Ryo's buddy Sage wasn't at all what I had expected. 

It was a question of preconceived notions: after listening to Ryo talk about him for a week or so, I had, understandably enough, built up certain expectations in my head. Most of 'em turned out to be mistaken, starting with his appearance. I'd forgotten Haruka's remark about Ryo 'collecting foreigners', so I was real surprised when this guy who looked like he'd dropped in from Southern California turned out to be the mysterious Sage from Sendai. (That, by the way, was something that puzzled me a great deal over the next month: if Sage was from Sendai, why did so many students call him a foreigner? All I could come up with was that it was either because he resembled an American, or because they were intolerant of anyone not native to Toyama. Turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, but I didn't get the scoop on it 'til later.) 

Anyway, so far as appearance went, it was probably a toss-up as to whether Sage or I was more of a misfit. He had it, as far as being most noticeable, and I now understood why Ryo could take one cursory glance up the hall and tell whether he was in school that day or not. One light head stands out like a sore thumb among a bunch of dark ones. But I think I outdid him so far as pure weirdness went. I blended in a little better, but I confused people more.

I got used to his looks fast enough, being plenty used to that kind of thing, but his personality was a much trickier equation to master. I really didn't know what to make of him for a long time. Though that worked both ways; he didn't seem to know quite what to make of me, either. For my part, I'd expected Ryo's friend to be someone a lot like Ryo: friendly, casual, easygoing and generally down-to-earth. What I actually encountered was someone very polite, quiet, and reserved. In a nutshell, he was extraordinarily Japanese, which was becoming my synonym for inscrutable. The only emotion Sage displayed at our first meeting was a very brief flicker of surprise when Ryo introduced me; after that, he was all polite impersonality, which was rather a letdown. If I'd felt any desire for polite impersonality, I would have approached any number of the other kids in our grade and tried to chat with them for a while; that woulda got me a good dose of it.

It was that feeling of letdown, as well as a certain sense of generosity mixed with self-preservation, that had me urging Ryo to eat in the cafeteria with Sage instead of in the hall with me. I knew Ryo hadn't seen Sage in weeks and thought they might want to catch up without me around; and I also didn't want Ryo asking me what I thought of his good friend. I didn't think he'd like my reply too much. 

I spent a good deal of that solitary lunch-time correcting those erroneous assumptions of mine. Mostly, I reminded myself that Ryo was something of an anomaly and that I couldn't expect anyone else to demonstrate his outgoing friendliness. Many people in America weren't like that, and being in Japan, where they were so much more reserved to begin with... I was just going to have to wait and see what, if anything, developed with Sage in terms of friendship. 'It would be nice,' I concluded a little wistfully, 'to have two good friends, but I guess so long as there's no open hostility, I can make do with one good friend and one...whatever he turns out to be. Comrade or something.' 

I was giving some thought to what would happen if things got hostile, or if Sage tried to edge me out of the picture- and concluding that it was pretty unlikely in this courteous society, though not altogether impossible- when Ryo returned alone and told me he thought Sage would probably eat with us in the future, if I didn't mind. I was assuring him I didn't when the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, and I went into the classroom wondering what would happen if I did mind. I never did find out, which might be just as well.

By the time school ended for the day, it was becoming pretty clear that we were going to be a trio, whether anyone 'minded' or not. I based this more accurate assumption on the fact that Sage- uninvited- joined Ryo and me at 'our' table in the library after classes, which was enough to get me speculating silently about the probability of it being 'their' table. I couldn't tell if Sage minded my presence or not; at first he buried his nose in his homework while Ryo helped me with my Japanese, but after about half an hour he emerged from his math and inquired what we were doing. He seemed to loosen up just a bit during the conversation that followed, and when Ryo made some remark about my American directness, Sage agreed to try and remember to be direct in his speech to make things easier for me. That was encouraging, and when we left school, I followed rather closely on his heels- startled him, in fact, but we had a pretty good talk during the walk home. He was a little shy and cautious, but I figured that would wear off as we got to know each other.

