Chapter 3
Emmy went to work with a smile on her face on Monday morning. She felt like she had a secret weapon in her pocket. A tiny
bright spot by the name of Axe Murderer that she could fire off a message to if she needed a boost.
They’d continued texting throughout Sunday once Emmy had escaped the bridal salon and survived lunch with her mother and sister.
His messages had brightened her weekend chores and nearly made her forget about the pending disaster of her ex being a guest
at her sister’s wedding. She’d laughed at more bird-band puns while she folded laundry and was so distracted by their conversation
that she almost bought almond milk instead of oat at the grocery store. They hadn’t told each other their real names or anything
identifying at all. She knew he worked downtown too, he was her age, had a big family, and he did in fact prefer regular milk
to either almond or oat. Although part of her wanted to, she held back pushing too hard for fear she might crush the fledgling
wings of whatever was hatching between them. She knew they were flirting with each other but calling it that put too much
pressure on the situation. She wanted to keep it simple. After all, she didn’t date.
“What are you smiling about, Jameson?” Gabe Olson greeted her when she walked into their office.
As was customary, he sat on the edge of his desk in the cubicle neighboring hers like some kind of Abercrombie gargoyle.
He had an affinity for pastel-colored polos that tightly cuffed his biceps.
(Emmy vowed never to look at his arms. Someone so infuriating was not deserving of such nice arms.) His teeth literally sparkled when he smiled, and his dark hair was always gelled into a neat wave she wanted to flick tiny wads of paper into just to see
if they’d get stuck.
At the sight of him perched on his desk’s corner, long legs stretched and ankles crossed, Emmy’s morning glow instantly dimmed.
He may have been visually appealing, but she reminded herself he did things like stick tape over her computer mouse’s sensor,
tell her meetings had been moved so she’d show up late, and often ate her— clearly marked —leftovers in the communal fridge.
In truth, all the men she worked with did things like that to one another. It was a bizarre bonding ritual—and maybe she should
have been thankful they included her in the pranking at all, but Gabe seemed to single her out more than the others. Not to
mention, he had a reputation for being cutthroat; his nickname around the office was Gabe Ruthless, and it was a well-known
fact he’d do anything to win. There was even a rumor he’d gotten another analyst fired years ago because he was in his way
for a promotion. It had happened before Emmy joined the team, back when Gabe was still an intern. She trusted him as far as
she could throw him, and seeing as he was over six feet of solid ex-baseball player muscle, that distance was about two inches.
Nevertheless, Emmy was well versed in working with difficult men and knew how to handle him. She rounded into her cubicle
and dropped her tote on her desk. “I’m not smiling anymore, thanks to you.”
Gabe dropped his face into a dramatic puppy dog pout and leaned over their half wall. She would have sold her left kidney
to make it a full wall. “Aww, come on. You were happy for a minute there. Did you have a good weekend? What did you do?”
As a rule, she didn’t talk about her personal life at work, though Gabe always seemed interested.
Other than when she occasionally grabbed lunch with her boss, Alice, and savored the rush of feminine energy as rare as oxygen on Everest, Emmy kept anything other than baseball analytics close to her chest. Part of that was because she was one of two women in the whole department and one of maybe fifty in the whole organization.
She worked in Boys Town and had learned to be a chameleon.
She could talk like them, drink like them, argue like them.
It was the price of admission to her career.
In all the years of doing it, she had partly become one of them.
She wasn’t about to tell Gabe Gargoyle Olson she went to her sister’s wedding dress fitting—he didn’t even know her sister
was getting married. If she was going to do that, she might as well tell him she spent Saturday on the couch with cramps radiating
up to her eyeballs too.
She sincerely thought about doing it for a second because surely he’d recoil in horror and regret even saying hello to her.
But she opted not to share. Instead, she sat in her chair and ignored him. She reached for her computer glasses and turned
on her monitor.
“Silent treatment; great way to start the week,” Gabe said, still leaning over their wall. He altered the pitch of his voice
and pretended to mimic her. “‘My weekend was great, thanks for asking, Olson. What did you do?’” He shifted back to his normal
voice. “Oh, how nice of you to inquire, Jameson. I went to my grandma’s birthday party and entertained my nieces and nephews
while their parents drank enough booze to drown a small village.”
