The Education of Nadia Heller

1987

There was a story on the local news, being broadcast on the television bolted to the wall of the hospital lounge, about a mother whose teenage son had recently committed suicide. It was questionable how good an idea it was really to have an unfiltered conduit of potentially very affecting stories and images piped directly into a place where you are at your most emotionally vulnerable, like the PA system at an airport departure lounge having some of the more maudlin Simon and Garfunkel songs on an endless loop.
  The hospital television was even encased in plastic to prevent, in this case, Jack Heller from changing the channel on the brutal human tragedy that happened to be playing out right after the tender, touching birth of his daughter.
  The victim’s bullish mother didn’t seem particularly distraught, however, as she was on the television calling for the President to investigate the violent video games that allegedly caused the death of her son. An avid role-playing gamer, he had been immersed for years in dark, violent imagery that, she said, contributed to her son’s mental collapse. Video games were, she continued, an unchecked menace to the youth of America, one demanding a federal intervention.
  Whatever special compassion parents were supposed to feel for other parents hadn’t kicked in for Jack yet, who found himself only contemptuous at the sensationalistic tone of the news piece. His disdain increased with the arrival of another set of parents – his wife’s – who were only now making their appearance. Both of them were dressed like they had abruptly left an opera at intermission, despite Amanda having gone into labor the day before. Whatever the explanation for this was, Jack was pretty sure it would be stupid.
  Jack directed Elisabeth Addison to the private room down the hall in which her daughter was sleeping. As his wife took off, Robert Addison sat down on the couch next to Jack and looked at the television, where the same news story was inexplicably still in progress.
  “Look at this,” Addison commented on the report after a minute of silence between the two men. “Look at the world we’re living in. You know, I pass by an arcade sometimes on my way home and you wouldn’t believe the caliber of child hanging out in that garbage pit. High school drop-outs. I see them there playing the arcade cabinets; I see them outside drinking and smoking. With their tattoos and facial piercings and all that. What a lifestyle that is.
  “And don’t think I don’t know,” he said, “about Dungeons and Dragons. That thing’s just loaded with Satanic images and messages. I heard that if you play a Dungeons and Dragons game backwards, you hear a message instructing you to shoot a police officer with his own gun.”
  Jack fought the urge to call his wealthy father-in-law a jerk-off.
  Addison leaned in close to deliver what appeared to be a man-to-inferior man talk. “I will never understand,” said Addison, “what it is you see in these games exactly. And you listen: if only for the sake of my daughter and yours, don’t lose yourself in some late night Dungeons and Dragons game and forget you have a family to provide for. You have a child now. This isn’t one of your pen-and-paper characters, you can’t mess her up and start again.”
  “Yeah, you know,” said Jack, nodding, “I’ll definitely give that a lot of thought.”
  Elisabeth Addison returned from her daughter’s room, where Amanda was still asleep, and asked to see the baby. Jack led them down the corridor; the in-laws following behind, where, he would bet real money, they were exchanging knowing and obnoxious glances at his expense.
  Their baby was in a room with the other newborns, and behind a glass window, sleeping peacefully – for the moment – in a microscopic cot. She was wrapped in a pink blanket and her face tilted to her left; wrinkled nose and open mouth. Jack pressed his hand up against the window.
  “This,” he said, “is Nadia.”
  Jack looked over at his in-laws and the expressions on their faces seemed almost like pleasant surprise.
  “What,” said Jack, “did you think I was going to name my child after some monster from Dungeons and Dragons?”
  He could tell from their reserved reactions alone that this was the case. He narrowed his eyes.
  “Get the hell out of my maternity ward.”


1988

Nothing felt natural to Jack about talking to someone who couldn’t understand what he was saying at anything above the most basic level. It made heart-to-heart conversations almost impossible. His everyday interactions with his baby daughter were often marred by long stretches of self-conscious awkwardness that Jack supposed he should have outgrown when he reached parenthood. This anxiety ceased to exist, though, when Nadia inexplicably burst into hysterics at something he said or did, and that was when the love between parent and child felt at its most unconditional.
  That night, holding Nadia on his knee, they watched St. Elsewhere in the living room while she waved her arms around ineffectually slapping at Jack’s shirt. During the commercial break, he was disturbed to see one of the anti-Dukakis ads that the Bush campaign was running, something about the candidate handing out weekend passes for convicted rapists and murderers who spent their Saturdays doing much of the same thing. Jack wondered if it was possible for him to watch television with his daughter even once without her seeing something coldly manipulative or horrifying. At least she wouldn’t remember this.
  “What do you think of that?” he said. “Eww. Gross.”
  Nadia burped.
  “You’re not going to grow up to be that terrible, are you?” He probably couldn’t get away with having his daughter up this late at all were it not for Amanda being out of the house visiting with her parents. “Of course not. You’re the best.”
  Jack gently held Nadia’s hand in his. “You probably don’t pay much attention to this, so I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of people out there telling you to be scared of things. I’m not going to be one of those people, okay?”
  Jack looked back at the television. “And some things out there are scary. I can’t even imagine what you think is scary at your age. I guess taking a bath. My point is that there are things that people say are scary, but are actually pretty cool and fun and important.”
  He lifted Nadia up onto his arm and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I know you’re not going to understand this, but this is mainly for me. So many people are going to tell you that video games are stupid or something to be afraid of. I can’t do anything about that, but I think that I’m the only one who will ever tell you that games are something to celebrate.”
  Reaching down to the coffee table, he picked up a Nintendo controller and guided her hands onto the buttons. She giggled.
  “Let’s get started.”


1989

Pulling together a briefing on the uptake of tax rebates by senior citizens, Jack Heller’s mind was, remarkably, not entirely focused on the task at hand. This was the day that Prince of Persia for the Apple II was released, and this being a weekday meant that Jack was stuck at his actual job imagining local punks blitzing every electronics store in San Francisco, smashing windows with bass guitars, cleaning the city out of his most anticipated game of the year. Then running over all the copies with their skateboards. It was terrible.
  On his lunch break, Jack power-walked to the store, cutting across the street where possible, and when he arrived his apocalyptic vision proved not to be the case. In the placid, deserted store, Jack made his way to the game shelves where four pristine copies of Prince of Persia waited for him. Jack picked up a box and clutched it carefully on the walk to the counter, where a surly teenage clerk rang up the purchase.
  “I hear this is supposed to be good,” Jack said hopefully.
  “Fuck you.”


Although Jack couldn’t play the game at work, he still felt compelled to tear open the shrinkwrap to see, at long last, what was inside this box. Even holding the diskette would have given him a charge. This was an artifact that represented such personal desire and potential of experience, that it made him feel like a different person just to look at and hold it.
  So strong was this upswell of emotion, his lust to get home and play this, that when his colleagues invited him out for a drink after work, he almost turned them down. Jack, at times, had to remind himself to be sociable.
  At an enthusiasm high, Jack attempted to explain Prince of Persia to the guys over a beer at some sports bar. After twenty minutes, he began to feel that he was having difficulty conveying his enthusiasm to the others.
  “No, you’re not getting it,” he said, putting his glass down on the table hard, “let me start again. There was this game called Karata… Kerata… caretaker… and it had such great animation… it’s the same guy.”
  Initially, the guys had politely acknowledged that this piece of entertainment from a medium they had no interest in might theoretically be cool, but at this point couldn’t hide their disinterest. The conversation moved onto ranking the Kiss studio albums from best to worst. There was a consensus that Destroyer was first.


When Jack arrived home later that evening, he walked into the kitchen to find his wife sitting alone at the table in the mostly dark room, and reading The Bell Jar. Jack kind of wished Amanda would dial down the portentousness every once in a while.
  Jack kissed her on the forehead while she kept her eyes glued to the page. “Hey,” he said, a little giddy, “I got Prince of Persia today. Finally.”
  “That’s cool,” she said absently, “I’ll get dinner ready in like an hour.”
  Jack pulled off his coat and tie and threw them blindly over the nearest item of furniture. In the living room, Nadia was leaning over the coffee table, illustrating wildly on a large sheet of paper. When she saw Jack enter the room, she dropped the felt-tip pen and applauded loudly. “Daddy!”
  Jack slumped down next to her against the front of the couch, reaching an arm over and tousling her hair.
  “Do you want to hear about Prince of Persia?” He took a shot.
  She nodded.
  “I haven’t played it yet. But from what I’ve read, it takes place in ancient Persia and you’re this prince who is imprisoned by an evil vizier. A vizier is like… he’s a bad guy. A really bad guy. But you’re the good guy. And you have to find your way out of the prison to rescue the beautiful princess. She’s good, too. How does that sound?”
  “Good, thank you,” said Nadia.
  He smiled. “Do you want to watch me play it?”
  Nadia clapped for him again.


