When Danny first moved to Hawaii with his mom, the circumstances of his arrival already meant that he wanted to hate the place. When his parents had sat him down in that way which he's sure was meant to be reassuring but turned out to be kind of scary and uncomfortable and told him they were separating, he knew that it was over. His life would be different forever. He'd tried to believe that his mom and dad would get back together, but two years of sniping and hissed arguments and too many closed doors meant that he hadn't borne out much hope, even from the start.

So, given his reasons for being there, Hawaii was pretty much the suckiest place on earth. The sunshine as they deplaned that made him curse and shade his eyes with his hand because they'd come from New Jersey in March? Sucky. The not unreasonably but still definitely hot weather that caused his shirt to stick to his back beneath his apparently not so reasonable denim jacket? Sucky. But the absolute pinnacle on the pile of suck that his life had become came when he and his mother went to his new school to enroll and set up his schedule and he discovered that while the school had a football team, and a baseball team, and a motherfucking golf team, they did not have a men's hockey team. When the registrar shot him a puzzled glance and told him the news, he felt his spine crumple, and he lost whatever small ounces of will to live that had remained from the whole sucky, hot, sticky, bright, not-New-Jersey mess of events that he had suffered through so far.

Understandably, Danny's enthusiasm for the first day of school could have been characterized as sub-par.