But the following day, walking to school, Sharkey saw Blaine on Nehoa Street and waved. Blaine did not wave back, and the next time Sharkey looked, Blaine was nowhere to be seen. He wondered if Blaine had been beaten up, but in class the boy was unmarked, and in the playground he heard Blaine laugh—he had never heard him laugh before, and it was a strange sound, like a sudden snorting honk. No one approached him or spoke to him. Sharkey took this to be a good sign—perhaps they were growing wiser, being pono. And he laughed when he remembered the word and the way Dr. Chock had spoken it, popping it on his lips.

Wilfred kept away from Sharkey that day too. The routine of classes, cafeteria, playground, dismissal was relieved by the absence of any aggression. Sharkey remained, as always, alone, and when the last bell rang he hurried across the playground and ducked through the gate in the chain-link fence.

It was when he came to the perimeter of the school grounds that he heard the barking—the choking yap that recalled to him the frantic sound of starvation. He looked back and saw Wilfred with a dog straining ahead of him on a leash, because Wilfred was slow, treading on battered flip-flops, and the dog was eager.

Wilfred’s gang was behind him, calling out, their flip-flops slapping the sidewalk—there were too many of them for Sharkey to give them names, but Fonoti and Clarence were visible for their size and their swinging arms. The dog had big shoulders and square jaws and a fat droopy tongue that swung as he trotted. Sharkey saw the dog clearly and was afraid, and wanted to run.

Instead of heading home he turned in the opposite direction, walking fast, to Punahou Street, and then to the overpass across the freeway, to Beretania, where he felt he was losing them. Down Kalakaua and through the maze of streets that led to Ala Moana, his heart beating fast—from running, from fear—he fled.

Crossing the grass to Magic Island, he was startled by the barking again—they must have taken a shortcut, and there seemed more of them now, the dog ahead of them, that gagging bark, those teeth—and Wilfred now calling out, “Haole—you got something for me!”

By then Sharkey had found his board in the stack, pulled his shirt over his head, and kicked off his sneakers, and when the dog was at last released and bounding at him he’d hit the water, the first wave of the shore break, the board under him, and was paddling to where the wave lifted, with froth at its lip. And he rose into it and turned, and at this height he saw the dog foundering, helpless, gagging in the thickened foam. Wilfred was on the beach, his gang behind him, and at the back a pale shadow: Blaine.