So we got off to what I thought was a reasonable start, considering that he was reserved and I was awkward with people, but by the end of the first week I was getting the feeling that a start was about all we were going to achieve. Sage was invariably courteous, but he continued to be distant, cautious, and quiet. He would readily answer any question I asked about schoolwork or Japanese customs and traditions, but he rarely volunteered anything and never talked about his family, Sendai, or any other personal stuff. He didn't seemed to mind my occasional sarcasm, but he seldom laughed and only infrequently smiled, so that I soon labeled him 'poker-face' in the privacy of my thoughts. (I didn't think he was the sort to appreciate a nickname, and I didn't want to risk offending him.) He was especially wary of venturing opinions, though I did understand why he preferred to be discreet on that score. The rumor-mill in Hanai worked overtime, and seldom did the gossipers make an effort to get, or keep, their facts straight. A simple, 'I don't watch much baseball' could be turned into 'he thinks baseball is a game for idiots' in the course of a single class period. It was sorta like a giant game of 'Telephone', except no one was even trying to get it right.

Anyway, after a week and a half of being kept at a coolly polite and respectful distance, I shrugged to myself and gave up my attempts to establish a genuine friendship with Sage. It bothered me a little, but not enough to fret over- only enough that I mused about it sometimes when I had nothing better to think about. I told myself I was lucky he was willing to accept me in the first place; if he didn't mind me being friends with Ryo, I was ahead of the game. So long as neither of us did anything to provoke hostilities, we could both be friends with Ryo, and if putting up with each other was part of the deal, it wasn't such a bad one. Especially since Sage had better English skills than Ryo- he was able to define more words and explain more of the Japanese grammar rules to me. I was grateful for that, since the school still hadn't done anything about finding me an official tutor. For a while, I did try to make a point of not actively excluding Sage, but eventually you do run out of polite, socially acceptable questions, and it wasn't long before the intricacies of the Japanese language comprised 95% of our conversations.

Things went on like that for the rest of January. I was friends with Ryo, I was...associates, I guess, with Sage, and all the time I wondered what Ryo thought was so great about his 'best friend'. I didn't know much about friends, Japanese or otherwise, but I didn't think Sage acted like any kind of friend. He had so little to say, often seemed distracted- as if he wished he was somewhere else- and in general was about as warm and outgoing as an icicle. There was no doubt he merely tolerated me, and he seemed only slightly more accepting of Ryo. And yet he was a constant presence...in the hall every morning, at the break, at lunch, in the library. He even continued to walk home with me every evening, though we rarely said much. I couldn't understand it at all and speculated quite a bit on what in the world was going through his mind. How could someone be so loyal, even devoted, and yet so indifferent? How could the verbal picture Ryo had given me of him be so different from who he really was?

I got some of the answers to my questions on the third school-day of February. As Ryo and I were sitting down on the floor outside the classroom- sitting on our jackets because the tile was quite cold- Sage appeared sans lunch bag and explained in his distant way that he had to eat downstairs today but he'd join us when he was done. He didn't wait for an answer, turning and hurrying after the rush of students before either of us could suggest we'd go with him. I looked over at Ryo, who seemed unconcerned if a bit taken aback, and suggested that he could go with Sage if he wanted to; it would be warmer down there, if nothing else.

"Oh, cold doesn't bother me much," was his aimless reply, and that was all he said on the topic. For all his claims of unusual directness, Ryo could be as indirect and inscrutable as any other native Japanese. In fairness, he was more often straightforward than not, so the times he did lapse into vagueness both intrigued and irritated me. Irritated, because I wasn't used to having to decode him, and intrigued at seeing the more Japanese part of his personality. It was probably my irritation that led me to bring up the subject I'd speculated privately about for so long- that, and also the thought that I might not have the opportunity again anytime soon.

"You know," I said cautiously, "when you talked about him- while he was out sick?- I got a kind of ...expectation of what he would be like. And I was thinking lately, it's sort of like when you meet or see a picture of a friend from the Internet; it's never quite what your mind made it into." 

"I don't know much about the Internet," Ryo remarked through a mouthful of sandwich, "but I know what you're saying. You hear about someone and you think they're this way, and then you meet them and they aren't." He frowned down the empty hall, took a drink from his juice, then turned to me. "He was like this with me, too," he said bluntly. "It was at least two weeks before he stopped being formal and distant, and another week before he'd actually call me 'friend'."

I looked back at him uncertainly; that was more direct than I had anticipated, but more to the point, it didn't strike me as altogether sensible. "I don't mean to sound offensive, but then, why bother?" I asked. Ryo frowned and I realized that I was on shaky ground. "Well, if you're trying to be friendly with someone and they just shut you out, then...that's not a pleasant experience, so why prolong it?" I tried again, more diplomatically.

Ryo's expression turned rueful. "I did ask myself that a few times. But I understood why it was taking him so long to trust me. He was testing me, making sure I wasn't playing Backstab on him." 

