Gary Soto’s young adult novel about life in poverty-heavy south Fresno begins with the main character, Eddie, sitting at a picnic table at Fresno City College. Soto places him near the mortuary studies department, and he begins thinking of all the dead people he has known and all the death-related sensory impressions nearby, right down to the mortuary studies students themselves. We see Eddie’s vivid yet untapped imagination early, as he envisions how the “students of that ghoulish business had to stand in the sun and quiver until the heat returned to their bodies” (2). He also unveils his “theory about a huge onion buried under the city,” a “remarkable bulb of sadness” (2).

Eddie leaves the campus to return to his apartment. We learn he is no longer a student studying air conditioning, having dropped out of college shortly after his cousin, Jesus, was murdered. Eddie heard about the murder from an acquaintance of his, Angel, a friend of Jesus and someone who Eddie trusts little.

Eddie describes his apartment—the swamp cooler, a couch and two chairs, a fake art print of a ship on his wall, a refrigerator, and a rose flowering near the entrance.