A first-generation college student, hours from graduating, dreads leaving school and her faculty mentor for the "real world" and her traditional, Eastern European parents.

A college counselor watches anxiously as her teenage son applies to college without her help. As her son plans for his future, the counselor and her husband reflect on how quickly their lives have changed, seeking ways to steady themselves in the midst of middle age.

When a teenager's grandfather offers him an old-fashioned suit to wear to his junior-high graduation in Los Angeles in the 1950s, the boy reluctantly accepts, despite the fact that he is scared of what his classmates will think of him.

When a young father is hired for an English instructorship position, he struggles to balance playing the role of a teacher and meeting the university’s demands for a published scholar.

A senior in high school realizes she is in love with an acquaintance within weeks of graduating, and she tries to initiate something before they both leave for college.

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

Though most of a prep school's students are away for the long weekend, a few boys stay behind at the dorms and are invited to dinner with a wealthy boy and his stepmother. At the dinner, the stepmother's attitude and appearance are just as alluring as the food, but the wealthy student acts strange and detached the whole evening.

When a group of boys graduate from Henry Hudson High School in the Bronx in 1944, the ceremony remains largely the same as any other year, despite the country being in the middle of World War II.

A freshman in college deals with loneliness and grief as she attends the weekly office hours of an English professor at her school, who happens to be the father of her friend who died of brain cancer.

After a fifteen-year-old girl makes a bet with her father that after high school she will leave home to never return, her father takes her to the train station early one morning and tells her to leave. When she winds up in Los Angeles, she finds her way there, despite the fact that she does not feel free.