The narrative shifts to a summer twenty-five years earlier, on a sun-scorched pier by a vast sea where three almost-fifteen-year-olds spent their days together. A hilariously timed fart sent them into uncontrollable laughter, a moment that would later be immortalized as The One of the Sea by C. Jat. The text stresses that those who shared such laughter never forget it, contrasting the authenticity of that memory with adults who misinterpret the painting as a simple seascape.

Before they were captured in the painting, the boys belonged only to each other. Their summer felt endless, their friendship absolute, and their shared knowledge of one another too intimate to carry unaltered into adulthood. The boys grew up poor, familiar with school fights, domestic violence, and the sound of a father’s drunken key in the door. In those weeks they witnessed death, were chased and assaulted, and endured more violence than the later auction crowd would know in their lives.

Among them, one boy—the future artist C. Jat—held an inner beauty that defied their ugly surroundings, his art a rebellion and a weapon. Joar, one of the friends, once leaned over the artist’s sketchpad and, in his own rough language, praised him; both boys’ responses (“You fucking alien!” and “Thanks”) stood in for unspoken declarations of love and dependence. The boys’ communication was clumsy but full of care.

Joar discovered a youth art competition in a newspaper his mother had brought home from the nursing home where she worked. On the first day of summer vacation, he explained the contest’s rules to his friends, who teased him by playing dumb. When the artist, nervous and self-doubting, scratched himself and tried to withdraw, Joar urged him to paint anything—even the sea—because he believed in the artist’s talent more than the artist did.

The third boy tried to defuse tension, joking that painting the sea would be difficult because it is too big to fit on paper, which reignited the group’s laughter and eased the artist’s anxiety. They spent the day throwing stones, telling jokes, and swimming, while the artist silently struggled with sadness he could not explain. The passage emphasizes that, of everything the artist would paint, capturing Joar as he truly felt about him was the hardest.

As the sun set, Joar insisted the artist had to escape their town because he was destined for world fame; the others might be trapped in hard lives, but not him. They lay on the pier, drinking cheap sodas and watching the sunset while the artist traced skulls in the air with his finger—an echo of the skulls later beside his signature. When the artist asked if they would still be best friends as adults, Joar answered that by then not all of them would be alive, a prediction that the narrative affirms.