On the day Sadie first met Sam, she had been banished from her older sister Alice’s hospital room. Alice was moody in the way of thirteen-year-olds, but she was also moody in the way of people who might be dying of cancer. Their mother, Sharyn, said that Alice should be given a great deal of latitude, that the dual storm fronts of puberty and illness were a lot for one body to grapple with. A great deal of latitude meant Sadie should go into the waiting area until Alice was no longer angry with her.
Sadie was not entirely sure what she had done to provoke Alice this time. She had shown Alice a picture in Teen magazine of a girl in a red beret and said something to the effect of You would look good in this hat. Sadie barely remembered what she had said, but whatever it was, Alice hadn’t taken it well, screaming absurdly, No one wears hats like that in Los Angeles! This is why you don’t have any friends, Sadie Green! Alice had gone into the bathroom and started crying, which sounded like choking, because her nose was congested and her throat was coated in sores. Sharyn, who had been sleeping in the bedside chair, told Alice to calm down, that she would make herself sick. I’m already sick, Alice said. At this point, Sadie started crying, too—she knew she didn’t have any friends, but it was still mean of Alice to point it out. Sharyn told Sadie to go to the waiting area.
“It’s not fair,” Sadie had said to her mother. “I didn’t do anything. She’s being completely unreasonable.”
“It isn’t fair,” Sharyn agreed.
In exile, Sadie tried to puzzle out what had happened—she honestly had thought Alice would look good in a red hat. But upon reflection, she determined that, by mentioning the hat, Alice must have thought Sadie was
saying something about Alice’s hair, which had grown thin from the chemotherapy. And if that’s what Alice thought, Sadie felt sorry that she had ever mentioned the stupid hat in the first place. She went to knock on Alice’s hospital door to apologize. Through the glass panel on her window, Sharyn mouthed, “Come back later. Alice is sleeping.”
Around lunchtime, Sadie felt hungry and, thus, somewhat less sorry for Alice and sorrier for herself. It was irritating the way Alice acted like an asshole and Sadie was the one who was punished. As Sadie had repeatedly been told, Alice was sick, but she was not dying. Alice’s variety of leukemia had a particularly high remission rate. She had been responding well to treatment, and she’d probably even be able to start high school, on schedule, in the fall. Alice would only have to be in the hospital for two nights this time, and it was only out of, according to her mother, “an abundance of caution.” Sadie liked the phrase “an abundance of caution.” It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. She imagined that “caution” was a creature of some kind—maybe, a cross between a Saint Bernard and an elephant. A large, intelligent, friendly animal that could be counted on to defend the Green sisters from threats, existential and otherwise.
A nurse, noticing the unattended, conspicuously healthy eleven-year- old in the waiting room, gave Sadie a vanilla pudding cup. He recognized Sadie as one of the many neglected siblings of sick kids and suggested that she might like to use the game room. There was a Nintendo console, he promised, which was rarely used on weekday afternoons. Sadie and Alice already had a Nintendo, but Sadie had nothing else to do for the next five hours until Sharyn could drive her back home. It was summer, and she had already finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth for the second time, which was the only book she’d brought with her that day. If Alice hadn’t gotten pissed off, the day would have been filled with their usual activities: watching their favorite morning game shows, Press That Button! and The Price Is Right; reading Seventeen magazine and giving each other personality quizzes; playing Oregon Trail or any of the other educational games that had come preloaded on the twenty-pound laptop computer Alice
had been given to do her makeup school work; and the myriad casual ways the girls had always found to pass time together. Sadie might not have many friends, but she’d never felt that she needed them: Alice was ne plus ultra. No one was cleverer, more daring, more beautiful, more athletic, more hilarious, more fill-in-the-adjective-of-your-choice than Alice. Even though they insisted Alice would recover, Sadie often found herself imagining a world that didn’t have Alice in it. A world that lacked shared jokes and music and sweaters and par-baked brownies and sister skin casually against sister skin, under the blankets, in the darkness, and most of all, lacking Alice, the keeper of the innermost secrets and shames of Sadie’s innocent heart. There was no one Sadie loved more than Alice, not her parents, not her grandmother. The world sans Alice was bleak, like a grainy photograph of Neil Armstrong on the moon, and it kept the eleven-year-old up late at night. It would be a relief to escape into the world of Nintendo for a while.
