A friendly teacher was a worry. What was it they wanted to know? Why were they pretending to care? Their smiles seemed false and their compliments a kind of manipulation.

Sharkey had expected bullying. He’d experienced mild bullying at Radford, name-calling, petty intimidation, occasionally a fight after school in the parking lot. He found none of this at Punahou. Yet there was something else in the air, not threat but a palpable sense of superiority; just the posture of some students, the confident way they walked, the way they spoke or gestured, oppressed him, and the only name for it was snobbery, something new to him and awful, because snobbery was not violent but instead a kind of poisonous lying. It was much worse than bullying—you couldn’t fight a snob, you couldn’t win.

The scar on Sharkey’s face made him conspicuous, a person of interest. To increase speculation and make himself mysterious, he refused to say how he’d gotten it. He did not want anyone to know him.

In his father’s stories there was always a mention of Special Forces—never names or numbers of people, or reasons for them to be special, but only a shadowy gathering of faceless men intent on a mission, recon patrols, working in darkness. Consider yourself already dead. Sharkey imagined them to be heavily armed, wearing camouflage, prepared to defend themselves and the country, a fighting force united in their common fear of Colonel Sharkey.

The boys at Punahou, the ones who became Joe’s friends, were united too—he thought of them as Special Forces. None were outstanding students, none had any other friends, none were on school sports teams; all of them smoked pakalolo. And among the smokers and the stoners was a surfer, Harry Ho. It was Harry Ho who showed Joe his first effective moves on a surfboard, his balance, his foot placement, his stance. And Harry introduced Joe to the older surfers at Waikiki, who called themselves the Beach Boys, another group who were like Special Forces.

So the world of Hawaii seemed to be made of different contained groups, who shared interests—not Radford students or Punahou students, but smaller numbers within those larger groups, like packs of dogs, who felt safe with each other and who had secret activities all their own. In the case of Sharkey’s Punahou group it was smoking pakalolo, a ritual that was all the more attractive for being forbidden.

The headmaster, Dr. Emmett Chock, denounced it at morning assembly after prayers, saying how harmful it was—a drug, unlawful and unhealthy. And side by side, Sharkey and Harry Ho smiled, as the two most committed stoners, both of them surfers, Harry expert, Sharkey improving by the week.