Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the death of a parent and the death of a child.

In July 1996, 12-year-old Lucy Everhart and Fred Kelly gather $1.45 from the pay phone coin returns in their hometown of Rockport, Massachusetts, to buy candy from the local Country Store. At the store, they overhear two tourists talking about a shark that’s just been caught. Lucy and Fred race down to the wharf to see the shark, and Fred comments that Lucy’s mother would’ve known if it were a great white or not, alluding to the fact that Lucy’s mother is dead.

The great white shark reminds Lucy of her mother, who was a shark expert and marine biologist for the state of Massachusetts. Fred wants to investigate the shark for the field guide he and Lucy are working on, an extra credit project for their science class. Fred oversees the information for the guide while Lucy sketches the creatures they find. The shark has been strung up on the wharf by the fisherman who caught it, Sookie, an old friend of Lucy’s family and a “fourth-generation Rockport fisherman” (12). Fred tells Sookie that he should call a biologist, but Sookie says that Lucy’s mother was the only biologist he knew.