1990

Jack thought about how he could get drunk as quickly as possible at this dinner party without raising any eyebrows. Jack and Amanda were hosting the Addisons, including Amanda’s intense younger brothers, and Jack wasn’t sure how his life got to the point where exactly zero of his family members were willing to show up to one of these debacles.
  “And of course,” said Elisabeth Addison, standing in the dining room with Jack and the rest of the Addisons, “he shows up wearing a t-shirt under his dress shirt.”
  That was a joke? Jack thought. “Ha ha ha ha ha.”
  Jack had a glass of white wine in his hand, but with Robert Addison’s glassy stare fixed upon him, he was scared to sip it for fear of judgment.
  Amanda entered the room holding Nadia’s hand, Nadia wearing some kind of Maria von Trapp-esque dress in a toddler size. Jack had no idea.
  “Oh, sweetheart,” said Elisabeth, “you look very pretty.”
  Amanda tugged on Nadia’s hand. “Say thank you.”
  “Thank you.”
  Amanda handed Nadia a plate of appetizers and asked her to offer them to her grandfather. Addison selected something and thanked Nadia, calling her darling, like the Southern gentleman he completely wasn’t.
  “Granddad,” enthused Nadia, “I’m going to show you my Prince of Persia.”
  “What’s that, darling?” said Addison. Amanda gave Jack a look.
  Nadia took a step back with her left foot and then plunged herself forward across the room, landing deftly on the other foot. The Addisons seemed to find this cute, although inexplicable.
  “Now,” said Nadia, “I attack.”
  Waving her hand around in a pantomime swordfight, Nadia stabbed at Robert Addison’s leg three times.
  “Oh no,” Nadia yelled, “spike trap!” She instantly dropped to the ground and stayed there. All in all, the performance was, Jack thought, remarkably faithful to the animation of the game itself.
  The Addisons looked at Jack, under the presumption that an explanation was forthcoming. Jack threw back the glass of wine.


1991

“‘Well, actually, that’s why I’m here on Scabb Island. I’m on a whole new adventure.’”
  Jack read this in his most convincing hero voice to Nadia, who was seated on his lap in front of the computer desk. Since having a daughter, it was noticeable to Jack how his gaming routines had changed, although not in any anticipated way. Invariably, any time he brought home a new game, he’d ask Nadia if she wanted to watch, and she always jumped at the chance. Jack would have to slow down his pace of play because Nadia wanted to follow along, but there was no activity they could participate in together that he enjoyed more than this.
  “What does Scabb mean?” she asked.
  “Do you remember when I explained to you what a union buster was?”
  Jack and Nadia had been playing Monkey Island 2 for a full hour, and past Nadia’s bedtime. Nadia seemed so excited about the game that he couldn’t bring himself to send her away. Part of him wasn’t sure whether this was because she liked computer games or because she liked shiny things. He liked to think it was the computer games.
  At the end of the hour, for a good ten minutes, Jack found himself clicking everything, unable to progress, slightly frustrated, not sure what he was missing, and decided that this would be a good time to send Nadia to bed, before he flipped his lid.
  “Maybe we should call it a day, honey.”
  She jabbed at the corner of the screen with her fist. “Make a mousetrap.”
  “What?”
  “Make a mousetrap to catch the rat.”
  Jack looked at her with the kind of sweet, uncomprehending condescension he normally afforded to four year olds, and then it made sense to him. He had a stick, he had string, he had bait. And there was a box that could be opened right next to where the rat was hanging out. Who knows what having a rat would be good for, but it would be something. Putting all the pieces together, he set up a trap for the rat and had Guybrush Threepwood yank the string, securing the rat within the box.
  “Hey!” yelled Jack. “You did it.” He kissed her on the back of her head.
  Nadia shook him off. “Daddy, read the voice.”
  “Oh yeah.” Jack looked up at the dialogue text flashing across the screen and adopted different voices for each character. Nadia responded enormously to Jack’s gruff, aging pirate voice. Jack didn’t even know he had this particular talent in him.
  Amanda came in to the room and told Nadia it was time for bed. Though privately heartened by Nadia’s angry protests, Jack pushed her off his lap and told her to listen to her mother, saying they’d keep playing tomorrow. Nadia walked out of the room to brush her teeth, and Jack couldn’t help grinning.
  “She really likes this, you know?” he said.
  Amanda smiled. “She wants to make you happy.”


1992

Jack Heller crawled into bed in the jeans he had changed into after coming home from work. He never fully understood why his wife cared so much about maintaining, washing and wearing a dedicated pair of pajamas every night. At least, Jack thought, Amanda didn’t yet consider him a lost cause and was still lecturing him to follow suit. He turned on his side in bed and felt a folded-up piece of paper stretch the line of his pants.
  “Oh yeah,” he said, pulling the paper out from his pocket, “Nadia gave me her Christmas list today.”
  “Didn’t you want to get her that puppy?” she asked, sliding up against the headboard.
  “I did, but you said he had a sad face.”
  “He did.”
  “Well, yeah, but adorably sad, like Marlena Dietrich.”
  “Read me the list.”
  Sitting up, Jack unfolded the sheet of floral notebook paper and held it before his and Amanda’s eyes.
  “‘Dear Santa Claus,’” he read. “‘For Christmas this year, I would please like a Super Nintendo and a beautiful diamond boat. If you can’t get both of these, just a Super Nintendo would be fine. Thank you. Nadia.’”
  “My, what a canny little girl you have raised.”
  Jack looked over at Amanda, who had slumped back on her side. “What do you think?”
  “I don’t really want to encourage Nadia to spend any more time in front of a screen.”
  “But why not encourage her interests?” Jack said. Amanda rolled back over to face him. “I know she likes this stuff. What if she wants to do this for a living?”


1993

From behind her desk, Nadia Heller watched, with lack of interest, her twenty-something teacher wrestle a cardboard-mounted map of the world into position against the whiteboard. Kate Taylor turned and exhaled slightly from the embarrassingly real exertion. She stuck out her arm and indicated a position on the map.
  “Who can tell me the name of this country?”
  Nadia raised her hand. “France, Miss Taylor.”
  “Yes. Very good. Can anybody name something that comes from France?”
  “French fries,” volunteered some kid after a collective moment of silence.
  “That’s true.”
  This is all? Nadia thought. She put up her hand again. “Napoleon Bonaparte.”
  “That’s also true,” said Kate. “Who was Napoleon Bonaparte, Nadia?”
  “Well, he was the leader of France.”
  “Yes.”
  “I play this game called Civilization with my dad, and you can play as Napoleon Bonaparte, and you can do all these amazing things. You make France grow really strong, and make the annual income and GNP and literacy all better because you listen to your advisors, and make lots of new buildings, and use diplomacy, and make the people really happy, and research new technologies like writing and gunpowder. We made France one of the top countries in the world.”
  “Yeah,” said Kate, glancing at the clock and blindly indicating another point on the map, “and who can tell me something about this country?”
  The class continued its unenthusiastic identification of random countries and their exports until the day ran out. Kate asked Nadia to stay behind for a moment, and she remained seated while everyone else filtered out.
  “Nadia’s going to hell-er.” Pre-teen giggles echoed down the hallway.
  “Nadia,” said Kate, “do you know what precocious means?”
  Nadia shook her head.
  “It means nobody likes you.”


1994

There was a war on video games. It was only on violent video games, technically, but as Jack explained to his wife, those were all the good ones anyway. The Senate, prodded into action by Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, had launched federal hearings on violent games. These hearings, and the quality of testimony they attracted, personified video games as a bloodthirsty, sexist sociopath that inured children to the sight of blood and whispered in their ear to start fires and disembowel clergymen. The characterization caught on with the news media, and Jack quickly came to feel like he was under suspicion from every normal, hard-working adult American. Jack despised the idea that because he played games, he was, de facto, a gamer: a nascent class of offender capable of every type of hate crime.
  This all explained how thrilled he was to be summoned to his daughter’s elementary school for a parent-teacher meeting, the teacher brandishing Exhibit A: a confiscated copy of the game Ultima VIII: Pagan, whose cover art was emblazoned with a large, fiery pentagram.
  Jack sat in a chair before the teacher’s desk, his legs crossed with complete contempt. Amanda looked pissed too, although probably not for the same idealistic reasons.
  “This,” said Sharon Stewart, tapping the game box, “is a pentagram. This is titled Pagan. These are satanic symbols. When we ask our students to bring in items from home for show and tell, we are not asking them to show off smut.”
  “It’s not smut,” Jack protested. “This is the sequel to Ultima VII. That’s a classic.”
  “To Kill A Mockingbird is a classic.”
  “Look,” said Jack, attempting reason and laying his elbows on the teacher’s desk in a gesture of down-home solidarity, “my daughter likes games. They can look dark or frightening from the outside, I admit. But this game is about as disturbing as Tolkein. Or Star Wars. It’s all high fantasy adventure. It’s completely innocent.”
  Sharon Stewart stared over the rim of her glasses. “I think Senator Lieberman would see it differently.”
  “We’re sorry she brought it in,” said Amanda evenly. “What exactly is the problem?”
  “This is the problem. Computer games. I’m following closely what’s being said in the Senate hearings. Have you got a copy of Mortal Kombat in your house, Mr. Heller? Do you have Night Trap? That masquerades as a computer game when in reality it’s a training tool for the systematic rape and murder of young women.” Sharon gave Amanda a calculated look.
  Jack couldn’t understand how this woman was ever permitted entrance to the city of San Francisco.
  “Lieberman is scared of what, as an old, old man, he doesn’t get,” Jack said. “Games are harmless. All that’s going on in the Senate right now is that it’s video games’ turn to be a bogeyman. Just like rock and roll, and comic books, and rap, and skateboards, and music videos, and Nick Nolte, it’s just video games’ turn to be the thing that ignorant people are afraid will corrupt the youth of today.”
  “Well,” said the teacher, “as it so happens, I have a sister who is a staffer for Senator Lieberman, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want your comments to get back to him.”
  “What, are you seriously threatening me? Is Joseph Lieberman going to get me fired?”
  “You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
  Amanda was clearly exhausted with this bullshit. “Look. Again, we’re sorry that Nadia brought something into class that might have been upsetting. We are. We’re sorry. We’ll be more careful about this sort of thing in the future. Is there anything else?”
  Sharon leaned back in her chair. “Nadia spends too much time talking about computer games, and she’s the only one. I’m worried that she just isn’t getting along well with others. She’s sad all the time.”
  “My daughter is not sad,” snapped Amanda. “She’s adorable.”
  “Like Winona Ryder,” said Jack.
  “It’s not me that you have to convince,” said Sharon. “Tell this to the other kids in the class. She isn’t relating to them. She isn’t making friends. The other children find her too competitive, too aggressive.”
  “Those are good qualities!” said Jack.
  “She won’t pay any attention to current events, or sports, or literature. She doesn’t do well in gym. She is only interested in computer and video games. I have been in the school system for twenty years and I have never seen anything like this. What are you teaching her at home?”
  This was too much for Jack. He got up from his chair and pointed a finger at the teacher’s unimpressed expression. “You know what?” Here was the most debilitating insult he could immediately bring to mind.
  “You’re a jerk-off.”


