At home on the ship, I always wanted to cut off my hair, because it was so black, and my skin was so white, and they didn't go together. But they wouldn't let me; they liked it that way, I guess, but _I_ didn't. No child wants to feel like a freak, and nobody else had hair like that, or dead-white colorless skin, either. Then, when I went down there, and saw all the humans, I was still a freak because I was so small. Larry's small, too. Almost as small as I am. And he's all one color. He has hair, of course, but it's so light, and his skin is so dark (both from the sun, I found out), that he looks just about the same lovely golden color all over. Or at least as much of him as showed when I saw him that time, in the diner. He was beautiful, and he was my size, and he didn't have ugly rough skin or big heavy hands. I stared at him, and I felt like grabbing on to him to make sure he didn't get away. After a while I realized my mouth was half-open, and I was still holding a cracker, and I remembered that this was very bad manners. I put the cracker down and closed my mouth. He smiled. I didn't know if he was laughing at the odd way I was acting, or just being friendly, but I smiled back anyhow. "I'm sorry," he said. "I mean, hello. How do you do, and I'm sorry if I startled you. I shouldn't have been staring." "_You_," I said, and meant to finish, _You were staring?_ But he went right on talking, so that I couldn't finish. "I don't know what else you can expect, if you go around looking like that," he said. "I'm sorry...." I started again. "And you should be," he said sternly. "Anybody who walks into a place like this in the middle of a day like this looking the way you do has got to expect to get stared at a little." The thing is, I wasn't used to the language; not used _enough_. I could communicate all right, and even understand some jokes, and I knew the spoken language, not some formal unusable version, because I learned it mostly watching those shows on the television screen. But I got confused this time, because "looking" means two different things, active and passive, and I was thinking about how I'd been _looking at_ him, and.... That was my lucky day. I didn't want him to be angry at me, and the way I saw it, he was perfectly justified in scolding me, which is what I thought he was doing. But I _knew_ he wasn't really angry; I'd have felt it if he was. So I said, "You're right. It was very rude of me, and I don't blame you for being annoyed. I won't do it any more." He started laughing, and this time I knew it was friendly. Like I said, that was my lucky day; _he_ thought I was being witty. And, from what he's told me since, I guess he realized then that _I_ felt friendly too, because before that he'd just been bluffing it out, not knowing how to get to know me, and afraid _I_'d be sore at _him_, just for talking to me! Which goes to show that sometimes you're better off not being _too_ familiar with the local customs.