Emma Jarvie is your typical teenager-sure, she's an Iranian American immigrant living in Santa Ana, CA, a neighborhood becoming notorious for its growing violence. But like every teenage girl, she worries about boys, tries to keep her grades up in school, and shops for makeup with her best friend, Julie.
All right, so things aren't as they seem. So she doesn't have a father in the picture, and her mother is slowly losing a battle to something...