Tracy should have been a boy. Even her older brother Spencer says so, though he wouldn’t finish the thought with, “And I should have been a girl.” When both are caught with gay partners, their lives and futures are endangered by their homophobic father as their mother struggles to defend them. At seventeen, Tracy dresses as a boy and leaves her parents in turmoil, with only the slimmest hope of finding peace within herself. She journeys to a girl in Alaska, calling to her from a photo.