Uncle Sunshine said, “Me, I’m brutal,” and made him run from one end of the beach to the other, Sharkey slamming his feet on the sand, to build his stamina, to rid him of his urge to smoke. “You gotta replace one ting with anodda.” Uncle Sunshine supervised Sharkey doing push-ups; he ordered him to carve a skateboard up and down the Ala Moana Beach walkway, riding the concrete as if it were a wave, in surf simulation, ducking under the hedges as if getting tubed. He exhausted him, and still he said, “No surfing until you in shape.” The training was indistinguishable from punishment.

Wilfred and his boys at school kept away. Nalani said, “You no like for dating me no more”—sucking his dick in a van was dating?—all of them seeing a new Sharkey over the next weeks, not the pale stoner who’d become their friend but a dark and dismissive and more muscular Sharkey, once again remote, another unreadable haole, but someone they left alone, because he seemed like a stranger again. And there were always other boys to bully.

So Sharkey had a new routine—away from home and his mother, away from school and the other boys—a renewed solitude and a mission.

Uncle Sunshine said, “I see what Duke seen—something in you. You can be good. You can be more better than good. You can be a winner—not to beat the other surfers but compete against youself, to get more better with each wave. To be you best. Who is your competition, your enemy? It is youself. Always against youself.”

In the time since he’d first met Uncle Sunshine he’d grown. Nearly sixteen, he was taller, stronger, better able to read a wave. The training on land had toughened him and made him impatient to get back into the water, but Uncle Sunshine said that only when he appreciated what a privilege it was to ride a wave would he be allowed to surf.

Submit, the man was saying.

“You need to be worthy,” he said. “You need to be pono.”

That word again, but now it had a meaning, because it was spoken by someone who was himself pono.

“Those boys from Roosevelt—those girls,” he said. “No respeck nothing. They drowning and they don’t know it.”

Sharkey now saw that he knew very little. He had taken his natural ability for granted and it had made him overconfident. He assumed that he could smoke weed and that he would eventually find his way back onto the board. He had not foreseen how hard it would be, how he would have to prove himself to Uncle Sunshine, who was more severe than any teacher at Roosevelt.