“Mine Sadie,” she said as they drove from the west to the east. “You know I am overjoyed to drive you to the hospital.”
“Thanks, Bubbe. I appreciate it.”
“But, I think, based on what you have told me, that the boy might be more of a friend.”
The waterlogged community service form had been sticking out of her math book, and Sadie tucked it inside. “It was Mom’s idea,” Sadie defended herself. “The nurses and doctors say I’m helping. Last week, his grandfather gave me a hug and a slice of mushroom pizza. I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”
“Yes, but the boy doesn’t know about the arrangement, am I right?”
“No,” Sadie said. “It never came up.”
“And do you think there might be a reason you haven’t brought it up?”
“When I’m with Sam, we’re busy,” Sadie said lamely.
“Darling, it may come out later, and it could hurt your friend’s feelings, if he thinks he is a charity to you, and not a genuine friendship.”
“Can’t something be both?” Sadie said.
“Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity,” Freda said. “You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won’t tell them to you again. But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Sadie said.
Freda stroked Sadie’s hand. “Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
Sadie knew that Freda was right. Still, she continued to present the timesheet for signature. She liked the ritual of it, and she liked the praise she received—from the nurses and sometimes the doctors, but also from her parents and the people at her temple. There was even a minor pleasure to filling out the log itself. It was a game to her, and she didn’t think the game had much to do with Sam himself. It wasn’t a deception, per se. She wasn’t hiding the fact of her community service from Sam, but the longer it went on, the less she felt that she could ever tell him. She knew that the presence of the timesheet made it seem as if she had an ulterior motive, though the truth was obvious to her: Sadie Green liked being praised, and Sam Masur was the best friend she had ever had.
Sadie’s community service project went on for fourteen months. Predictably, it ended the day Sam discovered its existence. Their friendship amounted to 609 hours, plus the 4 hours of the first day, which had not been part of the tally. A Bat Mitzvah at Temple Beth El required only 20 hours of community service, and Sadie was given an award by the fine women of Hadassah for her exceptional record of good works.
3
The Advanced Games seminar met once a week, Thursday afternoons from two to four. There were only ten spots, and students were accepted by application. The seminar was led by twenty-eight-year-old Dov Mizrah, surname in the course catalog, but known only by his given name in gaming circles. It was said of Dov that he was like the two Johns （Carmack, Romero）， the American boy wonders who’d programmed and designed Commander Keen and Doom, rolled into one. Dov was famous for his mane of dark, curly hair, wearing tight leather pants to gaming conventions, and yes, a game called Dead Sea, an underwater zombie adventure, originally for PC, for which he had invented a groundbreaking graphics engine, Ulysses, to render photorealistic light and shadow in water. Sadie, and about five hundred thousand other nerds, had played Dead Sea the prior summer. Dov was the first professor she’d ever had whose work she had enjoyed before she’d taken the class, not because she’d taken the class. Gamers, like herself, were avidly awaiting a sequel to Dead Sea, and when she saw his name in the course catalog, she had wondered why someone like him had wanted to interrupt a brilliant career designing games to teach.
“Look,” Dov said on the first day of the seminar, “I’m not here to teach you how to program. This is an advanced games seminar at MIT. You already know how to program, and if you don’t…” He gestured toward the door.
The format for the class was not unlike a creative writing class. Each week, two of the students would bring in a game, a simple game or a part of a longer game, whatever could be feasibly programmed given the time constraints. The others would play the games, and then they’d critique them. The students were responsible for making two games during the semester.
Hannah Levin, the only girl in the seminar besides Sadie （though this was an ordinary male-to-female class ratio at MIT）， asked if Dov cared which programming language they used.
“Why would I care? They’re all identical. They all can suck my dick. And I mean that literally. You have to make whatever programming language you use suck your dick. It needs to serve you.” Dov looked over at Hannah. “You don’t have a dick, so clit, whatever. Pick the programming language that is going to make you come.”
Hannah laughed nervously and avoided Dov’s eyes. “So, Java is good?” Hannah said quietly. “Some people I know don’t, like, respect Java, but—”
“Respect Java? Seriously, fuck whoever said that. Whatever. Pick the programming language that is going to make me come,” Dov added.
“Yes, but if there’s one you prefer.”
“Dude, what’s your name?”
“Hannah Levin.”
“Dude, Hannah Levin. You have to chill out. I’m not interested in telling you how to make your game. Use three programming languages for all I care. That’s how I do it. I write some, and if I’m blocked, I’ll sometimes work in another language for a while. That’s what compilers are for. Does anyone else have any questions?”
Sadie found Dov vulgar, repellent, and a little sexy.
“The idea is to blow each other’s minds,” Dov said. “I don’t want to see versions of my games, or any other games I’ve already played. I don’t want to see pretty pictures without any thought behind them. I don’t want to see coding that is seamless in service of worlds that are uninteresting. I hate hate hate hate hate being bored. Astonish me. Disturb me. Offend me. It’s not possible to offend me.”
After class, Sadie went up to Hannah. “Hey, Hannah, I’m Sadie. Kind of rough in there, right?”
“It was fine,” Hannah said.
“Have you played Dead Sea? It’s amazing.”
“What’s Dead Sea?”
“It’s his game. It’s, you know, the whole reason I’m in this class. The main POV is this little girl, who is the lone survivor of—”
Hannah interrupted. “I guess I should check it out.”
“You should. What kind of games do you play?” Sadie said.
Hannah frowned. “Yeah, sorry, I have to run. Nice meeting you!”
Sadie didn’t know why she bothered. You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch. As long as you didn’t associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I’m not like those other ones. Sadie was, by nature, a loner, but even she found going to MIT in a female body to be an isolating experience. The year Sadie was admitted to MIT, women were slightly over a third of her class, but somehow, it felt like even less than that. Sadie sometimes felt as if she could go weeks without seeing a woman. It might have been that the men, most of them at least, assumed you were stupid if you were a woman. Or, if not stupid, less smart than they were. They were operating under the assumption that it was easier to get into MIT if you were a woman, and statistically, it was—women had a 10 percent higher admittance rate over men. But there could have been many reasons for that statistic. A likely one was self-elimination: female applicants to MIT might have held themselves to higher standards than male applicants. The conclusion should not have been that the women who got into MIT were less gifted, less worthy of their places, and yet, that seemed to be what it was.