It's the mid-70's in the SoCal Inland Empire and 13-year-old Dawn is angry. The upcoming father-daughter dance at her middle-school has put her bullies in overdrive, picking on her for being a bastard kid and not being able to go. To prove them wrong, she decides to find her dad and show up at the dance with him. The problem - she has no idea where her father is and mom won't talk about him.

Then Mark shows up at school, an orphan of the state temporarily placed in Booger's house, the grossest kid in the neighborhood but Mark doesn't care. He's confident and jaded, but in a good way that Dawn finds intriguing. She hires him to be her body guard at school to shield her from her bullies. It's a friendship of outsiders coming together against their oppressors, and in this time, Mark hatches a plan for how to find her father. When the plan takes Dawn down a dangerous path, their simplistic view of how that reunion would go down, turns into a chaotic mess. Dawn learns the terrible truth about her father and this sets off a series of events she could not expect, and all this as the date of the dance nears.