It's 1922, and thirteen-year-old Woodrow Harper has moved with his widowed mother to his father's hometown of Lawton, Oklahoma. Perhaps here he will be able to find the closeness to his father that eluded him when his father was alive. He is befriended by his new next-door neighbor, a powerful state senator who becomes the father figure Woodrow always wanted, who understands him in a way his own father never did. The senator introduces Woodrow to the "best" people in town, but Woodrow soon realizes the "best" people have some terrible secrets, and to be accepted by them he has to do things that make him abandon his own values, culminating in a terrifying act of violence close to home.