For every school shooting survivor, life has two parts: Before and After. Before, Thea Callais was a star runner and a happy teen excited to go race hurdles in college next year. After, she’s so traumatized by the event that she physically can't run, as during the shooting she jumped through a window and sprinted for miles until she realized she was safe. Despite her and her friends’ efforts toward fighting for gun control from their home of Watertown, Maryland, she finds herself unraveling at the defeatism of it all. She ditches school and seeks out a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, in order to get some answers about what led to the day her life snapped in two.
Birdie Jenkins, is a woman in a man’s world, wielding power for the bad guys but with no concrete value system of her own. She believes Thea’s disguise as a DC private school kid with a dad who works for Rupert Murdoch, and she agrees to let Thea follow her around to write an article for the school paper.
Thea begins to see quirky Birdie as complicated, and not the embodiment of evil she’d previously thought people who shill for the gun guys must be. Birdie shows Thea K Street, the District restaurants that double as offices for mosquitos like her, and just how easily congressmen can be bought, sold, and shoved through the revolving door between public service and the private sector.
A big bill hits the Hill, and it’s personal-- it would lower the federal firearm purchasing age from 21 to 18. Caleb, the shooter at Thea’s school, legally bought his rifle six days after his eighteenth birthday. Thea convinces Birdie to block it, in exchange for Thea’s faux-father publishing a New York Post article about Birdie’s work as a female lobbyist. Birdie’s track record winds up trumping any good press, and the bill passes. Thea tells Birdie her story was a lie, and she is actually a victim of not one, but two mass shootings-- one in a grocery store with her father in 2008, and one at her Maryland public school. The craziest part of being a dual shooting survivor is that it's not going to be rare for much longer.
Thea and her friends graduate high school and they reckon with how to move forward in a society in which it’s always one step forward, three steps back. Her best friend Oliver reminds her they’re standing on the playground of their former school, Thurgood Marshall Elementary. Marshall was the first Black Supreme Court Justice, and as the court became more conservative, he responded by increasingly dissenting. Oliver tells her the key is to keep dissenting, no matter how futile it seems.
In November, 2024, Thea and her three best friends catch up from different corners of the country-- or in Thea’s case, the Galápagos Islands, where she’s spending her gap year-- all in the middle of voting for the first time in the midterm election.
