Sharkey kept his head down, he said nothing in class, the work was easy, nothing new—the math and history he’d already done at Punahou. Roosevelt was chaotic and noisy, but it was harder to be anonymous here, because he was a haole and there were so few at the school. He was jeered at and threatened—the threats sounding crueler when they were mumbled in pidgin. “Pretty soon we gonna have ‘kill a haole day.’” His books were scattered, his locker scribbled on with crayon, yet he was not touched. He felt pity for Blaine, who was physically bullied—pushed, elbowed aside, tripped, his ears flicked—and he saw how Blaine suppressed his cries, not wishing to reveal his terror.

Sharkey was stared at for his scar, and it seemed to caution the other boys. It was a mark of distinction, a source of power, all the greater because its history was hidden, though there was something in its ragged stitches and discoloration that suggested violence, and so it served as a deterrent.

“That’s quite enough,” Miss Matsuda said whenever there was a commotion in the classroom. But she never saw the subtle torments and had no idea of what happened in the corridors or the cafeteria or the playground.

Each afternoon Sharkey walked home rather than risk the bus and more taunts: the length of Nehoa Street and then up the hill and left into Aleo and on to Ferdinand, where his mother waited, to ask, “Nice day at school?” and he said, “Yup,” and kept walking to his room, where he changed. “Going surfing.” And it was then that he caught the bus or walked to Ala Moana, and at Magic Island he was in the water and free again.

But why? his mother asked in a pleading voice when he hurried away, and even when she didn’t say it, the question was in her squint whenever he left. It was something he never asked himself, nor could he give any reasons for running to the beach and plunging into the water, or flopping on his board and paddling into the waves, ducking as they washed over him and thrusting into the next trough until he was bobbing beyond the break.

It was play, it was joy, it was as natural and unexplainable as breathing, a pleasure and a relief to be uplifted in the sea. Never mind surfing; just sitting on his board and rising and falling on the plump belly of a swell, far from shore and the tiny people there, behind him the flat Pacific, empty as far as the smooth true seam of the horizon.