High school freshman Boady Sanden dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. Then Thomas Elgin moves in across the road, and Boady's life begins to twist and turn. Coming to know the Elgins, a black family settling into a community where notions of "us" and "them" carry the weight of history, forces Boady to rethink his understanding of the world he's taken for granted. Secrets hidden in plain sight begin to unfold, and the biggest secret of all is the disappearance of Lida Poe, the African-American woman who keeps the books at the local plastics factory. Word has it that Ms. Poe left town, along with a hundred thousand dollars of company money. As the mystery of her fate plays out, Boady begins to see the stark lines of race and class that both bind and divide this small town, and he will be forced to choose sides.