The adult Gordon LaChance is looking back to his childhood and recounting the coming-of-age event that most influenced the course of his life. He talks about how difficult it is sometimes to put important thoughts and ideas into words that will make sense to another person.

In August, near the end of a long, hot summer, the narrator, Gordon “Gordie” LaChance, and his friends, Chris and Teddy, are hanging out in their club, a treehouse overhanging a vacant lot in Castle Rock. Gordie describes it as a kind of social club with no name and a loose and fluctuating membership. They play cards and smoke and tell stories. The three boys are playing cards when their friend, Vern Tessio, arrives out of breath.

Vern tells them something that he overheard from his older brother. Three days earlier, Ray Brower, a boy their own age from nearby Chamberlain, had gone missing. Vern just overheard his older brother, Billy, talking with a friend about finding Ray Brower’s body but being unable to tell anyone about it because they had found it while joyriding in a boosted car. They found the body near the train tracks and theorized that he must have been lost and following the tracks to get home and was hit by a train.