- Jason Bock gets punched in the face. Okay, that doesn't actually happen on page one, but we're told about it the first sentence, so we're not really giving anything away.
- Jason is hanging out with best friend Peter Schinner (Shin) at the town's water tower, and runs into Henry Stagg and "three lesser juvenile delinquents" (1.2)—Mitch, Marsh, and Bobby.
- Jason tries to be cool and casual with Henry, who has a "history of sudden, unprovoked violence" (1.7). Shin, however, volunteers that he and Jason have come to the water tower for a science project.
- This makes Shin easy pickin's for Henry, who bullies Shin for his high-pitched, nasal voice, and questions his sexual orientation. Not cool, Henry.
- Shin freezes up. For more on this phenomenon, see Shin's write-up in our "Characters" section.
- Henry's buddies urge him to hit Shin, but it isn't Henry's style to beat up someone as helpless as Shin is at that moment—so he shifts his attention to Jason and his size, asking how much he weighs.
- Jason takes his "standard thirty-pound deduction" (1.29) and tells him one hundred and ninety-four pounds. Then Henry lays him out with a blow to the left cheek. Huh? Where'd that come from? Maybe Henry hates even numbers …
- Now Henry smiles happily. "Whatever demon had been controlling him was temporarily sedated" (1.34). Thing is, Jason is way bigger than Henry. Yet he doesn't fight Henry back… because Henry "scares the crap" out of him (1.36). And why is that? "Henry doesn't care what happens to Henry" (1.38). Yikes—we wouldn't tangle with him either.
- Jason steps out of the action for a minute to describes himself—"large-bodied, hulking, and neckless," and Shin—"thin, loose-jointed, with hair sticking out in every direction" (1.42). He gives a little background on their friendship. They were the two smartest guys in a computer workshop when they were ten years old and are now best friends.
- Shin is a science nerd, a characteristic which sometimes embarrasses Jason. The whole reason the two were at the water tower in the first place is they were hunting pods, that is to say, gastropods, such as slugs and snails. Shin has a terrarium—a gastropodarium—and the buddies are hunting snails in the moisture beneath the water tower. So you see, they aren't really hunting pods for a science project—it is in fact summer break—but Shin "just said that because he thinks science is sacred. He invokes science as if it were the name of God. Like it should be sacred to Henry, too" (1.49).
- Laid out on his back by Henry's right cross, Jason sees the water tower from a new vantage point. This is a turning point in his life, "one of those magic moments where suddenly the way you see the world changes forever" (1.52). He realizes "how important the tower was to the town of St. Andrew Valley. It was the biggest thing in town. Water from that tower was piped to every home and business for miles around. The water connected all of us. It kept us alive" (1.53).
- "'Water is life,'" he says to the delinquents and Shin. And thus he is inspired with the concept of the water tower being God. Natch. We totally get that. We've felt the same way about the coffee maker.