When Jo Mitchell moves to North Shore High School, the father of a girl named Abby offers to put Jo through her dream school, Carnegie Mellon, if she will befriend Abby, who is targeted as a rival by the Plastics' queen bee, Mandi.
In a rural Appalachian community haunted by the legacy of a Civil War massacre, a rebellious young man struggles to escape the violence that would bind him to the past.