“Bad dog!” This loud shout from the boy whom Sharkey had seen as a whisperer and a whiner. Sharkey was impressed, but he was also still terrified. The dog whimpered and licked Blaine’s hand and yapped. “See? He’s really friendly when he wants to be. But he could tell you were afraid.” This was a reprimand, from the boy who cringed when Wilfred Kalama flicked his ear.

Sharkey said, “I was attacked by a dog. At Fort Shafter. That’s why we moved.”

“Is that how you got that scar?”

“Yeah,” Sharkey said, and traced the livid gouge on his cheek that was like the letter C. “I had to get a ton of shots.”

“Come on in,” Blaine said, almost hearty.

But Sharkey said, “Maybe some other time,” and walked away, sorry that he had detoured here and determined to go surfing. He glanced back at the corner of Ferdinand and saw that Blaine was watching him, holding his dog’s collar, looking triumphant.

That night he wished he had not said anything about the dog attack at Shafter and instead had spoken to Blaine of surfing, how waves did not faze him. The thump and crush of water, the fetch of waves, were like the rhythm of life. Even when he’d been tumbled in a break as a child and his father had pulled him to safety, he had had no fear of water—he was buoyant, the sea was freedom. He felt cornered on land. Dogs thickened their muscly necks and barked behind fences and leaped, making the chain link clatter.

The dog at Shafter had made straight for him, bounding across the street, his fat tongue drawn aside by his speed, and he had jumped as he approached, pouncing, knocking Sharkey to the grass, and begun greedily to chew at his face, snapping his jaws.

Not a dream, but a memory, and even the dog’s name, Max, seemed sinister. Sleep saved him, brimmed around him like the sea, and he was submerged. Sharkey slept soundly, but when he woke each morning and blinked and yawned and remembered that he had to go to school, something like a sickness gripped him, a feeling of woe and weakness that was like a stricture in his throat that made him breathless. On many days his hatred of school was a heaviness, like sorrow. At breakfast his mother said, “Did you sleep all right, Joey?”—an absurd question. He always slept well. It was the waking up that was hard, saddened by the knowledge of what he faced.

If he took the bus, it was the loud rowdy boys teasing the girls and throwing spitballs, sometimes calling out “Hana batta!” and flinging snot. Or the chant of “Haole!” So he walked, setting out alone, but often Blaine hurried to join him, as though for protection, looking quite defenseless without his dog.