1995

Flanked by two other girls, Nadia Heller sat at the very back of the bus. It was only because the older kids were on a field trip that they could get away with this. Nadia was slightly nervous about a teenage skater with a backwards cap showing up with his burnout, bleached-blond girlfriend – maybe there was a nose piercing somewhere in there as well – and demanding that the girls shove it. On Nadia’s left, Teri removed a piece of chewing gum from her mouth and stuck it to the back of the seat in front of her. This was unreal.
  There was an unusually glamorous quality about Teri and Lydia, Nadia thought. Something about them felt exclusive, like a Babysitters’ Club that only had two people and wasn’t stupid. Since meeting them recently, they had both taken a liking to Nadia, and although she wasn’t fully clear on the reason, she naturally assumed that they were responding to her warm, charming personality. Nonetheless, she was desperate to impress, and so was bringing them to her house this afternoon.
  Teri asked Nadia to rank the guys from Friends, to which Nadia had to admit she had never seen the show. Lydia patted her on the shoulder and assured her that it didn’t really matter as long as she put Matthew Perry first. Nadia thought the correct answer was ‘who cares’, because boys were awful. Her mother teased her about this attitude, calling it an age-appropriate stereotype. It was nonetheless borne out by the actual boys in Nadia’s class, one of whom that day had tried to burp the Star-Spangled Banner. The Friends discussion seemed weirdly adult to Nadia, although marginally less boring than her parents’ definition of adult, which included watching legal dramas at 10:00 PM, frosty dinner parties and debating whether the new Beatles song Free as a Bird was any good or not.
  The girls made it off the bus with their cool kid status undisturbed. Playing the hostess, Nadia escorted Teri and Lydia through the hallways of her house and into her bedroom. The room, whose only wall decoration was a poster of someone on a motorcycle, most prominently featured a small television on the dresser, hooked up to a Super Nintendo.
  “I have Chrono Trigger in there,” said Nadia, pointing. “That’s such an amazing game.” The Super Nintendo sat next to a stack of Electronic Gaming Monthly issues.
  “Let me show you what else I have,” she said, and found a game box that she held up proudly. “Oh! This is King’s Quest. This one is so great. You get to be this beautiful princess who goes on this really cool adventure. It’s totally like watching a cartoon.”
  Nadia indicated the motorcycle poster. “That’s from a game called Full Throttle. Made by the guys who did Monkey Island. It’s so awesome.”
  “That looks like something boys would be into.” Lydia had palpable disdain in her voice this time when she said ‘boys’.
  “Well, maybe,” said Nadia, “but I really like it too because it’s such a cool story, and it’s really funny and there’s this really cool girl in it.”
  Teri surveyed the room. “Why are you so interested in all this crap?”
  “What?”
  “Video games,” said Teri, giving Nadia a disbelieving look. “My dorky older brother plays these and nobody likes him. You don’t have to waste your time with these.”
  “What? Why not?”
  “Because, you know,” said Lydia, trying to convince her, “you’re really pretty.”


1996

It was the very first time that Nadia Heller had been handed a note in class; a moment she had anticipated her entire elementary school career. ‘You have a secret admirer’, is what she had expected. ‘Do you like Ryan? Check one: yes/no’, would also have been welcome, if predictable.
  In fact, the note, passed to her by the girl sitting to her left, though its origins were a mystery, read: ‘Hey, I heard you like video games. I do too. Meet me after class across the street outside the parking garage.’ Nadia had never conceived of a note exactly like this, but she was delighted nonetheless. After a full day of tuning out the teacher and never raising her hand, she straightened her posture with a smile on her face, and volunteered to answer the teacher’s next question. She got it wrong.
  Nadia waited outside the parking garage as school let out, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. It was worth it, she thought, for her mom to freak out by not returning home immediately after school, if the result was meeting a potential soulmate, or someone who had a PlayStation she could use.
  Left foot to right foot.
  She was alarmed by the sight of a group of surly kids spilling en masse out of the school gates. Not that she was a detective or anything, but this clearly meant that even the students held back for detention were getting to go home now.
  Right foot, left foot.
  A custodian locked the gates. She didn’t even want to check her wristwatch at this point.
  Nadia slouched down on the pavement.
  This sucked.


In the living room, Amanda read one of her grown-up books; something in small print and was about thirty-year-olds with office jobs and mature relationships living in apartments or something dull like that. You wouldn’t catch a Final Fantasy character in a mature relationship, Nadia thought, as she lay out on the couch, plying a hairpin apart. Amanda had her favorite Velvet Underground album on the CD player; although when Nadia was in the room, Amanda would only ever let the song Sunday Morning play, and then keep that on repeat. To Nadia, then, the Velvet Underground was just the band that did that pleasant, soothing song about Sunday mornings.
  “What do you want to do for your birthday party?” Amanda asked.
  “Nothing.”
  “You’re turning nine years old, Nadia; you can’t do nothing. What kind of cake do you want?”
  “I told you, I don’t want to do anything.”
  “Well, I know that when Marie’s daughter has her birthday party next month, everybody’s going to have a sleepover and have pizza, and then go and see Harriet the Spy.”
  Nadia bent the hairpin so far back that it snapped. “Other kids are stupid.”


Nadia left class for lunch and as she walked across the playground she saw Teri sitting with a couple of other kids that she only recognized as the heirs to the junior prom throne. Teri wasn’t in her class anymore, and she thought it would be polite to at least say hi to her as she walked past.
  “Hi, Teri.”
  “Hi, Nadia.”
  One of the girls, Allison snapped to attention. “Oh wow, Nadia? You’re that girl who’s like obsessed with video games?”
  Nadia stopped walking. “I play them. So what?”
  “What’s your problem?” asked Daniel, another prom scion. “Do you not like normal things or something? Do you, like, not watch TV?”
  “Not really.”
  “Teri told us how your room is like stacked with that video game stuff,” said Daniel. “Do you spend so much time in all these fantasy worlds because you don’t have any friends? You know you’re a loser, right? I mean I just want to make sure that you know.”
  Nadia looked at Teri, who shrugged.
  “Fuck you,” said Nadia, to everybody.
  “Whoa!” said Allison, “she’s so hostile! Calm down. Hey, you might not know this because all you do is play video games, but it’s not really cool to be all bitchy and violent.”
  Nadia couldn’t think of anything further to say, so she just said swore again and ran across the playground out of their sight. Finding a vacant space behind a stairwell, she sat down and buried her head in her hands. Her eyes stung and she pounded at her legs in frustration.
  “Hey,” said an unfamiliar voice, “do you like video games?”
  Nadia looked up, more pissed than ever. It was some boy whose name she didn’t remember, looking at her with guarded interest.
  “Yeah,” she said cautiously.
  “Me too.”


1997

The grounds of Nadia's school were divided into three large outdoor courtyards. During recess, the southern courtyard was typically occupied by the school's younger children; establishing a sort of hierarchy through which the older and cooler you became, the further north you moved. Nadia accepted it was not a coincidence that the southern courtyard was where she and Evan usually hung out; at the periphery of the home of kids several grades their junior.
  Evan had in his hands a cloth map of Brittania, the world from Ultima VII. Drawing an invisible path on the map with his finger, Evan recounted his recent adventures in the game to Nadia, who silently judged his playthrough against her own experience. Nadia had lent Evan her copy of the game as part of her ongoing campaign to wean him off two-dimensional platformers and train him on long, cerebral role-playing games. Although this finally seemed to be working, Nadia was pretty bored of hearing about Ultima all the time.
  “I'm so over Ultima,” she announced. “I'm really getting into more sophisticated games like this new one Fallout. I’m going to make games like this when I grow up. It's so intense. It's like Ultima but you get to shoot people's heads off and there's all this swearing. It's totally adult.”
  Evan reminded Nadia that his parents only bought him one game a year and weren't likely to go for something that was ‘totally adult’. Nadia said he could borrow her copy.
  “Hey,” someone called out, “look at you two sitting together!”
  Daniel had become much more openly abrasive after being abruptly cut out of his circle of prom friends, for reasons that Nadia couldn’t care less about.
  “Leave us alone,” Nadia said.
  “What? I just wanted to know when you two are going to get married.”
  “Get lost.”
  “You’re probably going to have to,” Daniel continued. “You don’t have any other friends.”
  Nadia had been hearing this kind of thing way too often. “We’re not getting married.”
  “What? Why not? Evan, you’re spending so much time together, you want to marry her, right?” Evan was avoiding eye contact with anyone. “Do you want to kiss her? Go on, kiss her. You know he wants it, Nadia.”
  Nadia felt her cheeks flush. She thought that she was more angry than embarrassed; or, she was a little embarrassed, and that made her furious.
  “I guess he’s not into you. What are you reading, Evan? Let me see that.” Daniel made a grab for the cloth map and didn’t even try and pretend it was an accident when he tore it apart.
  “What is this, anyway?” He inspected the map pieces. “Some weird video game fantasy world? Grow up.” Daniel threw the map back in Evan’s face. Nadia gave him her best looks-could-kill glare.
  “You’re a dick,” she added for emphasis.
  “Seriously,” he said to Nadia, ignoring her, “why do you play these things all the time? Get a life. Maybe if you did other things you’d have more than one friend. Instead, you’ve just got this gay kid over here.”
  Nadia said nothing. She heard the sound of her ragged, hot breath echo throughout her body. Her vision, previously fixed on Daniel’s pro wrestling t-shirt, waved in and out of focus.
  “You know where you’re going to end up, playing video games all the time?” Daniel asked Nadia. “You know my dad works with your dad? He says he’s a total loser.”
  Nadia lunged forward off the seat and, throwing her fist, hit Daniel in the face. Daniel reeled back, as Nadia kept her stance and stared him down. Daniel glanced around, considering what just happened, then looked back at her and laughed.
  “Jesus,” he said, “that didn’t even hurt.”
  Nadia immediately punched him again, harder, and this time Daniel’s hands flew up to cover his face.
  “FATALITY!” she screamed so loud that it silenced the entire courtyard.
  Daniel dropped to his knees, and as he did, his hands fell away, her punch having spun open a faucet of blood that poured out over the concrete.
   Nadia realized that this would need to be explained.


