On a summer night in 1963, four pre-teen boys are talking baseball and girls in their sanctuary, a tree house in the middle of a vacant lot called the "snake patch." Their idyllic bull session turns to horror when a teen-age sexual predator rapes his girlfriend under the tree house, unaware the four boys are watching. When the girl later kills herself, the boys - one of whom is the son of the police officer assigned to investigate the case - struggle...