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.”