Despite growing up without her parents, Yesenia "Jessi" Rodriguez was a normal teenager. Not yet seventeen, she'd managed to make it through to her junior year in high school without succumbing to the lure of the streets in her city of Brooklyn. She had all a girl could ask for. Good looks. A good job. Great friends and family. And she was madly in love with her first serious boyfriend, Shyheim. Little did she know, this very year would be the one that changed everything as a sequence of bad situations and horrible choices cause her to grow up quickly. Trouble starts when Shyheim decides he wants his cut in a growing drug operation. This leaves Jessi wrapped up in the very thing she was trying to avoid and she starts to feel helpless when her brother and cousin follow suit. She finds solace and friendship in a boy named Ronnie, who steps in to protect her when an argument between her and Shyheim gets out of hand. Jessi then gets caught up in a shooting at her high school and she soon realizes just how dangerous things can get when a street war erupts. She tries desperately to pick up the pieces of her broken life, but things get deeper than she's ever imagined as death and violence take their hold.