Virgil is going nowhere. He's 16 and attending high school in the late 1970s, living with an abusive uncle and just trying to get through each school day, until a bad decision and an errant can of spray paint spin his life in another direction entirely--and then he's going fast. He meets JT, whose friendship brings him from the familiar streets of Santa Cruz to the wrong side of San Francisco, home of the slums and drug dealers and crime.
Sucked in by JT's magnetic power and unable to resist the temptations of the seedier side of the night, drawn in by the neon and renting a flat across the street from an all-night doughnut joint, Virg might be going too fast to make the right choices, but in the end maybe all that counts is that he's made them at all.