Lincoln Jones is always working on the latest story he's got going in his notebook. Those stories are his refuge, a place where the hero always prevails and the bad guy goes to jail. Real life is complicated: his mother works at a dementia facility after leaving an abusive boyfriend. Lincoln stays at the facility after school until his mother gets off work; he writes the patients into his fiction-- even the deaths he witnesses. Then Kandi Kain, a nosy girl at his school, starts prying into his private business. She wants to know what he's writing, where he disappears to after school, and why he never talks to anybody.