"Oh," I said softly. I had forgotten about Backstab, and I could see why it would make students wary of accepting a theoretically sincere offer of friendship. Of course, backstabbing had happened in my schools at home, but no one had made an actual game out of it. 

"But it wasn't just that," Ryo added, pausing to finish his juice. "I mean, not just Backstab that made him so suspicious. No one had ever been nice to him until I was, and he didn't know how to handle it."

"No one?" I repeated, positive that this was a considerable exaggeration. 

"Well, you've seen how it is, Rowen. Everyone else avoids him, ignores him- except for the ones who think that if they cultivate him, they'll get in favor with me." Ryo said that without a trace of pride for his own popularity- in fact, there was more disgust than anything in his voice. "Just like some of them do to you."

I nodded; I was not unfamiliar with the phenomenon. Most of the students had adjusted to me and some had become reasonably friendly, but it was easy to tell who was trying to curry favor and who wasn't. For one thing, they tended to ignore me when Ryo wasn't around, and for another, when they did stop to talk, they looked more at him than me. I found that obnoxious, and got my revenge by making it a point to stand directly between him and them, a procedure that amused Ryo a great deal. 

"And that's how it is now. Before, when Haruka and his friends ran the school, Sage had to deal with this constant... assault of insults and rejection every day." Ryo's voice was low, but fervent. "Everyone who wanted to get in favor with the bullies picked on him, he was basically the school's scapegoat. Remember how I told you about the match, when I met him and made that jerk back down? It made me mad that Haruka thought he could dictate who watched our soccer games, but it made me totally furious to see how many people just stood around listening to him abuse Sage. Standing there watching the show, looking at each other like, 'man, they're really tearing into him today, isn't it cool?'" Ryo took a deep breath and unclenched his fists. "It still burns me up. I know a lot of kids are afraid to stand up to that bunch, they're afraid of getting beat up- but I wonder how many would have defended Sage, or even just refused to listen, if they didn't have to worry about that. Considering how many simply ignore him now...very few."

I put down my sandwich and turned that over in my head for a while, skepticism warring with a sort of appalled sympathy. If Ryo was telling the unvarnished truth, Sage had led a rotten life at school; even if it was only somewhat exaggerated, he'd still had it very rough and could hardly be faulted for clamming up and trusting no one. I'd seen myself how teachers and students ignored him or drew away from him in the halls- many of them still did that with me, in fact, as though I might suddenly drop something nasty on them. But I was the psycho American, it was to be expected that I was avoided; he was the well-brought-up Japanese lad, so why-?

"Is it just because he looks like an American?" I asked at last, dismayed and a little uneasy. I hadn't been unkind to him, but I had about given up on him...perhaps he had sensed it and taken it for rejection. Perhaps if I started making an effort again- but even though I suddenly wanted to, I wasn't honestly sure I was up to trying to befriend someone who'd shut himself off so thoroughly. Coaxing people out of their defensive shells was not my forte. In fact, very little about 'people' in general was anywhere among my strong points. Especially in indirect, subtle Japan.

Ryo hesitated before he replied, his eyes suddenly wary. "Well, looking different gets attention, whether it's on purpose or not," he reminded me. "And it's not positive attention. If you're Japanese, you're supposed to look and act the part, or you get the treatment. It's different for real foreigners, the rules don't apply to them."

He wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know, of course. "I've noticed that," I agreed dryly. "But- of course, kids are worse about it than adults, but it still seems extreme."

Ryo sighed. "The thing is- I've never talked about it with him, but I think one of the reasons he gets the treatment is because people suspect he is part American."

I looked at him blankly. "So...?"

"Mixed blood is something a lot of Japanese feel very strongly about." 

"Very strong-" I stopped, frowning. "You mean they disapprove."

Ryo nodded and sighed again. "It didn't used to be so bad, but there's this wave of purism going on... it's fine to be interested in American things, and people, but it's definitely not okay for a good Japanese to marry anyone but another good Japanese, and have good Japanese kids. Kids with mixed blood, and their parent- whichever one is Japanese- are seen as a huge disgrace to their family. A terrible dishonor." Ryo scowled, his eyes narrowing. "I say it's racist, and I think it's horrible that the kids from mixed marriages get shunned and tormented by other kids, but try telling the purists that-"

"Oh, sure, blame the kid for getting born!" I snapped, slamming my drink so hard on the floor that it spilled on my hand. "Yeah, they had a lot of choice in the matter, didn't they!"

