In many urban and suburban communities, good and bad, it's understood that, if you see a crime being committed, button your lip, become "d'n'd'", deaf and dumb, or you'll bring trouble or worse to yourself and your family.  In one suburban junior high school in the Northeast Bronx, a still good mixed neighbourhood, in the early 1980's, an impetuous, earnest, stubborn black ninth grader, REESE ABRAMSON, reports an illegal drug transaction he'd witnessed in the school stairwell, defiantly breaking this unwritten rule and costing him his life.  Inside the boys bathroom, while a "fake fistfight" is staged outside in the schoolyard, causing a near riot, he is murdered by a hired hit man, a junior high school kickout, TERRY MAQUIS, who'd sneaked into the building.  This was to send the message to the other students.  The community is stunned, outraged, but nobody who might have any inside information comes forward. 
        A black eighth grader, HOLLIS GAULT, (the novel's main character), part of neither the drugs world around him nor of the anti-drugs value system trying to hold the line in this neighborhood ¾a sort of "boy without a country"¾finds that his cynical indifference to the drug problem begins to wane when his personal world is touched.  Instances abound in the community of burglary, arson, teen prostitution, menacing behavior and random violence that is tolerated.  Eventually, committing to whose side he is on, he opens his mouth and exposes the identity of a crack dealer he knows personally, MICHAEL O, his best friend.  He reveals it to OFFICER GITTENS, the crusading black police officer assigned to the junior high school along with his salt-and-pepper partner, OFFICER RUSS. 
        Thus his life is under threat as was REESE's, necessitating HOLLIS's and IMOGEN's change of school. 
        This causes the two police officers to intensify their harassing activities against the druggie forces and this in turn causes them both to be transferred to another precinct.  (Their families are threatened.) 
        This now puts HOLLIS's sister IMOGEN, a seventh grader, and him in the crosshairs, along with his mother FRANCINE and father CARLOS.  Will the timorous community stand up and be heard before another of theirs is murdered?  Can the burgeoning and increasingly brazen drug gang be stopped, its leaders W'AISI FLANAGAN, a college dropout and MR. WHITMAN, the owner of a fairly successful local dry cleaning establishment and the drug operation's secret bankroller, brought to justice?  Can TERRY MAQUIS and the other gangstas be touched by the law?  Will REESE's aunt MIRABELLA ABRAMSON, a devout woman, find a way to avenge his murder and the overdose death of her sister ANNABELLA, REESE's mother, without compromising her personal scruples and endangering her life?  Will, GITTENS and RUSS-a dynamic salt and pepper team-triumph over the druggies?  Will the murdered REESE be consecrated by the neighborhood's needed involvement?
        Immaturity, misapplied cynicism and machismo reverberate in the surrounding air of this world and inside HOLLIS's wrangling soul until his reckless nature puts his life in grave danger when he makes several senseless attempts to defy those forces seeking to harm him, and his sister IMOGEN learns of her best friend ERIKA's terrible secret.
        Events build to a climax when the community rises up against the druggie forces.  After a near miss, the gangstas, in their desperate attempt to "make an example" of HOLLIS, determine to come into the block where he lives to get him.  This is finally too much for his neighbors and, led by MIRABELLA, they band together and rise up against them, an act which culminates in their march to MR. WHITMAN's house.
           HOLLIS weeps with rage at the secret bankroller's front door.