In the first aimless and empty days after the funeral and the burial at a military ceremony at Punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific—an honor guard, a speech by the chaplain, a bugler playing taps—Sharkey became aware of a wordless concern, a watchfulness in the boys who had bullied him at school. It was not overt kindness, it was mute and awkward, something oblique, a suspension of hostilities that made Sharkey uneasy—no shouts, no swearing, no jostling, no physical contact at all. The boys whispered indistinctly among themselves, they made room for Sharkey, they were subdued and clumsily gentle, as though attempting to ease his mind, vividly expressed when the Samoan girl Vai, eyes averted, offered him a fragrant gardenia, pinching it in her dirty fingers. And Sharkey understood that, though he said nothing, his silence was taken to be grief, and there was honor and power in grieving. They felt sorry for him, but they were afraid too, because in his grief Sharkey was like an angel of death.

Sorrowing weakened him; he felt his body slacken as his energy drained away. He wasn’t strong enough to surf, and anyway his mother pleaded for him to stay with her, seeming to believe that she was in danger of losing him too. She clung to him, and he could feel her flesh tremble from the way she gripped him, somehow the sobs clutching at him in the tightening of her hand on her arm.

He had hated to go to school before, but now school was a relief—a break from his mother’s despair (“What am I going to do without you?” she wailed)—a consolation too because he welcomed the sympathy of the boys. He had no enemies now. He’d been wounded by his father’s death—no one wished to hurt him anymore. And the boys he had regarded as dogs and persecutors he now saw as wounded themselves; they understood death as loss and failure. They lived lives of rejection. They could have been cruel—he was more helpless than ever—but they were kind, they were protectors, and solicitous, seeming to feel a kinship in his misery.

The big ugly boy Wilfred, with the wild hair and the decaying teeth and stinking clothes—the boy who had tried to frighten him with his slavering dog, and who once had slapped him in the cafeteria, saying, “You sitting in my chair, fucken haole”—this tough boy approached him in the playground, his little gang silent behind him.

Wilfred put out his hand. “Dis for you, braddah.”

It was a plump well-made pakalolo blunt, smooth and dusty from being handled, an offering.

“Make you feel more better. Take away the badness.”