Love, art, sex, and rock 'n' roll! Nic’s comfortable suburban life is thrown into upheaval the morning after her high school graduation. A careless but egregious crime dashes the homecoming queen's plans of going off to college and leaves her family, the neighborhood’s new black sheep, struggling socially and financially. Come August, Nic is left behind by her friends — including her boyfriend — as they head to Austin for college while her circumstances force her to enter the bizarre purgatory that is community college. As she schemes to escape, she takes refuge under the most unlikely of wings — those belonging to a trio of third and fourth-year freshmen ghosting the halls of the community college, borderline burnouts she used to ignore as they smoked under the bleachers in high school. These aimless but talented musicians and artists take it upon themselves to show her parts of the city she’s never experienced before and teach her how to stretch a dollar. One, a rock singer from the poorer side of town, sets his sights on winning her, despite her goal of reuniting with her boyfriend in Austin. As Nic experiences real independence and self-expression for the first time, she must decide whether the life she’d been building is worth saving, or if it’s better to let it fall apart so she can reconstruct it from scratch.