1998

Immediately upon opening the door, Amanda Heller broke out into a fit of delight. “Oh, sweetheart. You look beautiful.”
  Grace, the neighbor’s daughter, acknowledged Amanda’s adulation with a tight-lipped smile. She stood in front of her beaming mother.
  “This is such a wonderful costume,” cooed Amanda, running her eye over the pink and white silk of Grace’s princess costume. “Did your mommy make this?”
  “No,” said Grace, “it was thirteen dollars.”
  “Oh. Well, come inside, please.” Amanda ushered Grace and her mother inside. “This is so nice of you to take her out, Lisa, Nadia really appreciates it.”
  “No problem.”
  “Nadia will be on her best behavior.”
  Jack rounded the corner. “Hey, Lisa, Grace. What a great princess costume.”
  Grace smiled again.
  “Hey, you’re Princess Grace,” Jack said, this just occurring to him. “Don’t get in a car tonight, honey.”
  Amanda looked at her husband like he was mentally damaged.
  “Nadia,” called Jack down the corridor, “Grace is here, do you want to come out?”
  Nadia reluctantly emerged from behind her father into the foyer. Her long brown hair was tied back in a pigtail, and she was wearing a teal tank top and khaki shorts fastened by a large black belt.
  “What are you, Nadia?” asked Lisa.
  “I’m Lara Croft,” she said. “She’s a tomb raider.”
  “Oh,” said Lisa, endearingly, “is that a character from the Simpsons?”
  “It’s a character from a series of action and exploration-focused video games,” said Jack.
  “How wonderful,” Lisa deadpanned.
  “Nadia wants to make video games when she gets older,” Jack said.
  “Why don’t you ask Nadia what she wants to do?” said Amanda, her tone dripping with level hostility.
  “What do you want to do, baby?”
  “Make video games.”
  Jack smiled. “See?”
  Amanda stared at Jack evenly. “Nadia, go and play with Grace for a minute. Lisa, come and have a glass of wine with us.”
  Lisa looked like she’d rather be anywhere else, but was irresistibly enticed by the prospect of a free drink. Jack filed away that little observation for future reference.


Grace followed Nadia into her room, complaining as soon as she was out of her mother’s earshot. “I wish I could have a badass costume like yours,” she said bitterly. “I’m eleven. I don’t want to be a princess.”
  “Why are you then?” asked Nadia, sitting on her bed.
  “My mom made me. You’re cool. Your parents let you do whatever you want.”
  “I guess so.”
  “What are you dressed as again?”
  “Oh, it’s Lara Croft,” she said, getting to her feet. “she’s this video game heroine. I think she’s awesome. She’s an adventurer and she fights guys and saves the world and all that stuff. It’s so cool for a girl character to be like that, I think. I’d much rather be a tomb raider than a princess. How strong do you feel being a princess?”
  “It feels like I’m here for some guy to save me,” said Grace.
  “Yeah. Exactly. Lara Croft, though, she does the saving.”
  “That does sound cool.”
  Nadia flicked through the jewel cases lying in a disorderly pile on her computer desk, and finally produced the second Tomb Raider game.
  “Here it is. Look at that.”
  Grace took the case from Nadia. The three-dimensional render of Lara Croft on the cover was dressed more or less like Nadia, albeit equipped with handguns and other crucial distinctions.
  “Look at her boobs, though,” said Grace. “These are huge. Like, stupidly huge.”
  “I guess.”
  “I mean, you were talking like this should be a role model for girls or something, but this is just something that was made for guys to look at. Right? How is this better than being a princess? I don’t look like this. Nobody looks like this.”
  “Well,” Nadia paused. “It’s very complicated.”


1999

Nadia realized far too late that the worst thing she could have done the day after the attack was to show up at school as if nothing had really happened. When they first heard the news, it was surreal but somehow, however inappropriately, okay. The story broke when a girl in Nadia’s class got a call from her parents asking that she come home immediately. It was not because she had any relation to the event, but rather all-purpose parental protectiveness that would quickly become overbearing. When the details emerged later that day, the room settled into a collective unease even as the teacher tried to continue with the scheduled lesson. Nobody cried or said anything, but Nadia quietly gripped the edge of her desk and thought about what a weird feeling it was to be safe only by virtue of being unimportant and uninvolved.
  That evening and the next day, images and theories about the shooters began to propagate. It didn’t even occur to Nadia, who was simultaneously wrapped up in and repulsed by the unfolding human drama, that it was a horrible time to be disaffected.
  In general, Nadia couldn’t find much reason to put up with the world – or at least the adolescent world, after all the shit she’d had to endure for the past four years. Although she was human and was always going to care about what other people thought of her, she’d stopped making a show of it. She’d started dressing all in black, wearing black nail polish, even dying her already dark hair a couple of shades darker. She wanted her new look to advertise her complete lack of interest in what was considered to be popular or social. It was an almost-goth-but-not-quite kind of vibe, because even she thought that looked a little gross.
  Nadia had heard, like everyone had, that the killers were aggressive, antisocial, unlikable misfits, and because naturally she didn’t like to think along these lines, it didn’t click for her until the day after the shooting that that was her type. She was that type. And she was used to kids teasing her, mocking her, and that was never cool with her, but the day after was something different. She noticed the stray looks, she caught the whispered conversations, and this time it wasn’t mockery. It was suspicion. Before, you never had to wonder whether somebody was capable of an attack like this because it was incomprehensible. They were thinking now, Nadia could tell, about whether she was capable of that. Whether she would do that. And the thought that anyone would ever ask that of themselves made her sick.
  In the girls’ bathroom, alone, she furiously tried to scratch the black enamel from her fingernails and rubbed her face with tap water to wash away the makeup until the skin around her eyes turned red.


That night, after dinner, Nadia was called from her room. Jack walked her in silence to the kitchen and took a seat next to a sober Amanda. He gestured for her to sit.
  Amanda cleared her throat. “We’ve been hearing,” she said, “about what happened at the other school. Those… killers, those horrible people, didn’t get along with anyone. They listened to violent music and watched violent movies, and, yes, played violent video games.”
  Nadia rolled her eyes, expecting her father to do the same.
  “Listen to me, young lady,” Amanda continued. “You’re all dressed in black, you don’t like other kids, you don’t want to go out or do anything except stay in your room. We are worried about you. We are worried about how you have been acting. You are surrounded by violence.”
  “Come on! Mom! I am not a freak.”
  “You don’t like other kids,” Amanda repeated.
  “They make fun of me. I hate them.”
  “Do you understand that what those boys did is wrong?” Amanda asked.
  “Oh my God!” Nadia threw up her hands. “Leave me alone!”
  Nadia jumped up from the table and ran back to her room, throwing herself flat onto her bed. Amanda appeared in the doorway seconds later, followed by Jack.
  “Do not walk away from me, Nadia Rose Heller. Look at what you spend your time with.” Amanda pulled a random game box from Nadia’s shelving; it turned out to be Tomb Raider.
  “She’s holding guns in her hand. Is this what you think is cool?” She dropped the box on the carpet.
  “I don’t even like her anymore,” yelled Nadia, lifting her head up and matching Amanda in her rare display of brazen antagonism.
  “What about this one? Fallout? Half-Life? More guns, Nadia. You cannot have this be your life. You cannot.”
  “They are not real,” said Nadia, whose throat was starting to constrict, “don’t treat me like a freak.”
  “Playing these is one thing, Nadia,” said Amanda, “your father used to play these, but you are hostile. You are moody and you are angry and I do not understand it. I will not let you be like this.”
  “I’m sorry I’m not obviously so perfect like you are. People hate me and now you hate me. I hate you. Get out. Get out of my room.”
  Amanda glared at her now openly weeping daughter. “This conversation is not finished.” She turned and left, leaving Jack in the hallway.
  “Dad,” said Nadia, crying, “come on. You can’t think I’m like this.”
  “Nadia,” said Jack softly, “I don’t understand why you don’t have friends. I don’t know why you choose to be so angry.”
   “Why does it matter? I’m not a psycho. Why can’t you understand that?”
  Nadia buried her head in a pillow. “Please leave me alone.” She heard Jack close the door. She picked up the Tomb Raider box that her mom had left on the floor. Lara Croft looked so content, so happy, Nadia finally saw, with being a natural born killer. The hero was a hero by virtue of killing hundreds of people. Lara Croft looked so uncomplicated, and Nadia had never been more pissed off with her before. She put her foot through the box.
  Nadia turned the television on and lay there on the bed watching legal dramas and local news and David Letterman until she drifted off to sleep.


