Sam stood, carefully slipping the maze and his drawing pencils into his backpack. “Are you saying you don’t want me to come and see you anymore?”
Sadie laughed. It had been a long time since Sam had heard Sadie laugh genuinely. Many things had changed about her, but he was pleased to discover that her basic laugh was untouched, aside from an inevitable, slight change of key. She had, he thought, one of the world’s great laughs. The kind of laugh where a person didn’t feel that he was being laughed at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing. “No, you idiot, I want to schedule a time for us to see each other. I didn’t want you to show up and not find me here.
“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.
Sadie offered Sam her hand to shake. Sadie’s voice was strong, but Sam thought her eyes looked vulnerable and tired. He took her hand, which was freezing and sweaty at the same time. Whatever her sickness had been, Sam could tell it had not entirely passed.
“You kept my maze,” he said.
“I did. Now, let’s hear what you thought of Solution,” Sadie said. She stood up and opened the window of her room, and the fresh air that came in was so crisp and cool, it almost felt like a drug. “Go easy on me, Sammy. You may have noticed that I’ve been a little depressed.”
II
INFLUENCES
1
Ichigo, though it was not yet called Ichigo, was supposed to be easy. Something that Sam and Sadie could accomplish during the summer between their junior and senior years.
Although the idea that the two of them should make a game together had been foremost in his thoughts since playing Solution in December, Sam did not broach the subject with her until March. It was unlike Sam to show such restraint, but he intuited that he needed to proceed slowly. She had been occupied with schoolwork, having fallen behind in her classes because of that dark month, the cause of which was still a mystery to Sam. The terse explanation she’d given for her depression was a “bad breakup.” Sam felt it had to be more than that, but out of respect for her, he did not push her to elaborate. They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it. One of the reasons they had become such good friends originally was because she had not insisted he tell his sad stories to satisfy her own curiosity. The least he could do was return the favor.
The other thing stopping him was how much he was enjoying having Sadie’s fellowship again. The two of them had easily slipped back into the rhythms of their friendship, and they saw each other several times a week for movies, meals, games. He felt fortified in her presence. His arguments and observations were sharper. He was less aware of the brutal New England cold than he had been in the two winters he’d spent without Sadie, and the constant, low-level pain in his foot was less central to his thoughts. When he walked with her, he even dreaded the cobblestones less. Most of the time, Sam did not experience himself as disabled, but the cobblestones, the ice, and the glacial pace at which he had to negotiate them suggested otherwise. If it had snowed, and depending on where the class was located, Sam would sometimes have to leave for class forty-five minutes early, hobbling across campus like an emeritus professor. As he had not considered himself to be disabled, the California boy had not factored in any of this when he’d decided to go to school in the Northeast.
Retrospectively, he realized that he had made a grave miscalculation when he had ended the friendship with Sadie. His mistake had been in thinking the world would be filled with Sadie Greens, people like her. It was not. His high school certainly hadn’t been. He had held out some hope that Harvard might be, but the college had proven especially disappointing on this front. There were smart people, yes. There were people with whom you might have a decent conversation for twenty minutes. But to find someone who you wanted to talk to for 609 hours—that was rare. Even Marx—Marx was devoted, creative, and bright, but he was not Sadie.
Sam decided that March was the cutoff point to convince Sadie to make a game. The high achievers who went to Harvard and MIT had usually settled their summer plans by March, if not earlier. On a personal level, Sam felt an urgency to that summer. In a year, give or take, student loans would come due—Harvard was need-blind （that was significantly why he had chosen it）， but even his generous financial aid package didn’t cover everything. He didn’t owe much, but he couldn’t conceive of asking Dong Hyun and Bong Cha to help with his loans, and he had not gone to Harvard to be a poor person. He had slowly begun to accept the truth of what Anders Larsson had said to him. Sam did not love higher math, there was no Fields Medal in his future, and there was no way it made sense for Sam to take on more debt to get a graduate degree in mathematics. Most likely, he would have to take a job working in tech, finance, or related consultancies—this was what most of his peers did. The way he put it to Marx: “This summer is my last chance to do something truly grand.”
One of Sam’s eventual strengths as an artist and as a businessman was that he knew the importance of drama, of setting the scene. He wanted to ask her to work with him at a special place—the occasion of their prospective creative union should be memorable. Even then, he felt that if they made a game, and if the game became what he knew it could be, he would want there to be a story about the day Sam Masur and Sadie Green had decided to work together. He was already imagining Sam-and-Sadie lore, and he didn’t even have a definitive idea for a game yet. But this was classic Sam—he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.
The way he saw it, he would be proposing to Sadie. He would be getting down on one knee and saying, “Will you work with me? Will you give me your time, and will you trust my hunch that this time will be well spent? Will you believe that we could make great things together?” For all his natural arrogance, he did not assume that she would say yes.
It was Marx who suggested the Glass Flowers. Sam had asked Marx for the most interesting place at Harvard. Marx had been a Harvard Yard tour guide, but even if he hadn’t been, he was the kind of well-traveled cicerone who always knew the best parts of any city.
The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants consists of around four thousand painstakingly accurate fire-blown glass and hand-painted specimens. A German father-and-son team had made them, around the turn of the nineteenth century, as a commission from the university. They were the answer to a problem: How do you preserve the impossible to preserve? Or, in other words, how do you stop time and death? Could there have been a more propitious place to begin the company that would become Unfair Games? What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?
As Sadie described it, in a 2011 interview with the Descendants of Lovelace blog: