In Florida, an adolescent girl named Meg moves with her family from a large house to a smaller apartment after her 10-year-old brother dies from AIDS. Her brother's immense hospital bills forced Meg's family to move to the poorer neighborhood. Across the apartment complex lives a Black woman and her two daughters. Meg has never lived in the same neighborhood as Black people before. One day, she sees the two girls locked out in the rain — the older girl has lost her key. Meg invites them inside her family's apartment. The girls seem wary of her at first, and are reluctant to accept Meg's offer of dry clothes. The younger girl is a first-grader named Bernice; the older girl is a fourth-grader named Dontella. Bernice asks Meg about Girl Scouts. Meg, who is not a Girl Scout but wants to be, pitches a tent indoors. She tells the girls a creepy story in the tent, but they are unimpressed and unafraid. Bernice asks who the clothes they're wearing belonged to, and Meg tells them about her brother. Bernice tells Meg that the girls' dad is dead. Bernice makes them all play a game where Meg pretends to be their dead mother and they pretend to have a funeral. Later, while Bernice is in the bathroom, Meg and Dontella talk about Meg's brother's death and discuss the sugarcane farms in Palm Beach County, a low-income area where many Haitians live and where the AIDS epidemic is concentrated. When Dontella and Bernice's mother arrives, she seems angry and expresses no gratitude towards Meg. She orders her daughters to leave. As Meg and the girls' mother wait for the girls to change, Meg thinks about the times she'd "refused a hug or kiss from [her] brother." As the girls leave with their mother, Meg hears Bernice note that they have the same house, but backwards.