A white midwestern girl moves to Chicago, where her new boyfriend is a black teen from the South Side with a rough, semi-criminal past.

Sara wants to be a dancer, but her dreams are cut short by the sudden death of her mother. She moves in with her father, who she has not seen for a long time. He lives on the other side of town, in a predominantly Black neighborhood. She gets transferred to a new school where she is one of the few White students there. She becomes friends with Chenille, and later, falls in love with Chenille's brother, Derek.—Kara

Sara Johnson dreams of becoming a professional ballerina. After the accidental death of her mother, Sara is forced to move from Lemont, a quiet Chicago suburb, to her father's ghetto apartment on Chicago's gritty south side. The new urban environment, very different than what she is used to, adds to Sara's feelings of loss and frustration, and her misplaced guilt, which is caused by the fact that her mother had been en route to her dance performance at the time of her death. But when she meets Derek, a popular fellow student with a passion for hip hop dancing and a future brighter than his troubled past, her repressed ambition is released through a revitalized interest in dance.—Anonymous