But the game room was not empty. A boy was playing Super Mario Bros. Sadie determined he was a sick kid, and not a sibling or a visitor like herself: he was wearing pajamas in the middle of the day, a pair of crutches rested on the floor beside his chair, and his left foot was surrounded by a medieval-looking cage-like contraption. She estimated the boy was her age, eleven, or a little older. He had tangled curly black hair, a puggish nose, glasses, a cartoonishly round head. In Sadie’s art class at school, she had been taught to draw by breaking things down into basic shapes. To depict this boy, she would have needed mainly circles.
She sat on the floor next to him and watched him play. He was skilled
—at the end of the level, he could make Mario land at the top of the flagpole, something Sadie had never mastered. Although Sadie liked to be the player, there was a pleasure to watching someone who was a dexterous player—it was like watching a dance. He never looked over at her. Indeed, he didn’t seem to notice she was there. He cleared the first boss battle, and the words BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE appeared on the screen. Without looking over at her, he said, “You want to play the rest of this life?”
Sadie shook her head. “No. You’re doing really well. I can wait until you’re dead.”
The boy nodded. He continued to play, and Sadie continued to watch. “Before. I shouldn’t have said that,” Sadie apologized. “I mean, in case
you are actually dying. This being a children’s hospital.”
The boy, piloting Mario, climbed up a vine that led to a cloudy, coin- filled area. “This being the world, everyone’s dying,” he said.
“True,” Sadie said.
“But I’m not currently dying.” “That’s good.”
“Are you dying?” the boy asked. “No,” Sadie said. “Not currently.” “What’s wrong with you, then?” “It’s my sister. She’s sick.” “What’s wrong with her?”
“Dysentery.” Sadie didn’t feel like invoking cancer, the destroyer of natural conversation.
The boy looked at Sadie as if he were going to ask a follow-up question. But instead, he handed the controller to her. “Here. My thumbs are tired anyway.”
Sadie acquitted herself well through the level, powering up Mario and adding another life.
“You’re not that bad,” the boy said.
“We have a Nintendo at home, but I’m only allowed to play it an hour a week,” Sadie said. “But no one pays attention to me anymore, since my sister Al got sick…”
“Dysentery,” the boy filled in.
“Yeah. I was supposed to go to Space Camp in Florida this summer, but my parents decided I should stay home to keep Al company.” Sadie ground pounded a Goomba, one of the mushroom-like creatures that were abundant in Super Mario. “I feel bad for the Goombas.”
“They’re just henchmen,” the boy said.
“But it feels like they’ve gotten mixed up in something that has nothing to do with them.”
“That’s the life of a henchman. Go down that pipe,” the boy instructed. “There’s a bunch of coins down there.”
“I know! I’m getting to it,” Sadie said. “Al seems annoyed with me most of the time, so I don’t know why I couldn’t go to Space Camp. It would have been my first time at overnight camp and my first time flying alone on a plane. It was only going to be for two weeks anyway.” Sadie was nearing the end of the level. “What’s the secret to landing high on the flagpole?”
“Hold down the run button as long as you can, then crouch down and jump just before you’re about to fall,” the boy said.
Sadie/Mario landed on the top of the flagpole. “Hey, it worked. I’m Sadie, by the way.”
“Sam.”
“Your turn.” She returned the controller to him. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“I was in a car accident,” Sam said. “My foot is broken in twenty-seven places.”
“That’s a lot of places,” Sadie said. “Are you exaggerating, or is that the number?”
“It’s the number. I’m very particular about numbers.” “Me too.”
“But sometimes the number goes up slightly because they have to break other parts of it to reset it,” Sam said. “They might have to cut it off. I can’t stand on it at all. I’ve already had three surgeries and it’s not even a foot. It’s a flesh bag, with bone chips in it.”
“Sounds delicious,” Sadie said. “Sorry, if that was gross. Your description made me think of potato chips. We skip a lot of meals since my sister got sick, and I don’t think anyone would even notice if I starved to death. All I’ve had today is a pudding cup.”
