It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.
By May, with Sam’s purloined dry-erase markers already squeaky and parched, Sadie was worried that they would never settle on an idea, and that they’d run out of time to make the game. From her point of view, they were already on an incredibly, indeed impossibly, tight schedule.
They stood in front of the whiteboard, which was covered with their rainbow of brainstorms. “There’s something here, I know it,” Sam said.
“What if there’s not?” Sadie said.
“Then we’ll come up with something else,” Sam said. He grinned at Sadie.
“You have no right to be this happy,” Sadie said.
While Sadie experienced this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible. But then, Sam could feel that way. Sam was a decent artist and he would come to be a decent programmer and level designer, but remember, he had never made a single game before. It was Sadie who knew what it took to make a game—even a bad game—and it was Sadie who would do most of the heavy lifting when it came to the programming, the engine building, and everything else.
Sam was not a physically affectionate person—something to do with having been touched too much during his years in the hospital. But he took Sadie’s shoulders in his hands—she was a full inch taller than him—and he looked into her eyes. “Sadie,” he said. “Do you know why I want to make a game?”
“Of course. Because you foolishly think it will make you rich and famous.”
“No. It’s very simple. I want to make something that will make people happy.”
“That seems trite,” Sadie remarked.
“I don’t think it is. Do you remember when we were kids, and how much fun it used to be to spend the whole afternoon in some game world?”
“Of course,” Sadie said.
“Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while—better than perfectly, actually—with a set of problems that were not my own.”
“You couldn’t land at the top of a pole, but Mario could.”
“Exactly. I could save the princess, even when I could barely get out of bed. So, I do want to be rich and famous. I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their troubles for a while.”
Sadie was moved by Sam’s words—in the years she had known him, he so rarely mentioned his own pain. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
“Good,” Sam said, as if they had settled something. “We should leave for the theater now.”
They were taking the night off to go see Marx in a student production of Twelfth Night at the mainstage of the American Repertory Theater. It was something of a big deal to be cast in the mainstage show. Since Marx was lending them the apartment for the summer, Sam had thought it would be a good idea for both of them to go.
Without knowing why, Sam had tried to keep Sadie and Marx apart. It wasn’t about either of them as individuals. But Sam could be private, verging on paranoid, and he liked to control the flow of information. He feared them comparing notes and somehow ganging up on him. There was another secret part of him that feared they would prefer each other to him—everyone, in Sam’s estimation, loved Sadie and Marx. No one, Sam felt, had ever loved him except those who had been obligated to love him: his mother （before she had died）， his grandparents, Sadie （disputed hospital volunteer）， Marx （his assigned roommate）。 But now, with Marx lending them the apartment, Sadie and Marx would inevitably know each other. Marx, who was playing the lead role of Orsino, had suggested that Sam bring Sadie to the show, and then they could all have dinner at the Charles Hotel afterward, with Marx’s dad, who was in town to see the play. “She’s moving in next week,” Marx said. “I’d like to break bread with her before I leave.” Marx was planning to spend the greater part of the summer interning for an investment banking firm in London.
Although Marx participated in college theater for three of his four years, he did not want to be an actor. He had the looks of an actor—six feet tall, wide shoulders, slim waist and hips that looked elegant in clothes, strong jaw and voice, good posture and skin, a glorious pompadour of thick, black hair. If he had a complaint about his college theater career, it was that he was always being cast as wooden strongmen or priggish dukes. In life, Marx wasn’t at all wooden or priggish. He was quick to laugh, warm and energetic, verging on goofy, and so it was strange to him that he was cast this way, that people saw him this way. He wondered what it was about himself. At a cast party for Hamlet, having smoked a couple of joints, he once asked a director friend, “What is it about me? Why am I a Laertes and not a Hamlet?”
The friend had seemed uncomfortable when Marx had posed the question. “It’s your quality,” he had said.
“What about my quality?” Marx had insisted.
“Like, your charisma or something.”
“What about my charisma?”
The friend had giggled. “Brother, don’t ask me about this now. I’m so wasted.”
“Seriously,” Marx said. “I want to know.”
The friend put his index fingers up to the side corners of his eyes and pulled them wide. He was making Asian eyes. The friend struck that pose for barely a second, and then it was gone. The friend giggled, apologetic. “Forgive me, Marx. I’m so fucking high. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Hey,” Marx said. “That is not cool.”
“You’re so goddamn beautiful,” the director said, kissing Marx on the lips.
But in a way, Marx was grateful that the friend had made that racist gesture. It was clarifying to him. The inscrutable, inaccessible, mysterious, exotic thing about him was—duh—his Asianness, and it was permanent. And even in college theater, there were only so many parts that an Asian actor could play.
Marx’s mother was an American-born Korean, and his father was Japanese. At his mother’s insistence, he’d gone to an international school in Tokyo, with kids from all over the world in it. It had sheltered him, for the most part, from the racism in his own country. Still, he was aware of a certain amount of racism that the Japanese felt against Koreans, in particular, and foreigners, in general. For example, his Korean American mother, who had taught textile design at Tokyo University, had made very few friends in all the years they had lived in Tokyo—but he could not say whether that was the result of xenophobia, his mother’s reserved nature, or her imperfect Japanese. But because he had been mostly raised in Asia, he had been completely sheltered from the kind of racism that Asians experienced in America. Until Harvard, he had not realized that in America—and not just in its college theaters—there were only so many roles an Asian could play.
The week after that party, Marx changed his major from English （this was as close as Harvard came to a theater major） to economics.