones.
    “Every year, we all fill out our brackets on Monday. On Thursday, the first day of the games, today, we track what happens in the first few games, which start around noon. We used to listen to the games online and make a big deal of marking the brackets after each game ended. But a few years ago, Anne Marie heard a story about how much time people wasted following March Madness games at work. So, she thought of this ‘clever’ way to eliminate waste at work while still keeping up morale.”
    He checked his watch. “The games start at noon, and new games start about every two hours. That means there are two big blocks of games during the afternoon of the workday. So what’s going to happen is that Anne Marie is going to call group meetings at 2:00 and 4:00. Everyone has to report on what they did during those two hours, and you need to show that you were productive. At 4:00, at the end of the second meeting, whoever is ahead in the bracket guesses gets to leave an hour early with pay, as long as that person worked through the afternoon. You understand?”
    “What about the money?”
    “Hey, shhhh.” Tom’s voice lowered even more. “That we keep to ourselves. We’ll give it out at the end of the tournament.”
    “Oh,” said Cole, thinking that this just wasn’t as fun as Tom was making it out to be. But he wasn’t the type to spoil a good mood.
    Tom cleared off a medium-sized bulletin board on the wall near his desk. He put up, in very neat rows, each handwritten bracket from the office. With the passion of an artist, he explained to Cole that he preferred to have everything filled out and checked by hand instead of having everyone just make their picks online and seeing their wins and losses spewed out by a computer. “It needs to be tangible,” he effused. “It needs to be organic.” Cole’s bracket, messy and hurried, was tacked right next to Nera’s, which had been written carefully.
    Nera walked by to inspect the picks. As she paused over his, Cole held his breath, looking sideways at her to take in the olive skin, the athletic build, and the certain knowledge that she could break his arm if he ever tried to make an unwelcomed move. One of these days, he let himself think. And why not? I’m a good guy, there’s no reason why we couldn’t… He was awakened by a sound that was part giggle, part scoff, part snort as Nera turned away from his bracket.
    “Seriously Cole?” she asked, not even looking at him. “UCLA over Boston College? Sorry, but, wow.” Cole went back to his desk with the enigmatic sensation of becoming defensive about something that, five minutes ago, he hadn’t cared about at all.
    As noon passed, Cole noticed that Tom began to slow down in his movements. He had headphones on. He seemed to be making notes on a legal pad, but he only used the pen in his hand occasionally. Every once in a while he would adjust the volume or click on something, but otherwise he seemed to just sit tensely, eyes distant. When two o’clock approached, he began to whisper something that sounded like an urgent whimper. It looked like he wanted to jump out of his chair and was using all of his strength just to maintain the image of calm diligence. At one point, Cole distinctly heard Tom whisper, “J ust shoot the ball!” Looking around the room, Cole noticed several others, including Nera, with headphones on and identically distracted looks.
    At two o’clock sharp, Anne