The story begins in a large college town in California at a shabby antique shop, A-Z Antiques. An off-putting old man runs the store. He’s known as the Professor, though nobody in the neighborhood can recall exactly why:

He was tall and bent and his thin beard straggled up his cheeks like dry moss on gray rocks. His eyes were dark and expressionless, and set so deep under heavy brows that from a distance they looked like dark empty holes (4).

The Professor’s store sits in a rundown neighborhood consisting of small shops and apartment buildings. The inhabitants are diverse racially and ethnically, and all the children in the neighborhood are wary of the antique dealer. One day in September, the Professor peers out of a dirty window in his back storeroom. He witnesses something that will later be known as the Egypt Game. Some children have slipped through a loose board in the fence and entered his storage yard. There are two girls aged about 11, one white and one African American, and a little boy of about four. The white girl is called April, and the Black girl is named Melanie. Marshall is the little boy; he carries a plush octopus named Security: