The conversation ended when the nurse called Alice’s name. They were ready to take her blood.
“See you around, Sam,” Alice called.
Sam called Sadie at home that night. “I ran into your sister at the hospital,” Sam reported.
“Yeah, Alice was there,” Sadie said. “Sorry, I was going to try to go, but I had Bat Mitzvah class. Guess what game I’m looking at right now?”
“What?”
“King’s Quest IV. I got Bubbe to take me to Babbage’s, and it was on the shelf a whole month early. I screamed when I saw it. Sam, the graphics are so much better than the last one. They’re maybe better than Zelda even.”
“You said you’d wait for me to start.”
“I didn’t really start. I installed it, that’s all. Listen, the music’s gotten better, too.”
Sadie held the phone up to the computer so that he could hear the MIDI track.
“It’s not coming through very well,” Sam said. “Sadie, Alice said this weird thing…”
“Ignore her, that’s just Alice. She’s THE RUDEST PERSON I KNOW.” Sadie yelled this loud enough for Alice to overhear. “Do you think if your foot isn’t hurting too much and you’re out of the hospital, Dong Hyun can drive you over to my house on Sunday so we can play through KQIV? If Dong Hyun drives you, I’m pretty sure I can get my dad to drive you back.”
“I don’t know. I think I’ll be here at least a week, maybe longer, this time.”
“That’s cool. Maybe I can bring the disks and we’ll install it on—”
“Sadie, she said this thing about you having a timesheet, or something like that.”
Sadie paused for a second. Though she had known this day would come, she had not prepared what she would say.
“Sadie?”
“It’s not a big thing,” Sadie said. “It’s this form I get filled out when I’m at the hospital. I think everyone has them.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “Right…But my grandparents don’t have them.”
“Oh, that’s weird. Maybe they do have them, and you never noticed? Or maybe…Maybe it’s so kids can visit other kids at the hospital.”
“That makes sense.”
“For security,” Sadie improvised. “Sharyn’s calling me to dinner. Can I call you back?” Sadie did not call him back. Five minutes before nine, the latest time he was allowed to call her house, he phoned her again. For a moment, she considered telling her dad to say she wasn’t home.
“But Sadie, Alice called it a timesheet,” Sam said.
“Sure, it’s also a timesheet. It says how many hours I was at the hospital. Why are you fixating on this? Did you ask Dong Hyun about this weekend?”
“But why would you need to know that?”
“I…” Sadie said. “To keep track of things, I guess.”
Long pause. “Are you some sort of a candy striper?”
“If I was a candy striper, I’d have to wear that dress, and I’d never wear that dress.”
“Other than the dress?”
“Samson, you’re being incredibly tedious. Can we talk about something else?”
“Was I some sort of community service project to you?” Sam asked.
“No, Sam.”
“Were we friends, or did you just feel bad for me, or was I a homework assignment, or what, Sadie? What was it? I need to know.”
“Friends. How can you think otherwise? You’re my best friend.” Sadie was near tears.
“I don’t believe you,” Sam said. “You were never my friend. You’re some rich asshole volunteer from Beverly Hills, and I’m a mentally ill poor kid, with a screwed-up leg. Well, I don’t require your patronage anymore.”
“Sam, it’s hard to explain, but it had nothing to do with you. The form was a game to me. I…Well, I guess I liked seeing the hours add up.” She suddenly had an insight that she thought Sam would respond to. “I was going for the high score. I got up to six hundred nine, but I think it’s more than—”
“You’re a liar and a really bad person and…” None of this seemed strong enough. “You’re a…a…” He searched his mind for the worst word he had ever heard. “Cunt,” he whispered. He had never said that word before, and the word felt exotic, as if he were speaking a foreign language.
“What?” Sadie said.
Sam knew “cunt” to be a Rubicon. He had once overheard his mother’s boyfriend call her this word during an argument, and Anna had transformed from a woman into an obelisk. After that night, he had never seen this boyfriend again, and so he knew those four letters possessed profound, magical properties. “Cunt” could make a person disappear from your life forever, and he decided that indeed, this was what he wanted: to forget he had ever met Sadie Green and that he had ever been so pathetic and cretinous as to imagine she was his friend. “You’re a cunt,” he repeated. “I never want to see you again.” Sam hung up the phone.
Sadie sat on her rose-print comforter, holding the telephone by her burning cheek. “Cunt” wasn’t Sam’s typical diction, and when he said it, his reedy voice had sounded comical to Sadie. Her impulse had been to laugh. She was not popular at her school, but she was a sturdy, weatherproof individual, and most insults didn’t feel like anything. Ugly, annoying, nerd, bitch, stuck-up, whatever. But Sam’s words, she felt. The phone began to chirp adamantly, but she could not bring herself to hang it up. She wasn’t even entirely sure what a cunt was. She only knew that she had hurt Sam, and she probably was a cunt.
The next day, Sadie’s father drove Sadie to the hospital. She went to the desk, and the nurse went to get Sam, but he refused to see her. “I’m sorry, Sadie,” the nurse said. “He’s in a mood.” Sadie sat in the waiting area and waited until her mother would pick her up two hours later. She wrote Sam a note, using a couple lines of BASIC, the rudimentary programming language she and Sam were both learning:
10 READY
20 FOR X = 1 to 100
30 PRINT “I’M SORRY, SAM ACHILLES MASUR”
40 NEXT X
50 PRINT “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE FORGIVE ME. LOVE, YOUR FRIEND SADIE MIRANDA GREEN”
60 NEXT X
70 PRINT “DO YOU FORGIVE ME?”
80 NEXT X
90 PRINT “Y OR N”
100 NEXT X
110 LET A = GET CHAR （）
120 IF A = “Y” OR A = “N” THEN GOTO 130
130 IF A = “N” THEN 20
140 IF A = “Y” THEN 150
150 END PROGRAM
She folded the note in half and wrote readme on the outside of the paper. If he put the program in a computer, the screen would fill up with i’m sorry, sams. If he accepted her apology, the program ended. But if he didn’t accept her apology, the program would repeat until he did.
The nurse brought the note to Sam’s room, then came back several minutes later: Sam had refused the note. And that night, when Sadie inputted the program into her own computer, she realized she’d made a syntactical error anyway.
A week later, it was Freda’s turn to drive Sadie to the hospital. Sadie did not want to confess to her grandmother what had happened. She did not want to admit that Freda had been right. She let Freda drive her all the way to Children’s Hospital, but when they arrived there, Sadie did not get out of the car.