Sugar also had a funny name, but unlike Flower, her name really was a funny name. In Japanese, her name was “Satoh,” or “Sugar.” And it really was “sugar.”
The word “satoh” does mean sugar in Japanese, and Sugar's parents actually used the real Chinese characters for the word “sugar.” So this was not a cutesy accidental sort of name. They really did intend to name Sugar, sugar!
She endured quite a bit of teasing when she was little, but she was truly so very sweet-tempered, she laughed along with the other children and forgave them. She also forgave her parents for giving her such an embarrassing name. In the end, it seemed that the gods must have directed her parents without their knowledge, because Sugar was truly a sweet girl. In fact, she was so very amiable and friendly, her teachers often suspected at first that she wasn't terribly bright, and the other children made jokes about her seemingly gullible nature.
However, this was far from the truth. Sugar was extremely bright. She was so bright that she often kept herself awake at night worrying about other people's problems. She fretted that no one seemed to see the things that she could see, and that even when she attempted to broach the subject with adults, they would pat her on the head and tell her that she wasn't making sense. But because she was kind and patient with the limited vision of the people around her, she did not feel frustration, only concern.
She had a way of breezily changing the subject so that two people about to have an argument were suddenly distracted and soon forgot that they were about to get upset. She sometimes sneezed violently, five or six times, like a kitten, causing the class to burst into laughter, just as the teacher was about to assign extra homework because someone had forgotten to bring his textbook to class. Her grades were not perfect, however, because she often chose not to study, especially if she was searching around the neighborhood for the owner of a puppy she had found wandering around, or if she was babysitting the kindergarten-aged children of a neighbor whose parents had rushed to the hospital—again—to take care of their ailing grandfather.
Sugar, her parents often said, is always right. And her closest friends knew this better than anyone else.
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