Ezra Faulkner was tennis captain, student-council president, and homecoming king; he had a beautiful girlfriend and perfect grades. He was everything anyone ever wants to be in high school. But, that was before his tragedy. He was supposed to go to a party, have fun with his extremely and stupidly drunk friends and makeup with his girlfriend. What he got was a perfect view of his girlfriend cheating on him, a Land Rover totaling his BMW, an irreparably shattered knee, a broken wrist, and the promise of never being able to play tennis again. He spent a lot of time in the hospital getting surgeries on his wrist and his knee and recuperating, but not one of his so-called friends visited. He was angry and he felt like a stranger in his own house, but he went to therapy and learned to live with it.
After a whole summer passes with no contact from his friends except for a lousy card, he is going back to school. He doesn’t think that he fits in with his old friends so he tries to keep to himself on the first day and he notices that there is a new girl at school. They sit with each other in Spanish and learn more about each other. They get off on the wrong foot, but the next day Cassidy apologizes and they start to hang out more. At lunch, Toby Ellicott, his childhood best friend, invites him to sit with the debate team at lunch and they find out that Cassidy and the team know each other from debate tournaments. Toby signs Ezra up for the debate team as a joke and Ezra signs Cassidy up for it as well, much to her dismay. They are unable to back out of it, however, so Cassidy decides to mentor Ezra, so that, unknown to Ezra, he could compete in her place.
When they go to the debate tournament, Ezra and Cassidy become closer and shortly after they start dating. Then, Ezra, Cassidy, Toby, and their friend Austin go to a silent flash mob and this is one of the parts of the book where Ezra really tries to make the most of the moment. Then, while sitting at lunch, Luke calls Ezra crippled so Phoebe slaps Luke and breaks up with him.
The date of the homecoming dance approaches and Ezra is nominated for king. They make reservations and plan everything out. The day of the dance, Ezra mentions details of the accident to Cassidy on the phone and she starts acting weird. That night, Ezra gets dressed up and waits for Cassidy to go to the dance together, but she never shows up. He drives to her house to find that she wasn’t there and then finds her at a park they went to on a date. She tells him that the entire time they were dating, she was amusing herself and that her boyfriend from San Francisco came back and they’re going to leave together. Ezra believes her and is devastated, he doesn’t go to the dance and he starts to hang out with his old friends again. Charlotte, Ezra’s ex-girlfriend tries to get back together with him and he finally comes to his senses and goes back to hanging out with Toby and the rest of his real friends. He finds out from Toby that Cassidy was planning on going to the dance with him and that her story makes no sense, so he gets Toby to help him find out the truth. Ezra runs into Cassidy at trauma therapy and they get into an argument. Toby finds out that Cassidy’s brother died and that’s why she stopped debating and switched schools.
Ezra decides to try and win Cassidy back by building her a snowman out of tumbleweeds. He brings his dog, Cooper, on a walk and goes to see her reaction to the snowman. She ends up liking it but immediately tries to take it down and she won’t tell him what is going on. Angrily, Ezra stomps away, but Cooper won’t budge. As he’s trying to get Cooper to move, Cassidy tells him to run and he sees a coyote. Ezra can’t run because of his knee, so Cooper runs to attack the coyote and protect him. Ezra knows it’s doomed because Cooper is a 16-year-old poodle and there isn’t much he can do against a wild coyote. The coyote stalks off after biting Cooper’s neck and they take Cooper to the vet because he is still alive.
As they wait for news, Cassidy tells Ezra that she realized that the person who ran the Land Rover into Ezra’s car is her late brother. She thinks that they can’t be together because of that, but Ezra still tries to get her back because he credits her with all of the changes that happened in his life and he doesn’t want to lose that. She makes him realize that he made the decision to change how he lived and she walks out of his life forever. Then the vet appears and tells him that his dog died. The story ends with him in college, finally deciding that he needs to make the most of his life and not worry so much about everything around him.
