A 9-year-old Black boy named Freddy imagines himself as a robot as he runs to St. Rita's Day Camp, a charity camp. He is late, because it took him awhile to wake his mother up to sign his permission slip for a field trip. His mother asked him to call her in late for work, as she often does, but he doesn't. He gets to the camp late, and Sister Pamela is displeased. He gets in the van and sits with his friend Santos, who the other kids don't like because they think his breath smells bad and his hair is ugly.

As the van drives to its destination, a house with a pool in the suburbs where a rich white family will feed them lunch and let them play, Santos overhears "Scarsdale" and assumes it's the Johnsons' house, a house they've visited in the past, which he talks up to Freddy. Freddy imagines how it will be.

However, the house is bleaker than Freddy imagined, big but like a bigger version of his own world, and the woman who greets them is Black, not white. At first Sister Pamela thinks they're in the wrong place, then they all go in.

The experience is mediocre and disappointing and not how Freddy imagined it would be. At one point, he picks a fight with Santos, who says that everyone says his mother stopped raising him when he was a baby, and they fall fighting into the pool. As punishment, Sister Pamela makes them sit and watch the other kids play. The woman who owns the house, Arlene, tries to make them make up, but Freddy won't.

Freddy remembers his mom's younger sister, Ava, falling ill and dying.

Freddy goes inside to use the bathroom and sees a painting of Black Jesus. Then, he wanders upstairs and finds a room with a tree painted on one wall and the lines "What shall I call thee? / I happy am / Joy is my name" on another.

In the next room, he finds Arlene lying in bed. She seems ill. She asks him if he would want to live in this house. He says he'd want to live in the Johnsons' house. He says he doesn't want to live in the ghetto anymore. Arlene says the Johnsons' hang pictures of the camp groups of Black and brown boys they have over to their house on their walls like trophies, in their parlor. Freddy tells her she'll get a parlor someday, and she says she doesn't want one anymore.

Arlene shows Freddy that she's pregnant, has Freddy feel her stomach, and asks if he thinks it's a boy or a girl. Freddy feels this moment is important; one he doesn't understand yet, but will never forget.