2000

It was the first day of the new school year, and Nadia didn’t give more than a second’s thought to what she would wear. She pulled on the old, red Atari t-shirt that used to belong to her dad, as if it were a t-shirt like any other. Not that Nadia was keeping track, but the wardrobe choice completely went without comment for what was almost the entire day. After school, she waited outside the gates for her mom to pick her up. She was standing there next to Alyssa French, one of the new girls in her class, someone she would probably never talk to ordinarily.
  “This is no good,” said Alyssa, waving a hand up and down Nadia’s chest. “An Atari t-shirt. That’s so retro, and not in a good way. Don’t get offended; I’m just trying to give you some advice.”
  Nadia shrugged. “I really didn’t think there was a problem with it.”
  “There’s no problem exactly,” Alyssa winced, “but it’s not particularly fashionable. It’s not au current. Personally, that retro, cliquey look is not what I would be going for. You have very delicate features, you should be styling yourself in something classic. Something timeless. An Atari t-shirt? That’s not very timeless.”
  Alyssa indicated her pants. “Like these. White, low-rise jeans. This outfit is very chic. Something to learn from.”
  Nadia reviewed her own dark denim jeans. “Maybe you’re right.”
  “Take it from me. You want a look that lasts.” Alyssa set her hands on her hips and looked off into the distance. “Anyway, I can’t spend any more time on you. I have Smash Mouth tickets."


2001

Nadia never thought for an instant that the weekend could lose its appeal. Here she was, though, clicking her heels and sitting quietly in her dad’s new apartment. Jack and Amanda had been separated since November, and Nadia thought it was very considerate of her parents to wait for a whole two months after the biggest national tragedy in their lifetimes to announce they were divorcing each other. She supposed the separation had technically begun earlier than that; Nadia just not having picked up on the subtle clues like her parents sleeping in separate rooms.
  The city apartment, Jack’s first ‘permanent’ set-up after the hotel room, was remarkably neat and spacious, with stairs leading up to a bedroom and bathroom. As Nadia was getting used to thinking of her parents as individual entities, it was becoming clear to her that her dad actually made a lot of money.
  “Hey,” said Jack, coming down the stairs, “have you worked out what you’re going to do for Christmas?”
  “I think Mom’s family is getting together for lunch. We’re going to Grandma and Granddad’s place.”
  Jack’s non-verbal reaction to that demonstrated that he had finally found the silver lining in no longer being married to his wife. Nadia thought it was the first time Jack had been honest with her about the separation.
  “Maybe I can come round Christmas morning,” Nadia offered.
  “Yeah. That would be good.” Jack made his way to his new en suite kitchen. “Do you want some hot chocolate?”
  “Okay.” Nadia pulled open one of Jack’s still unpacked boxes, containing stacks of CDs.
  “What are you listening to these days?” Jack asked her, noting this.
   “I’m not really listening to anything at the moment.” Nadia flicked through Jack’s excessive Billy Joel collection. Despite not listening to that much music anymore, she still knew enough to know that even one Billy Joel album was in itself an excessive collection.
  Jack sat down at the table with a mug of hot chocolate for Nadia, which she happily accepted because sipping it meant she wasn’t expected to talk.
  “How’s work?” she said anyway. This was something Amanda used to ask.
  “Good. Yeah. We’re working on a new project. I’m actually going to be up in Seattle for a week in January, at a meeting.”
  “Oh, okay. Should I write those dates down?”
  “I’m not sure of the specific days. I’ll email them to you later.”
  “Okay, cool.”
  She sipped the hot chocolate.
  “What did you do at school this week?”
  “Uh, well, English and Social Studies were fun. I liked those. And we’re studying for an algebra test. It’s kind of difficult. I don’t know.”
  “Oh, I can help you with that. Yeah. Bring your textbooks over next weekend and I can go over that with you.”
  “Alright. Thanks.”
  Nadia took another sip. Jack was looking like he wished he had something to drink. It wasn’t that she loved her mom more than her dad, Nadia assured herself, but at least Mom was still at the house, which had a room for Nadia to escape to.
  “Oh,” she said, “have you played GTA 3?”
  “Yeah, I have actually,” said Jack. “It’s very good.”
  “What do you think of all the controversy about it?”
  “It’s basically the same old story. The media’s sensationalizing and exaggerating everything.”
  “That’s what I thought.”
  “Though it is definitely violent and you shouldn’t be playing it. But what’s surprising about the game, I think, and what’s getting missed in the mainstream, is just how good it is. It’s actually significant. The 3D open city thing is such a revelation, and so well handled. They really brought it to life, and now that they did this it’s so obvious that this is where games will be going.”
  “I wish more games had picked up on that thing of having this huge, immediately accessible game world, like Fallout had or something.”
   “Yeah, rather than that more siphoned-off, linear mission structure kind of thing. It’s hard to do, I’m sure, but when it works like it does here, and when you get to explore it in three dimensions, it’s, just, I mean, wow. It’s perfect.”
  “Yeah,” Nadia nodded enthusiastically. “I bet.”
  Jack nodded and waited for her to say something.


That weekend, the first one Nadia had spent alone with her father, Jack had given her his copy of the new PlayStation 2 game Ico, along with his highest recommendation. It was, he said, just as important and potentially influential in its own way as Grand Theft Auto III, and not being age-restricted, it was something that she could play without Jack feeling like a bad parent. Nadia played it on the console hooked up to her bedroom TV over the rest of the week. This was the same week that Amanda took up part-time work and Nadia came home to an empty house after school each day. Her father was right: it was a great game, though so far it had failed to elicit the kind of emotional response it obviously had in Jack.
  It was a short game, too, and on Wednesday night, after Amanda cooked dinner for the two of them, she returned to her room for Ico’s final stretch. The end of the game was unusual amongst video games in that it was not especially intense or frustrating. Lying on her bed, Nadia figured out the solution to Ico’s final challenge quickly enough, and passively moved her thumbs around the controller to complete it. The final non-interactive movie that concluded the game was relatively downbeat as video games go. Nadia acknowledged emotionally that it was sad, but nothing prepared her for the uncontrollable, racking sobs that abruptly overcame her and lasted throughout the game’s entire credit sequence. She wept with her palms covering her face, and Amanda paused in the open doorway.
  “You’re crying at a video game?” she said, bemused. “You see something new every day.”


2002

Tyler was Nadia’s date. Jack forced himself to keep that thought in his mind if he had any hope of dealing with this sad new reality. Tyler was Nadia’s date. Tyler was also in Jack’s apartment, waiting patiently at the kitchen table while Nadia was in the bathroom upstairs getting ready. Jack swore that Nadia was taking about twenty minutes longer than was necessary to ‘get ready’.
  Tyler was a shaggy-haired dude with glasses. He was either fifteen or sixteen, and a student at Nadia’s high school. It was their third date, but Jack’s first time meeting him. He did not consider this to be a match made in heaven. The thought of Nadia becoming the future Mrs. Tyler briefly crossed his mind and nearly made him vomit.
  “Do you want something to drink, Tyler?”
  “Oh, no thanks, Mr. Heller.”
  Jack leaned over the kitchen counter. He guessed that he had an obligation to make conversation. He thought that while he had Tyler here he might as well ask him something he was legitimately interested in.
   “Hey, what do you like about Nadia?” he asked, genuinely curious.
   “Oh, uh,” Tyler looked unsure of what to say. He seemed like he was about to say he didn’t know, but realized saying that would be a mistake in front of Nadia’s father. “She’s fun. She’s really fun.”
  Nadia came down from the stairs, and for a minute it was like some movie where the glamorous-looking woman silences the crowd as she descends the spiral gold staircase. This was the closest Jack had ever seen his daughter to being made up. She was wearing a long blue dress and eye shadow. Eye shadow! Jack thought. This was a bad sign.
  “Hey,” said Nadia, taking Tyler’s hand, “are you ready to go?”
  Tyler stood up. “Yeah, wow, you look great. Bye, Mr. Heller, nice meeting you.
  “Bye, Dad.”
  “Okay!” said Jack, waving lamely, “bye! Have a good time! Be safe!”
  Nadia and Tyler closed the door behind them and Jack flopped down on the couch with the strongest urge he’d ever had to drink massively.


Tyler had taken her out for dinner at some Italian place where they struggled for things to talk about other than the latest high school drama. They agreed that the Social Studies teacher was attempting to conceal a pregnancy and that Jessica Booker was a bitch. The meal was basically okay, she thought, and she didn’t have to pay for it either. She’d noticed Tyler wince when the bill came, and this made her crack up on the inside.
  Tyler had parked outside Jack’s apartment, and as Nadia thanked him for dinner, he asked her to wait, because he said he had something to say.
  “You’re so fun to be around,” said Tyler. “I don’t know how explain it more than that. I think you’re fun. You’re really fun. And you have really attractive eyes and your voice is beautiful. I just think that you are so impressive and I want to spend more time with you. There’s something addictive about you. It’s something that just makes my heart beat faster. When I say you’re fun, I mean… compelling. Other girls don’t have that. Some girls are really pretty but it’s all flash. But with you, you’re really pretty, and there’s some, uh, something special that you have that makes me want to be around you and hold you and keep coming back to you.”
  Tyler stared into her deeply.
  Nadia glanced around, equivocating. Maybe this was as good as it was going to get. She looked back and Tyler and arched an eyebrow. “Can you take off your glasses at least?”
  “Yeah,” said Tyler, pulling them off, “definitely.”
  Nadia sighed and leaned across the seats, sensing the heat of Tyler’s gross sweat as she came closer. She shut her eyes tight and kept them that way as she pressed her lipstick-smothered lips against his.


