[Brackets] Read Free Page A

Marie popped out of her office and summoned everyone to the conference table, instructing them to bring what they had been working on for the afternoon. Cole printed off some documents and stretched his back as he le ft his desk, checking on Tom with a curious glance . Tom was standing, headphones still in, looking like there was just one more thing to listen to. When Anne Marie called over again, he ripped off the headphones in frustration, hastily reached into a drawer for a file, and huffed into the conference room. Cole followed.
    Just as Tom described, Anne Marie very nicely asked to have short reports of their day’s productivity. Cole was able to show that he had done exactly the same amount of work that he always did. Others gave similar reports.
    When they got to Tom, he opened the folder and removed a set of documents, each filled out very neatly. His report was the longest, and the volume of work was superhuman.
    “Tom, this is very impressive,” Anne Marie glowed. “We should do this every day, huh? Am I right? OK, we’ll see everyone again at 4:00.” The praise drew annoyed, sarcastic glares from everyone else, but Tom perked up and bowed his head in fake modesty. Cole wondered how much time Tom spent to do an extra day’s work in advance. He had to admire the foresight that he had never seen his coworker apply to any other workday.
    During the next two hours, as his coworkers sank back into faux productivity, Cole felt a mild case of afternoon grogginess set in. He did the normal work, answering the normal phone calls and entering the normal data. He paid a few minutes of attention to the radio station’s normal three o’clock news updates. The Thai ambassador was visiting somewhere, the inconclusive hunt for the Wall Street arsonist was ongoing, the American poultry industry was spooked by recent recalls. The reporter on the arsonist story was Anne Marie’s sister, Deborah Cheney, whose local morning TV show occasionally featured Anne Marie as an industry expert in the housing market. When the radio began rattling off the scores of the first games of the tournament, Tom could apparently hear them through his headphones, and they made him growl. A client came in to ask for information on mortgage rates, and Cole took some pleasure in sending him to Tom right away.
    As four o’clock neared, Tom, who had dispensed with the client very efficiently, ripped off his headphones in sudden disgust. He pounded his desk softly, grunted as if he’d been kicked from somewhere under his chair, and then composed himself as he turned toward the bulletin board full of brackets. He held two markers in his hand: a thin red one and a bright yellow hi-lighter. One by one, beginning with his own, he began to make marks. As a judge both exacting and merciless, he colored each bracket by crossing out or highlighting a team, leaving each sheet with a splash of golden approval and bloody punishment. When he finished Nera’s, he made eye contact with her and chuckled maniacally, holding up three fing ers. She nodded her capitulation.  S he already knew her score.
    Then Tom arrived at Cole’s bracket. Team by team, Tom marked with the highlighter. After a pause, he dropped the red marker on his desk.
    “Holy cow,” he said to himself audibly.
    Anne Marie came out and called everyone to the table. There wasn’t much time, she prodded, and they needed to get this over with. Tom looked at Cole with a narrow-eyed expression that Cole couldn’t interpret. Then he quickly reached into his desk, grabbed a second folder, and went to the conference table.
    After they had issued their reports, Anne Marie drum-rolled on the table with her fingers. “So, Tom, who is today’s lucky winner?”
    Tom didn’t answer for a moment. It looked like he was debating something internall y, and losing. “Cole, by a lot. Five for five ,” he finally said. There was weak applause around the table.
    “Hey, Cole! On the first try!