A reluctant laugh punched its way out of Emmy’s throat. She chewed her lips to hide a smile. No fraternizing with the enemy.
Especially not today.
Another member of their team waltzed around the corner carrying a tray of to-go coffees.
“Good morning!” Pedro Torres sang in his buoyant voice. He wore his customary plaid button-down, glasses, and lanyard looped
around his neck. “One for you,” he said, and handed a coffee to Gabe. “One for you,” he said, and passed one to Emmy. “Is
Alice here yet?”
“Torres, it’s a little late in the game to start kissing ass, you know,” Gabe said, and sipped his drink. He immediately frowned. He smacked his lips and gagged like a cat with a hairball. “Does this have almond milk in it again?”
“Yes,” Pedro said, and marched for his desk across the aisle from Emmy’s and Gabe’s.
Gabe dropped his coffee in the trash bin. “Milk comes from cows, not nuts.”
“Heathen,” Pedro said with a smirk.
It was not the first time Gabe had rejected his offering. They argued like brothers.
Emmy rolled her eyes at the scene. “Thank you, Torres,” she said, and happily sipped her drink. Everyone called one another
by their last names like in a locker room; the reflex was ingrained in her. “This was very kind of you.” She could have added
that she’d prefer oat milk next time, but she did her best to reinforce their good behavior. She was honestly a little surprised
he’d remembered to buy her one too.
The fourth member of their little nerd quad slipped in the door with his customary head bob greeting. “Sup?” Silas Ishida
said, and directed it mostly at Gabe and Pedro.
Pedro held up his coffee like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, and Silas seamlessly grabbed it from his hand as he passed, nodding
in thanks.
The four of them worked in a windowless, sometimes overheated cubby belowdecks at the ballpark. While fans only saw the players
on the diamond, the perfectly cut grass, the jumbotron, the peanuts and beer and seventh-inning stretch, the organization
had hundreds of people split up into an executive team, accounting, marketing, communications, guest services, operations,
and—the department where Emmy worked—research and analytics working at the stadium in a suite of offices out of sight.
The room Emmy shared with three men, a wall of whiteboards scribbled with equations, and a fake ficus tree branched off a long underground hall somewhere behind home plate.
Inside that room, they ran numbers, analyzed mountains of game data, wrote algorithms, built predictive models, all to help the team managers make decisions.
Trades, batting orders, pitching rotations, who got called up from AAA and who got sent down.
So, you’re like, the Moneyball guy? a particularly bro-y dude had said to Emmy on a truly awful date back when she used to attempt to socialize.
Rather than explaining she had advanced degrees in computer science and statistics, could write code with her eyes closed,
and drew complex predictive models in her sleep, she’d blinked and said, Sure, something like that .
That bro turned out to be one of the ones who tried to educate her on baseball. They never had a second date.
Marrying math to her favorite sport was a dream come true. She lived and breathed baseball. Even if she didn’t watch every
game, the haul of data—RBIs, OBPs, walks, hits, strikeouts, pitch counts—that flooded her desk allowed her to reconstruct
a game from start to finish. It was all a giant math equation, and the only variable was the human performance. She loved her job, despite the daily upkeep of living in Boys Town. She often got asked things by colleagues and peers like whether
she was sure her results were correct, or to list her qualifications, or where she went to school, or how she got interested
in data analytics in the first place—things none of her male colleagues were ever asked. And often she was asked these things
in a room full of mostly men, as if she had to prove her right to be breathing the same air. It was exhausting, and sometimes
she wanted to scream, but nothing fulfilled her the way crunching baseball stats did. It was her calling, and she simply had
to do it.
Unfortunately, she had to do it with a bunch of boys who often acted like she was the tagalong little sister no one wanted
around.
Luckily, a senior analyst position had opened up down the hall—literally. The office was down the hall and had an internal-facing win dow. And if Emmy won the job, she’d at least have the peace and quiet of her own four walls at the stadium.
As it stood, their team worked a nine-to-five routine. They did the grunt work of cleaning and analyzing all the data into
a digestible format for the higher-ups. The promotion to senior analyst would mean working during games, traveling with the