Mark Hayes has come up hard. Poverty. Chaos. Hunger. His mother a junkie. His father serving a life sentence. But as his senior year looms, Mark finds a bit of peace with his mother and her girlfriend in a farmhouse outside town. Here, he hopes to escape the upheaval that has dogged him since the day he was born, but as hard as he tries, he can't outrun his shadows. He is lost, but no more so than many of his friends, no more so than the institutions...