But, hearing him, the man holding the small dog made a pushing gesture that was unmistakably “Go away.”

The completeness of the camp disturbed Olive—being purposeful, it seemed more of a threat, more tenacious and potentially hostile. She signaled to Sharkey, and he followed her to the path, making a shaka sign to the people, but it was not returned. Then, a few steps into the path, they looked back and saw high grass and nothing of the camp.

In the sudden heat of the narrow path, its humid confinement, the bunched upright grass blocking the breeze, the whole passage a stifling tunnel of razor-edged grass blades and thornbushes, Sharkey tripped on a low post, regained his balance, then kicked it in fury.

It was another signpost, another splintered board daubed KAPU.

“We should have obeyed it,” Olive said.

Sharkey sniffed. He said, “Did you see those kids doing their homework? They go to school! School costs money—where do they get it? I wanted to give them something. That boy, the older one with the hurt eyes—I saw myself in him.”

“What do you mean?” She was ahead of him, calling over her shoulder.

“Haole kid. He has a tough time at school. He has to stick up for himself. Fight for everything he has.”

And Olive remembered the children, the big boy with the solemn face, the tense way he sat, like a boy on a bike, a little apart from the others, his sun-scorched hair, his delicate hands, and that was not ink on his pale arm—her memory came into focus—but a blue bruise.

“Joe Sharkey got bullied at school?”

“Every fricken day.”

“Must have been horrible.”

“Made me want to win,” he said. “They were local punks. All I cared about was surfing. I’d never be able to fight them—too many of them. But there were the waves. They took me away. You could be a very tough guy and wipe out on a wave. I learned to ride monsters. It was my way of escaping from them.”

But Olive had hardly heard that, or rather, she’d heard that boast so many times she was deaf to it. She was thinking of the bruised boy with the conspicuous blond hair and the wounded eyes and I saw myself in him. And a surge of love and sorrow for Sharkey that she’d never felt before made her throat ache, a constriction that kept her from being able to say she loved him. So instead she paused on the path and rested her head against his chest briefly, chafed it with her cheek, the clumsy touch of mute animal tenderness.