Why did he wish to be buoyant in the mild milky ocean until early evening, when the surface wrinkled in a sea breeze and shone, scaly under the slanting sun—sliding like mad in the barrel of a wave to the last kick-out on the reef, when the lip of the tube collapsed in a boil of foam, then tipping himself into the riptide to head back to the purity of the sea, sometimes a beaky turtle’s head staring at him with its side eye, and now and then the gulp and snort of dolphins passing in a pod, and never a human voice?

“I don’t know,” he told his mother.

“It’s dangerous,” she said.

And he laughed, because offshore, isolated on his board, away from Wilfred and his gang, he’d never felt safer.

It was only in the third week that he saw Blaine on his way home, the same route, walking fast. He moved as if pursued. Sharkey understood: he also was avoiding the bus, and he fled the school as soon as the bell rang. Sharkey followed him closely but said nothing, simply watched the hurrying boy, his hunched-over gait, his arms working. He turned off at Ventura Street, and after a few steps he called out and a faint barking began from somewhere within a small white frame house of peeling paint, a car with a rusted bumper in the driveway, which was partially hidden by an overhanging bougainvillea.

And perhaps with the confidence of being home, Blaine straightened and looked around and saw Sharkey behind him on the sidewalk, backing away.

“Hey.” He opened the low garden gate. “You live around here?”

“Up on Ferdinand,” Sharkey said, being vague, so as not to reveal that he had followed him.

“Want to come in?” Blaine looked pathetic; he was pleading.

Sharkey hesitated, but as soon as the front door opened the barking began again, and though Sharkey stepped back the dog leaped on him, first raking his face with his paws, then snapping at his feet, all the while barking in that choking slavering way, his jowls shaking.

“Wags, stop,” Blaine said in an admiring rather than a scolding tone, and Sharkey found it odd that this small boy was so confident around the fierce dog, and how he seemed to smile in relief when he saw that Sharkey was helpless, fending off the dog by raising his shoe against him.

“Don’t be afraid,” Blaine said.

Sharkey was terrified; the dog was trying to bite him, leaping to chew his foot.

“He wants you to pat him,” Blaine said. “Don’t you, Wags?”

The dog was slavering, barking, snapping at Sharkey’s foot. And only then, when the dog got hold of Sharkey’s shoe, wetting it with the froth of his saliva, did Blaine grasp his collar and pull him away.