What do you do if you’re a fifteen-year-old girl whose much older (eighteen) boyfriend breaks up with her because you won’t “go all the way?” What do you do if you live in the smallest town in the world, where everyone knows your business before you do, and it’s the first day of school, and you just want to hide under the covers and pretend you’re dead? What do you do if you love theatre more than anything, and you want to go to New York to study and be on Broadway, but your dads named you after Ruth Bader Ginsberg and want you to go to law school and change the world? If you’re Ruthie Barakat-Grimaldi, the youngest senior at Warren High School, who lives in the tiny town of Warren, in Central California, you suck it up, get out of bed, continue to lie to everyone you know, and get on with it. Only when she gets to school, there’s a new boy there, namely one Elliott Banks, a moody, truculent exchange student with a dreamy English accent, who’s so handsome it’s hard to remember how to talk when looking at him. What’s his story? All Ruthie can find out about him is that he’s living with his grandparents for the year, and he loves theatre, almost as much as she does. As the year progresses, Ruthie’s ex, Brett, who was dating Ruthie’s ex best friend Amelia, finds out about her interest in Elliott, unceremoniously dumps Amelia, and starts trying to get back together with her. He hates Elliott, and wants him out of Ruthie’s life, pronto. And as life rolls along, Amelia is left with her own problems, as are Ruthie’s friends, Pepsi, Linda, and Gordon, who feel uneasy about Elliott without quite knowing why. As for Ruthie, she finds out that it wasn’t that she didn’t want to go all the way, it was just that she didn’t want to with Brett; she has no issues where Elliott is concerned. Elliott is her first love, as she tells her dads, and she’s very comfortable being with him. The same cannot be said for Elliott, however. He looks at Ruthie and sees a fifteen-year-old girl child, and is very, very uneasy about how young she is. He himself is seventeen, and feels that she’s too young for most of the things she wants to happen. What’s a sexually curious girl to do?