An imaginative teenage girl, living in a mystical and dangerous community built on a deserted drive-in movie lot along the Texas/Oklahoma border, struggles to realize her potential, and escape the world she was born into.

Young Trevor McKinney, troubled by his mother's alcoholism and fears of his abusive but absent father, is caught up by an intriguing assignment from his new social studies teacher, Mr. Simonet. The assignment: think of something to change the world and put it into action. Trevor conjures the notion of paying a favor not back, but forward--repaying good deeds not with payback, but with new good deeds done to three new people. Trevor's efforts to make good on his idea bring a revolution not only in the lives of himself, his mother and his physically and emotionally scarred teacher, but in those of an ever-widening circle of people completely unknown to him.

Driving to a wedding in Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert, Paul and Adrienne pull off the highway and into Roy's Motel and Cafe. This roadside artifact proves to be a strange and surreal place with an unsettling mix of travelers, who force our couple to discover the secret hidden between.

Summer in a small southern town: Grace wants to go to college, but her feckless mom has poisoned that well (no student loans because mom has welshed on credit cards in Grace's name). Dorian wants to escape from his snobbish adoptive parents. They team up to sell marijuana - she hopes for enough to go to college. Both investigate family secretes, and things get complicated when Dorian falls for her, Grace falls for someone else, and Grace's 15-year-old sister behaves badly. Can Dorian find independence and Grace get to college. And what constitutes a family, anyway?