sitting in a station wagon, a strange wagon. He saw her and she did not see him. Brian was going to wave or call out, but something stopped him. There was a man in the car. Short blond hair, the man had. Wearing some kind of white pullover tennis shirt. Brian saw this and more, saw the Secret and saw more later, but the memory came in pieces, came in scenes like this—Terry smiling, Brian looking over his head to see the station wagon and his mother sitting with the man, the time and temperature clock, the front wheel of his bike, the short blond hair of the man, the white shirt of the man, the hot-hate slices of the memory were exact. The Secret. Brian opened his eyes and screamed.

This is all that readers learn in Chapter Three and Four about "the secret." Readers learn that this memory fills Brian with hate, that he remembers this experience in vivid detail, including what the clock and the temperature were at the time. We can infer this caused the divorce, but nothing else is said about the secret at this point in the novel.

It is at the beginning of chapter four that Brian reflects on "the secret" and the reader learns what it is about. As he crashes into the water at the end of chapter three, darkness falls and the reader is brought immediately to an account of that day he learned "the secret."

He'd been riding bikes with his friend Terry and he remembered everything perfectly. The clock at the bank read 3:31, the temperature was 82 degrees and he couldn't forget the date. He saw his mother in the car and just before he waved hi he noticed that there was a man in the car with her.

The memory is an incredibly painful one for him. He recalls it with a white hot rage that hasn't really diminished. He also notes later in the chapter that it had something to do with his bad luck. If he had good luck, his parents wouldn't have divorced, he wouldn't know the secret, and he wouldn't have crashed the plane into the lake.