“You’re weird, Sadie,” Sam said, with interest in his voice.
“I know,” Sadie said. “I really hope they don’t have to amputate your foot, Sam. My sister has cancer, by the way.”
“I thought she had dysentery.”
“Well, the cancer treatment gives her dysentery. The dysentery thing’s kind of a joke between us. Do you know that computer game Oregon Trail?”
“Possibly.” Sam avoided a direct admission of ignorance.
“It’s probably in the computer lab at your school. It’s, maybe, my favorite game, even though it’s a little boring. It’s about these people in the 1800s, and they’re trying to get from the East Coast to the West Coast, in a wagon, with a couple of oxen, and the goal is to make it so everyone in your party doesn’t die. You have to feed them enough, not go too fast, buy the right supplies, stuff like that. But sometimes, someone, or even you, still dies, like of a rattlesnake bite, or starvation, or—”
“Dysentery.”
“Yes! Exactly. And this always makes me and Al laugh.” “What is dysentery?” Sam asked.
“It’s diarrhea,” Sadie whispered. “We didn’t know at first either.”
Sam laughed, but just as abruptly, he stopped laughing. “I’m still laughing,” he said. “But it hurts when I laugh.”
“I promise not to say anything funny ever again, then,” Sadie said, in an odd, emotionless voice.
“Stop! That voice is going to make me laugh even more. What are you even trying to be?”
“A robot.”
“A robot sounds like this.” Sam did his impression of a robot, which cracked them up all over again.
“You’re not supposed to laugh!” Sadie said.
“You’re not supposed to make me laugh. Do people truly die of dysentery?” Sam asked.
“In the olden days, I guess they did.”
“Do you think they put it on people’s tombstones?”
“I don’t think they put cause of death on tombstones, Sam.”
“At the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, they do. I kind of hope I die of dysentery now. Shall we switch to playing Duck Hunt?”
Sadie nodded.
“You’ll have to set up the guns. They’re right up there.” Sadie retrieved the light guns and plugged them into the console. She let Sam shoot first.
“You’re fantastically good,” she said. “Do you have a Nintendo at home?”
“No,” Sam said, “but my grandfather has a Donkey Kong machine in his restaurant. He lets me play as much as I want for free. And the thing about games is, if you get good at one game, you can be good at any game. That’s what I think. They’re all hand-eye coordination and observing patterns.”
“I agree. And what? Your grandfather owns a Donkey Kong machine?
That is so cool! I love those old machines. What kind of restaurant is it?” “It’s a pizza place,” Sam said.
“What? I love pizza! It’s my favorite food on earth. Can you eat all the pizza you want for free?”
Sam nodded while expertly annihilating two ducks.
“That’s, like, my dream. You’re living my actual dream. You have to let me go with you, Sam. What’s the name of the restaurant? Maybe I’ve already been to it.”
“Dong and Bong’s New York Style House of Pizza. Dong and Bong are my grandparents’ names. It’s not even funny in Korean. It’s like being called Jack and Jill,” Sam said. “The restaurant is on Wilshire in K-town.”
“What’s K-town?”
“Lady, are you even from Los Angeles? K-town is Koreatown. How do you not know that?” Sam said. “Everyone knows K-town.”
“I know what Koreatown is. I didn’t know people called it K-town.” “Where do you live anyway?” Sam asked.
“The flats.”
“What are the flats?”
“It’s the flat part of Beverly Hills,” Sadie said. “It’s pretty close to K- town. See, you didn’t know what the flats were! People in L.A. only ever
know about the part of town that they live in.” “I guess you’re right.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Sam and Sadie chatted amiably while slaughtering several generations of virtual ducks. “What did the ducks ever do to us?” Sadie commented.
“Maybe we’re shooting them for digital food. The digital usses will starve without the virtual ducks.”
“Still, I feel bad for the ducks.”
“You feel bad for the Goombas. You basically feel bad for everyone,” Sam said.
“I do,” Sadie said. “I also feel bad for the bison in Oregon Trail.” “Why?” Sam asked.
Sadie’s mother poked her head into the game room: Alice had something she wanted to tell Sadie, which was code for Sadie having been forgiven. “I’ll tell you next time,” Sadie said to Sam, though she didn’t know if there would ever be a next time.
“See you around,” Sam said.
“Who’s your little friend?” Sharyn asked as they were leaving.
“Some boy.” Sadie looked back at Sam, who had already returned his attention to the game. “He was nice.”
On the way to Alice’s room, Sadie thanked the nurse who had told her to use the game room. The nurse smiled at Sadie’s mother—manners were honestly somewhat rare in kids these days. “Was it empty like I said?”
“No, a boy was in there. Sam…” She didn’t know his last name yet. “You met Sam?” The nurse’s sudden interest made Sadie wonder if she
had broken a secret hospital rule by occupying the game room when a sick kid had wanted to use it. There were so many rules since Alice had gotten cancer.
“Yes,” Sadie tried to explain. “We talked and played Nintendo. He didn’t seem to mind that I was there.”
“Sam, with the curly hair and glasses. That Sam?” Sadie nodded.
The nurse asked to speak to Sharyn alone, and Sharyn told Sadie to go on ahead to Alice.
When Sadie opened the door to Alice’s room, she felt uneasy. “I think I’m in trouble,” she announced.
“What did you do now?” Alice said. Sadie explained her theoretical crime. “They told you to use it,” Alice reasoned, “so, you can’t have done anything wrong.”
Sadie sat on Alice’s bed, and Alice started braiding her hair.
“I bet that’s not even why the nurse wanted to speak to Mom,” Alice continued. “It could have been about me. Which nurse was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry, kid. If it turns out you are in trouble, cry and say your sister has cancer.”
“Sorry about the whole hat thing,” Sadie said.
“What hat thing? Oh, right. My fault. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Leukemia, probably,” Sadie said.
“Dysentery,” Alice corrected.
By the time they were on the drive back home, Sharyn had still not mentioned the game room, and Sadie was reasonably confident that the incident had been forgotten. They were listening to an NPR story about the centenary of the Statue of Liberty, and Sadie was thinking how awful it would be if the Statue of Liberty were an actual woman. How strange it would be to have people inside you. The people would feel like invaders, like a disease, like head lice or cancer. The thought disturbed her, and Sadie was relieved when her mother turned off the radio. “You know that boy you were talking to today?”
Here it is, Sadie thought. “Yes,” Sadie said quietly. She noted that they were passing through K-town and she tried to spot Dong and Bong’s New York Style House of Pizza. “I’m not in trouble, am I?”
“No. Why would you be in trouble?”
Because lately, Sadie was almost always in trouble. It was impossible to be eleven, with a sick sister, and for people to find your conduct beyond
reproach. She was always saying the wrong thing, or being too loud, or demanding too much (time, love, food), even though she had not demanded more than what had been freely given before. “No reason.”
“The nurse told me he was in a horrific car accident,” Sharyn continued. “He hasn’t said more than two words to anyone in the six weeks since he was injured. He’s been in terrible pain, and he’ll probably have to be in and out of the hospital for a very long time. It was a big deal that he talked to you.”
“Really? Sam seemed pretty normal to me.”
“They’ve been trying everything to make him open up. Therapists, friends, family. What did you two talk about?”
“I don’t know. Nothing much.” She tried to remember their conversation. “Games, I guess?”
“Well, this is entirely up to you,” Sharyn said. “But the nurse wondered if you might come back tomorrow to talk to Sam again.” Before Sadie had time to respond, Sharyn added, “I know you have to do community service for your Bat Mitzvah next year, and I’m sure this would probably count.”
To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, “There is no more intimate act than play, even s*x.” The internet responded: no one who had had good s*x would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.
Sadie went to the hospital the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and then whatever days Sam was well enough to play but sick enough to be in the hospital. They would become great playmates. They competed sometimes, but they took their greatest pleasure from copiloting a single player character, passing a keyboard or a controller back and forth between them while discussing the ways they could ease this virtual person’s journey through an inevitably perilous game world. While they gamed, they told
each other the stories of their relatively short lives. Eventually, Sadie knew everything about Sam, and Sam, about Sadie. They thought they did, at least. She taught him the programming she’d picked up at school (BASIC, a little Pascal) and he expanded her drawing technique beyond circles and squares (crosshatching, perspective, chiaroscuro). Even at twelve, he was an excellent draftsman.