2003

Under the hum of the blow-dryer, Nadia sang into the mirror at a carefully calculated level that her father probably wouldn’t hear.
  “We’re the kids in America,” she vocalized to the backing track playing in her mind. She helped sweep back her blond-streaked hair with her free hand. “We’re the kids in America. WHOA-OH!”
  At that last part, Nadia closed her eyes and twirled, her outstretched arm sending a bottle of mouthwash flying to the floor.
  “Everybody live for the music go round.” Leaning closer to the mirror, she put in gold earrings, then pulled a pink jacket from the hook on the bathroom door and tried it on. Checking out her reflection, she came to the conclusion that this looked awesome.


“What, are you going to a costume party or something?” asked Jack as Nadia came down the stairs.
  “No, Dad. It’s a look.”
  “People didn’t actually dress like that in the eighties, you know. I would remember.”
  “Then they were missing out.”
  Nadia cracked open a bottle of water at the kitchen counter and checked the clock on the wall. “Do me a favor, Dad, when this guy shows up, don’t call him a jerk-off. Actually, stop calling my dates jerk-offs period. When you say that, sometimes they leave right then.”
  “I was doing you a favor with that last guy. He was a jerk-off. I understand if you want to go out with someone who’s into games, but you can afford to be a little more selective than that.”
  “So what if he doesn’t have your perfect critical taste?”
  “At least don’t go out with somebody who’s obsessed with one console over the other. That gets creepy. That’s just a weird sort of possessiveness that you should know, from playing video games, to stay the hell away from. He used the phrase ‘GayStation 2’. That was not a healthy relationship.”
  “It wasn’t a relationship. We went bowling.”
  Nadia took another swig from the bottle and looked at the clock. Thirty seconds until he was supposed to knock on the door.
  “Anyway, please don’t call this guy a jerk-off, otherwise it’s over. But, let me just warn you,” she said quickly, “and please don’t overreact to this, but he is kind of very pro-Sony and, yeah, he really hates Microsoft, and spells it with a dollar sign and


2004

Amanda Addison had changed her hair. Jack not having seen her in three months, Amanda’s dark, choppy bangs were new to him, and he had to admit they were flattering. Jack ran a hand through his hair self-consciously. Jack and Amanda sat next to one another on green plastic chairs arranged in the middle of Nadia’s high school auditorium. The room was steadily filling up with other proud – but preemptively board at the prospect of a two-hour-plus ceremony – parents.
  “I’ve been reading a lot about separation anxiety,” announced Amanda. “I think overall I’ve been reasonably lucky. I missed out on postpartum depression, and even you didn’t manage to screw up my life too badly. But separation anxiety… maybe I’m overdue for something to destroy me.”
  “Yeah, I wonder what it would be like to experience some sort of separation anxiety,” said Jack.
  “She’s suddenly not going to be there in my house anymore. My little daughter’s going to be gone forever.”
  “I also can’t imagine what that would be like.”
  Amanda turned to Jack. “You’re only going to be seeing her a couple of times a year. Doesn’t that bother you?”
  “Of course it bothers me. But it’s not like she’s going to the Sorbonne, she’s going to Stanford. This isn’t the eighteenth century where we send her away on a passenger ship and the next time we see her she’s married to a sea captain and has two children.” Jack paused. “At least, she better not be.”
  Amanda shrugged. “I guess.”
  “On the upside, though,” said Jack, “Stanford University! Our little girl is going to Stanford University.”
  “Yes. It’s very heartwarming.”
  “Don’t overdo yourself on the emotion, you ice queen. Remember that time when Nadia’s teacher called us in for a meeting and told us how bad she was at everything? Stanford University! Man, I wish I could see her fat face now.”
  Amanda checked her watch. “What did you get Nadia?”
  “For graduation? As a gift?”
  “Yeah.”
  Jack stared blankly. “What did you get her?”
  “That new cellphone she was asking for.”
  “Oh. Okay, good.”
  “What did you get – wait, jeez, I wonder if I can possibly guess. Jack, did you get her a video game?”
  “No.”
  Amanda looked truly shocked. “No?”
  “I wrote her a letter.”
  “A letter?”
  “Yeah.”
  “What did you write in it?”
  “None of your business.”
  “Fine.”
  “Also,” said Jack, grudgingly, “I got her a video game. But the letter was the main thing.”
  The school’s teenaged, volunteer sound technician approached the podium on the stage and checked the microphone levels.
  “I’m not so sure about what she’s got planned for Stanford, though,” said Jack. “Media studies? English literature? I mean, after all this talk about video games I was kind of hoping she’d express an interest in computer science or art or music or something more overtly connected to game design.”
  “Oh, get over yourself.”
  “What?”
  Amanda raised a single condescending eyebrow at him. “She is a young woman now. For the love of God, you have to stop living vicariously through her. Let her decide what her own interests are.”
  “Nadia likes video games.”
  “She doesn’t, though. She likes you. For reasons that elude me.” Amanda gave him the saddest, sweetest smile he’d ever seen. “All your life you acted like playing video games was how you made Daddy happy.”
  “That’s not true.”
  “Yes it is. And it’s fine if you didn’t mean it that way. But don’t pressure her anymore.”
  The lights in the back of the auditorium dimmed, and a student pulled the back doors shut.
  “Get ready to applaud our daughter,” said Amanda.
  “I’m going to applaud louder than you.”
  “Like hell you are.”


2005

The inevitable drawback to a life of playing and collecting video games, Nadia discovered, was moving to Stanford and having to reduce all her possessions to the contents of five cardboard boxes. Getting good boxes was a task in itself; high-quality storage boxes proving themselves as valuable a commodity as cigarettes in prison. Nadia had forced herself to dispassionately cull her game and console collection, eliminating everything but the titles she knew she’d want to play again, and consoles that she thought would be most worthwhile for the final year of their lifespan before being phased out completely. Halfway through the drive from San Francisco to Stanford, Nadia realized she didn’t even know if her dorm room had a television, and she nearly started clawing at the windows.
  Nadia’s box of games and game paraphernalia sat partially unpacked on the dorm room floor, some cases strewn out on her new bed alongside approximately two thousand dollars worth of film, English and history textbooks. In the process of moving in, she only briefly met her roommate, a blonde named Emma Hadley, who instantly had to disappear somewhere, leaving Nadia in the cramped double room by herself without either of them having formed an impression of the other. It was just as well, Nadia, thought, since she’d become slightly self-conscious about revealing her game-playing habits to a total stranger, and if this particular stranger didn’t react well then it would be all the worse. She wasn’t sure how she’d be able to hide this part of the life from Emma, and, as evidenced by the GameCube sitting prominently on her bedspread, she wasn’t really trying anyway. Nadia had been bracing herself for the moment where her roommate would glance over her game collections, look at Nadia, and either silently or very loudly wonder what was all this garbage.
  Emma flew through the door, as Nadia stood awkwardly by the bed. She cast an eye over the whole room and looked at Nadia.
  “Hey,” she said, the second sentence of hers that Nadia had heard, “my friends and I are going out for a drink, you should come.”
  “Uh, yeah, okay,” said Nadia, “I’m eighteen, though.”
  “So what? Come on.” Emma grabbed Nadia’s hand and pulled her out of the room. Nadia, pulling the door shut behind her, still had no idea who Emma Hadley was, but thanked God for her speed-of-sound socializing.


Nadia and Emma, who were in many of the same classes, ranked all of their professors on a scale of who was most likely to sleep with one of their students, get fired for it and write a novel about the experience. Their film studies professor, they agreed, was currently coming third. One time, after he asked Nadia to speak to him after the class ended, he skyrocketed up the list.
  “Nadia,” said the professor, speaking to the shifty college girl at the front of an empty auditorium, “I know that you’re into video games, and I thought you should know that if you wanted to incorporate that into your essay, that would be great. Games are an exciting new form of media that have lots of interesting connections with film and theater and literature, and if you wanted to do an essay that explored those connections, I think that would be very interesting.”
  Nadia blinked. “How do you even know I’m into video games?”
  “You’re wearing a Double Fine t-shirt.”
  “Oh. Okay. Well, thanks, but, I mean, I’ve played video games all my life and I didn’t necessarily come to college to study them more. I’m kind of more interested in learning about things that I’m not already super familiar with.”
  The professor furrowed his brow. “You’re a very strange girl.”


