Stopping smoking was not hard, except for the first week of brown sweats and food tasting sharper and a slight headache. Waking in the morning without a nicotine hangover was odd, giving him unusual clarity, and within a month the smell of someone else’s cigarette smoke was so sour it reinforced his vow. He was able to breathe more deeply, without a whistle in his throat. Feeling stronger in the water, he realized how smoking had impeded him—Uncle Sunshine was right. The odd thing was that while smoking weed had gotten him expelled from Punahou, the only punishment at Roosevelt was a three-day suspension.

Not smoking set him even further apart from the boys at Roosevelt, but he still saw Harry Ho after school and at the beach.

“Your guys always hassling us,” Harry said.

“What guys?”

“Roosevelt mokes, picking fights at the bus stop with the Punahou kids.”

Sharkey laughed, thinking how he was now associated with the tough school, the Roosevelt boys, when he knew he had no status except that of a haole in a school that was mostly Hawaiian and Polynesian—the Samoans and Tongans from Papakolea; the boys like Wilfred and Fonoti, who lived in cars, sleeping in the backseat.

Not smoking had another advantage—no one came up to him now and poked him in the chest with a filthy finger and said, “Geev ’um, haole—one cigarette.”

When his father came home and hugged him, Sharkey gasped and held his breath—the man was saturated with smoke-stink, the dead-leaf smell of burned earth, and the sweet-sour tang of whiskey. It was an odor of decay and cold ashes, and like the risen fumes of sickness, his yellow fingers, his stained teeth, his endearments growled in his bad breath.

“Joe, you’re getting bigger by the week.” His father seemed admiring of him, because his father was smaller and slightly shrunken, exhausted after the long flight, short of breath, grinning like a corpse as he sucked smoke out of a cigarette. He moved more slowly, although always stiff-backed, his head high, pinching the cigarette in his fingers.

“I swim and surf almost every day.”

“What about school?”

“It’s okay. I do my work.”

“If you don’t keep your grades up, you’ll never get into the academy.”

For the Colonel, always, the only aim of a high school education was that it prepared a boy for West Point, and West Point was preparation for the world.

“You gotta be smart.”

“I thought exercise was supposed to be important too,” Joe said.

Over dinner his mother said, “But every day!”

“When there’s no surf I don’t go.”