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fifth man. I could feel liquid metal begin to fill my lung and knew that in three seconds I would be bubbling and spraying blood. But I wouldn’t die for a couple, three minutes and before then the fight would be over. The idiot pulled his knife out of me, probably thinking he wanted to have it for another stab and not knowing that as long as it was in my side, he had a handle that could take me anywhere. I lifted into a sidekick that pulled all sorts of bloody strings under my ribs and put the edge of my foot squarely in his throat. He just about flipped over backwards. And that broke the circle.
    The count was two down and three wobbling when they scattered, one of them dragging the boy who took the three punches. That left me, standing tall and bleeding; Allie, with a face as white as her leather coat; and the man with the broken neck.
    Sometimes you can just walk away from a mess like that. Not always, but sometimes.
    His name was Emilio Lopez. They guessed that later from a tattoo and a steel ID bracelet. He was an undocumented alien, or the child of such, and didn’t have a scrap of paper on him. He wasn’t a citizen, anyway, and no one came forward to press charges.
    I was an Anglo from a good home, under eighteen, and only a brown belt at the time. It was a fight with knives and there was the honor of a white girl to protect. So, in the flashing red and blue lights of ambulances and patrol cars, the Monterey police wrote it up as self-defense while the medics packed the hole under my arm.
    They bundled me off to the emergency ward. The resident on duty probed and stitched, then confirmed that it was a muscle wound and the knife had turned on a rib. Meanwhile, the patrolmen finished up their paperwork and then told Allie and me to get our butts out to “Assholemar,” which is what they called our part of town, and to stay there.
    When we pulled into the driveway at the mock-adobe, it was dark. Both my parents were at sea, Father on the Petramin Explorer II and mother on the good ship Cutty Sark, which she had begun to sail with regularly. Allie took her wounded warrior upstairs, undressed him and made gentle, tender love with her mouth.
    As I say, sometimes you can walk away from it. Afterwards, I always felt it was a sign of how sick our country, our culture had become that a man could be killed on the streets and, because he did not have a piece of paper or powerful friends, the incident would close like that. It did not even make the front section of the paper, which was a miracle in a small tourist town like Monterey, and no one ever followed up with my parents.
    A man had been stomped like a cockroach and the stomper had driven home the same night. It was to happen a lot in the closing years of the last century.
    But Sensei Kan wasn’t part of that century. He was straight out of sixteenth-century Japan or wherever they practiced bushido, chivalry, honor. When I was healed enough to return to the dojo, he called me up in front of the whole class, stood me at attention, and took off my brown belt. Then he tied on a white one with his own hands.
    “You may think that to kill a man in battle makes you a warrior,” he said in a way that bounced off the oak floor and echoed in corners of the room. Anyone could tell he was furious.
    “If you have so little control of yourself, of your art, that you kill your opponent when you should disable and discourage him, then you must start over at the beginning.”
    “But,” I blustered, “there were five of them!” The note of injured protest in my voice was mixed with pride.
    “Then it is very lucky that your clumsiness did not kill more!”
    “But—”
    “Please be silent. Take your place at the back of the class.”
    No one met my eyes as I walked past the rows of students, not even Allie. She dropped out a few days later, unable to bear my humiliation. To her, I was a hero who had been wounded defending her.
    I thought about dropping out, too. But the next