Chicken Legs is the story of James Corbett, a skinny, big-eared, self-conscious ninth grader with blazing half-mile speed who attends Reedsville High School. Befriending a streetwise Brooklyn transfer and dating a myopic girl, James finds himself embroiled in issues of bullying, elitism and racism and uses his feature column in the school newspaper to combat discrimination and to examine his own humanity, finding strength in loyalty and first love.