Almost fourteen and a freshman in high school, Stevie Farr is a serious and talented cross-country runner. She is able to run nearly ten miles now and is the only freshman on the girls’ varsity track team. Though her father keeps promising to clock her exact mileage with his car, he always seems too tired to go out again after taking her younger brother Robby to ice hockey practice and games. Stevie knows her father has not felt well since he had a serious operation the past summer—in fact she suspects he’s feeling worse all the time—but she is unable to accept this as an excuse and feels he’s being unfair to her. Her mother considers getting good grades more important than making a team and is too busy to clock Stevie anyhow.

If Stevie can come in first in the 3.2 mile race at the big regional running conference, her team stands a chance of winning the meet. As she trains, she dreams of impressing the good-looking, sympathetic coach of the boys’ track team. She also plays a game with herself: if she wins, Daddy lives; if she loses, he dies.

Told honestly and directly by Stevie, the events of her fourteenth year, in which she comes to terms with pain and grief, acknowledges her own emergent sexuality, and falls gently in love with a boy on the track team, draw the listener close to Stevie as she moves along the uneven road to maturity.