The Colonel had been wrong. As a consequence of having one good friend, Sharkey had many friends. Sharkey found a balance with his friends; he greeted them on arriving at school, which was a fifteen-minute walk from his Manoa house, and they kept together in the playground—the nonjoiners, the stoners, the outsiders. They met after school and smoked, and, laughing—buzzed—Harry and Sharkey walked to Ala Moana and went surfing, no matter the conditions, even if the only wave was a foot-high crumbly mushburger frothing toward the shore. Afterward, under the palms, they smoked some more and studied the sea, which was limitless and stretched to the horizon, to where the late-afternoon sun pooled and became molten, the low clouds like flesh, bulging and blushing as the day waned, and finally crimson, the color bleeding from them, until the last gold blob dropped and a green flash glowed as an afterimage.

“Eh ka nani,” Harry said. “Beautiful.”

They kept to themselves. They did not think anyone took any notice of them. Sharkey believed himself to be so mediocre he was invisible.

So he was surprised when one day Dr. Chock approached him and said, “You’re Joe Sharkey?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Empty your pockets.”

3

The Mark of the Beast

It seemed a cruel and sideways question, the headmaster—Dr. Emmett Chock—saying to Sharkey’s mother, “I wonder if the young man understands why he’s here?”

With his fingers on his cheek, his hand hiding that side of his face, the badly healed scar like the letter C, still livid with teeth marks and stitches, Sharkey had been staring out of the office window. The day glowed with the last spatter of the shower. The morning was now drenched in light, the splashed blossoms on the plumeria tree thickened by the dazzle. Small simple raindrops were enlarged by sunlight to honey-colored syrup. The way they lingered and drooped, as though for him alone, gave him hope.

It took some moments for his sun-dazzled eyes to adjust to the shadowy room. His mother came into focus, looking ill, and the beauty of what he had just seen had the effect of making Dr. Chock doglike, his gray face and coarse hair, his loose jaw chewing in disapproval, exaggerating his underbite. The man poked at the papers on his desk with his yellow nails, then sniffed his fingers.

“Yes, sir, I do,” Sharkey said.

Dr. Chock probably wanted him to say more. What was the point? Sharkey knew he was being expelled.

“Maybe he hasn’t lived in Hawaii long enough to learn our concept of pono—goodness, virtue, righteousness, sense of duty,” Dr. Chock chanted, as though Sharkey were deaf or absent. “Kuleana means responsibility. Being pono is being true.”

He knew that: they talked of nothing else at morning assembly; the word was repeated in the state anthem, “Hawai‘i Pono‘i,” they sang most days. Yet that did not keep the older students from smoking pakalolo.