The protagonist, a young teenage boy, is at a friend's house in the country with a group of other teenage boys, watching an incredibly violent porn film in which a group of older men cut into a the back of a young girl who is tied to the bed with box-cutters. While the other boys decide to watch the film again, the protagonist feels sick and horrified and walks to the nearest payphone to call his sister to pick him up.

His sister, Charlotte, is seventeen and rebellious. Her whereabouts are strictly monitored by their father, who caught her making out outside the house. Charlotte sneaks out and takes their father's car to pick the protagonist up after he offers to pay her $20 to do so. On the way home, they hit a deer. The windshield shatters and the car spins off the road. Charlotte realizes the deer is pregnant and attempts to cut the baby from the deer's dead body in order to save it. The protagonist thinks about the film and the woman and the boxcutters. He also thinks about how strict their father is with Charlotte.

Charlotte asks if the narrator would miss her if she leaves town, and says she might. She gives up on delivering the baby deer, saying it's premature and would die anyway. They get the car out of the ditch. The narrator wonders whether, if he had been holding the knife instead of Charlotte, he wouldn't have been able to go as far with cutting into the deer or would never have stopped.