Nadia slammed Erik against her dorm room door, running her hands down from his shoulders and dragging her wet mouth across his lower lip. She felt him adjust his back against the whiteboard that had ‘Emma + Nadia’ written on it within a platonic heart. She fumbled blindly behind Erik for the door handle, pulled it open, and they fell back into the room. Friday night had began with happy hour cocktails at some absurdly impressive hotel, and five hours later Nadia found herself in some pitch black club downing her second-ever shot of tequila, having had her first about thirty seconds earlier. Stumbling through the floor of the club in an all-new zenith of inebriation, she decided that there would be no better end to the evening than to grab the hottest-looking guy to make eye contact with her and pull him into a dance.
  The dorm room was dark, illuminated only by the moon and the adjacent building that seemed to be a lightbulb factory that arranged all its display bulbs in the window and shone them at full power across the street. Nadia fucking hated that building. She lead him by the hand into the room and pushed him onto her bed, assuming that she was aiming right and he wasn’t going to crack his head open on a bookshelf. Nadia somehow resisted the inhumanly powerful urge to blurt out how fucking drunk she was.
  With Erik lying prostrate on the bed, Nadia climbed over him and they kissed again, Nadia awkwardly sliding her legs under his. Totally uncoordinated, her hands were alternatively pulling her hair back from her face, grabbing at his shirt and hooking into his belt. Erik broke off the kiss and sat up abruptly, his right hand canvassing the area of the sheets under his back until he produced a game controller.
  “What is this?” he said.
  “It’s a WaveBird. Take your fucking pants off.”
  Slapping the controller from his hand to the floor, Nadia arched back from Erik and pulled her black sweater over her head, swinging it across the room.
  “What is that?” Erik brushed the back of his hand across Nadia’s chest.
  “What?” She looked down. “This? It’s a Half-Life 2 t-shirt.”
  “No, I mean your necklace.”
  Nadia, who by this point had completely blacked out what she had chosen to wear that morning, held up the pewter necklace closer to her eyes. “It’s one of the Tetris pieces,” she said. “It’s the S-shape. In silver.”
  Erik’s eyes darted to the edge of the room. “And what is this huge stack of video games over there?”
  “What do you mean?”
  Erik sat up, sliding his legs out from under Nadia. “I’m sorry. This is too weird. I feel like there’s something not right here.”
  “What?”
  “It’s like you have a shelf of stuffed animals. I’m sorry, I really have to go.” Erik got up off the bed.
  “What? Where the fuck are you going?” called Nadia.
  “Sorry, Natalie,” said Erik, opening and closing the door.
  Nadia, still on her knees, stared over her shoulder at the door in utter disbelief, before falling onto the bed and pounding the shit out of a pillow. “Fuck! I hate video games! Fuck video games, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! God dammit! Fuck!”
  She collapsed utterly and face first into her bed, and lay there for a minute until a thought occurred.
  “Hey, Emma?”
  No response.
  “Yeah?” said Emma, after a while.
  Nadia paused, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Goodnight, Emma.”
  “Goodnight, Nadia.”


2006

The weekend before Nadia had an important Philosophy essay due, Emma brought her along to the apartment warming party of a couple of her law school friends. Nadia figured she could structure the essay in her head as she socialized, and begin writing the paper on her arm if necessary. To get herself started, she wrote the word ‘introduction’ on her left shoulder and ‘conclusion’ on the back of her hand. Emma was greeted with cheers as she came in the door, and she pointed to Nadia and introduced her to the room as Nadia, who likes video games. Nadia waved meekly.
  “You don’t have to introduce me as Ms. Pac-Man,” Nadia hissed at Emma.
  “They know your interests now. I’m doing you a favor. Get in there.”
  Nadia negotiated her way through the living room looking for a drink, and was called over mid-search by a big guy in a sleeveless t-shirt.
  “Hey,” he said, raising his voice over the Green Day song, “do you play Gears of War?”
  “No, I haven’t yet.”
  “It’s the fucking best game.”
  “Yeah, what do you like about it.”
  “Man, it’s like playing football with chainsaws. Slicing up dudes in multiplayer, it’s, oh, it’s so awesome. The chainsaw goes like this.” He held out his hands and mimed the decline of the chainsaw through its imaginary victim. “NGGGHHHHHHHHH, squirt. Fucking A.”
  Nadia smiled thinly and insincerely.
  “Hey,” he said, “do you have a 360? Give me your Gamertag.”
  Not having any paper, he held out his hand for Nadia to write on. She wearily obliged, writing down a phrase that was one letter removed from her real Gamertag. Moving on, she found a beer in the kitchen, opened it, and then spilled it on her chest when she turned around to see some girl standing six inches away from her face.
  “What kind of baseball game should I get for my little brother?”
  “What?” said Nadia, startled.
  “He’s nine.”
  “What kind of baseball game?”
  “I went into the store and there were like twenty of them.”
  “Oh. Uh. I don’t really know. I don’t play them.”
  “Well, think about it and get back to me.”
  “Yeah. Okay.”
  Shaking her head, Nadia moved back into the crowd with half of her drink in hand. She was looking around for Emma when another guy stopped her.
  “Hey, Nadia, right?” he said, “So you’re into games, do you have a PSP? Or a DS?”
  “I have a DS Lite. Yeah.”
  “Can we take a picture of you with it?”
  “For what?”
  “It’s for our gaming website.”
  She shrugged. “Why do you want a picture of my DS?”
  The guy shook his head. “No, it’s a picture of you with your DS.”
  “What? Why? Doing what with it?”
  “Well, holding it, and, like, licking it.”
  “What?!”
  He narrowed his eyes. “You know.”
  “Get a life!” Nadia emptied the remainder of her drink over his shirt, and took off in the opposite direction.
  “Bitch,” he shouted after her.
  Moving through the crowd, Nadia spotted a face that she recognized, a guy with DiCaprio-ish hair and glasses standing alone, and called out to him.
  “Hey, are you Mark? Are you in my Political Science class?”
  “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen you there. Nadia, right?”
  “Yeah. Hey, let me ask you. Out of all the candidates in the race right now, do you think there’s any Democrat who has a chance of beating Clinton for the nomination?”
  “Yeah, I think some of them have a chance.”
  “I think you’re wrong.” Nadia glanced around. “I’m going outside,” she said to him, tugging lightly on his sleeve. “Come and talk to me.”



Lying on her bed, Nadia plumbed the depths of Emma’s iPod while her roommate was out at a class. She managed to entertain herself for hours, far beyond her expectations, until Emma reentered the room and threw her bag onto a chair.
  “I’m loving these Pavement songs,” Nadia told her. “Boys are dying on these streets!” She faked the drum part with her eyes closed.
  “Yeah, they’re really good.”
  “And while you were gone I listened to this Radiohead song Creep like twenty times in a row. How did I never find out about this stuff before?”
  “You might also like Yo La Tengo,” said Emma, “they’re kind of like a nicer Velvet Underground. Like, if the Velvet Underground sang about summer instead of heroin.”
  “They sang about heroin?”
  “Yeah, and S&M and shit.”
  Nadia stared at her in disbelief. “They did what?” She scrolled through the iPod to find Emma’s Velvet Underground songs. “Holy shit.”


2007

This was the week of student presentations in Nadia’s film studies class. Nadia, selected at random, had been lucky-slash-unlucky enough to give her dissertation on Mulholland Drive in the first timeslot. She’d since checked out for the remainder of the week, and on Thursday, Nadia was sitting through the third ten-minute presentation at the back of the lecture theater, her bored head resting in her bored hand. Jamison, one of the students, stood in front of the podium, reading off his notes, the projector not having kicked in yet.
  “It’s one of the most highly-regarded pieces of work in the medium,” he read. “Prominent industry critics like Gamespot and Gamespy called it one of the most important, seminal video games ever, and if you look at the third-person action games that have followed its release, you can see that its influence is keenly felt. You’ll probably find a consensus amongst video games fans that Gears of War’s accomplishment within its medium is comparable to that of Citizen Kane.
  “Its significance comes from how it subverts the action game genre. While it’s fast-paced and action-packed, it’s very smart and melancholy and personal. When you delve into the game, you’ll see that it’s really the story of a ruined world, and about the emotional toll of death and war. I’m going to show a clip now, this is from one of the game’s trailers.”
  The projector flickered into life, and ran a Gears of War trailer, which coupled footage of the main character walking through the desolate city, curiously caressing the face of a broken statue, with the slow, piano-backed, misery-in-overdrive Gary Jules cover of Mad World; a song that existed to accompany every high school boy’s first break-up. An appreciative hush fell over the room.
  Nadia recalled her first and last time playing Gears of War online, the mic channel broadcasting prolonged silence, intermittently punctuated by coughing and then a slow, sustained orgasm noise. It made her especially uneasy when the other participants started talking and revealed themselves to all be nasal thirteen-year-olds. Nadia had started another game without the headset, but this ended up making her feel like the kind of dude who would protest that he didn’t know that that girl was fifteen.
  The trailer received light applause. The girl sitting to Nadia’s left leaned over and whispered how she never knew video games were this sophisticated. Nadia rolled her eyes.


Nadia critically adjusted her blouse in her wardrobe mirror while Emma lounged on her bed reading an issue of Vogue.
  “I forgot to tell you,” said Emma, “my sister and her kid are hugely into the Wii. Her husband, too, and when my parents go over to her house, they get everyone involved in that thing, what’s it called. Wii Sports. They eat that shit up.”
  “That’s nice,” said Nadia, putting in her earrings.
  Emma looked over the magazine. “Where’s he taking you?”
  “Don’t know.”
  “Just, you know, be safe. Do what comes naturally.”
  “Get out of my life!”


Following dinner, Greg parked the car outside Nadia’s dorm and sighed as he turned off the ignition.
  “I feel though as this is the most revolutionary date I’ve ever been on. It’s so easy to be superficial where you’re concerned. People I know just think you’re fun and pretty and that’s all that they care to know about you. I see something else in you. You are sublime. You’re deeply smart and literate, you challenge my assumptions at every turn. I’m trying to get around your personality, but you have such a unique, peculiar soul. You just shatter my perceptions of what I expect to exist. I’m constantly engaged when I’m with you.
   “The core of you, it’s something so special. It resonates. It’s something that comes along so rarely and when I see it reminds me why I like people in the first place. It reminds me why I like you. You take my breath away.”
  Greg looked at her expectantly. Nadia checked out the window, turned back to Greg, and winced.
  “Can you take your glasses off at least?” she said.
  “Yeah, definitely.”
  Nadia wearily leaned in for the kiss.