"Exactly," was my friend's reply, in icy tones. "Gay couples are better tolerated, they can't have 'dirty' kids...or if they do adopt or foster, at least it's a Japanese kid." He took a deep breath and added more calmly, "Like I said, we never talked about it, but I think that's what's behind it. Even Haruka isn't quite rude enough to ask whether it's true or not, though, so he goes with the oni aspect."

"The what?" I shook my head, wiping my hand with the napkin Ryo gave me. "Thanks. What's oni?"

"Oh- oni is one of those mythical monsters, you'd call it a demon, I think. The kind that can be solid or misty, change their shapes, possess people or mess with their minds..."

"Ah, yeah, that's a demon," I agreed, still puzzled. "But-?"

"So Haruka and his friends can't call Sage a half-American, because they don't know if he is and it would be too rude to ask. But they can call him a half-demon- hanyou- and that accomplishes almost the same thing." 

"I seem to be missing something here," I observed. "Why would anyone think Sage was a demon?"

"His eyes," Ryo explained dourly. "Eyes that color are said to be the sign of demon blood. Even if people don't believe in oni, it's not good luck."

"Oh, that's ridiculous!" I snorted. "For one thing, all the demons I ever heard of had glowing red eyes, not violet; and I personally know a dozen or more kids who'd love to have eyes like Sage's." 

"Yes, well, you Americans are tolerant people," my friend observed, his mouth twisting in a rather odd mix of disgusted grimace and wry smile. 

"Most of the time," I murmured, and looked down at my half-eaten sandwich. Picking it up, I started chewing again, feeling a lot less hungry than usual. 

"More tolerant than us, anyway," Ryo amended. "Sage has noticed it too- he does think well of you, Rowen. Just...be patient with him, okay? He will lighten up, sooner or later. Probably sooner; you two are a lot alike, once you get past that wariness of his."

I stopped chewing, taken totally aback by that seemingly innocuous assertion. 'Sage and I...are a lot alike? Is Ryo nuts? Well. Maybe not, he did say I'd have to get to know him, and maybe I wouldn't see it as easily as someone else would, but still...' 

I chewed on that thought as I finished my lunch, aware of the silence in the chilly hall. The whole school was heated, but the heat tended to dissipate in the halls due to all the cross-currents and drafts. I didn't mind: I preferred to put up with a little chill than feel closed-in and stifled. I liked the silence, too; it was relaxing. Usually. Today, though- in light of what Ryo had just told me about the student body's attitude- I was feeling more like someone caught in hostile territory than someone on lunch break at school. I had known, from my first day, that the omnipresent courtesy could be a cover for any amount of bad attitude, but I had not been aware of how frighteningly 'bad' some of those attitudes might be. Intolerance, blaming kids for their parents' choices, discrimination...and universal disapproval for having the bad luck to be 'different'. 

'Just as well I didn't dye this purple,' I thought, pushing away a bit of hair that was tickling my ear. 'Heaven knows what they would have labeled me if I had. Well, that is one thing Sage and I have in common: we're different-looking, and get flak for it. And we both get called gaijin a lot. But aside from that... I just can't see it.' 

My thoughts ground to a halt as Sage appeared around the corner and walked up the hall to join us, a sour expression on his usually impassive face. "I certainly won't be forgetting my lunch again this term," he said almost crankily as he crouched, then sat next to Ryo. "Maybe not for the entire remainder of the year."

"Was it the food or the company?" Ryo asked, touching his arm lightly.

"Or both?" I added, and Sage nodded at me. Ryo's eyes narrowed.

"Haruka?"

"Let it go," Sage said firmly, and changed the subject, mentioning a no-datchi tournament his crotchety grandfather had signed him up for that weekend. It would be his third or fourth, I hadn't been keeping close count since it wasn't something I was particularly interested in. But now-

"Is that three, or four now?" I asked when he paused, and he looked at me in surprise, shaking back the forelock that often slipped down to cover one eye. 

"Four attended, three participated in," he replied. 

"Is this some club thing where they have one every weekend, or what?" 

"Oh, they aren't all in the same dojo," Sage explained. "Tournaments are popular, there's several dozen every weekend. Some are school-sponsored-"

"Meaning that if you don't aren't taught at that dojo, you can't attend," Ryo interjected.

"Right. But others are open admission."

"You make it sound like a concert," I commented, and Sage smiled slightly. 

"Not quite. Once you sign up for your first tournament, your information is on file for the rest of the season, so you only have to register once- very efficient."

"But once you've signed up, you have to attend all of them?" I hazarded. 

"Well, you can't," Sage responded slowly, and I knew he realized that I didn't really get it. "There's too many going on at once, you'd have to be in five or six places at the same time."

