Christian has never had any use for a mother—his deserted him fifteen years ago after all. So when his grandfather dies, leaving him in a new town all alone, he'd rather spend his senior year with a foster family than look up his birth mother. And, as if his life isn't bad enough, his foster parents take in another stray, a girl whose family defines the word dysfunction.

All Kylie wanted was to save her mother from an abusive boyfriend, but when she calls the cops, her mother is arrested too, and Kylie is sent to a foster family.

Christian doesn't understand Kylie's loyalty to her mother, a woman whose bad decisions keep affecting her life, but he needs to convince Kylie to hide that they're both foster kids. As long as they tell the kids at school that they're family, then there's no chance he'll get sent back to the drug addict who abandoned him. And everything will be okay.