Set in the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in 1955 and ending in 1971, Parallel Lives A Love Story portrays the personal awakening of a mute girl born into wealth and an edgy, underprivileged boy. Maja Hawthorne and Billy Wayman Wolfe each separately and in parallel, fights against social expectations, their private longings, and ultimately who they are for who they will become. Their circumstances pull them together. Their flaws spin them apart. Maja begins invisible, misinformed and silent. Billy starts out using words of power to threaten, bully and lead others. Throughout the story these two characters are forced to confront their relationship to the spoken word as they endure emotional and physical pain. As Billy learns compassion and Maja finds the courage to speak up, their paths cross many times—a roadside accident, a Santana concert for farmworkers, Caesar Chavez with Robert Kennedy in Delano, the Native American take-over of Alcatraz. During these brief encounters, they touch, they kiss, and they break each other’s hearts as the currents of their lives pull them apart, again and again. This tale of class, power, and hope takes us from Maja and Billy’s first seemingly random meeting to the years beyond when the great divide of economics and culture no longer separated people, no matter how different, to demonstrate what happens when we reach past our expected destinies toward cataclysmic change.