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 sex.” The internet responded: no one who had had good sex 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.