Since the accident, Sam had begun making intricate, M. C. Escher– style mazes. His psychologist encouraged him, believing that mazes could help Sam deal with his significant physical and emotional pain. She interpreted the mazes as a hopeful indication that Sam was plotting a way beyond his current situation. But the doctor was wrong. Sam’s mazes were always for Sadie. He would slip one into her pocket before she left. “I made this for you,” he’d say. “It’s nothing much. Bring it back next time so I can see the solution.”
Sam would later tell people that these mazes were his first attempts at writing games. “A maze,” he would say, “is a video game distilled to its purest form.” Maybe so, but this was revisionist and self-aggrandizing. The mazes were for Sadie. To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.
At the end of each visit, Sadie would stealthily present a timesheet to one of the nurses to sign. Most friendships cannot be quantified, but the form provided a log of the exact number of hours Sadie had spent being friends with Sam.
It was several months into Sam and Sadie’s friendship when Sadie’s grandmother, Freda, first broached the subject of whether Sadie was truly doing community service or not. Freda Green often chauffeured Sadie to the hospital to see Sam. She drove a red, American-made convertible, with the top down if weather permitted (in Los Angeles, it usually did) and a silk printed scarf in her hair. She was barely five feet, only an inch taller than the eleven-year-old Sadie, but she was always dressed impeccably in the bespoke clothes she bought in Paris once a year: crisp white blouses, soft gray wool pants, bouclé or cashmere sweaters. She was never without her hexagonal weapon of a leather handbag, her scarlet lipstick, her delicate
gold wristwatch, her tuberose-scented perfume, her pearls. Sadie thought she was the most stylish woman in the world. In addition to being Sadie’s grandmother, Freda was also a Los Angeles real estate tycoon, with a reputation for being terrifying and unfailingly scrupulous in business negotiations.
“Mine Sadie,” she said as they drove from the west to the east. “You know I am overjoyed to drive you to the hospital.”
“Thanks, Bubbe. I appreciate it.”
“But, I think, based on what you have told me, that the boy might be more of a friend.”
The waterlogged community service form had been sticking out of her math book, and Sadie tucked it inside. “It was Mom’s idea,” Sadie defended herself. “The nurses and doctors say I’m helping. Last week, his grandfather gave me a hug and a slice of mushroom pizza. I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”
“Yes, but the boy doesn’t know about the arrangement, am I right?” “No,” Sadie said. “It never came up.”
“And do you think there might be a reason you haven’t brought it up?” “When I’m with Sam, we’re busy,” Sadie said lamely.
“Darling, it may come out later, and it could hurt your friend’s feelings, if he thinks he is a charity to you, and not a genuine friendship.”
“Can’t something be both?” Sadie said.
“Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity,” Freda said. “You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won’t tell them to you again. But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Sadie said.
Freda stroked Sadie’s hand. “Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
Sadie knew that Freda was right. Still, she continued to present the timesheet for signature. She liked the ritual of it, and she liked the praise
she received—from the nurses and sometimes the doctors, but also from her parents and the people at her temple. There was even a minor pleasure to filling out the log itself. It was a game to her, and she didn’t think the game had much to do with Sam himself. It wasn’t a deception, per se. She wasn’t hiding the fact of her community service from Sam, but the longer it went on, the less she felt that she could ever tell him. She knew that the presence of the timesheet made it seem as if she had an ulterior motive, though the truth was obvious to her: Sadie Green liked being praised, and Sam Masur was the best friend she had ever had.
Sadie’s community service project went on for fourteen months. Predictably, it ended the day Sam discovered its existence. Their friendship amounted to 609 hours, plus the 4 hours of the first day, which had not been part of the tally. A Bat Mitzvah at Temple Beth El required only 20 hours of community service, and Sadie was given an award by the fine women of Hadassah for her exceptional record of good works.
