Nick Swansen pretty much knows what it means to be Special Ed.: You can't drive, even if you're sixteen and your parents have two cars; the regular kids in school don't talk to you much; and even if you can memorize every fact about amphibians, it's hard to make sense of all the other stuff swirling in your mind. What he doesn't know is whether being Special Ed. means you shouldn't go to the prom. But since no rule says you can't, Nick decides to ask Shana.

But the prom doesn't turn out at all the way Nick expects it to, and everything bad seems to get all mixed up together: the prom, what Shana does, and the terrible thing that happened to Nick's sister nine years ago. Nick doesn't want to think about any of it, but he begins to realize that unless he makes peace with all the memories that trouble him, they will haunt him forever....