No one was entirely sure who had come up with the name Unfair Games, though all three of them, at various times, took credit. Marx thought he’d named it after a line he liked from The Tempest: “Yes, for a score of kingdoms, you should wrangle, and I would call it fair play.” Sadie didn’t think this made any sense—“fair” was not “unfair”; “play” was not “games.” She was sure Unfair Games derived from the fact that “It’s unfair” had been the unofficial mantra of her childhood. Sadie repeated it so often that her mother had threatened to deduct a quarter from her allowance each time the phrase was uttered. Sam, for his part, was certain that he had named Unfair Games: when he had woken up in the hospital with that broken ankle, he could remember thinking that the best thing about games is that they could be fairer than life. A good game, like Ichigo, was hard, but fair. The “unfair game” was life itself. He swore he’d written the name on a sheet of paper by his bedside, but no one would ever locate this sheet of paper. And where credit was concerned, Sam’s stories were often apocryphal, or at the very least, reverse engineered.
