Sharkey puffed and held the smoke in his throat for as long as he could while considering what to say, but the girl was touching him, seeming to know just what to do, as though she’d been with him before, and when his body had a reply, she laughed a little, a giggle of satisfaction that was muffled when she tugged down his shorts and gripped him with her hard hand, and then in the semidarkness, the heat of her mouth on him, the pressure of her lips, and the tickle of her encircling tongue, as he lay back dazed until, gulping, she was done.

That too was an embrace, an act of compassion, another gift, his first, and it became something he wanted, though he needed to smoke pakalolo to get himself through it. He sometimes wondered whether he would have been better off alone—no sympathy, no pity, and away from the agony of his mother. He kept a joint handy and burned it whenever the pain returned, because the sadness he felt was physical—an ache where he imagined his soul to be, at the core of his being.

And the remedy that surfing had always been—the relief of being on the water, tumbled by a great purifying wave—the remedy of surf was replaced by smoke. He felt a sense of panic, of the sort you might experience by losing your wallet or keys, when he patted his pocket and realized he had no more pakalolo, and was alarmed to ponder how he’d manage to get through the rest of the day.

This need became clear in this anxious period of crisis—he understood his father’s chain smoking and whiskey breath, his mother’s drinking—she did not disguise it, she kept saying, “I need a drink,” she no longer hid her bottle among the sofa cushions; and he understood Wilfred and the others—they were worried and weak, they made no pretense with him of being tough, they had nothing to fear from him, nor he from them. Blaine, the pale boy who’d betrayed him, kept his distance—he lingered, dull and uncomprehending, but Sharkey understood him now too: he was someone who was happier and less complicated than he’d guessed, and Blaine profited from Wilfred’s new mellow mood, his easing up on everyone in general. And Wilfred seemed content in the knowledge that he had the power to ease Sharkey’s pain, giving him pakalolo packed in matchboxes or sealed in plastic bags or rolled in joints, blunts as fat as a finger.