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was almost as if the suction of her body leaving the door yanked the kids free from the bus. They stepped down haltingly, forming in loose pairs, and then started pointing at the boat. Their voices came pretty hard over the salt air, and themodulations were all wrong, too high, too wild. A couple of the kids started charging down the gangway to the boat and the large lady swooped after them.
    I couldn’t breathe, watching them.
    And I didn’t dare look at Tommy.
    Because Tommy was not a kid who was challenged in that particular way. And I would never, ever say anything against those kids, but it wasn’t fair for Tommy to be lumped in with them. I imagined right away how it all went: how Mr. Cotter, or maybe another well-meaning grown-up at the foundation, had contacted Captain O’Shay and booked the boat for a group rate. Maybe they had dickered over the price, appealing to O’Shay’s sense of philanthropy, and I could guess the reasoning. They were all kids and they all had impairments. Tommy was simply one more kid, and the grown-ups didn’t mean anything bad by it, but that’s what it was. I glanced at Mr. Cotter and saw his face clouding over, because now, I knew, he understood Tommy better. Tommy probably knew more about sharks than anyone on the boat, but he was relegated to being a plain tourist, a kid, and he didn’t deserve that.
    It also pained me to see that Tommy understood one more thing. Once and for all he realized that people regarded him as they regarded the kids getting off the bus. Different. Less, somehow. Needful.

    The large lady’s name was Mrs. Halpern.
    She had a smaller, younger woman with her, Ms. Sprague, as a second-in-command. Mrs. Halpern was in charge, but Ms. Sprague did the legwork. They reminded me of two dogs herding the kids down the gangway. Mrs. Halpern was a big, slow-moving guard dog; Ms. Sprague was a border collie, quick to move, quick to react.
    Mrs. Halpern introduced the kids, but I didn’t really listen. Maybe that sounds unfair, or mean-spirited, but I didn’t care. They took a while to navigate the gangplank, to slip into life jackets, to adjust themselves to the boat’s rocking. I had nothing against them. One, a girl, turned to me and said something about sharks, and about the ocean, and I nodded. Another pointed at some gulls.
    And when a boy of about ten got his arm tangled in the life vest, Tommy stepped nearer and helped him.
    I felt all my anger drain away. I watched Tommy move forward, his step as weak as some of the challenged kids, and I saw him meet the boy’s eyes. The boy clearly had motor-skill difficulties, but he smiled as Tommy helped him straighten the jacket and pull it tight. And Tommy, his small, unhealthy body unsteady on the rolling boat, did not exhibit a moment’s hesitation at touching a stranger. He moved with gentle deliberateness, his attention transferred to his fingers as he straightened the jacket. He patted the boy’s shoulder.
    “I’m Tommy,” Tommy introduced himself. “You’re Mark?”
    “Mark,” the boy said, though his voice garbled the name a little.
    “Okay,” Tommy said. “Let’s have a good day.”
    That simple.
    TOMMY SHARK FACT #4: Pliny the Elder, in AD 78, wrote that fossilized sharks’ teeth rained from the sky during lunar eclipses. Other writers of the time speculated that the teeth were actually serpent tongues turned to stone by St. Peter. The teeth became known as
glossopetrae
—“tongue stones”—which possessed magical powers. People wore them as amulets and tailors sewed special pockets in garments so that the
glossopetrae
could be kept close to the body. Not until the mid-seventeenth century did a Danish scientist named Steno dissect a great white’s head from an animal captured off the coast of Italy. Eventually the shark’s teeth figured into its Latin name,
Carcharodon carcharias
, or “ragged tooth.”

    We passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, which was beautiful, but dangerous,