“A powerful rage came over me and before I knew it, I was throwing things around my room. Everything! All of the things that Alison had given me…But that wasn’t enough, and more than that, it wasn’t working. I realized I needed to do something REALLY BIG this time.”

Abandoned. That’s how Ronnie Hartman feels after her mother and Kenny, her mom’s good-for-nothing boyfriend, move to Alaska, bringing Ronnie’s two younger brothers with them and leaving her behind. Now thirteen years old, Ronnie has been “returned” from multiple foster homes because of her impulsive lying and stealing. Her latest foster mom, Alison, is Ronnie’s very last chance—if she doesn’t want to end up in some awful residential treatment center.

Meanwhile, Ronnie wants more than anything to fit in with the popular crowd, especially with the beautiful (but stuck-up) Paige. But when Ronnie betrays her only friend, a chubby outcast named Cat, she begins a pattern of deception that can only end in disaster. As Ronnie struggles to define herself, an important letter will present her with the most heart-wrenching decision of her life: to accept the woman who wants to adopt her, or to return to the mother who once abandoned her.