Gabrielle Zevin

Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.

She walked through another gate.

It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)

She walked through another gate.

What was a gate anyway?

A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn’t have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.

You are in the strawberry field.

You are dead.

A prompt comes up on the screen: Start game from the beginning?

Yes, you think. Why not? If you play again, you might win.

Suddenly, there you are, brand-new, feathers restored, bones unbroken, sanguine with fresh blood.

You are flying more slowly than last time, because you don’t want to miss any of it. The cows. The lavender. The woman humming Beethoven. The distant bees. The sad-faced man and the couple in the pond. The beat of your heart before you go onstage. The feel of a lace sleeve against your skin. Your mother singing Beatles songs to you, trying to sound like she’s from Liverpool. The first playthrough of Ichigo. The rooftop on Abbot Kinney. The taste of Sadie mixed with Hefeweizen beer. Sam’s round head in your hands. A thousand paper cranes. Yellow-tinted sunglasses. A perfect peach.

This world, you think.

You are flying over the strawberry field, but you know it’s a trap.

This time, you keep flying.

If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.

Marx put on his coat—camel colored, like Sadie’s. “Your friend is sick as hell. And maybe, a genius. How do you know him again?”

Her work seemed basic and uninteresting compared to the kind of work Dov was doing. Her work was basic and uninteresting. She had just turned twenty. Everyone’s work is basic and uninteresting at twenty. But being around Dov made her feel impatient with her twenty-year-old brain and the quality of its ideas.

They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them.

Sam looked at Sadie, and he thought, This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.

“Don’t worry, kid. If it turns out you are in trouble, cry and say your sister has cancer.”

“Next time, we fail better.”

But I noticed, and I am proud of you.”