Belly spends the summer she turns sixteen at the beach just like every other summer of her life, but this time things are very different.

T. Lily Decker is a high school senior with a twelve-year plan: avoid stress, drugs, alcohol and boyfriends, and take regular psych quizzes administered by her best friend, Sawyer, to make sure she s not developing schizophrenia. But when a newspaper internship results in Lily witnessing a mother elephant try to kill her three-week-old calf, Swifty, Lily can t abandon the story or the calf.

In the summer before college, eighteen-year-old Blake Brenner works to join the exclusive Serena Society with her girlfriend, and turns to alcohol to cope with the pressure of pledging, as her pursuit of success begins to strain her relationships.

Fifteen-year-old Carly's summer volunteer experience makes her feel more real than her life of privilege in Atlanta ever did, but her younger sister starts high school pretending to be what she is not, and both find their relationships suffering.

Time is a funny thing in the hospital. In the mental ward. You lose track of it easily. After six months in the Maryland Mental Health Unit, Kyra Sellers, a.k.a. Goth Girl, is going home. Unfortunately, she's about to find out that while she was away, she lost track of more than time. Kyra is back in black, feeling good, and ready to make up with the only person who's ever appreciated her for who she really is. But then she sees him. Fanboy. Transcended...

When Auden impulsively goes to stay with her father, stepmother, and new baby sister the summer before she starts college, all the trauma of her parents' divorce is revived, even as she is making new friends and having new experiences such as learning to ride a bike and dating.

Darcy's plans for a great summer seem to be evaporating when she finds herself traumatized over an earlier incident with Brian, and with her boyfriend in Detroit, her grandmother recently deceased, and her parents and friends all hiding secrets of their own, she does not know where to turn for help.

Middle-schooler Jackson's baseball skills are not of much help when he and his friends go to soccer camp, and while there he learns that his mother's boyfriend has invited them to move into his house, and friend Diego's father is deployed to Afghanistan.

Tamara dreams of the day when ten-year-old Muscle Man McGinty's constant lies catch up to him, but when an incredible event takes place in the summer of 1969, her outlook on life is altered in the most surprising way.