Narrator Timeline & Summary

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• Attends a close family member's funeral, and then drives to the Hempstock's farm to avoid meeting the family afterward.
• He goes out back to the pond to reminisce, and the whole story comes flooding back to him.
• Flashback to when he's seven years old, and he and his father find the corpse of their boarder in the backseat of their car, which has been parked down the road.
• Lettie takes him to her house to kill some time while the police work, and they become friends.
• Weird things start happening with coins and money, and then Lettie shows up right when the boy needs some answers. They go off to find the thing that's causing the trouble and ask it to go home.
• When they find the "flea," Lettie tries to bind it, but the boy accidentally lets go of her hand and the flea is able to burrow into his foot.
• That night he tries to pull a worm (that is the "flea") out of his foot and he gets most, but not all, of it.
• The next day Ursula Monkton shows up as his family's next boarder/childcare provider, and the boy has a really bad feeling about her.
• Ursula starts making him stay on their property under threats of awful punishments, and the boy realizes she's the evil creature Lettie tried to bind.
• The boy gets in a fight with his dad (who is under Ursula's spell), and his father tries to drown him in the bathtub.
• The boy escapes and makes it to the Hempstock's farm. They do some creative editing to the time frame of what happened, and convince his parents that he's just there for a sleepover.
• Lettie, her mom Ginnie, and Gran come up with a plan to get rid of Ursula Monkton—but when Lettie and the boy go to show her the way home, she reveals that part of her doorway home still lies embedded in the boy's heart, so the only way for her to go home is to destroy him.
• Lettie summons the "varmints," or hunger birds, to come clean up the mess that is Ursula Monkton. They eat her and she's gone for good, but now they're stuck with the hunger birds, which also want to eat the boy because of that portal lodged in his chest.
• The boy sees the varmints destroying his world and tries to sacrifice himself to save it; Lettie then throws herself on top of him and sacrifices herself to save him instead.
• Gran shows up and is angry; she sends the varmints home with a severe tongue-lashing.
• Ginnie, Gran, and the boy bring Lettie's body (which is dead, but not dead) to her ocean and release it to the waves.
• When Ginnie brings the boy home he suddenly has a totally different memory of what has happened over the last few days, and he's left with the impression that his totally normal friend Lettie has gone to Australia to be with her dad.
• Flash-forward again to the grown man who is sitting by a pond and he is remembering everything clearly now. The lady, who he now recognizes as Gran, tells him he's done this same thing periodically over the years, and each time he forgets that he's ever come back before. Lettie is still recovering, but she will come back some day, and she's checking him out from her ocean to make sure her sacrifice was worth it.
• When he drives away to meet up with the family who is waiting for him, he is left only with the memory of sitting by the pond where he used to know a girl named Lettie, who moved to Australia a long time ago.