"Oh. Even after you take out the school-only ones?"

"Even after that, yes," Sage asserted, and went on to explain how the dueling tournaments worked. Ryo put in a few clarifications from time to time, but even so, my grasp of the subject was still pretty shaky when Sage concluded with, "Lots of people can't even manage to attend one every weekend, though it seems I will end up being one of the exceptions. The General's insisting on it this year, though I'm not sure why."

I wondered about that. Obviously this general was his trainer and obviously Sage didn't like him much- but I seemed to remember Sage telling me his grandfather trained him. Curious, but since Sage never spoke of his family, he probably wouldn't appreciate me asking. 

"He didn't do that last year, did he?" Ryo remembered aloud. "Not even last term. Maybe he thinks you're getting better."

Sage snorted and a second later, the end-of-lunch bell rang loudly. All three of us jumped; I shook my head as I got up, picked up my coat and lunch-trash, and wondered aloud about turning down the volume on those danged bells. Ryo smiled ruefully as he picked up his own lunch bag; Sage got up with a wry look and suggested buying earplugs. "That would save time, effort, and getting into trouble when they find out you tampered with school property," he advised me, with a glimmer of humor. 

"You wouldn't tell on me, would you?" I asked, pretending to be shocked. 

"We wouldn't, but someone would," was his reply, and then he turned with a nod and a quick, "See you guys in the library," before heading back down the hall to his class. I went to put my coat back in my locker as students began swarming up from the cafeteria, musing again over what Ryo had said. 

Needless to say, my mind wasn't entirely on the afternoon lessons, but that was nothing new. It hadn't taken me long at all to catch up with the classes and the only subjects that routinely held my interest and challenged me were History and Japanese, for the obvious reasons. It was an improvement over New York, where none of my classes had challenged me, but I wished I could have been intrigued without having the longer day and Saturday classes! Have my cake and eat it too, as they say. I did find the science lab pretty interesting, but unhappily tame and structured. Penalty of having an overactive curiosity: when you've got a number of different chemicals out and a Bunsen burner going, the urge to see what happens when you combine all the chemicals and heat them is hard to resist. But we were only allowed to make the combinations set out in the lab-book, and since Ryo was reading off the list, I couldn't 'accidentally misunderstand' the directions and improvise. Alas.

It wasn't until I was in the library, idly writing out the answers to our math homework while I brooded over how Sage and I might possibly be alike, that something else Ryo had said made a belated connection. That match when I met him and made that jerk back down. Ryo had told me about the soccer match when Haruka and his followers were hounding Sage and Ryo had stepped in to stop it- 

When I met him?

I stopped writing, startled, and examined that thought very carefully. The infamous soccer match had happened only a few months ago, during Ryo's first term in Hanai. If Ryo had 'met' Sage then... did that mean the two of them had never met at all previously, or had they known each of other but not been friends before? And why had I assumed that they had known each other for years? After thinking about it for a minute, I decided that whether they'd known each other previously or not was irrelevant: the point was that the friendship between them must be very new. That explained why they didn't seem as close as old friends should be; they weren't old friends. In fact, according to Ryo, Sage didn't have any 'old' friends. And with that came a thought that I should have had long before: 'Perhaps Sage is so aloof with me- not because he thinks I'll backstab him, but because he's jealous!' 

It actually was not a very new thought, since I had wondered from time to time if he resented me hanging around with them, but I had never really framed it in terms of jealousy before. Resenting me would suggest that he just didn't care for my company and didn't appreciate having to tolerate me. But jealousy- that implied that he actually felt threatened by my presence. I understood the feeling, too well- hadn't I had a few nervous moments myself, thinking that now Ryo's best friend was back, I'd get shunted aside and forgotten about? And Sage would have been, if anything, a lot more concerned than I had been; he'd missed a single week of school and come back to find his one friend and defender busily being friends with a very unusual new kid. And his jealousy- or resentment, or whatever it was- would probably have been heightened by the relative shortness of his friendship with Ryo. Under the circumstances, the fact that he was friendly to me at all, to say nothing of 'thinking well' of me, was almost miraculous.

Obvious, in hindsight, but it's not unusual for me to overlook the human-feelings equation even when it's blatantly obvious. One of the reasons I don't get on too well with people is because I'm not good at putting myself in their place and imagining how they would feel about things. I'm too logical, and I don't like to let my feelings take over my actions.

So things made a lot more sense now, but none of my speculations answered the question that train of thought provoked: If Sage really was jealous, what, if anything, was I going to do about it?