“What? Yeah, me da luna,” Wilfred said, almost in wonderment. “See this mahu?” And he gestured at Blaine, extending his reach to flick Blaine’s ear again where it was reddened. “He real futless. See how he make ass? If he don’t shape up he’s going to get lickings,” he said, and pushed him. Then he leaned toward Sharkey. “We da kanaka ohana. And know what, haole?”

“What?”

“We hate fucken haoles.”

And then Sharkey stood up. He was taller than Wilfred but thin, already at fourteen with the suggestions of a swimmer’s physique, his second season on a surfboard, the thickening shoulders, the slender legs. Wilfred stepped back, the four other boys looking watchful. But Sharkey did not advance on them. He went over to Blaine and put his hand on his shoulder. He could see why Blaine was being bullied—he was small and pale and scrawny, and he had a girl’s soft unmarked cheeks. He knew from Punahou that the small boys got the worst of it. And out of the corner of his eye he sensed that Wilfred, unsure of him, was hesitating, looking closer.

“How you get that bite mark, brah?”

Sharkey touched the scar on his cheek. “Mark of the beast.” Then he leaned and said, “Get up, big guy,” and helped the cringing boy to his feet.

Wilfred grunted, and just then, at the moment of confrontation, the school bell rang. A teacher in an aloha shirt called out to them and began loudly to harangue them to go back to class.

The ninth-grade teacher was Miss Matsuda. Wilfred was Wilfred Kalama. Most of his little gang sat at the back of the class—Clarence, Fonoti, Sammy Boy, and Braddah Jay, all Hawaiians or Samoans from nearby Papakolea. The pretty girl in the desk next to Sharkey’s, the one who had spat at him, was Vai. Vai’s friends were Leena and Nalani. Leena was Samoan. The Chinese and Japanese students left him alone, but all the rest were tormentors—muttering at him in class, jostling him in the corridor, the girls as foulmouthed as the boys; “Fucken haole” was Leena’s refrain, Vai still the spitter, Wilfred the intimidator, threatening Sharkey with lickings in the parking lot after school. The only relief for him was their persecution of Blaine Langford, the skinny boy who sought refuge at the front of the room, nearest the desk of Miss Matsuda.