Puzzling over conflicting advice from family members, seventeen-year-old DeQuin Lewis continually faces trouble in his St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood, until a betrayal leads him to fresh start in an alternative school, one confrontation away from losing everything.

Ty is very proud of his father's accomplishments as a U.S. Army sargeant, but when a brain injury and partial paralysis send his father home from Afghanistan in a wheelchair, Ty finds it hard to balance schoolwork, basketball, a girlfriend, and friends with the time and effort required to care for him.