When two of her teenaged son Jason’s friends are murdered in a shooting, a middle-aged black woman spends her savings to buy him a ticket to live with his grandfather in Tallahassee for the summer. She knows that if she doesn’t get him out of the city, he may be next. Jason hangs around a crowd of boys with little direction in life, who frequently use drugs and alcohol and call themselves thugs. He’s angry with his mother, but accepts the decision and spends his last half day with his friends, drinking and smoking on his stoop. They pour some out for their dead friends and spend the rest of the time making fun of Jason’s trip. While they’re all poor, Jason’s mom is poor because she’s a single parent; their parents are poor because they’re addicted to drugs, and there’s a difference between them. While they may be thugs, he’s really a punk pretending to be one. Later at the airport, his grandfather’s home attendant meets him and takes him back to the house. His grandfather Cal had a stroke that devastated half of his body and left him wheelchair-bound. When they get to the house, Jason’s grandfather immediately asks him about his dead friends, which antagonizes the boy and sets them against each other. For days, Jason has nightmares about his dead friends, Stephen and Kiki, and avoids his grandfather during the day. He has chores, but for the most part they stay apart, especially when his grandfather has clearly painful physical therapy. He often thinks of his friends and their funeral, where his mother told him that he would be next unless he changed his behavior. One night after a particularly bad nightmare, he wakes to his grandfather comforting him. Later that day, they get into it again about his relationship with his mother and his dead friends, and Jason resolves to leave early. When he confronts his grandfather about it, he starts to cry about their meaningless and insignificant deaths, and tells his grandfather what it was like to witness. His grandfather offers for him to sleep in his room tonight, and as they’re lying in bed together, Jason asks what it was like for him to have a stroke. At first he doesn’t want to answer, but then he tells him how it feels like one half of you is missing, how living is the most difficult thing a body can do.