She was a sprite. She lifted her board and hugged it to her side and, head down, gasping, walked past him, treading the soft sand. She could have been his sister.

That was when he fixed the collar of his leash to his ankle and aimed his board at an incoming wave and flopped on it, paddling, nosing his board out through the low shore break. He drove his hands down hard, propelling himself forward with energy, yet he was anxious—the first time on this wave; he could feel it in his throat like the onset of nausea.

That’s good, Uncle Sunshine had said of the feeling of uncertainty.

Good? The sense of unswallowed anxiety that was a sort of disgust that wouldn’t leave him.

It make you more careful, the man said. You always find what you afraid of. Or it find you.

But Sharkey thought mainly of the teenager in the red wetsuit who had appeared at the top of the big wave and clambered to her feet on her board and then had stood and ridden in a confident crouch, slipping through the barrel as it narrowed and standing straighter as the wave thinned and chucked her onward, all the way to the shallows, where she stepped off her board and pirouetted onto the sand.

She was his inspiration as he paddled out, thinking, If she can do it . . .

Duck-diving under the incoming waves, he could feel their strength, the moving water not like water at all but like muscle—and though he knew he always surfed well at Magic Island and had confidence there, the surf break here at Pipeline was different altogether, a peculiar lift and push, a density that was new to him; and the sense too that a shallow reef lay under him, the solid ledge that formed the wave and was a blur of darkness beneath him.

When he got to the lineup he followed protocol and kept away from the other surfers, as Uncle Sunshine had told him. “You have no rivals,” the man said, “no enemies. You only compete against youself.”

He watched the other surfers study the incoming waves, each successive wave in a set rising higher and revealing as it rolled a bulge of blue water like an offering. And so the surfers judged its speed and maneuvered for the best position to gain a place in the lineup, paddling hard to push through the inward-curving face.

The swell heaved Sharkey up to the height of a housetop, and he sat, as though on the roof peak, and saw the other surfers, one by one, vanish over the edge and become lost in the boil before it. What alarmed him was the way a surfer looked as, wiping out, he flipped above the top of a wave, his leash tangled, twisting down, his board tumbling after him, and both then buried beneath the smothering froth of swirling water.