Fifteen-year-old Jason needs help. His mother died recently, leaving him alone to care for his schizophrenic father while keeping it all a secret. When the truth comes out, Jason is sent to live in foster care and forced to attend group therapy with other students at his school. Missing his father, missing his mother, and worried that he may be mentally ill himself, Jason finds support, strength, and direction with the help of the new people in his life.

This is an intelligent and honest story of what it is like to live with someone who is severely mentally ill. Jason must distance himself from the unhealthy relationship he has with his sick father without abandoning him altogether. In the end, Jason finds a healthy way to do so. An outcast at school, Jason's therapy group provides him with friends who are supportive and helpful to him on, and off, campus. Jason flashes back to a time when he was six and his father, thinking he was a Greek warrior, tried to bury Jason alive. He is also traumatized by an incident several years earlier when a bully stuck his head in a toilet. Jason is stabbed when he first arrives in a foster home, but the boy is kicked out and his foster parents are loving. Voices/characters in Jason's head help to narrate the story, complete with the sympathetic Aunt Bee from Mayberry, and a boy named Crazy Glue. Jason wonders if these voices make him crazy, but it is implied that these voices are more imaginary friends than symptoms of schizophrenia. Language consists of "sh-t" and "bullsh-t."

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