Protagonist Carrie Sinclair begins her story by explaining that her son, Johnny, is dead. She feels responsible for his death from a fire and laments all that Johnny will never get to experience. Carrie reveals that despite her son’s death, his ghost visits her often at her family’s home on Beechwood Island.

Carrie sits with her son’s ghost almost every night when she cannot sleep, and he often asks for stories of their family history. One night, Johnny asks Carrie to tell him about the “hijinks“ (4) she and her sisters, Penny and Bess, used to get up to in their youth during the 1980s. Carrie tells him that she does not like to remember that time of her life but decides that she owes Johnny the history of his family so that he can better understand “this island, the people on it, and why we act the way we do” (4).

Carrie begins the story of her 17th summer by saying that her full name is Caroline Lennox Taft Sinclair and that she was born in 1970. She explains that it was the year the boys came to the island and the first time she saw a ghost.