The woman scowled, lowering her head, and Sharkey saw that she had pitted cheeks, a smudge of dust on her chin, and her thumb, curled on the tennis racket, was dirty, the nail tip black. Her shorts too were not clean, with a stain like a rime mark of an old spill that had dried. And now he remembered like an afterimage from the bus stop that her tennis shoes were ragged and unlaced.

But the tennis racket was new and well strung, and she clung to it like a prestige object. It was this that gave her plausibility, even authority, though she remained silent—and at first her wordlessness helped her, the way a silent person can seem assertive, making us jabber. But Sharkey was less sure now. He had seen her dirty thumb, her bad skin, the stain on her shorts, and something else, a thin high whine of stink that might have been hers but could also have been a hum from Waialua Creek, which they were passing.

“Because if it’s not Hale‘iwa”—he needed to get this straight—“I’m not going farther than the community center.”

She said nothing—no whole words—but a gasp of impatience like an unformed word was audible to him, and when he looked again at her for meaning he saw she was moving her lips, mouthing words. Her lips were cracked, dead and peeling skin on their fullness.

“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

The woman made a sudden noise, a honk of objection, the sort of sound a startled duck might utter. Hearing it, Sharkey became anxious. Then he knew, or was almost sure, she was in the grip of a drug. He knew drugs. She was toasted and mute, with the obvious slowness and density of someone under the influence, grunting and obtuse and vague, less like a drunk than like someone who’d been clubbed on the head. And she’d probably slept in those clothes.

As he was passing the side road to town she honked again and made as though to grab the steering wheel.

“No!” he shouted, and pushed her arm away, shoving the tennis racket. He repeated it, fiercely, but the woman hardly reacted—she hugged her bag and repositioned the racket.

The tennis racket! It conferred respectability, suggested health and sportsmanship; and yet now he was sure she didn’t play, she was merely fumbling with it, she must have stolen it—what a fool he’d been. But he didn’t laugh, because he knew that someone drugged was someone dangerous, capable of anything, grabbing the steering wheel and sending him into a tree, howling at him, accusing him of—what?

“Give me money,” she said—her first words.

He said, “I’m giving you a free ride.”

“Money,” she said, licking her cracked lips with a gray tongue.