2008

There was a knock at her door, and Nadia, while trying to maintain her concentration on a line in her lecture notes about high-definition cinematography, called for the person to come in. Darren, walking in, asked if he could borrow Nadia’s Guitar Hero Rocks the ‘80s disc. Keeping her eyes fixed on the notes, Nadia waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the entire room, which was still evidently sufficient instruction for Darren to find the game and take off. Nadia had been effectively sealed in her room for three days, preparing for an important upcoming film exam. Now, by her senior year of college, she had been thoroughly disillusioned to learn that writing about entertainment could be so time-consuming. She had given the last two hours over to an intensive crash course in Molly Haskell’s entire body of critical thought; Haskell’s book now lying splayed over Nadia’s bed.
  Darren had pulled the Guitar Hero disc from a stack of games that appeared to be Nadia’s game collection, though this was not entirely accurate. Since junior year, Nadia’s father had been Fed Ex-ing her games that he had played and highly recommended. Nadia had received the first one, BioShock, gratefully, and played it for a couple of minutes that felt so innate and familiar. She put off playing the rest of the game, feeling guilty about it, because she had a busy weekend scheduled, and by the time she was ready to go back to it, Mass Effect arrived, and then Grand Theft Auto IV, and then Oblivion. She couldn’t believe that she ever had the time or the patience to exhaust even one of these forty, fifty, sixty hour games. She would actually really intend on catching up and making her way through the increasingly large pile, but invariably there was some band in the area that she’d never seen play live before, or another first date to think about. By now, she could construct a CD rack out of undisturbed game cases. Then there were the new games that she rejected out of hand entirely, like when she was out with friends and someone mentioned that they were looking forward to the new Metal Gear Solid game, to which Nadia laughed derisively and said Metal Gear was just a bad movie. The guy gave her a dirty look.
  The film exam went well enough, Nadia believing that she had put in a competent performance bolstered by an unnecessarily liberal use of Molly Haskell quotes. Returning home, she fell backwards onto the bed and shut her eyes. She thought that, by the time she opened them, she didn’t want to still be in her dorm room. She couldn’t just go back to studying or spending this night like she spent any other. This was what college was doing to her, she recognized. Having been there for so long, even so close to the end, she had fallen into such a routine. She wondered if she could get excited about a life where she put so much effort and energy into something just to come home and continue as if nothing had changed. If she was going to keep going at all then she needed something to shake it up, something new, just to keep her awake. Whatever the lifestyle equivalent of smelling salts was, she wanted that. She lifted her hand into her hair and considered dying it again.


The new blonde Nadia opened Darren’s door, her coat hanging over her arm. “I’m going to see this Yo La Tengo show tonight,” she said, “does anybody want to come?”
  “We’re playing Rock Band here, Nadia,” said Darren, tapping on the drum kit.
  Nadia shut the door behind her.


2009

On Monday, Nadia was to begin her first real post-college job, a copy-editing position at a public relations firm. She spent the weekend before taking the job up in San Francisco with her parents, and the last thing she did on Sunday before going home was to see a showing of Synecdoche, New York with her father. After the movie, they went to a diner for coffee, and Nadia was about to broach the subject of what her father thought of the film – she was throwing around adjectives like powerful and heartbreaking in her head – when her father volunteered that it was aggressively nonsensical garbage. Nadia decided not to pursue it further.
  “What time do you start?” asked Jack, stirring his coffee.
  “Nine.”
  “What are you going to be doing?”
  “As I understand it, it’s just proof-reading and editing reports and stuff like that.”
  “Ah.”
  “I mean, it’s not a great job but it’s kind of what I want to get into, you know: publishing and magazine editing.”
  “Yeah. It’s a good first step if that’s what you want to do.”
  Nadia timidly sipped at her coffee, scared of how late this was going to keep her up.
  Jack kept his head down for a minute. “Hey,” he said, “have you been following this whole controversy about Resident Evil 5?”
  “I – I haven’t, actually, I don’t know what it is. I didn’t even know they were making a new Resident Evil, to be honest.”
  “Oh, well, it’s – never mind, it’s not important. Did you ever play that copy of Resident Evil 4 that I sent you?”
  “I, uh, I didn’t,” she said, feeling a little shamed, “I got caught up with other things.”
  “No, that’s fine,” said Jack, nodding. “It’s just really good.”
  Nadia scratched at her nails and sighed. “I can understand you not being excited about this PR job. ‘Cause I know that for a long time, although you never explicitly said this so much, you were hoping for me to do something with video games, especially after the industry just became huge. Not to mention you clearly wanted me to keep playing them. And I don’t know what to tell you, Dad. I know that this part of your life is important to you and you get mad when people undervalue it, and this is not supposed to be me acting out.
  “I think the thing is that I have just, finally, finished my education, and it’s been almost twenty years of it. I can’t even remember a time that I wasn’t in school. This is the first time in my life where – I’ve done everything that I was supposed to do. I finished school. I finished college. There’s nothing that traditionally comes next other than me getting to decide what I want to do for a living. I feel like I’m finally ready for my life to begin, and I just, I’m not, I don’t start thinking about the past again. I want something new.
  “I know I disappoint you,” she said, “and I know you wish that I liked certain things more, or made other decisions. I don’t think that I’m like you.”
  Nadia shrugged and lifted the corner of her mouth slightly: a sad, weary half-smile meant to convey that it was okay. She looked down at the table. Jack rubbed at his temples. “Do you think that it is the job of a parent to tell their children that they love them even when they don’t mean it? Do you think that if you were running drugs and stealing things and hurting people that I would come visit you in prison and tell you how proud I was of you? I don’t always know what to say to you. But I have never not been honest with you. When I say that I am proud of you, I mean it. I don’t throw that around emptily. If you think that I say that a lot, it’s because I am crazy about you. I look at you and the last thing I see is somebody that is lacking anything. Jesus. Look at how confident you are. Look at how smart, how accomplished, how funny you are. Look at you going out into the world. You are the best thing I have ever been involved in.
   “You never got to meet my father. I still have no clue if he ever liked me. I know he liked to call me an idiot, and I honestly am not sure if he loved me underneath all that or actually thought I was an idiot. I have no idea.
   “The game thing, I don’t care. I wanted to share something with you. But I don't need to invent things for me to have in common with my daughter.”
  Jack got up from the diner table, finding his wallet in his jacket pocket. “I’m going to go pay for this,” he said, putting a hand on Nadia’s shoulder and leaning down to kiss her forehead. Nadia gently touched her hand against his.
  A teenage couple were sitting at a table across the diner, and when the boyfriend, a real skater type, got up to use the bathroom, Nadia got a look at his girlfriend. Slouching in her chair, she had bleached-blond hair, dark bags around her eyes, a nose piercing, and a brand-new red Atari t-shirt. Noticing Nadia staring at her, the girl frowned and shot her a glare asking what the hell her problem was. Nadia thought about what in the world she could possibly say to this stranger. Looking back at her hesitantly, she tried to think of something and then burst out laughing.


2010

Michael Wyeth was seriously concerned. He was in his late thirties, he was respectable, he was responsible, and he had chosen such a bad night to drink heavily. He had barely slept when he boarded the red-eye to New York City at five in the morning, and the colleague he was traveling with took one look at him and was clearly mortified, and a little afraid that would throw up in her lap mid-flight. Michael was usually never like this at all. His excuse this time was that by the time he had started to drink irresponsibly, he was drunk. The New York meeting was with the representative of a vodka company, ironically, vodka being perhaps the only thing that he didn’t drink the night before.
  Upon landing, the woman, obviously alarmed about this impending meeting, pulled him into an airport bathroom. This was a bad look, although one he’d have been able to find some enjoyment in if not for his current death wish. She fed him some aspirin and applied some of her own makeup to his face in the hope of making him look less frightening by degrees.
  They were seated at the restaurant before the client arrived. Michael scanned the menu, trying to hold his gaze steady. The woman expressed her preference for the salmon. He wanted to order coffee and chicken filled with coffee and glazed in morphine.
  When Nick Sullivan from the vodka company showed up, Michael stood up to shake his hand and knew instantly that he had nothing to worry about. He gave Sullivan a smile, shook his hand with total confidence, and settled in. This was home.
  “Nick, I want you to meet one of our writers, Nadia Heller.”
  Nadia and Sullivan shook hands, and everyone gave their orders to the waiter before Sullivan launched into his shopping list of issues. Michael was into this now. His gaze fixed on Sullivan, he nodded, said yes at strategic points, and responded with wit, understanding and compassion. Sullivan outlined what his company perceived to be the strengths and weaknesses of the brand, what they were looking for and hoped to communicate in a public relations campaign, and the kind of character they were hoping to exude in print, television and internet ads.
  “I brought this magazine,” said Sullivan, holding some news weekly up for Michael and Nadia and opening it to a full-page advertisement. “This is the kind of space we want. And, I mean, look what’s in here now. ‘Bayonetta’? Starring some harlot, apparently. Have you two seen these bizarre ads for the Wii? It’s the entire family sitting around the lounge and enjoying their video game console. How deceptive.
  “When I think about video games, the last thing I think of is family values. I think of desensitizing kids to violence, I think of graphic sexual content, I think of school shootings, I think of an entire generation sitting around the TV set and getting dumber.”
  Michael nodded in practiced sympathy.
  “They say it’s a bigger industry than movies now. Well, what can you say to that? I know this is something I would never let my children be a part of.”
  Nadia stood up and looked at Sullivan.
  “You’re a jerk-off,” she said, and she left.