“When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them. […] By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total that they took their coffee black for the rest of their lives and never ate dessert.”

Jimmy and Sean’s aversion to sweetness signifies how childhood experiences shape the rest of one’s life. Sean and Jimmy’s friendship is portrayed as incidental; had their fathers not worked together, they would never have met. This positions the events of the novel as consistent products of the past: had their fathers not worked together, had they not been friends, had Dave not tagged along, had Dave not been abducted, etc. From the opening, Lehane emphasizes that every event has a lasting and unforeseeable legacy.  

“Jimmy and Dave came from the Flats […] the Point and the Flats didn’t mix much. It wasn’t like the Point glittered with gold streets and silver spoons. […] people in the Point owned. People in the Flats rented.” 

Early on, Sean is differentiated from Jimmy and Dave through class. In acknowledging the economic disparity between the two boys, the novel conveys the nuanced but deeply felt ways in which class consciousness affects a community. Though the Flats and the Point are both working-class neighborhoods, it is the Flats that carries a bad reputation simply because it is the poorer of the two neighborhoods. Ironically, Dave is abducted from the Point, not the Flats. The two neighborhoods are consistently contrasted, even in their names; metaphorically, the Flats indicates a changeless, fixed state that is often indicative of poverty; the point evokes ascension, the possibility to rise.